Recent reviews by Mista

It's a little bit janky at times, but super chill and fun nonetheless. It has a huge potential and I can't wait to see how it will progress. In the meantime, I have to take care of my roof-high pile of CD players and old laptops.

Look at it and cope, AAA devs

Quite short, I managed to 100% it in less than three hours, but very fun and spooky. It is a little bit repetitive at times, because game forces you to do certain things to progress, so if you want to try different route, you need to finish the current one first, but the creepiness and spooks are absolutely superb. Highly recommended.

Justice for Wooly!

The most boring 20h I ever spent in a video game and even coop with friends didn't help. The weapons are random, so usually useless, Claptrap is an obnoxious thing that just makes you cringe, not a single attempt at "humor" ended up causing even a chuckle out of us, the enemies are too spongy to be fun, driving mechanics just simply suck and you spend in a car like half of this game, and the endgame sudden difficulty spike is a cheap tactics to just prolong the playthrough for as long as Gearbox could. The only good thing in Borderlands is "No Rest for the Wicked" in the intro, and I still regret it's connected to this game.

I have been very, very torn apart whether I should grant this game a positive or a negative review and I can't with clear conscience give it the former. It has great premise, but I believe it's just because one thing - there isn't many detective/investigation puzzle games that aren't simple point and click adventure games, and that won't hold your hand. I loved that about this game. I finished it completely. The story was good, and figuring out identity of someone just because in one scene I noticed a hand with a tattoo, and absolutely nothing else, or pinpointing a name only basing on an accent of the person - that felt very good.

That being said, the game is simply incredibly tedious to play. There is no quality of life features. First hour or two is simply a long chain of cutscenes that show you the memory, a scene of someone's death - timed one. You either check out everybody and spend 40 seconds of your life standing in place, waiting for it to finish, or you don't have enough time to properly check out the scene for the first time. But you can't go back, no, no, you can only go to next body, next scene, If you had any ideas or noticed any clue, you better remember which scene it was. After that chain of cutscenes is done, you can go back to any of them - you have to do it physically. There is no way to quickly check memories, if you want to figure out a person's fate, the game only shows you which memories that person was in, but you have to walk through the whole ship for one place to another. Some scenes can be accessed only from the previous one. You noticed something important so you want to go back a scene? Go out and start all that linked memories chain again, hope you won't forget what it was. The graphics looks cool for a while, after some time it starts to be a huge nuisance on the eyes and on your ability to figure clues that developer meant to be based on what you can see. Some identities can be figured out based on ethnicity and country of origin of some sailors, but you can't really figure that out when black-and-white pixels are so big the game feels like two steps away from being that censored-face witness in your criminal news TV show, but still less comprehensible. Few of the last identities I just managed to brute force while being just fed up with trying to find any hint walking from one side of the ship to the other to see the memories chronologically and still finding nothing remotely helpful. When the puzzle fits, it's really good feeling and really fun. When you start feeling like brute forcing your last few puzzles is better, just to be done with it - for me that means quite the opposite.

I'd love more games like this one. Just, you know, better.

A detective game that won't hold your hand with a mystery worthy of being a Phoenix Wright case, with all of the twists and incredible solutions that this time it's for you to figure out, and nothing is served on a silver platter for you. Absolutely magnificent.

Incredible, cozy game about exploring, finding animals and having summer fun. Incredible attention to details with all the birds, especially sound direction is phenomenal. Definitely must play for a cozy, calm fun.

Edit: I absolutely love this game, and it pains me, but I have to change the review to negative.

There's so many things I enjoy about this game. It's a fun detective immersive sim, finding out ways to solve the cases is satisfying when sometimes something clicks, or if you even by accident receive new info by asking people around. The core of this game is great and I really wished to have more games like this.

But this Early Access and 1.0 release are extremely disappointing. There were one or two types of building added, two or three case types introduced, and that's it. It literally feels like nothing. The game is full of bugs, and I could argue that there's even more than what I remember when I first play it when it released. It used to be buggy, sure, but now I keep getting stuck on benches and other things on the street, because models didn't load in time and are invisible for a while, both outside and inside, and the map takes few seconds to actually load from a blank state - neither of those used to be a problem.

Few additional cases didn't change much - there's still no endgame, no real goal or a prize besides just getting social credit to max level only to press the end game button. There's never any struggle for money, because after a case or two you have enough to just buy stuff you need and keep on going. Murders, the funniest parts, are actually quite sparse and it can take a few IRL hours to get a new murder case after finishing previous ones. Murderers still don't have any motives and plenty of times it can either be very easy or nigh impossible to finish a case (screw you, sniper killing people on the exactly same spot on the street. You won't be missed.)

Some cases are still unsolvable - good luck finding the target knowing that the person has blue eyes and shoe size 10, exactly nothing else. Interaction with NPCs is pretty much always the same and after a while it just gets tedious. To solve the case you start just paying people to let you in their houses and searching through all their papers to get info you need, then go to next flat to do the same, repeat until done. Or maybe just get a sword that one-hit KO pretty much everybody and just go around the flat, then to the next one, and so on. If you do it well enough, even with all the alarms, blockades and angry people trying to shoot you, you can be fully capable of checking out an entire skyscraper this way, then just run away without a care, because if you just run it's extremely easy to get away with everything, and once the pursuit stops, you're basically clean, you'll just need to wait out few ingame hours and not go to the building you were in for everything to drop and disappear. Or you can use the easy way and use a computer with govt database which lets you literally learn the details about everybody. Takes a while, is boring, makes the game even less boring, but it is a solution, and then you can always know whose these fingerprints are and where they live. I just choose to not use it, but it's there and feels like you absolutely didn't earn that info you're getting out of it. The game can lock you out from certain things if you're unlucky enough, for example if a murderer kills the only person working in a store, you'll never be able to use it again, because the game won't adjust to that.

All that just to get to the one of the most dissatisfying ending I have ever seen. You made it. Good job. Yay. End credits.

I absolutely LOVE this game. This is at least one of my top 3 of all times. It's exactly what I always wanted and hoped for. I was so hyped to see it grow, to watch stuff added, cities made alive and deep, I wished to see brand new city types, more cases, more ways of doing things. Meanwhile after a year and a half I got an option to buy an artbook or a console release, with a pretty good chance it's been now abandoned forever. It pains me so much to see that happen. The only thing I can hope for are mods, because modders are incredible people, but it's not what this game could be. It turned from a noir detective love letter sandbox greatness with perspectives into a shell of what it could be. Noir a lot of times start with the detective main character being on the bottom, only to rise up. But in this case, I'm afraid it's not that kind of story.

**

OG EA review: It has it's Early Access issues. Quite a bit of bugs - I managed to fall through the floor and die few times as well.

That being said, it's one of the funniest games I've played and my current obsession. I can't wait to see more of this fantastic noir cyberpunk world in further updates. Figuring out who the culprit is from a scratch with a bare minimum of information, following different leads and that dopamine rush when you suddenly figure it out - the last missing piece you needed. It's awesome.

Kung-fu hands go BRRRRRR

It's barely working desperate nVidia try to get you buy Series 40. It doesn't seem to work too well even on 3070. It's a sad joke.