Recent reviews by AzoreanEve

This is miles better than playing the flash versions! Thank you Mr. Skutnik, it was nice seeing you work on this on those streams.

I really liked the art style. Kinda wish there was more to this game :/

Strange and disturbing, it really leaves you wondering on the meanings of the various aspects of this game.

A bit buggy but still very fun, with great music. Probably on the easier side if you're used to metroidvanias and/or take your time to collect everything.
My only gripe is how we get some cool upgrades towards the end that aren't all that well utilised or implemented(?). Wall jumping made walls sticky but the jumping itself felt kinda clunky.

Bugs-wise, there's plenty but none seemed to be game-breaking. Mainly it's that jump pads and some other stuff that you interact by pressing down just do not work with the controller, even if other similar interactibles do work. At one point towards the end the game kept forcing the zoomed out perspective on every room, many of which weren't designed for it. Dashing at a room transition sometimes softlocked me. And most annoying of all was how teleporting from the map menu made it so the next time you used your secondary fire, you'd open the map instead.

Updated review (old one below):

Since Mr. Skutnik so kindly took the time to reply to my review and has addressed the most glaring issue of the game: autosaving gone wrong, I have now been able to complete the game and even have it run for some obscene 4 hours in a row with no crashes.

In short: it’s a point & click game with some very minor platforming elements whose biggest selling point is the gorgeous art and music, leading to a wonderful gentle atmosphere of a simple yet fantastical world which has seen better days. The puzzles mostly rely on your ability to observe and make connections and, while not hard at all, they can easily leave someone stuck if you haven’t noticed thingamagik #27 is meant to be used on thingamagik #53, or if you simply skipped an item laying in the background. It’s not very long but the average person will not be able to finish it in one sitting. The story isn’t much to write home about, you generally press forward, not really sure what’s up, similarly to The Daymare Town games, and then you reach the end and go “Ah, right, it makes sense! We were trying to get to the actual sea all along”.


I’ve followed very sideways-ly the development of this game on twitter, youtube, etc. Mr. Skutnik wouldn’t post too much about it but when he did I’d be excited about it in a “good for him!” kinda way, while… continuing to sit by the radio hoping for more Submachine news. I know, I’m sorry. Yet now that I got to play Slice of Sea, I really enjoyed it.
I mean, imagine a game creator you like finally has the chance to give as much care as he wants to a game, because he wants it to be a full project to be sold on the grownup game storefront (tho let’s be real, old flash games are being sold on Steam as well, but perhaps only very successful ones). That’s what it felt like for me, seeing the realisation of years of work on proper display.

There’s some 500+ files worth of background art assets in jpeg and png format that you can easily browse and see in their full glory and maybe even mix and match to make some interesting wallpapers. In-game, they work together wonderfully, giving that typical Skutnik pen+watercolour style that you might be familiar with. The music, mostly by Thumpmonks, only lifts these paintings with a sense of peaceful desolation.

The puzzles aren’t complicated at all, perhaps more on the obtuse side sometimes? Some people complained the clearly marked background areas were easy to miss, and I can only think that if you can’t notice they’re all accompanied by the same symbol you’ll have a hard time figuring out many of the puzzles in the game as they revolve around noticing the same symbols or structures in different areas and making the connection between these. The only more invested puzzle might be the code breaker achievement one as it actually requires you to write down things, whereas everything in the main game can be done with just Steam’s screenshot tools.

I don’t really have anything negative to say about the game in its current state. I wish Mr. Skutnik good luck on his future ventures and I recommend this game to anyone who might enjoy these kinds of exploration-based point & click games. Many thanks to my friend DC for gifting the game!


OLD REVIEW HERE:
I was really looking forward for another Mateusz Skutnik game and at first, I was not disappointed! Gorgeous art, soothing music, a fun world to explore and the expected kinds of puzzles.

However, twice have I tried to finish this game, and twice have I had it crash randomly, which wouldn't be a problem if it either auto-saved properly, or kept my last hard save. Neither is the case, as the game puts you where you last saved, makes it so everything you picked up after you saved is already picked up, but maintains the puzzles' completion status the same as when you last hard saved.
This means that if you get a random CTD, you might as well have lost your save as you are now soft-locked. You cannot redo the puzzles and retrace your steps because the game assumes the items are no longer there to be picked up, but they are also not where you placed them nor put back into your inventory.

I really wanted to play this game but I honestly no longer have the will to do so. There's no way of fixing my save files on my own, nor can I duplicate saves (despite multiple save slots being available), and, most important of all, I cannot simply save the game at any point and continue playing, as the only option given is to "save and quit". All I can do now is to replay everything I had done all over again and pray the game doesn't crash while constantly saving and quitting the game to re-launch it again right afterwards. This ruins all sense of immersion and wonder you might have while exploring and it's not worth it.

I'll recommend this game when this issue is solved. Until then, you're better off playing the Daymare Town or Submachine flash games.

I was eagerly awaiting this game and since this is gonna be a wall of text anyway imma jump right in. TlDr: art great, music great, writing pretty good, gameplay neat, asset implementation and UI with some faults. If Act 3 is to be of the same exact quality I'd still buy on launch day.

The goods:
All the sprite animations and expressions are lovely, the soundtrack is good, the dialogue, while (sadly) losing some of the immersion of Act 1 with the addition of meta tones in some places, was still pretty great and every tirade Joey went on about Dammek made me yearn more for Hauntswitch. My fave parts were the trial (after I figured out Tyzias would hard-carry me; I never touched an Ace Attorney game) and straight up everything that happened in the clown car. Was also very pleasantly surprised to see my fave goldie duo be as relevant as they were. If Hiveswap stuff were the only official Homestuck stuff I'd get in the future I would be happy with that.

The not so goods:
The first couple scenes feel kinda pointless. There was a lot in the backgrounds of Charun’s cave and Zebede’s hive yet you don’t really do anything there and they’re one-and-done deals. It nearly come across as teasing Friendsim players and leaving them hanging. Xefros's line about the lights in the cave also doesn’t help this case, especially since when you try to interact in the same spot with anything else Joey/Xefros will react to the mushrooms instead.
The big sylladex cards are noticeably blurry from being zoomed in. Looking at the low-res picked up drone figurine and seeing the crisp bg right behind it is not great.

The bads (as of the time of posting):
Someone get these kids some anti-aliasing!! It’s extremely notorious in Charun’s caves because their sprites have to be so tiny that they look godawful.
Some UI bugs, particularly in the trial scene or when loading. It seems like the UI has some delay (and sometimes if you don’t click in the centre of an icon it selects the neighbouring object??). Twice in 4 full runs did I have to load a previous save: once when the UI locked in the trial, another after getting the Soldier Purrbeasts achievement where I got teleported and stuck behind the elevator. It didn’t particularly bother me.
What did bother me was how loading the mp4 videos has a delay and your screen jumps to showing the characters as how they will be after the video is done, before showing the video. Glaringly obvious in the clown car and it kinda spoils what you're about to see.
Randomly removing the bee game or allowing you to fail NINE TIMES at each trial section before a game over were odd choices. I hope the game makes it back as it was, with only some skip option, because I loved it and it had a Problem Sleuth reference. The trial could do with 4-5 chances, 9 is overkill for the Born to Die achievement (also the game over screens are there to be seen and we have a decent hint system).
The last scene with the drone has an unavoidable troll game over because nothing informs you of the internal alarms, and worse even is how a pigeon pecking at some tendrils somehow fixes the problem.

I've spent over 80 hours and while I have most of the content finished (I think?) I'm still finding new dialogue, new minor character developments, new fun builds to try. One of my favourite things with Hades is that unlike other roguelites I actually often WANTED to die so I could progress on character dialogue (look I'm a big fan of mythology ok?) which lead to runs being quite chill and deaths bringing no frustrations.
Victorious runs being ~30mins means this becomes a great game to take a small break from things and then go back to other stuff. None of that dragged-out 1h+ run with no "quit during the run" option in sight bs.

Only drawback is that I wouldn't generally recommend doing many runs back to back (unless you're HEAVILY changing your build) because the lack of alternate routes/floors means enemies and environments become a bit samey.

The art and animations are very endearing and pleasing to watch, there's even attention to small details of these things that bring the world to life. The story got me curious enough but it's still too early to make a sound judgement on that. Looking forward to see more

I really loved this part of the game, despite how short it felt! Mostly because it kinda ends when good stuff might be about to happen so you're just left there, kinda blue-balled :/
The art is lovely and I cannot stress enough how much I missed this kind of interactions! It's like being back to drinking the juice that made up the Homestuck pesterlogs right at the beginning, the sillynes, the low stakes... the kind of casual fun I really needed tbh.

Only downsides imo is no option to move chat dialogue forward with the spacebar, and being unable to skip cutscenes on subsequent playthroughs.

Short, linear, very pretty platformer. You can reach the ending in a sitting but there’s still collectibles and a couple achievements you most likely passed. The main selling point is its art and atmosphere.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, my friends loved watching it. The mechanics aren’t anything new but they still felt fresh and fun. Meanwhile the story is pretty abstract but I guess you can see it as her overcoming a dark time (I assumed depression), which makes that last cutscene with that swelling music and the visuals just so…well it made me tear up a little.

Would recommend if you like what you see in the trailer, and are looking for a short relaxing game.

(Thank you so much for this gift, Forrest!)