Recent reviews by Katana

A short game, in some ways simple but very good at what it does. Has its moments of great puzzles, great tension from combat, even some pretty good storytelling absent of Resident Evil's narm. And, heck, they even throw in some videogamey humor at a few times without breaking the mood. The art style following the character art of Final Fantasy 7 was really appealing to me (especially since it evades prerendered backgrounds).

Some things I really appreciated: The game is pretty stringent about getting you to limit resource usage, but also has mechanisms to let you scrounge yourself back into place if you've become completely starved. Even if you find yourself out of ammo, it's surprising how many places you can find more sitting in hidden places, as well as special systems even for people that happened to waste everything. While the puzzles are often cryptically based around random notes, the game also has a resource-limited hint system built in - which can be useful, since sometimes you lose track of where you could keep making progress.

The game features traps and scripted enemy respawns, so that even when retreading old areas, it keeps combat and tension. The traps never felt cheap, and it even builds ways for you to use them against enemies.

While I'm often okay with tank controls in survival games in others like Tormented Souls, I ended up finding that the implementation of modern controls was convenient and preferable.

There you have it - classic survival horror with a great atmosphere, good unobtrusive writing, and a unique aesthetic!

Not much to say - as other reviews have highlighted, still plagued by crashing problems. Got one in my very first firefight. Floaty controls for a shooter, and I'm not enjoying the writing or characters either.

The contradictions and mystery in case one are pretty basic, and I wouldn't quite call it a "full case" in the way Frank Sahwit's was. But! There's great demonstration of character animations and intuitive UI. I'm honestly not often big on pixel art, but the characters are animated in a very expressive way, which really helps you to get more invested.

Probably the most signature element is the way the game explains bad evidence - eg, explaining that you're presenting a "theory" instead of a "contradictory fact".

Lots of circumstantial humor with great comedic timing. The game has a lot of detailed animation and funny reactions from the townspeople. There is perhaps a little bit of replay value in achievement hunting - a few of the game's jokes require a little bit of attention to details to locate. Otherwise, the main experience is a fairly straight run-through where you can't really do anything wrong.

Be warned some of the humor is pretty raunchy; but all in all even though all the protagonist can do is punch things, there's actually not much in the way of violence, just frequent innuendos and weird comments.

Don't expect 3M2M to be "constantly funny", but it absolutely has lots of room for the protagonist to grow on you. Some of the best, most well-designed moments of the game are designed to come up when you're not really expecting them, and at times the dev team has been willing to devote A LOT of resources to pushing a joke where it's needed, even if it's in an optional set of choices where players won't see them.

I was about 8-9 hours in when I learned one of the crowning achievements of this game: Replay Value. Yes, where many P&C games struggle through their budget to be barely playable from start to finish, 3M2M has a surprising number of branching paths for the game, many of which involve logical changes to puzzles, have funny moments of their own, etc.

Bear in mind that diving into details is your own choice. You could genuinely bore yourself by being too much of a completionist - for instance, almost one full hour of my playtime was in reading the name of every book in a library, a good third of which were witty references to other media or other meta jokes.

Given the number of chapters, and how well the game has kept up its quality bar with the great voice acting, detailed gameplay, animations and humor, I'm definitely satisfied and hope for this game to see a bit more attention.

There's a ton of interesting systems here that I'd love to experiment with. Unfortunately, the game doesn't give you time to. Potionomics feels very much like a board game or deckbuilder - one that you're meant to spend a dozen failing runs in, before finally working out the minmaxed optimal strategy to make it to the competition deadline just in time. But the game's UI just isn't built for that repetition; it has story it builds up, tons of conversations, and failing a run prompts you to load a save game, even though said save may not be in a strong enough spot to come out on top.

The game really needed a reexamination of its priorities, especially since what pulled a lot of people in was the charming artwork and writing. The timeslots work a lot like the Persona games in that they push you to make the most of what occasions you have - but Persona is usually much more *generous* with its time, letting you actually experiment and make some bad decisions or go for some "suboptimal" events just because they seem funny.

There have been no updates since release to re-examine difficulty, so don't expect any of this to change. Can't recommend it.

A much better game than I expected! The core of it is very simple "use coins to distract, ambush guards from behind" gameplay, but generally each chapter, they come up with some interesting new mechanic or weapon to add to Jesse Fox's challenges. These even culminate very well in boss battles that always feel like a unique application of some new concept, and are genuinely challenging a lot of the time.

For a pixel game, it doesn't trim on production costs - involving quite a lot of custom voice acting and artwork for short-lived scenes. Many of the jokes it puts forward are of the "silly situation" vibe more than the laugh-out-loud variety, but it works very well. And, what keeps it moving forward is that it's not FULLY reliant on humor - it's telling an actual earnest story of a hero's escape. In that way it's even kind of similar to Metal Gear, rather than just being a direct parody.

I always looked forward to the ideas it was going to put forth in each new boss fight, even when it found some inventively humorous way to suddenly kill me, and a lot of the challenges felt really satisfying to overcome. Definitely worth a playthrough.

Very cute short story. Establishes some genuine drama and character development to make you feel for the stakes - and has some EXCELLENT artwork and animation to follow it up. Some of the romantic writing definitely aims a bit cutesy lovey-dovey, but that can very much be expected. It's short, but certainly worth playing through.

I really enjoyed this one! The strongest impression may have actually come from the game's first chapter, which managed to take me by surprise.

From when you first gain control of your character and begin casually interacting with friends, exploring the house, getting a hold of the situation, there is no "big cutscene", no forceful reveal, that leads to horrible things all going south. You may just be browsing around the garage checking out a few details around the house, when you hear a creepy breathing noise, and get no more hint than trying to speak to a friend who says "...I don't like this..." before horrible things happen, sans-cutscene.

The game uses the time loop pretty well - by which I mean, a lot of the puzzles don't make such heavy use of the timing that you're required to do continuous resets. (This is something that actually made The Outer Wilds EXTREMELY frustrating for me) The puzzles are very challenging, but feel very appropriate, and even when momentarily stuck, the game continues to reward you with new events on a loop.

The horror elements of the game are very well done. Most of the soundscape stays relatively quiet, keeping your heart riding on the unexpected elements of that first night; and it tends to always add new little unexpected creepy twists, outside of the things you get used to from the loop's schedule.

The storytelling and character writing of the game certainly goes to some "deep" places, which is not a straight positive for all types of players. I think I appreciated the messages they were going for, and it's best not to hope for a straight-laced, logical answer behind the plot.

Last callout goes to the Playstation appearance of the game. It's aiming to look somewhere between PS1/PS2, with some touches to make sure people's faces are expressive enough. I like the balance they picked, giving enough detail to make the game playable while also evoking some of that "unrecognizable spookiness" of old classics.

Far too much of the game ends up being how consistently you can nail headshots. While I've played a lot of neat games that encouraged social stealth in common situations, the demands of being online multiplayer pretty much mean, just like Dead by Daylight, no one is playing stealthy except in some extremely niche situations. Unlike Dead by Daylight, there's absolutely nothing to do in the game if you can't win a Quake-style gunfight. You might completely spot someone out in an unobserved location, get several first hits on them, and then still lose because you don't understand the gunplay well enough.

There's ways of getting good at that formula, but there are also much better games out there for playing *that* formula. Basically, it is not a spy game.