Recent reviews by elix

Everything was fine until they let bigots infiltrate their community and now Tabletop Sim is the de facto home for transphobes who like tabletop games. Use screentop.gg or any other alternative instead of giving these devs money.

WAK

If you like crazy party multiplayer games this game's great. And it allows you to make duck noises to mock your dead friends while you leap off the side of the level edge after winning.

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If you don't already own this trash, only buy this if you want to support a publisher that thinks of you as a wallet that occasionally talks and thinks that modding your own offline game should be ILLEGAL. GTAO was peer-to-peer garbage to begin with and Take 2 has done nothing but milk it for Shark Cards. I've played Korean cash shop F2P games with a less abusive grind.

Stay away from this unless you enjoy being the victim in an abusive relationship.

I've only played for three hours of co-op, and I've cleared three chapters. MAN this is a fun game, and it's hilarious as well. I can't speak for the rest of the game, and I haven't touched single-player or the level editor at all, but I've no regrets so far.

The Behemoth are masters of making a responsive, addictively fun arcade platformer. Unless you hated Castle Crashers and everything it stood for, buy this game.

You're dropped in a barren, alien world with no real idea of what's going on, but as you explore and interact with the strange world around you, you begin to return music and colour to the world and bring it back to life. The soundscape builds around you, taking your own solutions and weaving them into the music of the world.

FRACT is a game that gives you a brief starting tutorial that is completely free of explanatory text. Not only that, the environment is altogether alien and bewildering, and suddenly animated at unpredictable times. Once you've completed the tutorial, the game throws you headfirst into the world without any further hand-holding.

And this is what's so fantastic about FRACT: It's full of secrets and amazing places and things for you to discover. But half the fun of unwrapping a gift is the surprise of opening it, and FRACT doesn't try and unwrap the player's gift for them like an excited younger sibling, it lets you pull every strip apart, revealing the glowing, pulsating melody beneath. It lets you piece together an understanding of how the world comes together and what makes it tick. The puzzles themselves are of increasing difficulty, but they shouldn't pose too much of a challenge once you understand how the game and the world works. And that's where the other half of unwrapping the gift comes in: You get the gift itself.

Solving a puzzle in FRACT after you've worked out the underlying system is satisfying, but it's made even more satisfying by the immediate increase in the layers of sound in the soundscape around you, as the tones you've been making the world make suddenly snap into tune and a swell of harmonies follows right behind. Feeling smart and being rewarded with the music becoming more awesome is a very pleasing reward mechanism, and the game continues it throughout. The world itself is surprisingly large, deliberate, and cohesive. There's a story here, waiting to be told in the silent (and musical) ruins. There are little nooks and corners that seem to serve no good purpose except to be a neat little place for you to find. There are side music puzzles that have no bearing on the game progression, and are merely musical toys for you to discover and play with.

No game is perfect, and FRACT is no different. Some of the puzzles require you to notice and intuit the relationship between things that are not the most obvious even with time and exposure to the puzzle. However, in a game that relies on understanding the subtle environmental clues to solve puzzles, if someone is stuck, it's as likely that in their haste to jump into solving the puzzle they've missed some small but important detail needed to guide themselves towards the solution. A moment's pause and a step back is often the kick that breaks the log jam. Failure in experimentation is inconsequential; at worst, you fall off a platform or have to backtrack slightly, and it's not long before you're right back to where you were, able to progress.

FRACT contains one final gift, even after you've solved the last puzzle, enjoyed the victory spectacle, and seen the credits, and that's the Studio. As you progress through the game, all the way up to the last puzzle, you unlock portions of the very real synthesizers in the player composition facility in a separate, quieter portion of the world. For the impatient, there's the ability to unlock the whole Studio immediately, without needing to finish the game. The synthesizer modulation settings work exactly like they do in-game (not counting the advanced synthesizer options that unlock last), so FRACT in effect teaches the player how to make music.

It's too early to tell still, but FRACT OSC may be my favourite game of 2014. It's going to take something pretty special to beat the high standard FRACT's set.

Metacritic score (~67) is not that far off. Not impressed so far, although I'll update my recommendation if my opinion changes. It's not that the game is terrible, but it gives lots of hints about the game that it wishes it could be, but fails to be. And I think I would like THAT game more than I like this cover-based third-person real-time-strategy shooter hybrid that can't make up its mind on what it wants to be and ends up second rate at either.

The things that the devs put a lot of effort and care into look/work great. Unfortunately, those things don't seem to encompass quite enough, and not in the most key areas. Examples: When you go into the AI-teammate command mode, time doesn't stop, it only slows down to something like 25% speed. The writing is... um, not the worst, but I'm bored of these people already and I only just met them. AI's kind of dumb early on, although supposedly later on in the game it stops feeling like escort missions and they actually hold their own.

It's not without its good elements. I like the setting itself; care definitely went into that, if not necessarily the dialogue. Where it's not a dark corner with fog and darkness covering up the extremely flat and featureless textures in unimportant corners and other corner-cutting measures, the world looks decent. The promise of what it could be/could have been is still a significant part, however.

It'd probably be a fun multiplayer co-op game, to be honest. Ditch the AI and just choose different classes and run through a campaign with 2-3 of your friends.

It's a mix between a beautiful dream and an experimental ambient electronica piece. If you prefer explosions and platforming, skip Proteus, but if you want to explore a procedurally-generated world and discover its secrets, this is well worth it.

It has a magic feeling to it. The graphics look very low-fi in the stills, but when the game is in action, the illusion is so complete, it all works. While people who don't give Proteus a chance and play it through at least once say otherwise, the game DOES have a beginning and end, and completing it once unlocks a few extra options (including allowing the terrain generator to get a bit crazier).

The save system is very clever. If you want to save a particular random seed because you like the island you're on, hit F9 to save a postcard. This postcard is a screenshot of basically your perspective at that moment, but it's more than that. The game visually encodes data into the image, and the image acts as a save state: Not only will you return to that island, you'll return to that moment.

If you can handle going 30 minutes in a game without blowing something up or killing a terrorist, you should take a long moment to consider Proteus.

Aww, yeah. I remember when we had to upgrade to a 4x speed CD-ROM to play this. Riven is a groundbreaking classic of a puzzle game. The graphics are at once beautiful and completely surreal, and the islands are varied and have a lot of surprises and secrets. One of the mandatory puzzles is artificially hard and time-consuming to solve, but working out HOW to solve it is a great challenge. The most important thing about Riven to remember is to treat it like it is _real_.

Also, once you get your book back from the guy in the store screenshots, don't read it.