8 years after I first heard about Pepper Grinder it finally, finally releases. And thus, I can now report that the game is... fine.

Using the drill feels incredible. It's fluid and responsive and lends itself really well to great level design. Everything else however, is not up to this standard. There is way too much in this game that is not the fun drill-based platforming.

The combat in particular is pretty grim. Your shockingly small offensive range is coupled with overtly aggressive enemies that leverage questionable hitboxes against you. There is way too much of this, and it just isn’t fun. The enemies feel like padding to make the levels take longer, rather than actual substance in the levels. There are 2 90% combat levels that are completely miserable. If I made Pepper Grinder I would not have included them. The bosses are sick though they ruled.

There are also quite a few sections of platforming where the drill is not used at all, or is only used as an interface with another mechanic. Few of these are fun; most feel stiff and over-simplified, assumingly so that attention could be placed upon the parts of the game where you’re actually using the drill. This is a questionable decision considering how many of these segments there are. Especially in the last 40% of the game these segments are absolutely too frequent. Couple this with a frustratingly limited standard jump and you do not exactly have the recipe for greatness.

This game does inarguably have its highs, but they are not exceptional enough to counter it’s lows. Music is nice and has a really cohesive sound throughout the game, which is also nice. Every level has a decently unique mechanic that makes it different, which is inarguably impressive. But this means the quality of every level leans strongly upon how good this mechanic is, creating an almost binary system for each level. If the mechanic is fun or not fun, the same thing can be said of the entire level.

I did have some fun but my socks remained firmly not knocked-off for the entire game. I would wait for a sale on this one.

Genuinely one of if not the most frustrating action game i have ever played. I will just say now that i am fucking ass at this game so take what i am gonna say with a massive chunk of salt. But, this game is just filled with shit that feels like its designed to piss you off while having both not enough tools to feel like you can deal with the easily or the guidance to teach a struggling player if the tools are actually there. Sorry man i can't recreate evo moment 37 while fighting 100 enemies on a 2d plain so they all stack on top of each other so its not easy to see incoming attacks while an off screen sniper is shooting at me creating a massive blinking red reticle which obscures more of the immediate enemies i am fighting. Only to then introduce enemies with super armor.

This game feels like it has an incomplete movelist and certain moves and movement are weirdly stiff and don't flow into each other. Ex: Up+Y. Jumping feels like ass in this game and there are tons of situations where enemies are falling in the air but i can't catch them to juggle for some reason and the game has no made a clear distinction why. Sorry i am too stupid to break down the finer intricacies of the game and its mechanics and its too niche to have other people explain it because the game does a terrible job at this itself.

Incredible art direction that is truly inspired but i wish it was tied to a game that i found more fun to play

Will try again when they inevitably make more patches to tone down some of the shit that is a massive turn off.

Get ready to dunk on Duplo 4 and other games with stable framerates or functional multiplayer in global chat alongside your fellow trailblazing trendsetters slavishly following youtube guides coming up with fun novel builds in this hot new "indie" hack & slash ARPG by hardcore gamers for hardcore gamers (hence why the hotbar limits you to 5 skills), that incidentally spent half a decade in early access with barely any substantial updates during the last couple of years leading up to its recent "1.0 release", which definitely now qualifies it as a robust and most of all complete game. That's why the campaign is still unfinished and you're getting to beta test two new subclasses along with other minor little things like an auction house, while yet more overdue fixes/reworks of old busted stuff littering the game are still underway, allegedly. If that wasn't good enough, it was made in Unity (of course) by incompetents to boot to ensure it runs as poorly as one would hope and so that moving your character has you weightlessly slide across the terrain just like in all your favorite survival crafting games or b**mer shooters, on top of the presentation in many ways being worse than even Path of Exile circa a decade ago. But don't you dare bring any of that up regarding a game with a CGI pre-release trailer and premium currency microtransactions or else you'll be getting plenty of downvotes from folks who for instance think boss attacks being inaudible is perfectly acceptable, or the equivalent of a skill like frozen orb looking and sounding many times worse than its originator from 24 years ago is a-okay. Because ackshually As We All Know it's a lower budget title by an incompetent "independent" studio and that's why they couldn't afford to for example implement animations for your character blocking attacks with a shield, unlike say a game called Diablo released back in 1996.

The time travel premise in this Chronicon successor amounts to a convenient excuse to recycle level geometry and an occasional opportunity to kill dinosaurs, with one dungeon featuring everyone's favorite ephemeral gimmick from Titanfall 2/Dishonored Too, which about sums up how inspired the whole thing is outside of the mechanical back-end and the few trademark Good Ideas there. Can I name any of the characters or even quote a single line of dialogue from the stellar storyline comparable in quality to Hellgate London's you ask? Well of course, my favorite was "ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄCK!!!!" - Spymaster Zerrick. All in all, if you're a fan of clipping your sword through enemies and hearing the same anemic splatter SFX over&over while littering the screen with increasingly larger damage numbers, then this should suffice as a good enough opioid to help distract you until Path of Exile 2 is available to play for the modest price of a 250 eurodollar supporter pack complementary with your closed beta key.

PS: the volume slider for the muzak says "absolute bangers for ye gamers", and that's why even at max it's borderline inaudible ingame and the OST itself is comprised of "relaxing 432hz tunes to fall asleep to" or epic™ tracks with women going OOO and AAA, really gets you PumPd up and ready2slay

Huh? Retro throwbacks are based on games like Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden, right? Mega Man Zero is still pretty new...


Gravity Circuit is a premiere example of creators not truly understanding the inner workings of the many things they are inspired by. Not as vapid as many games that do this-- and ultimately still a solid (but far from great) game-- it manages to show a lot about platformers and the culture around "retro" games in a bite sized 2 - 3 hour package.

The reason why I even wanted to play this game in the first place was the cool grappling hook, and I am proud to say that it is Fun. Unlike a certain other Mega Man game, the swinging in this game feels great to do and moving across ceilings fluidly is some of the better movement I've been able to use in a high speed platformer like this. Grabbing and throwing enemies with this same hookshot is also real fun, and it might be the best feeling "chuck enemies at other enemies" game I've ever played. Things usually die from being smacked with one of their cohorts: so it becomes a satisfying process of killing each subsequent enemy with the other when you can, and using your superior movement to personally destroy vulnerable mooks. This is all really cool, but this game commits the sin that most platformers do: it doesn't evolve its ideas.

Despite what I just said about the grappling hook, most of Gravity Circuit's levels do not make you use it in ways that matter. It is a mechanic comprised entirely of intrinsic value, and sole mechanic that makes this game's movement unique should simply not be like that. Another issue with the level design is its emphasis on collectibles. The way these stages flow when you're playing properly it feels terrible to do that really obvious "hit the breakable wall and do a CHALLENGE..." type secret shit, and this game has a lot of that. It is confusing to me that Gravity Circuit decides to have in level collectibles for your health and super meter. Like no, dude, make it a reward for literally anything else. The other major gameplay problem are the Burst Mechanics: the super moves you get and the "stand in" for special weapons in a classic Mega Man game. These are lame. Despite sounding on paper like they open up various possibilities for how you deal with combat, they instead heavily centralize them. If you have meter you hit them with a big move and grab afterwards. Even bosses are not safe from this sort of design.

The Zero games are some of the most expressive platformers I've ever played. They have their own issues, sure, but a consistent strength of the series is how good it feels to perform under pressure. There's a lot of ways to move through levels efficiently and stylistically as Zero, and the series knows this. Much of the level design is intentionally made in ways that flow comes from smart game knowledge and tight execution. Mistakes are meaningful and even one misstep in the wrong place can destroy your flow at best and outright kill you at worst. Gravity Circuit is severely lacking in these aspects. Sure, there is sincere game knowledge required in using the grappling hook in effective ways: it isn't enough alone. The stakes are not high enough and the game is not freeform enough otherwise for me not to feel like I'm "going through the motions" even when I play well. Mixing up my gameplay is deemed irrelevant by the level design, and what does it matter if I get die? I go back to one of the 5 checkpoints per level and lose nothing from it. The Zero games put more on the player, and that's what makes them fun. The dance between player and designer is not as strong here, and as a MMZ inspired game I expect a little more from Gravity Circuit.

Overall, Gravity Circuit gets a lot wrong, especially in comparison to the MMZ games. The skill expression is significantly worse, the levels don't push the player and the "12-bit" presentation is unremarkable (because like hell am I doing a whole section on that shit). Despite it all though, it's a decent game. There is fun to be had playing it and it most definitely is an enjoyable high octane platformer in its own right. I hate to compare it to MMZ so much because they don't truly feel so similar when you get down to it, but in practice the Zero series embodies a lot of things: including a lot Gravity Circuit doesn't quite reach.

Fuck Pyrocynical.

I would rather take three thousand absolute dogshit video game essays about this game beamed directly into my brain than have to listen to a fucking internet dipshit that got his start off of calling people slurs over footage of him doing csgo knife parkour tracks PRAISE this game for the most banal surface level reasons.

We have moved beyond Youtube game reviewers.

I appreciate the dude that created this game straight up gave Pyrocynical non-answers for the reasons behind the design of the game.

The student becomes the master overnight.

Lies of P is a game that came completely out of nowhere, left no impression on me beyond "why would someone make a dark, moody game about Pinocchio", and then managed to completely eclipse every expectation I had. I got back on Game Pass for Starfield and PAYDAY 3, and decided to give this a crack solely as a might-as-well-try-it; not only is this the better of those, it's one of the finest games I've ever played. I mean this honestly and heretically: it is better than all three mainline entries of the Dark Souls series.

Yes, Lies of P is derivative. No, this does not detract from its quality. The obsession with "newness", both as an inherent virtue and as something all creators ought to strive for, is an ideal forced to take root almost exclusively at the behest of European bourgeois Romantics all looking to (ironically enough) copy what Rousseau was telling them to do in the 1700s. Art as a whole has spent centuries upon centuries cribbing from other pieces to put itself together, and it's a fairly recent development that doing shit that someone else did but in your own way is seen as a failure of the artist. I, personally, do not care about this in the slightest. If you do, I would ask only that you examine why you believe this to be so; do you have a legitimate grievance against derivative works for any reason other than because others have told you that they're some synonym for "bad"?

Round8 Studio has come almost completely out of nowhere to deliver something that's immensely fun to play, narratively engaging, and utterly gorgeous in just about every area you can find yourself in. Any developer that can come out swinging this hard and connect with just about every blow deserves to be celebrated. There's a lot to talk about, and certainly a lot of it is in regards to the way that people are talking about it. I'll get my core thesis out of the way, first:

If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game.

If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game.

Lies of P rides a fine line of being distinct, but not different. The overlap between FromSoft's PS3-and-onward output is broad, borrowing bits and pieces and rearranging them around; something similar to Sekiro parries, something similar to a Bloodborne dodge, something similar to the Dark Souls 3 enemy ambushes. But Lies of P is distinct enough in its execution of these elements that long-time Souls players will unilaterally be chin-checked when they try bringing over their muscle memory from these other titles.

Perfect guards are a guard, not a parry, and tapping the block button Sekiro-style will make you eat a hit. The dodge offers fast, generous invincibility, but it's never as safe as the one in Bloodborne is; enemies using their big red attacks will cut through your i-frames by design, encouraging you to either parry or move well out of the way. Enemies will usually come in ones and be very obvious, but many will hide just out of sight in the hopes of clipping players who haven't yet been trained to look around before charging past a blind corner. The game is uncompromising in demanding the player to meet it on its terms, rather than copying wholesale from the games that obviously inspired it and allowing the skills you learned there to completely carry over.

If you try playing this exactly like every other FromSoft Souls game you've played up to this point, you will lose, and hard. If you can not (or will not) adapt, you will probably get filtered out by the Archbishop and start publicly wondering why anyone likes this game.

There's a very strange — and frankly, it feels borderline dishonest — set of complaints I've seen where people are just outright wrong about the way the game functions, and they then use their incorrect assumptions as a base from which to knock on the game. I've seen complaints that large weapons aren't viable because you don't get poise/super armor on heavy attacks; this is blatantly untrue, and charge attacks with heavy weapons will regularly blow straight through an enemy hit. People say the dodge is unreliable, but it really isn't; if you're getting caught, you're either messing up a (fairly generous) timing or you're getting hit by red fury attacks, which the game clearly tells you cannot be rolled through. People say it's an aesthetic rip-off of Bloodborne, and this really only applies to a couple of the eldritch enemies; Parisian streets, circus theming, and fantastical automatons lend to a pretty distinct visual identity from any of the other heavy-hitters in the genre.

People say the voice acting is bad, but most of the cast is made up of established, talented stage and screen actors returning from other games like Elden Ring and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, where their performances were lauded; they sound borderline identical to what they've done since just last year, so what makes it acceptable there, and laughable here? People say the translation is bad, but I only noticed a single grammar mistake and typo in my entire playthrough, and they were both buried in the flavor text of a gesture; the rest of the writing offered some evocative lines that managed to bounce between introspective, beautiful, and the coolest fucking thing I've ever read in my life. Where are these complaints coming from? Did we play the same game? It makes no sense. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out how anyone even came to most of these conclusions. It really feels like the most vocal naysayers only played enough of Lies of P to come up with a few surface observations and then made up the rest wholesale.

None of this is to imply that the game is without fault, because it isn't. Boss runs are still present in all of their vestigial glory, consistently adding a mandatory and boring twenty seconds before you can retry a failed boss attempt. Elite enemies — especially in the late game — are often such massive damage sponges that it's a complete waste of time and resources to actually bother fighting the ones that respawn. The breakpoint at which an enemy gets staggered is a hidden value, so you're always just hoping that the next perfect guard will be enough to trip it; we've already got visible enemy health bars here, so I can't see why we don't get enemy stamina bars, too. (Stranger of Paradise continues to be the most mechanically-complete game in this sub-genre.)

For these faults, though, there are at least as many quality-of-life changes that I'm astounded haven't been adopted elsewhere already. Emptying your pulse cells (your refillable healing item) allows you the opportunity to get one back for free if you can dish out enough damage. Theoretically, as long as you can keep up both your offense and defense, you have access to unlimited healing. It's such a natural extension of the Rally system, where you can heal chip damage by hitting foes; Bloodborne's implementation of blood vials looks completely misguided next to this. If you have enough Ergo to level up, the number in the top right corner of the screen will turn blue, no longer requiring you to manually check if you've got enough at a save point. When a side quest updates, the warp screen will let you know that something has happened, and where to start looking for the NPC that it happened to.

It's a challenging game, but it really isn't that hard. I do agree with the general consensus that it would be nice if the perfect guards could be granted a few extra frames of leniency. I managed to start hitting them fairly consistently around halfway through the game, but it's going to be a large hurdle that'll shoo off a lot of players who don't like such tight timings. Tuning it just a little bit would help to make it feel a bit more fair without completely compromising on the difficulty. Everything else, I feel, is pretty strongly balanced in the player's favor; I got through just about every boss in the game without summoning specters and without spending consumables, but they were all there for me if I really needed them. I'd like to go back and play through it again, knowing what I know now, and really lean into the item usage. It's not like you won't wind up with a surplus, considering how easy everything is to farm.

I understand that Bloodborne is something of a sacred cow, especially on this website — it's currently two of the top five highest-ranked games — so anything that seems like it's trying to encroach on its territory is going to be met with hostility before all else. I understand. It's a special game for a lot of people. That said, I'd suggest going into Lies of P with an open mind and a willingness to engage with the game on its own terms; you might manage to find it as impressive of a work as I do.

Quartz is stored in the P-Organ.

I think your mileage with this will heavily depend on how much you can forgive it for being so derivative, but I think in this case it’s worth forgiving. Personally, I have no problem with stealing souls systems like bonfires, estus, stamina management, parries, rallies etc. but there are points where I think Lies of P crosses a line: talking to sick people through windows, a not-fire-keeper calling you “clever one”, slowly pushing open heavy double-doors, the same damn item pickup and menu sounds, I think these kinds of choices are needlessly derivative and will only serve to remind people of other, better, games. A more thrifty approach could have taken the meat of souls without also taking the chaff. Even things like attacking, running and dodging animations are uncannily similar to fromsoft titles, which is a bit of a double-edged sword: On the one hand, this is one of the precious few souls copycats that actually feels great to play, because it takes the finely-tuned animation cadence of fromsoft so wholesale (the other souls copycat that feels good, Nioh, relies on the years of action game experience that Team Ninja has, so it’s maybe preferable for an inexperienced dev to simply steal in this case). The negative side of this is that everything which feels “off” or out of place will stick out all the more severely. Level design is pretty obviously inferior to fromsoft’s games, as linear as it is with a bunch of superfluous shortcuts, lacking the overlapping and layered tracks that define the best souls levels (ds3 undead settlement is a perfect example) and lacking any real side areas. But elsewhere I have to say that as the game went on, I found remarkably little to complain about: Environmental design and the art direction is alarmingly good for a debut game, enemy variety is surprisingly great - one of the critical things that separates good souls from mid souls, I was really taken aback by how the game has unique minibosses that are only used once or twice whereas basically every other souls copycat is defined by excessive reuse. The quality of the animations is universally top-notch, everything flows great and so many weapons have enjoyable movesets and bosses have subtle variations in their combos to signify what they’ll do next.

All creativity is about stealing to some extent, though this is admittedly on the more extreme end of that spectrum. Still, I think a fixation on its similarities - both superficial and meaningful - can cover up the actually original things that are here: Glossing over the neat durability and weapon-fusion mechanics, I love the parry/blocking system in this game and think it's an ingenious fusion of Sekiro and Bloodborne that actually improves both. The boon of Sekiro’s posture and parry mechanics was that it allowed bosses to have flashy, dynamic, extended blockstrings without feeling like you were just waiting for the boss to be done (i.e Elden Ring), because parrying those blockstrings did damage to the enemy. The flaw of Sekiro’s mechanics, for some people at least, was that parry was the only meaningful way to engage with a lot of situations, which Lies of P solves by requiring posture breaks to be activated by a charged heavy, forcing you into finding an opening and not just reacting with parries. Bloodborne, on the other hand, was all about hit-trading, thanks to its rally mechanic, and the boon of this was that getting hit was equally an opportunity just as much as it was a punishment, the flaw, however, was that in some cases it could promote mindlessly aggressive play, where you just hit-trade a boss to death without even trying to avoid their attacks (Bloodborne mostly got around this with clever enemy designs, but some bosses still have the problem). Lies of P fuses these two by locking the rally mechanic behind blocking, while retaining the parrying mechanics of Sekiro. The result is an interesting risk-reward pipeline: Risk a parry to get their posture down, if you miss and get a regular block, now you’re encouraged to go on the offensive to get that health back, getting hit is unequivocally bad and dodging remains very relevant as a repositioning tool. It’s interesting and, for me, very satisfying to engage with, though I wouldn’t say it’s perfect: It’s a little too insistent on parrying with the armour and tracking that bosses/elite enemies sometimes have, the fact that it doesn’t show you the posture bar so that you can’t factor in how close an enemy is to staggering into your decision-making also seems like an odd choice, and the “perilous attacks” beating both block and dodge can get a little ridiculous, but for the most part I really like the systems here.

The deciding factor for me is that the bosses in Lies of P are genuinely fantastic, all with loads of varied, amazingly animated attacks and interesting gimmicks, there are some lacklustre ones, especially the two lategame rematch bosses, but the run of bosses from Andreas with his side-switching gimmick, the Black Rabbits aka "O&S but with 3 different Ornsteins", King of Puppets, Victor and the Green Monster with the clever reuse of the Watchman is just banger after banger, they're all so creatively designed, and if I could commit some blasphemy real quick, I think this boss lineup is better than any other soulslike game, fromsoft included.

It comes with the caveat that this is a very difficult game. I love that, personally, the level of difficulty means that encounters demand you respect them and learn their moves rather than stumbling through, but it won’t be for everyone, and I think if you go in with the mindset that it’s just a copy, you’re not going to want to give it that respect. It’s a little sad that the general reception seems to be so lukewarm, and it’s hard to pinpoint whether this lies in the difficulty, the feeling that it’s a “knockoff”, a vindictive idea that any good soulslike is a threat to fromsoft, or just general fatigue with soulslikes. Regardless, a lot of the takes about how the game is unfair or feels “off” just don’t ring true to me at all; I think this is the real deal, it’s a damn good game, and I honestly find myself feeling that it’s going to be my GOTY, but hey, I loved Bloodborne and Sekiro, so it was probably a given that I would love a fusion of the two as well.