Recent reviews by Meissa

I enjoy interactive fiction with LGBTQ+ protagonists, so I can’t help but begrudgingly recommend this title due to how few options there are for this kind of story.

This game is a pretty straightforward iteration on DONTNOD’s previous work; if you’ve played the other games, then you know what you’re in for and whether this title is for you or not.

If you haven’t played Life is Strange before, go play that game instead to see if you like this kind of interactive fiction.

A big positive for this one is that this is one of the only games I’ve seen that explores the life of a young trans man. That’s super cool and underrepresented in video games! It’s slim pickings out there and you really do have to give it to DONTNOD that they did put a whole lot of money into producing a story for a really niche audience.

At the end of the day, I think this game does a good enough job being a love letter to the original Life is Strange and expanding the series to a new demographic and generation of queer audience. Given the day and age we live in, I think that’s lovely and good enough to give my recommendation for anyone who likes queer interactive fiction.


Ok, now I’ll give my nitpicks about what I didn’t like.

I think the gameplay and choices in this one are pretty uninspired, even by Life is Strange standards. Choosing which furniture to throw out from the old house hits a new low in terms of pointless decisions that aren’t even fun to make.

The Book of Goblins is, imo, pretty boring compared to the journals in the previous games and I hate how many of the puzzles force you to reference it.

The superpower that the protagonists have is also criminally underused as a game mechanic. It’s used almost exclusively as a clipshow tool, which is both uninteractive and uninteresting. They show it used to modify conversations behind characters’ backs all of two times in the entire game— If you’re going to have a great idea like this, why squander it so hard??

Really, I think that’s the best I can say is that the gameplay here is a solid “good enough”, but with immense missed opportunity. I just wish Tell Me Why did a little more to live up to its pedigree.

this game forces us to consider the real question: “what if the greek gods were an extremely catty family of disaster gays?”

wait

Most of my hours are on PS4, but I grabbed this for PC to play on Steam Deck. I’ll focus just on talking about the Steam Deck and DualSense controller experience since you can easily learn about the game itself from a million other reviews.

Controller bindings are overall very good out of the box— In my opinion this game probably has the best controller support of any space survival crafting game (that’s not a high bar, given how this genre tends to be fully of janky messes— but I digress).

Surprisingly enough, rumble and DualSense adaptive triggers work on PC/Steam Deck with no special configuration necessary. Neat! I’ve never seen a game even use that feature before, much less on PC.

Four nitpicks for controller, though:
- Switching multitools takes way too many button presses.
- Menus use a mouse pointer rather than dpad arrows to navigate. Makes sense for a PC game not really originally designed with controllers in mind, but you get used to it because the icons are big and easy to click with a controller mouse cursor.
- This is the only game I’ve ever played where the mouse pointer in menus is controlled with the left stick rather than right stick. You get used to it, but it’s weird.
- You can’t use the touchpad on a DualSense controller to control the cursor in menus (At least on default config— maybe there’s a way to use steam custom layouts to get it to work?).

Steam Deck performance optimisation is also decent. You won’t be playing this game anywhere near high detail, but the graphics still look good at lower settings and the game is very playable on Steam Deck (which is way more important than graphical fidelity on a handheld console imo).

I play on low settings to get maximum frame rate, and there are very few frame rate drops, even when pumping the resolution up to 1080p hooked up to my TV. There are a couple quirks with the viewing distance of outposts on planets taking a second to load as you get near them, but it doesn’t interrupt gameplay significantly. Loading times when warping between systems are also not too bad.

My main nitpick with the Steam Deck optimisation is that you cannot set your resolution to 1080p unless you switch to desktop mode. The settings menu won’t let you go above 720p in game mode for whatever reason. Not a big deal, but it does mean there’s a couple extra steps to get going when playing on a TV.

Overall, great relaxing game to play on Steam Deck. I highly recommend this game if you want to casually flop onto your couch and play with a controller.

squish

Terra Invicta isn't just a game, but rather it's the most lovingly crafted macroscopic alien invasion simulator ever created. Choices matter more than you can imagine: Terra Invicta asks you what you believe humanity's response should be in the face of existential adversity, and then it challenges you to accomplish the goal you've set for yourself and for humanity.

You face not only an alien threat, but also many cameos from the friends we already know: geopolitical rivalries, climate change, mutually assured destruction, and generalised difficulties that come with running a shadow organisation competing against various other ideologies in light of an alient invasion.

Terra Invicta will not hold your hand, but rather it is a game that gives you a whole toolbox of mechanics and expects you to make the right decisions to drag humanity kicking and screaming toward the bright or dark future ahead.

This is a game where the devil is always in the details, and when I say details... boy do I mean details. This is a game that tracks daily global emissions of CO2, CH4, N2O and factors the global atmospheric composition into global temperature change and cognitive effects on humans based on known cognitive risks of elevated CO2 exposure. This is a game that calculates positions of orbital bodies and the gravitational effects they have on each other to affect the optimal flight paths for your spacecraft. This is a game where the velocity of your spacecraft along with the momentum delta between combatant craft gets factored into the effectiveness of kinetic weaponry in space.

There is so much ♥♥♥♥ to learn about this game that you will never be finished learning. So if you're the kind of person who wants to spend several months of your life playing at least three games in a trenchcoat and losing your sense of self learning to operate a shadow organisation manipulating the future of humanity, then buckle up and give Terra Invicta a shot.


- So much lovingly crafted gameplay. The enjoyment cost per hour for this game is so incredibly worth it, even if you "only" play for like fifty hours before getting bored.
- The attention to detail is truly astounding. You will play this game for hundreds of hours and still continue to find little interactions and details that the devs snuck in or very obviously thought about when making this game. It's the little things, stuff that you might not even pay attention to-- like how the personal wealth stat of individual councillors changes whether the airpline model used to show them flying around the map is a commercial airliner or a private jet.
- The writing is incredible. Just really, really well considered and thoughtful exposition. The fluff text and dedication to the research put into writing it all is honestly the best part of this entire game. Pavonis really outdid themselves with the slow-burn storytelling letting you dig out and uncover the story behind the alien invaders. It's also cool that the perspective and the specific details you get change depending on which ideological faction you're playing as.
- There are three sort of "core" gameplay parts to this game: a somewhat traditional HOI-style map painter geopolitics game on Terra, a space 4x strategy simulation at the solar system level, and a real-time tactical space battle simulator for individual space battles. All of these mechanics are pretty fully fleshed out and offer hundreds of hours of game time learning fully how they work.
- The AI does not cheat. The aliens and other factions have their own missions which use the exact same diceroll mechanics as you do on normal difficulty. That being said, the aliens *are* an asymmetrical enemy, so some of the stuff they're capable of doing will absolutely feel like cheating, even though it's not. Make sure to give them a taste of their own medicine once you get the ability to do so later on.

- To be honest, this game feels pretty much perfect for the first hundred hours or so. The flaws only start to surface once you've been playing for an extended period of time and enter the later stages of the game.
- The menus are nightmarish to navigate, especially later in the game. It's not too bad when you start out just on Earth, but as you become more and more proficient with the game's systems, you start to realise just how much unnecessary clicking and camera snapping you have to do to accomplish basically anything.
- The AI factions are great on Earth and in the early space game, but they quickly lose steam in the late midgame and become more of an annoyance than anything. There's a running joke that any AI-controlled countries will run themselves into the ground, and the human faction AI will not build enough ships or perform missions to meaningfully complete their space objectives (for the factions that have those). This one is going to be incredibly tricky for the devs to solve because if they made the human AI factions more powerful, it could easily make it basically impossible to actually fight the aliens because you'd be too busy fighting the other humans.
- The game becomes a real slog after you reach Jupiter and need to work your way to the outer planets. The aliens will continue building an infinite number of ships for you to destroy, and the outer planets are all so far apart that it takes forever to reach them. It can take a decade or two of just pumping your own fleets out and playing whack-a-mole to get the alien fleet numbers down low enough to win the game as any faction that has to kill aliens. This may be realistic in terms of astronomical distances, but it gets pretty boring because at this point in the game you won't really have anything left to research and you'll already have all the countries you could want on Earth. So you'll spend an anticlimactic ~20-30 hours real time at the end of the game clicking the fast-forward button and micromanaging Defend Interests and event popups or whatever as your ships build.
- This game takes a really long time to beat. It took me ~300 hours of playing the game here than there for seven months of real world time to get through it. Near the end, I was sort of longing for my freedom. This game really isn't for the faint of heart and it's incredibly difficult to play to completion if you're employed full time.

- Not really a negative or a positive, but this game is incredibly slow-paced and slow-burn, even for a strategy game. Don't pick up this game if you're expecting an action-packed adventure. Pavonis are also the creators of the critically-acclaimed Long War mod for XCOM Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, so go check out those games if you're looking for a faster-paced title.
- The space combat is really realistic, which makes it sort of unintuitive. It can easily take a year or so of in-game time for an assault fleet to arrive at its destination. So both you and the aliens have an incredible amount of heads-up time to know when you're going to get attacked. But the flip side of this is that it takes a very long time to build up fleetsor infrastructure to support those fleets, so the decisions you made hours ago in real-life time will come back to haunt you regularly. And there are frequently times when you run into situations where you get to know that you're just kind of screwed in a bit and are aware of this long before a bad thing happens that you know you can't prevent. I think this makes for some truly unique pacing in this game, but some people might be turned off by this.

This post sponsored by the Academy. Friendship is Mandatory.

I'm Doing My Part!

(Re: Sony PSN bs. Love you Arrowhead Games-- hopefully this situation blows over soon)

Update: Sony decided to stand down on their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Another victory for the right side of history! Democracy always triumphs.

We love you Arrowhead Games!!!

If you liked the direction Arceus went with the creature collector genre, then I promise you'll like this game even more.

The developers understand everything that makes Pokemon fun and have polished the timeless formula into an extremely tight-woven and compelling original title.

- Exploration is actually fun and not tedious. There's hidden items to reward you for exploring, just like in Pokemon, but the collectathon never feels excessive.
- Pals and their skills actually matter outside of battle. You actually have reasons to let your animal friends come out and interact with them. Who could have thought this is important for a game all about animals?
- Cozy and fun, but doesn't get lonely like many survival crafting games. You have your pals to keep you company and to pawn off the work you don't want to do yourself.
- Incredibly well designed gameplay loops, regardless of the pacing you choose to play at. Significant parts of this game can be played as an idle management game, so you can take breaks between adventuring to just chill at your base and vibe while still making progress.
- This game genuinely respects solo players, which is seriously rare in this genre. Most games like this expect you to treat it like your job and have a group of friends you can always play with. Palworld lets you play with your friends, but it really shines as a cozy solo game.
- Beautiful original setting that's colourful and friendly like you'd expect, but subverted with dark quirks to remind you that this isn't your grandma's Pokemon game.

...you don't like survival crafting games. This game is an open world survival crafting game where you're mostly expected to set goals for yourself. There is absolutely minimal NPC interaction or story, so don't buy it if that's not your thing.

...you want to be able to continue to enjoy other creature collector games. I just don't think I'd be able to find Pokemon, Slime Rancher, or other similar games fun anymore after playing Palworld. This game really sets a new bar for the genre, and it's going to be hard to top after I burn myself out of all the content available in this game.

trans rights are human rights

that's not political, you clowns

I see all these negative reviews complaining about lack of support and replay value, but I just want to say that despite its problems, this game is really fun for the 2$ I paid for it on sale.

The gameplay gets pretty intense, especially late in a round when tons of enemies are spawning, and it's an enjoyable challenge figuring out how to best kite and kill enemies and when to use bombs and such.

When you buy this game, be aware what you are paying for. Arcadia is a casual shooter (As clearly mentioned) that is not meant to entertain you for long periods of time like other games. This game is fun to play on and off when you don't have time for other deeper games, and it fulfills that goal excellently. Don't buy this game if you are looking for a hardcore game to sink many hours into to beat or to become the best at it.

Whether this game is being actively updated or not isn't really relevant. The game mechanics are solid and very entertaining in a casual situation, and I'm happy having given a one time payment of 2$ and receiving the end product I got.

One point that I want to given special mention to is the music in this game. Hearing the music in this game is like half the experience of playing this game. The dev of this game put together an awesome soundtrack for this game, which ends up making it extremely relaxing and enjoyable to play. The music in this game is techno and trance from Newgrnds (Steam censors the full site name for some reason), so if you like that kind of music you'll probably enjoy this game

As the description clearly states, "Arcadia is a fun, casual little shooter." And that's exactly what you get when you buy this game. Hardcore gaming experience for hundreds of hours of evolving gameplay, no. Fun 2d bullet-hell shooter with awesome music that's worth a few bucks, yes.

Update: Modding community is back to being awesome as usual, for now, now that the Great Mod Monetisation War has ended. I really recommend this amazing game.

Paid Mods 2: Electric Boogaloo

They aren't paid mods. They're Mods You Pay For® — Bethesda, June 2017[i.imgur.com]