Seneste anmeldelser af DreamCarver

Alright. Okay. Yeah.

Do not play this.

To all those I know and care about: do not play this. It is extremely effective at what it does, Military A Grade, and that is a bad thing for you. You'll go into it thinking you'll be able to walk away from it with a mind relatively clear, but no, no you won't, you'll be left with a black stain slowly spreading, clouding the waters of your psyche, you'll be left with nothing but nerves and distrust for human warmth.

To those I do not know as well, who are going to read this and think to themselves that they will be fine, regardless of what I say... I will say this. Know that the Content Warnings at the beginning are not merely there for the sake of luring you in with the promise of spookiness, but rather to keep you from suing the company for damages later on. Furthermore, do not enter the game like I did, a bundle of overly cautious firecrackers ready to go off at the slightest shade of something going wrong. The game works slowly. Go into it thinking that you might get a School Days bad ending or something. Delude yourself, as I did. It will make the trap work all the sweeter when it finally springs.

One final note: Put this thing on a dissection table in a few months, once we've gotten over the inital shock of its effectiveness. Learn from it. Reverse-engineer it. It's too well done to not learn from.

... I'd wish you good luck. But I really don't think it would help.

A simple little puzzle game which one can learn in a minute and play for an hour. I've taken a liking to turning down the background music and putting on one of the podcasts my friend keeps sending me, or putting on music of my own to enjoy, or having a video play alongside it. The point being, this is not a game that commands your full and complete attention, but rather one that will keep your fingers and unoccupied portions of your brain entertained. Like unknotting a bunch of tangled strings, or fussing with one of those metal bar puzzle thingies.

It's calming, it's busying, it's rewarding when you finally put everything in its place. If that sounds like your cuppa, go for it.

THE SHORT VERSION: Quite possibly the most deceptively soothing game of abstract logistics out there. One moment your little web of colorful lines is perfectly set up to handle the constant rush of passengers, and three minutes later you're wondering why there are three stations suddenly full of upset clients. Quite well done.

MORE WORDS: Mini Metro was another one of the menagerie that I got back in the Humble Freedom Bundle. On bootup, I was simply greeted by a few simple shapes and... nothing else. So I got to clicking, linked them together with a colorful line, and suddenly a little rectangle started ferrying smaller shapes along the path. And from that point on, everything just... went. My network grew, I distributed my fleet of carriages and engines as best I could, and eventually the growing demands of the tiny shapes overwhelmed me.

And there's the game, in its base form. You try to get as many passengers as possible from their starting station to their desired destination. Eventually, the growing number of passengers will overwhelm your facilities and you will lose the game (at which point you can swap to an efficiency challenge mode, where nobody ever gets angry and your goal is now to ferry as many passengers per minute as possible), but do your best to maintain an efficient system in the meantime.

Which means it's a losing battle. At some point your beautiful web of transfers and interchanges will fail, and your desperate attempts to spread out the passenger population will come to nothing. But at the same time, the game is just so... calm. Little chimes from the picking up and dropping off of passengers, a soft hum from the lines as a carriage travels... even the "angry station" sound is just another pleasant chime. Which is kind of confusing at first. If the game is meant to be lost, why the approachable presentation? But then, I suppose if you want me to come back to a game I am destined to lose, you'd want make it as welcoming as possible.

In conclusion: Mini Metro is indeed a game I enjoy, maybe not to the degree of some of my bigger timesinks, but it's just so simple that I can't find much of anything to dislike about it. Maybe some mild complaints regarding tunnels and bridges and why can't the tracks just go around the stupid river bend they do it all the time in real life but that's about it.

Watch a little gameplay of it, then decide to give it a go or not.

A calming hex-based minesweeper logic puzzle dealie, with some sudoku elements thrown into the mix in the more advanced stages. I quite enjoyed my little time with it, even if it did go by quickly; I've just 100% completed the whole thing in two hours, but then, it's only a dollar. Thankfully I hear there's sequels, which I am now convinced to purchase.

Give it a try.

I'm not quite sure how to say this, but I'll try anyway: this game is a medicine. All the frustrations and angers you feel in your standard platformings and shootings: this game is that darkness' light, that yin's yang.

The whole thing is so colorful, so open, so inviting, that I can't help but love it. The presentation doesn't attack you in any way, but rather sits and shows to me a lovely little world of cubes and pipes and buttons that I want to run across, to explore, to awaken. In the little time that I've had with Refunct, I've had multiple moments where I just... lose myself. No hard thoughts about how to make that jump, no worries about the consequences of failure, I just go. And after a few minutes, I realize that I've just been running around without a care, wrapped in the game's embrace, enjoying the world. And I'm okay with that.

It's quite small, mind you. I've reached peak enjoyment in under an hour of gameplay; maybe I'll go back and learn to speedrun it, like it seems to be made for. But still. $3 is a very small asking price for a little piece of parkour heaven.

Let me tell you a story.

When I was a kid, back in the days when Steve Jobs was still alive, when I only barely understood where babies came from, when I read books about Forestclan and Firestar, when the only video game I actually physically owned was Myst, there were flash games. These were, mostly, the only games that you could share or show to other people. And among your Fancy Pants Man and Run, there was N. One little ninja VS a seemingly impossible number of levels, fueled by gold and a passion for juking rockets.

I played the eff out of it. And then, in time, I came to the edge of my abilities. The limits to my perseverence. Eventually, I stopped, but not before enjoying it half to death. There were a few other times, in later years, when I came back to it on a memory trip, downloaded it off the webpage, and kept a tally of deaths as I strived for 100% completion. But again, I eventually became overwhelmed by life and such.

And now N++ is here. Faster. Simpler. Bigger and, I will say, better. And now, with tunes. It is the essential N experience, and I am so happy it exists. I can feel myself entering that platforming Zen as I work my way though, a rock garden full of mines and golden flowers. And I continue to be reminded:

Simple does not mean Easy. Hard does not mean the opposite of Fun.

Three guns. Two enemy types. Eleven tapes. An entire keyboard of reload procedures. This is Receiver, and it wants you dead. Good luck.

If you have no idea what this game is, the best way I can summarize it for you is this: you have a Gun. Not one of those handy dandy point n shoot gunz that you see in every shooter ever, but an iron and gunpowder Gun, that requires you to understand exactly how to use it. Is the hammer ♥♥♥♥♥♥? Magazine full? Safety off? Get along well with your Gun; it's the only thing keeping you safe against the opposition.

The setting is graphically bare, for the most part. Apartments and rooftops and giant stairwells. The randomly generated nature of the layout leads to some strange combinations, but it's all perfectly traversable... so long as you keep an eye out for drones. Did I mention that you're a one-hit wonder? No regenerating health for you; you're a fleshy ball of important parts, and a hit from anything can and will be your end.

But where the game excels, and why I like it so much, is the parts in-between deaths, where you crawl from vantage point to vantage point, pressing your ear against the wall to listen for the whirring of blades from a shock drone, or a motor hum from some turrets. The shock that runs through you as you hear the crystal clear "beep" of something seeing you, and the momentary scramble back to cover. The satisfaction of seeing a drone fall out of the sky, or putting out a turret's camera in a single shot. And as you clear each apartment, each cluster of furniture and pipes, you gather the tapes. You listen to the voice's teachings. And you learn what it is you're doing here.

Other better reviewers than me have said it before, and I'll way it again: you don't feel invincible in Receiver. You feel all too delicate. You feel like you, with a gun. And that's pretty much the best way to put it. It's a gun simulator that somehow manages to actually wring a sense of danger out of the whole thing. So yeah, it's good. Maybe you don't want to spend $10 for as small a package as it is, but put it on your wishlist anyway. It's worth whatever you pay for it.

Look, it's not like I actively dislike this one. I just prefer to save that big blue thumbs up for the titles that I actually enjoy and would not be afraid to recommend. This is not one of those.

Rituals is an interesting one. Got it in the Humble Bundle a little while back and decided to finish it off one day. It seemed like my kind of thing, having grown up on Myst and its sequels. But then, perhaps I set myself up for disappointment.

It's too shallow. Too thin. Each puzzle is self-contained, a simple object + object + location kind of thing, your inventory reset with each new area. It's almost reminiscent of those escape the room flash games, only with a bit of an ego. And low poly crocodiles.

And just when I found myself beginning to actually care about what the hell was going on in this world, the game ends. Tells you "good job, play it again to find the other ending which is basically the same ending only you make a slightly different choice right at the end". So I did. And was equally stiffed in terms of satisfaction. Take of this what you will. Some may argue that the vagueness leads to everyone's opinions being valid. I say screw opinions, give me facts.

In the end, this game is a bit of a poem. Not a very good poem, mind. One of those love letters to the earth that make zero sense to anyone except the teenager writing them. But there's still at least some value in it. Though maybe not $5 of value.

Hey, at least I got those easy achievements.

... Where to begin?

Shall I tell you of the crackling cackle of skeletal monstrosities as they fade beneath the fury of the blades? Shall I speak of the scratching of the spiders' cries against my eardrums? Shall I try to convey the crumbling tremors as a centipede burrows beneath the floor of the arena, making a sound like the breaking of the earth itself?

Or shall I confess to the visions that came to me as I tried to sleep the second night after purchasing this game, of screaming skulls diving towards me, startling my body awake with a panicked twitch?

It's a perfectly satisfying portrait of FPS heaven and/or hell. You and your daggers against an infinite onslaught of enemies. No permanent upgrades. No unlocks. Everything you do in a run stays in that run. Could have been some sort of stat upgrade system. There isn't.

This game makes me feel weak and naked and afraid. And I love it to death and beyond.

The story of one man, his Harry Potter invisibility cloak, and his sick hops. Rated E for Espionage.

In all seriousness though, this game is super tight. It's a small package (only about 3 hours of gameplay to get through it the first time, future playthroughs will probably take less time as you get better at it), but every level is slathered in 8-bit cyberpunk scenery that makes you want to go back and check it out again.

And throughout every moment of the game, that soundtrack. That. Soundtrack. It made me come back after I got tired of a certain level in chapter 3, made me get back in there because I just wanted to hear it again. And I did. Beat the game that very same playsession.

Be warned, newcomer: this game is tough. You'll get caught. Again and again. Often in the same stupid way you got caught last time. But when you finally pull off that manuever, when you finally time your jump just right... You'll be on your way to becoming a Master.

Enjoy yourself some retro-future jump n' cloak today.