Recent reviews by Carmina

So this review is coming pretty early into early access after having gone through and beaten act 1 and 2 on the 2nd highest difficulty, "Spicy." I put 7 hours into the demo trying out each difficulty, attempting runs, trying new builds etc. I had high hopes for this game, and I still have high hopes for its future.

This is the weirdest combination of tower defense, tactical rpg, roguelike, and tetris. I honestly love everything about it. It sounds like something that shouldn't work but it does. Oh boy it does. Allocating stats between missions with the blocks is such a unique and brilliant idea. There is a balance between what makes for a good setup to get lines and what puts the stats you want onto the characters you want them on. Each character has cool unique abilities with a few different build paths. Setting up to defend the trash and block off the rat hoard while also making sure your characters aren't left too open is a delicate balance. There is depth to strategy and planning and I love where this is going so far. And there is enough enemy variety to keep it all interesting. The boss fights also have interesting ideas and mechanics, not just a beat down you have to plan around various invuln mechanics and I hope to see further creativity in the encounter design. The music is just a nice chill jam that you can vibe with. For a game that uses so much of my brain it really is just a relaxing experience to wind down with for me. I hope they can continue to polish this further with more acts and a full narrative arc. There is a solid foundation here with lots to experience and play with already. Can't wait to see what the future holds for this game.

Currently my only worry for the game is balance. Some characters seem significantly stronger than others. I hope they can find a good way to even out character power without having to nerf too much. I like where the strong characters are and would rather see characters that feel weaker get buffed to match. The new necromancer cat is very satisfying to play and I do kind of expect nerfs on her but maybe she just seems so powerful cause I'm prioritizing her boons so much cause she's the new character to try for me. Even so with her inclusion I find myself less interested in using the Raccoon. I love their mechanics but with every other character being so good at AoE and dealing with the hoards, their single target assassin gameplay feels underwhelming in comparison. Maybe I just haven't gotten the right boons yet.

I haven't found a game to scratch my tactical RPG itch this well since the original Final Fantasy Tactics. The roguelike gameplay and unique stat allocation system make this feel unique and stand out among other tactical games for me. There are systems to play with. Builds to find and break the game with. And I'm loving every minute of it.

An old school first person dungeon crawler inspired by King's Field is not the thing I expected to scratch the itch and get me so invested in gaming again but here we are, 26 hours later, and I had a blast. The NPCs have their charm, the story is interesting, the world is fun to explore, the class choices are unique and feel like they have an impact on gameplay (my choice of Vampire sure did), damage resistances matter, swapping between weapons is a must, some of the spells are pretty unique. Just a lot of cool ideas in this one. Lots of secrets to find and 4 different endings all easily achievable in one playthrough (with at least one only achievable post-game). The story doesn't hold your hand but it also doesn't feel unnecessarily obfuscated. I felt like I knew what was going on with areas, what I was trying to do overall, and why I wanted to do it; all without the game having to hold my hand about it.

Only minor complaints (really mostly just nitpicks) I have:
1) I got a bug where when transitioning through a door everything froze up and got stuck on a black screen and I lost some progress there. This only happened once and it was in a side area that from what I could tell looking up the issue, is slightly more prone to it. The area was the tower of the abyss or whatever it's called. Basically just a 50 floor combat gauntlet to get a very nostalgic (and powerful) weapon.

2) As a collector and achievement hunter I'm never a fan of achievements that require tedious grinding. In this case getting every spell (a requirement for one of the endings) and every weapon required farming enemies for a while hoping for that 3% drop chance. The grind didn't take too long and I got most random drops through regular play but it was frustrating looping through an area over and over towards the end waiting for a skeleton to give me an axe just for that last popup.

Oh as a side note: when you make your character you choose from a set of pre-set portraits to serve as reference for how you imagine your character to look. This portrait really only is there in the stats screen but it's a nice little bit of personality to the game. The reason I mention this is there are 3 slots in the game files for you to upload your own images if you want. Can personalize your character to be anyone you want and as an artist I appreciate that option.

It's filled with all the classic HomeStarRunner humor I came to know and love growing up with the early internet. The game is silly and ridiculous in it's own special way that feels right at home in the point and click genre. The puzzles are clever and getting that "ah ha" moment of figuring something out is gratifying every time.

Normally I wait till I finish a game before I leave a review but I dropped this one a few months back and haven't been able to get myself to jump back into it so I think I'm calling it "done" and throwing in the towel.

Firstly I want to say I loved the setting and the gameplay. The world is interesting and I liked the direction the story was moving in as a whole. It's a little rough around the edges, the main character has a little too much... hmm how to phrase it... not quite "angsty teen" but something close. She's so determined to prove herself and be useful to her father's mission but not in an endearing way. Most the time I liked her but every now and then I found the dialog to be a little "cringe" (as much as I hate the word it feels appropriate here).

The combat, to me at least, was really fun and fluid too. At first it's a little dry but the way it works having two weapons equipped at all times and being able to branch combos seamlessly between both weapons makes it fun to experiment and you can find some interesting setups with it despite the low number of weapon options to choose from compared to others in the souls-like genre. The upgrade system adding new abilities and combos to those weapons also adds a lot in keeping things fresh if you are willing to engage with the game's systems and meet it halfway. That said you could probably get through the entire game without upgrading anything and just spamming basic combos with one weapon but at that point I think the fault lies with you.

Bosses, at least up to the point I got, all had some degree of setup and story to them making them both interesting fights and narratively satisfying. The exception would probably be the first boss but as that's mostly tutorial I think I can forgive it, and it gives you some story direction after the fight so it's not complete mindless fluff. You never feel like you're fighting a big monster just cause "it's time to fight a boss" it always feels like there is a reason for the fight.

So all that said why did I fall off the game? Well I'm sure in no small measure it was due to the fact that I was playing the game on stream, making me distinctly aware of how long things were taking to get through. This was most notable in the dialog. As much as I love the world and the story setup the pacing of a lot of the narrative elements feels a bit too wordy and it caused moments where the game dragged if you tried to engage with all the dialog before heading to a new area. I started skipping out on conversations simply because I didn't want talking and reading to end up being my entire 4 hour stream. It wasn't that I didn't like the narrative being presented, more just the pacing and delivery of that narrative being a bit of a hassle, especially when trying to engage with an audience.

I do think there is a very good, if flawed, game here. The world and story are interesting and there's some fun characters in there. It's a game I hope I'll be able to get back to some day, but if not I will fondly remember my time spent with it regardless.

P.S. Vulcane is best girl and I would die for her.

The systems for this game feel so much different than your usual deckbuilder rogue. Like you still have your usual attack and defend cards but the addition of movement and the tactical grid style combat adds a new layer of strategy to it all, especially when you start to engage with other mechanics. One concept that stood out to me was the momentum mechanic. Each hit you dealt increases momentum, each time you move without attacking you lose momentum for each space moved. Some cards you need to be above certain momentum thresholds to play but are effectively 0 cost when you do get to play them (the exception being the cards that "end your combo" and set your momentum to 0). Other cards do more damage the more momentum you have so you're encouraged to try to keep your combo rolling. The other mechanic that I really enjoyed was being able to move enemies around. Pushing, sliding, and pulling enemies into each other's attack ranges really helps dwindle down their numbers quickly and you'll be paying attention to your turn counter most the game. Each room has multiple rewards, with the basic reward usually being adding a card to your deck but bonus rewards like extra money or upgrades to your cards or stats having requirements like defeating all enemies within a certain number of turns or protecting a vip or collecting a briefcase or pushing x number of enemies over the railing etc etc etc. It kept the game fresh throughout the entire run.

My only complaint for the game is a single run does seem to take a while (my first from start to clear was about 5 hours) but with the game seeming to save every time you play a move at least you can put a run on hold and come back to it later. A solid game and I look forward to exploring the other starter deck types and difficulty modes.

Not too easy, not too hard. You'll probably die a couple times, especially if you try to rush through areas, but ultimately the game won't be too much of a struggle to finish.

The platforming is fine, the movement isn't anything too crazy to write home about. It's your standard metroidvania fare; a double jump, a triple jump, an air dash, something to get through small spaces. The gender flipping mechanic is utilized well both in level design and a couple of the boss fights and it of course has it's uses for side quests.

Speaking of, if you just want the pixely lewds the side quests is where you'll find most of it. The quality of the scenes are decent enough and serve as your rewards for doing the little fetch quests. You also get rewarded with stronger attacks and more healing as you do these quests so you want to do as many as you can for those boosts. Each area has 2 scenes for when you die, one for when you die male, one for when you die female. These seem to bug a bit saving to the gallery, basically you want to save right after dying. Death takes you back to the last save point, nullifying all progress between the save and you dying so ideally you want to avoid doing so. Easy enough to go and purposely die right after a save point to get your gallery unlocks.

The story is nothing exceptional, pretty standard "go kill the bad guy chosen one" type stuff. There is some charm though to the characters for the side quests. None of them are necessarily deep or characters that you'll remember for all time but they clearly put some effort into a few of them to at the very least make things humorous.

Overall a solid metroidvania with decent enough lewd content. Give it a shot if you enjoy the genre.

A fairly decent roguelike in the vein of RogueLegacy. Overall I found the gameplay solid. The game controls smoothly and there's some decent variation in weapons and spells to find a playstyle that suits you best.

The sexual content is fine. They have fun with it and some of it can be fairly silly. When opening chests or getting stat boosts you can skip through the animation thankfully, unfortunately there isn't a way to speed up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ enemies. This isn't really an issue as you don't *have* to ♥♥♥♥ enemies even when they go down but it benefits you greatly to do so as nailing the little minigame for it gives you bonus "sin" which is your currency for leveling up and upgrades between runs. There is a spell that does a ton of single target damage that always puts enemies in the "lust" status making an optimal quick way to level and get through the game to just get that spell and use it on everyone constantly. It slows down an individual run but you easily double your sin gain by doing so.

Music gets a bit repetitive, had to mute it partway through. It's not that it's bad it just starts to get old after 9 hours. Boss fights are interesting and varied. The last couple in particular were really fun. Only fight that I wasn't too keen on was the first boss and 1 "meh" fight out of 5 I think is a pretty good track record.

This game might be some of the most fun I've had just *moving* around a game in a long while. As the description says, the combat is light and the movement is the focus. Each ability builds upon your kit and the game leaves you free to explore areas in what ways you see fit. There definitely are some "intended" ways to approach some areas but I found I was able to take advantage of the mechanics to get to things much earlier than intended leaving my final cleanup of power-ups very quick.

My biggest bit of advice is to start drawing a map as you go. It's easy to start getting turned around and lost as there is no in-game map to orient yourself with. I do recommend exploring to find stuff on your own and only resorting to looking up a map online if you get stuck.

The game is decently quick to get through, easily under 6 hours to 100% and worth every penny. Honestly at only $6 this game feels like a steal. If you like 3d platformers, metroidvanias, and don't mind old school N64/PS1 era aesthetics don't skip out on this one.

While the game shows its age in originally being a DSi release it still holds up fairly well. A solid short metroidvania with some interesting themeing, abilities, and characters. The boss fights aren't really anything special but some of the platforming sections and puzzles can be a little tricky. The game doesn't hold your hand much and you'll have to go out of your way to look around for stuff to progress. Ultimately it is a game that is sold on the charm of its characters. It's not the best entry in the series but for what it is, it's pretty fun and it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Risk of Rain is back and better than ever. I've always loved the original and this remake preserves everything I loved about that game and just adds more. New characters, new items, tons of stuff brought in from RoR2, and plenty of challenging achievements to keep one busy.

I'm hit and miss with my opinions on the new game mode the Providence Trials. Some of them are really fun, some are mind numbingly tough, and getting gold on enough to get all the unlocks for the game is going to be a challenge but one I'm up for I think. I think a couple are debatably too easy to gold and a couple others need some toning back just in general. Would be nice if there were more of them.

I'm almost certain that in my quest to 100% this game I'll put in more time than I did with the original, one of my most loved games of all time. Now whether or not the content will keep me as invested and interested as RoR2 managed to is yet to be seen but I think it has a decent chance of doing so. We'll have to see how well the modding scene takes off for this one cause once I run out of achievements I'll need something new to challenge me.