Recent reviews by Discarded Fortune Cookie Fortune

Hits hard and hits fast. Establishes its mood, tension, and horror very quickly, and uses intelligent camera blocking and sting moments to pluck at the tension in simple, effective ways. The actual game of Buckshot Roulette is clever and kind of fun, in a nervous way that serves the experience.

It doesn't take long to get good enough at Buckshot Roulette (and desensitized to 12-gauge in the face) for the game itself to stop being scary. Once you've got a good handle on the rules, making safe and confident decisions is common enough to diffuse the game's ambient tension. The new items in more recent versions of the Double-or-Nothing mode add fun new dimensions to how the players need to think about the decisions they make. However, the inherent swinginess of Buckshot Roulette's item-dealing becomes more and more of a roadbump.

Pizza Tower excellently pulls together an absurd aesthetic to dress an almost flawless gameplay experience. The play of Peppino traversing the Pizza Tower on foot by himself, which constitutes 95% of the game, spares no expense in terms of artistic detail and level affordance and thought. No matter where you're looking on screen, there is some detail that further communicates the cartoonishness of Peppino, the world he lives in, and his quest. Almost every level is built up in a way that naturally guides the player in and out of every level. Once you know where to start looking, it begins to feel like Pizza Tower is begging you to get your play squeaky clean. It provides so many affordances in how levels are built and how movements and collectible and enemies interact with the player. Pizza Tower knows every minute detail of typical gameplay, and polishes each one to near-perfection, creating a game experience where the act of participation gets to be a discovery of the world, of the systems, of the art, of the music, every single time.

Pizza Tower's only flaw is that all of the non-Peppino game modes don't receive the same level of attention. Some levels don't provide the same affordances that they would otherwise, which makes these alternative modes of play funny detours from gameplay at best and awkward standouts at worst.

The mod system is really cool!

It Comes in Waves is nothing special mechanically, but you're not here for the looting or shooting. You're here for the journey. You're here for the desert planet. You're here for the moments of quiet desperation.

Instead of telling you who you are, your character is a mirror for sparse characters to react to. Through those reactions you get placed into a headspace that doesn't necessarily tell you to feel regret, but that still presses that social force down on your head.

Fighting others is fairly simply and easy, but its the change in the thought process of why you fight is what is special. First you move to self-defense maybe to pre-emptive self-defense maybe to weight each digital life's water with the opportunity cost of spending the water it'll take to chase them down.

It Comes in Waves is able to place you into the world and give you the tools and affordances needed not only to help you feel like you belong to the world, but to also begin to build out how you feel about each sparse interaction and feature and meaning of the endless wash of sand.

It's also quite pretty.

Mad Max Clustertruck but you have a gun. It's a pretty short game, but with how solid all of the fundamental mechanics are and with how often the game tries to make levels seamlessly flow into each other, it still paces very well. Big setpiece story beats help break up longer multi-level stretches, so the entire experience still feels 'complete'. It's not the same line of trucks for 45 minutes, its a journey with clear progression not just in mechanical features and difficulty, but also highlighted events, places, and 'people'. And this is only possible because jumping and shooting are both intuitive and easy.

Meatgrinder's real flaw is that it doesn't go beyond mechanical basics to support the gameplay experience. Collision physics, environmental hazard signaling, and the placement and detonation of explosive environment pieces all lack deeper thought in their implementation. A player will begin to butt up against this in edge-case live-or-die scenarios even at lower difficulties.

To me, it feels like Meatgrinder received the minimum amount of artistic attention in any given area. There's enough to clearly communicate the intended fantasy without compromising the fun of the game, and that's it. But because there's nothing thrown into Meatgrinder that is unnecessary, the experience is overall more enjoyable than a game that might be longer or larger. Meatgrinder delivers on everything it wants to do, no more, no less, in 45 minutes flat, and it's a damn good time too.

Metallica-tier Soundtrack, Anthrax-tier Gameplay.

Wait, hang on, this game has The Guys? I freakin' love The Guys!

[but I do think one of the achievements is broken plz help mr tree man]

I was going to threaten to kneecap Duncan Mullins over Archivist Phase 2 (you know why) but it turns out that that was overblown so it's fine.

I can't believe they gave this to me for free

It's rough around the edges, sure, but it's got a really good soundtrack and it's really, really, REALLY fun.