Recent reviews by actuallyasriel

During a deep depressive/dissociative episode last year, I started getting recommended videos of custom levels for this game, and became entranced. Picking it up this year, I see how you could get hooked into it. It's not very long at only 12 levels, but it's the type of atmosphere you don't see anymore.

Note that if you get this, you should also get the BallancePlayer mod from GitHub, that adds enhancements and fixes beyond the Steam release. As is, it only runs fullscreen, and that was the big problem I had. It was last updated last week as of this writing, to give you an idea of how active the community around this game is.

Following the 1.1.0 update on April 11th, the inconsistent latency and inability to rebind keys has been fixed, and TGM4 is now very playable on keyboard!!

TGM4 is an ambitious and mold-breaking entry into the 27-year-old series, and while much of the identity of the original games has been altered, the core gameplay is still there; a speedrun to Level 1000 with some hidden requirements to get a better judgement at the end, and a blisteringly-fast 20G+ mode. They're joined by a slew of all-new modes inspired by other games (SHIRANUI, KONOHA), as well as ASUKA mode, which to my knowledge, is an Arika Original, and I love it.

The price is a bit steep, but I think it's worth paying, as Arika are continuing to improve and fix things and it's entirely possible we'll see new content in the future. But even for what it is, just showing the TTC that there's demand for weird, Guideline-divergent games in the Tetris franchise will be good for the franchise as a whole.

It is fanservice (in the traditional platonic sense), but I am a fan, so it's effective.

This is one of those games that sneaks up on you. Every time you think you've seen everything, you go a couple steps farther and NOPE, there's so much more, actually!! And it's still being actively developed as of this writing (September 2024).
If you can get with the old-school UI and relaxed pacing, there's a great time to be had here. If I have any issue, it's that some of the mechanics feel a little superfluous -- but that can come with time.

Feb. 2025 Update: The new UI rocks, and makes the game far easier to digest! There's still a bit of reading it expects you to do, but the Notes mechanic makes it easy to keep track of the important stuff. The survival mechanics do still feel a bit superfluous but they don't take up much of your time -- just grab a couple berries while in transit and you should never have to worry about it.

Stimming on the behalf of an elderly autistic man is not how I imagined I'd spend my morning.

Went from "too easy" to "what the ♥♥♥♥, man" right before the finish line. Effort is weirdly placed. Focus mode is dizzying but you have to use it. Gave me a migraine. Didn't have a good time.

(Note: I only have 2.5 hours on Steam, but I also have about a dozen or so hours of experience with the GOG version, and recently re-acquired it on Steam for the Summer Sale.)

Devil Daggers is a rock-solid, hard-as-nails movement shooter (a term that didn't exist at the time!)

It's stripped back to the studs, with a solid foundation of movement and an attack set that takes up your two mouse buttons and nothing more. There is not a whole lot to this game, and yet the vast majority of players, the vast majority of people who have written positive reviews for this game, haven't even seen all of it.
That's because the skill ceiling is *so high* that the world record run sits just shy of 20 minutes.
(For reference, the "kill zone" in the Moon map in Black Ops Zombies has been survived for many hours, with world record runs terminated out of boredom.)

There's minimal randomness to this game.* Every run looks much the same as the last. You enter a loop of throwing yourself at the same enemies, the same waves, time and time again. You're given a Sisyphean task and told to figure out the specifics through iteration. People claim that it's unfair, and while it is busy, I can't agree. As long as you use both your eyes *and* your ears (seriously, the positional audio in this game can't be praised enough, even with HRTF off), you will know what went wrong with every run. You probably won't stop it from happening again, but at least you'll know. The patience and adaptability demand on the player are intense. It seems to almost find joy in your struggle. "Just run it back," Devil Daggers taunts. What are you scared of? You shoot ♥♥♥♥♥♥ knives out of your hands. And then cackles as you die, again, and again.

And I Can't. Stop.

This is what Hell is like.

* - This might change past 180 seconds, but I have only gotten there a handful of times.

Let me make a one-liner response to most of the negative comments here, and then I will finish the game, and then write a proper review:

Selaco is not a power fantasy. It requires you to think on your feet and adapt to a dynamic cadence of combat. If you approach this game thinking that the same strategy will work all the time, your ♥♥♥♥ will get rocked.

It's tough, even punishing at times, but it keeps you switched on. I don't consider myself a very good FPS player, better than the median was maybe seven years ago, but the median Call of Duty player destroys me every day of the week and twice on Sunday. My rote aiming and response skills are incredibly rusty.

Despite this, I'm getting through it on Commander difficulty, which is about halfway up the list. People who say that Selaco is "too hard for veteran FPS players on Ensign (the lowest difficulty)" are probably approaching it the wrong way. You can't brute force this game, things will change between attempts. If even Ensign is too hard for you, there are further Mutators and accessibility adjustments you can use until you learn what the game expects from you. Don't be ashamed to use them, because the alternative is locking yourself out of an experience you might actually find that you enjoy.

I have a couple of gripes myself, and I'll get into them when I write a full review (which is still looking to be positive) but please take the negative reviews that claim it's "too hard" with a grain of salt. Look at what else they play, and decide for yourself whether or not you agree. (Be nice though.) That's all.

Engaging, surprisingly tactical, and unintentionally hilarious. You get what you came for.

Twin-stick Survivorlike gameplay with a satisfying cadence. Love the art style.
I have a minor gripe in that the two-tone text is hard to interpret in some menus; I've hit Retry when I meant to hit Quit more than once.