riven but worse vibes. vanishing of ethan carter vibes. immaculate presentation but seems packed to the brim with western adventure game bloat that would have ended up superseding anything id have gotten out of the aesthetic design. its awesome that with gamepass i can just dip my toes into random games im vaguely interested for like 20 minutes to see if its gonna be up my alley and be able to drop with 0 commitment when its probably not something i would like

played the first level, didnt realize what was going on and had to play it again. really the only notable thing about it is the really out-there character design and it being the most dreamcast-ass game of all time to never release on the dreamcast. actual game is just boring and not really a good rhythm game

eh... not really feeling it!

played 1.5 hours and this is tracking as extremely medieval fantasy one piece coded and I read 100 chapters of that and really only thought it was like fine i guess. also not really fucking with the characters they all seem lame and like people talk about how good the character interaction is in this so i can Assume it gets better... but also im not feeling like stickin it out right now. i want edgelord ff7 back its more fun

investigated because free and short and it's stylish as fuck, but its SoL drama, and like, its not bad but it is very slow and not really for me

Wait a minute, I hate golf lawn mowing!

great concept, underwhelming execution

adventure game with slow walk speed. also the language gimmick (aka the main reason im playing it) only showed up like once in 30 minutes. don't got time for that!

got an hour in, story seems cool but man is that gameplay frictional

this is like when i tried dwarf fortress (user knows jack shit about cars)

chicory's great but this is just boring sorry

sucks

certainly didn't seem bad by any means but i don't know, i'm just not feeling it. all my issues are with the gameflow, like, the presentation and story seem pretty cool but the gameflow of just doing a lot of slow walking and repeating the same events over and over but doing something slightly different each time i just would rather not for however much i paid for it. willing to return to at some point in the future if it gets cheaper

Any time I do any big mouse movements there's like a half second delay before it registers it. Spent like 30 minutes fuckin with the settings in Windows but couldn't fix it. Sad cuz it looks neat but it's probably too fast for my 0iq brain anyways lol

played 15 mins and got the vibe. competently made but it's not for me

tried on a lark thru steam share. i do not like fighting games and my like 30 minutes of experience with this did not change my opinion about that

i put an hour into this and oh my god i just dont care at all

"cyberpunk" as an aesthetic is something ive grown horribly, incredibly weary of and despite seeming like a diversion, this is so fucking by the books its grating. maybe in 2 hours itd change. but i booted this up a second time and shut it of within 10 minutes oh my god im so fucking bored i dont care about your shady agency ruling things from the shadows or the brother thats mysteriously gone missing or your robot that is kind of sentient but is still your property ive seen it all a million fucking times before i just dont care

played it for like 40 minutes and it put me to sleep so boring and then my emulator just started showing a really bad flashing visual bug and i couldnt find any settings to make it go away and i dont care anymore

boring

got bored

dropped multiple times, its just not very interesting to me and im not any good at it

It's so weird to me when people say that Sonic had a golden age of 2D games back in the 90s, and yet every time I try to pick up one of them I'm never able to stomach getting more than an hour or two in before putting it down for good. It's been a good several years since I've tried to play one, and I'd since forgotten what irked me about my previous attempts to play, but after an hour and a half of playing Mania I've completely remembered what about these games leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

On a surface level, Sonic games are all about "going fast", but in reality, on a blind playthrough, it feels like anything but. You've got momentum you have to build up to go at any sort of moderate speed, and you've got tons of obstacles in the way that impede that. That's fine and all, but with how fast you can end up going and how zoomed in the camera is (relative to the speed), pretty much every obstacle is basically not telegraphed at all until you've already been hit or reached a spring at the end of a path. In addition, basically every level past Green Hill Zone is a confusing mess of walls and paths you can easily get stuck on that only go backwards, making each level feel more like a maze than anything else. 2D Sonic games reward level memorization over any other skillset, which is kind of disappointing to be honest?

In that sense, Mania reminds me a lot of the early Marble Blast games. If you're not aware of the "racing line" of the level (which you won't be when playing it for the first time), certain levels in Marble Blast can feel like aimless wandering trying to find where that damn last gem you have to collect is. The difference is that aside from Green Hill, Every act in Mania feels like that, instead of just the small subset of "gem collection" stages that sometimes get thrown in the mix of things. In both Marble Blast and in Mania, the level design often feels like it's actively fighting against the gravity and design of the movement of the player. The second you build up enough speed to finally start going fast, the game will immediately invent a reason for you to stop.

Anyways if you wanna play a game where you go fast WarioWare and Ultrakill are better and if you INSIST on playing a momentum-based platformer Marble It Up is pretty aight. But when you crank up the speed on these platformers there's an incredibly fine line you have to tow (that you don't have to at lower speeds) between the game being dead easy and too frustrating to even bother with. Based on how much praise this game gets, clearly other people don't get as frustrated as I do when they run into a spring for the 20th time in 5 minutes, but I guess that's just a matter of personal taste. I would rather, yknow, go fast in my video games about going fast.

wasnt feeling it (if i had to nitpick its that it felt like it was just like big arena rooms back to back where you fight enemies for 5 minutes straight until they stop spawning and then you repeat until the level ends) and i havent played it in like 2 months. ultrakill is better

got like 3 or 4 hours in. to quote myself talking about it on discord:

"it's picked up a bit but honestly it just feels like more persona, not sure what i really expected. if i did not have any other games or movies or tv shows i wanted to get around to itd certainly be an inoffensive way of killing the time but there are other things id rather do rn so ill maybe go back one more time [editors note: i did not] and see if anything happens in the first few days of may but im not really seeing myself playing much more unless all of my backlogs instantly vaporize

it just doesnt feel like a new experience, and im not really in the mood to dump 60+ hours into a game that isnt markedly different from two ive already racked up close to 200 hours on"

i get the vibe it picks up a lot later on but im not in the mood to sink 30 hours into a game before it "gets good" and i havent been in that vibe since like 2019 when i had a single digit number of games on my backlog. i would rather just play something else that values my time more

dark souls is frustrating to me because I can see why people like them, and i can easily see a world in which i do also like them, but my problems with the gameplay cut too deep for me to just shrug it off. it is very much a "get good" game but unlike the "get good" games which i do like (celeste, katana zero, etc), fucking up in DS doesn't feel like an opportunity to learn so much as it feels like an opportunity for the game to punish you. this of course is completely determined by time; aside from a couple exceptions, fucking up in celeste sets you back maybe 5-10 seconds, in dark souls it can often be 5-10 minutes. it's not even that dexterously challenging (or at least, the combat i've experienced within the game didn't seem to cater to that sort of thing), it just requires patience, something i very quickly lose when i have to face a long challenge more than once or twice. it's like a kaizo game where you have to spend 80% of the time waiting on moving platforms to make a couple precise jumps and if you fuck up you have to do it all over again

text speed too slow

will go back to if someone makes a mod/action replay code to speed it up!

i get the appeal but its implementation of a lot of stuff (particularly conveyor belts at corners) feels waayyyy too jank, it feels like i'm fighting against the engine. i can tell this problem is just gonna get worse as the game ramps up in difficulty so im just gonna go for the refund tbh

made me realize the part i like about sonic adventure 1 is the fact that i don't have to play like half of the game if i don't want to

also the knuckles stages suck this time, every change they made to the mechanics from a1 makes it actively worse

played 2 chapters, i could see it might pick up a bit in chapter 3 but the intermediary gameplay is so grating i really don't wanna boot it up again. "talk to everyone about everything" gameplay is already pretty annoying but when asking the same person the same thing multiple times is often needed to progress it makes for a particularly miserable experience

didn't expect it to be for me, it wasn't for me. played at request of a few of my friends and got it steam shared. played like 2 hours and i had fun killing some random boss in some cave but basically everything else in the game 1-3 shots you and i know thats the point so yeah, not for me. can definitely see it """objectively""" being a game with a lot of work put into it but i just cant see myself ever willingly picking this up again

got filtered/got bored like an hour and a half in

probably gonna come back to it eventually but i don't wanna play it right now

water level in world 3 filtered me. why do you move so god damn slow in this game

it's a game you play with friends and mine stopped playing it pretty soon after i got it

too much water
(ok but honestly my main problem is it just feels like a chore to play, and the main gimmick kind of sucks. proof is that undoubtedly the best stars are the ones where they take fludd from you)

sometimes i need a reminder of how dog shit i am at platformers that arent mario

played like an hour of it, kind of controls like shit and i really was only playing for the music. i'll just listen to it on spotify and then play 3

prologue was awesome but then the normal chapters started and then it was about like church politics or some shit and i dont care anymore

dropped like an hour and a half in, remembered that the gameplay was like by far the best part of the remake and this one doesn't play very well

definitely a game that just tests the waters for a future, much more fleshed out game a la paper mario n64 or the original yakuza

don't remember why, abandoned it like 3 years ago or something

text speed too slow, finished one case

will go back to if someone makes a mod/action replay code to speed it up!

didn't like how it played

didn't care about anyone in the story and the multiplayer ran thin pretty quickly

abandoned a replay because i realized i already knew like everything about galaxy 2 and would rather play 1 which i am less familiar with, but then i never started 1

got past the first magicant section and realized i was playing a janky, grindy, nes jrpg