Recent reviews by A HUNGRY MOUTH

A tormented detective wipes his memory and shatters his psyche with an apocalyptic drinking binge. His skills have their own voices, and clamor for his attention like angels and devils crowding his shoulders. Improving a skill increases his competency, allowing for odds-defying successes, but makes that shoulder-mounted devil just a little bit bigger, a little more demanding. Vague recollections of the world and its politics accrete and solidify in his thoughts, acting as nuclei around which to (re)build both personality and morality. He's a blank slate reeking of acetaldehyde... and disco.

Also he really, really needs to solve a murder. Like yesterday.

Help this formidable wreck scrape his mind up off the grimy pre-war tile, and dive into the best-written RPG I've ever played. It's a truly amazing accomplishment from ZA/UM.

Hypnospace Outlaw is unbelievably good. Its communities are exactly as garish, awkward, cliqueish, rudimentary, earnest, and raw as the real internet communities of the real 1990s. I would have had a SquisherZ fanpage.


e: we are all the Chowder Man

Ah, an action brawler made just for me, the twisted subhuman who loves watching helplessly as I am stunlocked and juggled and hit seven times by the same attack; me, the worthless beast who thinks "i-frames" is a dirty word and dodges should never, ever work when you expect them to; me, the mud-caked troglodyte who luxuriates in every trash enemy requiring a dozen hits (and then, unbelievably, a QTE) to properly dispose of; me! I live!!

This game isn't fun. It's certainly not interesting enough to overcome the bad gameplay. Despite the "metagame" aspect being a selling point, what I saw of it is about as shallow as you can get: a voice actor pointedly repeating "you must follow the arrow" as though no one, ever, in the history of video games, has thought to do otherwise. I have no desire to see any more.

There are a lot of tonal and mechanical clashes in this game that work against the premise. I had written a long, uninteresting tirade, but this is really all I want to say:

At one point it's possible to happen upon a dead body in a control shack, triggering some dialogue in which the player character calls to inform his boss and to request the remains be recovered. In the very same shack, you can enter the restroom, grab a big turd sitting in the sink, and flush it down the toilet.

I'm really disappointed. Everything is basic and poorly balanced.

One punk far outclasses the rest by having both an aptitude for shotguns and a damage-blocking skill. It turns out that when you give a character massively greater survivability and damage output, he's superior to the rest! What an unforeseeable disparity!!

The base-building is just an incremental upgrade menu with minor cosmetics, and some choices are obviously more viable than others so the limited space doesn't even encourage build variety.

There are . . . ten or so? different enemy types. Half of them pose no real threat, and the other half pose a threat largely because their crude animations don't match up with their attacks. The baby's-first-roguelike "rooms connected by long hallways" map generation makes it easy to bottleneck-and-backpedal faster foes (though none are faster than you, even before you unlock the ability to upgrade your movement speed), and any slow or stationary enemies are helpless against circle-strafing.

There's a jump button, but I literally forgot it existed because there's no real verticality to the rooms apart from an occasional small dais that no enemy spawns on anyway. Rooms repeat frequently.

Before any unlocks there are a total of five weapons available, but a surprising variety of (again, only incrementally different) armor that don't matter because you just want pieces that boost your (shot)gun damage. I'm not sure if unlocked weapons are meant to be sidegrades or upgrades, but the reality is that like everything else, unlocks are either obviously superior or inferior options.

When I play this I want to play Doom ('93) instead.

A small package, addressed to me, containing a T-shirt that says "I STAYED AT THE NORWOOD HOTEL AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS TWENTY-YEAR-OLD T-SHIRT AND A STAY AT THE NORWOOD HOTEL" arrived at [my workplace] twenty years ago. It was rediscovered in the mailroom and delivered to me at my desk today. The shirt is the wrong size

GUARD: HEY!! We've got company, boys!! (begins shooting at me)
ME, AS COOL SPY AND HITMAN COLE BLACK: (crawls on all fours into ladies' restroom while hyperventilating)
GUARD: (watches me do this) Lost visual! Grr . . . where is he?? (runs in opposite direction)
ME: (has loud panic attack in toilet stall for three minutes until all-clear, then crawls out of restroom into direct view of original GUARD, restarting the process)

Your character can be too dumb to divine the purpose of a box of crayons, or so technically gifted as to build a grenade from a folding chair and some burnt-out circuitry. The array of mutant powers is staggering, but every one I've tried has been satisfying. The setting is outstanding, strange and wonderful.

Just one tip: don't mess with chaingun turrets.

Dull. Disjointed. A collectible-based game with permanently missable collectibles.

The investigation mechanic should be great, but its implementation is usually just okay. Other times, the game is weirdly picky about which facts contribute toward a conclusion, and on more than one occasion the expected answer to "what do I know about [thing]?" is just "[thing]." In grainy, prerendered cutscenes, the main character will react with astonishment at details he's already stared at and committed to memory. The investigation into his murderer starts at square one, despite the opening scene showing he knew enough to track down and confront the killer. At no point does this police detective seem to understand how, why, or even that he did.

Since the game has only about eight level maps, the transition between well-developed, fully funded zones and "we're out of money, just make a maze with some combat arenas" is stark. One level (toward the middle, surprisingly enough) is unique in having items that can be examined and generate a little popup description like clues do, but aren't clues and contribute toward nothing. The stealth combat is slow and frustrating; the only way to win is to walk up behind enemies one by one, hiding as necessary if spotted. And you will get spotted, because your movement speed is low, the enemies can turn around instantly at the end of their patrols, and the kill move requires you to hold a button and complete a simple QTE, leading to a surprising number of failures (though maybe that has something to do with using mouse & keyboard to play what is a painfully obvious console port). If you're killed, you get to attempt to sneak-walk behind the whole group again, one at a time. Fortunately, the enemies come in small groups, but even a small group is too large when each kill is so laborious, and the stealth options so minimal.

ALSO:

• You can't use the mouse to confirm in menus, but you can (must) use Q, E, 1, and 3 to navigate them.
• The villain's identity, motives, and MO don't make sense when taken together, but the main character has no trouble reaching the right conclusion after you point out [thing] three times.
• Extras are the same six character models repeated over and over. There is one (1) enemy type.
• You can walk through walls, but not ghost walls, which apparently have unfinished business.
• I don't know if it's even possible to fail the escort puzzles; the hardest part was remembering to talk to the character being escorted after every step.
• You defeat the villain using abilities that are unexplained and have been established exactly once prior to the final showdown.
• I don't like this game.
• Ghosts are a bummer.

Attempts the same style of gameplay as Nuclear Throne, although this game ends up being much shorter, much easier, much jankier, and with massively inferior graphics, music, and polish. The best thing it's got going for it is that it's free.

(02/14) eta: I've since noticed that ALL negative reviews of this game get Unhelpful'd into oblivion, so read this while you can.

(02/27) edit #2: changed the first sentence to clarify that I don't think the devs are ripping off NT, just that the two games have similar gameplay mechanics.