Recent reviews by SolarFlar3

The music and the visuals are the game's strong points, and they are both very strong, so I liked it overall a lot. Felt great in VR.

The fairy tales and storytelling style are weird enough that I wouldn't have expected this game to have as positive of reviews as it does, but I think people are drawn in by the vibe of the trailer, and if you like that vibe, then the game does a great job of maintaining it.

One thing worth noting is that the vast majority of the story comes through exposition by either a narrator or a character paced throughout a chapter until you get to the end and solve the problem. Not the strongest version of storytelling, but I dont know how you'd do a collection of fairy tales in a timely manner better.

Very fun!

It's crazy how good this game is.

The game is really fun. The bad is that the UI for deckbuilding seems like it could show you more cards at a time, the navigation around the map in the campaign is a bit slow, and buying cards almost feels like a trap before you max useful relics in the campaign, while also being non-refundable, though talent trees can be refunded which is great.

The good is that its very fun. This feels like an obvious format for a deckbuilder, yet the only one like it is inscryption, and this game feels more balanced while also having more interesting abilities, and I love that it has a campaign. I wish more deckbuilders were creature battlers instead of just building combo burn decks.

The game is very fun, so I recommend it overall, but I'm just going to talk about the bad stuff here:

* I think repros need to be removed from the game (damage dealing ones at least). When this game was first announced, Chris did an AMA where I asked him if the game was going to be less messy than 20XX was and he said yes. For a lot of early access, this was true, and then repros were introduced to the game. The repro archetype is the highest damage potential build which trivializes the game if you get it online and turns the screen into a mess of projectiles.

* Other than that, I think the game should give you about 1/3 as many upgrades as it does on average, and then scale down the late game difficulty to compensate for that. I know this is the roguelike genre, but the fun of this game is actually playing the game (more akin to Spelunky), which is different from the fun of playing Binding of Isaac or Slay the Spire where the entire fun is building a combo. In this game, if the "combo" gets too strong, the game is so easy that its not fun, and if you get unlucky and end up doing a pitiful amount of damage, bosses are so spongey that it slogs. This game could easily go down the spelunky route of having a more consistent experience by giving you fewer items and streamlining the experience.

* Chris said in a later ama that if the game does well then he'd like to add extra stages and then only choose 8 from the total pool of available stages for any given run. Imo, the game could already benefit from that idea by only choosing 6 from the current stages before you go to the end levels (making the game 8 total stages instead of 10). The reduced length would be welcome imo.

* There are a few boss fights where there are no walls and yet you aren't allowed to pass an invisible barrier on the sides of the stage. Imo, it would be better in those cases if like a spiked cage fell around the stage because it looks kind of ameteur for text to pop up that says "Stay put please" when you touch an invisible barrier.

* 20XX suffered from basically all of the same problems that I have with 30XX, and I wish those problems were addressed, especially since before early access was released, Chris said those things were on his mind, but I like 30XX art, stage design and boss design more. The only thing that's worse is that its probably less readable, but some visibility options help with that.

I'm pretty sure that Ludomotion is going to end up making my favorite game eventually because I love procedural generation, and they are the best at it. Unfortunately, this isn't it. I feel like its against my best interest to leave a negative review if I want this goal, but I started writing this with "yes" checked and that felt dishonest.

I loved Unexplored 1, but my biggest issue with the game was that it was too long. The highlights of the game were finding gear and consumables and discovering that the game was giving you exactly what you needed to overcome challenges (which were sometimes entire floors) that looked impossible... but not if you have potions of fire protection, and the game just gave me 3 of them! Moments like that happened regularly, but a single session of the game still felt like it overstayed its welcome because most of the floors didn't have this excitement, the game advertised itself as a gear based RPG, and you would find truly exciting gear maybe like 2-3 times in the 4(!) hour run. A game like this needs to have EVERY floor feel meaningful, so they all need to have bosses or legendary loot, or key items, or multiple of these things hidden behind puzzles and secret areas.

Unexplored 2 is a much prettier game, but amplifies this problem times like 100. I've played it for probably a total of like 12 hours across Epic through early access and Steam, and it is shocking how little progress I've made in any given run during that time. There is certainly loot to be found, but the majority of your real world time in actual gameplay will be sneaking around enemies (which the prologue warns you to not bother fighting) as you move to the destinations you care about. Also, "fun" gameplay elements such as needing to camp because you are fatigued, or needing to camp because you are wet.

In my current run, I've been playing for 3.5 hours. I just barely got to the first major point of interest (which still isn't the first quest yet), and I got through a large area, through a major dungeon to discover an important looking machine that I can steal sigils from to power it down, but I don't know what the consequences of that are. If my entire run up until that point was 30 minutes, I would feel like experimenting, but its been 3.5 hours, and I'm probably like 1/20th? of the way through the game, so I didn't want to mess it up that early, so I guess no reward for me... Unexplored 2 takes a big step back in terms of fun compared to unexplored 1 for me. In my time playing, I've never had the experience that the level generator did something cool which was the major selling point of unexplored 1, and I know the response is going to be to sink more time into it, but compared to other video games, the moment to moment time spent in this game is way less valuable.

My personal ideal unexplored game would be the metaprogression/overworld of desktop dungeons with the art style of Unexplored 2. On the overworld for that map, all of the nodes would be self-contained missions that take an hour to beat that have a similar vibe to Moryonder in Unexplored 1 where there's a fixed goal and unique biome and the generated level is densely packed, and beating those levels unlocks new content to play with as opposed to permanent power ups for your character that increases the diversity of what you will see on that given level, but also unlocks new levels to explore. A complete game in this style would probably have been 1/3 of the work compared to UE2, but I'm already feeling like I don't want to spend more time in this game, so the impressive amounts of content that it has will continue to be unexplored :(

I've played all of the Zelda games since Link to the Past except for the nonstandard spinoffs like Hyrule Warriors, and this is my favorite Zelda game. It is filled with mystery, doesn't waste your time, and finding the pages of the instruction manual is the most exciting collectible in memory. I love this game.

Everything about it is good. Feeding headcrabs to barnacles is no joke.

This is the best current implementation of current gen VR. The gameplay loop is perfect and there is unlimited content with mods. Plus exercise.

Not worth its price yet but certainly will be. The art is great and the combat is very good. Gone are the days of controller waggling in VR. At its current content level, you will probably finish everything the game currently has in 3ish hours. But replaying is very fun, and you can still grind your gear up to level 10, so its not like there's nothing to do after that. You can put restrictions on yourself too once you've beaten the game to make it harder like not using the stasis dagger.