Recent reviews by pmLite

I really hoped Tchia would be fun, because it’s such a great game on paper, but some poor gameplay design decisions made this game extremely frustrating and dull to play from nearly the first hour onwards. I want to make very clear that there are a lot of things I really do appreciate about this game—Tchia is beautiful, from a graphical perspective, a musical perspective, and also from a cultural perspective. It’s great to see the success of a small indie team making a game about a place they love and sharing its unique culture with the world. More games like this absolutely should exist.

Unfortunately, however, Tchia suffers from a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to the scope of the world, which leads to major gaps in traversal mechanics. Tchia’s map includes two relatively large islands, Ija Nöj and Madra Nöj, as well as a handful of other small archipelagos and shipwrecks. The game’s main storyline leads you on quests across these islands, and there are tons of different collectibles to be found on the islands and all over the ocean. All of this (in addition to the game’s own marketing) suggests that Tchia is a big open-world game. And yet, Tchia wants to be a small, easygoing, cozy game at the same time, so it purposely avoids traversal mechanics that are necessary to make an open-world game work. For example:

For some reason, you can’t see your own position on the map. If you push the left stick (which I frequently did by accident, due to it being the sprint button in 99% of other games—with no option to rebind it in Tchia), your map will recenter to an unhelpfully large circle saying you are “somewhere near here,” which is frequently half the size of one of the major islands. You have a boat you can travel with, but it’s slow, clunky, and difficult to steer—I almost never used it. There are certain docks you can fast-travel to with the boat, but they are also largely unhelpful given that a) there are very few of them, b) they are not close to major areas/villages on the islands, and c) you have to be at one dock to fast-travel to another one, so the time to get there is often not even worth the benefit of fast-traveling.

What I found to be the most effective means of locomotion was soul-jumping, which allows you to inhabit other objects or animals and move as them. Soul-jumping into birds is useful for traversing land, and dolphins for traversing the ocean. There is a limit to how long you can soul-jump for, but you can max this out early on, at which point it’s not a major concern. When you reach a certain point in the game, you unlock the ability to summon some of these animals, which you can then soul-jump into (assuming the summon actually works, which only happened about half of the time for me). This helps tremendously to explore the open world, but there are still issues with it. Any time you exit a soul-jump in order to interact with a collectible or view a cutscene, the animal will likely leave (birds and dolphins can get away quickly), and you will be stuck waiting on a cooldown before you can summon one again. Even after completing the main story, when the game grants you several “overpowered” abilities, there are still long cooldowns for these summons, making them very impractical for large-scale exploration of Tchia’s world. I do generally enjoy “collect-a-thons,” and I’ve 100%ed some much longer and larger than Tchia, but exploration in this game is downright tedious due to the fact that the only remotely efficient means of getting around disappears every time you exit it and you have to wait to summon it again.

I should also mention that Tchia took 6 minutes to boot up every single time I launched it, and around once per hour I encountered a “UE4 fatal error” that crashed the game while I was in the middle of playing. I haven’t experienced anything anywhere close to this bad playing any other game, so I believe Tchia is rather poorly optimized.

I wish I had more fun playing this game, because there are a lot of things it absolutely nails that I hope to see other games take note of, but sadly the gameplay and traversal in Tchia was painfully tedious for me the entire way through, so I can’t recommend playing it. Devs—you’re on the right track. There’s clearly a ton of love put into this game, which is great, and if you can figure out how to improve your gameplay systems, I have no doubt your future games will be fantastic.

Not terrible, but overall it’s an uninspired metroidvania with clunky gameplay. The visual style, music, and overall environment of the game are nice, but it simply doesn’t feel interesting. Pinball being the main gimmick seems clever at first, but it gets tedious very quickly as you have to repeatedly pass through the same pinball sections many times while backtracking all over the map for fetch quests. On top of this, the pinball levers are so heavily railroaded that it’s actively frustrating trying to get from point A to point B. You’ll often have to go in the opposite direction of where you’re trying to go in order to find some convoluted path there, which is only a problem because of how the paths are connected—having a bit more openness in the level design would be nice. Plus, the game has a fast travel system (beelines), but while you can get OFF at any point, you can only get ON at the ends (with a few exceptions), meaning if you want to make a quick drop off in the middle of the beeline, you’ll have to make your way all the way back to the end on foot. This would’ve been an easy change that could make the gameplay a lot less tedious. Don’t even get me started on using the exploding slugs to launch yourself for certain collectibles—those things are so finicky that a few of them took me over an hour just to get the angle correct once.

Yoku’s Island Express isn’t a *bad* game, but isn’t a particularly interesting one either, and some level design oversights combined with endless backtracking makes it feel quite tedious to play at times.

most unhinged, nonsensical, surreal game i’ve ever played… and i love that

Cloudpunk is a really fascinating experience overall. It has some truly beautiful visuals that make the world of Nivalis feel immersive and fun to explore, and the story is a compelling one that faces the player with genuinely difficult choices. The many side characters that you meet along the way reinforce the strange, dystopian character of Nivalis—it almost feels like something out of “Welcome to Night Vale.” The main story is actually relatively short, as it all takes place in a single night, but flying around Nivalis and getting to feel the city’s magnificent yet uncanny aura is a feeling worth experiencing. So while the gameplay may come up a little short, Cloudpunk makes up for it in vibes. Would definitely recommend.

Ghostrunner is one of my favorite games, so I really hate to give its sequel a thumbs down, but I was pretty disappointed by this game—not because it was bland or dull, but because it ended up taking many steps backwards from the original. For what it is, Ghostrunner 2 is certainly not terrible, still a pretty exciting platformer with incredible visuals, but it somehow manages to screw up a lot of things the first game did really well. Firstly, however, here are some of the things I think it DOES do a good job of:

-As mentioned before, the visuals are absolutely fantastic. This game is even more stunning than GR1, and it features a wider range of environments, all of which look beautiful. I’ve seen people complain about the performance, and while I had a couple small issues, I was consistently getting >100fps on max settings with a fairly mid-tier GPU, so I don’t think that’s a huge problem here.
-Naturally, the movement is still decently fun, even if it’s a big step down from its predecessor.
-Personally, I really liked the upgrade chip system in this game. The “Tetris block” system in GR1 was fine, but unlocking different chips and arranging them in the motherboard felt a lot more personalizable and interesting to me.
-The soundtrack is once again a banger.
-The wingsuit introduced in the last level is absolutely incredible, it’s without a doubt the best part of the game and I really wish there was more of it.

With that being said, there are two massive issues, as well as a few other small ones, that really ruined this game for me.

Firstly, the level design is extremely unpolished. To me, GR1 is the pinnacle of great level design. It does such an amazing job of using subtle color patterns and aspects of the environment to lead the player around without them even realizing it. Everything feels super smooth and intentional, and it’s what makes the platforming gameplay so much fun. I’ve even published a video essay on why GR1 is a masterclass in great level design. GR2, on the other hand, very much lacks intentionality. Many of the environments in GR2 are more muted and bleak than the neon-lit parts of Dharma Tower in GR1, which isn’t inherently bad, but when the first game leaned so heavily on using the environment to prevent the player from getting lost, eliminating those patterns with nothing in their stead creates a problem for GR2. I found myself constantly getting lost in this game, finding little visual indication of what I was supposed to do next and frequently running around in circles or aimlessly going to areas I wasn’t supposed to. This was especially a problem with the motorbike levels, which I’ll elaborate on later. But the bottom line is, getting stuck and lost is completely antithetical to fast-paced and fluid gameplay, and it was really frustrating to be constantly losing my momentum because of unclear level design.

In addition to its opaqueness, this game’s level design is also poorly implemented and could’ve benefited from significantly more QA/playtesting. I encountered many instances where the gap-jammer (grappling hook) didn’t pull me quite far enough to land where I was supposed to, or it flung me directly at a wall I was supposed to be landing on top of. There are several points where swinging on bars didn’t get me far enough to land where I was supposed to go either. These issues, among many others, indicate a lack of polishing and consistency with the level design. I also quite experienced many geometry/physics bugs where the game would make me start wall-running on something that wasn’t even a wall, or conversely, I would be unable to wall-run on a wall that was supposed to be run on (sometimes there was also a bug where I ended up partly inside of a wall and could only run very slowly on it). The launching air vents sometimes just didn’t do anything when I walked over them. Once again, these issues feel like they could have been prevented or at least recognized before releasing the game, and they drastically decreased my enjoyment of GR2.

My other main problem with this game is that it appears to take a design approach of prioritizing quantity over quality of new features. Nearly every single level was throwing some new mechanic at me that would rarely be used again in any level thereafter, and most of these mechanics came out half-baked because there are simply too many of them. It doesn’t seem like the devs took the time to deeply craft any of these features, instead just coming up with something to add for one level and then moving onto the next one. There can be potential for some really interesting combinations when you start to mix mechanics together, but unfortunately, that didn’t really happen here. This leads to GR2 almost feeling like playing with fifty different mods installed that aren’t meant to go together and sometimes actively conflict with one another.

As I alluded to earlier in my review, one of the most glaring instances where this flawed design philosophy crops up is with the motorbike. This addition definitely had potential, but it ended up making the middle portion that implements it the worst part of the game by far. This is because, in addition to the motorbike controlling horrendously, having very glitchy physics, and it being extremely difficult to “read” levels while driving it, the motorbike plays into GR2’s identity crisis that so many modern games are having because it wants to be every genre at once. The first level involving the motorbike still feels like a Ghostrunner level, because it’s relatively fluid and fast-paced—it would almost be fun, if not for all the other motorbike issues I already pointed out. But after this, GR2 basically pretends to be an open-world game for the next 3 levels, making you use the motorbike to traverse a world that has almost no visual indications of where to go whatsoever. One level in this open-world section of the game took over an hour for my first completion, because I just kept driving around aimlessly on the motorbike, extremely confused where the game wanted me to go. This is the EXACT opposite of what Ghostrunner gameplay is supposed to feel like! The fact that people complain about the game’s hub world interrupting the flow but then praise the motorbike is absolutely bewildering to me—trying (and failing) to be an open-world game is the single worst thing the devs could have done for the flow of GR2’s gameplay. And I won’t even start on its “roguelike mode” that apparently every game needs to have now… it took about twenty minutes to see everything there was to be seen, and it was even shallower than Ghostwire: Tokyo’s “roguelike mode” which is really saying something.

In addition to these two glaring fundamental flaws the game exhibits, many other small issues hampered my enjoyment of GR2 as well. For one, I’m still extremely puzzled who thought that having FEWER control layouts than the first game was a good idea. Having to play GR2 with a different control layout than GR1, like I did, is absurd, and there is absolutely zero reason for this. Also, some of the achievements have very misleading descriptions. For example, the most difficult achievement Godrunner, says that it requires you to “finish any 5 levels without dying,” but as it turns out, boss levels do not count for this. I could maybe understand if the achievement had simply said “finish 5 levels without dying,” but the use of the word ANY is incredibly misleading for an achievement where it cannot actually be any arbitrary five levels. Other achievements have similar problems.

Overall, while Ghostrunner 2 delivers some of the same thrill as its predecessor, this sequel ends up shooting itself in the foot as a result of its poorly-intentioned level design and cramming in of far too many shallow new features. It’s a shame to say this, but if you loved the original game, don’t come into this one with high hopes—it butchers a lot of what made the first one so good.

Super fun and engaging core gameplay loop with a ton of depth from all the different cards and abilities. Really love the changes in this latest update that made deckbuilding a lot more strategic. Wouldn't recommend going for all achievements though if you value your time and/or sanity.

The Last Clockwinder is a fantastic game and truly one of the most creative applications of VR out there. The gameplay revolves around recording clones of yourself whose actions loop in order to automate fruit plant harvesting. So, for example, you might record one clone that cuts a badgertail off of its plant and then tosses it across the room—and then go across the room and record another clone that catches it and sticks it to a bomb berry before putting it in the press. It’s extremely satisfying building these automated chains of control, and the process of recording interactions between several versions is yourself is a gimmick uniquely possible in VR. Despite being a relatively short game, there’s tons of room for creativity and problem-solving as you seek the most efficient ways to automate each mechanism. The lore is pretty well-done; it contributes nicely to the atmosphere of the game, as do the music and visual style. It also has options for smooth locomotion vs teleporting and smooth rotation vs rotating at customizable intervals (e.g. 30°, 45°, etc.), which is great for accommodating different levels of player comfort in VR. I would love to see The Last Clockwinder discussed in the same breath as Beat Saber, Superhot VR, or even Half-Life: Alyx as a must-play VR title presenting a unique, immersive gameplay experience that genuinely makes the most of VR capabilities. 10/10.

I was super excited to play this game because it seemed like a unique and interesting concept, and a game that would actually require a lot of thought to be put into it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I normally don’t review games, positive or negative, until I’ve 100%ed them, but I get a migraine just THINKING about trying to win 50 times in this nightmare of a game, so I’ll make an exception here.

As many others have pointed out, Deceive Inc really plays like a generic battle royale FPS first, and a stealth game second. The game essentially requires you to act like an NPC, which is fundamentally an impossible challenge, since NPCs just wander around aimlessly while the player actually moves with a purpose. For instance, locked doors in this game take time to “hack” in order to open them, but NPCs just brush right through them—so, even if I look like an NPC, if you see me sitting in front of a door for 10 seconds hacking it, it’s pretty obvious that I’m a player. As such, the stealth element of Deceive Inc comes secondary to its shooter core—it’s a viable and honestly rather effective strategy to just gun down everyone who might possibly be a player, and win by being the last one standing. This pretty much makes the stealth concept useless, when the way to win is just playing it like any other battle royale game.

This brings me to my next point, the gunplay. To put this concisely, it’s terrible. The time to kill is absolutely absurd (in what world does it take THIRTEEN shots to kill someone with an assault rifle???) and combat is generally very unbalanced. This is made worse by the fact that there is NO matchmaking system at all, meaning that almost every game, even when you’re first starting out, will put you up against level 400 players, some of whom even have the “Beta Tester” tag in-game. Considering the complete lack of beginner-friendliness in the gunplay, the game ends up just being dominated by these high-level players who can drill headshots into you over and over.

The game is also ridiculously confusing to grasp when you’re first starting out, and even at that point, there’s tons of information the game withholds from the player. Even just adding some fun tips to the loading screens like so many other games do could’ve helped with this. It would’ve been great if the tutorial actually gave some sample gameplay experience, rather than just a quick “this is what these couple buttons do” and then explaining the entire game to you in words.

Speaking of the tutorial, I experienced a bug where my queuing settings constantly defaulted to the tutorial, which meant that I had to return to the menu after EVERY GAME to switch my queuing back to solo. Another issue was that characters’ mastery levels didn’t register as leveling up unless I returned to the main menu—I’d gotten Red up to level 6 and the pre-game customization menu was still only allowing me to use her level 4 unlocks, until I returned to the main menu. These small bugs aren’t game-breaking, but they really show the clear lack of polish that was put into this game.

On the topic of a lack of polish, I was honestly shocked to see that this game is listed as having “Full Controller Support,” because attempting to navigate the UI of this game with a controller is nearly impossible. Most of the menus take the lazy way out by making you move a cursor around using the joystick (including one which forces you to GRAB a SCROLL BAR with the A button and slide it with the left stick… why can we not just scroll side to side with the right stick???), and sometimes button labels frequently disappear and reappear, as well as the cursor which is literally needed to navigate most of these menus. Some of the actual gameplay controls are broken with a controller as well, such as the ability to rotate when using the mimic gadget. Personally, I would argue this game has “Partial Controller Support” at best.

Also, I’m not sure why people seem to tout the fact that Deceive Inc is allegedly so great “because it isn’t a live service game”… when it literally is one. Same terrible battle pass system that every other online FPS has these days. And yes, that really is what this game should be categorized as—not the cerebral spymaster challenge it pretends to be, truthfully just another dime-a-dozen battle royale game with bad gunplay.

I’d really recommend staying against Deceive Inc, unless the devs can manage to completely revamp this game from the bottom up. It’s just a poorly-designed attempt at copying what’s trendy, masquerading as something new and different. It might as well be a worse version of Fortnite.

Sweaty Palms: The Videogame

Jokes aside, I actually found this game pretty fun. Maybe I'm weird.

Wow. I bought this game because it looked cool, and that’s about the only credit I can give it - it does look pretty nice, but the gameplay is so poorly-designed, filled with blatant flaws and misleading content.

Inertial Drift tries to use its pretentious vaporwave drift racing aesthetic as an excuse for controls that are clunky, unintuitive, and imprecise. Ironically, despite the name of the game and its very blatant theme, most of the challenges in the game will actually require you to drift as LITTLE as possible to win, because it slows you down drastically and frequently makes you lose all control of your vehicle. All the while, you have the game’s cringey characters, trying way too hard to be teenage hipsters, who are constantly switching between telling you that “everyone makes mistakes” and “you can’t make any mistakes if you want to win.” (It’s also great when they tell you you’re driving “perfectly” while you’re 10 seconds behind the opponent).

That brings me to Inertial Drift’s gameplay loop, which is practically nonexistent. The game is incredibly misleading with regards to how much content it has—it boasts 20 tracks, 16 cars, and a whole bunch of events and gamemodes. However, it really only has 5 tracks, since each one has a reverse version, alternate path, and alternate path reverse version. There is very little variation between most of the cars—some have slightly higher acceleration or top speeds, but the main difference is that some of them can drift while you’re holding the gas, some of them can’t, and some of them you must actively be braking to drift. It makes the game so much more confusing that different cars have different drift mechanics to achieve functionally the exact same result. The events, though, are by far the stalest part of this game. Practically every single mode consists of you driving alone on one of the aforementioned 5 tracks trying to beat a certain time. “Time Attack” and “Ghost Battle” are the EXACT same thing, other than the fact that Ghost Battle renders an image of the ghost you’re racing against, while Time Attack only shows you their time. “Race” mode is also extremely similar, but it lasts for the full 3 laps instead of competing for a best lap time (note that some of the tracks only have one lap anyway, making Race mode exactly the same as the other two). Duel and Endurance are hardly different either. It just gets so boring and repetitive so fast, especially considering that the ghosts are pre-recorded and don’t even have AI. And regardless of whether you’re playing Story Mode, Grand Prix, Challenge, or any other mode, you’re going to be dealing with these same events on the same tracks, over and over.

I also haven’t even gotten into the fact that many of these events are stacked heavily against the player to begin with. If you’re playing pretty much any mode other than Arcade, you choose a certain car, and then the game will pick your events/opponents. The vast majority of the time, the game will put you on tracks and events that your vehicle is particularly weak on (i.e. if you have a vehicle with a fast top speed but low handling, you’ll probably be facing tracks with lots of winding turns), which means you never really get to benefit from your vehicle’s strengths at all, only try to battle through its weaknesses. Meanwhile, the opponents will be the opposite, making the matchups pretty questionable right from the beginning. It feels like no playtesting was done for these modes at all, because almost every event is either extremely easy, or feels completely rigged. In some of the events the opponents will even glitch out and get teleported ahead of the player—this happened to me in Grand Prix mode using the Velox Jet.

In that same GP, the game actually puts you on the icy track against the only car in the game that can drive off-road without drastically losing speed. There are many shortcuts on this track which the ghost will take, and the player physically cannot use them. This is a Duel event, meaning the leading racer earns points the longer they are ahead of the other. As is the case with, quite honestly, the vast majority of events in this game, the opponent racer gains a huge lead at the very beginning, and the player essentially has one single window to pass the opponent, and if they miss it, there will be no future chances to catch up later in the race because the opponent is simply in a faster vehicle. Once again, this is an absurdly common experience in any of the gamemodes where your matchup is determined by the game (I didn’t really play Arcade mode at all because it isn’t needed for 100%).

Another thing that really bugged me about Inertial Drift was that in Grand Prix, you are given 3 “retries,” represented by an icon that looks like this: 🔄. To any reasonable person, this suggests that you can “retry” 3 times, i.e. you lose on your FOURTH failure. However, the game actually treats these as lives, meaning you lose on your THIRD failure, so you are only getting 2 retries. This is incredibly misleading—they could have used a heart or literally any other symbol to represent lives, but it simply does not make sense for the game to say you have one retry left, when you are in fact on your last life.

In case it wasn’t extremely clear, I strongly recommend against playing Inertial Drift. It’s disingenuous, boring, frustrating, and overall just a poorly-designed gameplay experience in almost every way. Note that I did not play the DLC, but I can’t imagine it’s really any better than the base game with all its glaring flaws. The only way I could see this game possibly being fun is racing against friends on Multiplayer, but there are still plenty of way better options out there.

Yeah. Don’t buy this game.

And before anyone shows up to “skill issue” me - as I mentioned, I 100%ed the game. I’ve completed all the Grand Prix modes and everything, which is no easy task. I’m not bad, the game just is.