Recent reviews by Red Sargassum Dream

Nothing I can add to this that others haven't already said before. This game is a masterpiece, a true marvel of game design. Lightning in a bottle.

If you're the type of person with the determination to push themselves as far as they can go to put all the pieces together, this is for you.

I was 50/50 on whether I'd give this a positive review but I'll just leave it at two things:
1) Soma is the most philosophically interesting and existentially terrifying game I've played in a very long time, possibly ever. The story is phenomenal. At its core Soma is a game about the mind-body problem (Cartesian dualism, metempsychosis) and asks some profound questions about consciousness and perception while making you do some pretty awful things to try and answer those questions.
2) Soma has some of the most boring gameplay I've ever experienced. It is one of the walking simulators of all time. Sometimes you hide. Sometimes you do some light puzzle solving. But mostly you walk, and walk, and walk, and walk. It is agonizingly boring. If you can put up with the tedious gameplay, the story payoff is worth it in the end, but don't be surprised if you just can't bring yourself to slog through it to get there.

I cannot conceive of a game fumbling the bag worse than Detroit: Become Human. Up until the last act this game had the potential to be the best narrative game ever - sprawling decision trees with compounding butterfly effects of all your choices actually resulting in meaningful player-driven change, completely ruined by the most hamfisted and hilariously ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ending. You can tell David Cage really thought he did something profound here with all the explicit references to the civil rights movement, but it was less of an homage and more of a farce. Really genuinely insulting stuff. I am immeasurably disappointed at the squandered promise of this game.

Overall not bad. Cute cozy mystery game with a compelling story. The ending has some real problems though - the ways in which your actions influence the ending aren't just obtuse, they're pretty illogical and directly counter some of the advice you're given early in the game (e.g. don't throw away guests' belongings). As a result it seems most players come to a very dissatisfying conclusion without any kind of resolution for the characters involved. But I still think it was a good effort from the developer, and I hope their next games iterate on this formula a bit more.

I have no idea why this game is so well reviewed. Case of the Golden Idol was better in basically every way - art style, atmosphere, plot, and puzzles. In Case, there were some frustrating moments but every tiny breakthrough was inspirational and exciting, and you felt rewarded for thinking through them. This game is not that. Rise of the Golden Idol holds your hand through every step of each solution rather than requiring you to do any work on your own or make any meaningful logical inferences. The only "difficult" moments come from trying to figure out which combination of words the game expects you to use to say the exact same thing you were thinking of, basically requiring you to "grammar cheese" some solutions. In the first game, those moments were not solved with grammar, but by actually changing the entire meaning of the sentence based on your word choices, and once you actually *knew* the solution, there was only one possible input.

On top of those issues, the setting of Rise was incredibly boring and the story was just one chapter after another in a long and winding tale of ~zany mad science hijinks~ that culminated in an obvious and unrewarding "twist."

If you're a fan of Case of the Golden Idol and you buy this game, I can only hope you don't feel as insulted by it as I do.

Editing my originally positive review for this game. Initially I thought Remedy got off to a bad start with a rocky launch but that they'd get a handle on it and smooth out some of the rough edges to make this a great little horde shooter, but as time goes on and their attempts to balance the game get more and more desperate, it's become clear they have absolutely no clue what they're doing with this game.

At launch I think Firebreak was actually great. People complained about the economy and progression systems but I didn't actually think it was too grindy or anything. I had some minor gripes (e.g. having to unlock pointless cosmetics before you got the upgrades that actually made your kit work) but they seemed committed to working out those kinks. Admittedly the onboarding experience was rough but they've certainly made strides in the right direction since then.

However, since the massive player drop-off after launch that they never recovered from, the game is basically unplayable. Fewer players result in almost all jobs being solo-only at this point, and the game does not seem to compensate for number of players in a match in any way. Enemy spawns are way overtuned, enemy health seems like it was shadow buffed, and all the while you're trying to handle multiple objectives by yourself, dealing with hazards that were designed for 3 people to keep under control, constantly dying even on Normal difficulty. This isn't even accounting for a handful of persistent bugs that make the already-overwhelming gameplay even more difficult to navigate.

Firebreak had a lot of potential but Remedy completely squandered it by hitting a deadline to release a minimum viable product. A couple of months in early access/open beta could have saved the game. As a massive Remedy fan and someone who was really hopeful for this game, I can't BS anyone by saying that it's worth your time.

Some interesting concepts and a fun story. Cool twist too. Most of the puzzles were relatively straightforward, but the "manual reading" one was actually pretty exciting and interesting, and the "identifying the feed" one was clever. I just could not get past the ridiculous anachronisms popping up constantly, and some very confusing internal logic.

This game takes place in 1992. Everybody has a cell phone, digital photography is commonly accessible, "zoom, enhance" is an actual mechanic. The game's FBI analogue has a database with facial recognition data of nearly everyone in the country? In 1992??? In 2025 sure, but not in 1992. Agents are constantly uploading files to your computer from their phone. At one point, confusingly, an agent apparently sends you physical floppy disks.... via his phone...? Baffling honestly. I was willing to set aside the fact that VoIP didn't exist in 1992 either, but after a while you simply cannot suspend your disbelief any further.

HAL's "hacking" capabilities are completely inconsistent, and the justifications for why they can't hack a particular thing make no narrative sense a lot of the time. Credit where credit's due though, nothing stands out to me as anachronistic about HAL's methods at least.

There's a big narrative-UX disconnect as well. Initially I thought the "phone calls" you receive from agents are just game objects showing transcripts of audio conversations, but at one point you're instructed to *enter a code into the chat box* as though it were a terminal. So now I'm asked to believe that my computer has been *actually transcribing* phone calls automatically while people are speaking to me, and that I can use this function as a terminal. Completely ridiculous.

This game would have made way more sense if it were set in the current year, with minimal changes to the story or mechanics, but I think the devs were just too enamoured with the retro aesthetic to let it go so they set it in the 90s anyways.

Side note: I had annoying bug where my keybinds weren't showing up in-game, so anything where I was required to press a key just had [???] instead. Not game breaking, just annoying.

Optimization issues aside, it's a great game. I love what the story adds to the DBD universe, but it holds up on its own as well. If you enjoyed Supermassive's other titles you're going to love this one as well.

Extra points for kickass creature design, but minus points for having an achievement that requires all paths to be unlocked WITHOUT an ability to easily change what choices were made at each checkpoint :'(

Overall, definitely recommend to any fan of narrative horror games, whether or not you're a DBD player.

It's a fun game overall, the gameplay is rewarding and gives you a good sense of progression without too much grind. Obviously it "borrows heavily" from many other games, but it takes the best parts of those games and combines them in a cohesive way. The setting is interesting, reminds me a lot of Death Stranding/Control/The Secret World.

However what is absolutely ruining my enjoyment of this game is the use of AI and generic Unity store assets. At first I was willing to forgive the developers for this because they clearly cut corners on asset development for the sake of ensuring the game feels good to play, but it really does creep in EVERYWHERE. A solid 70% of art assets in the game are AI-generated, which becomes impossible to unsee when you first notice it. This includes text and images on **PAID COSMETICS** which is IMO pretty unforgivable.

I'd prefer to have paid a subscription fee for this game rather than being F2P and full of AI slop and generic paid assets. Hire artists and developers to make bespoke assets for your game instead of defaulting to mobile game monetization. I shouldn't expect much else from NetEase but it's still disappointing.

i need more games that have no gameplay aside from going full Pepe Silvia on a corkboard