I'll confess that I've only played about 20 minutes of this game, so I'm not really reviewing it for myself, but for my best friend who passed away in March. We lived together so we would hang out and talk about video games almost everyday and before he passed away THIS was his favorite game, full-stop.

It's hard to describe how much I miss chatting with him about Rain World, it made him passionate about game ideas he was programming and passionate about games in general, it was exciting to see him have that spark for making art again. It's cringey, but I wish I could message the developers and let them know how much it meant to my friend that this game even EXISTED, let alone that it was this amazing to him.

The last conversation I ever had with him he was telling me about the lore for Rain World, how he beat every piece of content in it just to learn more about the story, and to my surprise, I found in one of his journals pages of him deciphering the lore and studying it on his own for fun.

It'll be a long while before I'm able to play any of his favorite games again, but I'm going to rate this a 5 on his behalf anyway, as I have no doubt in my mind it's what he would have given it. I'll never know why he chose to leave, but I at least have this game that spoke to him in a way you wish all art could, and as much as I wish he was here to tell you why it's a 5-star game, you'll just have to take my word for it. This was a perfect game to him, and he had way better taste than me!

One of the most unique and polished metroidvanias I’ve played. There’s the unique art design, blending pixelated retro graphics with neon colours and modern smoke, fluid and lighting effects, all coming together to give it this very surreal, very serene yet sinister atmosphere. There’s the open ended structure, full of branching paths and skips, I honestly can’t see any two players having the same first playthrough, and it goes without saying that it gives value to subsequent playthroughs. There’s the items, which take an almost Outer Wilds or Tunic kind of approach, where throughout the game you discover you have abilities and functions that you’ll realize were actually there the whole time. There’s the puzzles, some of which have more than one solution and encourage thinking outside the box. There’s all the surprises and hidden secrets, some of which really drive home the Outer Wilds/Tunic parallels. There’s the lack of tutorials or lines of text telling you what to do, its complete trust in you the player to figure it out yourself. All of this being made by just one guy. Billy Basso really had a very thorough creative vision and an exorbitant amount of passion and talent to see it through. I think he’s made something special, I feel pretty confidently that this is among the top 3 metroidvanias I’ve ever played.

Say what you will about Dunkey, but he has a damn good eye for indies and it’s endearing to see him use the platform he’s built to prop up smaller independent creatives like this. I’m excited to see what else Bigmode publishes down the line.

Played a TON of this at release and climbed the ranks using the ultimate badass: Crustle. If your team doesn't have that nasty motherfucker you might as well surrender.

Look, they'll kill me for saying it, but I fucking love this doofy ass game. I love a MOBA that doesn't require hiring private tutors to grasp (DOTA 2) or a MOBA that doesn't require you be on the sex-offender registry (League of Legends) to play.

What I think I like about it in comparison to other MOBAs is that the cast hasn't been infested with Anime Badass Action Heroes. Because it can't. Because it's Pokemon. All the Pokemon are so visually distinct that you always know who you are up against and what to look out for, instead of every League character becoming a variation of "Shonen Hero" who has 12 different abilities and can't die and also his ultimate is always off cooldown.

Hey, speaking of that. Is there a character better designed than Blastoise? Like, visually, how did they nail that? The original designer probably was nervous to show it to his boss because he was certain that Blastoise had already been thought up, I mean, he HAD to have been. I fucking love Blastoise.

Basically, if I can play as Blastoise I will play your game.

If there’s anything in this world worth keeping alive, it’s love.

In the void that is Revachol, we see the light of love and hope slowly fade away. It is up to us to cultivate and nurture that light so it does not die. Love is not dead! As you read this, you are alive and breathing, and it's up to you to seize what remains and fight for it. We can no longer wait for some great revolution that will fix all of our problems. If you truly desire a revolution, you must create the conditions necessary to birth it!

Disco Elysium isn’t just a game about what political faction you align with or finding out who lynched the man behind Whirling-in-Rags; it’s a story about love and why we must hold onto it, even in the darkest of times. I understand that nowadays, with the current state of affairs, it's hard to believe in love and hope. It's difficult to place our hope in a future that seems to have been stolen away from us, yet that's precisely when we need it the most.

I choose to believe in love. I choose to hold on to the hope that a better future is possible, no matter what, because I believe it is. The people we know, the community we live in, and the world we inhabit are worth fighting for. Disco Elysium taught me that fixing the world and making it a better place isn’t just about picking up a gun and waging some violent revolution; it’s about cultivating community and caring for those in it. That’s where the true beauty of Disco Elysium lies.

I believe the way this game conveys that message is quite powerful. Disco doesn't make some grand showy gesture beating you over the head with its message; instead, it laboriously takes the time to show you that the world you live in is beautiful and worth fighting for. It spends the time showing you the inner lives of those around you and has you helping them, one person at a time.

There is one specific character that I feel best embodies this: Cuno. Cuno, at first, is seen to be an irrational, difficult, vulgar, and poorly-behaved child, which leads you to inevitably hate him. As you learn more about Cuno and his home life, however, you realise there’s something greater at play. He doesn’t act out for the hell of it; he is the way he is because his father is a drunk who’s fallen down on his luck due to becoming a victim of the system giving up on him and his son. He’s left with no choice. The system has abandoned Uuno and his son, leaving them both to fend for themselves and pick up the pieces. Which sadly isn’t uncommon in Revachol and the real world as well. It’s perhaps one of the most striking and poignant stories in the game. I eventually went from despising Cuno to feeling empathy for him, as I did for many others in Revachol when I learned their stories.

I believe this approach to storytelling and character writing is incredibly effective, and the best part about Disco Elysium is that these kinds of stories are all over the game. This goes to show how much love and care was put into humanising the inhabitants of Revachol, which helps make the world feel alive. Because of how well the game fleshed out its world and characters Disco Elysium was successful at conveying the message that this world is worth fighting for. Not only was I captivated by this world, but as the game drew to a close, I found myself deeply invested in the wellbeing of these characters and the city.

As I learned about these stories, Revachol’s history, and the many political factions vying for power, I realised that this game was never about solving a murder or finding which faction is "correct." It was about learning to love those around us and working together to create a better world, one step at a time. Creating a better world was never an unattainable goal conjured up in the minds of idealistic and "ignorant" kids. It is a possible reality, but it demands the working toiling masses of the world unite and work hand in hand in creating this future. It is on us to seize the future and lift eachother up when we need it most.

Never give up on fighting for this future. It is only dead when you allow yourself to be convinced that it is.

the initial premise is interesting but the game just keeps going, and going, and going and by the end i found it hard as fuck to keep reading.

i kinda hoped this was a Silent Hill 4-esque game that took place in the tiny rotting apartment the leads shared, but it kinda devolves into a mediocre killing spree without purpose.

the coffin of andy and leyley feels aimless with its edginess and isn't really trying to say anything substantive but just disgust and disorient. the abusive dynamic between ashley and andrew isn't really explored properly and the author consistently seems to lack any self-awareness in the subplot. it's one thing to just write an incest eroge and just leave things at siblings fucking with no strings attached, it's another to consistently hint at something being wrong with their relationship but never commit to your commentary. it wants to have its cake and eat it too: present a harmful, toxic relationship, but also revel in how taboo it is.

as simply a horror experience, the limited visuals and presentation don't really coalesce into anything genuinely scary. andrew and ashley treat everything like they're completely oblivious to the circumstances around them, to the point of andrew being more upset about being referred to by a nickname than them eating their own parents even when they're no longer struggling for food. if nobody in the story seems to care all that much about what's going on, why should i? the tone feels earthbound-halloween-hack-edgy with the random "FUCK"s and snarky bits of extradiegetic text when just exploring a room.

i think this kind of experience works better when it's a lot shorter, and being presented with a third chapter really concerns me. this isn't a matter of not being able to engage with squicky subject matter, it's that none of the subject matter present here is actually handled well.

Animal Well really is a thing you need to experience with a controller in your hands and full focus because it is a living, breathing art piece that sucked me in. I bought this game 5 hours ago and I haven't put it down since. The way everything animated is like drinking cool water on a hot night. Refreshing.

Seeing the previews of this game, I thought "ok big youtuber videogamedunkey is firmly in his 30's and wants to expand beyond making shitposts and make money by becoming an indie publisher". I wasn't moved at all by any of the promotion for Animal Well. I am bored to DEATH of 2D platformers and this game only teased a pleasant art style which is not enough to make me care. Most 2D games all mostly play the same. I'm sleep.

Thing is I got 24.68 on my Steam Wallet, so why not give it a try.

It is a Metroidvania logic puzzler. There are no tutorials in Animal Well. You are left as to guess how you progress forward. It's not Baba is You go FUCK yourself hard. It is quite simple and natural gameplay that leads to bigger and bigger "ah-HA!" moments. The kind where you feel dumb and smart. Smumb. Darmbt. I felt like I was one of those things.

The gameplay mixed with the environments and ambient music just clicked with me hard. I was 45 minutes into the game after being cynical about the whole thing and my brain just snapped after a certain puzzle solution and I realized this game has a hidden power level of cleverness. It is so meticulously well thought out. It's not trying to reinvent the wheel. It just was catered for you to have a good time.

I recommend this game for everyone. I've been in a gaming slump where no new game releases has really excited me, but Animal Well is the game that pulled my brain out of that fog. Not saying it will do the same for you, but if you give it a shot, it just might.

It ain't as good as Hollow Knight, but this is right under that (so far) as a jaw dropping 2D game with content that keeps upping the ante in amazement.

Jamal Dunkey picked a banger to kick off his publishing venture.

the jump button was the best part of Elden Ring, Another Crab's Treasure very clearly proves that soulslikes were meant to be 3D platformers all along - and that stamina bars are overrated. i enjoyed Aggro Crab's debut title Going Under a fair bit, it had a great sense of humour and perfectly committed to its corporate satire but ended up let down a bit by being a roguelike (with the inherently sloppy area/encounter design that follows) and having combat that needed a lil more extra to it. Another Crab's Treasure has the same bitter hatred for the structure of society and scavenge-heavy gameplay as Going Under but with way more depth in every aspect. i'm a sucker for exploring colourful, cute areas and collecting stuff. its got intricate levels, a healthy variety of enemies, a very appealing artstyle, a final boss who would own a tesla, and a really adorable crabtagonist. it has some issues with balancing (the tentacle adaptation is busted) and boss design depth but i liked it a lot!!! enough that i played about 20 hours of it in four days, it's really meaty for an indie of its size. felt very well-realized, extremely charming but a lot more sincere and sad than i expected. very clever with its allegories in how it uses Souls tropes. it was kinda like the crab version of Char's Counterattack, in a way.

Another Crab's Treasure's existence is phenomenal to me. I love soulslikes so much, but also many platformers are some of my favorite games of all time. The marriage of the two genres is not something I thought I'd ever see, but here we are.

To get it out of the way, this game is closer to Sekiro more than anything. You only have one main weapon and you are forced to master it or you won't get very far (like Sekiro), however you are given many tools to also assist you alongside your main weapon (also like Sekiro) via the shell system.
The gameplay is done very well, it's super responsive and I never had any issues with the controls itself, besides some camera struggles at rare times.

The shell system is the main mechanic that differentiates the combat from souls/sekiro. There are many different shells you can find lying around the levels and they essentially act like shields that you can pick up and swap out. All shells have different properties like weight, defense and ability. The weight determines whether you are fatrolling or not, defense is defense, and ability is the thing you want to look out for the most. Each shell has a unique ability that can turn the tides of battle. There are so many abilities that they can range from simply healing you, or buffing your stats, to things like shooting magic or freezing everything around you. There is no 'best' shell here. You want to play around as some shells can benefit you more than others depending on the area you or are in or the boss you are fighting. I love this system and trying to find every new shell and seeing what they do kept the shell system very exciting all the way till the very end.

The glaring difference between this and souls games is the setting, and artstyle. We are so used to having realistic dead dark horror fantasy worlds as the backdrop for these types of games, but here we have something that feels more like a Saturday morning cartoon, and it is a very refreshing deviation to the typical backdrop of the genre.

The setting allows this game to also be a platformer at the same time, which is done very well here. Jumps cam easily be controlled through the air as you are given moves and tools to help your air control, including grappling hooks. Obviously it's no Mario Odyessy, but for a game that nails combat, it also surprisingly nails platforming too. Usually it's one or the other, and not both.

The difficulty is what you expect from a soulslike. It's not Sekrio hard, but it's not a walk in the park either. Each boss challenged me fairly and each took me a few tries, always feeling that the deaths were on me. Like Elden Ring though, if you do your fair share of exploring optional areas, you can find some stuff that can break bosses and trivialize the difficulty.

Exploration is close to Dark Souls 1 and Sekiro where levels are quite linear with branching paths with a lot of collectables that can greatly help you on your journey if you explore each area to the fullest. Exploring in ACT is even more fun than it is in other souls games as there is the requirement of having to platform around. As previously mentioned there are also some optional areas you can go to to get some great abilities and upgrades.

Unlike From's games, there is a lot of dialouge and cutscenes. The writing is the typical in your face humor that you'd see in something like a saturday morning cartoon, where they replace swears with puns like "shuck off". It's pretty funny and there is a decent story here, but it's nothing too deep and the game knows to not take itself too seriously either. There are some seriously funny moments though I will say, the devs got some good sense of humor.

Playing this at launch, it's not the most polished game, but it feels up to the standard that most AA games should feel. I know the team are very dedicated to supplying the game with post launch updates very frequently so we'll just have to see how much it improves from here.

There was still a bit to be desired. The game can be completed in about 18 hours, and 100%ed in 22 hours, which is 10 hours too short of what a souls game should be. It could have used one or two more areas to feel more like a fuller game. I'm still happy with all the content and I just enjoyed the game so much I wish there was more.

Aggro Crab has created something that could be a flagship franchise. There is some room for improvement and if there is work on a sequel, there is potential for one of the best soulslikes of all time. They have something good in their hands and they just need to keep the momentum going.

I highly recommend you give this at least a try if you are a fan of soulslikes, or want to get into the genre of soulslikes and want a solid place to start. Great game, loved every second of it - just wished there was more of it.