Recente recensies door Girthbender

This game feels like it had SOOO much potential but with even just a couple hours of playtime I'm already too frustrated to continue.

I made a typo in my name. Can't rename my character, can't remake it or even delete my account. I have to link it to a completely new account with a new email address. Okay fine, made a new account.. and misclicked when creating my second character. FML.

The controls SUCK. Navigating around feels clumsy, if I'm trying to interact with something there's a good chance that it takes a few clicks for it to actually interact. When I'm in a dialog and forget to turn "auto" off my character will walk away, so I want to click to move back but this will also close the dialog that I haven't actually read yet. Some items in your inventory seem to be used by double clicking, some by holding them down, but you move things by clicking and dragging. Guess what clicking and dragging involves? Holding it down. I keep accidentally using items I don't want to use because I'm trying to move things around.

Quest failure isn't even programmed into the game?? If you fail a quest you have to go into a menu to fail it yourself. On its own this is honestly not a big deal but it's still one more QoL issue that adds up. That doesn't leave me too confident about the game going forward.

The dev doesn't seem to care? The official stance seems to be "oops, oh well." Warnings about bugs and gameplay changes are mentioned on Discord, but if you're not on the Discord, don't see the message, and make a mistake that you didn't know was even a mistake, it's your own fault. Too bad!

[Edit: Okay that last section was admittedly not based on personal experience. And the dev responded to let me know that one of the issues I mentioned is now fixed, which is super appreciated! So I guess I can't actually say they they don't care, but the whole "can't rename/remake" thing still pains me]

Stagnant game, smurfs and toxicity galore, and now they're removing player trading. There are so many items in the game that you will NEVER be able to acquire with trading removed. Absolutely atrocious move, thanks Epic Games.

A very cute, yet short game. Beautiful music, although can be a bit loud. Different interactions give different results. Most importantly, CAT.

There's a reason this game has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating. After finishing this game all the way through, I'm really happy that I picked this game up. This game is an absolutely fantastic piece of art.

The mood is set pretty well, with the dreary fate of the city set unquestionably in stone. You know the fate of these people, and you know how dreadful everything has become. The level design is phenomenal, being memorable and made in a way that definitely hammers home the mood. Then the art itself is absolutely amazing, with animations that flow really well! The art is quite possibly my favourite part of the game, the second being the level design. The combat is pretty great too, and keeps its momentum pretty well once you get the hang of it. I played on Normal difficulty and it had a pretty nice difficulty to it, without holding your hand or walling you off.

There are, of course, some negatives to this game, which is unfortunate considering how much I loved it otherwise. For one, some of the items that you get in the game seem too weak to be useful. But hey, I guess the option is there at least. Another one, which is incredibly unfortunate and what I've been dreading to write, is that the characters.. well, I don't care for them nearly as much as I'd like to. And believe me, I really, really would like to. Thinking about who they are and where their lives have taken them, there is definitely immense potential there, but it just doesn't hold up well. You meet these people and interact with them, often more than once, but you aren't given enough background for these characters to really get a true feel for who they are. It would have given so much more depth to the story, and solidified the mood that much more. Now, don't get me wrong, I felt for them here and there, but the feelings subsided much more quickly than I had hoped for. And that's a shame.

Overall, this game was amazing and I want more. Thankfully this game is the 4th game in the series, so it looks like I've got some more to look forward to! I might play this game a couple more times first though, because I'm seriously in love with this game. For those who are worried about starting with this one, I didn't feel like I was really missing out on too much information. I highly recommend this game.

I got this game excited to play a procedurally generated twin-stick horde-based dungeon crawler. I could only get near the end of the second zone before I quit, because I was bored out of my mind.

It's procedurally generated, but in a way that's actually really bland. It's just an array of rooms that look the same. Just square rooms. The only variation in them are the rocks and the doorways to other rooms. That's it. And the enemies, though it looked like they would increase in difficulty over each wave, are always the same. The timer essentially just refreshes the enemies in the room. Even more unfortunate is that you have a chance of enemies spawning on top of you, with no indication of where they will spawn. The only way to avoid this is to step out of the room when the timer gets close. But wait, there is an item that you can get out of the shop which makes you invulnerable for a few seconds when enemies spawn. You get to Spend 1000 Blood (about 5 minutes of grinding, in my experience) to fix a fundamental flaw in the game. That's just bad game design.

Remember how I said I was excited for a twin-stick game? It's single-stick, though that's not inherently bad. The way that gameplay works is you run around and you shoot left or right, depending on which direction you were facing last. It's really simple, and that's okay, but there's two glaring issues with this: You shoot automatically and you can only shoot left or right. If there's a wall of enemies above or below you, you have to sacrifice your health just so you can get through. And before it's said that this is "just a part of the difficulty", well, you're not wrong. But bad controls are not a good way to make a game difficult.

Then there's the items. You start off the game with a choice of weapon. But it doesn't matter much, because as soon as you bump into a chest, even by accident, you lose your weapon for one that's likely inferior. You have no confirmation. You have no choice. You cannot get your weapon back. It's instant, and it's irreversible. And they're never anything good. Just the same three barely-useful weapons every time. I'm not sure if I was just really unlucky with that, but I spent a fair amount of my gameplay time grinding enemies just so I could get a half-decent weapon out of the shop.

If they add a way to shoot vertically and a confirmation of some sort (even just standing around the chest and/or weapon for a few seconds), this could be a pretty good game, even with the monotonous level generation. It would be even better if the rooms were reworked and difficulty was added for each new wave, but the fundamental issues should be taken care of first.

Wonderful storytelling. It feels like a mix between a text adventure and a choose-your-own-adventure book. And as a book, it definitely engages you and entices you deeper into the story.

Unfortunately, This Dungeon Is Not A Book.

I can definitely recommend this game for its story, and I'm happy about all of the endings, but there are several loose ends that need to be addressed before it's a truly enjoyable experience. I started off really enjoying it but it got to a point where I had to push myself through the frustration in order to finish it.

First and foremost, it gets repetitive. There are no saves in the game, and this means that every time you die, you have to start over and go through certain parts of the game a second time. This isn't too much of an inconveniece at first, since a lot of the time you're just flipping through pages and making a couple choices. But there are parts where you have to remember which steps to take, or long segments of text, or pages that only progress after some time has passed. The latter two, as I said, were executed great as far as a book goes, but does not mesh well with the game in its current state. This being said, it does have links in the beginning so you can skip ahead a bit. I believe this is to get around a limitation in Twine, so I don't believe that this particular point can be addressed easily, if at all. It's unfortunate.

Then there are parts where it's basically a guessing game. You do get a decent amount of information on what you're dealing with, but then you're given a number of paths where almost all of them kill you, and you don't have enough information to make a proper decision. To be fair, though, this is a classic way of doing a CYOA book. It just doesn't work as intended in a medium like this, and it's very likely a symptom of the repetition I explained above.

The encounters may as well not be there. There are, I believe, three encounters. They are all in the same place. You have one option. You have no will over how it plays out. You cannot die from them. They're just, well, there. I can understand the appeal as a storytelling mechanic, but the way it currently works, it just gets in the way.

There is no branching story. This isn't a complaint, but more of a warning to those who are thinking of purchasing this with the idea that it's a true CYOA. It's not. You make choices and you try not to choose wrong.

To sum up, this game is actually not a bad idea or a bad story, it's just poorly executed. For a couple bucks, I'd say to give it a try. Thinking about it, I believe the biggest issues (the repetition and the guessing game) can be remedied by putting in some option to revert to an earlier page when you hit a death scene. Not necessarily to that specific choice, but far enough back so you can make different choices without having to go through the monotony of reading the same thing over and over again. If such a change is made, or a similarly effective change is made, I'll revise this review and recommend it. In the meantime, though, I'm looking forward to the remake. With the better tools and the feedback he's gotten from this version, I'm sure the new one will turn out fantastic.