Recent reviews by NT

This game is pretty boring, and even at full sprint it seems like the monster runs faster than you.

Clearly this game is a Balatro-like, but I enjoyed Replicat a lot more because playing memory is a lot more active than playing poker, and trying to remember where certain cards are (like multipliers), and avoiding triggering them until the end of the turn was pleasantly challenging. And there's cats.

Where to start? The game took a while to finish loading in after I started playing, making for some awful frame skips. Playing with a controller, aiming feels floaty like you're in a turret. I was low health, and killed myself by reloading. Seriously, this guy isn't smart enough to keep from sucking out his last drop of blood? Enemies take a lot of shots, couldn't tell if headshots did more damage because the aim sucked too bad to hit consistently, and I got killed by a pair of legs that had almost as much health as a full body. The knife does diddly for damage. You can't back up fast enough to get away from the enemies. When the unkillable monster appeared, he threw me towards a corner I ran into and got stuck in. He moves too fast to evade, so you're guaranteed to take damage if you don't duck into a building, in which case he's dumb as a rock and has no idea where you are. But the proverbial nail in the coffin is having to stand still and rotate cranks for, and I kid you not, 30-60 seconds. Heaven forbid you have to run away during the sequence, because then you have to start all over again. If you fully do the crank, but miss going under the closing door, you have to do it again.

Atmosphere is cool, though.

First level was fun, when I was just singing whatever I wanted. But on the second level you have to hit the right pitch with your notes. I was in choir and had voice lessons many years ago, so I thought I would do decent, but I really struggled. Whether this was my fault or the game's fault the outcome was the same: I stopped having fun. It was no longer about "Singing my Song," but about "Hit this Arbitrary Note." Also, after less than an hour my voice hurts. What's up with that? Maybe because I was trying to sing at the top of my range?

One of the few games that ever made me cry. It also kept me guessing, both with how to play the game and the story. I had a great experience with "and Roger." You should get it now and play it yourself, before you get spoilered.

These are some of the best game maps I've seen, and exploring them is a delight. I wish I had known I could turn quick save on in options, as that's how I'm used to playing stealth games, but I still enjoyed myself on easy difficulty.

This is my favorite kind of free game, a passion project where a group of talented individuals come together to make a short experience that really shines. Unfortunately, it might have been better as an interactive art piece, because the gameplay is kinda boring. It’s mostly rotate this puzzle, push that box, and don’t let the search lights spot you. While it picks up later in the game, several of the early rooms are nothing but walk up to the puzzle, solve the puzzle, exit stage left. But those stages are breathtaking, easily on par with scenes from Puppeteer, with multiple flat panel moving parts and gimmicks that steal the show. The audio also shines, with great music and voice acting. Well, Romeo isn’t too impressive, but that might just be the nature of his lines; he isn’t a very interesting character, especially compared to the Narrator and Juliet.

If you want to see my full playthrough, check out https://youtu.be/2KZfeimvVlQ

A lot of fun and a great experience.

This game takes an hour or two to beat, and it's all fetch quests and finding key items. Exploring the environment was fun, and figuring out how to get to some of the items was nice, but it gets tedious quickly. I liked some of the characters, but for others I just mashed the skip dialogue button. The main story is almost nonexistent, and is just another fetch quest.

Let’s get this out of the way: Mango’s Fisharium is Digseum with fishing. Like, it’s almost 1:1, except you’re fishing up Dream Pearls instead of digging up Dream Fragments. But the developer does mention this in the credits, thanking “Digseum – Another short incremental game on Steam. And Tiny Fishing – Fun little minigame about fishing available on Mobile. Mango’s Fisharium is basically a child between those two games.” The developer also thanks “ChatGPT for writing some codes, translate [sic] and many others…” To me, this isn’t an issue, except both disclosures should have been in the store description. I didn’t notice any generative art, but who knows.

What I do know is this game is fun to play, like Digseum, but it’s definitely paced a little slower. It took me two and a half hours to beat Digseum, and a little over four for Mango’s Fisharium. Not only is the fishing minigame slower (and desperately needs the ability to manually reel your line in), but also some of the pacing is a little off – it took me forever to get out of Open Waters. I can’t think of any other complaints, so this it’s easy to recommend this as a $3 game (if you’ve already beat Digseum).

If you want to see my full playthrough and hear more of my thoughts, visit: https://youtu.be/JFvpUu4JDCU