Recent reviews by Fred Fungus

Presentation. is. everything! I very much enjoyed this game. The music is boppin, the art is kinda cute (I'm not big on pixel art generally, but it's done well!), the animations are fluid and great. The writing is so hammy that it's adorable, everybody is talking like 90's hackers. Very much plays up the corniness of cyberpunk, and it's goofy enough that it works. Any time it tries to get emotional it's eye-rolling, but it's not a big deal.

As a game though? It's pretty unimpressive. It does very little to differentiate the gameplay of a jrpg. It only has 2 gameplay hooks to sell: the eponymous Jack Move, your super move that your super meter builds, is pretty bare-bones. It does a little 3-move d-pad rhythm minigame, and then does a big bout of damage in one of the 4 damage types. And your RAM loadout. You can only have a few skills equipped at a time, and you have to either spend a turn swapping them out in combat, or do so out of combat. And you can upgrade how much RAM you have with in-game currency. Kinda interesting, but I never had to use it much until the very final dungeon. Every other game mechanic is pretty bog-standard for an RPG. Which is, acceptable, not every game can push boundaries. The great presentation can make the lackluster gameplay acceptable. But I was left a bit wanting.

The only real COMPLAINT I can have about the gameplay is that several sidequests feature items people give you, but there is no inventory to view these items, only the actual capital-i Items you use in combat. This made completing a few quests confusing because I would talk to someone, realize a few minutes later that I already had the item they needed, and need to go run around to find them again. The game's short, so this wasn't an enduring problem, but it was a minor annoyance.

Inferior Sekiro-inspired game to Lies of P.
The souls leveling up mechanic seems like an attempt at familiarity to draw in soulsborne players, as it adds nothing to the experience. There are 3 stats to level up. You clearly are not choosing a "build" like in a souls game.
Enemies, even the weakest starving peasant, take ages to kill. Everything is a hitsponge. Not only that, but they are almost all, without fail, FASTER than you too! From starving peasant to heavily armored guards that you can hear their chainmail clinking as they walk, every. single. one. Swings faster, moves faster, recovers from hits faster, than the lithe plague assassin. It feels jarring to play something that controls like a souls game (and I will credit it where it's due, it controls fluidly) but there are... no mooks? Every enemy, like in Sekiro, has 2 health bars, a vitality bar and a health bar. But unlike in Sekiro, they do not present two alternate methods to kill, but are both REQUIRED to kill an enemy. It makes all combat a slog. It also makes it so trying to analyze enemy attack patterns, you know, learning and and improving the way dark souls games intend for you to do, INCREDIBLY punishing. Because the enemy vitality bar refills up to the health bar underneath, so any progress on the first half can be instantly undone if you dont keep up constant aggression. So you need to wail and wail and wail on enemies. If you stop hitting even for the length of time it takes to dash back, take a sippy, and dash back in, if the enemy does a pattern that lasts 2+ seconds, they will start regening health.
Additionally, your basic attacks don't stagger any but the weakest enemies, and even then not always. Every. Single. Enemy. Attack. Has hyper armor. The player ALSO has hyper armor on the special energy weapon attacks, and your default heavy claw. Funnily enough, this is actually INSANELY counterproductive, and makes using the energy weapons a death sentence against minibosses and bosses, because they will wail on you for a full attack pattern while you swing your axe, spear, or hammer, and melt away 3/4 of your health bar. The charge-up for most energy weapons, and your claw heavy, are so, so, SO, agonizingly long for a game that seems to want to be fast-paced and kinetic like Sekiro. And their reward, with how little stagger and extra damage most of these heavy attacks do, is so small that it feels like you're better off just continuing to wail and wail with your basic attacks.
The first main boss is a ridiculous brick wall, that instead of testing how well you've learned the combat mechanics the game has spent the last 45 minutes teaching you, instead is only defeated by memorizing parry timing. To chip away at 2 huge health bars. And then there's a second phase. With 2 more huge health bars. It is insanely disappointing.
Speaking of parry timing, it also feels really awkward. It feels like a dark souls parry, where the parry doesn't start exactly on the frame of the button press. But this is a sekiro game, where you need to parry multiple times on every boss and miniboss attack pattern. Mashing L1 is actually way more productive than trying to learn timings. I don't know if there is a staling mechanic like in sekiro, where mashing L1 makes the window shorter (im inclined to think there isn't, because the parry animation actually has a combo-like pair of alternate swings!), but it doesn't feel like it.
Basically, it feels like every tool in your arsenal as a player is counterproductive to the enemies you have to fight. It's frustrating.
The animations are pretty. The main character looks cool doing sekiro executes. I'm not a huge fan of Plague Doctor aesthetic, but that's a personal quibble, if you think he looks cool on the steam store page you'll appreciate how badass he looks in-game. The general aesthetics of the game itself are pretty uninspired. Areas look generic, and are kind of hard to place spatially despite the game being incredibly linear.
The story is almost invisible. Fantasy kingdom blah blah memories blah blah plague blah blah.
The framing device of having it be the player character recalling events with his companion (the princess) is actually kind of charming, but it is kind of clumsily executed, due to the game trying to keep the Soulsy atmosphere and making it not immediately obvious (even though the actual story the game is trying to tell is not nearly as complicated as dark souls, so that kind of presentation isn't necessary at all).
Worth it if it's on sale, otherwise just get Lies of P if you're really itching for a Soulslike. It understands the design decisions behind Sekiro/souls games and tries to iterate on them much more than this game (and Lies of P is far from a perfect game).

EDIT: I have beaten the game. My views, as they always do, soften. This isn't a good soulslike. It's too short. The combat, while kind of pretty, with cool animations and decent vfx, is not designed well. The story is unexceptional. The non-boss music is goofy as ♥♥♥♥ and sounds like a kid's game. But it is still satisfying to beat the bosses. The music is cool, the kill animations are cool. And being as short as it is, it doesn't feel like an insane waste of time to just gun it from boss to boss (another head-scratching decision is that non-boss enemies drop almost no souls, from start to finish they all drop less than 100) and experiment with the different plague weapons and talents. My recommendation remains the same, get this if it's on sale for like 10 dollars, otherwise buy Lies of P, but I'm less annoyed now.

Very very very cautious recommend.
Visually gorgeous, great and fun animation and art style. always a treat to see real-life photo/video used in games, and part of the game feels like going through an I Spy book.

Unfortunately, I really think that the actual GAME attached to that just isn't that interesting. It's a point and click adventure game, which, while not necessarily outdated, isn't used in a really interesting way. Navigation is as clumsy and awkward as older ones due to pretty limited movement paths through the surrealist environment (how you interact with things is also awkward and unexpected due to, you know, surrealist environment). Because movement and interaction is so clunky and awkward, the timed puzzle at the end is honestly a bit frustrating.

It also is surprisingly buggy for how light the gameplay is. I had to restart the game twice. Once because the legs walked to another screen, the head wouldn't follow, and the cursor disappeared so I couldn't interact with anything. Another because the legs moved to one spot and just kept shimmying in place as if starting the movement animation, stopping, and starting again, once again making the cursor disappear. The hint book also wouldn't update during puzzles several times.

Lastly, and I hate to use this as a negative, it's super duper short. The full game is basically a demo. And says as such with a to-be-continued at the end! And I know, 2D animation is crazy time-consuming, and game length isn't usually something you should weigh too heavily in the value of a game. But someone more adept at solving point and click adventure puzzles could finish this game in less than an hour. 15$ is a STEEP price for a game of that length.

Solar system exploration is really fun, and the mystery/puzzle solving is well done, and I shouldn’t understate that. Being able to zip around the solar system with fully functional physics in space is super fun, and sleuthing things out feels super satisfying. Nothing in the game is gated by story progression, just your own puzzle solver skills.
My gripes are 1. The reset mechanic is super annoying. I understand why it’s there but a hard 22 minute gameplay limit is just frustrating. Also I can tell story-wise they’re trying to hit some emotional themes and beats that they don’t execute all that well. There are a few bittersweet moments, but I can tell they’re trying to hit hard and they don’t really make the mark.

A damn good soulslike. The visuals look a little wonky (unreal engine things), the voice acting varies between good and awful. The setting is cool, the story is serviceable (leaning to good). The writing is such that you can tell it's translated and sometimes not super artfully localized, which kinda can't be helped, translation is never easy. The gameplay is pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ good, they mix a lot of parts of bloodborne and sekiro and add in a bit of new flavor.

Fantastic game. The writing is fun and goofy enough to always be engaging (sometimes it is laugh-out-loud funny), and (with a few small exceptions) really makes you feel like you're in a late 90's forum. Doing "investigations" in the form of forum moderation is a novel idea that loses a liiiittle steam by the end, but the game is the right length that it doesn't have time to wear out its welcome. There's also a ton of stuff to do that isn't related to the main plot, so that also helps it from wearing out its welcome. You can have a little bonzai buddy tomagotchi that ♥♥♥♥♥ on your desktop!

significant downgrade from the souls series. Horse combat plays like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Open world does not mesh with the combat system. Lore is much less memorable. Progression is slow as molasses because enemies drop very few runes and you basically expected to farm them. Enemy attack patterns have very frustrating timing because the game expects that you have played the souls games and tries to trip you up based on that. A crutch you are expected to use (spirit ashes) in order to be able to beat bosses makes their "tells" in animation useless because they may change target mid-animation, which will kill you because bosses do INSANE damage. Unless the dark souls games are your favorite games of all time and you are completely starved for soulsborne combat, DO NOT RECOMMEND!

EDIT: My views have softened, as they always end up doing for souls games. The horse is still a very very clunky addition to the combat formula and IMO poorly integrated. Enemy mounts are actually an interesting addition though. The story/lore is, its hard to pin down, it's somewhat more expansive than dark souls, but it feels like there are a few too many dark souls open-ended lore q's for how expansive the physical space you play in is. Like, in dark souls you are kind of very on-rails and ♥♥♥♥ is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥ every place you look that it makes sense you get a keyhole glimpse into the greater picture. The ER setting feels just a liiiittle off for exactly recreating the dark souls story experience. I retract what i say about it not being memorable though. There are interesting and memorable ideas, story beats, and concepts. Spirit ashes are actually a very good addition, opening up new ways to take on bosses without having to rely on respeccing or multiplayer help. Feels like somewhat of a clunky implementation due to being in the open world dark souls game and therefore feeling kind of arbitrary when you can use it (i know there are in-map markers and the HUD pop-up, i mean the existence and points of placement for that limiter feel arbitrary). Still think that enemy patterns are even more annoying than any prior souls game. I understand they want to make a pull-out-all-the-stops flashy superboss like malenia, i don't mind it for her, there's just too much of it. All in all, eh. It's fun enough.

Cute little game!

I loved the game. Nails that ace attorney feel, the modified dnd magic system works great to make it work in a court case.
The music is shockingly good, I thought I'd be muting the soundtrack and playing the ace attorney OST over it bc I had low expectations for a game of this budget, but it's actually crazy good! Props to insaneintherain and shady cicada.
Likewise for the art! The characters are less zany than Ace attorney, but they are given pretty good personality in the sprites.
The writing is... good. There are minor spelling and punctuation mistakes sprinkled in a few places, but tbh I don't really care. I do care about the story though. I thought case 1 was pretty good. Good character interactions, good setup and payoff. The later cases held up, and I enjoyed seeing where the overarching plot was going. But... I kind of hated that the final case reveals that basically everything in Tyrions life was orchestrated by Eris for explicitly stated pointless evil scheming. I understand that in an Ace Attorney game you want to up the stakes with each case to keep the narrative tension, but I think they kind of missed the mark. Really did not like the resolution. Thought it was still going strong, kept the pace up, but then once Eris, as a near omniscient and omnipotent demon takes the stand, and eventually Tyrion gets his super shonen powerup in the extraplanar realm I thought it kind of lost some Ace Attorney magic.
Also it's more of a personal bugbear for me, but I don't really like the way it handles class politics. For god's sake, they say that the business owner in case 3 runs the union! CAPITALIST CLASS INTERESTS DO NOT ALIGN WITH WORKERS AGAINST NOBILITY! I actually was interested at first the way that magic interplays with class politics, the first case starts putting out some cool ideas, but the lack of understanding of class politics kind of shows in the writing sometimes (again, personal bugbear. I don't expect a crowdfunded ace attorney game to have perfectly written political intrigue, but the way politics in this fantasy kingdom work make noooooo sense. The last case, while a pretty good dramatic story, has a premise that honestly makes very little sense.)

MORE IMPORTANTLY:
ALMOST 0 HOMOEROTIC TENSION.

WHY does Tyrion have no male peers that he gets into emotionally charged, sparks-flying conflict with? An AWFUL missed opportunity, that's literally the best part of Ace Attorney. The closest boys in age to him are the little pipsqueak Wallace and the ragamuffin teens that exist for 1 scene and then evaporate. Shame!

Expect some fanart of Tyrion and Yaoi Prince Aster by yours truly to make up for this.


Also, did not like the post credits teaser. KEEP THE STORY GROUNDED PLEASE. I know a sequel is confirmed to be in early stage production.

GREAT game. Fantastic visuals, I'm usually a little dubious about pixel art, but this game has BEAUTIFULLY done art and animations. It even handles non-pixel visuals interacting with the pixel sprites in a way that looks good, which is rare for me to see in games. The music is out of this world, can't even say much about it. The gameplay is, very unfortunately, honestly just serviceable. It's basically a top-down beat-em-up with occasional puzzles that are usually really easy. The characters are adorably quirky with the earthbound style the art is obviously channeling. The story is good, made me tear up a bit at the end (though I am a bit of a sap and quick to cry at media).
MOST IMPORTANTLY, there's a game-within-a-game that's a roguelike jrpg with Gameboy graphics that completely ensorcelled me. You can even spend in-game currency to buy gachapon balls that have effects for the game-within-the-game.
ANYWAYS THIS GAME IS GOOD!! GET IT!!