Recent reviews by trashh

"Super Mario Brothers" for the few truly intellectual individuals. The Run Back in Time Potion is a deceptively simple mechanic that ingeniously recontextualizes how challenges are engaged with. It may seem at first that there is no point to the game, as the man is simply going "around", but once you realize the secret reason for his run back, you will feel ashamed of your words and deeds. This is but a glimpse of gaming from the future, and we are blessed to be alive at the same time of its release. Thank you Phil Fish

certified girlboss gaming 💅💅✨

Note: This review is about Halo: Combat Evolved only, since it's the only game I care about. It's a good collection if that's what you're here for.

Halo is the #1 game that I just cannot understand the reception it gets. It's constantly being touted as an aged, clunky mess, which baffles me.

In nearly every sense, I'd describe Halo as a masterpiece. The gameplay itself is easily the most notable aspect. It's heavily focused on strategy, planning out your approach to combat and causing you to constantly shift and adjust for your everchanging predicament. Rather than just having a stock number of guns you switch out on the fly ala Doom, the game gives only two slots to work with, which creates this constant trade off of guns, either using anything available or salvaging any ammo you can find, in every fight. People will describe the combat as slow paced, but I think they're missing the point. Sure, there's little movement options for you to use, but how you move around is but a small part of your options. You have to use anything you can, whittling down the enemy numbers in a smart way until you've won. This is the key aspect that makes Halo's combat work.

Despite this focus on strategy though, the game is also surprisingly open ended on what you can do in combat. The guns are just one small part of a much wider range of tools to use. There's multiple vehicles, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There's environmental things like turrets and shields, or even just the landscape itself and it's features that you can take advantage of. Later on, the game just dumps a bunch of options for you to use and allows you to run wild. Despite this though, you can't just use any option you want to win. As with its gunplay, you have to use each tool strategically. It's very impressive how well the game keeps its core strategic feel even with such a wide array of options to choose from. There's no catch all, you have to put everything together and decide your best course of action in battle.

However even then, Halo throws multiple curve balls at you, the biggest being The Flood. Compared to the small numbered, strategically minded Covenant, The Flood rush at you with at incredibly high volumes over extended periods of time, completely changing how you tackle combat. They're generally weak and dumb, but their constant bombardment and numbers is the true threat. Rather than the typical plan and execution, The Flood brings you straight back to more classic shooters, being thrown wave after wave of enemies. While not as deep or strategic, there's definitely some thinking that has to be done to make your way through. The Flood fights brought some of the biggest rushes in the game.

To settle this all down, Halo has one of my favorite environments in any game. The Halo itself is this simplistic but endlessly beautiful spectacle. It's hard not to stare out at the ring in the sky, or the vast skylines around the maps. It's not just visual, the world itself is endlessly interesting. The story isn't anything too crazy or complex, being a rather simplistic tale, but has just enough depth to make the world unique and immersive. The cutscenes themselves are also pretty brief, giving you all the information and some nice character moments before sending you right back into the fray, with nearly every being under 3 minutes. That white flash always put me on the edge of my seat, wondering what was about to happen.

To top it off, the atmosphere is incredibly heavy. Each locale has a great grasp of space and color, and creates this universal alien feel to the entire game. The swamp is a staple at this. The cutscene just before gives the first real piece of tension and stakes to the game, but it's left incredibly vague outside of a obvious huge threat. Your thrust into this dark, alien swamp, where you find corpses of humans and Covenant. This area, and generally the entire chapter, is terrifying and constantly intense. There's obviously a greater threat at play, you just have to go deeper. Even places like the grassy mountains or the beach, easily the most Earthlike parts of the world, not only just feel slightly off in geography, but are filled with these strange, blocky alien structures that are clearly not human nor Covenant. One final one I'd like to mention here is the Library. The entire facility has this larger than life feel to it. It makes you feel incredibly insignificant to the bigger world around you, almost like your stepping into a chamber of Gods. Everything is foreign and clearly made for something much higher than you, and I love it.

There's also the music, which exemplifies everything I just mentioned before. Halo has one of, if not my favorite main theme of any game. It completely encapsulates the feel of the game itself. The rest of the soundtrack is more atmospheric, punctuating the most iconic scenes in the game. Outside the obvious main theme, Shadows is a great example of this. Every time it played, I got on full alert. While I couldn't tell what the game was exactly using it for sometimes, the effect it has cannot be overlooked.

I think the biggest point of contention comes with the level design. Generally, I had no issue with it. Halo is a game that relies much more heavily on the enemies and players, rather than the environment in which the battle takes place. What, where, and how enemies are placed can completely change how you take on a fight. Even for The Flood, who are more repetitive in nature, can get by due to the variety of options you have against them. Sadly, I can't say it's void of issues. While I generally didn't mind the repetitive nature of the blocky environments, especially in the first snow level and the Library, I can't lie and say I wasn't sick of it when I was forced to go through the snow level backwards. Was it presented in a unique way while throwing The Flood in to make it more diverse? Yes, I'd say so, and the cross Covenant and Flood fights were pretty fun. But it wasn't fun to go through all these again, especially since the snow level was one of the longest in the game already. Outside that though, I have no issues with the levels.

People really need to come back to Halo: Combat Evolved. While there are many games I like that I can understand the lack of general appeal for, Combat Evolved just feels generally overlooked. It seems to be regarded as the awkward and clunky start of the true franchise, when rather it feels like a triumphant achievement of game design, having an incredible amount of thought put into each and every aspect of the game. Go into this game on Heroic with an open mindset, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. (also please do not play with the god awful remastered graphics)

Furi is so close to being amazing, but it slips up on the most crucial step to making it there. (To note, I played this game on Furier mode my first time through, as I wanted both the developer's intended experience, and I love a good challenge.)

Furi has some of the best, most engaging and challenging bosses I've seen in an action game. Each boss carries their own personal flavor and style, tackling different parts of the games mechanics and combining uses of them together in continuously interesting ways. Even in the fights themselves, there's constant variation going on, such as constantly changing and evolving attacks or unique arenas, while still keeping true to and expanding upon the bosses core theme and mechanical focus. I think it'll be a long time until I see an action game with bosses this good. That makes it all the more disappointing to say that this game is taken down by a health system that's far too forgiving. Leniency and making things easier not inherently bad, but the way they implement it is what does it in.

Think about how Dark Souls handles health and healing. Every fight, you only have a very limited amount of health. The only way to gain it back is via health vials, which gives back a limited amount of healing and stops you dead in your tracks. This creates a risk reward system to using vials, while also adding an extra layer of strategy. When is it safe to use it? Should I wait to take a bit more damage so I get to use this vial to it's fullest potential? Should I heal now that a phase change is coming up I've never done? Etc. This is constantly going through your mind each step in battle in Dark Souls. The vials make a system that creates strategy, resource management, and forced mastery of every boss. You have to learn all the bosses by memory to get past them, which helps lift up its admittedly repetitive boss design.

Now, compare to Furi. You start every fight with 3 lives. Every life lost fully heals both you and the boss, but the boss stays on the current phase they're on. Every phase beaten will replenish your health and give you an extra life back. Parrying also grants you some bonus health. See the issue? When the game gives you health (which you could theoretically heal infinite of) and lives, it creates gameplay that focuses not on mastering the bosses, but on getting to the final phase at the same state you were in at the beginning. You can die on each phase in this game but suffer zero actual punishment by the final phase. This sadly undermined most of the combat in the game for me, and turned bosses into just getting past the fluff to get to the real challenge. The fix is so easy too, it could literally be made in a patch.

I can't hate Furi on the whole because, even despite the major flaw, pretty much everything else is perfect. I mentioned the boss design before, but the music, story, visuals, writing.. all of it is really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good. I could never not recommend the game because of just how good those aspects are. And at the end of the day, I still had fun. I just wish it could've made that final step.

One of, if not the worst game I have ever played. Terrible level design (I love holding forward with 0 obstacles!!!), terrible music, terrible cutscenes, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ everything here sucks. It's incredible how much Sonic Team dropped off the second they tried 3D.

they ruined cd's level design and music. genuinely unforgivable

As someone who has spent hours dabbling into RPG Maker, I always knew it had incredible potential. It was by no means the most complex program, but it had all the tools for a gem to be crafted. However, despite the years of its existence, it felt like it never crafted anything that fully clicked. OFF has a fantastic story and great visuals, but puts little attention towards combat. Omori's few good aspects are stuck under heaps and heaps of flaws and bad design. All the various horror games such as Ao Oni or The Crooked Man are generally enjoyable horror experiences but completely ditch the RPG formula.

As an avid turn based RPG fan, Lisa is easily the best I've ever played. For a while, I've struggled to find a JRPG that mixes all the genre's strengths into one package. One with great gameplay would have mediocre story, and vice versa. Story wouldn't tie into the gameplay in satisfying and impactful ways. Combat was diluted with endless, useless systems of high volume yet with shallow complexity. My initial love for these games would always fall off as these cracks in their systems bore deeper. However, Lisa has reaffirmed my love for the potential of the genre by being a shining example of nearly every good aspect about turn based RPGs.

The gameplay was the part I was easily most worried about. There is a depressingly small number of games which I would say respect turned based combat, understand what makes it work, and executes it well. RPG Makers games were usually guilty of not. However, not only does Lisa nail it, but it also handles it in a unique way. In most RPGs, battles are almost entirely confined to the fight itself. You're usually given a moment to prepare, and rarely what happens outside of battles will affect you in them. Lisa instead takes the survival and resource management aspects of turn based combat and spreads it throughout the whole game. The whole "I can't use these items now I may need them later" feeling actually matters here as some items you get cannot be regained. Damage you take cannot always be healed, and you gotta charge forward with low health. And even if you find one, most heal spots have potential risks, including permanent debuffs, losing party members, and getting into fights. You can get randomly ambushed just walking around. Dialogue choices can have extremely dire consequences. Everything in this game sets you back, but you have to keep marching. However, the gameplay isn't carried by this either. Combat is still fun. Don't expect anything amazing; enemies are usually pretty one note and can be tackled with the same strategy. The best thing battles bring to the table though is the potential loss of party members. Specific enemies can instantly kill your teammates permanently. Forever. If you don't save scum, you'll have to reorganize your team and start your strategy from scratch.

However, that brings me into my first, and probably only issue; Lisa is too forgiving. Even on Pain mode, It's simply too easy to get past all the management and consequences. Money and experience can be infinitely farmed, items can be infinitely bought, and saves can be infinitely loaded. I only ignored these aspects out of respect for the spirit of the game, but I cannot overlook them. I can understand these being in the normal mode, but I really think pain mode should've taken the extra step forward, especially since it is possible to beat the game with these restrictions. I placed all of these on myself and got by. It made my experience better, but I could never get the nagging feeling in my head to reload and save resources or characters to go away, which took away from the experience as a whole.

The story is what most people find memorable about the game, and for good reason. I won't go into detail, but I do wanna mention one major thing; how it ties into gameplay. I've always thought that JRPGs are ripe to implement story and combat more seamlessly than other genres. The turn based nature allowing for story beats to happen step by step, as well as the heavy use of text to showcase battles allowing for dialogue and wording, levels and skills allowing for character growth to be easily and immediately reflected into combat, character visuals and names being able to change and reflect revelations, etc. The simplified visual nature of turn based combat allows for so much to be expressed that wouldn't be possible in other games is one of JRPG's biggest strengths, and Lisa has the shining example of this. I won't say specifically, but it's the fight on the first island after making the ship. This fight plays like a normal battle, but every aspect of it tells you about yourself and who you're fighting. I rarely cry, or even get even close to it in games, but this fight got me the closest to it in a long time.

Another big strength of the story is the focus. A lot of games really put importance on the big picture and what's happening inside of it, however Lisa doesn't care about that. The game is obviously post apocalyptic, but what happened before is almost entirely unknown. Any time you view life before, or have it mentioned, it's purely to drive the characters forward. Things like the mutants have little but vague hints as to why they even exist, and the game is all the better for it. For both serious and comedic purposes, the game focuses solely on the characters and their actions, and its the only thing that drives the game forward. The history of the world matters to you as much as it does to the characters themselves, so you rarely hear about it. I really like this approach, and I like how it thematically ties into Brad too.

To move on, Lisa has a very unique handle on its world. It's hard to describe how Lisa combines it's comedic and depression, serious sides. It's not like a coin, as that would imply two completely separated halves. They're moreso blended together, with both happening simultaneously. There will be moments where you'll go through a depressing cutscene where a long time party member gets murdered, and then a minute later you'll walk into a house where Poopsock Gonzalez will tell you the tragic tale of how he became known as Poopsock Gonzalez, before joining your party. This dichotomy wouldn't work if it weren't for two reasons; the first is how the comedic and depressing elements tie into the world. In most games, comedy is meant to relieve the depressing parts, to take you out of the sad and bring you out of the world with something disconnected to be comedic. However in Lisa, every joke is grounded within the boundary of the world itself and how it works. Humor and gags are so common and relentless in Lisa that they retroactively become part of the world itself, likewise with the depressing elements. You eventually just accept both as part of the world itself, and so you're never taken out of the moment by random bits. A shining example of this is the scene where you have to ride the body after the cutscene that nearly got me that I mentioned earlier. You're so depressed by this point that this very small, slight gag honestly does nothing but make you feel worse, and it's genius. The second main reason is because the game is actually really funny and really depressing. It is probably the funniest game I have ever played, and one of the most relentlessly sad games too.

In the end, I am left saddened that Lisa is an exception in its genre. How is stagnation even possible to happen when that is the case? We need more games like Lisa, ones that take a look at the genre they come from and innovate on what can be accomplished while staying true to what made said genre so established in the first place. Lisa doesn't feel like a loveletter to JRPGs, nor does it feel like it exists to be a solution to it's issues; rather, it feels like being a JRPG was just the natural fit to an already incredible idea for a game. And one day, it will click.

i love this game the fez

no p03 handshake

The only reason I tried out this game in the first place was just leave a negative review because of the company, which if you don't know, I suggest looking it up on YouTube. But anyways, I decided to try it out after noticing they made it free to give it a fair shot, since I'm like that with games. It still sucked.

It's probably one of the most soulless, corporate production line games I've ever played. Even the likes of EA and mobile game companies would be appalled and look down upon the idea of putting a merch link directly on the title screen.

As for the game itself, the gameplay seems fun at first but it get really repetitive really fast, which is funny considering the chapter only lasts 30 minutes. I like the idea of the puzzles but they just don't really do anything with them. Though maybe the gameplay would be better if this game wasn't complete jank. Terrible physics, multiple clipping issues, and the hand things feel horrible to use, they never do what you want. The last puzzle in particular is heavily brought down by this.

And there's the chase scene, which is meant to be the climax and highlight of the chapter but I could barely get through it due to an annoying use of invisible walls everywhere. There's some paths you should just straight up be able to go through but because the game doesn't want you to there's an invisible wall, which leads to an annoying segment that drags on. I get that the confusion was probably the point, but there's better ways to do that, like having more winding hallways or putting what may seem like paths on first glance but they're actually blocked vents, or something like that.

And speaking of the chase scene, there's the titular Poppy Playtime himself, who is just a really boring and bland design that is so painfully obviously made with the sole intention of being sold as a toy. Outside of the somewhat threatening height, there isn't a single aspect of his design that's interesting or scary in the slightest. He feels like the embodiment of every mascot horror character of the past decade, but at least characters like Bendy or Baldi have unique memorable aspects and styles that make them memorable; Poppy is just a cardboard cutout to push out as a mascot of the game. The only part I liked about him were his animations, but I'll get to that later.

This game also just has a really uninteresting world and story to me. Maybe it's because I'm tired of this FNaF type of story telling, but this game doesn't try to do anything different from those games, just another big business with a shady secret below the surface that involves dead children for some reason. I get it's subjective, but it's nothing I've never seen before.

The only compliment I can give is that the visual design of this game is overall pretty good. Great models, textures, animations, and I like the look of the factory as a whole. Sucks none of this artistic value is applied to the rest of the game.

Overall just don't play this game. I'm glad I waited to play so I didn't have to send a single cent of cash towards MOB Games. Speaking of that, I find it hilarious that they made Chapter 2 $10 dollars despite promising the future chapters would be $5, completely screwing over people who bought the game beforehand. Good sign of a company that respects its audience.