There's some really cool things in this game that distract from the fact that the open world is empty and most of the gameplay time is spent traveling between the different objectives. The game both lets me one-shot incredibly lore-powerful characters, or too hard and do almost no damage to strong regular enemies with the element they're weak against. The whole relationship between humans and pawns was the most interesting part of the game for me and I'm glad it was tackled more in depth in the DLC dungeon.

Pretty cool! Mechanics wise, it's pretty much Minecraft parkour mechanics except with better bouncing and worse ladders. Everything controls pretty consistent, except the poles/ropes/shafts that my character always lets go at random no matter how hard I'm pressing the crouch key. It does have that Getting Over It game design of losing all your progress in a single jump, so it's in no way accessible and that's a shame because the environment is really pretty and the music is good too before you've listened to all 2-5 tracks.

The horror aspect... It's kinda cool that it's there, but it doesn't really work for me 100%. Like, it's REALLY unlikely that you're going to get enough vertigo playing the game normally to make the creepy things have a decent chance of spawning. It's kinda scary when you intentionally look for it the first time, but it's very simple so it gets old after two or three times. Which I'm thankful for, I think keeping it as scary atmosphere with a shadow guy once in a while (which seems to be different for every player or playthrough!) is a really good way to go at it. But it's kinda doomed to not land right - be too aggressive and the horror distracts you from the already nightmarish jumps, be too mild and... well, the game as it is currently.

I don't want to be too mean about this since it's a free game and it's clearly a passion project, but it just didn't click for me.

At first I was excited because there seemed to be no obvious "oooh scary monster chases you!", which is my biggest turn off in any backrooms or liminal space inspired media. And it was really cool! The environments are diverse enough, the giraffes are cute and there's sort of a plot happening. Then the mannequins turned into oooh scary mist monster and I clocked out mentally.

The ending was fine and the CYOA twist was pretty good, but the SCP reveal kind of soured things for me once again. I really love SCP, I think mixing backrooms and SCP makes sense (backrooms wiki lore is just worse SCP anyways), but this is the coldest, most generic, most boring take on the foundation ever. They're cold and they do unethical experiments and terminate their D-class. Really? What is this, series 1?

Overall an okay experience compared to a lot of other backrooms media, but it just wasn't for me.

The controls are both more fluid but also worse than you're expecting. Strafing and dashing feel pretty good to do, but moving your camera at all feels like a nightmare. The customization aspect is pretty good too, the UI and weapon names aren't very intuitive at all when helping you decide if you should buy something, but the fact that you get a full refund when you sell something makes experimenting pretty fun if you're willing to crawl through the menus. I don't know if it was my copy of the game or if it's always like this, but most areas had no music.

The narrative is pretty interesting, I really wasn't expecting them to be so direct about the anti-corporate themes! That coupled with the debt and human plus systems makes for a pretty immersive experience, if not a slightly miserable one. The misery increases tenfold on the last few quests, unfortunately, and not in a cool thematic way. They throw some maps and enemies at you that... kinda assume the game is more fluid and has more potential to be more cinematic than it actually does. The best maps in this game are the large open ones with obstacles to hide behind, not the long hallways and hellish mazes and ABSOLUTELY NOT the final level's vertical moving platform climb and narrow shaft arena. Would have given it a 4 if not for this last 1-2 hours of gameplay. The cutscene has that characteristically "throwing ideas at the lore until fans pick it up" From Software vibe - it was pretty funny looking up what it meant online after finishing the game and seeing someone say "they remade this game 3 times I don't think even they think it's worth figuring out".

Aside from some confusion about where you start on the map and some collisions the game didn't warn me about until I had already crashed, this game is really solid and I had a blast getting through it! Even though your only real environment is the inside of the sub, it really does feel like you're immersed in an alien moon from the atmosphere and the little glimpses you get through the camera. I wish the final scare was as good as some of the other anomalies you get to see, it's a bit lame in comparison.

Pretty alright! This feels like a sandbox of ideas for completely different platforming games that don't exist. None of them go too in-depth which is kind of disappointing when you find one that you really like. The controls felt a little clunky - double tapping to dash works really well on the D-Pad (the intended movement buttons), but everything else doesn't. Couldn't care much about the story, it's one of those "we're making fun of tropes here" things but it still tries to keep you emotionally invested somehwo which didn't work for me. The graphics are really cool, mixing 2D and 3D in a way that looks goofy at worse and stunning at its best.

Love the creature designs in this game! My favorites have to be the cylinder servants, they look so ominous and distinct and I love the fusion of human + human technology with the obscured faces. The story was pretty straightforward but there's a lot of room to interpret the cylinder metaphor. I kinda wish they stopped asking me to go find 3 things sooner, though. Also, I did not know this game was procedurally generating environments for a while, and I always felt like I was doing something wrong when I found an incubator but no eggs or vice versa.

It's my opinion that to fully appreciate what this game is you have to be a little obsessed with the whole Mario 64 mythology that has been built up throughout the years. Lost builds both real and fake, never ending reports of players finding eerie and unfitting elements in such a classic game that pretty much always has eyes on it, the rise of analog horror fueling a new wave of atmosphere and nostalgia focused content - everything plays a part in it.

I often see the argument that the new generation of internet users is "making horror not scary", pointing out how the Backrooms now resembles the SCP Foundation and blaming them for the mascot horror trend that has produced some less than stellar cash grabs. While I personally don't enjoy the "personalization AI" theory and many other concepts that are a bit too far off from reality... so what?

I think that, when faced with a company such as Nintendo, who has the tightest grip on what Mario is and how you should be experiencing at every second of their games with the sole intent of fueling more dollars into their bank accounts, the boldest thing you can do is create something that is cringe. Something that doesn't make sense - or rather, only makes sense to you, at a certain mindset and point in time. Become unmonetizable. Make Mario have the hyper realistic bloody eyes if you want. It's your game.

In a climate where games preservation pretty much /has/ to overlap with piracy to be effective, I think making a rom hack like this that takes elements from real old SM64 builds and combining them with fanmade concepts and rumors old and new is fantastic. It's taking this game that is held to such high standards as "the beginning of 3D gaming" or whatever and getting weird with it.

After 20+ stars of playing, it becomes impossible to differentiate what is real, fake, old or new. It's eerie and comforting and nostalgic and innovative and any other feelings that it makes you feel. It can always be "that deep". It's oddly exciting to get to play something that wasn't ready to be shown to you. Some of the maps even kill you after a certain amount of time to prevent you from seeing the unfinished content. I think that's awesome. Games don't come out of thin air ready, they go through multiple iterations and what you get from the store is the cleanest, most sanitized and marketable version.

I think Mario should run through 5 identical castle lobbies until he goes through 3 fake paintings in a row and eventually reaches a huge cake with an equally huge star - which is actually a quicksand trap that kills him instantly. I'm glad someone else agrees.

First of all, I'm not sure if I can say I've actually "completed" the game. I rebuilt the community center, finished the mines and got to 100 on the skull cavern. I made some progress on Ginger Island but I didn't complete all of the golden walnut request things, nor the fossil, nor the vaguely racist frog's quest.

It's an alright game. There's lots of polish put into it, it streamlines a lot of farming game mechanics that feel slow in other games, it has a decent amount of content and it's very moddable. Pretty much all the problems I have with this game are personal preferences. Except fence decay, I think that's just stupid.

I think the streamlining of the mechanics works really well for most people, but it just made the game both too overwhelming and too slow for me. Since you can cram more activities in a single day, it's very easy to make a schedule for yourself that gets completely ruined if you don't optimize every single day. Or plant too much and then lack stamina for literally anything else.

I think farming games should be a little obtuse! There should be things in between you and the farm. Not too many things to the point where farming has no point (Harvestella), but having a story to follow or just some unique (non procedural) dungeons to go through make the whole experience more diverse. During the later parts of the game, it was pretty much just a numbers game. Ironic how even doing the community bundle instead of Joja makes you hyperfocus on productivity.

I'm not sure how much the game wants me to care about these characters. They're all interesting and have at least some backstory, but the way it's presented doesn't really click with me. Some of the writing feels... borderline tone deaf, such as the whole thing with George and treating his disability as a flaw. Shane is a dickhead for most of the game as well, I don't know how anyone can like him. Between Shane, Clint, Pierre and Lewis, a lot of people in this town are questionable and I simply don't feel like becoming friends with them at all.

There's the whole lore about the dwarves and shadow people war, the empire and republic war, the elves dying out, the literal wizard, and yet the game doesn't really tell you anything. It feels like it doesn't want to tell you anything. It feels like all these details were made to justify making flavor text more interesting, without making said lore interesting by itself.

But to be fair, that's sort of the point of the game. The community center - and the community as a whole - are broken and it's your job to fix it. But even then, it doesn't feel like anything you do is meaningful. Barely anyone visits the center when it's restored. Making a house for Pam to live in instead of her trailer has an emotional cutscene, but only really affects her schedule. Linus and the wizard continue to be somewhat ostracized no matter how much friendship you gather. What's the point? I'm simply a source of number go up for this town whether I'm serving Joja or a couple supernatural beings that use their tremendous power to... rebuild a community center no one really seems to truly care about. Robin certainly doesn't care enough to even consider repairing it herself.

10 years after purchasing it and 280 hours of gameplay later, I've finally finished my first single player playthrough.

I think the biggest issue with Terraria is that it doesn't tell you anything. I didn't have an issue with that when I first played the game since there wasn't much to do and you could easily figure out what to do next as soon as a new update hit, but trying to figure things out 10 years later is a different story. I had the wiki page open at all times. There is a set order to do things but the game doesn't give you any hint of it. You can spend a large amount of time scanning every single item on the guide to try and figure out how to craft the boss summoning items and then die to each one to gauge what order to do them in. That'd mean you'd still miss on some of the more obtuse encounters like Fishron, but it's possible.

Everything else about this game seems to have aged pretty well, though! Graphics are simple but pretty, the grinding feels rewarding even after they added a handful of new ores to search, the music is nostalgic (decent) and there's so much content for you to find (look up). There have been a number of updates that have eventually led to (in my opinion) every one of the main "classes" being viable and fun. Not to mention the modding community has really advanced over the years. There's so much to do in this game if you like the gameplay it presents. A classic for sure.

It's a pretty relaxing and chill survival crafting game on the first couple hours. The graphics are pretty and the atmosphere is chill. The only real threat are bears which spawn in preset areas and stay in them, but properly using stealth to get through them is almost impossible and you'll need to after a while to get more non renewable resources. The decision to have some of the main resources you'll need be non renewable (I think?) is very odd to me. But to be fair, those are at least very signposted with the giant towers. The later game renewables are impossible to find even with a guide since their spawn location isn't fixed, so endgame just becomes a boring scavenger hunt with an insane time limit since days are so short.

The theming of this game is also very odd. It's supposedly one of those games were you retreat into nature to live a simpler life or whatever, but the most important resources you'll need are metal pipes, bolts and nails that you collect from ruins of manmade structures. Is this an admittance that you can't survive on the wild on your own as someone who grew up in an urban society? Or did the creators just didn't think about the dissonance? Or maybe that's not the message of the game at all and there's no message because it's just a quick cash grab survival crafting 1/3rd of a game? We'll never know because the devs abandoned it.

Anatoli's route has more of a traditional RPG maker horror game feel to it, but I like how short and to the point it is. Pyotr's route is... weird! I wasn't expecting things to go in that direction after the somewhat grim-realistic endings on the first, but I can appreciate the more surreal tone things took. I think I got the best ending or at least one of the good ones, and aside from some tonal whiplash at the very end I'm pretty satisfied with how things went.

Overall, nice message about how the people in power will literally let others burn to achieve their senseless goals, and how feelings of duty and regret fare into it. I wish there were more save slots and a faster walking speed option so I could hunt for the other endings (I heard there's even joke endings but I have no idea how to find them), but I had a nice time with it.