Recent reviews by CaptainMeme

Absolutely fantastic game.

I went in a pretty simple variant on Minesweeper, but as you can probably see from the hours played, this turned out to be so much more than that. There are so many more mechanics than I expected, and they're all used very carefully in ways that build on one another and make for an extremely compelling puzzle. There's clearly been a lot of thought put into the layout of each level and the unlock path of levels in general.

My one frustration with it was my experience getting three stars on some of the higher levels, because getting three stars requires completing the level while making no mistakes, and that can take hours in some cases. But that was a) optional and b) always entirely my own fault (usually for going too fast), as everything in every level can be logically deduced if you take the time to think it through. And the puzzles were compelling enough to make me push past that and three star everything regardless!

Excellent game. Played with a group of friends over a discord stream, and we were tossing theories at one another throughout - it did a great job of keeping us engaged and guessing until the very end.

The way it's structured is very different to most Detective games I've played; it's open world, so you can choose the order in which you investigate areas, which feels very freeing. There is still a rough order in which you'll find information due to certain areas being gated behind certain keys, but it didn't feel like we were being forced down a specific path until we were finding the last few pieces of information.

It also walked the difficulty line incredibly well - there was only one point in the game where we got stuck, and it was resolved by having a quick check of some important locations for things we might have missed (turns out I'd missed a very obvious key). You definitely need to keep notes of the information you find outside of just the journal, but if you do so, you're unlikely to hit a complete dead end.

The atmosphere is incredible - the game *feels* like a horror game just because of the emptiness of everything and the music alongside it, but for the most part the spookiness stays there as an atmosphere and not something interfering with your gameplay. There are a couple of moments (three off the top of my head) where it breaks this and does something to actively scare you - they are few and far between, but as someone who is particularly bad at handling that I may not have made it through without having friends there to chat to through it. I think I would have preferred it without those moments, but overall it was still an incredible atmosphere, especially given how little is used to create it.

I would rank this game amongst the likes of Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds as one of my favourite detective-style games. Strongly recommend!

Nice little puzzle game with a great aesthetic! Not all that long, but was a fun game for a quick playthrough with a group of friends.

We did run into a few bugs while playing, but nothing game destroying. My only gripe was the sound design; certain things (primarily the sound effect for advancing conversations) were far louder than everything else.

Great fun and quite the workout!

Note: I played this as part of my attempt to get at least a first impression of every unplayed game in my steam library. As such, this review is just based on the first impression.

----------

I own Shadowgrounds because the developer made Nine Parchments, one of my favourite games of all time. After playing that I bought a bundle of their games, but the only game I tried out in that bundle was Trine and it didn't interest me much. Shadowgrounds was one of the games that just got completely missed as a result.

Looks like quite an old game! It's a top-down shooter, where you move the mouse left and right to rotate left/right and arrow keys to go forward, back, or strafe. I thought that was going to make controlling the character quite awkward, but they actually felt quite intuitive and I got the hang of it very quickly. It's quite difficult to miss with a lot of the monsters, because they're quite large, so that helped a bit too. Combat was quite simple, but fun; there's dodge-roll which feels good to use, your flashlight can be used to scare away smaller enemies but has limited battery (although the battery seems to last a very long time and recharges when you don't use it, so I found there wasn't really a reason not to just have it permanently on in combat), and there's a range of weapons which you unlock as you go. The basic pistol and the rifle didn't feel all that special, but I think that helped the shotgun feel great in comparison - it was quite a fun moment using it for the first time and just having the enemy be blasted backward by the force of it.

I having a feeling that the difficulty I played on, Normal, might stealthily make it difficult for you to die. You can lose health very quickly, but a lot of the times I was on low health I would somehow end up surviving without losing any more, despite not really changing my gameplay a ton. But honestly, I only really noticed how much stuff should have hit me when I was skimming through the video, and while I was playing it felt tense and exciting, so I'll give it a pass on this. I imagine you can turn up the difficulty if you don't want that, anyway.

Story was kind of interesting. It's nothing to write home about, at least as far as I got - facility on a moon base gets overrun by alien monsters coming out of the water - but the voice acting was generally good and added a fair bit. There's a lot of logs that give exposition hidden out of the way, which I'm always a fan of, but there was never anything unexpected in them. Maybe it gets better as the game goes on? I'm not sure.

Overall, thumbs up from me, and I think this might be one I come back to. The gameplay was fun, and I am kind of intrigued to see where the story goes!

An absolute blast to play with friends!