Recent reviews by Nelly

If you like Paganism, the Occult, and immersive, well-thought out world-building and you enjoy a good read, this game is a no-brainer. The art and atmosphere is beautiful and the writing is stellar. The setting alone explores a very interesting premise, and shows the lengths to which a village may follow superstition into tragedy. Every character is written with a unique voice, there are some instances of lovely humour and just so so much detail put into the lore and belief system present in the village. Til the very end there remains doubt whether the supernatural powers you become familiar with during the playthrough are real or mere superstition.

There are mini-games accompanying dialogue that present a nice level of challenge whilst conveying the pain and struggle of the characters. The map-based puzzles are also enjoyable, and nothing takes all that long to accomplish so that you'll generally have an easy time progressing through the visual novel.

My few gripes with the game are that:

- The English translation is a little awkward, but perfectly readable. Might throw you off at first, but the essence of the writing shines through and is well worth reading to the end.
- The game doesn't really communicate what decisions you ought to take in any given situation to achieve a good outcome, which would be fine, only the lore is rather obscure when you get started and the characters have a lot of knowledge you don't, so it feels like you are aimlessly traipsying around in the dark a lot. Whether you get a good ending or not relies on you making cumulative good choices throughout your playthrough, so when answers feel very obscure and arbitrary it's very easy to lock yourself out of a bad ending. That being said, the ending is not that significant to the story.
- overall the ending didn't leave me too satisfied. It felt like there were a lot of narrative threads that could have been tied up a little better, or themes that could have come to more fruition, because there are so many beautiful things going on in the story.

This project was developed by a very small team and deserves support. It's an incredible ambitious and beautifully written project that explores paganism in a way I've never seen before.

If you like the 'we were here' franchise or even if you've never tried one of their games before, I highly recommend picking up this one. It is by far the most complex, best-produced, quality game in the series with 10-12 hours of gameplay, lovely stage-setting, detailed and unusual puzzles and great sound-design.

We were here is a great experience with a friend. The gameplay relies heavily on your communicating well together, having patience for one another, and being willing to bash your head against a wall of puzzles for several hours with various initial missteps committed. At times, the puzzles can be a little more frustrating than fun as some of them rely on you trying to visualize your partner's complex screen and memorize it to proceed effectively with a puzzle, but the effort always feels worth it. There are many cool moments in the game, way more so than in previous installments, that feel engaging, cinematic and adventurous.

I really enjoy how we were here quite intuitively makes you feel a connection to your play partner as your two characters, visually indistinguishable for the most part, run into each other again at last after being suddenly separated. Proceeding together is fun and feel triumphant. There is a real feeling of joint accomplishment, of tackling a great challenge, of overcoming all odds.

Really good time, highly recommended.

Absolutely beautiful experience about connection, with fantastic linguistic-based puzzles and a lot of other great mechanics that keep it fun throughout. The game's art direction is incredible and the writing and design deliver moments of joy around every corner. The ending pulled everything together beautifully.

Highly recommended!

Great fun, took us about 80 minutes. Challenging without being too confusing, definitly takes full engagement. We picked it up on sale for £2.

Such exciting world building. What I love most about these creator's games is that they manage to mix horror aspects with areas where it feels safe and fun, and you can actually get sincerely attached to the setting despite all the surrealist darkness. Would highly recommend!

I like this game, pixel art is on point, great atmosphere and humour in places, a large world to explore and plenty to do for many hours of fun. I don't think the beginning is too grindy at all and its quite enjoyable to figure out a strategy for how to progress.
Only downside for me and the only reason I stopped playing a while is that I was hoping for a more narrative game with closer interaction with the characters and the world, but where that level of immersion is concerned, this is no stardew valley and the majority of characters are very much just questgiver NPCS.
Would still recommend, nice little simulation/management game.

Nice, short game with a good storyline and very interesting art style. Puzzles are fairly simple, but I didn't mind that as it didn't disrupt the story much. Some require a little creative thinking. The time-travel is a very nice mechanic, but it does come with a lot of backtracking and the character moves a little slowly, so I would only recommend this game if you have time to take it slow and enjoy the ride.

After reading a rather terribly negative review on Rock paper Shotgun about this series of games, I felt obliged, after just recently having finished it, to write a review. Deponia is a colourful, not too long adventure game set on a planet full of trash. The setting, in my opinion, was vivid and interesting and highlighted at parts a social political sense of class division, which was not so much explored in the first game yet, but is promising for the other games afterwards.

Rufus is not your typical hero main character. In fact he is not very likeable at all. His humour is insulting at best, he is scruffy, goofy, not so intelligent, selfish and mostly mean. But that, to me, made the game perfectly charming. Whilst I feel as though the main character deserves every bit of bad luck coming to him, it was amusing to watch him. I agreed more with the irritated characters around him than with him personally, but it was refreshing to see that sort of character and reflect on his actions as handled through the player.

I personally find stories with dislikeable characters far more interesting than the typical likeable ones, and Daedalic has a talent for having unusual main characters take the spotlight. That being said, deponia is one of these games that should not be taken as offensive or as too seriously. The game's humour, in my percetion, relies on the meanness and dislikability of the main character, and if one is easily offended or insists on politically correct representation of everything, this game may not be the best option for them.

Anyone however who doesn't need to overthink such things and can enjoy a little ruder humour might very well enjoy the deponia series with a few nice puzzles, charmingly frustrated characters and colourful settings. Maybe not Daedalic's best piece of work in my opinion, but definitly worth a play.

I didn't feel like this game was a good representation of choice-and-consequence games. You play as Rita, a barista stranded on an island with five other survivors after a plane crash, and are put into the position of the group's "leader" in order to help yourself and the others survive.
Let it be said at this point that I only played the game once, and I appreciate that its charm would lie in the different playthroughs and outcomes, but I was put off of playing it again after the first playthrough and the extra mini game attached to it.

First of all, the storyline is simple and engaging enough. Nothing narratively impressive. The characters are fun and colourful, but a little too archetyped to add any depth to the already relatively shallow narrative. The art style is nice. Refreshing art work, good design.

Why is the group following the player characters decisions? We get asked to decide for the group, but our character has in no way proven to be qualified to lead. Suddenly being asked to decide for this group of desperate survivors resonated with me as unrealistic and killed the emmersion. We are only in charge because we are the Player.

The decisions we get to make seem to reflect on relevant issues in the situation. Do we search the wreckage, or build a signal? do we look for food or water? Do we abandon base to search elsewhere? Whilst this issues are relatable and realistic, the outcomes of your decisions do not always reflect the players logical thinking. The game creates issues where in realty, a simple solution could have been found, and as a player I felt cheated by that.
You may for example decide to do one task with only half of the group, and the other will, for no particular reason, decide to do nothing all day. These often occuring non-issues result in death and major problems, but the player had no way of knowing how to deal with them better.

Characters die in these awkwardly created situations. The way the player character and the other survivors deal with this killed the immersion for me entirely. They simply don't care. As the dialogue goes, they might as well have gone: "oh what a shame. Whatever. Moving on,"

The mini game that comes with "Dyscourse" seems entirely unrelated, and appears to make ridiculous characters out of other indie game developers. Either I missed the point, or it is just bashing other devs.

For 15 euro, I could not recommend this game. It could have done a lot better with its original idea.

This is a thought provoking, original, well written, incredibly human game with a lot of subtle humour that really reflects on its own nature. I was positively surprised by it.

Character choice is interesting and new, although at first I didn't quite understand what I was meant to be doing. This later turns out to be the absolute purpose of the game, I guess. You're down on life, your love has left you, and you know nothing as certain as that you have to get her back.
So you go on a long, sometimes brutal journey to reach him/her, making ethical decisions on the way, deciding how to make the days count.
The game can at times be slow, but it gripped me from the start with its writing. Events happen frequently and keep the pace just fine. I honestly cared for some of the characters and found myself sometimes going back to a previous safe just in order to amend a bad decision I made. Although I imagine going with your guts at first and sticking to them is also really great in this game. And probably makes more sense for what the developers intended.

Here your choices really give the impression of mattering, and you have a large impact on the lives of the other characters in the story. Be good, be bad, you can be always a monster, sometimes a monster - you get the idea.

Can really recommend this game. Worth several playthroughs I reckon, because one playthrough is definitly not enough to see all the options there could be if you had only done something different. Always a few other people to side with, or other decisions to make that determine how you feel about the person you made the character become in the end.

Ending is probably a bit deterministic. From what I can see so far there is about three or four different endings, but they dont necessarily rely too much on all the things you have decided during the journey. I enjoyed the ending nonetheless, although it wasn't the best written part in the story. Something a character in the story says comes to mind "are you prepared for your happy ending?" well we might not even want it. Or something like that.

Anyway. Graphics are charming. Music stays in the head but is always well fitting. Few minigames to break the old mold, some of them pretty fun. Real interesting concept. Can recommend wholeheartedly.