Recent reviews by FanaticMarioMan

I am by no means done with this game and I'm almost at the 100 hour mark. Very few games ever in my life have held my interest for so long. I had recently gotten into Roguelike Deckbuilders, starting with Slay the Spire, played many an hour while ignoring my college professors, and Monster Train, played many an hour ignoring my postgrad responsibilities. The one thing that Across the Obelisk has to make it immediately better than either of those is multiplayer. I was almost always prefer playing games with friends than without, so being able to play one of my favorite genres with friends is amazing

The game is just a good game period too. There are 16 characters each with their own specialties, and many of them have two distinct playstyles to them, due to a two-branch level up tree, making it feel like way more than 16 styles to play. The adventure mode has tons of secrets and unlocks to discover, and the obelisk mode is a very solid traditional roguelike experience.

If I had to put any complaints, I have a few small balance issues (but no game is gonna be perfect on that) and the only real complaint I have is runs are pretty long. An adventure mode run with my friends is 4-5 hours. I don't mind it, but that can certainly be a problem for some people. We usually break up runs between 2-3 sessions.

Overall, extremely highly recommend for any fan of the genre.

I wanted to write a review just as a caution. Sometimes things really look too good to be true. This game looked good, but unfortunately it was only in the looks. I played for only 4 hours, didn't even get past Chapter 1, and was already so bored. Combat is repetitive, everything feels empty, and there's just a general sense of a lot missing while playing this game. I probably would have refunded the game if I hadn't tried to give the game a change and played for too long

I never write reviews for games. Most of the time I just don't feel strongly either way to write a review, which honestly I should change, it can be fun

But oh my word, I have to gush about The Witness.

I first heard about The Witness not too long ago just searching for a list of good open world games to play. The writer of the article threw The Witness in with a caveat in that, yes, technically it's an open world game, but not in the adventure game sense, because it's a puzzle game. Wishlisted it because it looked interesting and then bought it on sale. After playing it over the past few weeks, and thinking for a little while, I can safely say this my favorite puzzle game I've ever played.

On paper, The Witness has no right to be as good as it is. As some reviews will point out, the puzzles' core concept is incredibly repetitive: all of them involve drawing a line from start to finish. That's it! But what those reviews fail to mention, or probably that they failed to notice, is that every area has a new twist on how to figure out the correct line, and even within each area new sub-rules and twist are slowly taught and added.

I'm not going to talk about any of those types because a large portion of the fun of this game comes in the process of figuring out what each section is trying to teach you. There were so many moments of "Ah ha!" when something clicked that brought me joy every time.

However by far the best thing about this game are its secrets. If you're thinking about playing the game, ignore this next section, you are much better off experiencing the game yourself. But I'll talk about them for the sake of a complete review

This game is chalk full of secrets. Not every puzzle is required and there's lots of little single puzzles hidden around to find, there's secret bunkers with cryptic hexagonal puzzle to find (which I won't say what they're for), and apparently there's a whole secret area that I need to find.

But by FAR the best part of this game are the environmental puzzles.

I remember starting the game, noticing every once and a while some weird design choices about things around me, especially a lot of oddly circular things. At one point I realize that a section of steel looked like a puzzle route. Out of sheer accident I jokingly traced it.

AND IT DID SOMETHING. IT LIT UP. I was floored. That's a moment I'll never forget. I didn't find another for a while but then somewhere along the way, I started seeing them everywhere, and so many of them are so clever.

Anyway, this game is absolutely incredible. I would say not quite worth the full price, so get it on sale, but absolutely get it.