Recent reviews by Kitswulf

I tried this a while back, found it a little underwhelming and half-baked, and decided to wait to see if that would be its final state. Coming back later, the answer is "yes". There are better games in this genre out there. Try them, instead.

Metaphor is a turn-based JRPG in the same mold as the Persona/SMT series (made by the same studio, with some wink-and-nod references to the other properties) but with its own unique universe and story. The freedom to tell their own story is used to make a game about the meta-level postmodernist awareness our society tends to have about stories nowadays. The game keeps coming back to the thematic question: what is the point of 'fantasy'? If something can never be real, just words on a page (/images on a screen/bits in a program), what even is the point?

I'll let the game answer the question it asks and just say it gives a very satisfying answer both in-universe and out-. Highly recommended.

Please note I played the Demo to completion as well, so my "hours played" is closer to about 8 at the time of this review.

It's got a nice solid demo so I made the purchase pretty certain I knew what I was getting, and what I saw is what I got. It's got a cute-but-maybe-not-deep JRPG storyline that's enjoyable to follow along without really challenging me, I enjoy the character designs overall, the music is surprisingly good, and the match-3 mechanics work well enough. This isn't something with tense forethought to each move like Puzzle Quest. It's not a huge-and-intricate-build-your-team P2W like Gems of War.

What it is, instead, is fun. I can launch the game and have chirpy little anime waifus and furries shouting as I match gems, not think too hard, and after an hour or two have experienced some chill, low-effort entertainment that still engaged my hands and eyes.

It's not perfect, certainly. I share the general complaint that debuffs are king (against the player) in this game, and so almost all of my strategic thought goes into trying to minimize getting debuffed. But thanks to the tavern-meal mechanics one CAN decide to nullify most debuffs before any fight, and there's a nice touch of realism in that all my dungeon-delves are on the short leash of having enough provisions. My other complaint might be a bug: if a downed character is swapped out, once they're healed up and active again you can't swap them back in, either in the current fight or any future fights. I have to manually reset the party formation to move them back to my active team. But these just don't rise to the level of "ruins experience" for me.

I like the game and will likely continue playing it. Since the devs provide such a robust demo, I'd strongly recommend you download and give the demo a try. It matches the actual game pretty tightly, and if you're having fun with the demo, you'll have fun with the main game as well.

This expansion put in a graphical upgrade that added mandatory blur and bloom effects to the world and removed the option to turn them off, which previously had been available (at least since ARR, when I started playing). As a result, I have about a single hour a day I can play before the eyestrain, headaches, and other sensory issues make it too unpleasant or painful to continue. I'm lucky I don't have worse health reactions (some folks have gotten seizures or vertigo to the point of vomiting or being unable to walk, supposedly) but it's hard to play an MMO on a single carefully-budgeted hour once a day. Square Enix has said the new required bloom is "working as intended" when users reported the problem, so I'd recommend avoiding FF14 going forward.

It's a bit of a cute game but a lot of the QoL issues made it unpleasant to play. The game window kept forcibly resizing back to a default that was larger than my monitor no matter what setting I messed with, and the tooltips on controls only show once the first time you play, which I missed because loading the level caused the game to resize. Again. There are no options to bring it back up or refresh the "tutorial" such as it is. I'm afraid this one needs more development time until it's ready for presentation.

One of my favorite VSlikes/Bullet Heavens/Whatever we end up calling this genre. It has really interesting build variability with lots of interactions, numerous endgame builds that feel distinct while being viable, and several solid QoLs (achievements increase exp gain so you can meta-progress while you meta-progress, for example) compared to the genre's default. As of writing this I've only played for for 65 hours ("only") and stopped because I had consumed all the content made, but it's an EA title with a developer roadmap they've been meeting the milestones on so I suspect I'll be back playing it soon.

It offers what it says on the tin. It's an L4D3 that can't quite capture the magic of its predecessor, but is solidly fun and I enjoy playing it with friends.

If a less-famous studio tried to do what Bungie has done here, it'd be considered a scam and removed from the market. Caveat Emptor, much of the stuff promised here is no longer available in-game, but they'll happily take your money. (:

This is a really frustrating review to make because there's some real highlights to the game. The story and aesthetic choices are quite good and the very light meditations on AI ethics and philosophy that pop up throughout the game evoke science fiction writing at its finest.

Shame about the gameplay, though.

The problems are pretty deep into the core gameplay loops, and so far the patches have been mostly bugfixes without dealing with some very fundamental design choice problems. For example, the prioritization system for your drones is binary. Something is either a priority or not. This, combined with entropy making your drones wear out over time, means that there is no way to have drones prioritize their own existence above all else, leading to arbitrary death spirals that started hours back but you're only finding out about now. Upgrading resource extraction sites is ALWAYS a waste, as it merely increases the speed it draws from the finite pool of the resource, and it's cheaper and more sustainable to simply build another mine over another node of the resource. This becomes especially true when it turns out the degenerate strategy is to spawn new landing sites because new landing sites guarantee at least one of each resource node nearby, the only way to ensure you get a particular resource if you're short on one. This leads to silliness, for example in one run where since I can't mine the water now unreachable underneath the Martian lake, I'll have to launch a rocket next to my current launch site to get a water node to spawn.

At the moment, the dev team is working on bugs (quite a few, but not abnormally more than for an Early Access title, which this functionally is) and superficial annoyances that are easier to patch (one involves the story arc where you can get access to nukes that until recently did not give you access to the radioactive materials contained within the nukes), but I think the problems with the game go pretty deep into the guts of the design and I'm not seeing many alterations in that area yet. And by the time I had played long enough to be sure it wasn't just a fluke, it was past the refund stage, so buyer beware.

An excellent 50's housewife simulator in the same vein as "The Yellow Wallpaper" or "The Haunting of Hill House". Play it if you'd like to experience the struggle of plating eggs and bacon for family that takes you for granted and all the pathos such a core gameplay loop brings.