Recent reviews by Massenstein

If you ever played Pontifex or other similar bridge builders back in the day, this is very much the same, just much more polished and complex. One of the few steam games that can be easily recommended to any and all age groups, as it does very neat job of introducing some basics of structural physics in a way that children can understand, while at the same time offering enough challenge that actual engineers are also having fun with the game.

What an exceptionally beautifully written game, in my books one of the defining works of video games that are also art.

I wish I could find the review that originally made me buy the game. It was a very sincere and personal account on what the game meant to the writer and how it changed them. I hope that person is doing well.

I also felt this game changed me, though I imagine the effect would have been even greater if it had came out when I was much younger. Or I might have bounced off completely at one point in my life when I would have refused to let it enter my heart and mind, as it was a scary prospect to do.

It's a visual novel, but it has more depth than most games calling themselves RPGs. It becomes your story, if you let it. Being a visual novel, there's no skill components and also no puzzle solving, making it easy to recommend to someone who doesn't generally play games, or who might struggle with skill-based elements. There is some violence, occasionally rather gruesome, but that is not the focus of the game.

I'm not sure what more to say without going into spoiler territor, and I don' like spoilers. I went into the game with nothing but expectations based on the title, which I find is often the best way to approach any work. Give it a go. There's no lengthy tutorials or cutscenes to eat away at your 2 hour refund window, and that should be plenty enough time to decide if you want to let it into your heart.

After so many years still technically impressive, still getting new content, still buggy as hell and incredibly unfun. Every time I run it again I encounter a problem, then spent 20 minutes looking up for answer before finding months or even years old thread where that exact same bug is being discussed and apparently still not fixed.

It can be fun time-killer for a while if you're very bored, but even then I would recommend getting this from a massive discount. At least until the development focus shifts from adding new stuff to fixing all the broken old stuff.

A rough gem, but a gem nevertheless. There were bits I didn't love, like the parry mechanic, which is well designed and probably feels great to players who are into that sort of thing. For me it began to grate after a while, but not too much, since there is enough other things to appreciate.

The art direction is ridiculously beautiful and completely un-apologetic of its flashiness. I'm talking the level of absurd ham you usually only see in anime, but delivered much more gracefully. There are rough edges here and there that might have gone away if the team had bigger budget and more time, but at the same time more resources might have come at a cost of more executive meddling, so I'm glad they could make the game exactly as they did.

Some of my minor nitpickings have to do with how the optional side content ties to the rest of the game, but I have to say that rarely if ever has side content felt this meaningful and satisfying. It never felt like doing pointless ubisoft-tasks for the sake of completion. I shouldn't even be calling it 'content'. The whole game is art, with all of its imperfections.

I'd have hard time talking about the story without spoiling stuff so I'll just comment on the premise, which is what hooked me and pulled me in even when I was still undecided if the art style was too much for me: I appreciate that from the start the story is about going against what most characters in the world consider inevitable, against "god" or "fate" so to speak, and not much time is wasted mulling on whether that makes sense. That is the kind of energy we need right now, more than ever.

A game full of neat ideas that in my opinion clash together very badly. The room-drafting mechanic itself is a fun variant of deck-building. Then you have wide variety of puzzles, some of which are contained in a single room but most of them span the whole game, and the logic can be extremely arbitrary. Even if you are a pathological notes taker like myself, you will have to return to same locations over and over again to look for clues you might have missed, and even when you have documented everything you possibly can, you still might have to return to the rooms to see if you can now do something you couldn't do before.

On top of the RNG elements, your very ability to explore is a limited resource, being drained by moving to a different room. This means just testing out possible solutions can mean wasting the entire run, and also lots of hours of your life. Because this game is also incredibly slow, oh yes.

You walk at snail speed, or a turtle if you keep sprint-button pressed down all the time. Most things you can interact with have unskippable animations, short on their own, but so numerous that they add up. And every day starts with unskippable animation you learn to hate, since you will be seeing it so, so many times, especially because later on it will often make more sense to alt+F4 out of the game rather than save and start a new day.

There's a mod (ADHD in nexusmods) that allows you to adjust the game speed up to 10x, and I can't imagine playing without that. It's still a massive time-drain and doesn't use your time well, but the mod makes it at least playable if you are still interested in solving the mysteries.

Your mileage may vary wildly on how gratifying it feels to solve those mysteries. For me it felt like a build-up to something huge and exciting and then when I got to what I believe to be the definitive ending it just felt like whole lot of nothing. I get it, conclusions are difficult, and sometimes the journey being fun can excuse the destination being crap, but in this case the journey was arduous and increasingly un-enjoyable. I regret the time spent with this game when I have several more promising mystery-games awaiting in my library.

That's my impression anyway. Lot of people who made it to the very end disagree with me, and maybe you will find it more enjoyable than I did. Read more reviews, avoid spoilers (thankfully the community is very mindful of these) and for the love of gods install the mod.

One of the best games I've played in recent years at least, and definitely one of the best-written one I've ever played. I didn't expect such depth of characters and narrative when purchasing a game about wizards doing tactical assaults. I came to really, really love these characters.

Gameplay-wise TBW manages to simultaneously be engaging and forgiving, making it easy to recommend for anyone even slightly interested in turn-based tactics games but who might find XCOM too hard. I'm one of those people. if you are hardcore XCOM nerd then you might find TBW easy, but you might still enjoy it for the story.

Maybe the only thing I have to nitpick about are the map arranging minigames after some missions. The concept is fun and it adds to the plot, but sometimes I was just really into the rhytm of blasting people through windows and making connections on the map broke that flow. A small raisin in otherwise fantastic bread.

Thank you, Suspicious Development!

edit: few days after reviewing I noticed the game isn't officially early access anymore. I don't know how to feel about the fact that it's considered nearly finished product now. There's still one more content update coming, as well as better modding support. The rest of the review has been written under the impression that it was still very much work in progress.

I had initially left a negative review years ago and in retrospect that was unfair, since the game has always been honest about being early access. I removed that negative review recently, and then decided to re-visit the game. It has come a long way since then.

Still early access, bear that in mind, and janky in many places, but it works enough and it does some very unique things. A procedurally generated immersive sim that does more work to earn that title than many AAA games calling themselves that.

Usual problem of procedurally generated worlds is that everywhere feels the same. SoD also suffers from that somewhat, but the city — which even at max size is rather compact — manages to feel lived in. There's joy in stopping by the diner next door for a burger and maybe to check the bulletin board for job listings. If you're masochistic like myself, you might enjoy such lucicrously senseless jobs as "steal envelope from this person, and the only thing I can tell you about that person is that they're 189cm tall and have no beard."

Murders are the real meat of the game, though. You might not know immediately when one happens somewhere in the city, though it's possible to even be there to witness it, or be first on the scene. Otherwise you get the nofification immediately when it is reported. Cops are not your friends, and also not in the game, and trying to get to the crime scene before them or sneaking in afterwards is part of the fun.

Every building in the game is full from basement to penthouse with apartments, businesses, offices and back rooms, and most of these are connected by a spaghetti of ventilation ducts. Windows can also sometimes be used as entry points. The ventilation duct mazes are very nonsensical but having grown up with fiction where people crawl through these all the time there is lots of joy in that for me, and they're especially good for escapes. If you're reading this and you last played the game years ago when reaching the ducts was a terrible reflex game of mashing buttons, you'll be happpy to know that it's much more reliable now.

It's primarily a detective game, but I come from Thief background, and you just can't give me an immersive sim and tell me not to go burglarizing all over the places. Fortunately the game doesn't tell me that. Breaking into places is often necessary for solving the case, but you can also do that for fun. It's a grim cyberpunk society where the upper crust lives high above the riffraff in lavish homes, and the game is totally fine letting you rob them blind and trash their places if you want.

Which brings me to my minor complaints, that there aren't much consequences for player for anything you do. There's a meter of fines that keeps counting up when you do crime within premises, but you only have to pay for those if you get caught, and it goes back to zero when you leave. Sometimes people chase you for a while, but you could literally break down someone's door, beat them senseless, throw their furniture out of the window, and then come back half an hour later and they are fine with you. But hopefully that sort of things will be ironed out in future releases.

The development seems still very active, with last content update having came out april and next one promised in august. I'm eager to see where this game is going.

Has unsolvable game-breaking bugs. Civ2 is more stable than this.

Definitely top-3 in puzzle games I've enjoyed, made purely of things I enjoy. Being completely turn-based eliminates some annoyance I have with some otherwise excellent puzzlers such as Talos Principle, which is the sometimes-necessity to be quick and avoid mistakes during a long sequence. None of that in Baba, and you can undo turns and restart with minimum fuss.

I also love that the puzzles are always the size of one screen, so you can instantly take in everything. Sometimes the everything is lots of clutter, but sometimes you are presented with a deceptively simple setup; just a few words and objects, and it might look impossible to solve. But you can trust that it is possible, though sometimes you have to try out things the game hasn't taught you yet. That dynamic reminds me of witnessing close-up magic, where you can absolutely trust that there's no video editing used, no stooges, just you and the magician doing something that looks completely impossible.

Just a really wonderful game. If you like puzzlers at all, please give this a try.

It is wonderful to see this game on steam, especially given how unique it still is, somehow, since good ideas in video games are often forgotten.

I can heartily recommend both the free DS and the purchasable base game, though I think getting long-term enjoyment from the game requires you to look into modding scene, as the game was originally shipped somewhat unpolished in some important areas. Specifically the genomes and brains of creatures themselves had lots of room for improvement, and it speaks a lot for the power of the game and the community that that is exactly what people did: the robust genome and brain system allows for huge amount of modifications and is simple enough to learn with the tools provived.

At the time of writing this review the bundled Genetics Kit does not run well on modern machines, but that is apparently being worked on. In the meantime I recommend looking up Creatures Wiki and downloading either CFE or CFF genomes, player-made additions that greatly improve the behavior and intellect of the creatures.