Recent reviews by alejandroenrique.com /art

better now

A bit buggy atm but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it's reach on PC what else is there to say

zippity fast

Kabam's leftovers were bitter, but now with DECA on hold, it situates Realm of the Mad God firmly within the tradition of a fresh revival. The game experiments with brisk moments of pure reflex, bullet-hell glory, washing every frame with luminescent color, and seeding each realm with fantasy philosophy, and the gameplay with meditative mindfulness. Over 800 hours of gameplay, without including browser and Kongregate, I'd say I'd have at the very least over 1000 hours, it all looks very impressive, but does it actually bring anything to the table?

The game begins with the tutorial, but skipping it, you reach the beach, where you'll spend some of your first noob hours before getting a grasp of the game, you stand on the verge of a very misleading and cruel world, filled with bright colors but extremely high stakes, having to risk yourself every minute while you casually speculate about the feel of death. Is it like flying or falling? You look down on a land of high-rises and diffuse, varicolored light. The player's first real experiment starts here, with a subjective point-of-view. The camera sits at the centre of your character, before you set it to the proper way, off-centered, when the character is hit by a particle, it speaks with a slightly muffled and reverberating voice, as though hearing itself; "oof", it says.

After getting to level 20, the last level, the real game begins, having to max your character with potions, the character drinks it, and you get one more point of a certain stat, HP and MP being the most valuable, increasing it by 5 points each potion.

Once you get used to the game it becomes more of a meditative experience than game, intrinsic and trance-inducing, the screen illustrates the player's altered visual perception, offering a remarkably accurate rendering of a DMT trip, with the ceiling becoming a red-hued pulsation of fractally repeating ferns. Sounds grow warbly, as though heard from far away while underwater. A low mumble of conversation begins, though you are alone in the room.

Like much of Realm of the Mad God, it’s a visually arresting scene that does little to advance plot or any kind of story whatsoever. Hearing your character's scattered oofs while it trips throughout dungeons only underscores that potion use can scatter your thoughts. Your character's don’t appear that profound to begin with, and his pot-taking (and dealing) later appears as a refusal to join the ranks of players it calls “PPEs.”

Oryx makes clear he has deeper issues in mind, through Craig, a fellow potions aficionado. Craig asks whether the character has read the Book of Geb, and soon he’s monologuing about the Egyptian view of the afterlife. As this is probably the longest conversation in the game, we can assume it will have later relevance.

It does, because the character quickly gets shotgunned by Medusa. As its blood spills onto the floor of a grimy Highlands lava pit (in a realm named “Medusa” of course), he wonders, “She shot me. Did she kill me? Did she shoot me? I’m just tripping, that’s what it is. It’s the potions.” (Craig later makes explicit the connection, claiming that the body releases potions at death.)

[a distinct 'Dun, dun, dun...' echoes through the room]

Your character’s apparent death (and eventual fame-earning) further frees your game's direction, which rises through the ceiling and becomes unstuck in time. It follows you through your grief and anger from a disembodied remove. Its perspective removes any nuance from individual players; they all become head-tops and foreshortened bodies, save when the camera occasionally dives into the lower, material world. Often this means zooming in on a light source until it loses all definition. When it becomes only light, the game cuts to another, similar light, zooming out to reveal a new scene. This technique repeats many, many times.

Viewed from above, the characters become visually flat. Oryx amplifies this alienation through banal dialogue delivered with flattened affect, as though all personality has been burned away by potions of life. (Craig, especially, delivers every line as though he’s just waking up.) Without a strong sense of character, Realm of the Mad God becomes primarily an intellectual exercise, the wooden dialogue one of several enemies recalling retro titles. But the games’s intellectual underpinnings—its ideas—seem muddled. Oryx claims to have experimented with potions as visual research, and he supplies the rw nw prt m hrw (that is, Book of Emerging Forth into the Light (Book of Geb) as an interpretive framework for the game.

Neither of these influences has appeared in Kabam‘s earlier work, but Realm of the Mad God does share life a preoccupation with violent, rupturing moments. Here the most obvious break is your character’s death, which enables over two hours of cries from the player. Earlier, though, your Wizard was killed in a brutal Earth Smash, a scene you'll return to several times. With your other character’s death, you and your character became inseparable, nearly incestuous. This violence-spawned connection, the game implies, ultimately leads to your character’s brutal death—and incessant rebirth.

The muddled (perhaps clichéd) exploration of violence and repercussions makes Realm of the Mad God more like other bullet-hells than one might at first expect, but this is quickly polarized as you discover its permadeath condition, most bullet-hells are reliant on practice for perfection, with little loss for death, but in Realm of the Mad God, it circles around it, making permanent death and loss of character incessant every minute, every second, every dungeon, a mishap and you'll have lost what you worked weeks for. Life and death in this game are technically impressive, equally beautiful and filthy, polarizing and provocative. As for the end, players may not immediately understand what they’ve endured. Like a drug trip, the profundity here is ersatz: however maxed you are, whatever riches you're wearing, whatever Great Truth you believe you’ve attained, you can’t bring it back with you.

Became P2W and useless once they made classes -pretty much- only obtainable by paying.

OUT OF THIS WORLD LOL

INCREDIBLY PIRATEY. ONE OF THE BEST GAMES OF OUR GENERATION.

Pretty straight-forward. You Have to Win The Game. A game about a lost young man trying to find the true meaning of the terrible world he's trapped in, finding meaningless objects trying to make a way to kill time until the day he is finally gone from earth. Terrible, terrible decision he's made by trying to kill time and not trying to kill himself, we explore his pitiful empty life as he enters madness due to his delirious adventures.

"First God made heaven & earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light."

Those are just some of the inspiring words you'll hear from Team Meat's masterpiece, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.

This game is a magazine of Biblical insights and exquisite art, and it also covers both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, illuminating the text with the latest insights of modern Biblical research in a difficult and perfectly set puzzle that breaks your mind as you try to progress through each level of the basement, this being a metaphorical way to reach the protagonists' subconscious, where all his traumas dance in a sickening satanic fest. It airs a wide range of issues and viewpoints. Each room was beautifully illustrated with masterful artwork and scenes from the Bible lands.

Crazy Moo Games' "Canyon Capers'' is like an erotic daydream about chances missed and opportunities avoided and springed. For its hero, who spends several nights wandering in the sexual underworld, which are the 5 ancient worlds, it's all foreplay. He never actually has the 'treasure', secretly meaning sex, but he dances close, and holds its hand in the flame. Why does he do this? The easy answer is that the beauty of the gems has made him jealous. Another possibility is that the story it tells inflames his rather torpid imagination.

The game has the structure of a thriller, with the possibility that conspiracies and murders have taken place. It also resembles a nightmare; a series of strange characters drift in and out of focus, puzzling the hero with unexplained details of their lives. The reconciliation at the end of the game is the one scene that doesn't work; a film that intrigues us because of its loose ends shouldn't try to tidy up.

You play as an anonymous man, possibly has a wife and would therefore be a married couple who move in rich Manhattan society. In a long, languorous opening sequence, they attend a society ball where a tall stone, a parody of a suave seducer, tries to honey-talk the wife of the anonymous man. Meanwhile, the anonymous man gets a come-on from two aggressive and beautiful gems, before being called to the upstairs bathroom, where Victor, the millionaire who is giving the party, has a gem who needs a gemologist's help, and that's where everything starts tearing apart in the sick world that Canyon Capers is in.