Recent reviews by 4[v4[/V5!5

I'm not much of a rogue-lite player. However, as a twin-stick shooter, I think the game is pretty fun. I feel as though convenience is a fairly strong point of the game, since you can teleport to conquered rooms on the fly as long as you're not trapped in combat.

Thanks to the rather generous re-roll system, mechanics of acquiring items such as side books (weapon upgrades) and artifacts (character upgrades) are not much of a hassle either. I usually end up with exactly the weapon build that I want to have due to the amount of times you acquire items and can re-roll them too.

The game contains some permanent upgrade farming too in the form of simple side quests. They award you with skills that do stuff like increasing start HP, bombs, side book slots and so on. It does not take long to progress enough to the point that you can get a simple clear on Normal (about 5 hours, I think) but it takes a bit more to fully max it out (15 hours for me).

Aside from this, I have a few complaints:

Upon getting your first simple clear, a room gets added to each of the 5 stages. However, that room is not marked in any such way that you could avoid going into it, if you were not interested in entering it. I believe a change should be made to mark those rooms, so they can be avoided. Edit: It turns out, each stage follows one of three layout patterns. If identified, it's possible to avoid these rooms after all and also reach the end of the stage faster.

When choosing between upgrades for your weapons, the game does not give you any actual numbers that would help in comparing them to another. The game does tell you if certain weapon properties get reduced or increased, but not by how much. Having to choose between them can be a little frustrating at times because of this.

I believe the enemy variety should be upped a little. The variety in general feels like it is lacking between different runs, since I believe that every stage will always have the same amount of enemy rooms, treasure rooms and one shop as in every other run. The greatest variety combat-wise between each run is the layout of the individual rooms in which it may be either easier or harder to take out enemies in a more controlled manner or avoid traps.

The attack power gained through equipping risky upgrades is far too powerful. Risk upgrades increase your book's strength in exchange for adding some weird quirk that might even deal damage to you under some circumstances. However, for most of these, there are usually good counter measures. Add multiple of those to one book and you can delete enemies extremely quickly, even bosses.

Furthermore, the True Last Boss felt like an impossible jump in difficulty to me without equipping any of those. However, once I learned how powerful risky upgrades were, I added multiple to one book and then I didn't even have to dodge a single pattern during the TLB on Normal difficulty. The difference between using them and not using them should not be that insane. However, it is clear that the higher difficulties are designed around utilizing them. The HP of the bosses is so much higher that it is unreasonable not to use risk upgrades. Personally, I wish the general balancing was a bit tamer in regards to both the damage benefits of risk upgrades and HP scaling on higher difficulties. All in all, the bosses definitely end up being a weaker aspect of the game.

Ultimately, despite these balancing decisions, the game's higher difficulties and harder achievements are still challenging.

Short but fun murder mystery game. I had a good time.

However, I do have some issues and, since I don't want to say anything about the mystery itself or the characters, this will sadly take up the majority of the text in my review:

The art might take some time to get used to but I did get used to it.
A select few tracks in the soundtrack sounded a little too messy for my taste, however.

My greatest issue with the game is the lack of an important quality of life feature. From other mystery games, I value the option to look through your evidence while prompted to answer a question (that does not involve presenting evidence itself). However, in Shinrai, when prompted to name a culprit or answer a multiple-choice question, you can not look through your evidence and notes, which I found to be pretty frustrating.

The game was pretty intriguing at first but I feel like some of the rather on-the-nose dialogue about the mysterious events in the game was ruining that for me.

The nature of the gameplay loop also killed off the tension pretty quickly. As in, the hostile of the game ended up being more inconvenient than scary. Not too rarely, I let myself get killed intentionally to reset time.

In short, I think the puzzles were fine and the hint tracker is a very good quality of life feature. However, the horror aspect just wasn't very strong, especially with the stakes being so low.

Chill and lovely game. Characters are fun and their arcs are well-paced.

That wasn't so bad, Strohmeier really got me worked up. B******.

Good story experience with decent horror but a bit lacking in gameplay.
It can sometimes take quite a bit to get from point A to B due to slower movement speed and the puzzles were rather easy. Because of this, I felt like I spent more time walking than having to think about my next course of action.

The best parts about the game for me are the setting, atmosphere and the survival horror mechanics. I like the different uses some resources and tools have and the different ways in which you can fulfil your objectives. I haven't played much of the original Amnesia (and I haven't played those in between at all) but I like what this game did and I would likely enjoy another horror game designed with this mentality.

My main complaint comes from the lack of escalation in danger as you're free to explore most areas right off the bat. Though I do like the open map design, once you figure out the monster, it isn't really that scary anymore. Having the power and therefore the danger throughout the entire facility be tied to one generator is also not that great in my opinion.

Started playing the game immediately after finishing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. You can immediately tell that it adopts the base ideas of the classic Paper Mario games while also improving on them.

The three main characters and the world of Bug Fables are very charming. Most importantly, traversal, for the most part, does not feel like a drag, especially later on in the game when you can sprint and when you gain an item that lets you fast travel back to the Ant Kingdom. In Chapter 2, I started playing in Hard Mode by equipping a medal you can get at the very beginning and had a good time. It also incentivised me to do a lot of side quests along the way and they ended up being fun and not at all boring for me.

There's only a few things I do have issues with in Bug Fables:

The game's obsession with urging you to make a build that asks you to intentionally poison one of your party members felt really backwards. All in all, it took quite a while for the game to really give you attack increasing options that didn't in some way have trade-offs, which made the gameplay progression feel extremely slow for a long time until you suddenly had access to some really amazing stuff.

Some puzzle concepts got rather annoying for me real quick. Especially those where you had to push ice blocks with Kabbu, since that process is unnecessarily bothersome.

Platforming was also a little janky but not that great of an issue.

I think this game's lovely.

In the time I've played the game so far, I cleared the Arcade mode on Expert and the Expert Boss Rush. The Expert difficulty is the highest in the game and considers itself to be Normal Arcade difficulty.

Jet Buster definitely contains quite a few bosses with fast paced patterns. However, getting an Expert 1cc is not that hard since the game throws a lot of score extends at you which are easy to obtain. The scoring system is seemingly quite simple too. If there's more nuance to it, I'm not aware of it, since I haven't played for score so far.

I got my main enjoyment out of the Expert Boss Rush where you do not get extends and need to fight all bosses back to back. Clearing this without Continues is a lot more demanding in comparison.

The game contains good visual QoL features, like being able to reduce brightness of the background and wallpaper or changing the color of various enemy bullet types.

My only complaint about this game is how some characters are much weaker than others.

There've been a lot of changes throughout the time frame in which I've been playing this game so far. Personally, I enjoy the game a lot and I'm also satisfied with the new content which has been added recently.