Recenzii recente de sencative grammer experrt

Really wanted to like this game - an unassuming little horror/mystery point-and-clicker (a MystLike point-and-clicker- so static screens, first-person perspective, as opposed to a LucasLike or KingsQuestLike or whatever).

For a while, I was into it. Maybe not the greatest game ever, but it had an atmosphere and a good sense of the unknown about it, so hey. I could forgive having to click five times to get from a doorway to an object visible from the "doorway entrance" slide, but inaccessible unless you moved forward, turned right, moved forward, turned right, moved forward again. I could even forgive occasional forays into outright pixel-hunting (spoiler alert: the vent grate, after you remove it, is reduced to about 15 pixels at the very top of the frame). Whatever.

There was even a fun little math puzzle!

But then the puzzles veered into the illogical, nonsensical, and downright irritating.

At one point a random door suddenly unlocks when you view a certain completely unrelated event across the map - you have no way of knowing or reason to suspect that this particular door is now accessible. There's no in-universe "reason" for it. It just magically unlocked. Magical door-unlocking gremlins - oooOOooOOoOooOoooh, scarrRrrRrrRrrryyyy!

One particular puzzle requires following an insane series of left/right/straight directions along a map - switching between the directions and the map is a multi-click process. Screenshot ahoy.

When looking through security camera footage at one point, you need to search for the "<place> #" camera - not "xx" (the in-universe room reference number when looking at a map of the entire facility) or "<place> 0#" (with a leading zero, as it's labelled on the in-game map). You also have to deduce that "hh:mm" is referring to 24-hour time notation, rather than the 12-hour time we're all used to, despite 12-hour time being used everywhere else in the game text. Because inputting the required fields is a cumbersome process (accompanied by a slight delay after each "guess"), trial-and-error at this point is not encouraged, and it's easy enough to put "Cell 07" instead of "Cell 7", get the standard "nope" result, assume that you were barking up the wrong tree, and wander around aimlessly wondering what clue you're missing.

But worst of all is the in-game Google.

See, there's an in-game computer with a "web search", but pretty much everything you enter returns zero results - the name of a central organization, the names of leading characters within that location's organization, hell, the name of the large city near which the game takes place returns "0 results". But you need to search for a particular place of business (mentioned in passing) into the web search and, huh, all of a sudden there's a result!

Then - as if this wasn't enough! - you need to know to put a person's nickname - not their first name, not their last name, not their first name and last name and nickname, but just the nickname - into the web search so the computer will vomit up some more puzzle-solutions.

Look, I respect that the game doesn't have a giant pink elephant holding a neon "TRY SEARCHING FOR THE NAME OF THE HOTEL!!" sign next to the computer that does web searches, and I understand the developer may not have the time or patience to create an entire exhaustive fake web history for every character, including social media accounts, press release mentions, their old high school site that mentions them by name in a photo caption, and of course the social media accounts / press releases / high schools of their facebook friends, but my capacity for trial-and-error is a finite resource, and seeing central themes within the game return the exact same "0 results" page does nothing to replenish that resource. A bit of backstory and filler text for major characters or concepts within the game-universe would go a long way to ensuring that, eventually, I'll feel compelled to put "Fargo Lane Hotel" into the search and advance the plot. Failing that, at the very least, have me find a memo where someone says "hey, I forgot the address of that hotel" and the other person writes "do your own web search" or something, because I've run numerous complex statistical analyses and it turns out that in the current state of affairs there's precisely a 0% chance of me ever deciding to type that into the search box.

Anyway, my reward for finding a walkthrough and following the walkthrough to solve the above idiotic puzzle was a five-minute monologue delivered by a voice actress who honestly, truly sounds like she's trying extremely, incredibly hard to not sound wooden but unfortunately ends up sounding wooden AND mentally challenged instead, accompanied by buggy subtitles that occasionally glitched out ("<first line of text> <second line of text> <voiceover keeps playing, subtitles remain on the second line of text> <fourth line of text>") and hence kept me from just muting the bad voice actress.

At that point, it's Seinfeld wincing, putting his hands up, and getting out of his seat. The puzzles really are unsolvable without the walkthrough, and the game mechanics - the clicking, the pixel-sweeping, and of course the awful awful voice acting - only serve to detract from the plot. The sum enjoyment of "<game> + <walkthrough>" is less than "<walkthrough>", so I'll just close the game and continue reading the walkthrough.

Not the worst point-and-click MystLike I've played (that award still goes to the stunningly awful "Real Horror Stories Ultimate Edition"), but not worth paying for either, and certainly not worth paying $8 for. Even at its lowest-ever sale price ($1.59 at the time of this review), it's probably a "meh", and if you're not into trading cards then that "meh" would be a "nah". Just read the walkthrough.

There's some neat ideas here. I particularly like the concept of randomized level order, which eliminates the most tedious part of simplistic leaderboard / speedrun-style games: getting through the first few easy-mode or low-multiplier levels in order to progress to the challenging portions.

That said, absolutely everything else about this game ranges between "neat idea, needs improvement" (short levels are nice, but there should be a lot of them, otherwise the game gets incredibly repetitive in a bad way) to "how the ♥♥♥♥ did anyone not fix this" (none of the characters stand out from the background, so every level begins with a split-second of trying to figure out just where the heck you are - why not have a spotlight flash or, hell, even an arcade-style "v 1P v" indicator?). The controls are mediocre at best (have fun trying to jump off a single-tile-wide block), the music is the sort of stuff that's fine for a thirty-second minigame, but grates on the nerves after the third or fourth minute, the leaderboards aren't done too well (no filtering to just your Steam friends, and no filtering by character, which means certain characters are pointless to play as since their physics render them objectively, mathematically inferior to others - this is on top of the fact that since the level order is randomized, your streak of fifty clears of the hardest jumping puzzle maps can be trumped by some lucky idiot who got the "walk right" level fifty-one times in a row, so the whole thing is a bit more about "who got good RNG" than "who is a platform speedrun god king voodoo pro").

I like that the game is simple. I like the THEORY behind this game. But the execution is very much a "meh".

A slow-paced, clunky-feeling shoot-the-zombies game without much gore. Weapons don't seem to have any "oomph" to them - shooting a zombie point-blank with a shotgun feels like you're plinking away at a pink demon in old-school DOOM with the starting pistol. It's just not visceral the way a zombie game should be.

The UI is really weird, too - possibly an artifact of being designed with VR in mind - your mouse changes the perspective of menu screens, as if they're a sheet of paper in the game-world, but you still need WASD to select options, instead of just centering the option in your field of view.

I don't bother with VR, but other reviews seem to indicate that it's not terribly great on VR - which is a shame, as it's not terribly great with a standard setup either. The game also chugs a lot worse than you'd expect from looking at the relatively simple models - at times, my disk access light was solidly on for thirty straight seconds, like I was doing a defrag or something.

All in all, there's certainly games that have done it worse, but games that have done it better too, and those looking for the fabled Next Great Zombie Game of legend will have to keep looking - it's not to be found here.

"Oh, wow!" the man who had been trapped in a cave for twenty years and had bad taste to begin with squealed. "A physics puzzler designed for mobile/touchscreen devices!" He touched his hand to his bosom as if overcome by emotion and softly purred, "I have never seen such a thing in my life". Suddenly, he perked up, his eyes going wide with surprise. "What's this!? The UI is cumbersome and the hitboxes are really poor, thus rendering the levels clunky to play and clunky to restart as well!?" His eyes rolled back in his head and his hand went back to his bosom: "I... I think I'm in love..."

A simplistic and slightly buggy game that absolutely feels like the jam-game (a game created in a short amount of time, usually in a distracting party environment) it is.

For starters, clicking doesn't quite work right. Sometimes clicks just won't register, other times the hit detection just doesn't quite align with the displayed cursor. Managing to mess up the act of pointing a mouse and clicking on things - something that's been handled with grace and relative aplomb since approximately the mid-1980s - is bad enough, but in a game consisting mostly of clicking it's borderline unforgivable.

There's an RNG element which is utterly frustrating - sometimes you'll waste an entire turn trying to attack an undefended territory and repeatedly losing, then watch the AI attack one of your fortified strongholds and capture it on the first try. RNG absolutely *can* spice things up when used sparingly, but this game offers no real strategic choices to mitigate the RNG. You can't choose between a high risk / high reward or low risk / low reward technique, and territories don't have any form of a hitpoint system, so attacking multiple times isn't necessarily going to chip away at a wall of defenses. You're basically just rolling a d6 and if it's 2 or higher you win, or natural 6 to capture a fortified territory.

Furthermore, because of the RNG and simplistic (as in "virtually non-existent") strategic element, the broader game quickly collapses into which side manages to capture the most territory on the first turn. More territory = more money = more attacks = more territory. Sure, that's the basic gist of every 4X game and RTS on the planet, but - for example - in Civilization I can place cities in better territory for defense and economic bonuses, and easily hold back an opponent with twice as many cities in poor locations. In Starcraft, I can use recon to see an enemy is weak against air, and focus my research and unit creation into air units, making the best of what may be a bad situation and eventually turning the tables. Hell, even old-school DOTA (even before all the comeback mechanics) wasn't quite as much of a snowball as this game - and nothing is more tedious than playing out the last few turns when you're in an unwinnable situation, or even the last few turns when the enemy has just one territory left and you can't tickle the RNG into giving you your justly-earned victory.

It's single-player only, and the AI is about as bland as it gets. You don't see certain opponents prioritize defensive fortifications and others going for larger acquisition - it's just a cacophony of attacks and random tile improvements. It's the worst sort of AI - not smart enough to bother planning ahead for, and even worse, not predictably dumb enough to manipulate.

To top it off, there's seemingly no options menu, which means you're stuck listening to the bland and repetitive music throughout the experience. It's a bit like the songs in a Koei game from the SNES era, except far shorter and far, far more repetitive. No full-screen option either - hell, you can't even change your character color away from blue.

All in all it reminds me of the "games" that might be bundled with a Linux distro ten years ago - sort of a tile-based Liquid War, except Liquid War had more map variety and, hell, you could even change your color and name.

It's free and I think it's still a little bit overpriced.

Crimsonland except not even remotely entertaining. Hope you enjoy tiny enemies and not knowing if a loot pickup will be good or complete joke-tier trash until you've already picked it up.

The music is bona-fide incredible and I genuinely considered giving it a "Yes" based on that alone. The controls are crisp and the movement "feels" right. However, the unforgiving hitboxes, inability to judge foreground/background details, and completely unnecessary darkness torpedo this one.

I REALLY don't get why the devs added the darkness - it's not something that a retro game would do (or even be capable of), and only serves as a source of artificial frustration.

Still, the soundtrack is incredible.

Seeing that this game seemed to involve "howling", "touching", and "screaming" I was hoping it'd be a dating simulator, but nope - it's Flappy Bird, but with a "make noise in real life to flap" gimmick. The game's pace is tear-jerkingly tediously slow - it takes forrrrrever for that balloon to inch its way forwards. Nice steampunky art assets but far too trifling an experience to bother with on a real computer and too slow to really enjoy as a mobile game.

That said, if you or a loved one is a mouthbreather with a microphone - and let's face it, anyone who's played a team game knows there's plenty out there - this game will at least be a nice compliment to that skillset.

Mediocre-bordering-on-terrible platforming with controls that are every bit as awful on gamepad as they are on keyboard, and neither can be rebound to anything even vaguely approximating 21st-century control layouts. Enemies take far too many hits to kill, to the point where you sincerely wonder if they're actually destructible, and your attack has a radius of about fifteen pixels.

The artwork is hand-made, which is nice, but there's barely any animation so it ends up looking like a Mario Paint demo. The voice acting is bad and seemingly cannot be skipped.

Somehow I doubt an "Episode 2" will ever come out.

"About This Game
Ever had that itching desire to break out of hell and into the highest reaches of heaven?"

Yeah - so I Alt+F4'd.