157 reviews liked by Ricecreammm


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Pretty cute all the way through!

I'd backed this game near the start of it's development in like 2021, I followed updates for a bit, but eventually figured for a visual novel it was better to wait for the full package, and was pleasantly surprised when I got a steam key for it when it came out there! I didn't have the time to actually play through the game fully until now, and it was lots of fun to see the added/finished content!

There's not a crazy amount to critique in terms of game play, it's a visual novel with branching paths, you read and make a couple choices lol. I guess my only "game play" complaint is that the Felicia route is clearly the "intended route" as it has the most content and branches to check out, which can in turn make some of the other routes feel a liiiiitle underbaked. But it's not a deal breaker as each route offers something fun and unique!

The art is good all throughout! It's a little funny when you can tell what was made early in development vs late. But it's also kind of cool to see the different artists skill and style develop between certain gallery scenes.

The writing is really sweet too! I think sometimes it was a little too on the nose or cheesy for me, but I think it all has it's charms. The game never gets too heavy or anything, but all the characters feel thought out, and the little moments of drama are fun! The big twist in the Gavin route is really clever and fun to play out, it's probably the most dramatic the game gets (I guess the Julie route has some of that but it's all played off in a fun way that it doesn't feel quite as dark, just exciting and fun!).

Overall I'm glad I played this game finally! If you're into this kind of stuff, it's got a lot of charm and is worth checking out! I'm also excited to check out what's been done on the sequel!

Oh and to all my friends seeing this! Hi! I try to keep a habi of not just talking about porn or fetishes unless I'm super chill with those people so sorry if this is how you had to find out I'm into this kind of stuff LOL.

It's pretty cute i guess.

As much as I'd love to not mention it, it's impossible not to compare this game to Lethal Company. I feel like any game going forward that wants to try and recapture that Lethal Company appeal is going to have a hard time beating what Lethal Company already offers.

I think this game is way more chill than lethal company. Not that I'm ever a "try hard" when I play lethal with my friends, but this game incentivizes the silliness that tends to come with your average game of lethal. Both the games are dumb fun, but this game encourages you to be dumb. You are playing as a group of "Spooktubers" after all.

The camera mechanic is pretty cool, and is where most of the "chill factor" comes from in the game. Rather than hunting for junk like in lethal company, you're on the hunt for views on a clip show you make with an in game camera. This is where the magic of this game comes in, as one player can record up to ~2 minutes of footage with the in game camera. This leads to everyone being dumb on purpose, after all your best friend dying means more views right? It's a ton of fun finishing a dive into the "old world" and coming back up and watching the stupidity unfold in a sporadic retelling of your adventure.

The other chill factor in this game is the monsters. Compared to lethal company, the monsters in content warning are much less, well, "lethal". This is done purposefully since as I mentioned earlier the game wants you to be stupid. Where a lot of the comedy of lethal company comes from the instant-ness of death the monsters in that game cause, the comedy in content warning is seeing the monsters brutalize your friends, only for them to stand back up and walk it off.

There's a lot less pressure in this game than in Lethal Company, and in a lot of ways it works well. There's one treasure (the camera) and you're a lot more likely to all survive due to the inherently less hostile game design.

However, the game just doesn't have the depth Lethal company does. All the rewards in this game are mostly cosmetic, Expensive emotes, Party poppers, Silly microphones, etc. It plays into the gameplay loop well enough, your videos get "higher production" the longer you go. But they don't really effect how you interact with the world, unlike Lethal Company. In lethal you can get new tools that let you explore outside of facilities, or teleporters that can create clutch saves, or instant chaos. In Content Warning each loop is the same, even the location you dive to is picked for you and stays the same for the 3 day loop for each view quota. As it is now, I feel like I've seen most of what Content Warning has to offer. And it was a good time! But I don't think I could play this more than maybe one or two more times.

I got the game on launch when it was free for the day, and as a free game it's a 100% recommend. At $8 It's still pretty cheap, but I would only get it if your friends already have it or want to play it. However, if the game gets some updates, then I might change my tune! I do think it has room to grow and be a more "chill" alternative to the game play loop Lethal Company currently dominates.

I think this is a pretty fun little expansion, and a fun little foray into roguelikes for Nintendo. Notice how I said little twice?

I don't want to sound like an entitled gamer with this review, but my biggest complaint with Side Order is that it felt like it was JUST short of being something really special. The first chunk of this DLC is really cool, the tutorial climb up the tower is full of dialogue and character interactions, there's cutscenes and intrigue. You get to the top and win the fight! But uh oh, the real big bad appears! Back to the bottom of the spire with you! Now for the roguelite to begin!

Now the first couple runs of Side Order proper are really fun! Seeing all the new bosses, the new enemies and floor layouts, the new chips to modify your weapon! It's all super cool to see, what's next! With little to no upgrades its super challenging and has a good amount of butt clench! I really was proud of myself for beating it on my third attempt (#humblebrag) because it felt like the odds were against me! I cleared the final boss with my final life and got hyped up for the final sequence of the game! It was a really good time, and now they're challenging me to beat it with every weapon? Sick!

However that's where the cracks start to show.

The first thing that kind of grated on me was that excluding the final boss, there are only 3 possible bosses, and you see 2 of them on each run. This leads to the randomness of bosses during runs being, pretty limited. I wish they had either had all 3 bosses during the run and eliminated the random chance, or perhaps added just one more boss so that there weren't so few boss combos possible. Second, the chips simply aren't as run changing as they should be. The ultimate change in each run is what weapon you're using, it doesn't feel fun to build around certain chips when all that REALLY matters is the gun. Finally, the "hacks" from Marina make subsequent runs trivial once you have enough. After clearing the tower 2-3 times, I don't think I lost a run until the final challenge.

As for the story, well. It's really bare bones. You get scraps each time you beat the final boss with a new weapon, and the dev logs explain how the expansion came to be, but it's not really anything crazy, unlike the octo expansion in the (much better) game before this. There's some cute dialogue in the elevator going up the tower, but in a game that encourages you to beat it at least 12 times, it repeats too soon, and I started skipping it.



Ultimately I think it's the best part of Splatoon 3, which is not a high bar as I think splat 3 is a step down from it's predecessor. So if you already own the game and have 20 bucks to spare, check it out, its fun enough to dive back into Splatoon for a bit.

Finally I want to talk about the final challange Spoilers ahead for that I guess (it's just gameplay mechanics.)


The idea of climbing the tower with no upgrades again was cool, something deserving of a giant reward. It was cool to some extent! I liked only having one life, it made every mistake feel grave and I went into a panic! Beating the final boss as "wimpy" as possible felt cool too...



and then nothing. no cutscene. barebones rewards. nothing. Hell, the story implication is that you just saved your own soul and they don't. really mention that. I was really pissed at this. I get a reskin of a weapon I don't use in the multiplayer, and a sticker for my battle tag? and story wise all i get is a pat on the back from Pearl? come on dude.

This review contains spoilers

Back on Splatoon 2's FinalFest, I was in Team Order. Not only did it strike me as the preferable moral choice, it also seemed like the less hacky threat to theme the next game around. I don't think there's a Nintendo baddie who wouldn't align themselves with Team Chaos, and it seemed easy to picture how that would pair with Splatoon's colourful, forever teenage aesthetic. I wanted to know what an orderly Splatoon would be. It seems the developers were fairly inspired by the curious prompt, too, as they pretty much ignored the divine authority of SplatFest results to deliver this vision as a bit of DLC.

Side Order has a pretty conservative approach to random elements, and that's both a good and bad thing. While I was pretty cold to the idea of Nintendo's new generation of developers handing over the game design tools to an algorithm, the levels here are all tailored with the same care they've traditionally put into the series' single-player content. There just isn't all that much of it. This is billed as a mode that you can play endlessly. One run through Side Order takes roughly half an hour, and the bulk of any two runs will be spent on the same stages. The variables are meaningful, and help to build skills you can carry over to the main multiplayer content, but I don't know if it'll have much meaningful impact outside of Splatoon's active playerbase.

Each run through Side Order asks you to select a pre-made weapon loadout and presents you with 30 floors of a tower to beat. Each one presents you with a random selection of three levels to pick from, each marked with their own difficulty rating and completion rewards. Levels each come with one of five objectives, and all involve either chasing or defending a target while fighting off oncoming enemies. It's fun, but it doesn't really offer the variety or complexity of a typical single-player campaign. I don't think anybody outside of the most hardcore fans will play through it with every loadout.

The thing is, Splatoon gets to use its characters, aesthetic and themes as a crutch. For the most engaged fans who lap up this stuff, this side of the DLC makes up for the relatively shallow pool of content. There's a lot of direct callbacks and narrative ties to previous games and a good amount of Splatoon deeplore stuff. It just seems to repeat a lot of the same beats we've already seen, and the only people who will care about this aspect of the content are the same people who will be bothered by those things.

It's a big showcase for Splatoon 2's pop duo, Off the Hook, with Pearl acting as a Bowser's Fury-style drone partner, taking out swarming enemies and shouting out words of encouragement as you play. She's a pretty good fit for it, really. It was kind of funny to see Marie take a similar role in Splatoon 2, trying to inspire action without losing her cool, but if Splatoon wasn't so committed to its characterisation, she'd have been hooting and hollering like Pearl throughout it. Dialogue and unlockable written content relentlessly reinstate how much Marina and Pearl love each other, though despite the burgeoning enthusiasm from a significant segment of the fanbase, it appears we're not going to see explicit confirmation of a gay relationship in a game from the publishers of Tomodachi Life anytime soon.

Playing through Side Order with different weapon loadouts (each one themed around a familiar Splatoon character, of course) will unlock further weapons, in-game cash to spend on upgrades, and entries from Marina's diary. These act like the Squid Sister Stories did in the runup to Splatoon 2, offering us a little insight on Marina's perspective following Team Chaos's victory, but it's relatively perfunctory. Marina's a fairly pristine character, uniquely talented in a range of interests, and full of love for everyone. It's hard to imagine her doing something maliciously. The developers have far less conviction in pinning her as a villain as they did for Callie in Splatoon 2, putting a lid on the possibility before you even see Side Order's opening titles. It's a little underwhelming, but I respect the team's commitment to established characterisation before everything else. We might get less exciting stories for it, but when the fans watch the concerts, they fully believe in those dancing fish people. You don't want to mess with that.

I'm a little anxious that the politics have taken a bit of a backseat in Splatoon now. Pikmin 4 was guilty of the same, and I really don't want it to be something Nintendo shies away from. Octo Expansion took a really big swing on this stuff. Not only did it deliver a fairly earnest anti-racist message in a way that really complemented the established characters and setting, I was fucking thrilled with how it put the game's ecological message into stark view. Implying that there's something to be learned from the energy and passion of the youth movement of the late sixties, by homaging Planet of the Apes' post-apocalyptic revelation with its sunken Statue of Liberty, but also presenting it in the most Splatoon way possible, with you grinding around it on midair ink rails to a thumping soundtrack and rapidfiring at Lady Liberty's pulsing weak spots. It's difficult for me to think of any part of a videogame that I love more than Octo Expansion's final hours. I was with Splatoon since Day One, and this was the perfect way to tell me that my good will had paid off. Presenting the oncoming climate emergency and subsequent extinction of the human race, not only as a solid fact, but a rollercoaster with popstars and dualwielded uzis. There's nothing like that in Side Order. Just a loose implication that dogmatic authoritarianism is a flawed attitude. It feels pretty lame by contrast. I don't know if anybody else gets as much out of this side of Splatoon, and I don't think they can repeat that high. I just feel obliged to keep prodding the developers to get radical again.

That's not to say that Side Order makes no meaningful progress on the story. Following up on the liberation of the Octoling army, we're given some insight into who those people were and how their lives have changed since. It's significant to our understanding of Marina, and shows commitment to the continuity. It didn't stir me too much, personally, but if there had been so much as a comment from a Squid Sister, I know I'd have been far more invested.

Completing Side Order gives players the ability to set Splatoon 2's Inkopolis Square as their main hub. It's kind of weird to be seeing nostalgia for a game on the same console, but with all the signs that the Switch may be wrapping things up, there is a bit of ennui in going back to the 2017 stuff right now. As a big fan of Zelda, Mario and Splatoon, that year was a complete thrill ride for me. Not only was there excitement for this new console, we were giddy for a version of Nintendo that put all its focus on a single platform. There seemed to be a massive new title every month, for a while. As remarkable a system as it became, I think it's fair to say it didn't really carry on that same trajectory for long. With Tears of the Kingdom, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and the Mario Kart 8 DLC, it feels like Nintendo have just been trying to repeat those 2017 successes, rather than continue on that journey of invention. Splatoon 2 is good, Splatoon 3 is good, and Side Order is good, but Octo Expansion had me thinking the series would change and get far more ambitious. I don't think that's happened. It's like we've seen everything it can be, and all we can expect now are minor tweaks. I still want Portal 2/Resident Evil 4 structure in single-player Splatoon. I just have far less faith it's going to happen, now.

I'm the kind of fan who paid for this as soon as possible to get access to the Splatoon 1 hub. Of course this is what my criticism is going to look like.

This review contains spoilers

The first hour isn't boring you are. Was kinda disappointed when this just became superliminal. idk kinda reductive but i thought the like office comedy thing it had going on was a lot more unique then the more clichely indie stuff after that. It has a similar thing to flower sun and rain where the rigid daily structure is a great setup for comedy. and just like that game every review seems to think it's some kind of drag when i just found it really chill. BUT then that ending bit goes on for so long that it begins to become compelling again and getting out into that outside area is incredibly cathartic. I uhhhh said no to rachel cus i wanted to explore the rest of the island and didn't know it would send me back to the nightmare hell office and i thinkkkk you just get sent into a loop you can't escape from? idk there's like 4 playthroughs of this on youtube and none of them say no to rachel (understandably) so idk if there is an actual bad ending but after samey looking room like 50 i just closed the game lol.

I think it's cool when semi long games don't have saves. It ironically made me more likely to actually finish it. Knowing i can't just save and say i will pick it back up later.

am really excited to see what this dev team can do with a bit more experience on their next game

Can you tell im really tired writing this lmao

it's a sad day for fighting game fans as katsuhiro harada announced the long-running tekken series would be laid to rest earlier this morning. this comes mere hours after news that competitor under night in-birth II sys:celes sold over one birthillion copies, leaving many to question why bandai namco chose to go head-to-head with the anime juggernaut

chaos later erupted at the funeral when kamone serizawa unexpectedly leapt from the casket mid-eulogy. armed with steel chair he wasted no time incapacitating michael murray before removing his shirt, shotgunning several cans of beer, and climbing back into the mahogany box. witnesses say he refuses to leave, stating it "belongs to [him] now"

virtua fighter creator yu suzuki was seen fleeing the scene and while he declined to comment on recent events, he revealed he's been hard at work trimming down shenmue's story and now expects it to conclude within the next six or seven games

when we return we'll have more breaking news on the dark side of accessorizing, the closure of ed hardy, and why some are calling this an unprecedented golden age for planet earth

stay tuned

While I do love UNDERTALE, I haven't stepped foot in a high school for at least the entirety of this game's development, so unfortunately there's nothing for me here

Stopped playing not long after finding out characters can only wear what is gender-assigned to them, and as a woman whose fashion revolves around dressing more masculine, that for me was a bit of a big strike. A big part of fashion in real life is going against social norms, so it’s disappointing to offer a fashion game that forces you into so many boxes. The game is a bit boring from how simple it is, too, and having two characters feels impossible, as my wife and I share the game and found that when someone online makes you an outfit, you have no idea which character it’s supposed to be for! Adding an additional character seems to be just for having an extra face to dress up as the story progression is shared between the two characters, too. So weird.

2/5