Recent reviews by Wojit

A cool little retro RPG, with great systems, good writing, and a compelling Lovecraftian story in a medieval setting.

Fun and cute! If you like management games and twee romance.

It's like Fate of the World except fun and not punishingly difficult!! Maybe decarbonisation should be less fun and more difficult?? This probably functions better as an educational game tho.

Actually good it turns out! Despite generally really enjoying Firaxis games I avoided this one for a combo of reasons (Chimera squad wasn't very good; I assumed this would be another XCOM clone; the marketing is god-awful (why is the colour image so yellow! Why is Wolverine grimacing like that!); I am generally sick of Marvel ♥♥♥♥; etc). I eventually picked it up on sale (it is a Firaxis game after all), and it massively surprised me. It's goth but light, funny, well-written (if sometimes way too Whedonesque), and wonderfully original.

It's essentially a tactical/spacial deckbuilder, with cards that let you move around a 2D plane, interact with the environment and hit things. During the combat missions, everything comes together real well, and play feels satisfying. Between missions, there's a bunch of chatting with characters and performing activities which all either advance the plot or help build decks (one deck for each character, which combine into a 24 card deck when three characters go on a mission). Those downtime bits sometimes get a bit tedious, especially if you don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about marvel characters, but the missions stay interesting and challenging with the help of some really well-implemented (and optional) difficulty scaling.

I got a few minor gripes, the biggest of which is it is maybe a bit long. I was hardly racing through, but my 62 hours of gameplay is a single playthrough. I took a looooong pause in the middle of the story, probably about 40 hours in, because I'd lost... Maybe not interest, but momentum. I came back to it a week days ago and raced through the rest of it, and it felt fresh enough to keep me interested to the end. The deckbuilding could also be a bit more interesting: there are mechanics that make you destroy old cards, which discourages flexibility and experimentation, and some cards are Simply Better than others, which leads towards making a certain kind of deck for each hero except the Protagonist.

Anyway yeah cool play it imo

The Running Man as an X-Com like tactical turn-based game with curated levels, and decent plot/characters! A little easy once all your characters' skills are in place, but doesn't overstay its welcome at all.

More like a conditional recommend but that's what you get when Steam has a binary rating system!!! It's a neat kind pulp horror Monkey's Paw story which is largely about how Corporations and various Right Wing movements create and exploit fear in order to advance their agendas. That, like, theme works well, and the game never lets the leaders off those movements off the hook with its supernatural conceit. Also, the stories are fun and the art is cute. On that level the game is a success. It makes reference to various urban legends, including some particularly homophobic and antisemitic ones, and while it doesn't explicitly deal with that homophobic or antisemitism, it does always operate on the level of "these myths are false and are working against your interests," even within the logic of the gameworld.

The less successful bit is, like, the gameplay. It basically plays like a very simple strategy game, and the strategy matches the theme well, but it's all a bit too... Simple. Like, it's not far above the level of the kind of phone game where you just click on the right things at the right times. There's no challenge, difficult decisions or deep thought required. To the creators' credit, they obviously know that, and so the game doesn't outstay its welcome or try to provide a pointless Endless mode. But I do wish there was a bit more I could sink my teeth into on that level.

I've played a number of novel indie grand strategy games that just don't play well, so I was skeptical when I stumbled across this game, but it absolutely knocks it out of the park, with an enthralling, deep and unique gameplay that has had me staying up way too late the last few nights. At first touch the game seems overwhelming, with masses of information and characters and variables, but the tutorials and hints are perfectly calibrated to give you a handle on the basics without railroading you into any particular playstyle or strategies, and within a few hours of play I knew how to read the board, manipulate the world and find any information I needed.

Great retro shooter in the Duke Nukem style based on a character from Hypnospace Outlaw. Does a great job of, like, level design as exposition.

I finished The House in Fata Morgana! As with Certain Other Games you may have seen me play, this is essentially a long book. Maybe you could say that of most visual novels. The clue is in the name. But in particular this is one with very few choices, and none that don't lead to fairly quick dead ends.

And as to the story... So when I was young I read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut. When I came to write my own major work at the end of high school, I was inspired by one of his rules for writing short stories: "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of." I used to think this was a cool and fun thing to do, but I think I've gone off it somewhat lately, and increasingly look for stories with a bit more light. That said, The House in Fata Morgan subscribes heavily to this technique. It just turns the Misery valve to full and then breaks off the tap. Or something. Idk how valves work. Point is, it is structured to have the most miserable things happen to its characters at all time. And at first, at least for me, there was a feeling of "oh this feels a little gratuitous." But it starts to make sense, and it comes together, and we really do get to see what the characters are made of in the most delightful way.

In terms of the visual novelly features, the art is quite lovely. The music is incredible, like, really often ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ weird but in ways that utterly grew on me to the extent I bought the soundtrack. And in one particular chapter, it did some really cool and unsettling things the likes of which I've not seen in any other visual novel, in my extraordinarily limited experience.

My only critique is one that I would also have about Umineko, These stories are long. They sometimes feel longer than they need to be, but in both cases I look back at them and think, "Literally not a single scene could have been cut. This story, so wonderfully told, needed to be this way." But then maybe it's not a matter of scenes. Maybe some moments could have used a bit less repetition, slightly less wordiness, a slightly tighter framing.

Anyway, there's no question of it having overstepped its welcome. In fact I've already got the... Expansion? Follow up? Bonus chapter? I don't know what it is, but I'm about to start it.

Superb gameplay. Just utterly perfect experiences of flow, impeccable level design, utterly smooth handling. Very good gameplay. Everything else about it... Took me a while to warm up to. The plot is absolutely solid, if a bit Edgy (self-consciously so). The aesthetics feel like Paradise Killer with all the weirdness filed off. The writing... Feel a little lackluster at first, like, overly reliant on easy cliche and broad character archetypes, but it did grow on me somewhat by the end, as the characters became more familiar and fleshed out. The great voice acting helped with that (especially Ian Jones-Quartley playing Radicles But Evil). I was surprised at the end to read Aevee Bee's name in the credits for the writing, but it makes sense. Some of the writing does feel like We Know The Devil with, again, most of the weirdness (and explicit transness) filed off. As I said, it grew on me.

That gameplay, tho. I imagine I'll find myself going back to play some of the post-game challenges.