Recent reviews by Insanitys Muse

It's still early access but I don't see anything in the roadmap that would likely impact this decision, but then again other devs have surprised me to chance a positive to a negative before.

Anyway, right now I am having a blast with this. It is a mashup of Hades and Warm Snow (Warm Snow I also recommend, it's crazy), I would say erring on the side of WS. A lot of rooms tend to be tons of enemies spamming very short telegraph attacks, which means you either play very defensively OR very aggressively and just zoom around trying to kill things before they hit you - there's not a lot of room for a middle approach but that's more Hades' speed, this is much faster.

I would actually say the animations on the store page are a bit misleading - combat is VERY fast and aggressive. Enemies often start attacking the same frame they spawn in, they have very little cooldown, meaning the actual attack animation is basically your window to get in hits or reposition. Kill them before they hit you is the name of the game to me, but it's not a one-hit-you-die thing like Katana Zero or anything like that, you do have room for error, but can't let yourself get whittled down too much.

There are a number of "skins" that change your playstyle a bit, although I would say right now straight attack based builds tend to be pretty hard to get off the ground compared to anything else strangely enough. Attacks also put you in the most danger so that hopefully will get improved at some point.

Translations are there but a bit wonky in places, as expected. I would say the difficulty is lower than Hades or Warm Snow, but Hades is fairly easy if you slow play it (I hate how spongy enemies in Hades can be), but if you don't know how to build synergies and when to actually back off you'll die pretty fast.

The aesthetics are great. Some of the animations are janky but it's cell shaded so it blends in a lot better than some games. Sound / music is IMO the weakest part, I honestly don't think you'd miss anything playing it muted and I probably will do that and listen to music instead.

This is just a great game. It's the FPS John Wick / Jason Bourne / Hotline Miami a lot of people want, with a somehow compelling narrative going on at the same time. I have basically all the challenge levels left to do, and a number of S ranks, but just playing through the campaign and checking off the optional objectives was a lot of fun.

Another excellent metroidvania style game from the dev here. Despite the camera perspective change up and a different style of platforming, it still is one of the best out there.

Fast travel to save points (from anywhere), optional markers for missed collectibles, challenging curses, charming characters, satisfying smashing of stuff, frogs, I dunno what else you really want. Some of the fights definitely stray into bullet hell territory which isn't my favorite thing but I still managed to have fun (it's probably why Sheepo is my favorite of the 3, because no bullet hell, but still they're all amazing).

In my opinion all 3 of these games so far should be quintessential examples of the metroidvania genre. They do so much right and don't forget what makes it fun like a lot of other games.

If I had a criticism of this one, I would say I felt like the characters and dialogue in Islets was more fleshed out and enjoyable - it's not bad here, just feels like there is less of it.

Edit: I wanted to edit to just emphasize how amazing the level design is. I did things way out of the seemingly "default" order but it wasn't through any cheesing or sequence breaks, it's just you often can go to one of several biomes and go about your business there. It can be fun going "back" several levels with the upgrades you get as you just fly through platforming and puzzles.

This is an excellent piece of art, with some really fun ideas and good world building / story telling, that I think is ultimately flawed by some questionable design decisions that might be from it being the devs first metroidvania / action game.

The art, soundtrack, lore, and responsiveness are all top notch. Exploration is mostly fun, although even when fast travel is fully unlocked it's a little annoying (you have to teleport twice essentially). A lot of the boss fights are quite well done, and most of the enemies are interesting and distinct, with only a few rooms where the encounter design is seemingly intentionally annoying (requiring a specific technique or thing to cheese it safely).

All that said, the game has a weird amount of "autoscroller" style time gates. From literal ones (where if you die, you have to redo the whole thing), to more figurative ones which are much more frequent. Boss fights in the later 1/3 of the game are especially guilty of this. Bosses turn into HP sponges, with 2-3 health bars and a new phase for each, and after 1 or 2 attempts you're probably clearing the first health bar with no notable drain on resources, which means it just turns into a time sink. That's because the dangerous attacks are unique to phase 2 (or more often, 3) and often require VERY specific timings or things to counter them, which you have to learn through trial and error, and I very rarely lost because I was out of health potions but more often because you just get chain attacked from failing to figure out how to counter one giant attack into another random dangerous attack.

The later bosses also have a tendency to have 2 or 3 moves which have very different reactions required, but have similar (or identical) tells, which means you have to react during the second part of the windup animation. Again, these are often incredibly dangerous attacks that even with the max health for the time, can lead to you dying before you have a window to heal. Invulnerability frames from getting hit do exist but it's a fraction of a second.

Unfortunately the final boss is the worst of them all - they do not react to a number of your tools the way all previous bosses have, the parry timings are intentionally all over the place, and several of the attacks require a very exact sequence of actions by you to survive. The boss also has a preposterous amount of HP given how few attack windows you have, and given you can't create windows with this boss like you can with some of the previous ones.

If you struggle with the standard difficulty, I strongly recommend changing it to story mode - reducing incoming damage a little can help you learn the boss fights significantly faster, and boosting your own damage can mitigate a lot of the wasted time in the first 1-2 phases of the fights. And the game as a whole is worth it. But the default difficulty is significantly harder than Sekiro for a good chunk of the game, and actually harder than anything I can remember trying this hard with. Most boss fights do not have a cheese, like many harder Soulslikes, they have things you HAVE to do just to survive - there is no easy way out.

I hope they make another metroidvania, and I hope they use this experience to refine it. The autoscrollery feeling in a lot of the later parts of the game (where you just have to go at the speed the game says, no exception) along with multiple multi-stage boss fights with unique, life-ending new attacks at every step, feel like they could be removed and replaced with something more interesting (more fights instead of super long, trial-and-error ones, for one thing). But the game gives you the tools (in the difficulty settings) to power through and experience the game, so it still gets a recommend for me.

As someone who has never been to the UK, this seems roughly like a "slice of life" documentary.

It's a little bit goose game, little bit Monty Python, lotta bit British, and just generally quite funny.

As far as the time-to-money thing, this offers more content than a cheap movie ticket + popcorn, or some fancy movie screen ticket (actually is cheaper than those in my area, surrounded by giant theaters in every direction, not exaggerating). I think it's a fair price. It's also cheaper than (1) horse armor in Diablo 4, etc.

If you are concerned about time-to-money value only, then I recommend sticking to endless games like Minecraft (still almost unmatched value in the world due to modding) or Civ / Workers & Resources / Rimworld / Dyson Sphere. All fine games with absurd value.

A ways to go yet but it's a good example of the fun 7/10 type of game to me. Somewhere between God Of War and a Souls, bit harder than GoW but way faster and more fluid than Souls. Pretty significant emphasis on using the correct parry / dodge / interrupt and target priority, as well as some exploration.

The world / lore seems cool, but it sounds like it's extremely unexplored in the game itself, outside of the first like hour of the game.

I am unsure about the optimization complaints, it runs flawlessly for me and people I know so it might be issues with particular hardware or software, certainly much better optimized than like... Elden Ring, for example. I am not sure I've even had any stutters at all which is so chronic in modern games.

This is a pretty enjoyable pseudo-survival / production / exploration game. It doesn't lean super heavily into any of the single aspects of those genres, but mixes them and makes something I personally haven't quite experienced before. It's sort of like Terraforming Mars, in first person, mixed with a touch of Subnautica and a pinch of Satisfactory.

It's a ton of fun feeling the world unfold as you explore and upgrade, and what used to be a big planned expedition suddenly becomes a quick jaunt to check something or build some more stuff. It's also awesome seeing the world around you transform as you progress - I can't think of another video game that gave me that sensation, but it's really neat.

I originally thought it was procedural generated and you would go from planet to planet but it's one designed world, with a much longer journey. There are some RNG things you can explore later on but it's debatable how fun or worth it those are, to be honest. I would absolutely love, and pay for, DLC that was just this game but on new planets with slightly varied setups maybe.

I do think certain parts of progress drag - maybe to encourage you to explore more, maybe just because you didn't focus on certain infrastructure / pipelines, who knows. A lot of stuff starts to feel kinda pointless towards the end, if you enjoy building and decorating for the sake of it that's the time to do it while the stuff ticks up. Also, drones are pretty buggy with certain things which can be very annoying to try and fix if you have like 40 structures involved in something that isn't working right. Trying to place structures is pretty finicky too at times.

All that said, those are minor quibbles, and the game itself is just a blast to play.

Seems to be effectively abandoned unfortunately. A real shame.

This is going to sound harsh, and well... it is. This is by far the worst Limbo / Inside / Planet of Lana-esque game I've ever played. It basically fails on every note it tries to hit:

Graphics - these look great, in screenshots. The thing is, in-game, they're still INCREDIBLY flat. This makes it difficult, if not impossible in some sections, to tell what is a physical thing that will kill you in the foreground vs. the background. It leads to just trial-and-error for the whole game

Gameplay - oof. It's bad. I'm not sure if they wanted to make it a more ambitious, dynamic platformer and couldn't pull it off, or they wanted to make a much more streamlined simple platformer but decided to complicate it by making it a horrid mess. You can jump and literally see your sprite pass right through grabs and fall to your death. You can get wildly different results from identical button presses. Grabbing points and hitboxes are basically random. It's some of the worst platforming I've ever experienced, and I'm played those old 16-bit-era games this one mentions as inspirations. So many of your deaths are just not your fault the first time through.

On top of that, checkpoints are sometimes a minute+ behind you, especially in glorified autoscroller sections (one could argue 95% of the game is, but the even more autoscrollery-autoscroller points), so you just wait through the little animated death scene for the 200th time and then do the exact same 1 minute segment you just did but now you know there's a "gatcha" from offscreen. Repeat until they decide the section is done.

Sound - I get what they were going for with the music and the radio and it is like, close to getting it, but it's all just... off. Outside of one or two parts. That could be because it feels like the audio is designed to play at certain points as if you're making flawless progress, but it just plays no matter how much getting knocked back you do, so a lot of the dramatic moments just have nothing or something random playing. In a more streamlined game this would have worked a lot better.

Collectibles - these are just insulting. Literally 95% of the "collectibles" are just right on your path, but the other 5% you have to find, through jumping off ledges and replaying levels, what weird little spot you have to go into. It just feels so utterly pointless to have so few off the path at all, yet they're naratively the same weight as the ones tossed at your face. Speaking of narrative

Story / Lore - I actually am pro a lot of what the statement of this game is. Giant tech companies are bad for us, the rich people leading them are among the worst of humanity, and capitalism is probably the eventual death of us all. But this game talks about it in such an immature, lazy way it makes me embarrassed to agree with it. It's got every trope in the world and somehow makes them worse than most other games. It's just bad. It's what a techbro would write if a techbro was anti-techbro. If you asked an AI to write you a story about kids left behind on earth it would be about as soulless. It references works of art and literature without apparently any emotion that should be involved in that.

I didn't really enjoy Somerville but I'd rather replay that whole thing than try to finish off the achievements here, it at least had feeling behind it. Even if I hated the stealth sections so much (puzzle 2d platformers need to stop pretending stealth is an interesting puzzle, it's not), I appreciated the rest of the game. Here I just can't find anything to commend. The closest I can say is, at points, you can see glimpses of what it could have been, but it's just a hot mess instead.

I wish every metroidvania had the QoL stuff Biomorph did. Biomorph has one of the best maps I've seen, fast travel from every save, warp back to saves from anywhere, they added a run so you don't have to spam dash to get around "fastest", and rooms are highllighted when you've completed them.

For the game itself, it's quite fun. I think the forms end up being less of a big deal than they seem at first, 95% of the time you are better off running around and fighting in your base form with the customizable chip loadouts which are nice to help deal with specific enemy types in different biomes. The bioforms CAN be helpful in combat or certain bosses, but mostly they're for getting around in my experience, which is fine since your normal form is fast and responsive and fun.

I don't really have much negative to say about it. So many metroidvanias get fundamentals like movement or exploring wrong or make them tedious, but in Biomorph it's quite fun, pretty clearly telegraphed, AND you can even get around some of the intended ways to get upgrades with some creative approaches / exploring. I 100% it in 16 hours and it didn't drag or feel grindy, and I definitely feel like I got my money's worth.

The only criticism I can really point at it are that the tone and atmosphere feel a little off - the world and story are quite bleak but the cartoony graphics and light music sorta fight with that. Not that in the real world, bleak situations are without hope and lightness - it just doesn't quite resonate in tone like some other games do for me, which is OK.

I hope more games take the lack of tedium and nice QoL present here as inspiration, sometimes it's the difference between great fun and great misery.