Kusoro
2023
I am writing this review after something like a year of playing Honkai: Star Rail, right as it started to lose me. It's kind of a post-mortem on my experience with the game, and whether I end up dropping it today, tomorrow, in the next month or in a few months, I'm marking it as "abandoned" for reasons that hopefully will become more clear as you read this review.
Honkai: Star Rail is a gacha JRPG. It's a chinese game rather than japanese, but it follows all the usual JRPG tenets by focusing more on the story and the feeling of adventure than on the aspects of building a role for yourself to play.
To explain how bad of a mismatch those two genres are, I will need to talk about what smarter people than me almost certainly have a better name for, and what I call "perpetual storytelling".
Different people approach writing differently: some like to plan everything out, and have the world, the characters, the main events and, most importantly, the ending planned in advance before they even commit a word to the manuscript of the story, while some prefer to let it flow as they go and develop organically. This is often referred to as architect/gardener dualism, but really it's more of a spectrum and most writers fall somewhere in the middle.
This model only really makes sense when the author actually sets out to write a complete story, with the beginning, the middle, and the end. This is how overwhelming majority of the stories work, but it's not how all stories work. With this conceptual framework set, I can now talk about perpetual storytelling.
What happens, when you as an author set out to write a story that is supposed to run indefinitely? Imagine you’re writing for a TV series that’s guaranteed to get greenlit for new seasons as long as the ratings don’t drop too badly, or, indeed, for a live-service game of which gacha games are a subset of, which don’t really end as much as they just die one day, as the developers post the End of Service notification. Imagine that also, for some ungodly reason, you decide to have the overarching plot alongside the more manageable finite arcs that take place within a season of television, or, in case of gachas, within the span of an update.
If you’re leaning architect, you are screwed, as you can’t really be an architect if you’re writing a perpetual story. You can’t plan for everything, because there is no cutoff point for you to stop at. As years go on and the narrative wheels spin through, you will exhaust whatever preplanned material you’ve had and will start to have to make stuff up on the fly. Retcons and things that couldn’t have possibly reasonably be hiding in the background will follow. In effect, you will have to start being a gardener.
Writers who lean gardener thrive in this kind of environment, but the usual problems with the kinds of stories that grow organically are multiplied tenfold, when you can never go “enough is enough, I’ve said everything I wanted to say with this story”. Rehashes, contrived conflicts, contrived attempts to freshen the setting, aforementioned retcons and things sprung out of nowhere, characters in perpetual stasis after they play out their role, power/stake/scope creep are all problems that get exponentially worse the longer the story goes on, and this is all problems that every piece of media that goes through perpetual storytelling embodies eventually. This includes shows like LOST and gacha games like Honkai: Star Rail alike. But this isn’t even the worst problem that comes out of this mode of storytelling.
The worst problem is the reason why the story has to be perpetual. You can’t even have a satisfying ending, because you have to keep your audience, you can’t have them decide “ok, enough is enough, I’m satisfied with where the things ended up and I don’t really care to see what’s next”. As such, every ending of every arc has to open three times more questions than it answers, and you have to be constantly promising your audience that the Cool Stuff and the answers to all the questions is just around the corner.
The worst problem of Honkai: Star Rail, and by extension, of all live-service games and narratively driven TV shows and millions of words long webnovels is the constant blueballing of their audience. The audience has to be kept motivated enough to keep playing/watching/reading the thing, but at the same time, never satisfied enough to decide that they have had enough.
With this long preamble out of the way, I can finally talk about Honkai: Star Rail.
The first area of the game, the space station, is pretty much the tutorial area. You, the analogue of walking nuclear bomb that, for some reason, isn’t treated with the kind of horror the concept should require and isn’t locked under seven locks on some desolate planet where blowing up wouldn’t kill millions of people, solve a few small problems and become a part of the mostly persistent motley crew that’s composed of the fairly standard spread of archetypes: a comic relief, a straightman, a wise old man, a hot competent lady and a small mascot creature. The task is to go around the universe and solve local problems in attempt to defuse the same kinds of artifacts of mass destruction that the main character possesses, which cause all sorts of weird stuff happen at the writer’s convenience.
This isn’t the worst setup for the perpetual story, because one of the workarounds for some of the problems having to spin the wheels forever creates is to not make it much of a story to begin with, and focus on individual story arcs that can be planned and executed more conclusively. Problem solved? Well, you might think so after playing the first planet, Belobog, and I wouldn’t blame you for not noticing that the entire Belobog arc fit into the initial release version of the game, 1.0, and the brunt of the narrative hydra I was talking about, where every conclusion has to spring up three times more questions than it answers, is being borne by the second planet, Luofu, which is full of promises of cool stuff in the future and where nothing interesting happens in the moment.
This will be the pattern for every story update from then onwards. The story of Luofu “ends” with a few characters wiggling their eyebrows towards Threats on the Horizon, the story of Penacony, the third planet, ends alike. Each of those took multiple patches, and every one of those was in and of itself incomplete, leaving the player with heavy-handed cliffhanger and plenty of breadcrumbs leading nowhere.
And now, finally, for the reason I’m marking this as “abandoned”.
No matter where I drop this story, it will never be finished. By its own tenets, by its own incentives the only way it ends is if Hoyoverse cans the game, and if it happens, the kind of narrative hydra that years of perpetual storytelling spawn cannot be killed to satisfaction within a month or two between the End of Service notice and the game going offline. There will simply be too many hanging plot threads, too many things not playing out as they should, the overbearing load that comes from always positing more questions than answers.
Think of the ending of LOST, or BBC Sherlock, or Moffat era Doctor Who story arcs, or Homestuck, or Worm, or any other perpetual story. This is the kind of ending perpetual stories get, and it’s the only kind of ending they can get simply by the strains the structure imposes.
The clash between JRPG, that focuses on telling one cohesive story full of colourful cast where everyone goes through their own arc, and live-service model where the story can’t be whole and cohesive by design, and where characters have to be rehashed, reinvented and replaced over the course of the indefinite run, should be obvious by now. No matter how long Honkai: Star Rail is going to run, it’s not going to get better as a JRPG, and it will never even reach the same heights as it did in the very first planet arc that was allowed to be whole by the virtue of the incomplete second planet already present on release.
There isn’t much I want to talk about here other than storytelling structure, to be honest.
The gameplay is alright. It’s gacha. If you’re an impulse spender, avoid the genre at all costs, otherwise it’s a decently fun time with interesting teambuilding, slow incremental progression systems and not much in the way of high-end content.
Someone has compared these games before to a very long-term roguelite run, and I think the comparison is apt – the fun in gachas lies in making do with whatever luck and planning sends your way, and it stays entertaining for as long as you keep getting new teambuilding ideas.
This is where the advantage of the live-service model is – every patch brings some new gameplay content, whether it’s a new game mode, new characters or gameplay-focused events.
The character designs are mostly pretty bad, unless you like a very specific aesthetic (detached sleeves, random holes in clothing, as much skin-tight clothing as possible to accentuate curves), barring some of the guy designs. The character archetypes are bland and I don’t think I like a single character in this game much.
The area designs are hit or miss. I really like some of the areas, while others are warehouse mazes or disjointed floating platforms or generic JRPG final dungeon designs that consist of Menacing Floating Cubes.
The visuals and music are fine. There are good vistas and good themes, but nothing particularly stands out. Nothing is grating either, though.
I recommend this game to people looking for a gacha/live-service with an above-average effort put into it. If you’re not a fan of the genre and don’t see yourself sticking to one game with perpetual but fairly incremental updates to gameplay, there’s nothing you can find here that you wouldn’t be able to find in better games.
Honkai: Star Rail is a gacha JRPG. It's a chinese game rather than japanese, but it follows all the usual JRPG tenets by focusing more on the story and the feeling of adventure than on the aspects of building a role for yourself to play.
To explain how bad of a mismatch those two genres are, I will need to talk about what smarter people than me almost certainly have a better name for, and what I call "perpetual storytelling".
Different people approach writing differently: some like to plan everything out, and have the world, the characters, the main events and, most importantly, the ending planned in advance before they even commit a word to the manuscript of the story, while some prefer to let it flow as they go and develop organically. This is often referred to as architect/gardener dualism, but really it's more of a spectrum and most writers fall somewhere in the middle.
This model only really makes sense when the author actually sets out to write a complete story, with the beginning, the middle, and the end. This is how overwhelming majority of the stories work, but it's not how all stories work. With this conceptual framework set, I can now talk about perpetual storytelling.
What happens, when you as an author set out to write a story that is supposed to run indefinitely? Imagine you’re writing for a TV series that’s guaranteed to get greenlit for new seasons as long as the ratings don’t drop too badly, or, indeed, for a live-service game of which gacha games are a subset of, which don’t really end as much as they just die one day, as the developers post the End of Service notification. Imagine that also, for some ungodly reason, you decide to have the overarching plot alongside the more manageable finite arcs that take place within a season of television, or, in case of gachas, within the span of an update.
If you’re leaning architect, you are screwed, as you can’t really be an architect if you’re writing a perpetual story. You can’t plan for everything, because there is no cutoff point for you to stop at. As years go on and the narrative wheels spin through, you will exhaust whatever preplanned material you’ve had and will start to have to make stuff up on the fly. Retcons and things that couldn’t have possibly reasonably be hiding in the background will follow. In effect, you will have to start being a gardener.
Writers who lean gardener thrive in this kind of environment, but the usual problems with the kinds of stories that grow organically are multiplied tenfold, when you can never go “enough is enough, I’ve said everything I wanted to say with this story”. Rehashes, contrived conflicts, contrived attempts to freshen the setting, aforementioned retcons and things sprung out of nowhere, characters in perpetual stasis after they play out their role, power/stake/scope creep are all problems that get exponentially worse the longer the story goes on, and this is all problems that every piece of media that goes through perpetual storytelling embodies eventually. This includes shows like LOST and gacha games like Honkai: Star Rail alike. But this isn’t even the worst problem that comes out of this mode of storytelling.
The worst problem is the reason why the story has to be perpetual. You can’t even have a satisfying ending, because you have to keep your audience, you can’t have them decide “ok, enough is enough, I’m satisfied with where the things ended up and I don’t really care to see what’s next”. As such, every ending of every arc has to open three times more questions than it answers, and you have to be constantly promising your audience that the Cool Stuff and the answers to all the questions is just around the corner.
The worst problem of Honkai: Star Rail, and by extension, of all live-service games and narratively driven TV shows and millions of words long webnovels is the constant blueballing of their audience. The audience has to be kept motivated enough to keep playing/watching/reading the thing, but at the same time, never satisfied enough to decide that they have had enough.
With this long preamble out of the way, I can finally talk about Honkai: Star Rail.
The first area of the game, the space station, is pretty much the tutorial area. You, the analogue of walking nuclear bomb that, for some reason, isn’t treated with the kind of horror the concept should require and isn’t locked under seven locks on some desolate planet where blowing up wouldn’t kill millions of people, solve a few small problems and become a part of the mostly persistent motley crew that’s composed of the fairly standard spread of archetypes: a comic relief, a straightman, a wise old man, a hot competent lady and a small mascot creature. The task is to go around the universe and solve local problems in attempt to defuse the same kinds of artifacts of mass destruction that the main character possesses, which cause all sorts of weird stuff happen at the writer’s convenience.
This isn’t the worst setup for the perpetual story, because one of the workarounds for some of the problems having to spin the wheels forever creates is to not make it much of a story to begin with, and focus on individual story arcs that can be planned and executed more conclusively. Problem solved? Well, you might think so after playing the first planet, Belobog, and I wouldn’t blame you for not noticing that the entire Belobog arc fit into the initial release version of the game, 1.0, and the brunt of the narrative hydra I was talking about, where every conclusion has to spring up three times more questions than it answers, is being borne by the second planet, Luofu, which is full of promises of cool stuff in the future and where nothing interesting happens in the moment.
This will be the pattern for every story update from then onwards. The story of Luofu “ends” with a few characters wiggling their eyebrows towards Threats on the Horizon, the story of Penacony, the third planet, ends alike. Each of those took multiple patches, and every one of those was in and of itself incomplete, leaving the player with heavy-handed cliffhanger and plenty of breadcrumbs leading nowhere.
And now, finally, for the reason I’m marking this as “abandoned”.
No matter where I drop this story, it will never be finished. By its own tenets, by its own incentives the only way it ends is if Hoyoverse cans the game, and if it happens, the kind of narrative hydra that years of perpetual storytelling spawn cannot be killed to satisfaction within a month or two between the End of Service notice and the game going offline. There will simply be too many hanging plot threads, too many things not playing out as they should, the overbearing load that comes from always positing more questions than answers.
Think of the ending of LOST, or BBC Sherlock, or Moffat era Doctor Who story arcs, or Homestuck, or Worm, or any other perpetual story. This is the kind of ending perpetual stories get, and it’s the only kind of ending they can get simply by the strains the structure imposes.
The clash between JRPG, that focuses on telling one cohesive story full of colourful cast where everyone goes through their own arc, and live-service model where the story can’t be whole and cohesive by design, and where characters have to be rehashed, reinvented and replaced over the course of the indefinite run, should be obvious by now. No matter how long Honkai: Star Rail is going to run, it’s not going to get better as a JRPG, and it will never even reach the same heights as it did in the very first planet arc that was allowed to be whole by the virtue of the incomplete second planet already present on release.
There isn’t much I want to talk about here other than storytelling structure, to be honest.
The gameplay is alright. It’s gacha. If you’re an impulse spender, avoid the genre at all costs, otherwise it’s a decently fun time with interesting teambuilding, slow incremental progression systems and not much in the way of high-end content.
Someone has compared these games before to a very long-term roguelite run, and I think the comparison is apt – the fun in gachas lies in making do with whatever luck and planning sends your way, and it stays entertaining for as long as you keep getting new teambuilding ideas.
This is where the advantage of the live-service model is – every patch brings some new gameplay content, whether it’s a new game mode, new characters or gameplay-focused events.
The character designs are mostly pretty bad, unless you like a very specific aesthetic (detached sleeves, random holes in clothing, as much skin-tight clothing as possible to accentuate curves), barring some of the guy designs. The character archetypes are bland and I don’t think I like a single character in this game much.
The area designs are hit or miss. I really like some of the areas, while others are warehouse mazes or disjointed floating platforms or generic JRPG final dungeon designs that consist of Menacing Floating Cubes.
The visuals and music are fine. There are good vistas and good themes, but nothing particularly stands out. Nothing is grating either, though.
I recommend this game to people looking for a gacha/live-service with an above-average effort put into it. If you’re not a fan of the genre and don’t see yourself sticking to one game with perpetual but fairly incremental updates to gameplay, there’s nothing you can find here that you wouldn’t be able to find in better games.
2013
A very solid 2D Zelda-like.
It's somewhat janky to play (but honestly, most 2D Zelda-likes are jank to play, including 2D Zeldas) and the aesthetics have that Yume Nikki fever dream inclination I don't particularly vibe with, but the exploration is good, and the game avoids post-game mop-up fatigue in a clever way I don't want to spoil to anyone interested in playing this game.
I recommend this game to anyone who wants to scratch that 2D Zelda itch.
It's somewhat janky to play (but honestly, most 2D Zelda-likes are jank to play, including 2D Zeldas) and the aesthetics have that Yume Nikki fever dream inclination I don't particularly vibe with, but the exploration is good, and the game avoids post-game mop-up fatigue in a clever way I don't want to spoil to anyone interested in playing this game.
I recommend this game to anyone who wants to scratch that 2D Zelda itch.
2024
Animal Well is a great metroidvania with a heavy focus on exploration. The comparisons it gets around the internet are a bit overblown, but it's a good game nonetheless.
There is no combat to speak of in the game, the entire focus of it is on the exploration, and the game does it well: you're free to go wherever you want with little to no handholding or strictly gating areas behind an unlock.
The unlocks themselves are fairly unique and fun to play around with, they're not the usual stock metroidvania set of dash, double jump, roll while crouching et cetera which helps the game to stand out from its peers. Some of the unlocks feel outright busted with the stuff you can do with them, but they never really trivialize the game.
The world feels pretty compact and very content-dense, which helps to somewhat alleviate the damage backtracking does to the experience. You also unlock plenty of shortcuts all around, and there is a limited form of fast travel.
Having said that, I have gotten to the ending in about 10 hours, and I've stopped shortly after without collected all eggs and secrets because, as it is the case with many metroidvanias, I don't think it really survives the transition from the exploration to mopping-up. The backtracking and lack of quality of life features like any kind of indication towards area completion quickly turn it into an unfun chore when you have maybe a dozen eggs remaining and no obvious places to investigate, with some parts of it being worse than the other. I'm sure completionists get something out of it, but I've never been one myself, so the appeal is lost on me.
There is also plenty of puzzles you aren't going to solve alone, which are meant as a community experience or something you look up in a guide. Neither of those is my personal idea of fun, but I think it's worth mentioning and if you don't like this kind of thing, you can safely ignore it as it's entirely delegated to the optional part of the game - to reach the ending, you just need to play the game.
The visuals in this game are probably the best part of it. The world on the screen really feels alive, with flies swirling around the lanterns, leaves falling, plants swaying as you go through them and other little stuff like that. Explosives feel especially amazing, I'm not sure if I've played any other game, or 2D game at least with TNTs as convincing as in this one. The audio does its job to convey the atmosphere pretty well too.
I recommend this game to anyone who likes the exploration aspect of metroidvanias. It's not the next Outer Wilds by any stretch, but it might as well be the next La Mulana (if La Mulana was a playable game) or Tunic (if it didn't have terrible combat and was a metroidvania instead of a Zelda-like) or Fez (if it was less focused on puzzles).
There is no combat to speak of in the game, the entire focus of it is on the exploration, and the game does it well: you're free to go wherever you want with little to no handholding or strictly gating areas behind an unlock.
The unlocks themselves are fairly unique and fun to play around with, they're not the usual stock metroidvania set of dash, double jump, roll while crouching et cetera which helps the game to stand out from its peers. Some of the unlocks feel outright busted with the stuff you can do with them, but they never really trivialize the game.
The world feels pretty compact and very content-dense, which helps to somewhat alleviate the damage backtracking does to the experience. You also unlock plenty of shortcuts all around, and there is a limited form of fast travel.
Having said that, I have gotten to the ending in about 10 hours, and I've stopped shortly after without collected all eggs and secrets because, as it is the case with many metroidvanias, I don't think it really survives the transition from the exploration to mopping-up. The backtracking and lack of quality of life features like any kind of indication towards area completion quickly turn it into an unfun chore when you have maybe a dozen eggs remaining and no obvious places to investigate, with some parts of it being worse than the other. I'm sure completionists get something out of it, but I've never been one myself, so the appeal is lost on me.
There is also plenty of puzzles you aren't going to solve alone, which are meant as a community experience or something you look up in a guide. Neither of those is my personal idea of fun, but I think it's worth mentioning and if you don't like this kind of thing, you can safely ignore it as it's entirely delegated to the optional part of the game - to reach the ending, you just need to play the game.
The visuals in this game are probably the best part of it. The world on the screen really feels alive, with flies swirling around the lanterns, leaves falling, plants swaying as you go through them and other little stuff like that. Explosives feel especially amazing, I'm not sure if I've played any other game, or 2D game at least with TNTs as convincing as in this one. The audio does its job to convey the atmosphere pretty well too.
I recommend this game to anyone who likes the exploration aspect of metroidvanias. It's not the next Outer Wilds by any stretch, but it might as well be the next La Mulana (if La Mulana was a playable game) or Tunic (if it didn't have terrible combat and was a metroidvania instead of a Zelda-like) or Fez (if it was less focused on puzzles).
PARANORMASIGHT is a mystery VN with great visual aesthetics and underwhelming story.
I love the edited photos as background imagery, the character sprites look fairly unique and are expressive enough. The menus also look great. My only complaint about the visuals is that chromatic aberration is a bit annoying and there's no way to disable it. The music is fitting though repetition got to me a bit by the end.
That being said, the presentation is probably the weakest part of the game when the writing is concerned - most of the playtime will be spent reading character's accounts on the information you are already aware of, or on the cool stuff they apparently did offscreen.
The story doesn't really have a hook or an overarching theme that would give the player a reason to care about what's going on. I have seen every ending in the game, and I still can't tell you what the story is supposed to be about. The game tells you that it's about the different perspective on resurrection, but it doesn't really explore the concept, it just uses it as a prop. Stuff just happens until the story is over. Every mystery VN has at least one Epic Twist that's supposed to recontextualize what's happened before then, and in PARANORMASIGHT you guess this twist immediately if you've played games like this before, and then the ~10 hours between the start and the end are filled with faffing about doing things that don't really tie together into a cohesive narrative.
Random meta gimmicks would've been cool, if they weren't already overdone by dozens other games that do a better job of tying them into the narrative. The game has nominally non-linear structure, but the progression through the game's story is almost entirely devoid of actual choice on the player's part: the flowchart is full of arbitrary roadblocks that force the player down the single available path.
The characters personalities are fairly weak and I don't think I could recognize most of their lines without seeing their names/sprites. Their motivations are often contrived and the game even draws its attention to it, only to handwave it with a "women be shopping" kind of remark.
The bottom line is that this VN doesn't do anything better than the other VNs with a similar focus already have done.
I recommend PARANORMASIGHT only to people who are really desperate for another fix of a story similar to Zero Escape or AI: Somnium Files.
I love the edited photos as background imagery, the character sprites look fairly unique and are expressive enough. The menus also look great. My only complaint about the visuals is that chromatic aberration is a bit annoying and there's no way to disable it. The music is fitting though repetition got to me a bit by the end.
That being said, the presentation is probably the weakest part of the game when the writing is concerned - most of the playtime will be spent reading character's accounts on the information you are already aware of, or on the cool stuff they apparently did offscreen.
The story doesn't really have a hook or an overarching theme that would give the player a reason to care about what's going on. I have seen every ending in the game, and I still can't tell you what the story is supposed to be about. The game tells you that it's about the different perspective on resurrection, but it doesn't really explore the concept, it just uses it as a prop. Stuff just happens until the story is over. Every mystery VN has at least one Epic Twist that's supposed to recontextualize what's happened before then, and in PARANORMASIGHT you guess this twist immediately if you've played games like this before, and then the ~10 hours between the start and the end are filled with faffing about doing things that don't really tie together into a cohesive narrative.
Random meta gimmicks would've been cool, if they weren't already overdone by dozens other games that do a better job of tying them into the narrative. The game has nominally non-linear structure, but the progression through the game's story is almost entirely devoid of actual choice on the player's part: the flowchart is full of arbitrary roadblocks that force the player down the single available path.
The characters personalities are fairly weak and I don't think I could recognize most of their lines without seeing their names/sprites. Their motivations are often contrived and the game even draws its attention to it, only to handwave it with a "women be shopping" kind of remark.
The bottom line is that this VN doesn't do anything better than the other VNs with a similar focus already have done.
I recommend PARANORMASIGHT only to people who are really desperate for another fix of a story similar to Zero Escape or AI: Somnium Files.
2021
The best way I can describe Class of '09 is that it's a South Park episode in a VN form.
It doesn't really have anything interesting to say, the setting is greatly hyperbolized to the point of absurdity (if this really is accurate to american highschool experience then Jesus Christ, America is even more cooked than I've realized), and progression between some scenes makes absolutely no sense, but it's decently funny (even if the jokes are one-note and get old pretty fast) and short enough to not outstay its welcome too much.
Also, Nicole's VA must move on to the bigger leagues, she did an amazing job at voicing the character exactly how the obnoxious selfish teenager would talk, from the first voiced line you hear you immediately know who you're dealing with.
I recommend this VN to anyone who enjoys crass cynical humor of the shows like South Park.
It doesn't really have anything interesting to say, the setting is greatly hyperbolized to the point of absurdity (if this really is accurate to american highschool experience then Jesus Christ, America is even more cooked than I've realized), and progression between some scenes makes absolutely no sense, but it's decently funny (even if the jokes are one-note and get old pretty fast) and short enough to not outstay its welcome too much.
Also, Nicole's VA must move on to the bigger leagues, she did an amazing job at voicing the character exactly how the obnoxious selfish teenager would talk, from the first voiced line you hear you immediately know who you're dealing with.
I recommend this VN to anyone who enjoys crass cynical humor of the shows like South Park.
2024
In the age of hundreds of gigabytes of storage space wasted by mediocre high budget slop, a game 60 megabytes in size comes out and cooks all of them.
The year has barely started, and it seems like my GOTY has already been decided - Balatro is an excellent game that sucked me in for 40 odd hours, and I have blasted through all I cared to complete in about half a week since the release.
Balatro is a loosely poker-based roguelite with the same basic structure as Luck be a Landlord - every round you have a target score you need to hit by assembling poker hands from the cards you get from your deck, and you build synergies between rounds to hit higher scores as they scale up. The gameplay loop is extremely addicting and you can easily lose yourself for hours playing run after another.
The game has nailed basically everything there is to playing a game like this: the runs are pretty short and you can leave them whenever without losing progress, rounds don't drag out because you're encouraged to hit the score in as few hands as possible, the descriptions are consistent and succinct, the UI is clear and intuitive (my favourite thing about it is that you can see your deck composition just by howering over it) and there aren't any tiny annoyances that wouldn't matter by themselves but build fatigue over the dozens of runs.
On top of that, the game looks great and sounds great. The one song the game has is completely stuck in my head, and I love the special edition card effects - they look exactly how I remember collectible cards looking.
There are some things that could've been done better, but nothing too bad and nothing that can't be improved by updates or expansions.
The first thing is common for roguelites: the playable decks you unlock are, for the most part, very similar to one another and there are maybe 3 or 4 decks that actually play differently. I wish there were more gimmicky decks like Plasma or Anaglyph, or maybe a way to assemble your own deck, or a deck that starts you with 2 random eternal jokers.
The second is I feel there isn't enough synergies for the types of combos except flush. It's much harder to build a run around straights, or x-of-a-kind, or full houses than it is to build a flush run. There are more jokers that implicitly or explicitly synergise with playing a full hand of the same suit, and there are many more tools to turn cards into the same suit than there are tools to manipulate cards' rank.
The third is the way challenges get unlocked. You only have 5 unfinished challenges available at any time, and you unlock one more every time you finish one. This leads to a situation where you finish all the fun ones that are available, and are left with 5 unfun ones (which is fine! challenge is literally in the name) that are hiding who knows what behind them. I will say that the fun ones are frontloaded and the further you go, the more anti-fun they get, but you can't really know what's there until you've unlocked them.
Like I said, this is all stuff that could be added with updates or DLC. It doesn't detract from the core of the game at all, and it more or less boils down to "I wish there was more of it". Maybe there will be more, but it is already an excellent game.
I highly recommend Balatro to anyone who likes roguelites and especially the synergy building aspect of the genre.
The year has barely started, and it seems like my GOTY has already been decided - Balatro is an excellent game that sucked me in for 40 odd hours, and I have blasted through all I cared to complete in about half a week since the release.
Balatro is a loosely poker-based roguelite with the same basic structure as Luck be a Landlord - every round you have a target score you need to hit by assembling poker hands from the cards you get from your deck, and you build synergies between rounds to hit higher scores as they scale up. The gameplay loop is extremely addicting and you can easily lose yourself for hours playing run after another.
The game has nailed basically everything there is to playing a game like this: the runs are pretty short and you can leave them whenever without losing progress, rounds don't drag out because you're encouraged to hit the score in as few hands as possible, the descriptions are consistent and succinct, the UI is clear and intuitive (my favourite thing about it is that you can see your deck composition just by howering over it) and there aren't any tiny annoyances that wouldn't matter by themselves but build fatigue over the dozens of runs.
On top of that, the game looks great and sounds great. The one song the game has is completely stuck in my head, and I love the special edition card effects - they look exactly how I remember collectible cards looking.
There are some things that could've been done better, but nothing too bad and nothing that can't be improved by updates or expansions.
The first thing is common for roguelites: the playable decks you unlock are, for the most part, very similar to one another and there are maybe 3 or 4 decks that actually play differently. I wish there were more gimmicky decks like Plasma or Anaglyph, or maybe a way to assemble your own deck, or a deck that starts you with 2 random eternal jokers.
The second is I feel there isn't enough synergies for the types of combos except flush. It's much harder to build a run around straights, or x-of-a-kind, or full houses than it is to build a flush run. There are more jokers that implicitly or explicitly synergise with playing a full hand of the same suit, and there are many more tools to turn cards into the same suit than there are tools to manipulate cards' rank.
The third is the way challenges get unlocked. You only have 5 unfinished challenges available at any time, and you unlock one more every time you finish one. This leads to a situation where you finish all the fun ones that are available, and are left with 5 unfun ones (which is fine! challenge is literally in the name) that are hiding who knows what behind them. I will say that the fun ones are frontloaded and the further you go, the more anti-fun they get, but you can't really know what's there until you've unlocked them.
Like I said, this is all stuff that could be added with updates or DLC. It doesn't detract from the core of the game at all, and it more or less boils down to "I wish there was more of it". Maybe there will be more, but it is already an excellent game.
I highly recommend Balatro to anyone who likes roguelites and especially the synergy building aspect of the genre.
This was my second attempt at getting into the series, after Etrian Odyssey 5, which I dropped very early on.
I've had a decently good time with EO3 for a while, but the game started to slowly erode my enjoyment of it somewhere at the middle of the second stratum. Little and not so little annoyances piled up, and by the time I've finished the third stratum I realised I'm no longer having fun with the game. I still might finish it at some point, so I'm leaving it as shelved, but the chances are slim.
I will outline my biggest points of contention:
- the inventory is way too tiny.
You only get 60 slots for everything, be it consumables, equipment or drops. It fills to the brim in about 20 minutes and the constant trips to the hub break up the flow of the game and since you can't set up a two-way portal or anything like that, the time you spend just running back to where you were in your exploration efforts adds up quickly.
- the game can't decide whether it wants to be the kind of game that's obscure about its mechanics like Noita, the kind of game where the player isn't supposed to sweat too much over the details like Stardew Valley, or a grindy optimization-focused kind of game like what Etrian Odyssey was advertised to be by some of my friends.
For the obscure mechanics game it explains its mechanics too much. For the game where you're not supposed to optimize too much it has too many hard counter encounters you need specific teams for. For the grindy optimization kind of game it doesn't explain the mechanics enough, the player doesn't get to make informed team building decisions without either having a guide open or wasting enormous amount of time savescumming to figure out how scalings work (which by the way is incredibly inconsistent between different skills, my favourite example is that monk's healing skills actually get worse as you level them because the healing power scaling isn't worth the TP costs scaling).
The game tries to be all three of those types of games at the same time, and it hurts the experience a lot. When I'm trying to play it like the obscure mechanics game, it has no real moments of discovery because everything gets explained to some degree. When I'm trying to play it like a chill game, I stumble upon an encounter that my team is woefully unprepared for. When I'm trying to play it like an optimization game, I get frustrated at the lack of hard numbers to base theorycrafting on.
- the game can't decide whether it wants to be a gameplay-focused game, or a story-focused game.
It starts like a gameplay-focused game - you make a guild, you recruit a team, you clear the map drawing tutorial, you're free to go. It continues like that until the middle of the second stratum, with all the cute attempts at story staying out of your way. But after that, the game starts interrupting players exploration with mandatory trips back to hub to listen to another portion of inane lore dumping and nonsensical attempts to outline a conflict between two factions who literally want the same thing and that the player has no reason to care about whatsoever. It culminates when the game presents the player a choice that doesn't really mean anything except that you're only getting one out of two unlockable classes. I don't understand this at all. I wish the game either committed to being gameplay-focused and ditched the disruptive story elements, or committed to being story-focused and built up a story from the start with actual characters to care about and a narrative that's more than "go down and kill superevil ultragods".
- the map drawing aspect is pure tedium and adds nothing of value to gameplay.
The game has the auto-mapping option, but it's not good enough. I still had to manually place the chests I've opened, doors and gimmick mechanics like streams or moving platforms. This is the kind of annoyance that really adds up over tens of hours of playthrough.
Somewhat related to this, shortcuts are really annoying to find. The exploration of the dungeon turns into constantly hugging walls with your face pressed against them because the only tells there might be a shortcut are visual - the interact prompt, and a slightly different pattern on the wall.
Almost everything positive I can say about this game (barring the incredible soundtrack) has a "but" that still comes back to those four points.
I like the combat, but it doesn't give enough information - for example, every time I cast an enchantment with a sovereign on my arbalist so that he attacks the enemy weak to ice with the appropriate element, I have to pray sov acts first and arb acts second, because the game just doesn't tell you the turn order at all.
I like the conditional drops system, but the game only tells you how to get them for some of the monsters that have them, and doesn't mark down the method anywhere, so you have to remember it individually for what has to be like a hundred monsters or, more realistically, play with a guide.
I like the exploration, but having to draw the map only distracts from it, and having to sniff every wall just in case there's a shortcut is annoying.
Can I recommend this game to someone? Yeah, definitely. For a lot of people the annoyances I've described won't be a big deal at all. I can see someone enjoying the constant trips back to the hub and seeing them as a way to facilitate smalled play sessions, or something like that. I know a lot of people who don't mind playing with a guide. Some people will probably not mind the story interruptions at all, and see map drawing as a cute dungeon crawling tradition. If you're the cross section of all those people, you'll probably have a great time with the game.
I've had a decently good time with EO3 for a while, but the game started to slowly erode my enjoyment of it somewhere at the middle of the second stratum. Little and not so little annoyances piled up, and by the time I've finished the third stratum I realised I'm no longer having fun with the game. I still might finish it at some point, so I'm leaving it as shelved, but the chances are slim.
I will outline my biggest points of contention:
- the inventory is way too tiny.
You only get 60 slots for everything, be it consumables, equipment or drops. It fills to the brim in about 20 minutes and the constant trips to the hub break up the flow of the game and since you can't set up a two-way portal or anything like that, the time you spend just running back to where you were in your exploration efforts adds up quickly.
- the game can't decide whether it wants to be the kind of game that's obscure about its mechanics like Noita, the kind of game where the player isn't supposed to sweat too much over the details like Stardew Valley, or a grindy optimization-focused kind of game like what Etrian Odyssey was advertised to be by some of my friends.
For the obscure mechanics game it explains its mechanics too much. For the game where you're not supposed to optimize too much it has too many hard counter encounters you need specific teams for. For the grindy optimization kind of game it doesn't explain the mechanics enough, the player doesn't get to make informed team building decisions without either having a guide open or wasting enormous amount of time savescumming to figure out how scalings work (which by the way is incredibly inconsistent between different skills, my favourite example is that monk's healing skills actually get worse as you level them because the healing power scaling isn't worth the TP costs scaling).
The game tries to be all three of those types of games at the same time, and it hurts the experience a lot. When I'm trying to play it like the obscure mechanics game, it has no real moments of discovery because everything gets explained to some degree. When I'm trying to play it like a chill game, I stumble upon an encounter that my team is woefully unprepared for. When I'm trying to play it like an optimization game, I get frustrated at the lack of hard numbers to base theorycrafting on.
- the game can't decide whether it wants to be a gameplay-focused game, or a story-focused game.
It starts like a gameplay-focused game - you make a guild, you recruit a team, you clear the map drawing tutorial, you're free to go. It continues like that until the middle of the second stratum, with all the cute attempts at story staying out of your way. But after that, the game starts interrupting players exploration with mandatory trips back to hub to listen to another portion of inane lore dumping and nonsensical attempts to outline a conflict between two factions who literally want the same thing and that the player has no reason to care about whatsoever. It culminates when the game presents the player a choice that doesn't really mean anything except that you're only getting one out of two unlockable classes. I don't understand this at all. I wish the game either committed to being gameplay-focused and ditched the disruptive story elements, or committed to being story-focused and built up a story from the start with actual characters to care about and a narrative that's more than "go down and kill superevil ultragods".
- the map drawing aspect is pure tedium and adds nothing of value to gameplay.
The game has the auto-mapping option, but it's not good enough. I still had to manually place the chests I've opened, doors and gimmick mechanics like streams or moving platforms. This is the kind of annoyance that really adds up over tens of hours of playthrough.
Somewhat related to this, shortcuts are really annoying to find. The exploration of the dungeon turns into constantly hugging walls with your face pressed against them because the only tells there might be a shortcut are visual - the interact prompt, and a slightly different pattern on the wall.
Almost everything positive I can say about this game (barring the incredible soundtrack) has a "but" that still comes back to those four points.
I like the combat, but it doesn't give enough information - for example, every time I cast an enchantment with a sovereign on my arbalist so that he attacks the enemy weak to ice with the appropriate element, I have to pray sov acts first and arb acts second, because the game just doesn't tell you the turn order at all.
I like the conditional drops system, but the game only tells you how to get them for some of the monsters that have them, and doesn't mark down the method anywhere, so you have to remember it individually for what has to be like a hundred monsters or, more realistically, play with a guide.
I like the exploration, but having to draw the map only distracts from it, and having to sniff every wall just in case there's a shortcut is annoying.
Can I recommend this game to someone? Yeah, definitely. For a lot of people the annoyances I've described won't be a big deal at all. I can see someone enjoying the constant trips back to the hub and seeing them as a way to facilitate smalled play sessions, or something like that. I know a lot of people who don't mind playing with a guide. Some people will probably not mind the story interruptions at all, and see map drawing as a cute dungeon crawling tradition. If you're the cross section of all those people, you'll probably have a great time with the game.
Disgaea 7 is my second attempt at digesting this series. Last time I tried it, it was 5, and I bounced off of it for the reasons I don't really remember.
This one is pretty good though.
It's a tactical JRPG that goes more or less how any tactical JRPG goes: the stages are relatively small, separated into squares with different elevation, you move your units around and try to squash enemy units. It has a few unique gimmicks on top of the usual tactical JRPG combat, but for the most part it will feel familiar if you've played Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre or Fire Emblem before.
The actual fun happens outside of combat.
The game is completely fucking broken, and I mean it in the best way possible. The feeling of getting a weapon that has stats an order of magnitude better than anything else you could possibly have at this stage of the game from the in-game faux gacha is incredible. Realising you can equip three pairs of slippers onto one character and make them move over half the map in one turn is incredible. Finding an infinite action loop within a battle and setting up an overnight farm to get your character to level 9999 is incredible.
And not only the game is completely fucking broken, it knows it is and encourages breaking it. As an example, there is a boon you can get that triples the exp the character receives, but only for the next map, which puts an incentive on finding an aforementioned infinite loop and sticking to it.
As far as I'm concerned, the real game here is not the frankly kind of mediocre TRPG combat, it's figuring out how to snap the game in half with the loudest pop it can possibly make, and it's a ton of fun.
I couldn't tell you a thing about the story. It's something about a band of wacky characters collecting mcguffins throwing around the jokes that mostly don't land. Sometimes there are attempts at drama which feel wholly out of place, and don't last for long. The writing in this game feels very extra, and it seems like the game itself knows this - it offers the player to skip the following VN-esque scene every time they enter the new stage.
The visuals are good. The game has something like a hundred unique animations for the various skills and magic both your and enemy units can use, which I find very impressive. I liked the OST at first, but by the end it got a bit grating - it feels like there's not enough unique tracks for the duration of the game.
I will probably go back and give Disgaea 5 another attempt. I had a lot of fun with 7, and I would be interested to compare the two.
I recommend this game to anyone who enjoys breaking games that are meant to be broken, as long as they don't mind the tactical JRPG kind of combat. There's probably some value for the enjoyers of the lighthearted anime plots as well.
I highly advise any and all completionists to never ever play this game. By the end of it, my item completion was at maybe 10% and I've still got no idea where I was supposed to find the rest - hunting for all of them seems like a complete disaster.
This one is pretty good though.
It's a tactical JRPG that goes more or less how any tactical JRPG goes: the stages are relatively small, separated into squares with different elevation, you move your units around and try to squash enemy units. It has a few unique gimmicks on top of the usual tactical JRPG combat, but for the most part it will feel familiar if you've played Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre or Fire Emblem before.
The actual fun happens outside of combat.
The game is completely fucking broken, and I mean it in the best way possible. The feeling of getting a weapon that has stats an order of magnitude better than anything else you could possibly have at this stage of the game from the in-game faux gacha is incredible. Realising you can equip three pairs of slippers onto one character and make them move over half the map in one turn is incredible. Finding an infinite action loop within a battle and setting up an overnight farm to get your character to level 9999 is incredible.
And not only the game is completely fucking broken, it knows it is and encourages breaking it. As an example, there is a boon you can get that triples the exp the character receives, but only for the next map, which puts an incentive on finding an aforementioned infinite loop and sticking to it.
As far as I'm concerned, the real game here is not the frankly kind of mediocre TRPG combat, it's figuring out how to snap the game in half with the loudest pop it can possibly make, and it's a ton of fun.
I couldn't tell you a thing about the story. It's something about a band of wacky characters collecting mcguffins throwing around the jokes that mostly don't land. Sometimes there are attempts at drama which feel wholly out of place, and don't last for long. The writing in this game feels very extra, and it seems like the game itself knows this - it offers the player to skip the following VN-esque scene every time they enter the new stage.
The visuals are good. The game has something like a hundred unique animations for the various skills and magic both your and enemy units can use, which I find very impressive. I liked the OST at first, but by the end it got a bit grating - it feels like there's not enough unique tracks for the duration of the game.
I will probably go back and give Disgaea 5 another attempt. I had a lot of fun with 7, and I would be interested to compare the two.
I recommend this game to anyone who enjoys breaking games that are meant to be broken, as long as they don't mind the tactical JRPG kind of combat. There's probably some value for the enjoyers of the lighthearted anime plots as well.
I highly advise any and all completionists to never ever play this game. By the end of it, my item completion was at maybe 10% and I've still got no idea where I was supposed to find the rest - hunting for all of them seems like a complete disaster.
2023
Slay the Princess is a good mystery VN I've enjoyed most of my way through it.
My first impression was "it's trying to be Stanley Parable too hard", and I'm very glad to say this impression did not last. The game reveals its own identity fairly quickly, and has a lot of neat details that allow the player to roughly guess the shape of things before they're revealed in the final act's exposition dump mandatory for all mystery VNs.
The prose is surprisingly good. Reading Slay the Princess still didn't feel like reading a book, but it didn't feel like reading a comic book either, which is extremely rare for videogames.
Sadly, the ending didn't land for me, and I don't entirely understand the decision to force the ending as early as the game does it. Did the author feel the concept wears thin this quickly? Is it meant to facilitate multiple playthroughs? Is it so that most people who play this game have slightly different experiences from one another? I will never know, but I would really rather see all the game has to offer as it has pretty good quality-of-life features for it within a single playthrough.
The themes the ending brings up didn't resonate with me much, and while, like I said, a lot of details felt well-integrated into the rest of the game in a way that allows the player to guess at what's going on (the mechanics of the interactions first and foremost), a lot of it felt tacked-on as a mandatory explanation to allow for the concept of the game to exist (everything to do with the Narrator as an example).
The art is stunningly good, and the game utilizes it to the utmost degree. I love the artstyle, I love the pencil wiggles, I love the parallax effect as you move the mouse around.
I really didn't like the princess' VA for the most of the game, except for some of the post-chapter 2 scenes, but the male VA did a really great job, especially considering the amount of work it must've taken.
I recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a mystery VN or, generally, unconventional experiences rare games have to offer.
My first impression was "it's trying to be Stanley Parable too hard", and I'm very glad to say this impression did not last. The game reveals its own identity fairly quickly, and has a lot of neat details that allow the player to roughly guess the shape of things before they're revealed in the final act's exposition dump mandatory for all mystery VNs.
The prose is surprisingly good. Reading Slay the Princess still didn't feel like reading a book, but it didn't feel like reading a comic book either, which is extremely rare for videogames.
Sadly, the ending didn't land for me, and I don't entirely understand the decision to force the ending as early as the game does it. Did the author feel the concept wears thin this quickly? Is it meant to facilitate multiple playthroughs? Is it so that most people who play this game have slightly different experiences from one another? I will never know, but I would really rather see all the game has to offer as it has pretty good quality-of-life features for it within a single playthrough.
The themes the ending brings up didn't resonate with me much, and while, like I said, a lot of details felt well-integrated into the rest of the game in a way that allows the player to guess at what's going on (the mechanics of the interactions first and foremost), a lot of it felt tacked-on as a mandatory explanation to allow for the concept of the game to exist (everything to do with the Narrator as an example).
The art is stunningly good, and the game utilizes it to the utmost degree. I love the artstyle, I love the pencil wiggles, I love the parallax effect as you move the mouse around.
I really didn't like the princess' VA for the most of the game, except for some of the post-chapter 2 scenes, but the male VA did a really great job, especially considering the amount of work it must've taken.
I recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a mystery VN or, generally, unconventional experiences rare games have to offer.
This is the best detective game I've ever had a pleasure to play, hands down. It's also one of the very rare cases where I can't think of anything negative to say about the game (if I ignore the DLCs, that is).
The Case of the Golden Idol swiftly avoids every trap those games tend to fall into: there is absolutely no downtime forced on you because you don't embody a character that has to actually move around, the game doesn't take you for an idiot and actually lets you figure out everything by yourself, it usually provides way more than one way to figure out any particular fact, there is a persistent cast and a storyline which again the game doesn't take you for an idiot about, you never have to just guess your way through the game without good information (at least in the base game), and there is a lot of stuff you can pick up on that the game won't even quiz you on but that might help with your deductions later.
Almost every case in the base game is great, with maybe an exception of the penultimate case, which still had really fun parts about it. The DLCs are, sadly, significantly worse and there is a downward trend to their quality: the first DLC has three cases, two of which are pretty good but the third one is more or less just the summary of events; the second DLC's first two cases are okay but the third one is awful, doesn't even make much sense by the end and has maybe the only instance in the game where you're forced to guess the events that transpired.
I recommend the base game to everyone who likes to figure out things, which is probably everyone. I recommend the first DLC to anyone who ended up loving the base game, and if you really really loved it, you could get something out of the second DLC as well.
The Case of the Golden Idol swiftly avoids every trap those games tend to fall into: there is absolutely no downtime forced on you because you don't embody a character that has to actually move around, the game doesn't take you for an idiot and actually lets you figure out everything by yourself, it usually provides way more than one way to figure out any particular fact, there is a persistent cast and a storyline which again the game doesn't take you for an idiot about, you never have to just guess your way through the game without good information (at least in the base game), and there is a lot of stuff you can pick up on that the game won't even quiz you on but that might help with your deductions later.
Almost every case in the base game is great, with maybe an exception of the penultimate case, which still had really fun parts about it. The DLCs are, sadly, significantly worse and there is a downward trend to their quality: the first DLC has three cases, two of which are pretty good but the third one is more or less just the summary of events; the second DLC's first two cases are okay but the third one is awful, doesn't even make much sense by the end and has maybe the only instance in the game where you're forced to guess the events that transpired.
I recommend the base game to everyone who likes to figure out things, which is probably everyone. I recommend the first DLC to anyone who ended up loving the base game, and if you really really loved it, you could get something out of the second DLC as well.
2023
Chants of Sennaar is one of the most unique puzzle games I've ever played. I don't think I've seen a fun linguistic videogame since Bookworm Adventures maybe.
The player climbs the tower populated by people with different glyphic languages, and they have to figure those languages out by observing the environment, the actions of the natives, and by making connections between different languages. This is incredibly engaging even while it's simple, and the difficulty ramps up somewhat when the player gets to the third layer of the tower. The puzzles never get to the same level of difficulty as something like Baba is You, but they don't stay on the level of Cocoon either.
There are a lot of neat details in the languages and how the natives use them. The glyphs of the same general category usually have something in common, the structure of the different languages is not always the same, and they reflect the people they belong to (different groups don't always call each other the names with the same meaning, and while a religious group has a word for god, militaristic group has a word for duty and scientific group has a numeric system). The ultimate challenge of the game is translating conversations between people of the different group, where you really need to remember all those details about their languages to construct correct sentences.
The only reason this game is not 10/10 for me is that by the end of it backtracking gets a bit annoying, because the movement speed is pretty slow - there is like 10 seconds between clicking somewhat far on the screen and the character actually getting there. Stealth sections are a bit annoying as well, but they're short and, with the exception of one room on the second level, clear about which guards can see you and which can't.
I recommend this game to anyone who likes puzzle games. I especially recommend this game to anyone who likes anthropology and lingustics - it's not super complex about it, but it does scratch a fairly unique itch.
The player climbs the tower populated by people with different glyphic languages, and they have to figure those languages out by observing the environment, the actions of the natives, and by making connections between different languages. This is incredibly engaging even while it's simple, and the difficulty ramps up somewhat when the player gets to the third layer of the tower. The puzzles never get to the same level of difficulty as something like Baba is You, but they don't stay on the level of Cocoon either.
There are a lot of neat details in the languages and how the natives use them. The glyphs of the same general category usually have something in common, the structure of the different languages is not always the same, and they reflect the people they belong to (different groups don't always call each other the names with the same meaning, and while a religious group has a word for god, militaristic group has a word for duty and scientific group has a numeric system). The ultimate challenge of the game is translating conversations between people of the different group, where you really need to remember all those details about their languages to construct correct sentences.
The only reason this game is not 10/10 for me is that by the end of it backtracking gets a bit annoying, because the movement speed is pretty slow - there is like 10 seconds between clicking somewhat far on the screen and the character actually getting there. Stealth sections are a bit annoying as well, but they're short and, with the exception of one room on the second level, clear about which guards can see you and which can't.
I recommend this game to anyone who likes puzzle games. I especially recommend this game to anyone who likes anthropology and lingustics - it's not super complex about it, but it does scratch a fairly unique itch.
2023
Cocoon is a really good looking game and the soundtrack is fitting enough. That's about the extent of the nice things I can say about it.
First things first I'll get a very minor complaint out of the way. By default, the keyboard controls are bound to arrows, and after I went and remapped them to WASD as most people, I imagine, do, the pause menu still only responded to arrows. Mouse is not supported for the menu either. This isn't a big deal, of course, but it already set me on the wrong foot with the game.
Nominally this game is a puzzle game but, much like Limbo and Inside, the two previous games from this developer, the game doesn't offer any challenge in regards to solving any of the puzzles. I completed the whole game on auto pilot in about 3 hours, never having to stop and think about the solution, and, as I approached the end of the game, the logistics of actually executing the solution started taking long enough to be annoying: the movement speed is slow and to enter a world the action button needs to be held for a second or two.
I don't think there is much else to say about this game, really. It's a very short and pretty walking simulator that pretends to be a puzzle game. In my opinion, it's devoid of anything interesting gameplay or story wise and looking at pretty environments gets really old really fast, but if you're into that kind of thing, give it a go.
If you really like the concept of this game but want actual puzzles out of it, give Patrick's Parabox or Recursed a try instead.
First things first I'll get a very minor complaint out of the way. By default, the keyboard controls are bound to arrows, and after I went and remapped them to WASD as most people, I imagine, do, the pause menu still only responded to arrows. Mouse is not supported for the menu either. This isn't a big deal, of course, but it already set me on the wrong foot with the game.
Nominally this game is a puzzle game but, much like Limbo and Inside, the two previous games from this developer, the game doesn't offer any challenge in regards to solving any of the puzzles. I completed the whole game on auto pilot in about 3 hours, never having to stop and think about the solution, and, as I approached the end of the game, the logistics of actually executing the solution started taking long enough to be annoying: the movement speed is slow and to enter a world the action button needs to be held for a second or two.
I don't think there is much else to say about this game, really. It's a very short and pretty walking simulator that pretends to be a puzzle game. In my opinion, it's devoid of anything interesting gameplay or story wise and looking at pretty environments gets really old really fast, but if you're into that kind of thing, give it a go.
If you really like the concept of this game but want actual puzzles out of it, give Patrick's Parabox or Recursed a try instead.
2023
I've been waiting for this game with bated breath ever since the first trailer, and upon learning that Yasunori Mitsuda himself, one of my favourite musicians of all time, wrote some music for it, and then playing the demo of it during the recent Steam's demo exhibition, my hype for the game steadily progressed. Needless to say, once again I'm reminded that one should count their chickens when they hatch.
Sea of Stars is one of the most mediocre games I've ever played. It's not bad, I dont regret the time I've spent playing it, but it just doesn't have much to offer beside nostalgia for the better games I've played through many times and absolutely stunning visuals.
This is the one positive thing I can say about the game without any "but"s - it looks fantastic. There's an insane amount of effort put into presentation of basically everything, even the minute things: every food item has its own sprite, every island you can visit has its own unique resting site that you might not even see if you don't make it a habit to rest on the overworld map, almost every location follows the day/night cycle, the title screen changes depending on your progress through the game, there's maybe about a dozen animated cutscenes (I think they kind of clash with the otherwise pixelart aesthetic, I've had the same problem with Chrono Trigger's PS1 rerelease, but they do still look really nice), all characters have alternate spritework just for one scene you might miss, all weapons have their own sprites, et cetera. The visual design of every location is great, they're all memorable and distinctive, and everything in them fits together nicely. The characters and enemies alike are all very well animated.
The combat is good initially... but it stops introducing new elements very quickly and ends up stagnating. If you've played the demo, you've seen most of how the combat goes - it's turn based and you control three characters, who have a basic attack (if you press the action button when the animation suggests so, you get an extra hit in), a couple of skills that use mana which regenerates with basic attacks, an ability to infuse the basic attack with magic generated by hitting enemies without the infusion, and food items which regenerate health or mana or both and have a total limit of 10 at a time. There is a combo meter that fills in through using skills and breaking enemies stance, and you can use it to make a pair of characters execute a special skill. About 10 hours later or so you also get to swap your characters mid-battle which is a free action, and the characters gradually get their ultimate skills, which use a yet another separate meter and have their own long flashy animations a la Limit Breaks or summons in Final Fantasy games. When enemies attack, you can time the blocks and take reduced damage.
This might sound like a lot to take in, but getting a grasp of it doesn't take long, and after than the combat is mostly static. The combat livens up a bit when you get to swap the characters around, but that novelty wears off pretty quickly as well.
A lot of skills end up strictly inferior and since they use the same resource, there's rarely any reason to deviate from the ones that work best. As an example, the fourth party member has the ability to delay opponent's turn, and it ends up dominating every other ability they have. The third party member has a very strong healing ability, and it dominates the rest all the same.
The combo meter fills up too slowly to use in most circumstances outside of the boss battles, and for the most of the game it's dominated by a single ability - a party-wide heal. This happens with the ultimate meter as well - the fifth party member simultaneously deals damage to all enemies, delays their turn and heals the entire party. No one else's ultimate has nearly as much utility.
The story operates completely on mcguffins and prophecies. No one can make a step without being bound to do so by Fate, which is used extensively to handwave away the impossible knowledge the characters suddenly obtain about what to do next and the lack of motivation to do so. Very few characters in this story actually want something from life, and when they do, they end up doing things so colossally stupid it becomes, perhaps unintentionally, hilarious.
Plot sort of starts in the middle and ends in the middle as well, there's very little progression to be felt throughout the game.
I feel there's only one party member with a distinct personality, the rest are kind of bland and uncharacterized. There are occasional comic reliefs which work decently well and don't become annoying by overstaying their welcome. The villains are all caricaturely evil, most of them in a cartoonish way, and some in the complete disregard for morals way. The background characters come and go without leaving much of an impression.
The world, despite extensive lore dumps, feels extremely artificial and tailor-made for the adventures the party is having. The progression through the world feels artificial as well - as I've played the game, I quickly learned that there's no sidetracking to be had, for almost the entire game there's been only one unexplored location available, which I had to traverse to get to or to otherwise unlock the new singular unexplored location. The game opens up a bit right at the end, but only just a bit - the best of it's efforts on that front will lead the player to about 3 screens or so of the optional area and a rematch against the boss the player had already fought, the other lead to 1 screen worth of a rudimentary puzzle, another boss rematch, or a short series of battles.
This, to me, was the probably the most disappointing bit - JRPGs typically excel at gradually widening the scope of themselves and allowing the player more and more leeway in what they can do as they get access to more and more optional locations bit by bit. In most JRPGs, getting a ship represents the moment of the game opening up for real. In Sea of Stars, it means nothing except that the player can now traverse ocean to get to the next singular unexplored area currently available to them.
Gameplay progression systems also happen to be boring.
Leveling up provides benefits so minute I don't understand why the devs didnt simply tie level ups to boss battles only, while making them more substantial at the same time. The game limits grinding severely either way - the amount of experience points needed for the next level scales very fast, as does the experience defeating enemies provide as you go through the game. It's therefore very hard to over- or undergrind which is good, but, again, I don't see why they designed a problem they needed a solution for when a game in Chrono series that they're so clearly paying homage to already completely sidestepped the whole issue two and a half decades ago. The skills/combos are already tied to story progression and collectible scrolls anyways.
The weapons and armor dont have anything to them except numbers, no special effects or anything (with one singular exception of a set of weapons that deals higher damage to undead), so they end up being disposed of as soon as the player finds a weapon/a piece of armor with better stats. The accessories are a bit better, but still like a half of them are just stat bonuses. Some of them are pretty transformative, though, and one is outright game-breaking.
As the story goes, the player gets access to a few knick-knacks that allow them to get into places they couldn't before, and this brings me to the secondmost sore spot in the game for me - collectibles being tied to the true ending.
I don't mind it in principle, what I do mind is the lack of quality of life features typically associated with such endeavors. Backtracking is very painful in this game, especially early on. What's even more painful is the lack of any sort of list for what you're missing in which location. There is a parrot that screams the random articles of the remaining collectibles in the area at you, but it's random, it's one at a time, and it takes forever to ask it again, and it includes in its tally the abysmal minigame that replaces the sort-of-traditional-for-JRPG-genre collectible cards minigame, which I wouldn't want to inflict on my worst enemy and which will be absent from this review lest I descend into words not lightly used in the civilized society. Collecting all the Rainbow Conches was not a very entertaining experience.
The soundtrack has some nice pieces, but overall it left kind of an amateurish impression on me. In a lot of songs the lead melody feels way too loud compared to the rest of the instrumentation, and a lot of songs suffer from the kind of uncanny sound you get by placing the same exact note with the same exact velocity using the same exact primitive instrument that has only one sample tied to it per note or maybe a deterministic synth generating the sound. The instruments themselves are often pretty obnoxious (especially the marches song, that one had me turn the music off until i got through the area). Nevertheless, I like the day/night cycle also cycling through two variations of the same song, and some songs having the dynamic stopping point, pretty neat.
I find myself running out of steam writing this review not unlike how the game itself seemingly ran out of steam and just sort of ended. I don't know if I can recommend this game to someone. Like I said at the beginning, I don't regret my time with the game, but I also don't see any particular reason why I would want someone to experience it.
It's a very okay game.
Sea of Stars is one of the most mediocre games I've ever played. It's not bad, I dont regret the time I've spent playing it, but it just doesn't have much to offer beside nostalgia for the better games I've played through many times and absolutely stunning visuals.
This is the one positive thing I can say about the game without any "but"s - it looks fantastic. There's an insane amount of effort put into presentation of basically everything, even the minute things: every food item has its own sprite, every island you can visit has its own unique resting site that you might not even see if you don't make it a habit to rest on the overworld map, almost every location follows the day/night cycle, the title screen changes depending on your progress through the game, there's maybe about a dozen animated cutscenes (I think they kind of clash with the otherwise pixelart aesthetic, I've had the same problem with Chrono Trigger's PS1 rerelease, but they do still look really nice), all characters have alternate spritework just for one scene you might miss, all weapons have their own sprites, et cetera. The visual design of every location is great, they're all memorable and distinctive, and everything in them fits together nicely. The characters and enemies alike are all very well animated.
The combat is good initially... but it stops introducing new elements very quickly and ends up stagnating. If you've played the demo, you've seen most of how the combat goes - it's turn based and you control three characters, who have a basic attack (if you press the action button when the animation suggests so, you get an extra hit in), a couple of skills that use mana which regenerates with basic attacks, an ability to infuse the basic attack with magic generated by hitting enemies without the infusion, and food items which regenerate health or mana or both and have a total limit of 10 at a time. There is a combo meter that fills in through using skills and breaking enemies stance, and you can use it to make a pair of characters execute a special skill. About 10 hours later or so you also get to swap your characters mid-battle which is a free action, and the characters gradually get their ultimate skills, which use a yet another separate meter and have their own long flashy animations a la Limit Breaks or summons in Final Fantasy games. When enemies attack, you can time the blocks and take reduced damage.
This might sound like a lot to take in, but getting a grasp of it doesn't take long, and after than the combat is mostly static. The combat livens up a bit when you get to swap the characters around, but that novelty wears off pretty quickly as well.
A lot of skills end up strictly inferior and since they use the same resource, there's rarely any reason to deviate from the ones that work best. As an example, the fourth party member has the ability to delay opponent's turn, and it ends up dominating every other ability they have. The third party member has a very strong healing ability, and it dominates the rest all the same.
The combo meter fills up too slowly to use in most circumstances outside of the boss battles, and for the most of the game it's dominated by a single ability - a party-wide heal. This happens with the ultimate meter as well - the fifth party member simultaneously deals damage to all enemies, delays their turn and heals the entire party. No one else's ultimate has nearly as much utility.
The story operates completely on mcguffins and prophecies. No one can make a step without being bound to do so by Fate, which is used extensively to handwave away the impossible knowledge the characters suddenly obtain about what to do next and the lack of motivation to do so. Very few characters in this story actually want something from life, and when they do, they end up doing things so colossally stupid it becomes, perhaps unintentionally, hilarious.
Plot sort of starts in the middle and ends in the middle as well, there's very little progression to be felt throughout the game.
I feel there's only one party member with a distinct personality, the rest are kind of bland and uncharacterized. There are occasional comic reliefs which work decently well and don't become annoying by overstaying their welcome. The villains are all caricaturely evil, most of them in a cartoonish way, and some in the complete disregard for morals way. The background characters come and go without leaving much of an impression.
The world, despite extensive lore dumps, feels extremely artificial and tailor-made for the adventures the party is having. The progression through the world feels artificial as well - as I've played the game, I quickly learned that there's no sidetracking to be had, for almost the entire game there's been only one unexplored location available, which I had to traverse to get to or to otherwise unlock the new singular unexplored location. The game opens up a bit right at the end, but only just a bit - the best of it's efforts on that front will lead the player to about 3 screens or so of the optional area and a rematch against the boss the player had already fought, the other lead to 1 screen worth of a rudimentary puzzle, another boss rematch, or a short series of battles.
This, to me, was the probably the most disappointing bit - JRPGs typically excel at gradually widening the scope of themselves and allowing the player more and more leeway in what they can do as they get access to more and more optional locations bit by bit. In most JRPGs, getting a ship represents the moment of the game opening up for real. In Sea of Stars, it means nothing except that the player can now traverse ocean to get to the next singular unexplored area currently available to them.
Gameplay progression systems also happen to be boring.
Leveling up provides benefits so minute I don't understand why the devs didnt simply tie level ups to boss battles only, while making them more substantial at the same time. The game limits grinding severely either way - the amount of experience points needed for the next level scales very fast, as does the experience defeating enemies provide as you go through the game. It's therefore very hard to over- or undergrind which is good, but, again, I don't see why they designed a problem they needed a solution for when a game in Chrono series that they're so clearly paying homage to already completely sidestepped the whole issue two and a half decades ago. The skills/combos are already tied to story progression and collectible scrolls anyways.
The weapons and armor dont have anything to them except numbers, no special effects or anything (with one singular exception of a set of weapons that deals higher damage to undead), so they end up being disposed of as soon as the player finds a weapon/a piece of armor with better stats. The accessories are a bit better, but still like a half of them are just stat bonuses. Some of them are pretty transformative, though, and one is outright game-breaking.
As the story goes, the player gets access to a few knick-knacks that allow them to get into places they couldn't before, and this brings me to the secondmost sore spot in the game for me - collectibles being tied to the true ending.
I don't mind it in principle, what I do mind is the lack of quality of life features typically associated with such endeavors. Backtracking is very painful in this game, especially early on. What's even more painful is the lack of any sort of list for what you're missing in which location. There is a parrot that screams the random articles of the remaining collectibles in the area at you, but it's random, it's one at a time, and it takes forever to ask it again, and it includes in its tally the abysmal minigame that replaces the sort-of-traditional-for-JRPG-genre collectible cards minigame, which I wouldn't want to inflict on my worst enemy and which will be absent from this review lest I descend into words not lightly used in the civilized society. Collecting all the Rainbow Conches was not a very entertaining experience.
The soundtrack has some nice pieces, but overall it left kind of an amateurish impression on me. In a lot of songs the lead melody feels way too loud compared to the rest of the instrumentation, and a lot of songs suffer from the kind of uncanny sound you get by placing the same exact note with the same exact velocity using the same exact primitive instrument that has only one sample tied to it per note or maybe a deterministic synth generating the sound. The instruments themselves are often pretty obnoxious (especially the marches song, that one had me turn the music off until i got through the area). Nevertheless, I like the day/night cycle also cycling through two variations of the same song, and some songs having the dynamic stopping point, pretty neat.
I find myself running out of steam writing this review not unlike how the game itself seemingly ran out of steam and just sort of ended. I don't know if I can recommend this game to someone. Like I said at the beginning, I don't regret my time with the game, but I also don't see any particular reason why I would want someone to experience it.
It's a very okay game.
TBD
Disclaimer: at the time of writing this review (which I can't believe I'm writing), this safe-for-work version of the game I have played hasn't been released yet. However, looking at its Steam page, I don't anticipate any major changes to what I'm about to praise the game for, so I might as well write the review now while my thoughts on the game are still fresh.
Somehow, we live in the timeline where an h-game is now my third favourite roguelite deckbuilder, right after Slay the Spire and Monster Train. It's also the first game that made me realise I actually quite enjoy premeditated deckbuilding where I sit and think about card costs, synergies between cards, the balance between defence and offence and all that good stuff, I just hate most deckbuilding games.
Usually, in a deckbuilding game, you aren't really building the deck as you want to use it, you build for the sort of statistical average and hope that the RNG gods will bless you with the hand you need to have to pull off your wombo-combos. In To the Dungeon, the deck is your hand. The way it works is that when you run out of cards to use, you semi-permanently discard one of them to get the rest of your cards back in your hand. This is so insanely clever and it solves so many of the usual design problems of deckbuilder games with one single mechanic, that I'm flabbergasted that the first time I see it is in a god damn h-game.
Deckbuilder games often devolve into finding an infinite combo. Can't do that here, as you use the cards you have to discard them one by one.
Deckbuilder games often suffer from allowing turtle builds where you go full defence and win by turn 80. Can't do that here, you simply don't have enough cards to discard to last this long.
Roguelite deckbuilder games often have extremely long runs as every encounter goes for significantly longer than one turn. Here, your first turn is usually your strongest one, and since you can only get discarded cards back very occasionally, you have a heavy incentive to end things in 1-2 turns.
If RNG gods don't smile upon you, in most deckbuilding games you tend to get fucked through no fault of your own. Here, most of the destructive randomness is eliminated by the fact that the deck is your hand, and you build it specifically for how you're going to be using it. There are still some random aspects to some effects of the cards, and to the relics you can get during the run, but it's either strictly beneficial, or something you choose to inflict upon yourself if you want to.
None of that is to say that other good deckbuilding games just leave most of those problems unsolved. Slay the Spire deals with infinite combo decks and turtle decks by both making them pretty hard to get to work over the course of the run and making most enemies scale their stats as the fight goes on. It has a lot of tools for mitigating RNG, with a lot of card's effects dedicated to cycling through your deck faster, or picking out a specific card from your deck. Similar things can be said about other deckbuilding games, but I have never seen the solution as singular, general and elegant as it is in To the Dungeon.
Aside from the main mechanic, it's fairly standard with some small twists (the shield you gain doesn't reset after battle, most buffs only last one turn, cards can have special effects that give you buffs on discard that last for the entire run). There are buffs, debuffs, DoT effects and some light cost manipulation. You build your deck before the start of the run, and you can upgrade and give extra effects to the cards with runes you find in your runs and craft in the shop. It has enough variety to fill the 5 deck slots the game has with ease.
All that said, I feel the balance could've been better. The difficulty feels just right for the first 3 dungeons, but after that any decent deck you build will severely outscale the enemies, and it could've probably been solved just by tweaking their stats a bit.
It would also be nice to have more optional dungeons that facilitate specific kinds of decks. I never have any problems with finding intrinsic motivation to try out different builds for fun, but I know for certain that a lot of people would build one deck that works and just stick to it, which would get you through this game but also would leave you pretty bored, I imagine.
I don't have much to say about anything other than gameplay here. The visuals are alright, though I wish at least the heroine who is on the screen 95% of the VN section time had more than one pose with changing facial expressions. The music is good. The story is probably accidentally horrifying, as is often the case with the h-games.
If you're looking for a good roguelite deckbuilder and don't particularly mind that it's an h-game, I recommend trying it out right now. It's cheap, it's on Steam. If you really don't want to play an h-game, get the SFW version this page is dedicated to whenever it's out.
Somehow, we live in the timeline where an h-game is now my third favourite roguelite deckbuilder, right after Slay the Spire and Monster Train. It's also the first game that made me realise I actually quite enjoy premeditated deckbuilding where I sit and think about card costs, synergies between cards, the balance between defence and offence and all that good stuff, I just hate most deckbuilding games.
Usually, in a deckbuilding game, you aren't really building the deck as you want to use it, you build for the sort of statistical average and hope that the RNG gods will bless you with the hand you need to have to pull off your wombo-combos. In To the Dungeon, the deck is your hand. The way it works is that when you run out of cards to use, you semi-permanently discard one of them to get the rest of your cards back in your hand. This is so insanely clever and it solves so many of the usual design problems of deckbuilder games with one single mechanic, that I'm flabbergasted that the first time I see it is in a god damn h-game.
Deckbuilder games often devolve into finding an infinite combo. Can't do that here, as you use the cards you have to discard them one by one.
Deckbuilder games often suffer from allowing turtle builds where you go full defence and win by turn 80. Can't do that here, you simply don't have enough cards to discard to last this long.
Roguelite deckbuilder games often have extremely long runs as every encounter goes for significantly longer than one turn. Here, your first turn is usually your strongest one, and since you can only get discarded cards back very occasionally, you have a heavy incentive to end things in 1-2 turns.
If RNG gods don't smile upon you, in most deckbuilding games you tend to get fucked through no fault of your own. Here, most of the destructive randomness is eliminated by the fact that the deck is your hand, and you build it specifically for how you're going to be using it. There are still some random aspects to some effects of the cards, and to the relics you can get during the run, but it's either strictly beneficial, or something you choose to inflict upon yourself if you want to.
None of that is to say that other good deckbuilding games just leave most of those problems unsolved. Slay the Spire deals with infinite combo decks and turtle decks by both making them pretty hard to get to work over the course of the run and making most enemies scale their stats as the fight goes on. It has a lot of tools for mitigating RNG, with a lot of card's effects dedicated to cycling through your deck faster, or picking out a specific card from your deck. Similar things can be said about other deckbuilding games, but I have never seen the solution as singular, general and elegant as it is in To the Dungeon.
Aside from the main mechanic, it's fairly standard with some small twists (the shield you gain doesn't reset after battle, most buffs only last one turn, cards can have special effects that give you buffs on discard that last for the entire run). There are buffs, debuffs, DoT effects and some light cost manipulation. You build your deck before the start of the run, and you can upgrade and give extra effects to the cards with runes you find in your runs and craft in the shop. It has enough variety to fill the 5 deck slots the game has with ease.
All that said, I feel the balance could've been better. The difficulty feels just right for the first 3 dungeons, but after that any decent deck you build will severely outscale the enemies, and it could've probably been solved just by tweaking their stats a bit.
It would also be nice to have more optional dungeons that facilitate specific kinds of decks. I never have any problems with finding intrinsic motivation to try out different builds for fun, but I know for certain that a lot of people would build one deck that works and just stick to it, which would get you through this game but also would leave you pretty bored, I imagine.
I don't have much to say about anything other than gameplay here. The visuals are alright, though I wish at least the heroine who is on the screen 95% of the VN section time had more than one pose with changing facial expressions. The music is good. The story is probably accidentally horrifying, as is often the case with the h-games.
If you're looking for a good roguelite deckbuilder and don't particularly mind that it's an h-game, I recommend trying it out right now. It's cheap, it's on Steam. If you really don't want to play an h-game, get the SFW version this page is dedicated to whenever it's out.
2019
I know what you're thinking, looking at those 1.5 stars.
They don't reflect anything like the "objective" quality of the game, because I don't think I can abstract myself away from that I really, really can't stand its fundamental mechanic and that I feel it clashes with how I like to explore in games in a particularly bad way.
If it's not a problem that you have, it might well be the best game you've ever played.
They don't reflect anything like the "objective" quality of the game, because I don't think I can abstract myself away from that I really, really can't stand its fundamental mechanic and that I feel it clashes with how I like to explore in games in a particularly bad way.
If it's not a problem that you have, it might well be the best game you've ever played.