Recent reviews by Spicy Bee

Sephonie is a game that started with an initial reaction of "This seems neat" and ended with a reaction of "I love how much love and care went into this"

Got this game on a recommendation from a friend without knowing too much about the story and overall I enjoyed it, albeit a bit confused by the end. There are elements that feel up to interpretation but overall I thought the story had a lot to say about learning about the places and people around you in order to help support the future. But while that was my takeaway I think other people will have their own interpretation of the story.

The core gameplay consists of exploring a cave system on the island of Sephonie, your move-set is generally basic, primarily consisting of a sprint, a wall run and a mid-air dash. But the game does enough with this to keep it interesting, even introducing some new mechanics right at the end. There are also some puzzle sections where you have to place blocks to match 3 or more of the same colour in a line which I found fun. The core concept or the puzzles is simple but it introduces some fun curveballs throughout that really make you consider every move.

I really enjoyed the collectibles in this game, though I think its unrealistic for a player to find them all until they've beaten the game (Which proves area-specific counters for collectibles so you can find what you've missed) as some of them very specifically expect you to explore places that you might not think are accessible without some clever platforming, which almost feel like a nod to players that thought they got somewhere they weren't expected to be. The collectibles are completely optional but provide nice insights about the playable characters.

Notably basically every element of this game has accessibility options to make the gameplay easier if you want it, which I really liked, especially if you just want to explore.

For me, what cemented my enjoyment of this game was the post-game, where you unlock an option called "Bubble Adventure" which adds bubbles to the levels which you can touch to gain height and if you land on the ground after it counts as collected. This doubles as a fun way to add shortcuts when searching for the final few collectibles but also as a fun collectible in and of itself. The personally loved the rewards for collecting the bubbles, which unlocked dev environments from the development process that you can explore . And with 400 bubbles in the game, only 250 is required for the final reward so there's a lot of leeway to avoid particularly tricky ones.

There's an element of this game which I can only describe as raw which I adore, the devs put so much heart and soul into this game and it shows. As a piece of art the music and visuals are phenomenal. The story was gripping and even the elements that I didn't quite understand had me hooked. If you like exploration based platformers, or just like a good story with a lot for interpretation, check this game out.

As a piece of playable art, Dream BBQ is a wonderful experience, though I personally believe it leaves much to be desired as an actual game. If you just want a weird and wonderful 2 or so hours, just download it and give it a try (it is free), that said, if you think you'll be tempted to go for 100% achievements or simply finding the paid collectibles, you might want to read on

I'd recommend experiencing this game for yourself once (maybe twice) but if you go for the achievements (Or if you buy the supporter edition and go for the collectibles) you'll find a decent amount of things will boil down to spending a significant amount of time just doing something repetitive or nothing at all (One of the collectibles requires waiting in a spot for around 10 minutes I believe) which quickly turns this into a weird and wonderful piece of media you experience for yourself and share with friends into an exercise of reading a guide to find all the achievements and collectibles you missed.

I'm also not a fan of the saving system, you can only autosave in your current slot, which feels extremely limiting when the game encourages experimentation. You can't get everything in one playthrough and there are specific aspects that may require you to try many times to succeed, however the only option to go back to retry (Or just try a different combination of actions) is to reset your entire save and skip through a bunch of cutscenes, I can only imagine this will get worse once chapter 2 (and beyond) are released)

This game could really benefit from the ability to create savefiles manually and to be able to select them at will (Like Doom or Fallout New Vegas) rather than be limited to autosaves on your current slot (Even if this required beating the game first so you can just enjoy the experience first, it feels like QoL that should exist in some form), though I doubt this will be changed.

Its a compilation of a bunch of games and some of them individually have arguably been worth the price of the entire compilation.

I've beaten 6 games and completed the bonus objective on 4 of them so far, I've not touched over half the games still and I've had way more than enough fun to recommend this game.

From golf to simple arcade games to an entire puzzle platform game, this game has been a blast for the majority of the time I've put into it. It can be extremely challenging at times depending on the game you're playing, but there is something in here for everyone to enjoy... and if you enjoy a bit of every genre you're going to adore this game.

And that's not even going into some of the secrets you'll find if you have a keen eye ;)

Extremely short incremental game, but also really fun and doesn't outstay it's welcome, was exactly what I needed after a less than ideal day and for $3 its a nice little distraction which won't take up too much of your time

I absolutely loved this as a sequel to Grapple Dog, though there are some aspects that may be a bit more polarising to fans of the first game I loved them personally.

The pacing is much improved from the first game, it feels like they took the themed level approach from the first game and just scattered them throughout the story, which really helps reduce the tedium of going through a world with the same theme throughout with the same song playing throughout. Instead you'll get a few levels per world that draw from a few different themes to add a nice bit of variety.

The addition of a 2nd playable character Luna is something that I think comes down to personal taste, I enjoyed just having a character with a gun I could shoot (though the mechanics can be a bit broken at times, I enjoyed it), the main downsides is the aiming can be a bit clunky while you're trying to move and I often found myself trying to use Luna's dash as Pablo and ground pounded to my death, but overall I didn't find these too much of an issue for me personally.

I enjoyed the move to make the berries an actual currency to buy skins rather than another thing to collect to progress (Previously they were required to get medals and you had to hunt down a majority of them) They can be ignored if you don't want the cosmetics, though I collected them pretty thoroughly throughout the game and didn't die that much, I still needed about an hour of "grinding" to get everything, so I kinda wish the prices were adjusted a bit towards the higher end.

I liked the collectibles in this game, they didn't feel too difficult to locate outside of one collectable (Duck Bands) which seemed to be deliberately hard to locate and get to, which really made me experiment and learn new quirks and movement mechanics which I really enjoyed learning (And it was amusing to realise that the devs knew some of the particularly broken bits of movement tech and just left it in the game and designed some secrets around it)

I like the movement, the new character and the music so overall this was a very enjoyable experience that I ended up just beating 100% in under 24 hours, where as the original game took a similar amount of time to complete but I kept needing to take a break from it due to the pacing.

Highly recommend this game whether you've played the original or not. The writing still has a lot of heart and charm, and it was a joy to 100% outside of the final hour of berry grinding.

For £15 it scratches the heisting game itch better than some of the competition which cost twice as much (if not more)

Great games, though you may need to deal with a bit of lag from flash emulation

If you liked the first 2 games in the trilogy, you'll love this one!

It ok

:)