A multiplayer nightmare (in a bad way)

Lobbies full of sweaties who take it WAY too serious, and constant meta balancing that completely ruins characters you spent money on or just changes how the entire game works.

The worst update is the addition of a countdown after someone escapes, forcing all other players to prioritize escaping rather than helping or playing mind-games with your victims. No longer having a standoff with a killer who is blocking the door and having to use Navy Seal tier stealth tactics to maneuver around a map , hoping to find the Hatch before the Killer finds you. Now it's "hurry up, get this game over with, we have more mediocre matches for you to play"

I originally played this game in 2014-2015 and it kind of blows my mind that more time has passed between my first playthrough and my second than the time between the game's release circa 2010-2011 and my first playthrough. It's a fun love letter to older games, particularly 2D Zeldas. I think the game is mostly carried by the novelty of creating your own character and having a ridiculously large sword, but the underlying game is still solid. I think it would have been better with more quality of life features though like being able to scroll and zoom in on a map, a compass to show item locations, a checklist and tracker for items and quests, the ability to drop pins and markers, and less tedious level design. The amount of time sensitive events is ridiculous too. It's way too easy to miss things especially in a blind playthrough. I actually ended up getting the bad ending during my first playthrough because of this. Overall, it's probably my favorite 2D Zelda that isn't actually Zelda, although it's not like I've played very many of those.

What's on the menu tonight, boys? Invisible food.

So, I'm not really sure if this used to be as buggy as it is now or if I just never noticed, but taking your Sims to a restaurant is kind of a miserable experience. Like, it's an all day excursion. Take PTO because you're gonna be stuck there until 3:00 AM when you really just wanted to go on a date night with your husband. I'm not really sure what the issue is honestly, maybe all of the furniture just short circuits all of the Sim's brains and gives them stupid idiot disease, or quite possibly they all have some serious ADHD because it's almost impossible to keep them seated for even 5 minutes.

The waiter is a pregnant alien and the chef is a robot who keeps shutting himself down mid-shift. There's a thunderstorm outside so everyone is running around in fear. The bathroom is too far away so there's piss puddles all over the floor. The guy sitting next to me keeps eating everyone else's food. I ordered my appetizer 6 hours ago and it still hasn't come. An old person just died in the lobby and a celebrity is screaming songs into the open mic. It's nothing but CHAOS!!!!

I appreciate the sheer amount of possibilities that could happen, but I seriously don't recommend bringing more than one Sim to one of these things. It's funny for like 10 minutes, but it does quickly turn into a migraine. I went to a restaurant everyday to fulfill the Experimental Food Collection, and that's really it. She ate 3 meals in one sitting each time and can now craft the most disastrous artisanal foods you can think of. Squid tentacle à la Mode if you will. Nothing but the finest cuisine over here, except for when you order something and it comes invisible like the waiter is pulling the biggest prank and charges you for it anyways. Dickhead!!!

Aside from that, there's really nothing else other than the gameplay. Having no Aspiration is a bit weird because in this pack you can actually own your own restaurant, unlike the Spa Day pack. You can actively choose the staff and take care of your guests, which is rather nice but there's really no incentive to do it without an Aspiration though. (Unless you really want to live your restaurant owner fantasy). Being in direct control of the operation helps it run a bit better and you're actually paid for a full night. I'd definitely rank this above Spa Day even with the bugs just because of that alone.

I like the ideas a lot with this one but it's probably the buggiest pack out of them all. It's been patched multiple times throughout it's entire lifespan and it seems they just can't figure out how to get it to function normally with all the other DLC throwing wrenches into the Sim AI. With every other expansion pack added into your game, this one breaks again. It's not a super necessary pack to have for a full experience of this game, so I wouldn't buy it again personally. However, if you're a true psycho you can feed unsanitary sushi to your guests and literally murder them with it, so there's that.

Maybe Dine In instead.

Some of the most unique minigames that take full advantage of the controls

Many of these minigames have wibbly-wobbly controls, but it actual works in this one, and the ones that don't have everyone struggling with it, not just you

Characters have a unique system where they come with a personal dice, making a bit of extra strategy with who you pick. You can even get additional dice midgame to expand your choices, but can lead to just steamrolling/getting steamrolled from the armada that someone has on their team.

The biggest crux of this game is the maps, they are HORRENDOUS, arguably only 1 map is even remotely enjoyable. You are often screwed over by being stuck in RNG hell or begging the game to hand you a Golden Pipe so you can just get a star.

Great party game, definitely one to consider at the family cookout :)

!!! MOVE OVER GAMERS, WE GOTTA GET THIS REVIEW OUT BEFORE CHRISTMAS !!!

You want to know the funniest thing about being a kid? It’s being ignorant to the fact that some things are just horseshit, and boy was kid me quite the ignoramus. Revisiting this game, it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but there was some sick part of me that wanted to relive a good moment of my life in the one Spyro game I have the most unblurry memories of.

Well it turns out, those memories end at the 2nd level and nothing beyond it. Even the borderline racist NPCs somehow scrubbed from my mind. There’s no shot I finished this as a kid, and my memories kept the better portion of the game in stasis forever. They’re not good levels per se, just functionally better. After that the game quickly hurtles closer towards dystopia the further you get into it. To put it quite bluntly, this game is just not finished and couldn’t be more of a beacon of developmental hell. Except this was from the PS2/Gamecube era back in 2002 and.. yeah folks, crunch and corporate shenanigans have been happening our entire lives. This shit was made in the same time it takes to grow a human fetus and still somehow ended up being more of a disappointment.

With vast levels that are emptier than corn fields and enemies with zero life put into them. There’s no variety to be seen, just small ranged dinosaur and big dinosaur who make this sound when you murder them. If this game has achieved anything, it’s that it is at the very least sometimes funny. But you won’t be laughing when the camera 360 no scopes itself into the wall of the level design, launching you off the platform that you’re currently standing on. On normal hardware this game runs like it’s being squeezed through a tube, but even while playing it through unscrupulous means there still feels like there’s some sort of wind resistance pushing against Spyro as he charges. He feels like he weighs a metric ton, which makes platforming a goddamn nightmare. If that’s not enough for you, throw in some magic floors that clip through your body, and mini-games made by Satan himself. The draw distance is abysmal. You want to go on your cozy little gem collectathon, but they removed Sparx’s little hint clues which means you’ll be scouring all of these gigantic levels for much longer than you want just for that one last gem to appear out of thin air because it glitched out the first time. It's actually a marvel of achievement that speedrunners were able to figure out how to beat this game in 1 minute, the amount of time it takes for the veil of nostalgia to be sucked from your eyes.

What’s it all for, you may ask? Well, some of the most weirdly named Dragonflies I could have ever imagined. They really just pulled from anywhere with these guys. “Hey, it’s Karen!!” Spyro says, but the subtitle says “Rhett.” I can’t believe my childhood hero Spyro just deadnamed that dragonfly. And like I said, these issues get more prevalent as the game keeps going. With each level, the more unfinished it feels. The worlds get emptier with more nonsensical tasks that barely function. Assets aren’t re-used, but still uninspiringly pulled from previous titles in an effort to save time. Unlockable powers that get used less and less, voice lines completely missing in some instances, etc., etc. It all culminates into a final boss fight that not even I could foresee. A baffling affront to God himself, just a gauntlet of atrocities deep fried through the Christmas deadline conveyor belt. Spyro died and we killed him.

Keep this game dead, do not “reignite” it. There is no redemption to be had. Lock this one in the vault and treat it like a lesson. One day you too could make your own Enter The Dragonfly, and you don’t want to be that guy. Sometimes things should be left as memories in our heads, never to be revisited. This is a ghost for a reason, so fear it.

Now for the end of this review, I feel like it’d be only fitting to just stop talking in the middle of my

Within the first 5 seconds of freedom this game gave me, I immediately picked up the kitchen knife and used it in probably the worst way possible. The game didn’t stop me and it also didn't seem to care, and neither did I. But that was probably the worst way possible to start this game, because as it dragged on for hours the main thought in my head was, “We were cooking on the first route” which should have ended the game. Instead I was trapped in a torture chamber of nonsensical solutions and horrible dialogue delivery, with an ending that wasn’t even interesting enough to be worth the painful drawl. The image of Daisy Ridley’s weird polygonal feet are scarred into my brain forever.

While I find the trial and error bit of gameplay to be rather neat, it’s done in such an excruciatingly painful way here. Every do-over lacks the ability to skip the cinematics so you’ll feel your body rapidly age with every scene you’re forced to watch on repeat. The lack of options your character gets to work with are frustrating and unrealistic. The characters shamble around like zombies and there’s zero way to speed up the process to get back to a later segment in the timeline aside from some line skips. I guess had they implemented such a silly concept then the game would quite literally be 12 minutes long. Instead, you sit through hours of trying out the smallest changes, only to awkwardly miss-click something and have to redo the whole process again. With every make-out session your wife assaults you with unprompted at the beginning of every loop, the more reptilian I felt while playing this game. How icky it made me feel while I slowly became an iguana.

You’d think a game that allows you to stab the shit out of your wife in the first five seconds would have literally anything to say about violence or impatience or domestic abuse or literally anything? Maybe it’d point a finger at me and go, “You’re part of the problem!!” and question my immediate conclusion to stretch the game's choices to it’s most inhumane limits. Nope. It meant nothing, like it was just something cool you could do for the sake of it. Violence is actually the only way to siphon any useful information from any of the characters, in fact the peaceful communicative solutions don’t even open up until after you’ve murdered so it’s not like it’s not encouraged. But, it literally doesn’t acknowledge this as something awful nor does it affect your character in any real way. The game does not care, so why should you? Allowing me to start the game with the ability to do this really set itself up for failure. It never challenged my thought process, so I just simply progressed with not giving a shit. It's almost like game interactivity has a way of affecting the player if it's implemented in a meaningful way instead of just existing for "artistic" shock value.

At the end of the day, does it even matter? I went through all this effort just to land on a conclusion that I said out loud as a joke. When the twist happened and that joke ended up being the reality, oh fuck off. This is it. It’s just a game that let me murder my wife in the first 5 seconds of it and nothing else. Riveting stuff, guys.

How they got James McAvoy, Willem Dafoe, and Daisy Ridley involved in this is insanely hilarious. They sound like they’re phoning it in the whole time, like they don’t even believe in this game’s bullshit themselves. It’s artistic, I’ll give it that. But, am I buying it? No. I ate chocolate mousse while a man screamed at my wife and hogtied her to the floor right in front of me. Neat.

Got around to playing this game the right way and I’m glad that I did. Disregard my first review as either a solo-player's point of view or just simply the insane ramblings of a madman. We’re KeyWeing as God intended now.

This game is playable in solo mode for sure, but it’s like asking your brain to work at a level it cannot simply comprehend. With co-op you get free range of your keyboard and a buddy that will share 50% of the backbreaking work with you. How else do you people think you get your mail? Not by people, but through the blood, sweat, and tears from the most overworked, underpaid, armless birds. At least they get the benefit of informal dress codes. Please excuse my dripless friend, he’s just not quite at my level yet.

There are 4 main level designs that vary in obstacles as the game progresses which is just enough variety that keeps the game extremely fun throughout its entire playtime, which is decently lengthened. It’s enough to get through in one session and can be stretched by rechallenging the levels for better rewards, hidden items, etc. There are bonus levels with different gameplay mechanics as well and they net you more tickets for your gold mine of Kiwi cosmetics.

I think what works the best for KeyWe is how there isn’t any Overcooked! or PlateUp levels of vitriol. All three are great games with similar co-op mechanics, but there’s equal opportunity for both players to actively help in each scenario here. You can’t really impede on the other or kill your friend, which makes it a real breath of fresh air. In fact, the only thing that impeded anything were the slight moments of online desync, but it wasn’t a big issue. I found establishing a level of communication and having to shout “1, 2, 3!” before simultaneously finishing a puzzle to be rather charming. We are considering speedrunning the game now, that's how Earth shattering it was for us.

The difficulties fluctuate without ramping up to impossible degrees. While it’s a relatively easy game overall, the later levels have a fitting stress factor for the hidden masochist inside of you. The final stretch is one big, satisfying gauntlet of all of the skills you've acquired throughout. It’s not that the levels are super difficult, they’re just stressful with really well-executed shit inducing anxious music to go with them. You're a professional at this point, but the music is making you second guess yourself. The OST is actually fantastic and I’d post examples but I can’t find it ANYWHERE!!! All I have is this old trailer to work with, but it uses one of the best songs in my opinion. Classic example of the composer giving it their all, even if it’s for a short goober game about bird mailmen. Never stop.

Anyways, play KeyWe. It’s ridiculously fun.

This game has a lot of potential, but I feel like the initial concept works against it. It’s a bit more mean-spirited, where you kind of hope something horrible happens to everyone and it actually needs to in order to progress. It’s a concept that unfortunately rips away all of the scariness and hilarity that most people would probably be looking for. Aside from a well-timed spawn, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Unlike the other game that this one will be compared to until the end of time, there’s no chance of organic comedy coming from your friends who are avoiding danger rather than looking for it. The point here is to hope that something kills everyone and that the camera man isn’t dicking around somewhere else while it’s happening.

I played the game for about 2 hours and feel like I’ve already experienced everything it has to offer. The upgrades it sells you are mostly cosmetic and the amount of views you get per video seem completely arbitrary. You’ll have some rounds of gameplay where everyone dies in the first 5 seconds, leaving you with 60% of film left and others where barely anything happens at all. The environments don’t really give you that much to play with and there’s no reason to wander off because there’s only one camera. Every day ends with an awkward movie experience where everyone sits around looking at the unedited footage and maybe sometimes you’ll hear a light chuckle under someone’s breath. It’s nice that they offered it for free, but I probably won’t go back to this one until it gets some major updates.

The best 2D Zelda imo. A charming Zelda game metrodivania vibes. A game where you explore and backtrack a lot.

First off, as usually, the game looks nice. The music is great. The story is...fine/mid. It's basic. Nothing special. It does not ware out it's welcome. Honestly the length.

Let's get into the meat of this review though. The Kinstone system is a lot of fun, if you like backtracking. This is where the metroidvania feels come from. It wants you to backtrack a lot. Most of it is optional though. You connect a kinstone with a NPC and the world changes in some way. It's a neat little gimmick.

The kinstone system does have it's flaws though. You have no idea when a npc has a kinstone quest ready. So you spend a lot of time checking npcs over and over.

The other annoying thing is that they kinstone quests can be missed. Thus you miss out on certain things without ever knowing. Hiding massively important/beneficial items behind it is imo, not fair. Considering things can be missed with no knowledge. The game does not say, "Hey there is a quest here!" So you gotta check the same npcs 10x times and hopefully you catch them when they have a quest. But also hope you have the correct piece to connect with them.

The dungeons are mostly well designed. They are fun. The items are mostly neat. The bosses however...

This game doesn't have well designed bosses. The first and third are fun. The rest are very annoying. They are either terribly signposted as in boss 4. Or they seem to require you to take damage like boss 2 or have an infuriating time doing to the intended way. Boss 5 has too much going on so you are constantly getting hit. We will talk about the final separate though.

My biggest complaint is that the game has jank hit boxes. Like very jank. Enemies and bosses have unbalanced hitboxes while you lack any invincibility frames. This game is not above stun locking you into sevaral hearts worth of damage. Contact damage is devastating due to bad hitboxes and you having zero i-frames.

The final dungeon is fun but is lazy. You fight the same mini boss a total of at least 12 times. It's just lazy. The dungeon before it although not my favorite, felt much longer and well planned out. Had many neat puzzles. The final dungeon is mostly you fighting Darknuts over and over with the occasional puzzle/new mechanic.

The game is a bit jank. Enemies can turn on a dime but once you use an item you are locked in the direction. The copy ability is neat but also very finicky. It's almost inconsistent in terms of damage. If you copies get hit physically they disappear. No damage. If they get hit by fire, the fire affect will transfer to you. Which does not make any sense. But you don't take damage, you just run around on fire. If they get hit by electricity though you get damaged and stunned as if you got hit directly. IT'S JUST STUPID DESIGN. Makes no sense.

Prior to the boss you have to run through 3 rooms meant to just take your health away. The final room being 3 Darknuts. Darknuts suck. They are not hard. The are just hard to get consistent because they are so jank and can turn on a dime to block you. You gotta do these 3 rooms and a 3 phase boss with no way to replenish things in your bottles. It's brutal.

The final boss is badly signposted and infuriating. Only 1/3 phases I feel like was well designed and fun. The first phase is infuriating as it's just meant to damage you a lot. The second phase makes a lot of sense and is generally fair. The final phase makes no sense so you gotta trial and error it. It yet again has infinite ways to damage you. It can literally just block you in ways that force you to take damage. You can even fall of the side, as if we needed another way to take damage. It almost is not very intuitive. And it can give you terrible patterns. I'm glad I used save states because I doubt I could do it without them tbh.

I know I bashed this game a lot. But exploring this world is generally fun. Becoming tiny is neat. It has a lot of charm. It's a forgiving game mostly. It drops a lot hearts. Pots are consistient in terms of what they drop. So if it drops a heart, it'll always drop a heart. So you can farm hearts and consumables if you need.

You will like this if you enjoy exploring and backtracking. It's a fantastic game with some jank and bad design.