Recent reviews by Patchnote

Simply not a good level. Performance was awful for an 11 year old game on UE3. I was getting 20-30 FPS with occasional minor stutters at lowest 1080p on a 2070 SUPER at 10% utilization and a 3900x.
The level itself feels like it has an awful, extremely red filter that makes it incredibly bright and genuinely started giving me a headache, no doubt enhanced by the low choppy framerate. In some places the carpet is just shy of pure #FF0000, meaning that not only is it terrible to look at, you have to stare intently to find the also red blood and the glass that (perhaps due to playing on lowest) was nearly invisible. Thankfully getting the 2 achievements only took around 90 actual minutes of playing.

One of the better idlers out there. There's plenty of optimizations you can make to how your city is built out, meaning that if you have a poorly designed city things will take longer than they need to. If you don't have a balanced economy you can even crash it (although it's always recoverable), so you actually have to put some thought into how you expand.

At free, it's definitely worth trying out at the very least.

Good.

I knew I was getting into a walking simulator, but there is nothing of interest to walk to.

You're holding W for a few minutes over bland terrain to click on one thing, then repeating.

There is just absolutely nothing interesting at all going on here. There are no perilous paths up a winding mountain, no high bridges you can survey the land from, there's no abandoned buildings you can explore for no reason, barely even a pretty flower to admire. It takes a minute or two to read everything the game has to offer, while the other 99% is holding W with a largely empty world to look at. The world itself simply doesn't have a story to tell.

Being in a loop, forcing you to reset, is solely a hindrance and serves no interesting purpose. You can't utilize anything you learn from a previous loop to find something new or get somewhere faster. If you're unlucky, you'll also be 10 seconds away from the next POI when the loop resets, meaning you effectively lost all "progress" to that place and you're just holding W through a mundane field again.

While the one song is quite enjoyable, it's the only one you get to enjoy. The writing isn't even horribly interesting as well.

If you really want to know what the game has to offer while respecting your time, play the song and Google the text, and maybe rewatch the trailer. That's everything.

Dominique Grieshofer has yet to release a game on Steam that doesn't pull me in and make myself try again and again. With Refunt I started speedrunning it and went so far as to submit a run to a leaderboard. With Swamlake, similar to Refunct, it's utter simplicity _somehow_ doesn't make you bored but rather makes you want to do better.

The first time I loaded up the game I not only was slightly taken aback by how it just plops you right in, and it didn't take long for me to die. Even after several rounds I still wasn't doing too great, but occasionally I'd find a strategy that'd work slightly better, and I'd refine that technique to get further, only to find something slightly better, and so on. I still haven't quite worked out how to consistently get those gems, but I'm going to keep trying.

For $1.00, and it might even go on sale at some point, I'd say go for it. Even if you don't like it you'll be out, what, a candy bar? And you'll be supporting a small developer who, even if you don't like this game, I think you should keep an eye on.

If you enjoyed the original N then you will like N++ even more.