BoltGSR
2000
(guy who's only played Nox playing Diablo for the first time) getting a lot of Nox vibes from this
2012
This is long overdue a replay, but I remember at the time being baffled by how the game is actually just linear for the first 2/3rds and it's only in the last segments that your choices start to matter in any way.
2021
Started off strong but by the time I got to the Quidditch mini game in hour 15 I was yelling "End. End!!!!!" at the screen
1996
super mario y'all... Super fucking mario!!!
frankly this is a 3.5 with how floaty the mechanics are but the absolute ridiculousness and charm of the subspace emissary cutscenes pushes it up to a 4
1994
oh you know i'm grabbing the first review and "played" for pickle wars for the ms-dos
anyway, don't play this game.
anyway, don't play this game.
1994
you have found an enchanted ring of stamina
you have found a cursed chainmail of stamina
you have died
you have found a cursed chainmail of stamina
you have died
It's an old game with a fresh coat of paint through and through, but by that same token I was pleasantly surprised by how much it has going on. It's a lot of fun to play it and think about how it influenced the murder mystery game genre going forward, and I dug the voice acting a lot.
But like everyone else has said, it's also wildly unintuitive in places. Just save yourself the trouble and play with a guide.
But like everyone else has said, it's also wildly unintuitive in places. Just save yourself the trouble and play with a guide.
What a blast of a game. I think RE7 still beats it in terms of aesthetics and tone, but Village married the RE7 style with the gunplay of something like RE4 or RE2make better than I thought was possible. I also appreciate the focus on buying persistent cross-playthrough upgrades, and having a max difficulty balanced to that.
A really solid VN, imo! I love the aesthetics of it, and I think it does a good job of telling a multigenerational tragedy. It sags a bit in places, but as someone who doesn't play a lot of straight VNs I ultimately enjoyed my time with it a lot, and its division into multiple doors with (mostly) independent scenarios helps keep things fresh enough.
2019
I mostly had a good time with this, but I think its design leads to an unavoidable dip around the 70% mark where you're just doing run after run without really getting much progress, even using the "give me settings with events" button. A fascinating concept with a fun true ending, but just a little too constrained by its design for its own good.
2015
I've really been sinking time into this one recently, but I can feel I'm starting to fall off of it. Unless you really really get into city design for aesthetics's sake, there's just not a long tail to any given scenario, and every run starts feeling pretty much the same.
Also, the in-game Twitter is a nightmare. Some of it is just "I guess a flash mob joke was slightly more relevant in 2015", but there's no excusing the "Rastafarian accent" "jokes" you get if you legalize weed. You can turn it off, but then you lose a source of notifications that something's going wrong in the city.
Also, the in-game Twitter is a nightmare. Some of it is just "I guess a flash mob joke was slightly more relevant in 2015", but there's no excusing the "Rastafarian accent" "jokes" you get if you legalize weed. You can turn it off, but then you lose a source of notifications that something's going wrong in the city.
There's a lot in this game that I love love love love love. The final few days are the kind of JRPG climactic stuff I live for, and it's just so satisfying to revisit this world and its aesthetics.
My big issue with the game is that a lot of the main story drags - there just isn't a sense of forward momentum, and even the final week has a few days that are more about you running around taking care of what feels like busywork because obviously the plot stuff can't take place until the last day. The time travel days are also pretty dull, and Scramble Slam is just a nightmare of a time-waster.
My big issue with the game is that a lot of the main story drags - there just isn't a sense of forward momentum, and even the final week has a few days that are more about you running around taking care of what feels like busywork because obviously the plot stuff can't take place until the last day. The time travel days are also pretty dull, and Scramble Slam is just a nightmare of a time-waster.
2021
very earnestly felt like an interactive fiction game from 2006, but sadly i mean that in a bad sense this time
2021
After sinking so much time into Octopath, I was hoping to have the BD series click for me in the same way, but... nope. I just couldn't take its world, characters, or writing; it was all so dry and paint-by-numbers that I found myself struggling to push forward. When I realized I was only able to play maybe 60 minutes at a time without my thoughts drifting towards "maybe videogames are a waste of time", I had to shelve it.