Recent reviews by ToasterPig

Lorn's Lure is a fantastic game that lets you experience climbing around vast esoteric structures and crawling through tight caverns.

Throughout most of the game you can explore at your own leisure, find every nook and cranny, try the same jump thousands of times all without penalty, I spent 4 hours on the first half of the first level just exploring where ever my stamina could take me. Gradually as you play the levels, they become much more compact. Fewer side areas and a more cohesive sense of direction. I personally didn't like this gradual change as I really wanted to see every area be as vast and as expansive as The Wall was, but that just wasn't what the developer had in mind.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Two out of the eight levels in Lorn's Lure really bothers me. The first one being level 4, Ancient Cistern. It is a level that sets its tone with vast network of aqueducts that sprawl infinitely upwards. With the sound of waterfalls and gentle music. I was excited to climb all over this place and see what awaits me. I was unfortunately disappointed where the entire level takes place on the floor where touching any pixel of water instantly kills you. The entire level is a bunch of random shapes placed in the water, it's not debris or anything it's just squares and octagons, maybe some tubes. You do not get to climb to aqueducts and in fact you don't really do a whole lot of climbing in general. The level vaguely places some ideas about an ancient temple existing down here with two large structures and some paintings, however, the level design does not help solidify this idea. You also get an upgrade here that lowers your gravity and gives you a speed boost. This addition is nice but not really necessary, the increased speed is appreciated but the increased gravity detracts from the Tic-Tacing ability you get in level 2. Tic-Tacing off a wall after this upgrade sends you flying off which is really inconvenient for attempting Tic-Tac jumps where you want to jump off the same wall repeatedly. Overall, I think the level design for the platforming could have been executed better and the upgrade be simplified to just the speed boost.

The other level that bothers me is the final level, level 8, Dissolution. The first half of the level of completely different from everything that comes before, Bright blue skys, green grass, floating water, it's absolutely jarring. It looks like a demo/tutorial world with its design and that is its goal. You obtain the grapple hook and your stamina is increased (?) so you can now perform 3 air dashes. The water geometry you parkour near is horrendously bad, grazing it at all kills you. There is no real sense of a level here, much less of it being a part of the mega structure, it's just a training course for the grapple hook. After this training course you are teleported in front of a massive floating torso, it says some edgy dialogue and effectively says "you're lorn and you've been lured!!!!" then everything flashes red and begins playing breakcore. You are thrown into a difficult timed section where this headache inducing music blares in your ears. You must fly through an obstacle course all while not slowing down or hitting any of the kill boxes (Which there are many of!) At the very last part of this ultrakill-esque creepy pasta level is a section where it's just a bunch of small windows you have to jump through and not get caught or you just die which is extremely frustrating and unfun, the grapple hook is barely usable here as you'll get caught on so many ledges and fall into the blood below or behind you. This level flips the entire game experience on its head for absolutely no reason. I understand wanting to add a grapple hook and make a level where you have to progress through quickly but that is not at all the rest of the game. Everything before this is completely slow, methodical, and beautifully atmospheric. Dissolution rips all of that away and throws you into a level akin to something like ultrakill or super meat boy with elements of sonic.exe. I genuinely do not understand this "twist" where you get to the end of the game and a guy goes "GRAAHHHHH!!!!! YOU'VE BEEN LURED, LORN!!!! GRAAHHHHH!!!!!" It completely sours the rest of the game having built up so much atmosphere while slowly introducing unique mechanics that can all be used together then just throwing all of it away for fast paced grapple hook level where climbing, tictacing, and dashing aren't necessary because you now have the grapple hook which invalidates it all.

Overall, I think Lorn's Lure is an amazing adventure climbing game (even though you mostly go down) based off of "Blame!" and various other works that depict mega structures in a similar way. Level 1, 2, 5, and 7 deliver on the mega structure depictions most imo, with others being put in a different direction or just not being that at all. I really hope to see level 4 and 8 reworked or redone to be more interesting and more inline with the rest of the game but obviously that's MY vision of the game, not the devs, so I don't expect them to just do what I think is better. Game with level 4 & 8 is a 6.5/10, without it's 9.5/10. Would recommend*

Something behinds the scenes must have gone very wrong for the DLC to be shipped like this.

Each character and enemy added has unpolished animations and several issues. Every character (Barring Void Fiend) have been completed with 3 alt skills, having a mastery skin, and a false son skin. The 3 new characters all have 1 alt skill each and no false son skin, which is from the DLC they are in. Seeker is horribly bugged with her utility frequently breaking and her reviving being inconsistent and unpredictable, False Son has unpolished animations and incorrect hitboxes and particle effects (Includes the boss & playable version), CHEF has his name written wrong, Primary is bugged to near unusability, Secondary aim is bugged, Utility missing keywords, and more unpolished animations.

Each item in the DLC feels like it was AI generated or at least made by someone who doesn't know how to make RoR items, none of the items synergize with any other items, have unplanned detrimental effects on top of bugs, some have their models scaled incorrectly, and generally add bloat to the item pool with no benefit or compensation.

Thankfully, the map & music artists show that they care about the game with the level of effort put in to what they worked on. The new maps are beautiful, well designed albeit a tad large, and have interesting lore additions. The music tracks are bangers as always from Chris Christodoulou and a few other musicians. I appreciate your works.

I wish and hope that the DLC is able to eventually be fixed with alt skills and skins added, animations polished, typos and writing inconsistencies fixed, items reworked, and each character made to function properly. But it shouldn't have been this horrendous in the first place, I shouldn't have to hope that the developers will fix the product they made, but with what Gearbox has given us, I fear the worst.

For the DLC with a CHEF in it, it is far too undercooked.
Do not buy.

Horribly buggy and unpolished game.

The concept is good, it's a monster tamer with the unique gimmick of being able to combine every monster together with unique sprites however the actual gameplay is horribly flawed, boring, and monotonous. Even after being out of early access for over a YEAR the options menu for keybinds was the default unity menu that was unusable due to stretching past the overlay of the game. In TUTORIAL there were still lines of text unaligned with the text box, walking around shows you random patches of terrain with up to 4 different colour palettes with hard edges and no transitions. Battles have had several reoccurring bugs throughout early access that still plague it in full release such as after killing a monster sometimes the UI disappears and you can't see anything but the monster sprites. Overworld sprites can randomly flicker or go invisible. You can get stuck with interacting specific objects by walking into them wrong. menus overfall feels too sluggish or too slippery, sometimes having too long of animations or no animations at all on top of being horribly inconsistent, there are about 4-5 different UI styles that all clash. No part of the game I interacted with didn't have some sort of issue.

Each area feels bland and empty, the space is mainly filled with monsters instead of interesting structures. Towns are a few houses you can't enter and 2-3 useful buildings, NPC are as bland as default pokemon NPCs where the flavour text is tips made for toddlers and nothing interesting about the location or lore. I didn't get far in the story so I can't speak much on the topic but, this game went with the edgy approach of evil team where they are super evil and say bad words to make them epic-ly evil and they will threaten to kill you.

The gameplay of fighting monsters was hard to even do just due to bugs hindering the battles but even when it worked you could just mash A and blast through everything. The game has a battle mechanic called synergy but actually has nothing to do with synergy at all! You can wait a turn to build a bar synergy or switch monsters to do the same, this synergy bar provides absurd buffs forcing you to interact with it and there is nothing stopping you from repeatedly switched or blocking each turn to max out your meter then instakill the opponent. other than that it's just pokemon with a weirdly inconvenient menu.

Overall, this game is a buggy mess in a semi-playable state with uninteresting story and content. The devs refuse to rebuild the game with the updated version of their engine to remove bugs because "no game will ever be bug free." and not because they are lazy. They for some reason have DLC and an IRL trading card game despite the current state the game is in. I really wished this game was good, I love monster games, especially indie games who always add some sort of interesting spice to the formula, but not this time.

Unbelievably atmospheric game. The entire world is so unique and funny while also being extremely disturbing and eerie. This game is worth the full price of 20$ and is a must buy on sale. It's from 1999 with very few physical copies sold and still to this day the original developer bug fixes the game and updates translations on steam. Bless him and his masterpiece.

This dude made a SOURCE game in 2023. Gobless. Refreshing gMod TTT where all the weapons are actually good, insane.

Additonal colours are only for the second season of DLC characters which doesn't make any sense, why would I need to buy another pack for these specific characters when the first pass gives it to everyone including the first DLC characters? Was hoping for an expansion of 4 new colours for every character but instead you just get what you already have. Arcsys pls

Mysteries Under Lake Ohpelia is very much JUST a fishing game and nothing more. It is extremely atmospheric and enjoyable to walk around, catch some fish and just relax. My only issue with this game is that I was drawn in my the "Mysteries" part, I really thought this game was gonna hold something special and scary. This game does not. When you finally get enough money for the final rod and lure you go look under the lake and what do you get? An image and some spooky music, after that a cute little claymation sequence but nothing more than that. The mystery isn't a mystery at all, there's NOTHING down there and I really wish there was. Still gonna leave a positive review because it seems the intention for the game was just to be a fishing game with a funny little ending and not really what I was looking for.

No, I will not change the song, you're going to listen to Home Sweet Grave whether you like it or not.

I love every act of this game and wish there was more of it. During the final act you're shown the two other scrybe's boards and gameplay gimmicks and I love both of them and really would like whole replayable rougelike areas with each scrybe. Or even just one big roguelike with all 4 scrybes like in act 2 but in full 3D like act 1 & 3. This game is fantastic and really hope there will be some sort of update or DLC that gives something like that after you finish the game. God I love this game.

Guhh yeah I guess maybe if you really wanted but it's like yeah it could be if you like but like uhgnnn buh