Recent reviews by Oddish65

Psycho Patrol R asks the question that nobody asked; what if Cruelty Squad was not fun and sucked?

The game is fun until you get into the mech. Which is a sentence I don't think I've ever said. It's awful. Aiming in the mech is horrible and floaty but every enemy has perfect aim. The mech is so heavy and cumbersome and you HAVE to use it because there are a bunch of mech enemies that spot you and instantly kill you if you aren't. The weird Dark Souls money loss and recovery mechanic is awful. The reduced health when you're out of your mech is awful. The weird free roam world is weird. I don't like this game very much.

There's something here, under all the weird frustrating crap, but it's fleeting. I'll play around with it a bit more, and it might change my opinion eventually, but right now it feels like everything I disliked about Cruelty Squad kicked up to 11.

Wait for it to get better before you buy. Not worth 20 bucks, let alone 40.

Elin gives me the same rush that I got when I first started Terraria. The gameplay loop is genius; delve into dungeons/wilderness looting everything not nailed down, kill monsters, Die or retreat, then stumble back to base to upgrade your gear and build your base. It's the same magic that got me to play Fallout 4 for longer than I should have. Despite that seemingly simple premise, Elin is deeper than meets the eye; with a load of strange mechanics that keep things feeling mysterious and arcane.

Despite comparing it to multiple games; Rimworld, Caves of Qud, Kenshi, Fallout, Elin remains its own beast. It has its own quirks and foibles and the lack of a cogent guide/the amount of text in the game that's machine translated makes it hard to actually know what you're doing... but I promise that the game is worth at least a look.

Also, I cannot believe that Elona got a sequel, and that I only found out about it by stumbling onto an ad for it on steam.

Drakengard meets Ultima meets Off.

That sentence should excite you.

Wooden Ocean lives up to the name, it's deep and wide enough to get lost in, in every sense of the word.

Wooden Ocean has STYLE. Pitch black and grungy, it somehow works the outdated and clunky RPGMaker engine into something genuinely beautiful. Admittedly, a majority of the art assets are just manipulated asset-flips, but even so, the uncanny acid-washed vibe of the final product is shockingly coherent, similar to the style of something like Cruelty Squad- though with a more restrained and almost melancholy vibe. I find the game world intoxicating, in both design and visual. It feels like exploring an abandoned Minecraft Mega-server; filled with insane superstructures built at the whim of omnipotent players and then left to rot in a tangled heap.

Dungeons lead into dungeons lead into dungeons. I got lost for a full hour scrambling through pitch black tunnels beneath the ground, tripping past two whole dungeons that I barely poked my head into... only to emerge gasping onto the surface a stone's throw from the start of the game. I cannot stress how amazing it feels to explore in this game.

The world isn't empty either. It would be one thing if it were just a tangled mess of hallways and random encounters, RPGMaker can basically make those on its own. No, Wooden Ocean has content in spades. Almost every NPC has a full on conversation between themselves and the party, not just a single line of dialogue. There are mini-dungeons, normal dungeons, puzzles and chests and sidequests hidden throughout the game-world. There's a triple triad card game. There's a town management system that actually causes the town's map to change. There's a giant Final Fantasy 10-esque sphere grid- which is unrelated to the massive skill list for each weapon and magical element- there are FIFTEEN magic elements by the way.

The writing is similarly dark, but also very quirky in a way that I somehow, against all odds, find charming instead of grating. The game threads a knife-thin gap between obnoxious misanthropy and genuinely clever and heartfelt character writing. It's like if an edgy "holds up spork" fanfic suddenly became self aware and started talking to you about the nature of morality and metafiction. It's just too well written to be cringe. Murda murda indeed.

How did this get made? Did someone lock the dev(s) in a basement somewhere and refuse to feed them unless they made a 60-hour JRPG? It's a project that stands in defiance against scope creep, against the long odds of indie game dev, against the fact that you shouldn't spend nine years making a game for an engine that a large number of people flat out refuse to play games made in. The thought of this game not having a cult following makes me want to scream. Wooden Ocean deserves for people to care about it, if only to balance out the sheer amount of effort and care that must have gone into dragging this insane masterpiece into existence. I can't believe that I wouldn't have heard about this absolute diamond in the rough if not for the video made by Worm Girl.

Play this game, because the world would be better if every time a project like this finished, everybody knew about it.

Signalis has a great sense of style. The way that it plays with low-poly 3d, pixel-art, and the way that the game presents itself is genuinely impressive. There's clearly so much love put into this game, and I can see why so many people are obsessed with its world and characters. That's why it's such a shame that playing the game is miserable.

Signalis is a throwback to the classic survival horror games of old- Resident Evil and the like. It's a shame that it also copied all the tooth-cracking frustration those games were full of. Six inventory slots shared between keys, guns, ammo, and health items!? Unskippable cutscenes before boss fights (Which are terrible.) Scarce save rooms. Progression locking puzzles that flip between block puzzles for toddlers and actual algebra. And, the piece de resistance; CONTACT DAMAGE!? (I hate contact damage. I've hated contact damage since the first time I ever encountered it as a child playing Kirby Superstar. I've hated it as an adult, I think I may just continue hating it after I die and finally go to Hell.)

Signalis is badly designed. Which is an insane thing to say. just look at it! The art! The character designs! The everything! Signalis oozes good design! That's why it's so shocking that Signalis's core game design is bad. Rooms are too tight and filled with too many enemies, which are too fast to really avoid, particularly because they have CONTACT DAMAGE. Killing them isn't a good option, because it's a survival horror game- not only will you run out of ammo quickly, they'll also get right back up after a few minutes unless you expend another scarce and valuable resource to keep them down. Even if you've been thrifty, all these resources you're holding are filling your pockets to burst. Enemies don't always reset between being activated either (dependent on a stealth/noise mechanic that I never fully understood,) so you could walk through a door and directly into an enemy's back and take contact damage. I did that a lot. The game is filled with dozens of such dead ends where it's unsafe to stay in either room. There's an option that you can toggle to add tank controls. I think I would actually rather shut a door on my fingers.

Signalis is grating, clunky, and beautiful. Watch someone else play it on YouTube.

(Note: Signalis actually has several difficulty options, even ones that let you increase your inventory size! That's pretty cool, but I literally cannot stand playing games on easy difficulties.)

Spoiler free.

This game is good. It's like a more playable version of La Mulana.

Animal Well is a game about puzzles, exploration, and secrets. You explore a genuinely massive and mazelike map, finding tools that help you navigate and solve puzzles. Every room has a puzzle, even the ones that don't look like they do- and every room has a secret, sometimes two, sometimes three. Secrets are one of my favorite things in video games, and Animal Well is full of them. There are secret areas, secret puzzles, secret items, secret gameplay mechanics. It's addictive. Every new room fills you with excitement; you can't help but imagine what it could be hiding.

The developer says that the game is separated into three "layers" the first layer is the route required to beat the game. The second layer is the post-game and 100% completion. The third is apparently some kind of ARG that could take potentially years to solve. I have genuinely no idea what the third layer looks like, other than that I've been told that there are traps within the game's code designed to softlock dataminers. I have no idea if I even touched that part of the game at all during my playthrough.

Most of the more interesting puzzles in the game come in the second layer, after you've probably already beaten the game, which I found disappointing. While there are a handful of really great puzzles necessary for completion; I found myself enjoying the side content a lot more than the main route. First layer puzzles are mainly just using one of your items to hit a few switches while you platform, post-game puzzles involve writing down information, following clues written on walls, connecting hints scattered across the map, etc. They require a level of attention and thought that first layer puzzles don't, and are much more engaging.

The main route is just a little too easy, I was never stumped for more than a minute or two. In addition, I think that some of the puzzles and platforming sections are a little too unforgiving. The timing on some of the puzzles is brutal, and there are a few block puzzles that will instantly kill you if you fail them- with checkpoints just a little too far away to be tolerable. It really sucks to solve a puzzle and be doing it correctly, and then have to do it five more times anyways because the margin of error on the timing is a hair's width.

Anyway, the exploration in the game is fun, the platforming is fun, the items are fun, the puzzles are fun. The graphics are great, the sound design is great, and the level and creature design is great. Animal Well is worth checking out if you like metroidvanias, puzzle games, secrets, and combinations of the three.

I might be crazy, but I just don't "get" the Sunless games. I had the exact same problems I had with Skies as I had with Seas. I read all these gushing reviews for the games and I can't help but wonder if we're playing different games. I spent an hour in this game completely bored to tears. I sailed through an empty map, watching my resources tick down. I turned around and returned to port, arriving just before I ran out of supplies completely, spent all of my money on more fuel and supplies, and then did it again. I didn't find a single port, I didn't trigger any interesting events. I got two events that drained my resources, and a handful that gave me a tiny scrap of money that I could use to buy ONE more supply, which promptly ran out long before I found anything.

I know that there is cool stuff in this game. I've seen clips on youtube of people exploring the ports and seeing black holes and alien leviathans and all that crazy stuff- but actually playing the game and looking for that stuff feels like garbage! Fuel and supplies are so stupidly expensive that you might as well be flushing your money directly down the toilet of your space-train. You start with five of each, which you quickly learn was actually a fortune. Also, the scouting ping you get by sending out your bat is weird. Using it costs the supplies you need to live, it can fail, and doesn't tell you what it found, just where it found something. And you start the game with a blank map and not enough money. Apparently you should go find ports so that you can trade for port reports, as well as fulfill trade requests! Again: I didn't find a single port, despite exhausting all the money I started with, all the supplies I started with, and selling the quest item I started with for an extra 200 bucks. I literally sank all my money into exploring and didn't find a single actual port. (And I followed the vague directions given by quests and deliveries too!)

I get that there are difficulty options... I'm just not in the mood. It's uncharitable, but my reaction to dragging myself through an hour of boring "guess the number I'm thinking of" gameplay is not to "admit defeat" and lower the settings. I play games on their standard difficulty- if I have to use cheats to play a game, I'd rather not play it at all. Maybe this is a "git gud" moment, maybe I'm actually just hilariously bad at Sunless Skies and I'm doing something so stupid that the tutorial didn't even think to warn me not to do, maybe you're just supposed to enjoy the gameplay loop of doing nothing, running completely out of money, fuel, and supplies and being literally unable to leave the port. I don't know. The game might deserve more than an hour before I write it off, but I find myself completely drained of any desire to continue playing. I don't want to start a new run, I don't want to try again with a lower difficulty, and I don't want to play this game any more.

Oh man do I want to like this game. Beautiful aesthetic, interesting premise... Vernal Edge looks like a fantastic game. Then I actually have to play it. The combat is uniquely un-fun in a way that I struggle to articulate.

The poise, pulse, and attack charge mechanics conspire together to make every combat encounter into a miserable experience. There's a flow somewhere in there- use heavy attacks to force enemies into their staggered state, then combo them with light attacks to earn pulse attacks to regain any hp you lost, and use magic attacks to augment your damage/combos. In practice though, this sucks! Enemies take upwards of four charged attacks to stagger! Charge attacks that require you to hold down a button for about a second! Sure, you might stagger one, but then the other one that didn't get their poise broken hits you and makes you fly across the screen. Every time your character gets hit, you lose all control, get flung backwards, and are trapped in a stun-state until you hit the "a" button to get back to your feet. I cannot stress how bad getting hit by any attack feels in this game- it's a complete loss of all momentum. Pulse attacks are just not fun to use either, they have no I-frames and some of them feel like they don't refill any health at all. The forward launching one feels like it refills a good amount, but again, it lacks any I-frames, so you have to wait until the enemy's poise is broken or isn't attacking to use it. I would rather have a healing system like Hollow Knight or even just a healing item system. Charge attacks also feel bad to use, on principle I dislike any platformer that makes me hold down a button to charge an attack while trying to do something else. It makes my fingers hurt, and I feel like it could have easily been mapped to another button. Attacks deal hardly any damage, even on the basic difficulty, and there isn't any way to raise your damage that I'm aware of. Magic attacks do barely more than light attacks with your sword, despite using a resource and ostensibly being exploration rewards that should make you more powerful. I don't like parrying, I don't like using heavy or light attacks, I don't like using magic attacks, and I don't like using pulse attacks. Plus, there are only a handful of enemy types that get reused constantly. (Also, for some reason enemy types have no set poise rating. There's a healer enemy that's either the easiest enemy or the game or a hair-ripping annoyance in every fight, based on whether they stagger from one charged attack or four. Sometimes the giant brute enemies don't even have ANY poise, and can be launched into the air by light attacks, but sometimes the lightest enemy needs three charged attacks to stagger. There doesn't seem to be any logic to it other than the game's whims.) Just everything about the combat feels tangibly "off" and unsatisfying to me. Every time I get locked into a new encounter or boss, I sigh.

Because on the flip side, the platforming mechanics feel AWESOME. The game is entirely open ended, and you can grab a ton of traversal abilities out of order. Every new addition feels better than the last, and eventually you'll be blasting through areas at lightspeed, barely touching the ground. It feels fantastic to blitz through a platforming puzzle because you have an item that trivializes it- and it feels good to wander around the weird floating islands finding new cool magic attacks and heart pieces and memories. (With the small nitpick that there seems to be a somewhat limited number of memory pieces to equip. I kept finding duplicates of them. I think their effects stack though, so it's a small problem to have.)

Vernal Edge tried to reinvent the character action wheel, and I think they missed the mark. Maybe something will "click" with me about the combat, but for the moment I find it too frustrating and clunky to actually recommend this game, since it's such a prominent feature. Give it a try to see how you like it though, I see from the reviews that a lot of people actually enjoyed the combat, though I can't personally relate.

Graphics: Great
Gameplay: Great fun half the time, not so much the other half
Story: Surprisingly interesting

Okay, content warnings first. This is a bloody game, this is a mature game. Play it or watch before you give it to kids, though I guarantee this game earns its m rating. There are dessicated dead bodies, chopped open dead bodies, necessary violence against emaciated dogs, etc. It's honestly pretty standard dark fantasy fare though, if you can stomach Diablo you can take Elden Ring.

This game probably requires two reviews, one for Souls series fans, and one for newcomers to the series. I will start with the fans of the series, though I can hardly imagine a fan of the series who isn't already playing. Elden Ring is the best of every game in the series. It has Bloodborne's moveset variety and quality, it has Dark Souls 3's anime ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ attacks, it has Dark Souls 2's build and magic variety (including powerstancing,) it has 1's combat and world design, and it has Demon Soul's enemy design (though only visually, I'd actually compare their move sets to a mix between Bloodborne and DS1.) Add the open world on top of this? Immaculate. Break the sequence and sprint for the area with your favorite weapons and items, fight bosses out of order and in any order you want, go absolutely crazy. I can't overstate how well the open world formula works for this game. Oh, and it really is like they mashed all these games together in terms of size and length. This game is the length of three souls games. Bloodborne is short comparatively. I'd say that this is easily a hundred hour game without even factoring in the incredible replay value.

For newcomers, it's a tough sell. A lot of people get turned away from the difficulty of the series and never come back. A lot of open world fans don't like a lot of the decisions made by Elden Ring, but a lot of that comes down to taste. Some people dislike the lack of guiding cutscenes or dialogue, your character does not progress by collecting and turning in bear pelts for EXP to voiced NPC's. Questlines are vague and obtuse and NPC interaction is fairly sparse. However, those questlines are not required for character progression, instead of completing small annoying sidequests for exp and money, you just gain it directly from killing enemies and picking up items. Likewise you have to orient and direct yourself in the world. You are very rarely, and I mean maybe twice in the entire game, given a map marker to travel towards. The rest of the time you're going to have to read your map carefully and explore based on your own intuition and curiosity. I personally like these features, In fact I love them. This game had my favorite exploration out of any open world game I played, matched only by Breath of the Wild. Which is a very good comparison, actually, though comparing games to both Dark Souls and Breath of the Wild is something of a cliche at this point, it really is true. Elden Ring is Breath of the Wild by way of Dark Souls, and it is truly fantastic. As for the difficulty, I disagree that this game is too hard. In fact, this game features quite a few new abilities that I think make it even easier to tailor your experience than the last few in the series. Co-op is essentially unrestricted now, there are tons of ways to get very powerful npc summons on command, and spell-casting has never been more viable. I also understand that some people don't understand difficult games, though I am sad that you won't give it a try. A long time ago I thought that I wasn't interested in games with a higher difficulty level, but now that I've actually given them the time of day, I find that difficult games are among my favorite. I particularly like the sense of camaraderie that it can bring; comparing experiences fighting bosses and frustrations with difficult enemies is part of the fun of the game. Obviously the community has a problem with elitism, and some very obnoxious people try to bully other people into playing a certain game. If you're planning on streaming this game, I seriously recommend turning off the chat. However, I also find that I love talking with other people about this game, and that there are truly some wonderful members of the community. Those are all the negatives I can think of. Now let me gush about this game.

Breath of the Wild had a problem of rewards. Every shrine had the same reward: a globe that essentially functioned as xp. Get enough and your health or stamina goes up. Other rewards are always koroks, rupees, or clothes, though clothes are the only unique rewards in the game, and they eventually run out. Weapons also break, so they don't function as permanent rewards. Now imagine Breath of the Wild without any of those issues. Every shrine features a unique reward, layout, and often a unique variant of a miniboss to fight at the end. The dungeons in Elden Ring are created by tileset, but each of them feels completely unique. The creativity, and sometimes cruelty, used by the designers is stunning. The weapons you find are all unique, featuring interesting and viable movesets, as well as a special ability called a weapon art which allows you to perform really cool abilities depending on the weapon. Some swords let you grow a magical glowing sword and do a massive overhead slash, some swords let you do cool samurai moves, the flail lets you spin it around and hit people over and over and it's hilarious. There's a sword where the weapon art wreathes the weapon in black flames that cause enemies to freeze- there's a sword that glows with magical power and turns every heavy attack into a ranged projectile. Imagine breath of the wild if there were ten times the number of weapon types and each weapon also had a unique ability. You can also get things called ashes of war, which give you weapon arts that you can equip to replace a weapon's natural weapon art, and also modify its damage scaling. The build variety in this game is incredible, by the way. Use a weapon art that lets you spin your sword around telepathically, get a weapon art that lets you yell REALLY LOUD, get a weapon art that makes your favorite weapon scale off of faith and shoot yellow fire. Every weapon and ash of war has a place in this game, and they all feel fantastic to use, collecting them is a blast. Every equipment drop, chest, miniboss, dungeon, puzzle, dragon, treasure scarab, everything had me grinning ear to ear when I saw it. I haven't even started on the game's actual magic spells, of which there is an incredible variety- blood magic, dragon magic, gravity magic, they're all fantastic. That's not even all of them, by the way. There's too many spells to even describe, and they're all viable. Collecting them is an absolute joy. This game has, per-capita, made my jaw drop the most out of any in my library. I'm serious when I say that this game is massive. The amount of content in this game is stunning. Every time you think you've seen all that you can, there's something else you're missing. There are areas that have literally stunned me speechless when I saw them. I can confidently say that this game is GOTY. I'm serious. I cannot see anything that's scheduled for this year dethroning this. Breath of the Wild 2 has a shot, but it's going to need to hit the mark very hard if it's going to take the spot.

TL;DR Did you like dark souls? Then buy it. You didn't? Try it, you might still like it. Best game of the year, absolutely a 10/10.

This game hit all of my hotspots. The writing is witty and consistently fantastic the whole way through. West of Loathing is the type of parody that, while goofy, still has a wonderful heart underneath it all. (The Gun Manor DLC has one of my favorite quest lines in any RPG I've ever played.) The worldbuilding itself is absurdist but consistent in an amazing way. So even if Clowns are Devils and Cows are Demons, a la DnD, it all makes sense. Sometimes I would legitimately have to sit back away from my laptop and take a second to think about the deep seated jokes and just turn them over in my head. There's a quest that I forgot about until the end of the game and it suddenly came back to me, just as I ran into the punchline.

If you aren't sure about shelling out for this game, you could always play the online browser game Kingdom of Loathing, the game that came before this one. The writing, and quality thereof, is pretty much the same. The gameplay is pretty different, but that isn't why I loved either of these games. Once you have a feel for the writing, you can come back and enjoy the West of Loathing experience.

This game is also pretty PG-13, it doesn't feature much, if any, blood and gore, there are a few sex jokes, and the humor never really gets mean spirited. I would recommend it for younger gamers, if they can stand the mostly text based interface.

A fun little game!

There are quite a few positives here. The combat feels very nice, it's a little bit slower paced than other roguelites, with fewer enemies per room. Every combat feels like a lightning round shootout. It feels a bit more strategic than most other roguelites, which simply demand that you strafe around the room spamming your attack- you limited reload speed makes you think about how you're moving and shooting. The art style is to die for. The Mignolia-esque dark inkings give the whole game a very dark, almost rembrandt painting atmosphere. The darkness helps the protagonist pop from the background, though the enemies might need a little bit of work with that. I found myself being blindsided one too many times by a rifleman I thought was just a patch of dirt. And with that, lets talk negatives. I didn't like the balance on the curses- ten enemies is a few too many to go through without being hit. It might be a good amount in Dead Cells, but there are very few enemies per room, and it seemed very picky on which ones actually counted. I think maybe the dog enemies don't count? Besides that though, the game is a bit easy. I killed the wendigo on my first run without ever dropping below half health. Also the cover system is a little finicky, though I'm sure that will get a little more work.

Other than that though, I thoroughly enjoyed the half hour I spent on this game.

Warnings: The game does feature the use of firearms, but you knew that already. I can see some people being upset by the description of death the main character gives and the general bleak tone that fills every environment. I wouldn't give this game to young children, it would probably scare them. Otherwise, you should be fine, unless you have very specific and sensitive triggers towards undeath.