Recent reviews by Quantum_Mango

Abandon all priorities, ye who enter here.
This game is a fast-forward button on your life. Hours feel like minutes. Days fly by in a blink. The new power plant is finished and you glance outside to see the sun is already rising. Constant dopamine hits from that feeling of achievement render your body incapable of thinking about anything but the factory during the workday. Maybe you will even leave the PC running to let the research queue finish, the resources stockpile, and the belts back up. This is a deeply nerdy game that forces you to plan ahead, be organized, calculate ratios, and set achievable goals. Next, you will experience the strong desire to become a reclusive hermit and to abandon all your responsibilities. You may find yourself neglecting family and friends to see the factory grow. You will forget how to speak to other humans and organize your sleeping and eating schedule around your precious engineering time. Maybe, like me, you will grind all of the achievements and download mods like Space Exploration and Seablock. Then you must overcome the most difficult and treacherous complex recipes and production demands of these challenges you have set yourself. Only then, when you have achieved so much that seemed impossible, and the factory is a sprawling behemoth systematically exhausting the resources of a practically infinite map, can you see the ruin your life has become, the megalomanic genocidal monster who is The Engineer. You can set yourself the smallest of goals in the real world. Read one page of a book. Touch grass. Say hello to a real person. Make homemade sauce for your daily spaghetti dinner. You begin to apply the systematic efficiency you have learned to your entire life, and become a muscle-building, incremental-learning, problem-solving machine. You make daily progress that will inevitably lead you your new life goals. Maybe one day you will return to your factory and pick up a new challenge. The old high will return, but you have now transcended the addiction. They can never understand this joy you feel, but you are in good company. Around the world there are other engineers just like you, operating in parallel. Perhaps you even meet a few on multiplayer or Discord servers. The conversation between you is often surface level. Sometimes you communicate only by map pings and memes. But deep down, you feel a resolute bond like that of fellow smokers, disaster survivors, brothers in arms. You realize a nuanced understanding of one facet of our human species, our inexhaustible demand for growth, the problems it causes, and ways to solve them. You drink a bitter draught of techno-optimism, humanism, and despair. You feel a sense of belonging in the most desolate imaginable wasteland. Now, the factory has become a map of your brain, and your brain has become a map of the factory. Spaghetti or not, the factory must grow.

JETT stands out as a raw gemstone from a sea of titles that may be polished, but lack soul. This game deftly dodges the unspoiled planet colonization/exploitation/automation trope, presenting an alternative with both its gameplay and its gentle-but-prescient commentary on the fallacies of colonialism. The developers, writers, and artists of JETT have created a true modern work of sci-fi, examining an original alternative future and asking questions which could belong at the core of future civilization, such as how to balance human flourishing with the need to tread lightly in the universe. A great deal of love and thought has been dedicated here. While the length of the two campaigns is only about 24 hours, JETT is a unique experience that should not be overlooked.

Slice of Sea brought me right back to the world of Submachine and Covert Front that I love so much and played over and over as a kid. Fans of these series will delight in the tie-ins to Skutnik's other works. The fluid art style and rich soundtrack made every screen a delight. The puzzles were solid, well built, and I never needed a walkthrough or felt too frustrated as far as the main storyline went. Still hunting for those last few achievements! The one area I felt was a bit lackluster was the beginning and ending animation scenes felt too rushed. Overall this feels like a masterwork incorporating all of the best parts of Mateusz's previous art with a vastly improved engine. So wonderful to be in this strange, colorful world again.

Great shaders, fun destruction, challenging to 100% without exploits. Large explosions cause lag spikes (7th gen i5, 1050ti). A fun timewaster, great for practicing speedrunning, moderate replay value.

FTL is a great game. It combines an attractive, retro-arcade design style with complex spaceship management. The ability to pause changes the concept from action shooter to strategic RPG adventure. With its RNG-based nature, FTL is rogue-like and rewarding to play again and again. But it's not all up to chance. Certain equipment choices, upgrades, and dialog options are better than others, and some choices have higher risks for greater rewards. Learning these strategies is key in FTL, where a misstep combined with bad luck will quickly spell disaster for your ship. Don't expect to win on your first run; learn from each run and improve your strategies until you hit on a winning combination of calculated risks.

I'M THE CONDUCTOR OF THE POOP TRAIN!

After 700+ hours and 69/69 achievements, multiple playthroughs with friends, playing and making mods, and running a RPG campaign based on the Borderlands universe, I feel that it is time to give this game a positive review. So there.

Made it to Level 5. Hyped up on stimulants and canned meat, I loaded my shotgun and carefully opened a door. No baddies nor sound of baddies. I entered the room, scouting among the metallic rubbish for useful parts, when the door slammed behind me and two pixelated monsters bigger than anything rushed me. I feverishly threw down some RDX and ran in circles screaming, trying to avoid the streams of shots from... miniguns? duel-wield miniguns? My cursor finally landed on my last Panzerfaust and with a stream of fire I launched it. One of the baddies exploded in a colorful splatter. The other came at me in an attempt to crush me to death with its minigun/biomorph arms. I emptied a clip of my pistol as I ran backwards towards the door. Nope. Locked. With only a second remaining before death I pulled out my Weapon of Last Resort.

Its name?

Cangun.

With a fiery blast a flurry of nails sprayed out and the next thing I knew I was standing on a grisly robotic corpse. MONSTER DATABASE UPDATED! Nerves trembling, I reloaded my weapons, used my last medpack, and found some supplies in a corner. Those might come in handy for crafting later. Thinking about my need for ammo, I entered a newly-opened door.

And was instantly fired upon by three Guards with Shotguns.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Before the door had finished opening, my poor pixel body was splayed on the ground in a pool of my pixel blood.
Time to start over at Lvl1.

Teleglitch. I love to hate you.