Recent reviews by failedabortion52

Toby Fox is the greatest voice of the internet generation.

One of the most aggressively unique games ever made. The exact middle-point between Shinji Mikami and Suda51's styles, both in terms of gameplay and brain-melting presentation; the gameplay, somehow, perfectly straddles the line between being a point-and-click and a first/third-person-shooter. Aesthetically awesome, with so much black humor and a mindbending political narrative that it feels more like a playable art project concocted by Adult Swim alumni than something a company as big as Capcom would put out, as a *major exclusive* for the GameCube, no less! Paradoxically the type of game we need more of, and yet also needs to be kept a rarity. If you like video games in any way, you owe it to yourself to play this. There is truly nothing else like it.

Don't buy this game at full price. It's a great rendition of Tetris, but $40 is way too steep of an asking price. Wait for a sale.

With that out of the way, please play this. It's still Tetris, so you know it'll be good, but the visuals are breathtakingly beautiful and the soundtrack, while slightly uneven, absolutely soars with its highs. The sound design is immaculate, making the movements of your pieces fit the music of the stage results in so many levels that you can play in a rhythmic way, deliberately moving pieces one way or the other for the sake of keeping the beat and melody alive.

Sometimes, you don't need more than pretty lights.

This is worth the price of admission for DMC3 alone, the other two are just gravy.

Give Ice-Pick Lodge 60 thousand million hundred dollars as soon as humanly possible

A perfect taste of what's to come, and a fantastic evolution of concepts that were only hinted at in the original game; just as much as 2 evolved on the survival mechanics. Yes, part of me does wish that we just got "Pathologic 2 again", but I'm awestruck at the creativity and boldness to take the game in this direction. I'm deeply in love with the medical examinations, and the mysteries each one provides, I'm excited for the full game for them alone.

The only complaint I have (other than the as-expected messy performance) is how quickly Apathy builds up. I think it's a very creative concept that is in line with how IPL has done things in the past, but it feels just a smidge too oppressive, especially when it impacts walking speed so heavily; I'd really prefer for it to either build up slower or be a little less impactful. Otherwise, I'm entirely on board with what they're doing-- Disco Elysium by way of Camus.

this is the best game ever why is there blood in my mouth

Less of a game and more of a book with walking in between the pages. Don't listen to anyone who says this game is too hard, or unplayable, or you should skip it and play 2 instead (you should play 2, though). It's so much easier than people say it is, you just have to learn to speak the game's language, so to speak. The survival aspects really only matter for the first couple of days; once you have access to a gun and the burned out districts, things become pretty trivial. I would say that's a bad thing, but when the main focus of the game is the writing, it just lets you focus on that more. An experience that will live with you, mainly because you'll spend 70 hours completing it if you play all 3 paths, which you will.

Some general advice:
- Don't be afraid to savescum, it's fine, everyone does it. The game is janky as hell and F5 and F8 are your friends. Save before going through infected districts. Save before going into infected/abandoned buildings. Hell, save before talking to people; if you don't mind your manners or make the wrong choice, you can and will lock yourself out of things, or worse.
- Read your letters. You'll hear a little paper rustling noise every morning/afternoon, and see a symbol in the bottom left; press L (by default) to read them and start your daily quests (around 7:30 AM), or occasional side quests.
- Stock up on food on day 1. Sell whatever you don't need and buy food. On that same note, sell your medicine (except Feromycinum), Immunity is mostly pointless; see the first point.
- Entering a building despawns any hostile NPCs, and re-entering it refreshes the trade inventories of the NPCs inside. The latter is mostly useless, unless you find one of the blonde little girls, in which case you can reload her inventory to get Shmowders easily. You'll want at least 5 by day 12.
- Use a guide. No shame in it. If you want my advice, use it whenever you need it to point you in the right direction, but if you want to use it for the whole ride, that's fine, too. Whatever makes you experience the whole game, as long as you're reading.
- There are two great mods that I unfortunately can't link to, but are available on Nexus; 1080p Remastered HUD to make you not require glasses to read the HUD, and Better Map, which is exactly what it sounds like. People can say that the map is deliberately misleading, but after a few days of using it, it just becomes annoying.

I'm reviewing this solely from my experiences with Zombies. Is the game fun? Sure, well enough. The movement enhancements are a great leg up that I think most, if not all, players would agree with. I find that the guns have more recoil than I prefer, but never enough to be too bad. Really my opinion on this is just that it's Cold War 2, with some improvements and some drawbacks. It's more balanced, but I find that the level of power in CW was just plain fun, and the scaling difficulty curve of this game makes every game feel more stale; the brick wall you run into at round 31 is palpable. The writing is worse than Cold War's, but if you're coming to a Zombies game for story and characters after BO4's ending, you should really know better. All in all, it's fine. Not the best game in the series, but not terrible, either.

The reason I strongly advise any and all players to stay away from this game is the level of transparent greed that Activision has been soaking in for years, with it coming to a head in this game. A $70 game, with a paid *and premium* Battle Pass, and exuberantly priced bundles of cosmetics (e.g. skins for your guns and characters). If you're going to engage in these practices, you usually only do *one*, not all three at once. At every turn, the game hounds your ankles for more money, with the Battle Pass and Shop being visible from the main menu before the game itself, and advertisements for bundles laced into damn near every screen. Not to mention, these rewards are *not* purely cosmetic; getting a skin for a gun or grenade also permanently unlocks it, without even needing to use the skin, meaning that you are rewarded with progression skips for dumping more money into a game that you, again, already paid $70 for.

All of this is bad enough, but at worst, it's just frustrating and irritating, but maybe not enough to completely ward off any recommendations. What crosses the line for me and makes this into a downright slap in the face is the use of artificially-generated art in multiple of the game's assets. For a company to be so avaricious as to charge what Activision does for bundles and battle passes, only for certain "rewards" to be sludge lazily cranked out by a machine, when they're one of the most profitable and richest companies in gaming? It goes beyond being anti-consumer into flat out insulting. If the game doesn't give me the slightest bit of respect, and in fact goes completely against my respect, then why should I return the same?

If, in some pipe-dream future, Activision stops using AI, then I'll come back here and say *maybe* get it if you have disposable income and are willing to be harassed with the constant reminders to "BUY BUY BUY". But until then, please spend your time (and money) with companies that don't take your money and then directly spit in your face.

BLASPHEMY AGAINST THE HOOOOOOLY SPIRIIIIIIIT

Counter to my feelings on AB+, I actually find that the two final bosses this adds are quite good! The final final boss is the best the game has to offer, and while I'm mixed on Mother, I've gathered that she's one that does ease up tremendously with further experience. I do question a DLC that's half (or probably more than half) just fan-made content made official, but considering the content was good enough to get the mark of approval from the devs, I feel that probably says something. The two new characters are very unique, to say the least, and I appreciate the different experiences they bring to the game rather than just being "Isaac but blue". Luckily, the real character additions come in the form of the Tainted characters; alternate versions of the entire cast, with new abilities that shake up the game in fun (or at least interesting) ways that really make them stand out from their originals, and not just be "Isaac but harder". I do think this DLC's weak spot is in the "alt path" (aforementioned fan-made content) feeling out of place, aesthetically and literally, and frustratingly difficult with its tendency for bullet spam. The best aspect of the DLC, for me, is the massive overhaul to a great majority of the items in the game; yes, some once great items have been nerfed a bit to keep them from being instant win buttons, but the upside is that an even larger amount of awful items have been buffed or even reworked into good or, at the very least, fun items. It still suffers from the roguelike curse (the first 5-10 minutes always being dreadfully boring), but I find that a lot of the problems of the past have been significantly eased here. It's not perfect, and there's still some flat out bullsh!t, but would it really be Isaac without it?

Really unfortunate that Repentance, a great DLC, requires this, as it's easily the worst collection of content the game has to offer. A new character that's just a more boring version of Isaac (which is a low bar), a worse version of an unpopular and repetitive side mode, and hands down the two worst, most unfun final bosses in the entire game. Where the other bosses reward you for proper dodging, Delirium and Ultra Greedier flood the screen with projectiles and visual clutter, while cranking the boss armor up to 11; the former in particular being almost entirely random to fight, which is miserable in a game that requires consistent play as much as this. The item bloat in this stuffed the game to the seams with useless trite, though admittedly Repentance seems to have fixed this, so I won't say that definitively. This is basically spleen-venting since the DLC is a necessary stepping stone for Repentance, but I just wanted to get my thoughts out on how poor this DLC is.

It's good. I will say that it's a little bit too based on "number go up" design (nothing against the game, just a game design principle that turns me off) for me to fully get hooked on like so many others, but it's a fun hour or so every time I boot it up. In fairness, there's little that you could do with a poker game that isn't "number go up", so I'm not too harsh on it. Nice soundtrack, honestly gorgeous pixel art, and an immensely creative concept and execution, about as good as you could ask for from a roguelike. It still falls victim to the typical roguelike trappings (dull early games, grinding for one specific thing, general RNG frustration), but it's still fun through that. Maybe. I've deliberately avoided the harder stakes to still actually have fun, so. I understand why this gets the praise it does, even if I don't personally find it quite as addicting; it really is a perfect execution of what it wants to be.