Recent reviews by ghostcatte

crab souls!

the game is funny - seriously, cleverly written and considered. it's challenging enough to feel like it's lived up to the "soulslike" category but with some nice balance to be a great intro/onboarding for folks who aren't used to the genre

a solid little puzzle/translation game. you get the opportunity to "validate" glyphs so you're not fully guessing. there are 5 languages and while they're all totally distinct, sometimes you'll run into signs or statues with the same phrase in multiple languages, giving you an opportunity to use your previous knowledge to learn a bit about a new language.

my favorite bit is just how different each of the languages are, both in terms of visual style and in terms of structure / what vocabulary is available

just absurdly good. if you're here, you definitely have already heard by now... just... do it. it's so good

It's short but sweet. The mechanics are very cool, and the team should be extremely proud of what they made! The narrative feels a little jumbled to me but it made enough sense and I had a lot of fun with it. As a technical achievement, well worth the money. Some folks might find it somewhat short for full price, but in my opinion it's always worth supporting smaller studios, especially when they're doing such cool and impressive things as Viewfinder.

The core gameplay is fantastic. The sound design and soundtrack are amazing. The core game is nearly perfect at what it attempts.

Technically though, the game is really flawed at the moment. Performance has been pretty rough, and while the devs are actively working on it, it's pretty up and down patch-to-patch throughout the pre-release beta and now into release. Also there's some stuff just straight up missing from the game that was supposed to be in by now. No private servers, no weapon crafting, the full range of promised weapons seems to not be in yet. And the cash shop showing up at the same time we find out about all the missing features is pretty grimy.

It's understandable if some folks would rather wait until it's all fixed up first, but
I'd still recommend it because I think the issues will be addressed in the near future. and even with them, it's a great game.