Recent reviews by ARKYmouse

This is such a stylish game with a lot of visual flare that instantly drew me in. Gameplay is all the things you'd want in a bullet-hell, rogue-lite, twinstick shooter. The music is phenomenal, the sound design and direction is fantastic for a headphone experience. Love the UI with its sort of gritty, glitchy, "hemopunk" color aesthetics.

I unfortunately couldn't play too much of it due to the style of controls, which isn't a fault of the game itself, moreso my hands. I got in a few runs and afterwards, my hands were aching. Maybe if I got a hold of this game in a previous portion of my life before arthritis started eating up my joints, it wouldn't be so bad. I sadly can't keep playing this, but that didn't sour my mood. This game's definitely worth getting if you're into twinstick arcade shooters.

Had a lot of fun with this one, but it felt really short. I guess I shouldn't be terribly disappointed given the price point, but... damn, this game has a lot of potential for growth. Sad to see nothing new come of it in nearly 6 months as I write this.

Gameplay is fantastic and feels really satisfying when you start to get a functional build going. As far as auto-battlers go, this is a really neat take, where every weapon and trinket actively does something. The right balance of difficulty during your progression through the game and the overall loop is nothing short of addictive.

And just the sheer variety of weapons you can get is really impressive, making you consider dozens of different builds and strategies between heroes you can play as. This made Diablo-like inventory management exciting. The only damning part of the whole system is how much time you spend between floors rearranging your stuff. Yeah, I get that's apart of the experience, but it really breaks up the action, especially when you end up spending more time rifling through your stuff than actually fighting. Feels like the transition between combat and inventory management could be better paced and smoother.

Sound and music is alright, nothing stellar to write home about, but the sounds of your weapons hitting stuff is pretty satisfying. But because the music is a little repetitive and lacks any real depth or variation, I tend to just mute it and put my own tunes on.

As I said, this game is short, and really lacking in content outside of fighting room to room in the same, dark, stone castle scenery. The most you'll see in variation is like, one room might have book shelves. Another is... just a stone platform. Maybe there's a well or a trap on the floor. Maybe there's an inaccessible gateway or door in the background. But that's it. Kinda underwhelming considering we're supposed to explore this whole big ass tower. Would be nice to get a stronger feel of stage progression. There's not even a proper, true final boss to face. Just a final stage kind of super mook, and one boss who doesn't really give the satisfaction of fighting a true, final antagonist.

Overall: 7/10

For what you pay for, this is quite a little gem of a game. But damn, it's short. Has a great deal of potential to go big.

Strongly recommend trying this game out! If you're a fan of light, simple city-builder type games, then you'll feel right at home with this one. I've been following this one since its early days on Twitter. It's had a LOT of polishing up and feels very well put together, and the dev team is fantastic and very receptive to its fanbase!

GAMEPLAY: ★★★★
Almost perfect, for what this is! It's your typical square-grid builder type interface. UI feels good, it's simple and to the point. Placing buildings isn't terribly finicky, and has improved a fair bit since the game's initial EA started. But there's more to it than placing buildings and making your citizens happy by giving them access to resources. On the side, you can direct a hero to interact with event items scattered throughout your area. Often, this yields rewards. In the future, heroes will have a much greater role in terms of gameplay. Lots of potential that's actively getting realized, bit by bit!

GRAPHICS: ★★★★★
Fantastic stuff! It's very cute and stylized, has a low impact footprint on systems, and does a very decent job giving off that cartoony fantasy vibe. The shaders and particle effects integrated in the environments are very well done and textures blend seamlessly in with each other in a very organic fashion. I'm excited to see what other visuals we'll get as the game grows.

SOUND: ★★★★
Music is nice and fits the vibe well, changing dynamically with events as they come, they did a decent job keeping the feel of a fantasy hamlet without going crazy on the brass and string section like you find in so many other games to feel "epic". Maybe that's a personal taste of mine, but I like that the music is a little more understated and subdued to feel relaxing and immersive. The sounds of the villagers, buildings, and environment ambiance is also very well done. Nothing's loud or too plosive on the ears.

STORY: ★★★
Okay, so there's not much to tell, but it is pretty charming at premise! You take on the role of a lord, new to the region, and start off building a settlement for your little villagers. Shortly thereafter, you'll begin to integrate in the community of other local empires as a new neighbor, while seeking out a cute, romantic bond with one of the regional lords and ladies! Along the way, you'll solve dilemmas for your people and send your hero out to investigate mysterious events in the realm. Right now, it's pretty simple for what it is, but the devs have much more in mind for this game as it grows. The game's trying to tell a story with you at the helm, after all.

ACCESSIBILITY: ★★★★
As this is an early access game, there's still a lot to improve upon and give us as users. Right now, unfortunately, there isn't a ton in the way of accessibility features. But the devs are listening in discussions and are eager to jot down and use feedback to improve the game. No colorblind support as of yet, but the game does allow for personalized controls. Newbie experience with the game makes learning how to play as a first-timer to city builders a breeze, and you can disable such tutorials if you're already practiced at it. And the UI's got a fair number of languages supported! (English, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese) More can be added as time goes on and development focuses on these QoL additions.

OVERALL: ★★★★
Definitely worth picking up and trying! It feels great to play and it'll only get better with time and more feedback from the community! This is a much smaller dev team and they're very eager to make this game go far.

I got the game back in its first year in EA. Been a fan and loved the hell out of the vibe this game brought. But let's address some things before we start setting off party poppers and funeral bells. The bulleted points are the parts I've experienced and either enjoyed or felt underwhelmed by over the course of time I've owned and played this game.

• First, the music is fantastic, gets you very hyped and tense.
• The 2bit visuals feel right at home and quite nostalgic, very good.
• The mysteries are interesting, even if a bit short, but there's plenty to explore and try in different ways.
• Combat feels appropriate for what you face, you're not an action hero, and you very likely can and will die.
• Relying on the discord for mod distribution is, has, and always will be an inefficient and unpleasant experience.
• The content updates we sporadically got were fantastic and kept things interesting (even if they were very, very seldom).
• Lots of missing promised improvements and fixes (accessibility options, UI overhaul, save-load functionality)...

Now let's look at some of the more controversial changes brought on by the publisher-backed 1.0 release.

• Artwork and lore changes

This is supposedly because some people were gnashing and biting about the art style of the sprites for years, how it supposedly looks like stolen/traced Junji Ito artwork. For what you're getting, this game is homage. It's derivative. That's a huge selling point that gave this game a lot of charm. Now it's been changed. And maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but these changes look... undercooked. They're a flat downgrade. And pending the time I write this review, the Discussions board is rife with similar sentiments. I'm stunned, not just disappointed, at how much of a blow the game took visually, for the sake of dodging these accusations. In so doing, it gives credence to the accusers' claims. Apparently, all references to Junji Ito have been scrubbed without warning, replaced by a mustached man. And everyone's age has been set to 20 for some reason. Is this pressure from the publishers to net a rating for the physical release? Was it considered inappropriate in a few countries? No real explanation as to why, seems like a weird thing to change since the game's got a very obvious slant towards the protagonists being high schoolers, or fresh out of high school at the most for a small number of characters. Now it just looks weird and doesn't make sense from a narrative perspective. You try explaining what a 20-year-old is doing in their fourth senior year in high school and tell me why 2 and 2 equals 5.

EDIT: They rolled back some of the changes, fixed up some of the ages more particularly. And there's supposedly a way to restore the old artwork of certain characters under specific circumstances. But for the mostpart, the changes are in-tact and looks pretty bad. Changes the vibe of a lot of the characters and their expressions.

• The new content

It's... not a lot. It hardly added much. Sure, this is just like any other patch, but a 1.0 patch, going out of Early Access deserves a lot more than that. The Blood Moon update over a year ago gave us more than this. For all of the fanfare put into this launch trailer for 1.0, I had my heart holding out for this patch to give us all the promised content, improvements, maybe stuff I didn't expect to see. It's not bad, but it's underwhelming compared to past content updates.

• The trailer

God, seeing this got me so hyped today. It looks so incredible as a way to really pull you in and get you to try the game. Guess that's what it was meant to do. But maybe it gets my expectations way too high, cause this trailer has more polish and charm now than the game itself. It's like the opening act at a concert doing five times the work for the main show. If this kind of passion, effort, and quality could've visited upon the game during its four years of development, I might not be evaluating the trailer itself with skepticism. I don't count the trailer itself as bad, just the work behind it being misplaced. It's function is purely to hype up newcomers and nothing more, and this feels a little dishonest for the amount of work put into a game that, starting off, I was passionate about from the perspective of a fan.

People might clown my review, but I wanted to be honest. If you're a newcomer and you haven't watched or played it, give it a try. I won't say this game is bad, because even with all of its problems and controversy kept hidden behind the curtain, I like it. I enjoyed it for the amount of time I gave it. I'm just disappointed that it didn't bloom into something bigger and had to get hobbled and kneecapped by development troubles and pressure from fans and skeptics online. Hopefully, this isn't the last update we'll see for this game, and maybe it can improve and grow into something more worthy of the hype, post-EA.

Bottom line, if you're new to World of Horror, get it. Try it. It's still worth the $20 USD price.

Been having a blast with this on and off since the moment I got it. The story's lightweight, but there's plenty of amusing reading material in the bestiary for you lorehounds. That aside, this is just a good arcade style top-down shooter. Weapons are diverse, power growth is incredibly satisfying once you get the swing of things, the music is banger as hell, and the sound design is excellent. Visually, you get what you see in the previews, but there's a very welcome charm to it that feels right at home out of a janky PS1 era 2D game.

On first impression, this one needs some time to cook. It's still very early in its balance and gameplay mechanics. But it IS promising if they can fill in the game further and whittle down their early access roadmap. In its current state though? I can't really recommend it. It feels more like a demo of an early access. Maybe get it on a discount if it goes up on sale before it gets out of early access, cause for now, it's kind of lacking substance and polish.

• GAMEPLAY
Once you got the core experience down, there's not much "new" to experience as a player beyond that, apart from the current available mission events themselves. Needs some balancing as far as figuring out how to balance expenses research needs. The clock and the passage of time feels very disproportionate to the movement and activity of your Gaters, and meeting their needs doesn't seem to actually satisfy their conditions, making them fall apart as exo-team members pretty fast.

• ACCESSIBILITY & CONTROLS
Easy enough to pick up and figure out, though removing room tiles is iffy. It's easy to trap bots inside solid walls when trying to fill rooms in unless you slowly, steadily fill open spaces in one tile at a time with a way to escape. The rest of the hotkeys are fine and you've at least got the freedom to adjust keybinds. Graphics settings are pretty bare and simple, no colorblind settings.

• VISUALS
So-so and simple. Nothing aesthetically strong about the visual designs going on here, but maybe that'll change as the game gets polished up and improved as it gets closer to full release. Your Gaters all kind of look like they've got thousand-yard stares. Maybe that's intentional? I can only guess. Graphics are okay right now for lower to mid-end systems, which is a plus as far as accessibility goes. I hope they'll revise the overall presentation of the game, cause the concept art honestly feels cooler than the in-game graphics.

• SOUND
Nothing to really write home about, but the sound and music for the game works. It's okay. Maybe more can be done with it, but this game's strongest point is likely going to come from its gameplay and the growth of the player's Initiative compound. Though sometimes, the music does strangely seem to "lilt" towards sounding like something bad just happened, then springs back to sounding like something positive happened, which can be confusing if you're expecting audio cues. No voice lines, which is fine, though it could help with alerting the player to new updates aside from nebulous audio stings and swells that tend to blend in with the background music.

Shelled out too much when this game dropped. Waited two years for them to get their ♥♥♥♥ together, with a little gameplay in between to test it out. It's still got a lot of problems, but it's at least playable.

Or it WAS at least. Today's (April 11th, 2023) patch adds raytrace overdrive. Which for a tremendous majority of the users who own this game, will go underutilized. It's apparently broken all displayed text for MANY players, and it all comes in a 20GB download that is not optional. Today's patch was the last straw for me.

I tried to stomach how so many of the game's promised features were dumped and quietly abandoned on launch day, on the year-one anniversary of launch day, and beyond. If I could get a refund, I would, but I got over 100 hours out of it. Yeah, I've had my fun with it. But the game itself could be so much more than it's currently struggling to be if they just focused on QoL patches and bug fixes. Not this non-optional raytrace bloatware update BS for people with multi-thousand-dollar hotrods for PCs. Modders can figure this ♥♥♥♥ out, it should be optional. PLEASE just focus on fixing ♥♥♥♥, not hobbling the game with more unwanted graphical spit-shine.

I wanna recommend this. I do. But there's critical, severe issues for new players that they'll have to really slog through and only after, decide for themselves if it's worth it. With that in mind, I cannot in good, unbiased conscience, recommend this game to a new player. There's a lot of positives to the game itself, but there's a slew of arguably worse facets those positives have to stand shoulder to shoulder with.

Let's first look at the positives. I'll try to keep it brief.

The gunplay on its own, is the game's strongest quality. It feels smooth, responsive, kinetic, lively. The animations, render quality, visual effects, all of it gives the player excellent feedback and feels very natural. Bungie really put this game's engine through the paces to make it what it is, and it shows. If you played the original Destiny, you're getting much of the same and more. There's a lot of depth to building a character that takes time to master. Learning this stuff is satisfying. Seeing your work in action with the combat system feels even more so. And with a diverse arsenal of powers and weapon types, you won't find yourself growing bored.

The game is a visual masterpiece in of itelf. With just as much love and care, Destiny 2 is eyecandy galore. With incredible landscapes and environments, weapons, armors, enemy designs, and visual effects, you'll be hard pressed to find other MMO-like games with as much polish as this one.

Okay, now for the bad.

As a first time player, you will be thrust neck deep in a very long, ongoing storyline dating as far back as Destiny 1. Since the time between Destiny 2's launch up to the end of the Beyond Light expansion, a LOT of content's been deprecated or just outright sunset* out of purview for the players to enjoy. What this means for the players unfortunately, is that you'll miss out on crucial story content. Just flat out entire chapters of the Guardians' story is G O N E. Untouchable. You can only now learn about what happened through the eyes of other players who have uploaded video playthroughs or read about the lore. I don't need to tell you how incredibly bad this is for a game, who's bigger selling point is its own lore, where you gotta trudge through dusty Youtube pages and broken, tracker-infested Fandom wiki sites to learn about what happened in a game's story. It's a wholly hostile experience for new players.

*Sunset (or Sunsetting) refers to making old content no longer accessible and removed from the game. Either to be repurposed or phased out entirely for any number of reasons. Often, this is due to needing to improve the writing, improve context or the content therin, or just paring the game size down for the sake of system requirements and performance reasons.

The game does nothing to teach you the more important virtues of gameplay once you're dropped into this game, late into the story. And with so much to do, you won't know where to begin or possess any context as to why you're off doing a mission on some alien planetoid somewhere in the solar system, fighting an alien faction you've never heard of, but are treated like you possess intimate familiarity with them. You, the player, get treated the same way by NPCs, as if you've been this long-time grand, heralded hero of the new age. And you haven't even learned everybody's names yet. It's rough. And probably the biggest part that'll turn first time players away, only to uninstall the game shortly after.

Okay, this isn't as brief as I said it would be. A lot deserves to be said. The game's a mixed bag for a multitude of reasons. I've put close to 700 hours of my time into this game, but I think I got lucky. And that's coming from a player who joined in, post-Red War. For veterans, they'll probably go "oof" seeing that. I still play it for the positive reasons. And for the sake of enjoying one of very few games many of my friends and I can play together. But the negatives get worse and worse and worse as time goes on, and more content gets updated because nothing gets done to alleviate those issues. Only more story content gets dropped and puts the player further and further away from a decent starting point to actually learn what's going on and how to begin.

For all the joy I've experience, and may yet still glean from this game's future, for now, I gotta say, not recommended. At least, not for new players approaching the game for its story and new user experience.

I hope this game gets some significant improvements in the coming months. Right now, I can't give this a stamp of approval, but I'm at the very least, hopeful to see how this will turn around.

The first and foremost thing I instantly noticed with this game was the unusually pushy behavior from the hyena's part about his own opinions pushed on the player based off their initial decisions made. It makes you outright feel like you have to make a specific set of decisions or else you're doing something wrong. I shouldn't feel like an opinion's being scrutinized as 'childish'. Player characters should be able to mould their tastes around the decisions and actions of the players themselves, lest the immersion is destroyed. More decision branches should also be implemented to coincide with this form of player character development. I feel like I'm walking in a dark hallway full of trip hazards and I'm getting judged for walking over such hazards instead of walking around them, if my metaphor makes any sense. Making a decision should totally have consequence, but the NPCs shouldn't unanymously agree against a choice you make. There needs to be a bit more variety in their reactions.

I gotta agree with the opinions I've seen on much of the game feeling bland... That and how the characters' personalities feel like a hyperextension of some sort of theme, ideal, or social quirk. It feels unreal, you can't relate to any of these characters. Granted, they feel animated and colorful, but... You can't just paint a character with one 'color'. By that, I'm meaning their personality and expressions. I certainly hope this isn't a portrayal of the fursona owners' actual personalities, or else if I were one of them, I'd actually feel kind of insulted...

I can't knock on its presentation too much though. For a demo, this is nicely presented. There's little in terms of the aesthetics you could do to improve it since it's a visual novel. But the music is pretty forgetable and the sounds I feel are a little too sharp and loud in places. Stock audio's not really a good idea because it can clash with the immersion.

I love the art though, definitely. I'm hoping the artist plans to draw much more than one static image for every character. Voice overs would also be an amazing boon to the production quality, but I'm not holding my breath.

This game's alright, even if a little repetitive. The attacks could be a little more fluid, but I really enjoy the sheer crushing force you sorta feel with your every hit. The weapons and armor are pretty neat for their selection, but don't get too attached to anything for long. Often, weapons and armor quickly get replaced with vastly superior ones or your equipment quickly becomes crud compared to the foes your facing. The sound for this game is pretty satisfying too, but I wish the music wasn't quite so repetitive.

Overall, I think I enjoyed this for what it was. Played it on and off for a few days and liked what I played. Other than that, I think this game's got some masculinity issues. I lol'd pretty hard after realizing every character you can create in the game is some variant or another of super beefy, burly, angry beast-throb Mc.Angersteak. Kinda gross, but it's whatever. The aesthetic's just an aesthetic and I can't really call it a negative thing. Still, I got a laugh out of the design.