Recent reviews by Asva

TODO

I'm disappointed... 😒

The goods:
* Music is pretty good as a standalone, but doesn't match the scene. I.e. in dungeon having more subtle music would make more sense to me.
* Anime inserts and introduction are top notch.

The bads:
* Story had some consistency at the very beginning, but it lost me in 4-5 hours into gameplay. Felt like random mumbo jumbo at that point. Big words, character development in 4 sentences. Game is very much in a rush. Why? I would've gladly spent some more time diving in worldbuilding.
* UI felt great at first, but as I played more - I felt it's not convenient. There are some things I didn't see, like enemy or my heroes statuses. And it's overall exhausting and too much in your face.
* I though Metaphor would be a better Persona, but no, it's just another Persona (with shiny wrapper). Expect to see:
* A lot of backtracking in dungeons. And mobs respawn. And dungeons are bland. So not exactly the most fulfilling activity.
* Big empty multi-storey dungeons. I don't understand what kind of experience that decision is meant to induce. My intent was to play rpg, not pathfinding simulator.
* When you start battle - you really really want to start with priority. For that you have to hit enemy and avoid them hitting you. That system doesn't feel great. Camera sometimes hides enemies and the movement and hits are too fast.
* When you start battle with ambush and the group is pretty big - you might get straight up destroyed. This happened to me in second dungeon in game, and I had to replay it from the start.
* There are a lot of battles and they're pretty much the same. I would assume you need to battle couple of thousand times in this game. I would also assume they made the game fast to make this less painful. I see no reason why there should be so many battles in the game.
* You have set amount of mana on dungeon. When you're out of mana - you pretty much only can use basic attacks. Killed monsters restore a tiny amount of that, but not too much. So when you're out of mana - you kinda have to get away from dungeon, as you're dealing very little damage. I don't understand why that's needed.
* Your time is limited. That's not a problem by itself, but it doesn't feel great for me to work around that issue. It looks like "Take close attention or start game anew". Why this exists?
* Loading screens.

I might play some more, maybe with lowered difficulty to observe the touted storyline. We'll see. So far, my experience is far from blissful.

This was addictive, fun and short! Remininded me of Forager somewhat.

But let's move to things that could be improved.
* UI is not great, I'm used to Factorio/Shapez visual clarity and meaningfulness, so got big standards. Here it's a bit of a mess. Most indicative for me was research tree. It's very hard to differentiate researched tech from non researched one.
* I found no way to move buildings. I didn't want to rebuild them and had to move one by one by hand.
* Game is pretty straightforward, there is no decision making, all stage is exactly the same as previous. Maybe except for last one, which was more time consuming, but that's it.

Game doesn't have any replay value, but all right 5-10h of semi-passive entertainment.

This is a very robust immersize visual experience. Puzzles felt more of a narrative tool rather than a challenge.

I played on monitor in lit room, but I should've probably played on projector with dimmed lights, to maximize impact.

I think this is the best visual-meditative game I've played so far.

Overall: Great Game.

Couple of criticism I gathered, while playing on hard with friend:
* Almost all bosses are cheesable (you can shoot them off-screen). And my gamer soul finds it hard to not cut corners.
* Most of the equipment is irrelevant. I played as ranged/summoner and I used 2 sets through all the game. I used earliest summon spell (bats) and just upgraded it. I changed ranged options though, so that's something. But it feels I should be more inclined to experiment. (maybe make some enemies very resistant to ranged or something)
* I had to choose utility over features . The game has teleport off-hand. It allows you to jump through creeks in walls and empty spaces. I just used it through all the game because of added convenience.
* There is a lot of useless crap . I wish there was an option to just disable all the cosmetic stuff. I'll never use it and it just makes inventory hard to manage. I had some fun with initial setup of storage system, collecting item sets on mannequins, but it gets stale very quick.
* Cooking system is too much . You only need to use a couple of recipes in practice. The way it is - it's hard to find the recipe you need. Maybe something like bookmarks would help, so you can easily go through your personal recipes.
* Inventory management . Some buttons do not make sense. Developer should have just copied handling from terraria or minecraft. I.e. to use item, you have to move it to active slot, then exit inventory, then use it. You also can't run and use inventory at the same time. There are more issues and I don't see any reason for inventory to be that clunky.
* Hard difficulty is not managed well. Everything kinda one-shots you and enemies are getting bullet-spongier. But still the game didn't feel too hard nor required a lot of tries to clear. I wish there was some difference in hard mode apart from tweaked damage and health.

Excellent new solutions:
* Update system for items. Early game items do not lose relevance.
* Persistent items. I'm not sure why other games are not doing this. Nothing is ever lost in Core Keeper and that feels great.
* Snake boss sequence and fight itself felt great. Most fun I had in this game, wish it was a bit more difficult though.
* Black wall fight was excellent. You can make do with crappy arena if you're skilled enough. We had all right arena and it took us about 6 tries :D.
* Movable Portals. Portals were great in general, as building railroads and backtracking on each death is just painful.
* No Grind. Every grindy activity could be automated or done very quickly if you know what you're doing.

Apart from what I just mentioned, the game released not too long ago, so content is severely lacking and I would mostly consider current state a solid framework of things to come. Maybe I'll attempt to speed-run early game to get to new content. Looking up to that!

I could say for sure - this is the best idle game I played so far.

The way it works - is that you have a number of systems, and you only can focus on a couple of them at once. So it's always a matter of choice and a balancing act. There is no way to brute force the game by leaving the game for a month. You make a choice, go away for a day or so, make another choice.

Overall was very smooth experience for me. I didn't enjoy the last part, as I stopped feeling the need to play idler. Maybe I'll return in some time.

Feels like a prototype so far.

Visuals are interesting and relaxing.

Gameplay... is not there.

Very small nice experience, maybe around 2 hours.

Issue I had was that the game detected incorrect region and ping was abysmal. So it didn't run nicely and I was getting a lot of disconnects before I changed it.

Probably due to Total Mayhem Games being a small studio - the level of polish is sometimes lacking. I had some audio issues and had to switch to Discord, it's also not playable with unstable connection. There were points where interacting with items felt tricky.

This game is set as a narrow experience, so there isn't much wiggle room or sandbox elements. Which I would consider a plus for focused coop.

The ideas for puzzles are just endless and I don't understand where team gets inspiration! That is to say puzzles are excellent. I'd consider them a benchmark for that genre.

Maybe something I'd like to see are puzzles of higher difficulty, as I already went through all games in series and got maybe a bit too good with communication and puzzle solving. So I don't feel as much accomplishment.

It didn't bring me any joy.

Feels like a skeleton of idea right now.
* Visuals are very unclear.
* Shooting is unresponsive, and more of a gimmick.
* Feels like you don't have much understanding of current state of resources.

Overall I didn't feel any meaningful decision making, rather some colors and menus and numbers thrown at me to supposedly enjoy.

Initially I considered the game to be somewhat of a Nova Drift, but with coop. The dream...

I didn't play too far as I found game has significant issues:
* Hitboxes are way off. Most of time I was hit - I didn't understand why.
* Colors are off. It's very hard to differentiate projectiles from enemies.
* Design language is off. I would assume arrows to be projectiles, not enemies.
* Perspective is off. It's hard to understand how far the enemy is from you. It's very hard to understand where jumping boss would land. I would much prefer visuals to be flat (Nova Drift) or simple isometry. Area should be square.
* I believe random movement for enemies is a mistake for this kind of game. Controlled movement similar to first enemies makes much more sense.
* No telegraphing even though boss has a lot of moves. I expect telegraphing to be present in modern survivor-ish game. Or at least enough hp to be able to tank it.

What I like:
* I liked the way game showed all numeric values, so you don't have to guess what each perk does. Felt similar to Arcen Games UI somewhat.

I played Deep Rock Galactic Survivors recently and it felt insurmountably more polished.