Recent reviews by Insanitys Muse

Another "wish there was a maybe" button. It's not a bad game but I have a hard time recommending it for the money or time investment, short and bundled though it may be.

I normally love me a slow, linear walking simulator with environmental storytelling, but Somerville overdoes it on the "slow" to where it really feels like it's just padding for time for some reason. A lot of the "puzzles" are just figuring out where in the not-quite-linear 3D space you are supposed to stand, or which button they want you to press when.

Also, I hate "stealth puzzles". I would compare them to autoscrollers in platformers except sometimes those are still fun. Stealth puzzles are timed things you have 0 agency over and often the longest time waste in any game that has them. There are only a few in here but they still get annoying.

I really think the glacial pace of the game is the biggest problem. You could shave 30% of the time off easily and it'd be more enjoyable. The unskippable credits between the final ending scene you have to sit through 4 times if you want to see the endings (and get the achievements) is a pretty good example of the game just trying to waste your time.

Another major problem is either the environmental storytelling isn't enough, or the story is so overly simple that it feels underwhelming. It feels like there's a lot more they're trying to convey but it's hard to know because there's nearly nothing beyond the hint that maybe there is. Planet of Lana did this much better (actually a ton of games tell more details and depth with no words than Somerville).

Somerville has some good moments but everything else drags it down. I don't hate that I played it but I feel like the time would have been more enjoyable elsewhere.

I'm not done with it quite yet, but I believe I've got nearly all the pieces put together now.

I get why people would think it's a roguelike, but it's very specifically not. You DO "start over" but it should become increasingly clear that you aren't actually starting over. Changes you make in one cycle impact the next, you can retain a certain number of your abilities (which then makes the "xp" you earn available for other abilities or for other uses you learn about later), and the more you progress the more permanent things happen and the more the game opens up.

I think part of the problem is, much like the first Darksouls game when it was released, Ultros is opaque as all hell about any of this. The best way to play is basically to mindlessly plow forward, because the game is semi-linear up until 5-6 hours in (and it's not significantly longer than that). Another good comparison might be The Messenger, where the game does a complete flip partway through, and so you really just want to plow forward blindly up until a certain point.

There are good and bad things to this. It feels novel, and like you are learning things on your own that are new even if you've played dozens of metroidvanias (which I have). However it feels a bit misleading in that you might think you are able to do things you can't yet. The game feels much more open than it is until you get to a certain point, and part of that is due to incredibly level design - and also the level design that is different depending what cycle you're on. It hurts my head a bit to think about how they did that.

I do also think, as fun as the big reveals are, you are asked to retread the same things a few too many times in the early cycles. It sort of feels like a 5ish hour tutorial for a 9-10 hour game. And like, a lot of it is fun while it's happening, but it's just that feeling that you are missing something the whole time when really you aren't, you just aren't far enough into the game yet.

Overall, it's a fantastic new entry into the genre, with new themes and great art. It's NOT roguelike, but it does ask you to retrace your steps a lot as part of the main story, not just to re-explore (although you are effectively re-exploring basically 100% of the time). It's also a metroidvania first and foremost, not a soulsvania, which feels a little too rare nowadays so I appreciate it.

I've played a lot of bullet heavens over a lot of hours (dozens of the games and hundreds and hundreds of hours) and if I had to describe this it would be "generic" and "messy". The in-game graphics are just blah, and that's what you will spend 90% of your time seeing. The abilities have no feel to them. A lot of the choices seem meaningless, you could choose anything OR the choice is very obviously best.

Overall I just don't see the appeal here. I'd rather play something with some personality, some gimmick that makes it stand out from the others in the genre, and I'm not seeing it here. Rogue Genesia does the overworld map thing already and is far more interesting, other games do the buy-items-to-amplify-stats thing (Brotato among others), and most of the other games I've liked from the genre just felt better to actually play and make builds for.

If you haven't played many of the games from this genre, you can definitely do better than this. It's not awful or anything, but you're paying the cost of 2-3 of the other ones for something that isn't as good.

Excellent follow up to Lucah so far. I don't think you have to play that first, there are a few references but the lore isn't as straightforward as some games in the first place, and it's a lot about the atmosphere and experience of your character.

The art style is one of the big factors, some people are immediately turned off but it looks and feels so good as you play, I encourage you to keep an open mind. It really does a better job than any "realistic" graphics game I've seen of making you feel the oppression and tragedy of the game world.

I love the rewind mechanic, encouraging you to learn the rooms and enemies and it works great even in boss fights because boss fights aren't 10 minute slogs like a lot of modern action games. Parrying always feels great, and there seems to be a lot more customization options for your build than Lucah but it definitely is an extension of that system.

Overall, this joins Lucah in being one of my highest recommendations, both on its' own and as a sadly hidden gem. These two are just two of the best indie action games out there.

Updating this to a Yes for now. They finally got online mostly actually working. It's not my perfect ARPG but it's fun so far.

The loot and crafting system is not explained well at all, but it's arguably better than most in the genre once you know how it works. I strongly recommend checking a video tutorial, 10-15 minutes of your time will make the gear make a ton more sense.

One of the highlights they emphasize is the various specialty classes and the skill tree for every ability. These are indeed cool, but balance is a bit all over the place right now, and QoL for it is missing.

Respeccing is pretty bad, you can respend your level talent points pretty cheaply but there are minimum investments in some stuff so you have to remove like, 1-3 points, close the window, reopen it to be able to spend them again, then talk to the person and unlearn the next 1-3, etc.

The even more tedious thing is you have to focus on leveling up skills as well (those skill trees in the description) and while you can change those, you skills you un-focus lose their levels (up to a minimum based on your level). I don't really see the fun in re-grinding a skill because you wanted to try the other skills you get as you level (or just try a new build). I'm level 30 and if I respec a skill to a newly unlocked skill it starts at 4 out of ~11-12 where a developed one would be, which is OK. The problem I have is if you want to swap back to a skill you had invested in, that's just gone forever and you have to regrind it. It's just not a source of meaningful choices, it's just tedium, and it encourages everyone to use cookie cutter builds because otherwise you're looking at a non-trivial time investment to try even a slightly different build, much less one of the dozen+ bigger swaps you could theoretically make.

So ultimately, if you're OK with watching & reading some guides, I'd recommend it. Their next big content is supposed to be end-game super hard enemies so you won't likely be able to get by on just random nonsense builds and like I said, respec is a pain and a grind, so it's not really worth much experimentation when you'll end up with something someone else already mathed out. I hope they make respecing easier to encourage people to do their own thing but these kinds of games rarely do (which again, just leads to everyone using the same builds which is a shame)

I have to give this a no for the moment - the EA version was very promising and really only missing in some content and some balance.

The full release unfortunately seems to have just straight up made the game worse, although it's possible it's some kind of overarching bug. Characters control much worse, slower and less responsive. Even the loading is slower, the main menu is slower, just everything is slower in 1.0. They still have the previous EA build in the beta branch (which more devs should do) so it's easy for me to hop back and forth and test it out and it's just night and day.

It's also more grindy now, and they removed a ton of systems that were in the EA version like corruption + buffs, combos seem to be broken or gone, and the new "coop" thing isn't really what anyone thinks of when they think coop. Other QoL things were worsened:

*Maximum camera zoom distance is much closer now, which makes bosses more of a pain since they can often attack from off screen now. Also despite showing less the game just runs at worse fps as mentioned before

*The end of room upgrade choice thing is one step forward one step back. The old way was very easy to read, now it is harder and the way it scrolls is kind of strange too

*The selection for rooms to visit at the end of a room is very jumpy when using a controller now, and it's way too easy to accidentally select the wrong room unless you wait a full second after every direction input. It used to work fine.

*I have no idea if the balance is better or not, so much of the rest of the game has changed it's hard to compare. Despite making it farther in my first 1.0 run than any of my EA runs, the control felt way worse, so maybe it's just easier now flat out. It didn't really feel like I was in that much control, especially after getting used to the feeling of combat in EA

They did issue a patch in just a couple of days to give players the ability to import their meta resources from the EA file, but the option is not appearing for me. Presumably they'll fix that. All the other issues remains to be seen.

I know some people are enjoying the 1.0 which is fine, but I'd recommend checking out the EA beta branch and comparing, and try to convince me the 1.0 is not worse mechanically in every aspect. Even traversal in the hub is slower now.

The tutorial and translations seem somewhat improved but also some of the complex systems were removed so it could just be because it's a more straightforward roguelike thing now.

I don't think I can recommend this enough. It's a fantastic take on tactical deck building, with moving your ship (and/or the enemy ship, and/or drones, etc.) around is a huge part of combat. The runs are average length, somewhere between 50-60 minutes depending on your build and what you run into and everything.

There are a ton of different ways to specialize, even from the start of the run. You select a ship, which have different sizes, turret placement, and starting bonuses. You select 3 crew which each have their own pool of cards you build your deck from. Some are... not the most synergistic, but if you want you can try and find some wonky / fun combos across all of them.

On top of the actual mechanics of the game, the art and characters are charming as heck, and are gonna make me go finally try Sunshine Heavy Industries out of my backlog. Each run you complete you can unlock the memory of one of your crew. I'm not sure what happens after all of them are unlocked, but it's nice to have one of these games with a pretty well defined story and fun character interactions.

This is an interesting idea but it ultimately is just mostly boring. Using your score from previous run to invest into the next, and snowballing like that, is interesting, but it can also lead to going backwards if you're swapping characters around and pick a bad one or just have super bad luck with shop choices during the run.

On top of that, there is no way (that I can see) to speed up the early parts of the run, nor is there ever any difference in it. This is true of a number of bullet heavens, but it's especially egregious here as you end up spending 5+ minutes every run just doing nothing but running in a circle picking up the money.

When you aren't "too powerful" for a section, it's pretty typical of other bullet heaven games, although it's made a little bit worse by the scrolling screen. You basically do the same "circle around" movement you do in all the other games, except you have to made sure to do it only in the top part of the screen, so you have time to grab the money (xp) before it drops off the screen and is forever gone. If that happens too much you lose the stat check of the game even faster, so it really limits what your choices are.

Overall, it's an OK concept but I just don't see anything worth your time. It's so restrictive and so repetitive in a genre that is always trying to overcome the repetitive nature of short, repeated runs with novel gimmicks, here there's just nothing to make it more dynamic, and a lot of the other designs make it less interesting than Vamp Survivors or any of the others like it.

My constructive feedback points would be:

The scrolling screen is unique, but the money / xp going into the void makes the player movement very limited. Find a more interesting alternative so players can feel free to use the whole screen instead.

The repetitiveness of starting completely trivial 5+ minutes of gameplay runs over and over needs a fix. A game speed multiplier makes the most sense to me, but there are other ways to handle it (like "checkpoints" you could start at further in which give you an approximate score and upgrades to choose from if you've reached them before).

A lot of the weapon and character balance just seems awful. I personally think "character facing" instead of "mouse facing" weapons are always too weak to justify the downsides, and here that seems especially true - every one I tried was just worse than basically every other normal weapon. Maybe they're designed around "optimal" upgrades or synergies but in that case they're just always going to be the worst choice anyway.

tl;dr: Yes, but as long as you're OK with a pretty simple, short, semi-novel take on a bullet heaven.

The arguably most interesting thing in BloodDome99 is the dynamic between levels and money. You get money automatically by killing enemies, but you have to pick up their XP to level. When you level, your funds determine what possible perks you can afford (also weapons, which drop in via drone every so often during a run). When you hit 300k of funds, the boss spawns, and killing the boss ends the run. So maximizing XP you pick up, and spending on the biggest things you can, will give you more power, at the cost of a longer run (there is a scoreboard for that, but TBH it's pretty pointless right now due to the RNG of the game, so if you care about score attack stuff I wouldn't take it seriously).

That's really the main gimmick here for this entry into the genre. Right now there's only 1 level (and I'm not really sure what more levels would mean for something like this). There are a few enemies but only 1, besides the boss, is a threat, and I think that's due to either a bug or questionable design. You can basically win 100% of your runs by taking a pistol or katana to start, and just taking every +offensive perk option you see when you level up (and avoid taking the income increasing ones since that means your funds eclipse your levels too fast).

On the surface that's fine, I like when these games don't require meta upgrades to beat the base difficulty. The thing is, there aren't any meta upgrades, there are just more perks and weapon options to unlock, and a lot of them aren't really good (or they require a lot of other luck getting synergies to be good).

After 3 hours I feel like I've seen what it has to offer, and it's fun enough for 3 bucks, but just know what to expect when you grab it. Since it's EA this could well change but right now the balance of the game makes it pretty stale pretty quickly compared to a lot of these types. I don't mind having a truly short entry though, better in some ways than the ones where you have to repetitively grind something often frustrating 80 times to get an achievement or unlock (looking at you, Army of Ruin)

I got this when it first came out in EA and spent a fair bit of time with it, but there was clearly a decent amount missing, and the balance left a lot to be desired, but the core idea is one I want (non-pvp extraction shooter) and the basics were all solid so I had some fun and shelved it to wait for updates.

Well, it's been some months and some big updates, and I wanted to check out the new gun update since it looked and sounded awful.

And yea, it's terrible. It feels terrible to engage with, it doesn't feel balanced at all, and most importantly it's not fun. I really don't know how they thought it was an improvement, they clearly want the game to be something that I can't imagine, and if this is it then that's kinda disappointing.

If it had this gunplay when I bought it, it would have been an instant refund. You could argue ~20 hours is OK value for the price but I kept it because of the promise of what it already was but with more content, and now it's way worse with barely more content. This is one of those "that's what I get for supporting EA" moments unfortunately.