Recent reviews by Morgue

Perfect little tower defence. A classic.

Cannot dis-recommend this game highly enough.

Waste of a great premise. There are some parts of the execution of this game that are spot on and it has great aesthetics and some cool ideas, it's often briefly REALLY fun to play which is why it stings more that the difficulty is almost unplayable and the games makes very minimal attempts to be accessible to a new player. You have to learn the hard way how to survive on even the lowest difficulties and most of the creative possibilities of a city builder are lost to invariable challenge. Worse the game tends to waste your time buy causing you to die because you're not ready to meet objectives you didn't know were coming, forcing you to replay hours of scenarios even when you have the skills to complete them.

I was all set to change my "would never recommend" rating after finally completing the first scenario on easy difficulty. Watching the timelapse of my city, which I had nurtured and lovingly guided through the many huge challenges of the scenario to ultimate success felt so fulfilling.... then I was dumped into the menu screen. Thre was no way to actually play and enjoy the city I had built. It was over just as I was about to start having fun. I would give this game somewhere between minus 30 and minus 120 stars out of 10. ♥♥♥♥ this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game.

Also the game aggressively advertises its DLC and sequel at you while you're in the game menu. Hey, marketing tip! If you want to get me to buy Frostpunk 2, the time I am LEAST likely to do that, is when I've been playing Frostpunk 1!

Game gets just about good if you add -devconsole to steam launch arguments, start an endless scenario on the most forgiving map press backtick and type ShowDebugButtonsPanel, that way you have some buttons to hit every time you almost die from stupid ♥♥♥♥. That means you get to play the game long enough to get the hang of how it works, rather than dying too fast to learn anything from your mistakes.

I actually unlocked almost all of my achievements without cheats once I'd gotten good at the game, but first impressions count so I still rate the game poorly. If I hadn't had cheats I would never have had a good enough time to warrant continuing, or had the practice to build up those skills, so the intended play experience is worse than garbage.

Really good city sim. A genuinely fresh and exciting idea.
1) soothing due to choices of music and attractive visuals. and having a cuddly animal friend at all times
2) Genuinely challenging, needing to address constantly changing climates, manage the needs of your onbu and work around its autonomy and limitations
3) the city building is simple enough not to be initially overwhelming but challenging enough to enable a lot of play time before getting boring
well designed interface makes it easy to manage resources and ensure food production is on track
4) At time of writing, there are no children and new residents must be found in the world. I hated tthis mechanic in every other game I've seen it in, but here it actually works well because you're always on the move anyway
5) the role of luck and trust in controlling your environment adds another dimension
6) needing to send out explorers, take care of your onbu and change crop strategy in different climates means the game never becomes self-managing, but nor is it overly fussy requiring too much manual control of your village

the bad:
There's a really annoying bug that means this will only play if I disconnect my internet. No idea why but stopped me getting cheevos or playtime because the game would just crash after a few minutes. Eh, it's free so I can't complain too much.

Don't like that there are no saves, but this is a situation where it works. The game is short and there are not really failstates. I struggle to concentrate for that long. Gld you can have timers off though, I got lost a lot.

The good:
Otherwise, perfect game. Love it. Fun gameplay, gorgeous presentation, clever ideas. A message which seems complex, then too simple then complex again. Beautifully told.

Good town building game. The workshop really adds replay value.

Gothic stardew valley. Exactly what I want.

Learning to use a game engine and working on project in it is an absolutely huge commitment. I'm not confident putting forth that commitment to an engine in commercial control. How can I trust that it will continue to function in ways that are acceptable to me? That's why open source projects such as Godot are so much more appealing. It also appears to have a much more respectable 2D workflow in comparison to (what I've seen of) Unity.

yeah, very good. I still revisit this one even after 3 great sequels and 2 mediocre ones. The scenarios are all mre or less impossible, unfortunately. But the sandbox mode does enough. Childhood favourite, turned me into a communist, strong recommendation.

Literally the best game to come out since Planescape; Torment. In 20 years, the only games that've been GOOD at all are Arcanum of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and Torment Tides of Numenera. Disco Elysium is the first game that has made me consider if it is AS GOOD as Planescape Torment, and the answer is that they are proximate in quality, and subjective factors like when you first played them and your preferences will need to decide between them. I don't even want to say anything about it, I just wanna say it's perfect and doesn't require description. But then I also want to talk about it endlessly.

Okay fine. I'll say... 3 things.

Obviously, Kim Kitsuragi is the best character in any medium. I don't need to say that, everyone has said it already. Just confirming that it's true.

It came out as about 45 hours of game play, maybe more if you're a slow reader. It has a lot of alternative paths, but the story is very mystery driven so I honestly wouldn't say it has a tonne of replay value. Not right away, anyway. Not like Arcanum where it has so much replay value you catch yourself re-playing it when you haven't even finished your first playthrough. I wanted it to last forever. I wanted... slightly more from the ending. However, I started seeing screencaps online... and realised there is way way more to this game than you can see in one playthrough. Not only do some quests have multiple ways to complete them (not as many as Arcanum, but more central to the plot), but each dialogue can go in drastically different directions depending on your choices, which is par for the course, but also because of your skills (passive hidden checks are built into the dialogue trees where you get new options or new information depending on those checks). The plot obviously loses something when every twist is already known to you, but there are still nuggets of new information and new delightful dialogue. And by Delightful Dialogue I of course mean; Any Time Kim Kitsuragi Says Anything.

Probably the only game I've played and never once needed to reach for a walkthrough or guide, or map or tried to google to find the right way to do anything. Just pure sit down and play, the answer will come. I realise that this was mostly down to my luck (and my choice of build; thinker is better for a first playthrough) but it was true none-the-less, every previous RPG I've played had me glued to a walkthrough. In this one.... I eventually started looking up what thoughts do once internalised. But other than that I got no assistance from the internet and only minimal savescumming.

The writing is subtle and beautiful but unfortunately it sort of gets in its own way. My immediate an unquenchable love for Kim Kitsuragi stopped me behaving in some of the truly zany manners that are open to you on my first playthrough, which ironically limited my insight into Kim, which is just as much in how he reacts to you being awful as his positive interactions. What he will and will not think less of you for. What makes him tick and what ticks him off. Perhaps, I suspect, what he's willing to reveal to you if he truly feels like you're too insane to judge him.

Also the writing is genuinely subtle and beautiful. Which means that if you have had your brain muscles atrophying on those fun USA-made TV shows where the plot points are first incredibly obvious and secondly pointed out to you boldfacedly anyway, juuust in case you still didn't understand, you miss some things. The Language of it is sublime, a natively English speaking and reasonably well-read fellow like myself (not bragging, just saying my perspective is my own) will generally automatically understand the terms, but they are either archaic (eg 'Occidental' - but thankfully not also using its racially-charged opposite, or**ntal often considered a slur by Asians/other groups it's used to other) or intentionally different parallel developments like "infraculture" or "supranatural", "sines" instead of "vibes" which are just different enough to add flavour and a sense of otherness without being jargony hard to understand or feeling like a fantasy trope. However this may make the game a little trickier for English as a second language speakers.

It has a message, a stance. It has real-world relevance and that relevance is obvious, unlike a lot of more fantastical settings where it might be hard to consider the way things line up to your world. Its perspective from writer Robert Kurvitz, an Estonian, being a nationality who don't dominate this Anglo-centric cultural sphere is fresh and engaging. Plus it has a balanced view of communism, which is always nice.

Above average for the genre, but the plot was really silly. Like, oh the big twist is... what I always assumed right from the begining? So shocked.