Recent reviews by Illustrio

Feels silly leaving a review on FTL — who would be reading these? Is there anyone on steam who doesn't own FTL already? This game is a masterpiece, probably permanently damaged the indie scene by being so good that it made everyone else say "I should make a roguelike". Every year or two I have a hunger to play through it a few times with a new ship, try out some new builds, and kill that damn flagship. Five stars out of five.

A legendary classic of the 00s indie games. You could download this for free from the original website, but why not pay a little money for a piece of history? Also check out Iji[/], Cave Story, uh, maybe Ben Croshaw's old games, Datajack... There was a whole era of weird games you could only find on the internet, back when I was young, and not an ancient millennial boomer who feels sleepy when my bedtime runs past 11:30.

I remember playing Dex many years ago and bouncing off the opening few minutes. I'm not sure what I thought the game was going to be — maybe I pegged the opening scene for a Gunpoint ripoff? I genuinely can't recall. The funny thing is, if I had kept playing for another 90 seconds or so past where I stopped, the game would have opened up into a high-quality action-platformer with an interconnected map (not like Metroid, more like an adventure game) with RPG elements. The gameplay and platforming are solid, the music and visuals are great, and the story is a classic cyberpunk yarn. Dex would have absolutely killed on the SNES. I think this style of game is great, and not nearly as common as it deserves to be. Give the demo a try.

Echo Point Nova is such a rock-solid zoomer shooter that it obviates the need for further development of zoomer shooters. We don't need any more; the genre is over. As Mario Kart is for kart-racers with weird powerups, so Echo Point Nova is for fast-paced first person shooters with cool movement tech and a bunch of secret glowing orbs.

An astonishing achievement, perhaps the best Turn-Based Tactics title on Steam. Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics-as-puzzle sort of game, more like the also-excellent Into the Breach and less like your XCOMs and your Ogre Tactics and so forth. Unlike ItB, all of the content is hand-crafted. Every map of every level is unique, interesting, and carefully designed to allow as many creative applications of your units' extremely weird abilities as possible. The story is funny and cleverly written (though I think I wasn't supposed to walk away with as strong a negative feeling about Zan as I did), and the characters are charming. The whole experience can be completed in under 20 hours — the optimal length for any video game, as those of culture and breeding universally attest. An easy 10/10.

An explanation of playing for 27 hours then leaving negative review: I played through the Early Access last year, before the Clockwork Kingdom update and of course before the 1.0 release. I enjoyed it at the time, and in fact I still enjoy Dread Delusion. But serious bugs and performance issues mean I feel like I have to leave a negative review in order to be fair to the people who are considering a purchase.

Internet hubbub and other reviews see Dread Delusion compared to both Morrowind and Lunacid. It comes out alright in the comparison. Like Morrowind, there are mushrooms and freaks; like Lunacid, there are banging tunes and an attractively low-poly "retro" aesthetic which never really existed, but feels like it could have. I think it's worth pointing out that Dread Delusion has even fewer RPG elements than Lunacid — it's really an adventure game at its core, with a veneer of RPG elements to help give a feeling of progression and gatekeep some cool toys behind speech checks and locked doors. It's only "souls-like" in that it imitates Kings Field (which if you haven't heard of it was an early Fromsoft game and a precursor to the Dark Souls series). It also really isn't a "metroidvania" at all, but I've given up on the battle of defining "metroidvania". Combat is also extremely simple, so the main draw of Dread Delusion is wandering around the weird environments and talking to strange people.

Unfortunately, a game which depends on its walking and talking is going to be seriously hurt by any issues with its walking and talking. I don't recall too many crippling issues with the 10 hours I played of Dread Delusion in EA, but in the 18 hours I've spent with the 1.0 release almost every major quest has failed in some way. Some of them were benign — sidequests turning out the wrong way because the dialogue tree misfired isn't a major issue — but others have essentially rendered the game unfinishable. The game didn't recognize when I attained the passport that let me out of the starting area; it didn't recognize when I recruited the first major NPC in the first major area; it didn't recognize me entering the Clockwork Kingdom or allow me to recruit the major NPC of that area; I have no idea what happened in the Endless realm but I'm pretty sure it broke entirely. Even the fairly simple faction quests in Hallowshire managed to hardlock themselves when I recovered quest items out of order.

So, that's the state of things. Hotfixes have addressed some of these issues, and I hope those continue to be released. For the moment I'm going to post this review and then set Dread Delusion aside. I'll circle around in a few months and see if these problems have been resolved. I hope they will be. Dread Delusion is a game worth playing, and for you it might even be a game worth buying, but the issues are too numerous for me to ignore.

TL;DR good game, shame about the bugs, buy it in 6 months when it works.

Well, as of 11/29/2024 I've played through Dread Delusion again and it's had some major stability improvements and bug fixes. Changing this to a tentative thumbs up. Assuming your experience isn't marred with softlocks, Dread Delusion is a fun and interesting adventure game in a weird neural galaxy.

I've played an awful lot of this and I've played an awful lot of Baldur's Gate 3. They're both good. BG3 has high production values, of course, but Solasta has its own kind of charm — the experience is a lot like playing D&D at a real table, with a DM who only knows two or three funny voices. There's also a lot of player-made-content for Solasta, some of it just as good as the real game.

I have never played this game before. Why is it in my library?

When it works it's fun, but I'm going to leave a negative review up until I can in good conscience tell people that it works. About 3 missions in 4 end in an abrupt crash or server disconnect as of March 5th.

Terrible, but in a way that arises from many small flaws adding together rather than a single crippling one, and so is hard to express in a review. The plot isn't funny, and it isn't clever, which means that the characters don't have much to say or do about it. The characters aren't fun to talk to, which means that the gameplay has to pick up the slack. The gameplay is that supremely dull type of FPS RPG where you have to grind to get a gun that deals +1.6% more DPS so you only have to shoot an alien in the face 17 times instead of 18 times, which means that it can't carry the game. So the only reason to play is if you're really, really into spacesuits. My vote is to skip this one.