Finally finished the real not demo so updating. (Finished as in beat the highest difficulty and also beat at least one difficulty with every character, with all Steam achievements.)

This is, without a doubt, my absolute favorite "survivor" type game. I think what it boils down to (pun intended) are that it is extremely well designed both visually and game-wise. The visuals are viewable even when there are hundreds of things on screen, and the game plays almost completely differently between characters and all builds are viable.

I noticed a Steam update just dropped... time to lose another few hours to it...

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DEMO REVIEW ONLY
I've spent 5 hours on this demo already and this game basically distills the 2d top down survival shooter genre into its purest and most fun form. I can't wait for the full game.

This is a short and sweet little "open world" puzzle game that's essentially a minimalist Witness. (I know I compare every game to The Witness but seriously, this game has a very similar type of puzzles.) Its got only a few mechanics but it hones and combines them to perfection, and while it is frustrating to figure out where the last puzzle you haven't solved is located none of the puzzles were frustrating or unfair, and many of them were very clever. Definitely give this a go if you like puzzle games.

I came in expecting a collection of games, and what I got was a collection of games, fiction, interactive art, experiments, and sometimes just... vibes. While some games---or experiences I guess---are more technically impressive, polished, or even just longer than others they overall embody a messy, emotional, beautiful, meaningful, and often queer experience. As the kids say, it's hashtag relatable.

I ended up playing every game in one sitting and only learned afterwards that the intention was for the player to do a pull or spread once a day or so. I don't regret it but I also don't recommend it, though I can see myself getting frustrated if I did that because some games are much longer than others and it would mean that while I would spend 5 minutes in one session another would take a half hour.

Instead of reviewing each individual game, I'll just list my five favorites and why I like them without spoilers: Hierophant. Empress, Emperor, Magician, and Tower. Hierophant won me over with a very unique and beautiful art style, though the story also helped a lot. Empress and Emperor were both just Really Solid Games with great mechanics and execution, and while I could honestly see them as "full length" games they were also just perfect in length and didn't overstay their welcome, plus, once again, they both told great stories. Magician and Tower were probably the least interactive of the bunch but they stand out in art, audio, and especially the stories.

So yeah, many of these games tell great stories. There were a few that were lighter on the fiction (especially one that's an arcade score chaser) but even they had worldbuilding and themes and vibes. Overall these games all want to tell you a tale, and I found that almost all of them succeed.

There were some issues I had with this anthology, though. I felt that a few games were a bit longer than they needed to be and overstayed their welcome. I encountered some technical issues: most noticeably I could not run one of the games and another had a gamebreaking bug that made it impossible for me to progress. This leads me to another issue I had with some of the games: it makes sense that most games are short enough that they don't provide a save/continue feature, it is frustrating when a medium sized game doesn't have it so if someone had gone wrong I had to replay the whole thing.

Out of the 22 games I finished (or "finished" in the case of the endless games) all but 6 of them. As mentioned before, 2 games I couldn't play / didn't finish due to bugs. There were 2 that I gave up on because the in game explanations weren't really enough for me to figure out the game, and 2 that I quit halfway due to difficulty. I do plan on going back to the bugged game and 2 of the others because I really enjoyed the time I had with them. So overall I've enjoyed 19/22 games in this anthology (and maybe 20 once I see if I can fix the can't start game problem) which is a VERY GOOD ratio. Like, when was the last time I even enjoyed more than 3/8 games in a bundle?

Oh also you can pet a capybara in one of the games.

This game has vibes. That's about it. Otherwise it's a lot of fiddly sailing with occasional oops out of fuel gotta go manually drag boxes to the ship or gotta solve a simple puzzle that is made harder by the vibes and the extremely zoomed out camera (which can be zoomed in but it's not great).

It's boring as heck, but also active enough that you can't multitask.

It is very pretty though.

I really want to love this game! It's beautiful, got great characters, the puzzles are fun, combat is decent, and has a nice story. But four things prevent me from really loving it.

First, it is an extremely linear game with Xenogears Disk 2 levels of lengthy cutscenes. That's normally okay except between the very linear cutscenes and fetch quests there's also dungeons that are more Zelda-like with secrets and abilities and puzzles stuff, and there is zero ability to backtrack through them to collect things you miss. Those two things work but also clash with each other.

Second, there's also a tonal clash. It's somewhat humorous and funny and look at these monkeys on a train lol. It's also... extremely sad. Like characters will die and genocide is a thing in the game. The clash is weird.

Third, speaking of monkeys on a train: there's an entire mostly comedic chapter right before the final area. It's unnecessary and tedious and half of it is an annoying as hell stealth section. That's an entire star off right there. There's just way too much padding. There are times when the padding is interesting, but not enough times.

Lastly, while the boss designs (especially towards the end) are very good, there are several boss fights that are essentially quicktime events where you have to smash a button repeatedly and there are no accessibility settings for that. Boo.

Also there are a couple weirdly racist things like the floating meditating turbaned guy that serves as set dressing?!?!

So yeah, I mostly enjoyed my time through it and glad I finished it, but it was frustrating as some points and I just... don't love it.

I took a long time before I reviewed this game because I wanted to get through all difficulties first and... that took a while. And it was a good while! The game is well paced, the characters all fun to play, and is generally a blast. Certainly the best FPS I've played in recent memory and what I wish Borderlands could be.

I don't think I want to play this game much anymore except maybe when a DLC drops, but I've gotten 90 hours out of it and those were 90 darn good hours.

Also being a cute bunny who does the flying sword was LITERALLY MY DREAM AS A CHILD.

Take Titanfall 2, remove the giant robots and absolutely brilliant level design, turn the movement and gunplay from 11 down to 6, and then replace the void you made with jokes about holes and alien sex and you have High on Life. It has surprisingly competent (and sometimes fun!) gameplay, but it's clear that the point of the game is the humor.

And the humor is... surprisingly good. Not all of it is well written and some of it is repetitive---there are only so many jokes about holes I can take in---but when it lands it's great. The writing shines when it pokes fun at gaming (and the game) itself or when it's just out of nowhere absurdist. It's got better writing than Borderlands for sure.

More surprisingly the humor is not racist, not homophobic, not fatphobic, not anti-Semitic, and not transphobic. The closest thing was when two male characters had traditionally female names, but nobody made fun of it or even commented on it. There's a very low bar and this game crossed it!

The gameplay is... okay. The gunplay and combat is frustratingly mediocre at the beginning and becomes satisfyingly mediocre once you get a couple more weapons. Since guns reload themselves when you switch them out and their specials have separate cooldowns having only one gun really sucks. Same thing can be said about the platforming. Once you have some options it can be fun, but this isn't Titanfall 2 for sure.

Where the game suffers is the end. Both the writing and the gameplay become pretty lacking towards the end, and it feels like there are additional things like more gun mods that were planned but never implemented.

This game isn't the most amazing thing ever but it's fun, unless you can't stand the writing. It's not a meal from a 5 star restaurant, but sometimes it's okay and you just want the Stoner Special from Jack in the Box where they put cheese sauce and onion rings on a burger.

One note: this is an utterly terrible game at $60 and I would give it 0.5 stars had I paid $60 for it, but as part of Game Pass (which I paid $1 for) it is a fun time.

EDIT: Took 2 stars off because I just found out the main guy who made the game who also does the main voice is a terrible person.