Hellishly mesmerizing, like peering through a microscope into a pulsating, "glow-in-the-dark" party for bugs. Psychedelic, kinetic and exhilarating through and through. Akin to Thumper and Post Void with it's antagonizing vibes and visual obstruction used as difficulty. Gotta be honest, Barely know what the hell is going on 80% of the time. A layer of esoteric rules and game design that leave me confused; like, when do I actually die? Does my health regenerate? What exactly do the power-ups do?
Highly recommend to not listen to the lies and deceits (recommended to play with gamepad) and just play with keyboard and mouse. Felt like my brain split into two while with a gamepad and I genuinely started to get headaches after 20 minutes. Worth it doe, these shapes and colors be POPPIN!!!

I keep asking myself why i play these free indie games with retro graphics. There are a ton of revered titles sitting in my backlog untouched. None of them have been particularly worth my time, despite the fact that they are so short. My Eyes Deceive is no different. The only compliment i can give is that the visuals were interesting at times. While the gameplay is appropriate for the topic, it is still entirely lifeless. The worst bit is the use of CSA as a literal punchline in a horror mystery, with no suitable warning. Maybe someday i'll find one of these free games thats actually worth a damn, but i don't see myself playing any more until then.

If nothing else the scope and visuals are astounding, this is tech that nearly matches the peak fidelity of 32x with Nintendo's trade optimization tricks and 2D/3D hodge-podging. The change to a mission based structure is fine but these levels are extremely low effort, they're all like one hallway with 2 pincushions to shoot. The dogfights are pretty bad until you learn to cheese them with the charge shot. Music is way worse, neither rockin' nor movin', it's a shame.

It's easy to see why this was canned when the game still needed a huge amount of content to fill out the world, and the cost of FX-2 boards would eat out their profits.

Shantae but good (actually this time)

Very cool how beyond just the cutscene style and spritework this retains a lot of the weird quirks of the zelda cdi games. Yknow, the objects you can never tell if are in the background or foreground, enemies needing different projectiles to kill, picking stuff up/talking to people with your sword, the shitty darkrooms, the weird jump feel, all while managing to play like an actual platformer instead of like a DVD menu. Multiple instances where I mistook a door I needed to go in to progress for a background detail, but god are those backgrounds a treat to look at, perfectly in line with how the originals look so cool. Plays alright, nothing really to write home about as far as metroidvania stuff goes, I do like how its segmented into a bunch of smaller levels rather than one sprawling map so you're never really lost for long. Probably couldve used more enemy variety but they're fine as an ends to a mean.

My biggest gripe's with the animation. Yeah, its funny and charming and does a good job replicating the original, but it just feels kinda off, like they got real close to that weird ass animation the ogs have but didn't get all the way. You watch those original faces of evil cutscenes and those weird fuckers never sit still, always bending and turning in random directions while they spout their nonsense. Arzette's animation often feels kinda stiff by comparison, doesn't have the same distinctly Soviet feel that the old ones have. Hardly a bad effort but I just think it couldve been a little better. Do like how little it feels like its winking to the audience about how goofy it is, good on them for playing it straight. I did clap and do they soyface when they said "Dinner" and "It burns", obviously.

also the hotel mario homage was cool but as far as im aware there's no reference to i.m. meen which they were fake for

I sometimes have the tendency to look down on these ‘Lost games' ARG BS that flood itch.io and steam. Not because they're bad or not scary but because they're always the most basic bog standard creepypasta BS you could possibly think of with very little to show for it in scares, puzzles, or clever use of the ARG format. I think the only games I’ve seen done well were Ben Drowned, Godzilla NES, and Petscop, two of those are just hi-effort Creepypastas and one that doesn't even exist. Which is why I'm glad to say that this game goes out of its way to not only pass the super low bar of lame creepypasta lost game bs; but also carve its own path as a pretty great ARG and a genuinely scary experience. Finally we can have a lost game ARG where it's not about a dead person/child controlling the game but rather something much MUCH worse.........disgruntled employees.

Also I really wanna give this game a huge thumbs up for the game's N64 like presentation. It's not one for one like the games of its era and at points you can clearly tell it’s not a game that could’ve worked on a real N64, but they make it work in the lore of the ARG along with still having the ability to make the atmosphere all the more dreadful by going for a more basic lower quality look.

I don't have much else I wanna say about it without giving away spoilers but I do think the puzzles are a little too obtuse at times but the game was designed to be a community driven ARG experience so really if anything they did too good of a job if you think about it. But overall it's just a really solid horror experience I'm glad I gave a chance instead of just scrolling past it like any other itch.io ARG creepypasta schlock.