Recent reviews by Bear

I'm typing this not to beat down on the game, but express some changes I think the game needs to make to better the player experience. I love the concept of this game, and there truly is so much potential for this to be a fun experience to come back to with friends.

As other reviews have mentioned, the game is jank. There is some charming, cute jank as well as some frustrating, annoying jank. Let's focus on removing the parts of the game that is ruining the experience and leave in the fun charm.

First off: remove the ai from your main splash / title. Not only does it look awful, but it's going to be a huge turn off for many people who will not even give this game a chance thinking it is pure slop. The game looks good. Stand by it. The fact ai is used in that way says to me that the devs are either lazy or don't have any confidence in their work.

Second: there needs to be a way to cleanly wipe the text box. The only time I ever struggled or took damage was when I had accidentally double typed or misspelled something, and then fumbled completely at not erasing the word completely. A short-term bandaid solution would be to change backspace instead of deleting just one letter just deletes everything in the text box. A long term solution will be redeigning the ui to be clearer on your typing and mistakes as well as implement a new keybind to completely wipe the slate along with a normal functioning backspace. (or even the option to toggle backspace as a single letter delete or full word wipe.)

Third: the movement needs to be changed. There's a ton of things you could do, but as it is now, I don't see many people wanting to play this game longer than 2 sessions. Movement is tedious and unfun. My suggestion that wouldn't completely change the game is just make it so that you use the mouse to click and point at the set points you have now to move to. This would make things interesting as combat and movement would be restricted since one requires hands on the keyboard and another requiring the use of the mouse. It would also free up so many letters to the point you don't need to hide enemies' damage words. Which leads to-

Fourth: streamline the system of picking up items and combat. Change movement to not rely on typing, and from there you're now open to not needing the "combat stance" mechanic and slash typing for actions. Typing /reload is incredibly frustrating where just typing reload would've sufficed. Same with quick eat and the like. There is no reason for the / command, just scrap that entirely. I also don't think the combat stance is necessary. Just have the enemies' death words appear on their body and typing it will instantly switch to combat.

Fifth: show the current objective and progress through it. Honestly I wanted to drop the game when I was completely confused at what I was doing and how far along I was. The game has a few objectives you juggle at the same time at a point to where you're not even sure if you've missed something you need to back track to find (through the annoying movement that ruins this) or if you're just not at the right place and need to go to a specific room. Leading to half the game's run time being just endlessly wandering rooms you've been to.

Sixth: Enemies will get stuck on doorways making it impossible to hurt them without you yourself going to the door and taking damage trying to get in the right line of sight to do damage back. This leads to frustrating times of cheap damage taken.

Honestly, I hope this game is not a cheap cash grab and the devs are dedicated to making this game a fun experience. We'll have to see the changes they make in the near future to truly know their intentions.

This is such a hard game for me to decide on. On one hand, I LOVE Darkest Dungeon 1 and the ability to play more of it and see these characters with graphics and updated mechanics is such a treat.

On the other, this game completely lacks, in my opinion, the main interesting game play loop / decision making that made Darkest Dungeon 1 such a unique and memorable experience. The long term town progression, investing in new heroes and slowly building them up through the pain of the dungeon and nurturing their strength and growth over hours of time only to lose them in a series of decisions YOU made, that wonderful mix of strategy, anxiety, and attachment you have to everything is not present in the slightest in Darkest Dungeon 2.

Darkest Dungeon 2 is a pretty fun rougelike. That's it. There's nothing too much to say about it otherwise. If you're a fan of the first game, you'll find that immensely disappointing. If you're someone with zero experience of the first game, or you didn't like the first game, yeah you might like this game.

If you can treat this game as it's own thing, a rouglike with a dark atmosphere, fun combat, and interesting lore, yeah you'll have a good time. If you want an actual Darkest Dungeon sequel, this ain't it

Love the horror, the bestiary, the vibes. It's all exactly what I wanted from the game. The absolute best part of this game is unlocking more entries to read about. The game's length isn't a huge problem to me either as others have mentioned.

However, the puzzles suck. They are either completely obvious or legitimately so vague and unhelpful it's a shot in the dark between 3+ options. I often found myself looking up an answer later only to go "what? that doesn't make sense." It is a pretty bad sign in a puzzle game if even after someone sees the answer, they do not see the logic followed to clearly reach that conclusion.

The writing is entertaining, and the voice acting is mostly fine. But man, the call puzzles are just not fun. Which kinda sucks since this is the main game-play loop.

So if the main mechanic is poorly done, why do I recommend it? The story, the lore, and the entries are fun enough to carry it all for me. I went into this game fully wanting the analogue horror vibes as well as fun entries to read and that's what I got. Hopefully in future updates or expansions, the writer of the game gets more feedback from others to ensure the puzzles are not only coherent, but fun.

For anyone who is not involved at all in the creation of any creative medium, skip this. I hate to say it, but you probably won't enjoy this that much.

This game is made with and speaks a language people who create unavoidably become fluent in. This game hurts. A lot. I don't know how to describe it. If I tried describing why this game is so good to anyone who hasn't played it or isn't an artist / creative themselves, they'd think I'm either crazy or they'd think I'm just being hyperbolic for attention.

I can't discuss anything that makes this game good without spoiling the purpose of the game. This is meant to be played blind. Particularly during a time of creative burn out, during a low point, or even just during a break.

Instead of talking about what the game is or has to offer, I just want to try and sell the game to creative / artistic people this way:
This game is an emotional therapy session for you to observe, think about, and heal with. When the experience is over. You won't be thinking about what happened in the game or even what any of it could mean. You'll be thinking about your own life. Your own journey ahead of you. Your work and your artistic journey. The ability of this game to accomplish that is astounding. This game is neither inspiring nor is it overtly cynical. It's just unashamedly real for a very particular, niche audience.

The game's length is only 2 hours at best, but you'll be thinking long past that about how its affected you.

As a game, In Stars And Time is awful. Basically from every angle I look at with its game play it is at best, a mediocre RPG maker game and at worst, legitimately boring and frustrating. If you've noticed a ton of RPG maker games having an issue where "spam basic attack" will win most encounters, know this one is no different. Basically every random encounter and boss fight can be beaten by completely ignoring the game's "unique" fighting mechanics, skills, and items in favor of just, spam basic attack and occasionally heal. Random encounters are annoying to say the least. The rewards you get from them are worthless (especially considering most of that reward is taken away per loop), and the enemies themselves serve only to make each loop and back track to be tedious and padded out rather over anything.

The game has a weird issue where it can't decide what difficulty it wants. The entire game up to the king is so lazily easy, you have to wonder what's even the point of having combat in the first place. I am not joking when I say I would've enjoyed this game more with zero combat up to the king's fight because it only serves to waste your time. The only thing I would want to keep the combat for is I do like the battle portraits of the main cast.

The game also takes a note from Nintendo by fluffing out the early half with a frustratingly long tutorial of its very basic mechanics. The game's tutorial takes about 18 minutes to finish, and the entire tutorial could've been summed up with "hey it goes by rock paper scissors rules" I guarantee you everyone above the age of 8 playing this game would understand the combat (other than the all-out-attack) if you had just condensed the tutorial to that. I tried early on to not let the slow start affect my opinion of the game, but it dragged on so long that the game almost feels too horrible in that aspect to not be intentionally boring and repetitive.

Which wouldn't be too much of an issue if the game's dialogue was better. Don't get me wrong, I actually like the characters, and a good amount of their interactions are fun for me to read (the first time at least but we'll get to that.) There's a recurring issue that this game is written, at best, at teenager fan fiction level. The dialogue is ripped seemingly straight from 2010s tumblr humor and marvel one liners. If you enjoy that humor, that's fine. But I don't really find the "puns", the "fake cursing", and the overall children's cartoon level way these characters talk endearing at all. I would say about half of the dialogue in this game had me cringing or rolling my eyes. The other half either being tolerable or interesting. What's weird about the childishness of the writing is this game has adult themes. This is by no means a children's game. It's like if Steven Universe occasionally was broken up by adult characters talking about sex and alcohol. What is the tone supposed to be.

The characters are one-note archetypes and nothing really pushes them beyond that. The main character is the only one with "depth", but the depth feels more like a self insert fan fic oc rather than a real, interesting, layered character. Which honestly feels like a disservice to how interesting they COULD be. I love all of their designs, and I love how they bounce off each other. These characters are best when they are allowed to interact and chat as people and not just make another stupid pun. Sorry, but being "Self-aware" to how puns aren't funny doesn't actually make them a good addition to the game. As a one off joke, maybe, but this game relies heavily on it being so cringe, immature, and amateurish in writing but then pretending its self aware by that. Is it really self-aware if there's not actual commentary or deviation from that style of writing? There is nothing EXCEPT immature, marvel jokes here in most of the dialogue. There's only out-dated memes and "quirky" moments that you've seen 100 times before in better games. Is that really interesting for a player just because the writers know how lazy that writing is? I don't think so personally.

The most interesting part of the game's story / mechanics is the time looping. Small problem, it is the most under-baked, sad excuse of a time loop mechanic I've seen. I am not joking when I say nearly every time I had to loop was from the game FORCING me into a moment that it went "aww man, guess you gotta loop back!" The game has no puzzles. It has no player choice. It has nothing the player can do that makes them feel like they're playing a game. The puzzle the game recycles over and over is: go into new room, nothing to interact with, leave, "oh no, that room is blocked off now and there was a key in there you missed main character!! if only we had a way to loop back and get in there", die, loop back, now the game ALLOWS you to pick up the key, continue with story. There was no choice, there was nothing you failed on your part, that entire interaction was rail-roaded for you and you must do it every time you play the game. I am bored of that and this is my first play through. The designers have killed any potential and desire for anyone to want to replay it from the start.

A last thing about replay-ability, the game doesn't allow you to skip dialogue until you've seen it. So a lot of times, you'll be forced to watch a text box slowly fill up with annoying text that's entirely unskippable. This is made worse when you have to re-watch some scenes especially early on as you aren't even allowed to skip repeated dialogue. Admittedly the game is aware that repeating the same dialogue over and over gets annoying, so it gives you an fast-forward button on SOME dialogue scenes. Why did I highlight some? Well that fast-forward button is only present on, I'd say, around 60% of the repeated scenes in the game. This leads to times where you actually do still have to sit through the slow text boxes, the long dialogue trees, and horrible writing in its entirety. There is no skipping it no matter how many times you see it. Why is this? I have no idea. It feels entirely arbitrary when you are allowed to skip and when you're not. The final salt rub in the wound is that the fast forward isn't even that fast. I would much prefer it just skip to the very end of the tree instantly or to my next dialogue choice rather I be forced to watch the scene play out slightly faster. Before you say, "well if the dialogue bothers you that bad, just turn off dialogue animations". Let me tell you, I did from very early on. The dialogue is still a slog to get through. It's so clunky for no reason. If you're going to write dialogue you as the writer are self aware is bad, why make the user experience so bad as to be forced to read it over and over and over again? It makes you start hating these characters for how much they yap.

The middle point twist isn't even enough to save this game. By that point, I've already grown to hate the characters, the story, and the repetitive dungeon I'm forced to explore with the same 6 enemies patrolling it. I want to like this, but it truly is not worth the money or time.

Before I leave though, I do want to have a positive section-
The art in the game is really nice. I love the main cast's designs. They are expressive, lively, and a joy to see. Whoever made the art for the game deserves plenty praise. I am very happy of the game for having a lot of positive LGBT representation. More games need that, and even if I am not enjoying the game play that much, just for good representation alone I am happy to support the game with my money and never refund it. While I'm sure some people would find LGBT in their game to be a negative, I am actually an adult therefore I don't "eww gay = bad". The game does have good moments and interesting lore occasionally. Those moments carried me through to want to finish it. The character dynamics are fun to see. The game obviously has a lot of heart put into it. I hope it gets better.

The actual game is fine. The gun play is fine. The graphics are good enough. The game-play loop is entertaining for the first bit.

That's all the positives I had to say.

This game is not "bad" per se, but it is full of so many small gripes that I legitimately think they all add up to make this game completely overshadowed by doing literally anything else with my time. I'll just list my gripes with no particular order.
- The graphics are "over-rendered" with so many effects, fog, lighting artifacts, and motion sickness movements that instead of looking really pretty and impressive it just feels like a headache in a box with such little visibility I actually felt like I'd have better vision with a normal fps without all these annoying "dark moody" lighting systems on a 144p video.
- The menus require click-and-hold on everything. EVERYTHING. From changing settings, selecting missions, quitting the game, inviting friends, it seems like everything in this game is just meant to feel clunky and annoying.
- The enemies are not very varied. I mean, there is plenty of enemy variety but all of them are the same thing essentially. Fleshy person you shoot at and kill as fast as a L4D zombie. The special infected type monsters completely blend in with the rest of the enemies both literally and figuratively.
- The game is incredibly simple in its complexity while entirely being so lacking in info to the players that you can't easily just do what you need to do. Our first game had us running in circles completely not having fun, and when we did figure out what to do, we just kinda though "Oh. That's it?"
- This game is one of those games that builds itself up to be very skilled, complex, and strategic, but in actual gameplay, it's nothing like that. You just walk into area, shoot, and move on. The only thing that's "hard" about it is that you have as much health as a tissue box and resources are scarce.
- The health system sucks. You don't really have a lot, which doesn't work in this game full of hits you couldn't avoid from how hard it is to see due to the way it's rendered as well as weird instances of friendly fire and other quirks that make you lose your health pretty unavoidably. The medkits are rare and don't even heal you fully. With how easily you lose health, there's basically no reason to heal. It's such a rare resource that you lose so easily, it's practically worthless. Made doubly true by the fact that once you're less than 20% health, you just auto-regen health. So We spent 90% of our game just at 20% and regen health which is not fun to do but also there's really no alternative.

I really wanted to like this game. The Free Weekend I got to try it on was exciting at first, but we were with no exaggeration so bored out of our minds that we just all quit the game early before even playing longer than an hour. Does that make my review unfair since I haven't really experienced much of the game? Most definitely.

Does the fact that this game I was interested in before is so boring that I didn't even care to play it long enough to form a fair opinion show pretty clearly how lack luster / clunky the game is? Most definitely.

Such an amazing game. I love everything about it. The visual style, the music, and the game play are all just perfect for what the dev was going for. I absolutely say this is worth your money. The only "issue" with the game is wanting more at the end. A lot of these songs are up there in how memorable / catchy they are as Rhythm Heaven for me, and that's saying a lot! I really hope to see more from the dev with a similar formula of this game.

If short games bother you, wait for a sale. But even with its shorter length, I genuinely feel it's worth its price. There's a lot of replay value as well with multiple difficulties.

I am so absolutely torn on this game. I wish there was a "mixed feelings" button, because the game has a lot I like as well as plenty of issues that make me unable to play longer than a few songs without getting annoyed. From what I heard, the developers are amazing, and genuinely care for the game. The game itself is very fun if you like rhythm vr games. I also got this all on sale, so for the price I got it, it was definitely worth it. For all those reasons, the review is staying a positive.

Now to air out all the issues I have with this game.

As many others have mentioned, the games timing. It is legitimately awful. I can never get bronze on the medium difficulty songs despite not really struggling with them that much. So what's holding me back? I'm missing a TON of notes, and I guarantee more than half of those missed notes are not my fault what so ever. I will swing the hammer down, watch the spark effects, and then the note just still counts as a fail. This isn't something to flex or anything, but I have 100+ hours on beat-saber and I can easily beat nearly any expert + song on my first try. I say that just so you know I am not a beginner when it comes to vr rhythm games. The fact I miss so many notes is legitimately game ruining to me even though there is no technical "fail", and I could just shrug it off. But I do not find it fun to have several failed notes that was entirely out of my control.

The drum positioning is not enough. I don't know if it's a me thing or if it's an issue with the game, but I have fiddled with the drums every single time and never do they feel to be in a good position. It always feels like they're way too high up, way too low, way too the left, way too the right. I think the issue with this is the drums are locked into being right next to each other in a straight line. I can't tell you a good alternative, because it feels like we're caught in if you offset the drums positioning to wrap around comfortably, you compromise the ease of telling the timing of each note properly. But leaving it as is is uncomfortable with any setup I use.

Finally, the charting. I cannot handle the max difficulty songs yet, but I do stay inside the middle difficulty. The song's charting is not great. There's so many songs that just make me feel like a toddler hitting a toy drum rather than actually reaching any flow state in this rhythm game. The "runes" are strewn about seemingly at random with very few times them actually feeling they fit the song (usually this only happens during the chorus). The poorly charted songs paired with the unreliable game timing leads to a very un-fun experience. Think playing Friday Night Funking with wii motion controls. It is frustrating.

I noticed today that when I launched the game, it is not detecting any of the DLC I have purchased (I purchased all of the DLC) and was left only able to play the base game today. It's only happened once and this could absolutely be a steam issue not the devs fault, but I figured it's worth noting.

If you think the game looks fun, it is! So definitely grab the base game on a sale and give it a try. It's really not that expensive, and it's worth the experience. Just maybe hold off on the DLC packs until you really give it all a good play through to get a feel for how the game is. Maybe you don't have any issues like I did, or maybe I'm just bad. I'm going to keep trying to get used to this game, because I genuinely want to enjoy it.

A game all about art and the freedom of creation, but zero options for actual art tablet support. Is this game for non/casual artists to just mess around in, or is this something that's actually catering to an artistic audience? I'm not going to spend more than a few minutes forced into using a mouse. Mice for art inherently are clunky to use and with prolonged use can lead to carpal tunnel. The long time spent drawing and the repetitive movements will absolutely put a ton of strain on your wrist that a drawing tablet would not.

The developers tout how this is full of dynamic tools and how this is "the most advanced artist sim", but they completely ignore what is, in my opinion, the most fundamental part of any art/drawing game. Which is giving your players support for the necessary tools to use the program effectively.

An alternative to tablet support would be VR support. VR would fix the issues I have with the game as well. Since VR controllers don't force your wrist into a dangerous and uncomfortable position. I've drawn in vr for hours with no issues, so that would also make this game actually worth it to play. Just something that is more tactile and natural to draw with than a mouse/controller.

This game has so much potential and fun features. It's sad to say, but I have zero interest in the full, paid game unless the devs get rid of this arrogant mindset to never support actual artistic tools. I'd rather just play Passpartout with its actual tablet support or just paint in vrchat since VR painting is surprisingly comfortable as well. If they fix that issue, it would absolutely be a recommended game, and I would purchase the full game.

Super hot is one of the big vr titles that everyone recommends as the must-have titles. Even after buying this game on discount, I really do feel it was a waste of my money. The novelty of it's concept is definitely there. The fun in living out matrix style combat is absolutely appealing for the first 15 minutes.

For that reason, find a friend who owns the game already and ask them to let you try it out. This game is super fun as a first time experience in the first half hour or so. If you've played the game longer than that, you've realized 2 things about the game when you first got stuck at a section.

1: The games combat is so clunky and unreliable that it practically feels like rng to get through certain sections. The biggest issue is you need to throw items as a projectile to win some scenarios. If you know anything about vr, you know throwing anything in vr is the most frustrating and inconsistent mechanic practically every mediocre vr game will get wrong. I knew the solution to certain scenarios the first time I played it, but found it to be a roll of the dice whether the game would detect the direction I am actually throwing correctly. Most of the time it would just throw directly into the ground, and I'd die due to that. Mind you, I've had vr since the vive first launched. I am experienced in these games, and never have I run into a title as highly praised as this be so poorly designed as relying on this pitiful excuse for a throwing mechanic. If the game had a toggle to switch to a point and pull trigger to throw, this game would actually be fun to play.

2: This issue ties into the horrible throwing mechanic. The lack of checkpoints. I would have a much easier time swallowing the pill that the game requires unreliable throwing controls if the game didn't make me lose a ton of progress with each (usually unfair) death. The easiest way to get players to lose all fun in your game like this is to make them repeat the same 3 levels over and over because the controls just don't work. Those first few minutes where you punch and shoot guns are so fun, but the second throwing is relied on is the time you realize how boring repeating the same levels 8 times in a row dries up that novelty of the main mechanic.

So final note to anyone thinking "well I can beat the entire game with no deaths and always moving". I need you to understand this is from the perspective of my first ever play through of this game. Just because you have memorized every enemy spawn, level layout, and weapon placement does not mean that these actual flaws with the game are any less real for players without 10+ hours in this game that has less than 2 hours of real content for $25.