Recent reviews by Reyos

Playable but far too broken. There's a bug, one that is well known and reported, where when you put one of your guns down (and you do for all of them at some point in the story) when you pick them back up they don't have their upgrades, any upgrades, all the damage, ammo and other boosts are gone except the mods. It makes it really harder later on when you have base gear.

This game is short. The run time I have of 6 hours is padded by doing this game when multitasking most of the time. There's some graphical issue I was running into, which could have been intentional, it looks like the distortion I remember from old CRT tvs and VHS tapes. If it was intentional they should have offered a way to turn it off, if not it should have been fixed, it made it hard for me to play the same way motion blur (which the game had but you could turn off) does. The characters are poorly written, the two main characters have an argument part way through that felt so unbelievable.

The game feels like a glorified tech demo honestly, that it was made to show off the fluid physics in the gunk more than be an actual game.

I will probably recommend this game eventually, but there's too many issues to recommend it now.

Controls:
For a game that pretty much requires a controller to play, interacting with the menus and any screen other than combat with the controller is terrible. Some of the issues are just unintuitive controls others are controls that are just not there on controller. I am guessing that last one was less noticeable for the developers since they probably tested in Chinese, where the text doesn't take as much space to say the same thing and there's no need to scroll.

Translations:
There's some major issues here, from bugs that show Chinese text when playing in English, to inconsistent translations that matter. The status effect Electrocute is called Shock on some drivers, and the game refers to Tenacity Break and Stance Break which seem to mean the same thing. At least I assume these are all the same things, it doesn't explain some of them very well...

Guidance:
Like I said the controls and functions aren't very intuitive, in that case the game should guide you a lot better you would think. It doesn't. It doesn't really explain breaking down prosthetics, or building and enhancing them. It doesn't explain that fused drivers still have their individual parts working as before.

The gameplay itself is fun, the story isn't bad, but it just needs some reworking and polish before it's something I can suggest people play.

A massive improvement over Doors, Boxes just has so much more inside.

The puzzles were better, I had been stumped for a bit now and then, the ability to manipulate items adds a little more to the puzzle solving than find item, use on obvious spot.

There was a bug that made one of the puzzles (5 shields above a throne) not register as solved when I had the right answer. I know I had the right solution because I skipped it and it set the result to a solution I had already tried, but that's the only time I had to skip a puzzle.

I saw this and was thinking "Great another game like The Room" I've wanted more games like that for a while. This game looks good, the doors look beautiful artistically, but that's kind of where the good ends. I gave the game more credit than it deserved when doing the "puzzles" they were too simple and quick I have now 100%ed the game in 6 hours, and that was including walking away and doing other things in that time while it was running. The game was too easy, the collectable gems and scrolls were barely hidden, half of the time the game does everything but put out a neon sign (arguably they do that too with how the gems glow) so you don't miss the hidden optional collectables.

This game mostly reminds me of Dead Cells, so much so I checked to see if they were made by the same company after playing it the first time. The game is good, and I am still going through it (I think I finished it once, at least I got to a cut-scene kill). This is a good thing, Dead Cells is probably my favourite game in the genre.

It does feel lacking in content however. That may be because I am so early on still after only 7 hours, but the weapons seem all the same, and new one blueprints are hard to come by for more, which makes me wonder if they are just made rare because the haven't created that many different options - using so many of the same weapons all the time gets repetitive though. Permanent upgrades also seem a little limited and easy to get. I've unlocked the first tier of pretty much every permanent upgrade option at this point, and many just feel underwhelming.

All that said it's still a decent game, and worth the price I paid for it during the sale, with hopefully more content to come.

I like games like this, Myst was one of my favourite games of that era. This game had some potential but doesn't live up to it.

First the graphics. resolution tops out at something much too low for a game released in late 2022, this isn't the end of the world, but it's just one of the smallest of many issues in this game. There are issues with how it renders for me, lines through everything diagonally across my screen that don't exist in any other game. Some of the graphical issues made it harder to play, anything written in game was hard to read, and for a few puzzles (notably the morse code translation) you needed to read in game writing.

Control issues. My biggest gripe was the mine cart section, every other part of the game when you have to push a lever, you use the mouse, click and drag the lever, but here it uses the movement controls. I spent ten minutes trying to figure it out, seeing if I had missed some way to unlock the cart before I tried just pressing move while in it. This isn't the same system for moving the mag-lev, there you grab the lever with the mouse and push it forward, but..,

Game breaking bug. The game broke right after the mag-lev section, when it was moving, the game had me looking down, when I got out of the chair, the game kept spinning, I saved and reloaded to try and fix this, and it loaded me off the map in the water where you're not supposed to be able to go.

And all of this took far too little time. I'm an hour and a half in and the lighthouse seems like the end game (2 achievements left to earn) If the game hadn't bugged out I would probably finish before the 2 hour mark, particularly because a lot of that hour and a half was idle time while the game was just allowed to sit (one of the reasons I like games like this, outside of active puzzle solving you can just safely sit there and do things when you are free to do them) The puzzles were easy for a game like this, too few and far between mostly,

I'm giving up on this game for the second time, probably for good. Bad resolution, bad controls, and bad bugs. And it's a shame, the look, feel and lore of the game showed promise, reminded me of The Witness, the last game like this I played, in a lot of ways, and was better in lore I think, but in all the other ways it far paled in that comparison

A while back this simple puzzle game got some sweeping changes, and most of them cause problems. The UI was simple before, now it's cluttered and not intuitive. There's a gear button on the puzzle screen, it does nothing, the position of the puzzle is a little off, it's cut off on the top of the screen and the pieces noticeably shift upwards when put into place, it took me a while to find where the preview was, since it wasn't on screen anymore I had to click a few times, once I figured out the mascot at the bottom right was actually the interface for puzzle actions, to open it.

I still play this because I have it, I try to do the challenge puzzles, but I open it maybe once a month, and wouldn't have touched it if I were coming to it knowing how it is now.

This is Magic: the Gathering on the computer, free to play and possible to play without spending any money, that sounds great, but...

Magic as a game has been going downhill since M20, the power creep has exploded, which is both good and bad for this game, bad in that it makes it hard for new players to learn the game without getting frustrated, but good in that new players don't need to pay as high an entry cost when many of the best cards available are coming out currently. The existence of Arena has lead to some of this downhill slide even on paper magic, the easiest example I can think of is the fetches from SNC, which automatically sacrifice when played - this is counter to the usual wisdom in magic of waiting until you know what you need, and waiting so you don't give your opponent more information, but was done because it speeds up the digital game.

That brings me to some of the worst issues with how Arena is implemented. It waits to ask you if you want to take an action every single time you can, which gets pretty annoying when you have instant speed effects like Skirk Prospector. They haven't given a way to tell the game "no, I don't want you to wait for me to confirm I don't want to take this action every single time I can"

There are no good shortcuts for the game either, no way to tell the game when you left a card on top in the middle of 30 scry 1 triggers, that it shouldn't keep asking you if you want it to leave it on top (I've had this in the 100s, it's not pretty) shortcuts that are obvious in paper and would be easy to code in, and even obvious if you are leaving a card on top that you want it to stay there (in this case)

The game also punishes you for it's own limitations. I have lost games because the game took so long running through actions that would have taken 5 seconds in paper because it needed to ask half a dozen questions and get the same answer every time for each step of the process.

The game has also started offering "Alchemy" cards, and rebalanced versions of real cards, but it also offers you very little choice in if you want to play with, and agaisnt, these cards or not. Priest of Possibilities and Oracle of the Alpha are cards that shouldn't exist, but if you want to play anything other than standard, you are forced to play against these decks that use digital only cards and mechanics. As for the rebalanced cards, the worst example is Symmetry Sage, a piece of what was already one of the most common and oppresive decks in standard that was made stronger, even more oppressive and even more broken.

I love Magic the Gathering I have played it for over a dozen years, but there are problems with it, they are getting worse, and they are much, much worse here. They could fix some of them, but they don't seem to want to put in the effort. I don't recommend people join in now, not until some of these fixes are put into place.

Game feels like it could be pretty good, if it didn't CtD over and over and over... This wouldn't be as big of an issue if the game saved itself more often, but since all saves are manual and only at specific points, a lot of progress can end up lost if it crashes at a bad time.