Recent reviews by Timberheart

It's good.

One of my favorite games of all time. The game is a bit hand-holdy, although I understand this game is designed for literally anyone to play, so I understand. Otherwise everything is 10/10.

Very fun to tinker around with, especially as the devs keep iterating and improving on the game since launch.

The average minimum wage worker experience.

Game changed my life. It inspired me to become a game dev myself, and taught my that it is okay to not enjoy your work sometimes.

Fantastic game. Fantastic art direction, characters, storyline, Astralshift really poured their heart and soul into this one. A little buggy at times, but in my three runs of this game, they were few and far between and only one was game-breaking. If you're interesting in sapphic stories, satanism, fairytales, and retro anime, then this game is a must-have. It was good enough for me to want to go for 100% completion.

A fun little game, the clips are hilarious. However the game is badly optimized and will make your PC hot regardless of specs, so if you're running on a lower-end machine, be wary of that.

I have thought a lot about whether or not to recommend this game because it has some deep rooted issues that make it a nightmare to play unless you're already familiar with it. Ultimately, I've decided to recommend it. Even though I found the game exceedingly frustrating to play, it had so much character and polish that I can tell Astralshift poured their heart and soul into it. I love everything about this game - except for the gameplay itself. Let's talk about that.

The first thing I would like to bring up is the story. Astralshift decided to pull the baffling decision where they withhold any and all crucial information up until the very end of the game - so instead of getting drip fed information that slowly lets you piece things together, you spend the entire game completely confused up until the very end. Often, it was lacking a sense of progression - not gameplay wise, there were always new environments and puzzles, but story wise. For a majority of the game, there are no big breaks that help you understand, so it often feels like you don't know what you're working towards or why you're doing it.

The puzzles often contain wild leaps of logic that I struggle to understand, and feel convoluted in a way that puzzles should not be. Often, the punishment for failing a puzzle is death. Which on its own wouldn't be the worst thing ever, but the gameover screen takes a solid 30 seconds, and every death felt like a slog. This became even worse because the game insisted on using a save point system which I cannot understand the reasoning why. Often I had to replay long segments of the game because the save point placement is... lacking.

The third and final bit is the dialogue. When it's good, it's really good. But when it's bad, it's often characters going back and forth without getting anywhere. There were too many times in the game where a long cutscene amounted to the main character exclaiming "I don't understand!" and every other character dismissing her for not understanding without explaining anything. Harpae and Lisette were the worst offenders of this, you could remove a good chunk of their dialogue from the game and nothing would change.

For me, personally, this game became far more enjoyable when I asked a friend to just explain the ending to me. And this goes back to what I said earlier about being familiar with the game increasing your enjoyment. When you learn what the ending is, a lot of information given to you throughout the game falls into place, as any well-written game should. The problem is when you don't know the ending, you spend the whole game not understanding anything and struggling to find any reason behind, well, anything that happens in the game. What should feel like clues to paint a bigger picture that ultimately comes into focus at the end, instead it feels like various random events happening that get taped together at the end.

Also, the steam cards spoiled the name of the main character, which is supposed to be one of the games central mysteries. So if you do end up buying the game, don't interact with the cards until after completion.

Gordon Freeman waking up in 2024 and seeing vortigaunts eating at the same table as him

A very easy game to recommend. Superior to Portal Stories: Mel in my opinion, especially because Stirling didn't spend the whole time dictating the goal. I'd like to highlight a few specific aspects of the game that I feel like commenting on.

-Original mechanics. I don't expect much from a fan game, and especially not anything on-par with the main game, but some of the original mechanics in this really made it an interesting play, if only they had more time to realize their full potential. The ones that come to mind are the independent laser cubes.

-Okay story. The story has some kinks that (in my opinion) should've been worked out, but this one is more of a nitpick rather than a criticism. Regardless of that though, it's decently written and the characters are lots of fun, with great voice acting to back them up.

-Challenging puzzles. Not to keep comparing the two games, but one of my biggest issues with Portal Stories: Mel was that a lot of the puzzles felt a bit over-reliant on certain mechanics, and some of the solutions felt unintuitive and hacky at times. A rule of thumb is that a player should feel smart or proud or satisfied after solving a puzzle. This game passed that bar for me, which is arguably the most important bar to pass in any portal game.

I think the developers at Second Face Software did spectacular with this one, and their puzzles were simultaneously simple and fun to take a crack at.