richie
lakeview cabin 3, 4 and 6 are sooo fun and entertaining!!! 3 is a nice easy entry into the game and its mechanics whereas 4 ramps up the difficulty and also throws in some rng to keep replays interesting, i think 4 is my favourite :) 5 is way too convoluted in terms of puzzles and i dont think it fits properly in the series but i think the meta manual aspect is kind of cool i just didnt enjoy playing the entire episode with a wiki open. 6 is very cool though! the alien/thing mashup is cool and i like that theres a realistic way to get through this episode easier than expected. a very fun collection and im excited to play the sequel
this is so good and cool and fun and scratches something in my brain that is now motivating me to FINALLY play obra dinn (and look into other deductive puzzle games) however. i cannot recommend this in good conscience with the AI art. definitely a bummer and not worth any money at this stage
2023
i literally do not understand or agree w people claiming this is mascot horror or youtube bait or etc. that is simply not true. there are no mascots. there is no youtube bait. not every episodic horror game is a mascot horror youtube bait .
regardless. this is SO FUCKING COOL. the art style and animations are so fun and cool, the characters are really charming and boxers is my child i love them :') the soundtrack ROCKS its so sick and the gameplay is so fun!! the variety of minigames and the exploration aspect is really great and im a sucker for fourth-wall meta breaking concepts. im genuinely in love with this from first episode alone and theres huge potential here for it to be an incredibly unique indie horror. getting undertale, everhood, and also daniel mullins inspired vibes from this which is everything i love so im really excited for more of this
regardless. this is SO FUCKING COOL. the art style and animations are so fun and cool, the characters are really charming and boxers is my child i love them :') the soundtrack ROCKS its so sick and the gameplay is so fun!! the variety of minigames and the exploration aspect is really great and im a sucker for fourth-wall meta breaking concepts. im genuinely in love with this from first episode alone and theres huge potential here for it to be an incredibly unique indie horror. getting undertale, everhood, and also daniel mullins inspired vibes from this which is everything i love so im really excited for more of this
2022
logging for the little dlc extra. it was cool!! not much of anything but ive been excited for mouthwashing and the trailer here made me more hype. it looks super sick and i cant wait for its release
2021
this is like fun initially and a very interesting premise and concept, i love the pixel art style and the mechanics and running my little pawn shop. but im kinda like sick of losing and my story ending because i dont want to choose options that place me as complacent in the dystopian setting here. this is just a personal issue and i know its a video game its not real etc etc but personally i just cannot bring myself to mindlessly report people for no reason or exploit them. it feels bad and shitty! and i wish the choices u make had more impact and were still winnable scenarios yknow. so this is an abandon for me. its fun while it lasts but i dont think ill ever be able to "beat" it or achieve many of the endings and thats okay bc i enjoyed what i did play!
2018
paratopic and videodrome and anatomy and maggie siebert's everyday for the rest of your life . im having thoughts
2021
something hits hard about this right now and i feel like this was the perfect time for me to experience this. not particularly a game but moreso a piece of art, about art and life and feelings. your life is valuable and important no matter what you choose to do with it and you have lived a fruitful life even with ur lowest days.
2022
i want to grow my own grandpa
This review contains spoilers
this is a difficult one to review. buckle up because i have a LOT of thoughts about this and they will probably not be cohesive
i love deadly premonition 1, despite it all. i love swery65 and his games. even when he is obviously so inspired by suda51, swery is a guy who makes games purely for himself and he makes games that he enjoys and his games are pure nonsensical fun because of that. you can tell that all of his works are products of love and a genuine interest in what he's making, they're silly and weird and so self-indulgent and it's great! deadly premonition is a broken game where its gameplay flaws somehow make it even better, and d4 is genuinely one of the best things i've ever experienced and i love both these games dearly.
deadly premonition 2 is complicated. i WANTED to enjoy this so badly, given how much i love the first game and i was so excited to hear a sequel was finally being made, and despite a lot of my issues with this game, i DID enjoy some of it. not all of it. and i am having very complex feelings about it.
upon initial impression, a few hours into the game, i felt like deadly premonition 2 was trying too hard to be good in the way that deadly premonition 1 was. dp1 was accidentally fun, a product of its time--the characters were weird and quirky and had so much accidental charm, the story was silly, the side quests were odd and unique, everything in this game was a direct result of a self-indulgent japanese xbox game made in the 2000s. you can feel it! and it's awesome!
deadly premonition 2, however, is trying so hard to replicate the charm of the first game that it isn't an accident anymore, and you can feel that it's trying too hard.
le carre is a HUGE town that is so incredibly empty. the majority of the map is residential streets and houses that you can't enter and with nothing to explore and no incentive to go off the beaten track; there's so many empty homes in the town yet there's a very very small cast of relevant characters and most of them die so quickly. greenvale was full of life, lived in, all of the characters had daily routines and you could see them at all times around the town, driving, in the grocery store, and it felt so charming and complete! le carre is deserted. you rarely see a character around town, there's almost no cars on the streets, there's really no stores to go into or npc homes to explore... it feels so lifeless. and it's sad. it's also frustrating to explore le carre without a vehicle--the skateboard is funny and all, but until you upgrade its speed it's SO horrible to get around such a large town with it, and by the time you do upgrade its speed you (finally) have access to fast travel, so it's pointless.
despite all of this, i guess i was trying my best to look past it all and enjoy it anyways. and i did! i can't explain why, perhaps just knowing that this was deadly premonition 2, a sequel to one of my favourite games of all time, i still had fun going around town and meeting new characters while the story was still beginning. that's where a lot of my hatred for this game comes in: the story developing.
from the getgo, i guess i should have expected that swery's take on louisiana voodoo culture wouldn't have been great. houngan is the first character you meet that indicates things are about to go to shit. i'll admit i don't know extensive knowledge about the culture, but houngan is supposed to be representative of a haitian lwa, and while his appearance is comparable to those in other media (see: every fictional variant of baron samedi), i still don't know if it's... appropriate or not. while houngan might be an accurate representation of a lwa, there's definitely issue in the way york frequently mimics his accent in a way that is supposed to be funny but is just blatantly racist.
the game just devolves as it goes on and by the final episode, me and my friends were in awe, speechless of how horrific the racism is here. throughout the game, we see multiple scenes of the clarkson family (an all-white southern family who own le carre) discussing their legacy, their tradition, and talks of a blood purge. it reeks of white supremacy. it's an obvious undertone to the family, addressed directly in the story with how melvin woods, the black sheriff of le carre, discusses his experiences with racism in the town and how the clarkson family dislike him. spoilers for the ending of the game: this is all turned on its head when it's revealed that melvin was actually one of the masterminds behind the whole plot of the game, and while he reveals his scheme dressed in all-white robes eerily reminiscent of a klansman, it's also hard to ignore the underlying narrative of a black man being subserviant to a racist white family. it sucks. it's insane to me that no one else is talking about how bad this is.
dp1 was bad, full of misogyny (every woman suffering a horrible death) and transphobia (in regards to its handling of thomas mclaine, a closeted trans woman), and while these things have been critiqued before, swery didn't seem to make it any better with dp2. dp2 is full of every -ism and it's so much worse.
with all of the racism previously mentioned, there's also insane transphobia: lena dauman is a trans woman who is murdered in a much more horrific way than thomas was in dp1, she's inexplicably "evil" (the mastermind of it all), she's constantly deadnamed and disrespected by everyone in town, and she also willingly partook in an incestuous relationship with her elder sister, having a child together. there's fatphobia: candy woods used to be the most beautiful woman in all of le carre, used to be being the crucial plot point, because now she's shown to be a grotesquely huge fat woman and this makes her disgusting and ugly, not to mention that she is unwillingly put in this situation as a pawn to the plot--candy was seduced by a guy who didn't love her and was simply using her, to which he drugged her for years and forced her into being a cult sacrifice. the misogyny here is just as bad as dp1, truly. it's a lot to handle.
my thoughts on this game are all over the place. it tries too hard, it's not fun, it's simply bad. i enjoyed the ending, and i am glad that zach has a happy ending and so does patricia, and i liked the cinematic feel and the aesthetics of the game (you can tell swery likes movies), but i just don't think i can look past everything else. i know everyone else has talked about this game being bad, discussing the boring sidequests and the poor gameplay, but i don't feel anyone has pointed out how horrible the entire plot and premise of this game is.
i wish i liked this more and i wish i could say it was good, but it's frustratingly disappointing how awful this was and it's kind of put me off any interest in future swery games. i won't be replaying this and i'm sad i didn't like it.
i love deadly premonition 1, despite it all. i love swery65 and his games. even when he is obviously so inspired by suda51, swery is a guy who makes games purely for himself and he makes games that he enjoys and his games are pure nonsensical fun because of that. you can tell that all of his works are products of love and a genuine interest in what he's making, they're silly and weird and so self-indulgent and it's great! deadly premonition is a broken game where its gameplay flaws somehow make it even better, and d4 is genuinely one of the best things i've ever experienced and i love both these games dearly.
deadly premonition 2 is complicated. i WANTED to enjoy this so badly, given how much i love the first game and i was so excited to hear a sequel was finally being made, and despite a lot of my issues with this game, i DID enjoy some of it. not all of it. and i am having very complex feelings about it.
upon initial impression, a few hours into the game, i felt like deadly premonition 2 was trying too hard to be good in the way that deadly premonition 1 was. dp1 was accidentally fun, a product of its time--the characters were weird and quirky and had so much accidental charm, the story was silly, the side quests were odd and unique, everything in this game was a direct result of a self-indulgent japanese xbox game made in the 2000s. you can feel it! and it's awesome!
deadly premonition 2, however, is trying so hard to replicate the charm of the first game that it isn't an accident anymore, and you can feel that it's trying too hard.
le carre is a HUGE town that is so incredibly empty. the majority of the map is residential streets and houses that you can't enter and with nothing to explore and no incentive to go off the beaten track; there's so many empty homes in the town yet there's a very very small cast of relevant characters and most of them die so quickly. greenvale was full of life, lived in, all of the characters had daily routines and you could see them at all times around the town, driving, in the grocery store, and it felt so charming and complete! le carre is deserted. you rarely see a character around town, there's almost no cars on the streets, there's really no stores to go into or npc homes to explore... it feels so lifeless. and it's sad. it's also frustrating to explore le carre without a vehicle--the skateboard is funny and all, but until you upgrade its speed it's SO horrible to get around such a large town with it, and by the time you do upgrade its speed you (finally) have access to fast travel, so it's pointless.
despite all of this, i guess i was trying my best to look past it all and enjoy it anyways. and i did! i can't explain why, perhaps just knowing that this was deadly premonition 2, a sequel to one of my favourite games of all time, i still had fun going around town and meeting new characters while the story was still beginning. that's where a lot of my hatred for this game comes in: the story developing.
from the getgo, i guess i should have expected that swery's take on louisiana voodoo culture wouldn't have been great. houngan is the first character you meet that indicates things are about to go to shit. i'll admit i don't know extensive knowledge about the culture, but houngan is supposed to be representative of a haitian lwa, and while his appearance is comparable to those in other media (see: every fictional variant of baron samedi), i still don't know if it's... appropriate or not. while houngan might be an accurate representation of a lwa, there's definitely issue in the way york frequently mimics his accent in a way that is supposed to be funny but is just blatantly racist.
the game just devolves as it goes on and by the final episode, me and my friends were in awe, speechless of how horrific the racism is here. throughout the game, we see multiple scenes of the clarkson family (an all-white southern family who own le carre) discussing their legacy, their tradition, and talks of a blood purge. it reeks of white supremacy. it's an obvious undertone to the family, addressed directly in the story with how melvin woods, the black sheriff of le carre, discusses his experiences with racism in the town and how the clarkson family dislike him. spoilers for the ending of the game: this is all turned on its head when it's revealed that melvin was actually one of the masterminds behind the whole plot of the game, and while he reveals his scheme dressed in all-white robes eerily reminiscent of a klansman, it's also hard to ignore the underlying narrative of a black man being subserviant to a racist white family. it sucks. it's insane to me that no one else is talking about how bad this is.
dp1 was bad, full of misogyny (every woman suffering a horrible death) and transphobia (in regards to its handling of thomas mclaine, a closeted trans woman), and while these things have been critiqued before, swery didn't seem to make it any better with dp2. dp2 is full of every -ism and it's so much worse.
with all of the racism previously mentioned, there's also insane transphobia: lena dauman is a trans woman who is murdered in a much more horrific way than thomas was in dp1, she's inexplicably "evil" (the mastermind of it all), she's constantly deadnamed and disrespected by everyone in town, and she also willingly partook in an incestuous relationship with her elder sister, having a child together. there's fatphobia: candy woods used to be the most beautiful woman in all of le carre, used to be being the crucial plot point, because now she's shown to be a grotesquely huge fat woman and this makes her disgusting and ugly, not to mention that she is unwillingly put in this situation as a pawn to the plot--candy was seduced by a guy who didn't love her and was simply using her, to which he drugged her for years and forced her into being a cult sacrifice. the misogyny here is just as bad as dp1, truly. it's a lot to handle.
my thoughts on this game are all over the place. it tries too hard, it's not fun, it's simply bad. i enjoyed the ending, and i am glad that zach has a happy ending and so does patricia, and i liked the cinematic feel and the aesthetics of the game (you can tell swery likes movies), but i just don't think i can look past everything else. i know everyone else has talked about this game being bad, discussing the boring sidequests and the poor gameplay, but i don't feel anyone has pointed out how horrible the entire plot and premise of this game is.
i wish i liked this more and i wish i could say it was good, but it's frustratingly disappointing how awful this was and it's kind of put me off any interest in future swery games. i won't be replaying this and i'm sad i didn't like it.
2023
fun!!! a really nice pick-up-and-play cosy little time filler. i was hoping for more story-based stuff or like, drive/intent to actually play i guess, but once you complete all the customer chat logs to their end there's not much else to do. which is fine! this game is clearly intended to be played solely to relax and have a chill little time rather than Complete A Videogame. it's super cute and fun for what it is and i had a good time with this
2019
holy shit
2018
i don't know what it is about this game or maybe it's my adhd but there is something so gripping about this. numbers go up . i've never finished it/completed the main quests and i don't think i ever will but i've spent over 70 hours in this game doing....... stuff. it's not something i think i'd solely dedicate my time to but as something to idly play on the side while i watch tv, it's pretty good.
edit: i actually finally finished it. thoughts are the same.
edit: i actually finally finished it. thoughts are the same.
2022
sort sort i love to arbritrarily sort
2022
ill be honest i think im just done with this until... the full game is finalised? or at least until a big enough update releases that this is worth investing more time in. i really love slime rancher 1 and i want to enjoy this--and i think i will when its finished!--but for right now theres just not enough content to justify playing it for more than a few hours. with there being no end to anything and no actual quests or anything to strive towards, this is more of just a "have fun with ur slimes" game than anything else. which is fine! i love the graphics update and the looks of the new map and i love the new slimes, theyre all so cute, but theres just nothing else to unlock or do after you explore the whole map and find all the new slimes.
the new map feels too large in a way that is bothersome.. like navigating the locations feels a bit stressful and theres so many twists and turns its easy to get lost and not have a convenient way to get back home. a minimap would be useful, or a waypoint/marker system at least. the gordo's feel like an afterthought and instead of unlocking new areas to progress to they just kind of... exist in the map and dont really give any benefits. harvesting resources is better in this game and has more purpose than the first, but overall i just.. feel like theres not much here until a huge update or a finished game is released.
im excited for a full release and i think ill really love it! but for right now i think im finished with this
the new map feels too large in a way that is bothersome.. like navigating the locations feels a bit stressful and theres so many twists and turns its easy to get lost and not have a convenient way to get back home. a minimap would be useful, or a waypoint/marker system at least. the gordo's feel like an afterthought and instead of unlocking new areas to progress to they just kind of... exist in the map and dont really give any benefits. harvesting resources is better in this game and has more purpose than the first, but overall i just.. feel like theres not much here until a huge update or a finished game is released.
im excited for a full release and i think ill really love it! but for right now i think im finished with this
2022
im not sure how to feel about this! i think a lot of other reviews are correct in talking about how the game is buggy and feels rushed/unfinished and the gameplay mechanics/loops are not... great. but i also think what IS here and the start of the game primarily is really cute and fun! i just wish it was better executed and there's potential here for something awesome.
the decorating of the resorts becomes redundant when the premise of levelling up rooms and earning points is based on just reusing the same highest-level furniture over and over, and managing the resorts themselves becomes kind of pointless in the endgame. once you complete the quest of giving 50k coins to an npc (which is a bit of a tiring grind to get through) there's really no need for money anymore and i spent the entire last portion of the game ignoring my resorts and just speeding through the quests; which give you a very rushed story that feels shoehorned in in a way that doesnt fit at all, and the story for the game also just kind of... ends. there is no game over screen. there's no concrete finish to this and completing the last main story quest left me confused as to whether the game was even over or not--its very abrupt and im not particularly a fan of a lot of things going on here.
i love the art style, i love hank and the characters and i find the initial gameplay premise very fun (i didnt mind the cooking mechanic either! it was a nice change of pace) but i just think it gets boring around the midpoint and doesnt offer anything interesting to keep you engaged. getting to the end was a little difficult and i think im disappointed that i didnt enjoy this as much as i wanted to!
the decorating of the resorts becomes redundant when the premise of levelling up rooms and earning points is based on just reusing the same highest-level furniture over and over, and managing the resorts themselves becomes kind of pointless in the endgame. once you complete the quest of giving 50k coins to an npc (which is a bit of a tiring grind to get through) there's really no need for money anymore and i spent the entire last portion of the game ignoring my resorts and just speeding through the quests; which give you a very rushed story that feels shoehorned in in a way that doesnt fit at all, and the story for the game also just kind of... ends. there is no game over screen. there's no concrete finish to this and completing the last main story quest left me confused as to whether the game was even over or not--its very abrupt and im not particularly a fan of a lot of things going on here.
i love the art style, i love hank and the characters and i find the initial gameplay premise very fun (i didnt mind the cooking mechanic either! it was a nice change of pace) but i just think it gets boring around the midpoint and doesnt offer anything interesting to keep you engaged. getting to the end was a little difficult and i think im disappointed that i didnt enjoy this as much as i wanted to!