Recent reviews by jaypeg3

It's a good couple's game for pairs who like a challenge together but aren't looking for an excuse to break up yet. The chaos of dealing with too many tasks and not enough people is challenging but not overwhelming, the humor is charming and consistent, there are power-up combinations that can be memorably game-breaking, but nothing 'necessary' to have a good run and it definitely allows for players to complement each other's strengths/deficiencies. All around good game.

Oh lord, if you play this game with your significant other, make sure you've talked about who gets the kids/pets when you break up.

The gameplay is simple, but unforgiving, you need to be in perfect harmony with your partner and you need to carefully plan out your route. There are cute NPCs that I think are a pleasant reward for advancement, but the target audience for this game appears to be masochists, so there's no shame in using the accessibility options if you don't enjoy repeating the same half-hour of gameplay over and over again because you were 0.0043 seconds off on your timing. I repeat, there is no shame in using the accessibility options.

The artwork and the trailer evokes a sense of exploring some deep, complex world, but the actual gameplay does not live up to this promise. The gameplay really clashes with the tone in a way that destroys the mysterious world evoked by the artwork/flavor text, and while the gameplay isn’t “bad”, it’s not strong enough to carry the game on its own.

The tone seems to suggest that you are exploring some wild, chaotic space, but the gameplay is extremely ridged. The flavor text between fights and delves seems to suggest that your character is supposed to be forming some sort of an emotional bond with the creatures, but if you’re not planning on which half of your deck is going to get ground into expendable meat shields by round 2 you’re not going to make it to round 4. None of the creatures have any sort of unique “flavor” to them, if you separated the card portraits from the creature attacks/stats I would be hard pressed to tell you which went together, this is further emphasized by the fact you’re supposed to take attributes from some of your creatures and add them to other ones. Enemies are grouped in bizarre ways that gives no sense of this being in a cohesive environment, or that any of these creatures have some sort of consistent behavior. I didn’t feel like an explorer diving into the dangerous unknown, I felt like I was playing Temu Pokémon cards in a middle school cafeteria.

As for the gameplay itself…it’s OK. The mix and match powers mechanic is interesting has potential, but I don’t think this game really lives up to that potential. Matches are over really quickly, so if a combo takes more than two turns to set up it’s not worth it because one of the creatures will be dead in three. There are some synergies that can be taken advantage of, but the rouge-like nature of which creatures you can encounter and the limited resources you have to tame creatures means you can never predict at match three what you’re going to have available by match six, making it neigh-impossible to plan out any sort of “build” for your deck. Combine this with the very steep difficulty curve in each run, and I feel like the game punishes players for trying to think of any strategy beyond which creatures hit hardest.

Positive reviews are often boring because there’s nothing to pick apart and examine for flaws. Combat and platforming is fast and smooth, there’s a lot of variety for different playstyles and it encourages players to change their approach when facing new challenges, the world is stunningly beautiful, they have a wonderful juxtaposition between decay and hope that makes the glimmers of joy just that much more beautiful by comparison, the NPCs are a delight, and the story doesn’t require 12 different Wikipedia articles to understand. It’s just a really good game (if you like Metroidvania platformers, but I’m not going to discuss the pros and cons of an entire genera here, just know that this game fits very squarely in that genera).

It is *hard*. I think the difficulty serves to encourage exploration and experimentation, as well as asking players to think more strategically when facing multiple enemies than most games do, but I can also very much understand why someone might not want to spend their limited hours on this earth “getting good” at the cute bug game. I would strongly suggest anyone considering this game play the original Hollow Knight first, it will give you a good idea of whether you’ll enjoy the challenge this game presents.

It’s just a bit too sweet for me.

There’s not much about this game I can say is objectively bad. The one thing I think was an unambiguously poor choice was the lack of a narrative framing to explain the player’s presence in the tribe. It seems to communicate that you’re already an established member with a bit of history with them, which creates a bit of dissonance with the fact that you’ve got no knowledge of the NPCs as a player, and a relationship status of zero as a character. It also really throws a lot of characters at the player right away, which was a bit overwhelming for me. I also didn’t really like the way the game tracked tribal contributions alongside player contributions, part of this is because I’m a try-hard who felt a personal pressure to contribute my “fair share” each day when I probably should have been focused on building my farm/exploring the world, and part of this is because certain game events seem linked to the community contribution level which means that I had a lot less control of the pace of this cozy game than I wanted, however this community contribution system really reenforced the primary message that the developers clearly wanted to this game to have, so even though I disagree with the mechanic I see the logic of why it was included.

Now maybe didn’t give this game enough of a chance, farming games are usually more about narrative rather than game mechanics and I did stop a bit early, perhaps before the story had a chance to take off, but nothing in the early game suggested to me that this would be a story I would enjoy. Now this is very much personal opinion, but the set up didn’t seem to allow much space for conflict or interesting growth. It was utopic, even the conflicts seem obvious miscommunications that would be solved just by sitting people down together and having them communicate their feelings. Now I’m not going to hold it against anyone for craving that level of optimism, especially with how the world is currently, but it just wasn’t a story that I was willing to put in the time to watch unfold.

In the end, I believe this game is going to disappoint you, the real question is whether the journey is going to be worth it.

It is weird to be using rogue-lite elements for a puzzle game. You’re given a random set of rooms each run and have to hope that what you get includes something that will allow you to progress the game. Early on this works surprisingly well, as the player I didn’t just get the mental challenge of solving a puzzle but also the little dopamine rush of winning a gamble each time a room I needed came up in the draw. Early game there were a lot of clues to follow, a lot of rooms that hadn’t been explored, so every run always felt like it had given me *something* to progress me further. But, as the game progressed and I followed more and more trails of clues to their conclusion, there were fewer useful rooms for me to draw, I started having runs that felt like they were useless and this did not mesh well with the fact that this game does *NOT* respect your time. Unskippable cutscenes, mandatory backtracking, slow animations, if felt atmospheric when I had two or three hypothesis I could test in a run, but when I had to go through two or three runs just to test a single hypothesis it started feeling like a pointless grind without an end in sight.

That said, I don’t regret buying this game and I would still suggest it to other players because in my opinion the ride was worth the fall. The rooms are intriguingly crafted, the world beyond the mansion fills out piece by piece in interesting ways, forming a picture of the world that is familiar yet novel. Most importantly there are narrative plateaus, where the player has enough information to feel like they’ve got a complete story even if they didn’t reach the final ending, it gives a stopping point where you can set the game aside and still feel like you’ve accomplished something.

Which is what I did. Maybe I’ll pick it up again later, but for now I’m happy with the milestones that I’ve reached.

PS. This game does lean pretty heavily on some English/American cultural norms for its puzzles, some I might even say that some are specifically upper-middle class English/American norms. If you don’t live in one of these two nations you might have some undue hardships solving some of these puzzles.

I mean, it's solitaire.

I'll admit that I was expecting something more from the team behind BABA IS YOU, but in their defense they never claimed this was anything more than a collection of solitaire games. If you like organizing from chaos without needing much in the way of aesthetics or storyline, then you'll find something in this collection that will scratch that itch. If that's not your cup of tea, maybe stop looking at solitaire games?

Yeah it's a fantastic game, it's beautiful, the voice acting is amazing, the combat puzzles are smooth and dramatic, it's a hugely ambitious project that Larian Studios knocked out of the park. Larian Studios should feel immense pride in the cultural phenomenon they created, and they deserve every ounce of praise they’ve gotten for this game.

But it’s not a game for me, and if you’re here digging through the reviews then maybe it’s not the game for you either. It’s too big and its storylines are too interconnected for me to enjoy this game all the way through. In theory these should not be downsides, these are the selling points of the game, but in practice it kills my desire to play this game before I finish act I.

Let’s break this down a little bit so you can understand where I’m coming from. For interconnectedness of the storylines, basically I pick my character, pick my party, pick my wifu, and then every few hours of gameplay I am teased with hints of fantastic storylines I am missing because of all the things I didn’t pick. So I go back, pick a different set of traits and choose a different wifu, only to be reminded once again of all the storylines I’m missing because of the options I didn’t pick. It’s like going to a restaurant to get some ribs, only for the waiter to go on and on about how great the pasta is. So I set the ribs aside and order some pasta, only to have the waiter start talking up the chicken. Maybe other players can sit down and focus on the story they chose to play, ignoring all the quest hooks they can’t take, but I’ve got too little time and too much FOMO for that. Playing this game, I become a dog who can’t decide which frisbee to chase. Again, this should be great as it entices and allows replay value. I’m sure for lots of other people that’s true, but for me it drives right into my second problem with the game:

It's too long. It’s a great, epic storyline with deep lore, but most of the playtime is not actually spent moving that storyline forward. The true primary gameplay loop is combat, the thing that most of the character’s stats are geared toward and the thing that most of the actual gameplay time is going to be spent doing, and the combat just doesn’t change enough to stay interesting for the duration of the game. Don’t get me wrong, their tactical puzzles are fantastic for the first 15 hours, but after that… it just gets repetitive. Maybe you’re the kind of person who can step away from a game for a couple weeks, let the action hub and spell AOE animations fade from the backs of your eyelids, but for me, if I step away from a story-heavy game for too long I lose the vibe of the plot, especially a story this long and with so many recurring characters, and have difficulty re-immersing myself in the world. And speaking of losing immersion…

The way they tell the main story makes it really difficult for me to get immersed in the storyline, specifically they create an apparently time-sensitive threat that needs to be dealt with then litter the path to resolving that threat with a dozen side quests. Now I could ignore the side quests in favor of what makes the most in-world sense for my character to do, but as said I’ve got huge FOMO and it seems ungrateful to have the developers spend so much time on these side plots just for me to ignore them. Alternatively, I can hunt down every little narrative rabbit hole, and admit that the dramatic tension is fake, that the evil overlord will sit still for as long as I need to collect all the butterflies and help every single cat out of their trees, but that also kills my immersion with the game.

I’m not saying this is a bad game, this game absolutely deserves to be the cultural icon that it is. I still really want to love this game, but despite all my hope that my next playthrough will be *the* playthrough that lets me experience all the joy and excitement everyone else seems to have while playing this game, if I’m being honest with myself BG3 is probably not going to be a game I ever play to the end and I wish I’d known that before getting swept along in the hype.

I mean, it's Tetris. If you don't like Tetris what are you doing here? It's a nice rouge-lite, the resource management and addition of strategic buildings is fun, but it's additive not transformative. The core loop of making patterns match to please your pattern-seeking brain hasn't really changed.

Billy Basso, you sadist.

Seriously though, it's a good game. Predominantly rewards observation, memory, and slavish examination of every bunny-hopping inch of every egg-forsaken room. More dexterity challenges than I expected/wanted, but not to the point where I think it would ruin the game for anyone. Far fewer lateral-thinking or logic based puzzles than I expected/wanted and if that's what you're looking for maybe you should reconsider buying this game.

It's got fantastic spooky-lite ambiance.

Also, Billy Basso is a sadist. No disrespect, he made a fantastic game, but I truly believe that man has spent at least one full day sitting alone, just giggling about all the players getting frustrated by the sneaky cecotropes he's put into this game.