‘Twas not too great imo. Has really solid presentation for the first third or so of the game, but then it devolves into dark and uninteresting corridors and factories. Its story was also initially really intriguing but then it slowly lost its lustre the further into it I went. Some scenes felt utterly pointless, but overall, it’s a really thought provoking story that takes place in a thought provoking world. It’s quite a bleak game that’s wears its blade runner influences on its sleeve, but it takes too long to conclude. I do commend the game, though, it has one of the most unlikeable main characters I’ve ever seen in a piece of media, let alone a game. I was thoroughly impressed at how little this game pulled its punches. It’s just a big shame that the gameplay is kinda horrific, even by point and click standards. It was essentially just “go to this waypoint, talk to people, do a simple task where you have to go get something and then talk to someone, play a stupid minigame, watch cutscene, go home, repeat, etc.” The puzzles ramped up later, but they were ultimately really tedious and spent more time wasting my time by having me walk to interactable objects than actually learning how to solve the puzzle. Seriously though, the march to the end was kind of a blur because so much shite happens and it has this weird thing where none of it feels like it has any climax or impact, but everything is constantly built up to be vaguely meaningless. That makes no sense it writing, but State of Mind was a weird experience. Also, the audio mixing and sound design in general was not that great, with many sound effects lacking impact and many scenes feeling really empty.

Overall, it’s tough to recommend State of Mind because it’s quite janky and the gameplay is rather boring and tedious, but, if you’d like to play something that will leave you thinking about a lot and are interested in seeing what I’d consider to be a really well-written genuinely unlikeable character, then maybe, just maybe, this game could interest you.

Necrodancer is quite good, but I’d like to be done with it. His has one of the tightest gameplay loops I’ve ever seen. Though it’s not too great presentation-wise, with the pixel art being fairly basic and the music being pretty typical pseudo chiptune-esque music, that gameplay is so fucking addicting. I’ve yet to play All Zones mode, which is supposed to be the main way the game was meant to be played, but slowly understanding and mastering the different mechanics of the game makes for some really interesting moments, and then finally making it through to the end of a zone is quite satisfying. I think that some of the enemies in the game could use a little more visual conveyance, but other than that, it’s pretty spot on for the most part. There are a tonne of hidden secrets and discoveries that can be made by the player. Being a roguelike, it’s incredibly light on story, which normally kinda bothers me/puts me off from the genre, but the gameplay is so consistent and engaging in Necrodancer that I don’t really mind too much. The game is deceptively difficult though, there are a lot of deaths to be had. Maybe it’s not actually that difficult and I’m just (admittedly) really bad at the game, but don’t be fooled by its first area or so because the challenge ramps up at the 2nd zone. However, the most difficult part of Necrodancer is not immediately pressing restart once you’ve died. Since the primary gameplay loop is so engaging, I keep wanting to give it a go, and since the game has no loading screens, it’s highly possible that I’ll instinctively restart the game even when I don’t want to. But before I can pause the game, I’m already playing it again. If you wanna play an engaging roguelike, I certainly recommend Necrodancer.


Even if you don’t like the music of the game, you can customise the game to include whatever music you want to play in different areas and the game will follow suite. I wouldn’t normally go out of my way to play a roguelike unless I haven’t played a game in a while and I don’t wanna get completely sunk into a world. Sorry for the ramble, in short, Necrodancer is quite good.


(Aside: Oh also, the bosses are okay in Necrodancer. Nothing too special, but they do a decent job at testing the player’s skill at the game. Also, if you wanna play chess as a rhythm-based roguelike, you’ll probably definitely enjoy the game.)

Bound By Flame (3/10, 6/10)

I just finished it. This revery is gonna be on the longer side of things. Overall, Bound By Flame is a janky ARPG with grand ambitions and a lacklustre execution. That’s apparently how a lot of other people view the rest of Spiders’ games too. However, I thought that there was a fair bit of charm in Bound By Flame, I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. However, that’s probably because I haven’t played enough janky RPG’s, and when I think about everything Bound By Flame does, or at least tries to do, I can’t help but conclude that this game was quite garbage. Graphically, it’s nothing impressive, which is fine with me considering that games are more than just their graphics, but it’s not helped by the uninspired aesthetics and derivative art and world design. Conceptually, the game is neat. In a dying world that’s being taken over by ice lords and an undead army, you’re possessed by a demon and you’re humanity’s last hope. You theoretically have to try to fight against the demon even though it gives you powers. There’s a lot of interesting things that could be done with this world and concept, but it does absolutely nothing with it. Its combat is super basic, but functional enough. It took a bit of time to get used to the dodging since you can only dodge backwards, and I’m unsure if parrying is even functional. There were many times that enemies’ animations lacked some conveyance, and the hitboxes were awfully inconsistent, so it was kinda inconsistent to parry anyone.

Granted, I’m pretty bad at video games, so the problem could just be on my end, but in many cases, I don’t believe it was. I found it much more useful to dodge attacks instead, since dodge-breaks had stupidly long counter windows since it would go into slow-motion every time I dodged an attack properly. However, the proper “times” I had to dodge enemies was also a tad inconsistent, with some dodges going into slow motion towards the beginning of the enemy attack telegraphs and others going into slow mo right before the enemies hit me. Occasionally, it would go into slow motion after I got hit by an enemy and took damage. Suffice it to say, combat is inconsistent. Oh yeah, I just realised I forgot to mention the demon powers, which is a problem in and of itself given that it’s essentially the game’s main selling point. The powers were extremely forgettable and underpowered unless you’ve upgraded them and gotten a bunch of skills. It really is a shame because it just serves as janky fire-themed magic that you’d find in a basic fantasy game. It’s even more ridiculous when you take into account that this is literally the first fantasy game I’ve played that isn’t Dark Souls, and I cannot even remember the magic powers, even though they’re literally the SELLING POINT of the game. There’s also an extremely barebones stealth system that clearly demonstrates how pathetic the AI is. I could be crouched directly in front of an enemy and they wouldn’t see me, so I’d go around them and stealth kill them. I don’t have much else to say about that, other than that I was playing at the hardest difficulty and that still happened. The bosses were also pretty inconsistent and uninteresting for the most part. They ranged from pathetically easy to stupidly difficult. The final boss in particular was fucking atrocious. It was WAY harder than everything else in the game. I managed to cheese it with a ridiculous amount of traps and arrows, but that was after many deaths from numerous stun locks from the first phase and broken hit boxes from the second phase. It was the only multi-phased boss in the game that I can recall, too. Basically, it was not just a difficult fight, it was an outright broken one at times, and it’s the most absurd difficulty spike in the game. While it sounds like I’m complaining about the game being broken and difficult a lot, it really isn’t difficult at all. In fact, I’d say that it’s too easy at times. The main difficulty either stems from the game not functioning properly, or from the enemies being total damage sponges. Even basic enemies can take up to a minute to kill at times. There were several times that I’d beat bosses and mini bosses on my first try. The final boss of act two was especially pathetic, having beat it on my first try. It was made all the more pathetic, though, when I had to fight it 4 more times in Act 3, since the devs felt the need to pad the game out with filler content that they didn’t have the time or resources to create. That’s one of the biggest problems with the game. It felt like there was too much in the game despite the fact there wasn’t enough content to span the course of it. There’s a lot of mechanics and systems and characters, but anything I could say about them is just limited to either “it’s barebones” or “it’s inconsistent.” The side missions? Barebones. The story? Inconsistent? The level design? Barebones and inconsistent.

The biggest problem with the game, though, is that tied in a bow of
obviously rushed development. Bound By Flame was clearly envisioned at a much larger scale than it could possibly hope to achieve. The game begins with a large, scripted set piece, and it’s the only one in the game. Act 1 has a billion different side missions and characters and (admittedly similar) maps. It had a much larger scale than the rest of the game. Actually, that’s underselling it, Act 1 made up, like, half of the entire game. It has its own self-contained story and everything. It really demonstrates the ambition of the dev team better than anything. Act 2 feels barebones by comparison. They made more much enemies in it, but the maps were more smaller and more repetitive than Act 1. It was towards the latter half of Act 2 that the game really started to spread itself thin. There were many long-form fetch quests where I had to collect a large number of collectibles or kill a large number of enemies for the purpose of satisfying a character’s request or something. The side quests were less about the interactions between all the characters at that point, and were more about padding the game out. Sure, there were definitely mostly character-based side missions, but they mostly felt more centred around one particular companion in the game who shows up in act two. Oh yeah, there are also companions in Bound By Flame who follow you everywhere. They all do different things and have different backgrounds, that I’m not gonna go into because this thing is already way too fucking long. However, for the sake of comedy, I’ll go through and describe them all one by one. There’s the curious daughter of a magic wizard, a facetious elf cunt who does archery, a fearless knight who talks like a cosplayer and has a death wish, the ratchet precursor of 2B, and Mathras, the ancient spirit who has seen everything and serves as a walking plot contrivance. Overall, these companions don’t really add much to the gameplay except for an extra amount of stress, since they fight with the player until they die in battle. However, if they die in a battle, they aren’t gone for good, but the game never mentions that, so I kept being paranoid about letting them die and restarting from my last save for over 2/3 of the game. Anyway, as I was saying before I interrupted myself, Act 1 was expansive and ambitious, Act 2 was less so, and Act 3 was absolutely pathetic because they clearly worked on it at the end of the dev cycle when they lacked the most resources. There are TONNES of reused assets. All but two enemies are reused from throughout the game. One of those reused enemies was literally just a smaller version of the final boss of Act 1. Act 3 had a total of 8 side missions, and some of them actually counted as part of the main story. One of those was a romance scene with ratchet 2B. It’s as awkward as it sounds. And then after the admittedly decent final boss for Act 3, it’s over after just two chapters (compared to the 3 for each previous act). Act 4 immediately follows, and that just consists of the final boss and the ending. I know its taken me a long time to get to the point, but basically, Bound By Flame felt like an interactive timeline of its own development. It started as an endearingly janky game and it ended as a bunch of mechanics and ideas that were haphazardly slapped-together in order to reach a deadline. It’s a game that reached for the sky and fell flat on its face.

Despite my overwhelming amount of criticism though, Bound By Flame gave me a lot of genuine enjoyment. It’s fun to play a janky game and see how it flexes and crumbles when it’s in motion. It’s fun to laugh at a game that’s so clearly rushed and lacks so much polish. On top of it all, though, it’s interesting to see how a game as bad as Bound By Flame is able to hold my attention for its entire duration. Everything may have been barebones and/or inconsistent, but it’s also all put together with just enough competence that it wasn’t too much of a slog to get through. I feel that I learned a bit from playing this game, and frankly, that alone made it worth playing. The laughs I got from it was only the cherry on top of a freezer burned sundae.

If I were to give it an obligatory rating, I’d say that it was a 3/10 game that I enjoyed as much as a 6/10 one. Holy fuck, I didn’t mean to write this much about this game.

Do I recommend this game? No. Did I enjoy it, though? Overall, yes.

Pyre (7/10, 7/10)

Pyre was a pretty good game. I don’t like to compare the different games I play too much for these reverys, but I think Supergiant Games’ body of work is particularly interesting to talk about, so we’re gonna do just that for this one in particular. Before I talk about Pyre, itself, I’d like to talk about the games that preceded it first.

When I played Bastion, I thought it felt like a game that was built by a competent and motivated team, albeit a rather inexperienced one. The combat was pretty enjoyable, the music was awesome, the visuals were competent- if a little stiff at times-, and the storytelling was pretty good. I especially liked the narration; the game wouldn’t be the same without Logan Cunningham. Now that I think about it, the game actually employed a mild amount of directly interactive storytelling, too, which is always a positive in my eyes. That being said, I think the game got somewhat repetitive by the time I’d reached the end. The movement felt rather slow and, although my memory could be failing me, I remember the enemy variety felt rather lacking, as well. For a first game, though, Bastion was remarkably strong.

Transistor aspired to be a more mature and intimate game than Bastion. It felt like Supergiant was trying to prove themselves as a “serious” developer. In a sense, I’d say that they succeeded at what they were trying to do. Transistor is, above all else, a game that had a clear vision behind it. It is an aesthetic masterpiece. It looks and sounds unbelievable. There are several songs from its soundtrack that I think about semi-regularly, and that is a feat given how little I tend to think about game music these days. Additionally, I cannot think of a single moment where the game looked anything less than spectacular, and I don’t say that lightly. The world of Transistor is super captivating, and I wish I could spend more time in it. I could gush about the good things this game does for full minutes, but for each thing Transistor does well, there’s something else that it lacks. I don’t wanna rant about this for too long here, but to put it simply, Transistor’s story and gameplay are not that great in practice. There are many intriguing ideas for sure, but the game merely holds its ideas out on a silver platter and expects them to carry the whole experience. The combat system is certainly interesting, but no amount of combinations of attacks make up for both the lack of enemy variety and uninteresting battle arenas. Additionally, tying the stories of various characters in Cloudbank to the different functions you pick up throughout the game is a neat concept for sure, but it effectively serves as nothing more than over-written lore that does little to branch out its world. It pushes you to interact with its world through static menus rather than through gameplay, and I personally find that to be so disappointing considering how stunning its world is. Red’s story is ultimately very simple, but since the transistor is the one who has the ability to talk, and he’s a dull- albeit well acted-character, the world is made all the more boring as a result. I apologise if none of that made sense, but I’m starting to go down a rabbit hole. The point is, Supergiant’s vision for Transistor was super strong, but its individual parts didn’t quite live up to the strength of that vision. As a result, Transistor is more interesting to talk about than it is to play, but I’d still say that there was certainly enough on the table to prove that Supergiant was not just another indie game studio. They were clearly a talented bunch, and with Transistor, they proved it.

This brings me to Pyre. Since Supergiant had proven that they were able to make a fairly tightly-knit game that could turn heads, with Pyre, they seemed keen on proving that they’d matured as a studio, and now had the ability to make a real “big” game. They took a visual novel about a band of misfits going on an adventure together and combined it with a sports-action game, and it’s topped off with an added multiplayer mode that I honestly haven’t played. It’s an ambitious game, with 8 playable characters each with their own backstories and 8 different races with their own specific cultures and backgrounds and 9 different “triumvirates” that you fight against, each with their own backstories and lore, and several different arenas, and a book full of expansive lore about the structure of the world and its history and its conflicts and...yeah, you get the picture. Pyre isn’t just a game that’s based on a strong vision like Transistor, it’s not just attempting to be a strong game like Bastion, it’s an entire world’s worth of content. Given the size of the team, the fact that they were able to build a game/world to the scale of Pyre is a testament to how much Supergiant had grown as developers at that point. What’s more impressive, though, is the consistently high quality at which they built the game. The characters are all rather well-written. I can remember the names of all of the main cast and what they do in the gameplay and story. They all have their own character arcs that are pretty well realised, too. The first 6-8 hours of the game are especially strong, and is concluded by a moment in which I actively exclaimed “holy fuck, that’s so cewl!” What follows is some rather consistent gameplay for the rest of the game.

You know, in some respects, I’d say that the gameplay was too consistent at times. The sports gameplay is quite simple, it’s like hand-ball with more magic. Once I leveled up all my characters and stuff, the game was a little too easy and easily cheesed, but I think that could partially be my fault since I played on Normal difficulty the whole time. Mind you, some of the Rites (that’s what the sports gameplay is called) could be really engaging and intense when I was matched up with opponents who I was at a similar skill level to. That being said, I was quite ready for the game to be done a few hours before it actually ended, the story beats felt rather repetitive at that point. Despite that, though, I think that the ending was pretty strong, all things considered. It was interesting to see all the outcomes my choices lead to, and how all the interwoven stories tied together in the end. Despite the fact that the game is partially a visual novel, and, as the name suggests, those tend to be more text-based than most genres, Pyre makes great use of the interactive medium to assist in it’s storytelling. Its mechanics change through the course of the story depending on the decisions you make, and while I won’t spoil how this works, I do have to say that the way it does this pushes the player to master each of the characters, regardless of how much they enjoy playing as them. The visual novel sections of the game and the extra reading in the form of the book of rites, they don’t dominate the storytelling too much. In fact, I’d say that Pyre blends its story, world, and lore MUCH better than in Transistor. It didn’t feel like I was just reading glorified text boxes in a menu, it felt like, as a reader, I was a “part” of the world by learning more about the world. It was my role to learn the lore, and lucky for me, that lore was quite interesting to read through. It was closely tied to the world of the game, itself, and it gave a whole bunch of context to a lot of the bizarre imagery in the Downside, as well as some of the more “foreign” concepts of the game’s world.

Overall, Pyre feels like a game that was made by a team who learned from their past experiences. Just about every aspect of the game feels like it had a consistent focus and was given an equal amount of attention. While the presentation is not quite as profound as Transistor’s, I think that the extra focus that was put on the story, world, and gameplay was ultimately worth it. The soundtrack, while still good, was not particularly interesting to me, save for a few songs, and the visuals, while polished and even gorgeous at times, didn’t really blow me away apart from one time in particular. Logan Cunningham’s voice acting seemed to play less of a prominent role as it did in the previous games, with his character only turning up to narrate the game’s Rites. I don’t think his character added all that much to the game’s world or story save for a few unremarkable moment, but I’m just nitpicking at this point. The game feels like a complete package, and one that I was glad that I experienced.

If anything I’ve mentioned in this Revery sounded remotely interesting to you, I’d definitely recommend picking up Pyre. If you feel you can see it through to the end despite its repetitiveness in the latter half, I think you won’t be disappointed. The game isn’t too long, and it felt to me like a game that is worthy of the praise it received. I definitely wanna czech out Hades when I can, because Supergiant is a great studio whose narrative can be see through the games that they’ve made. With all this in mind, I were to give Pyre an obligatory rating, for both its quality and my enjoyment, I’d give it a 7/10.

It was a real treat to play Pyre, especially after Bound By Flame. It’s funny actually, it was shorter than that game, but the game felt deserving of its length. I didn’t notice the time that went by until after I finished my play sessions. That, in my opinion, is a mark of a strong game.

Monopoly is just a rip-off of Florida. Hospice care is also a rip-off of Florida. Florida is basically death's waiting room, and this is the board game that you have to play while you wait. Monopoly is like listening to a terrible teacher lecture you, and that teacher is the father of the Six Flags guy. The most optimal way to play Monopoly is with an oxygen tank while Everywhere At The End Of Time is playing over a loudspeaker, and if you're really hardcore, you should try playing it while on an IV drip too. Monopoly is basically like a disappointing trip to Sea World where you have to also watch the 'trainers' abuse the animals after the show. Playing Monopoly is equivalent to starring in Dallas Buyers Club and then watching it all the way through multiple times. You just sit there and watch yourself physically waste away into nothingness over and over and over again until you're sick of watching yourself in the process of dying and just want the grim reaper grant you the sweet release of death, but instead he just gives you more fucking Monopoly money. I hate Monopoly. I hate Monopoly! I fucking hate Monopoly.

The first time I played this, I could barely even sit to play it for more than 45 mins because I was recovering from a back surgery. I enjoyed it enough to finish most of the game anyway. 2 years later, I played it again nearly all the way through with a sibling of mine. I remembered how to play it once I stopped playing as the stupid fucking teensy Gandalf cosplayer and started playing as Sir Globox. Sir Globox is the best character in the game, and I think he embodies Rayman Legends more than even Rayman himself. The character designs are absolutely ridiculous—stupid even— and I do kinda like them for that, but Sir Globox is a treasure and I adore him. He looks like he’s constantly having fun regardless of the scenario and he’s always vibing with the world around him. You know who I don’t adore, though? Murphy. Look, I consider myself to be a decent person with a decent sense of morality. I respect and appreciate people from all manner of cultural, ethnic, and sexual backgrounds. Whenever I see Murphy, though, I get a primal urge to call him slurs. I haven’t given into the urge as far as I’m aware, but I just can’t help it. My hate for Murphy extends beyond the limits of reason, I unironically believe that he is responsible for the sexual assault at Ubisoft. He just sits there with his stupid toothy grin and does nothing but laugh at how much Ubisoft lets him fucking get away with. Murphy probably supports genocide. I think I hate Murphy more than anything, he could cancel me and he literally supports genoc-

Sorry, I’m getting distracted, I started to play through this game again with my father, and I intend to continue playing it with him. I also plan to play it with my other sibling and finish almost the entire thing with him, too. Rayman Legends is without a doubt the best Rayman game since Rayman Ravin Rabbids.