fenomenath
2 reviews liked by fenomenath
Afterimage
2023
As others have mentioned, it's ironic that such a pretty game needs more polish. The developers strikes me as chefs with all the same high quality ingredients the best restaurants in town use, but only the basic ability to cook.
Combat is there but feels clunky, repetitive, and slow as all the recovery times and iframes are unbalanced, and everything is animated too slowly to allow for responsive and reactive engagements. On the same note there's a huge variety of weapons, and while the devs understand light weapons are fast, and heavy weapons are slow, there's no mechanical nuance to one over the other in combat beyond the attack speed and damage.
The enemies do have varied attacks and timings but large health pools and no knockback, hit stun, or behaviour which gives it a very dated feel, like a flash game. This makes every fight feel very static, repetitive, and mechanically uninteresting. Each weapon should feel like you have a different kind of advantage but the enemies just aren't programmed to offer that depth of interaction.
Another amateur quality is in the movement. There's a delay after touching down after a jump that destroys any momentum you have and slows the whole game down, this destroys the responsiveness of the game and just feels sloppy. You also begin with a dash, sustainable jump, and you can extend a jump by doing an attack - but there's no reason for this last one as you can dash after jumping from the the start. Having so much movement right away feels excessive, unearned, and wastes the beautiful opening background artwork.
The game also has 2 different crafting systems (crafting and cooking) both of which are as boring and by the numbers as all the others are these days. Collect x, collect y, combine for z, it's all numbers and busy work that doesn't add anything but tedium to the game. And the menu's don't help - every sub-menu remembers your cursor position, but the menu tabs always open to the inventory which creates a lot of extra page flipping that made checking pick ups or trying different weapons a chore.
Another sin is giving you too few skill tree points to actually buy anything when you're introduced to the skill tree - but looking at it, it's gigantic and every upgrade seems like tiny number improvements that no one really cares about but are easy to program and give the illusion of choice and variety, but actually you're just climbing the planned linear curve of difficulty as the game goes on.
As for the story I'm a big can of Christian fan fiction, it's a fun mythology to work with, but nothing here is spelled out or made clear. It's all vague imagery, allusions to depth, and obvious symbolism with anime thrown into the mix. Your save points allude to the fruit of knowledge, the world was ruined by a flood, god is dead or gone or something, and you're the chosen shonen to save the world. It just comes off as pretentious and shallow but I also didn't play very long as you can see.
Every aspect of this game just feels... rough around the edges. It's a lot of small amateurish mistakes that leave the game feeling so unpolished despite the excellent art and it leaves the game feeling like it lacks quality. The end result is much like my 2nd girlfriend - pretty, pretentious, and surprisingly shallow. 2/5.
Combat is there but feels clunky, repetitive, and slow as all the recovery times and iframes are unbalanced, and everything is animated too slowly to allow for responsive and reactive engagements. On the same note there's a huge variety of weapons, and while the devs understand light weapons are fast, and heavy weapons are slow, there's no mechanical nuance to one over the other in combat beyond the attack speed and damage.
The enemies do have varied attacks and timings but large health pools and no knockback, hit stun, or behaviour which gives it a very dated feel, like a flash game. This makes every fight feel very static, repetitive, and mechanically uninteresting. Each weapon should feel like you have a different kind of advantage but the enemies just aren't programmed to offer that depth of interaction.
Another amateur quality is in the movement. There's a delay after touching down after a jump that destroys any momentum you have and slows the whole game down, this destroys the responsiveness of the game and just feels sloppy. You also begin with a dash, sustainable jump, and you can extend a jump by doing an attack - but there's no reason for this last one as you can dash after jumping from the the start. Having so much movement right away feels excessive, unearned, and wastes the beautiful opening background artwork.
The game also has 2 different crafting systems (crafting and cooking) both of which are as boring and by the numbers as all the others are these days. Collect x, collect y, combine for z, it's all numbers and busy work that doesn't add anything but tedium to the game. And the menu's don't help - every sub-menu remembers your cursor position, but the menu tabs always open to the inventory which creates a lot of extra page flipping that made checking pick ups or trying different weapons a chore.
Another sin is giving you too few skill tree points to actually buy anything when you're introduced to the skill tree - but looking at it, it's gigantic and every upgrade seems like tiny number improvements that no one really cares about but are easy to program and give the illusion of choice and variety, but actually you're just climbing the planned linear curve of difficulty as the game goes on.
As for the story I'm a big can of Christian fan fiction, it's a fun mythology to work with, but nothing here is spelled out or made clear. It's all vague imagery, allusions to depth, and obvious symbolism with anime thrown into the mix. Your save points allude to the fruit of knowledge, the world was ruined by a flood, god is dead or gone or something, and you're the chosen shonen to save the world. It just comes off as pretentious and shallow but I also didn't play very long as you can see.
Every aspect of this game just feels... rough around the edges. It's a lot of small amateurish mistakes that leave the game feeling so unpolished despite the excellent art and it leaves the game feeling like it lacks quality. The end result is much like my 2nd girlfriend - pretty, pretentious, and surprisingly shallow. 2/5.
Cultist Simulator
2018
this one is tough to rate because I feel like you can leave it dissatisfied after a few hours and still think to yourself that maybe if you gave it a little big more time, you'd come around and enjoy it. cultist sim is a resource management style game that's primarily text based with lots of room for personal strategies and interesting mechanics but unfortunately this game has so much that it gives you right off the bat, the amount of content is almost to its detriment. the stories on the cards you unlock are interesting, but the way the minigames are paced means it is hardly possible to really take a moment to stop and read/think/immerse yourself in the stories being told to you. maybe i'm an idiot or something, but i felt like i was just playing with my brain off and being thrown so much all at once with no time to slow down. couldn't vibe with it but i tried.