Recent reviews by DParse

Briefly interesting but absolutely terrible boss design makes me give this a thumbs down. During the final boss encounter, all your weapons except for your starter weapon are disabled, crippling your build and decimating your DPS and synergies. And on top of the that the boss is a boring slog with ridiculous healing during invulnerability phases that last for ages because you need to charge multiple pillars. So more than likely the boss will heal to full so you can enjoy slowly whittling down its millions of HP with one ♥♥♥♥♥♥ weapon again.

This is surprisingly clever and an entertaining twist on an Uno-style card game. There are a bunch of different decks to play with, and the later entries in the list (which are all unlocked from the start) introduce some intriguing tactical combinations of mechanics, and even a hint of metagaming. There's certainly much more opportunity for strategy and outplaying your opponents than vanilla Uno.

I was worried that the bots would be rather dumb, and it appeared that way when I was trying out the simpler decks, but once the complexity ramped up they seemed to play fine, taking advantage of combos and whatnot. Surely not as good as human players, but the game supports online multipler and has a discord for finding matches. The English is a bit choppy for some card descriptions but nothing that makes the game unplayable, and that's a fixable problem.

What matters most is if the game is fun, and I enjoyed quite a lot.

There's a lot to like, but the quality of the software is abysmal. It crashes every single time I try to play, sometimes after an hour or two, sometimes after only a few minutes. I wouldn't buy this game until the stability has significantly improved.

It honestly hurts me to say this, but this game has not been modernized since the first Chip's Challenge from 1300 years ago. Jesus Christ, it's 2020, Sokoban puzzle games need to have undo controls. It's so easy to make a misstep, and being sent back to the last checkpoint when you know the puzzle's solution is incredibly frustrating. I loved Chip's Challenge as a kid - it honestly might be my first puzzle game ever, and launched a life-long passion. To this day the iconic music pops up in my head. But this product is not high enough quality for today's market. It feels like like an honest-to-goodness sequel to the original Chip's Challenge, released 20 years too late. I'm sorry to the developer - I loved the original and I thank you profusely - but this is not today's puzzle game standards.

Strong contender for the best game ever made.

An excellent, very unique and very beautiful puzzle game. Gorogoa tells the story of a kid who tries to summon a dragon by following a mystical ritual, but this takes him on a circuitous, non-linear and non-euclidean journey. You, the player, shuffle around the storybook of his life and piece together the story by helping the boy progress through his life.

By manipulating the 4 panels on-screen (by zooming, panning, swapping, and overlapping), certain panels and scenes will interact in ways that let the boy navigate the complicated spacetime he lives in. As the player you need to find the clever visual clues scattered around the environment that link seemingly separate scenes together. A suspicious carving of a woman plucking a star from the sky and lighting her lantern is a clever way to tell you how to light your own lantern. A drawing of a compass pointing to the north star is secretly a clock hand waiting to be lined up with a clock tower, jumping you forwards in time.

The game has a beautiful visual language and ample hints to help you work your way through the puzzles. The developer obviously truly cares about the design of the game and it paid off. Definite purchase for puzzle lovers.

I completed the game in about 3 hours of play, but it was absolutely worth the purchase despite the short playtime.

I don't usually play Visual Novel games but this one seemed appealing. The voice acting is really nice, all the actors have really nice voices to listen to. The art is incredible, and there is a gallery to review all the panels you have seen. Navigation is easy and you can go back panels if you missed/misread something.

This is ONLY a story. There is no gameplay/decision making involved. The story is about a genetically enhanced girl and her bodyguard. It's a fantastic read and I highly recommend it to people who enjoy stories.

The Witness is a puzzle game with a minimal amount of story but an absolutely beautiful world to explore, with an excellent merging of the puzzles you solve and the environment you're in.

It is unabashedly a puzzle game, and it has extremely well-crafted and insanely difficult puzzles, while still providing a natural learning progression without hand-holding and annoying tutorials. You start by solving easy puzzles, then harder, then harder still. The reward for solving puzzles is most often more puzzles, like the games Hexcells, Hook, or Snakebird. Occasionally you find audio logs that give philosophical perspective from famous thinkers like Einstein, Nicholas of Cusa or Heisenberg.

But make no mistake about it - this is a puzzle game, and like the other games I listed, the reward for tackling a grueling puzzle is solving it. Some people will not like the lack of RPG Puzzle Experience Points™ or new and exciting guns with which to take down tougher puzzles, but it's not that kind of game. The game is about taking in the surrounding and using it to solve puzzles.

The puzzles themselves are brilliant. Even though they all take the same general form (You need to find a path through a maze) there is an ENORMOUS amount of variety. Furthermore they are brilliantly paced and the game does an excellent job of teaching you the rules non-verbally. You'll come up across two or three puzzles with a new symbol, think you understand it, but then the game will force you to deal with a puzzle that makes you tweak the way you thought it worked. Regardless of what some detractors say, there is not a single puzzle in the game that 'breaks the rules'. It is perfectly consistent.

Some real criticisms: The trailer promises a story about regaining your memory, but that is absolutely 100% not in the game. Some of the areas are incredibly unfriendly to people with disabilities like color-blindness or deafness. Some of the quick but tough puzzles turn off on wrong guesses (to stop people from bruteforcing them) and you need to resolve the previous puzzle (the solution remains on the panel, so it's not difficult) so that can be annoying.

However these flaws are minor compared to the excellent puzzle crafting, the beauty of the island, and the mind-opening fusion of the two. This game is heartily recommended to people who like puzzle games.

Small spoiler for people who "don't get it": If all you've done is walk from puzzle to puzzle, making guesses until you move on, and then finish the game without looking around, you're going to have a bad time. The environment MATTERS. Go to the mountain. Take a look down at the river. Open your eyes.

Rabi-Ribi is a classic metroidvania game, with boss battles mixing in bullet-hell elements.

I give it a huge thumbs up for being a solid MV with TONS of collectibles, lots of secret areas, and lots of abilities. The controversial parts of this game will never be the gameplay - it's the aesthetics. The game just OOZES cute, and for some people that might be a big turn off. I think it's great, though. I like the cute characters and the visuals outside of the full-body dialog shots are just astounding. The controls are tight and the game is genuinly fun. Big thumbs up.

Unplayable if you want to use the mouse but have a controller plugged in. I'm not changing my gaming setup just because a lazy developer didn't put in an option for which control you want to use.