It's very easy to get lost in this game - there's lots to do and other than battles, everything takes about 30 seconds, so it's easy to get lost in the checklist. Due to the amount that you're "accomplishing" with such speed it's easy to forget that no individual task is really that satisfying and that your progress is mostly incremental. If you're playing strictly for the strategy elements, you're going to have a bad time - this is an otome game with the trappings of a strategy game.

This isn't to say I'm not enjoying myself - I've found myself surprised by how quickly time is flying by when I'm playing - but I'm able to recognize it as a turn-your-brain-off kind of fun. I'm not thinking that hard, I'm not doing anything mechanically intense - I'm talking to characters that are seemingly written specifically to avoid having a second personality trait.

Ultimately, regardless of how fun this game ends up being when I complete it, Nintendo wins. Not only do they have my money, but they have tricked me in to caring deeply about at least 2 of these one-note characters. If anything happens to Marianne I'm airmailing my Switch across the street.

The biggest thing this game gets right is survival/action gameplay combined with defined goals that can be knocked out in 30-90 minutes. In the same way that Battlerite felt like a MOBA without the laning phase, this feels like a survival game where the first five hours have been compressed into five minutes. It's a shame that there's nothing else really special about this - take a survival game, add a class system, compress the entire "run" into a couple hours, and that's it! Because things move so fast, there's never a whole lot of room for individual runs to shine - there's not enough time for you to feel like your "build" is doing anything unique, or like you've been forced to play in a weird way due to the way each run is "randomized". I think the ideal version of this game is somewhere in between the two modes presently available, where you'd have enough time to feel invested in a particular run and its unique qualities without feeling like you've just started a new full-time job. Creating this hypothetical game mode would require a pretty drastic re-imagining of the game's identity, so while it's unreasonable to expect devs to completely reinvent their game just for me, I hope there's a game dev out there playing this and going "Damn.. survival games really should be shorter."

The "big twist" that you'll likely run into the first playthrough is decidedly unsubtle, but your next playthroughs are where the substance really is in this experience. It is a short story, but the ability to experience it in game form and say "no, what if things were different" is where it shines.

Once I started exploring subsequent playthroughs and tried to get the best ending I found myself relating a lot to some characters (and very little to some others). I think I'm a tad fonder of the experience because I'm able to relate, and it's personal enough that I can't really say how that would differ if this experience is totally alien to you. I also think the game's quality suffers a bit due to its brevity, as getting the most common ending and seeing that you "missed messages" makes it extremely obvious where those missed messages were. I also think there's potential for some people to be put off by the very quirky dialogue, but the game is free and short, so it's worth a shot.

It's hardly a game in the traditional sense - the developers will tell you that much. However, it's exactly the type of thing I'm looking for when I want a super casual experience.

Sure, you're really only placing seeds and trash, but the limited space available means that you really have to think about how you're placing these objects (lest you crush a plant). By forcing you to place these objects deliberately, you're not only thinking about where there is physical space for these objects, but also where they'd make sense if you stumbled upon such a scene in the wild. You're creating these pretty, overgrown dioramas, sure, but you're also creating these scenes that feel haunted by the people that once lived there despite it all falling into place mere seconds ago.

It's a gorgeous game and a borderline meditative practice at times. Please check it out, it deserves the attention.

A fun rhythm game that's got a lot of charm in both gameplay and presentation. I have a few gameplay related gripes in that the camera and some of the VFX make it hard to sight-read some of the tracks when you're first getting the hang of things, but it feels responsive and satisfying to hit the notes. I'm not great at determining whether things are charted well, but I can tell what I'm meant to be following in each song (which means it's better than the average osu! track).

The writing in the little vignettes we get is a little much, but I do feel like this is a silly complaint to level at a demo and I still generally like the fact that there's a story attached to each song.

Unreasonably good for a demo-slash-side story with a good variety of songs too, definitely check it out if you're interested in rhythm games.

I want to like this game really badly because it's got a solid core, a competent enough paint-by-numbers soulslike that lacks any kind of charm. Every second I've played it I'm waiting for something to hook me - a story beat, some gameplay element, a cool weapon I unlock - but nothing ever does.

There are a number of elements present in this game that are obviously here because they feel "very Dark Souls" but are out-of-place when inserted here. Even the bonfire mechanic feels like it was put there because the devs like Dark Souls, as opposed to deciding "this is something the game needs/benefits from"

Tremendously fun, the only game I've found that can really simulate being part of that action movie scene where the deal goes wrong - you've got chaotic gunfights, car chases, double-crosses, thievery, and clean deals actually do happen often enough that you can never be sure if you're being conned or not.

Some of the most fun I've had in a game recently without any of the tilt. It's actually because it's so impossible to shoot guns both rapidly and accurately that makes this game work - gunfights are chaotic, more bullets hit the environment than your target, and you can't even really be sure that numbers advantage will win you the fight. The best bet for everyone is just to make the damn deal and get out of there alive.

At its best, it's the most fun I've had with a video game in a while - I don't mean engagement, I mean actual fun. At its worst, it's just your average internet chatroom, if a little better due to the fact that most people are generally committed to the roleplaying. The controls are jank and sometimes I think the first-person perspective results in a little too much chaos, but the core idea here is fantastic and fills a niche I've wanted to see done for ages.

E: It may be worth noting that I've only truly attempted to play the round-based game mode. For one, it's the only server type that sees a population of more than 5 people at a time, and thus it's the only one where people will explain the game to you, as playing the World mode will drop you into what is effectively an unmoderated GMod server, something I can get elsewhere and have no interest in playing here.

With hand-crafted maps I would probably have a lot more positive things to say about the game, but with the randomly generated maps they all lack character as a setting and are therefore harder than you might expect to memorize.

The way I've described this to friends is that everything feels 15% off. The scale of the maps feels distorted in a different way from room to room, the prep time feels 15% too short and the round time feels 15% too long. These are little things that can easily change (the game's still in early access), but I think the main thing souring the game at this point ties into the prep time complaint - players at this point just don't know how to coordinate with the limited time they have. The fact that you've got to stock up and share materials at the beginning of every round suggests that you're meant to come up with these careful strategies, but you're not given a lot of time to coordinate with 5 internet strangers what the plan is before the action happens. Perhaps this will get better as the game approaches a full release and people begin to develop a more coherent meta, but I've played a lot of Counter-Strike, man, I know that even if you're all on the same page it takes like 15 seconds minimum so that everyone knows to rush A Long.

I think the way materials are shared/stolen is pretty cool and something I wish more games would do, but I think a little more work needs to be done to make sure all the parts fit together nicely. If they stick with the randomly generated maps I think that'll continue to be a downside, so I hope they're not married to that decision going forward, because that - to me - isn't what makes this game unique.

All things considered, I'm interested in where this goes. I think it is, in a word, "neat", but I'm probably not going to revisit it until it's either released or about to be - that way I can gauge what direction this game goes in the end. We'll see if it gets a popularity spike as that date approaches, too, since I'd argue it deserves one. I shit on the randomly generated maps but I think the game has an interesting visual identity and could really develop into something special with the right changes.