Recent reviews by water dispenser

Picayune Dreams is a good game, and is well worth your $5. But contrary to the overwhelmingly positive rating it has, there are some glaring flaws. My review will mainly be negative, as I have no good way to describe that despite these flaws it is a fun game.

Soundtrack: Just a lot of good DnB, props to the composer milkypossum. Take a listen on youtube if you don't believe me, but maybe not too far because these songs are definitely best experienced with the gameplay.
Presentation: Numbers are fun. Space is fun. Horrors are fun. The game excels in taking fun things and using them to create a fun experience.
Player input: You use buttons other than wasd. Take that, Vampire Survivors.
Weapons: Most weapons/accessories can be reasonably built around, which allows a good amount of replayability.
Demo: Play it.

Difficulty:

• Scaling: If you play on base difficulty, you'll probably have a HARDER time than someone playing on a higher difficulty. For the full run, you'll have to be wary, but not too wary of the enemies. On difficulty 5, you'll be very weak until ~mortality 8 (pre-boss 2), where it turns into an idle game, besides the bosses. After beating boss 4, I went on my phone and didn't go back until the final boss, but it ended up not being necessary as they weren't able to fire any bullets before I won.
  
• Bosses: If you have any bullet hell experience at all you should be able to beat them first try, then flawless them second try and beyond. These are not hard patterns in the slightest.
  
• True ending (minimal, non-lore spoilers) I've already gotten it, and think it was fun trying to get a no-hit, but locking the true ending behind a no-hit run is just not a good idea. An achievement is more than enough.

Minor annoyances: I'm pretty sure these are newer game developers, and it shows. Things like statues being on a higher layer than enemies (you can't see enemies at the same position as them), less obvious mechanics not being shown to the player (auto-aim and speed up buttons), and other less-than-intuitive things bog down the experience a bit.
Skill Tree: Skills are very obviously variable in quality, so you need to choose whether you want a good build or an interesting build. I assume most people end up picking the same general assortment of incredibly good skills while ignoring some interesting ones. For example there's a whole section dedicated to a berserker build: tons of buffs on low hp. But this is just objectively worse than just picking "all xp +5%", "+xp% on boss kill", because you scale way worse.
Story: The story has caught some flak for being pedestrian, and I agree somewhat. There wasn't much I could gain from the story because I've already thought through these topics; they aren't new to me. I think it could be meaningful to some people, so I was tempted to put it in neutral, but the presentation could use a lot of work. I mean come on: (a picture taken from a lore scene, without context is meaningless) this even made me laugh [imgur.com]

Size. You get what you pay for; it's a $5 game. There isn't a great long story, and you could probably beat the game* in one sitting. On the other hand, it doesn't try to pad out the game with filler, boring content. Take it as you will.
Mechanics explanations. There's no tutorial. I'm glad to see this, because it doesn't take much to understand the general idea of how to play if you're already used to vampire survivors-esque games. Some people will want a tutorial.

play this

i wish they cared about their game :(

Uses Uplay.