Recent reviews by grand theft horse

My favorite part is this really considerate feature where if the game feels like you could use a break, it will just crash directly to desktop for you, like a bartender cutting you off.

Who else up shaking they rat rn?

No spoilers in this review at all, if you liked the game but feel like my sentiment resonates with you, do yourself a favor and grab CLICKOLDING. It's also 3€ and 100% worth it if you liked this.

Positive mostly because it's short, abrasive, and very unique, I want more games like this!

That being said, it does feel like a 48hr game jam game, I really think this game needed just a little bit more. Not even gameplay time or mechanics, just more intention behind the whole thing, think about what feelings you are evoking in the player and why. This could have been great, the uncertainty and weirdness was fantastic, but towards the end the illusion starts to slip, I feel like there's no there there, like all this fantastic creativity isn't really serving an interesting new perspective. Still though, I'm glad I played it and any experience this unique is easily worth 3€ to me.

I gotta say, we could really do with more games that are this short and this weird. If you can spare the 3€ and you're value strange new experiences over 'fun', I'd pick this one up, but blind, don't look anything else up and don't read this review. There's nothing mindblowing going on, it just feels better when you're out of your element.

Some spoilers ahead:

I think the post-ending (the white room) really isn't necessary and subtracts from the game a little. We didn't need anyone to point out the meta-element behind the fourth wall, we all picked up on that subconsciously just through how damn weird it feels to be doing this.

It also just doesn't really contribute any more to the story, the first 10k clicks are pretty much perfect on their own. Grounded enough to make you unsure if you should feel safe or not. Everything after that just feels totally disconnectedm unimportant and gamey in comparison. Overall still pretty great though

I mean on a technical level the game is an absolute mess. Everything is way too close, the only way to adjust the FOV beyond the incredibly tight default 70 is to use UnrealUnlocker, and even then everything stays uncomfortably close to your face, I get motion sick after too much active gameplay.

The gameplay is fine, so far I haven't noticed anything particularly special about it to be honest, it plays it pretty safe and runs down a long list of classic shooter staples.

But I didn't pick the game up for the gameplay, I would've been fine with another Accounting VR which basically had none.

As long as you're into Roilandisms, this game is endearing and entertaining and has made me laugh out loud more than a couple of times.

If you hate Roilands 'eh, good enough' style of storytelling and comedy, you'll probably be miserable by the third time a guy named Shmeep Florbo shows up and monologues the same four lines at you for 12 minutes.

So yeah, I think it's funny and interesting and worth a buy unless you know the humor wouldn't do anything for you.

Honestly it feels like this game is one medium-sized streamer away from blowing up massively.

Insanely fun party game for when you can get at least 4 or 5 friends together, easy to get into, with a little bit of depth and loads of classes. There should probably be some more diversity for the cop team, right now most of the classes feel very similar to play and except for the spy the robbers always have the initiative.

Still though, insanely fun game that's criminally underplayed. Like a reasonably priced SpyParty with actual gameplay and content.

LISA is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ brutal.

Yeah it's got its funny moments, which end up getting clipped and are usually the only exposure people have to these games, but at its heart the themes of this game are terrible, and completely unavoidable. It's not subtle, there's no mistaking what's going on here, and it's ugly.

The game isn't fair, and you'll be put in some very uncomfortable situations and forced to answer questions with no good answer. You'll lose members of your party and you'll actually hurt, not because the dialogue tells you how sad the protagonist is being, but because you just lost an extremely important asset from a gameplay perspective. So much of the story of this game isn't told through dialogue but directly through gameplay.

Try to weasel your way out of these tough calls, find a way around them, that perfect solution other games usually reward attentive players with, and the game will only hurt you worse. Did you really think that would work? Why should it?

As a result everything you do gets lent a certain weight that I usually never feel in single player games. You learn to accept the harshness of the game and adapt. You'll make tougher, meaner calls to earn a few more firebombs, and as a result you'll have an easier job surviving.

This is not a game you can recommend to everyone, but if you have the stomach for dark themes and unfair gameplay, please pick these games up, especially when they go on sale.

I really, really want to write paragraph after paragraph about this game and all its clever ideas, but I genuinely believe it's better to go in blind.

It tells a fun, unconventional story and has troves of absolutely insane out-of-the-box gameplay mechanics.

If you have even a passing interest in card games definitely buy this game, and try not to look up anything about it. It's much more than it says on the box.

pretentious review warning:

Kentucky Route Zero is probably the most beautifully written game I've ever played, but I still don't know if I can recommend it to everybody.

It's a story that's not done, ready, and interpreted for the consumer, because it can't be. It's not finished before you play. Or after, for that matter. The story of Kentucky Route Zero is entirely ephemeral, much like the oral tradition that clearly inspired it, and you, the player, are one of its main storytellers. It foregoes the pacing, arcs, and flourishes we expect a story to give us, and delivers something that's a lot more satisfying because it's a lot less satisfying. It's a story that reads as incredibly real not despite it's surreal, unusual style, but because of it.

Most of the time in real life you don't get neat closure or dramatic goodbyes when someone drifts out of your life. When life takes something from you, there's no rhyme or reason to it. No poetic justice, no promise that it'll all even out in the end. Kentucky Route Zero understands and respects this truth, and still manages to deliver a story with purpose, meaning, and hope.

For large parts of the game I wasn't able to logically understand the implications of what was happening, I was caught up in the moment and it totally went over my head. The thing is though, I didn't need to. At it's best, Kentucky Route Zero can completely bypass your left brain and inject the emotion right into your veins.

If you're not in the mood for this kind of story, don't force it, you'll probably only end up frustrated.

But if you are okay with it, okay to set some time aside and get lost in the story until suddenly you're not, buy the game.

This game looks and feels like a console game, the most egregious part of this is the weird view smoothing and extremely tight FOV. Even at its Max, a setting they call "90", it feels like you're looking through binoculars.

This might work fine on a console, where you're sitting some distance away from the TV, but on PC it's extremely disorienting, and to me personally, physically sickening. It also means it won't really work well on ultrawide monitors.

You used to be able to tweak an .ini to increase the fov cap, but that has been patched with no replacement. Apparently the devs don't care that this is an accessibility issue. People prone to simulation sickness literally cannot play this game in its current state.

The UI also suffers greatly from this console-first design, and I'd rather port my entire steam library to uplay than play one more game on the atrocity that is xbox live.

Stop letting Microsoft touch videogames.

Let me just get something out of the way.

The writing is ass. It's predictable, it's lame, it takes itself seriously to a borderline offensive degree. It's exactly what you would expect from videogame writing, with all the horrible implications that phrase entails.

That being said, if bland stories and pained exposition usually don't bother you, they won't bother you here either. It's not especially egregious, just bad.

And you're not here for that anyways, you're here for a fast-paced skinnerbox that keeps outputting cool ♥♥♥♥ in return for your time.
And that's something this game is pretty good at.

It's got its problems, quite a few actually, raytracing doesn't seem to make use of RTX cards, or at least not efficiently, and you may have to override High DPI scaling behavior for the game, or it might just ignore mouse inputs at random intervals, which is seriously annoying in a game that often requires super precise timings. Your grappling hook feels 'off' somehow, your slow-motion move is often necessary, but honestly feels like it breaks the flow of the game.

BUT:

Damn, you get to run around real fast and kill dudes in one hit. There are some interesting choices in the level and enemy design, from a gameplay perspective, and while you'll be blowing through all the content relatively quick, those will keep them interesting during replays, especially if you're trying to outperform your friends, their times and deaths for stages will be visible at the end of a run, a great way to let players motivate themselves without giving them explicit goals, which can often cause burnout.

And all the while the soundtrack just keeps egging you on, pushing you to go a little faster, to play a little more recklessly...

The game's short-ish runtime is pretty easily justified by its replayability and cost. It's no masterpiece, but if the trailer looks fun to you, I guarantee it will be a lot of fun to play.