Recent reviews by DarkFarmer

Great idler- fun gameplay hooks and unique cute pixel art.

Best-in-class mobile idle RPG Idle Wasteland comes to Steam!

Fight, Gather, Craft, Cast and use items to boost through heart-pounding boss fights. Play your own way, and choose which paths of progression to take.

Its Nuts! 🔩🔩🔩🔩🔩🔩🔩

One of the greatest games of the 2010s, dark exploration, apocalyptic, horror, sci fi- psychological horror. great stuff. very sad and dismal when it isn't scary.

NieR: Automata is a masterpiece-probably the best JRPG of the 2010s.

An adventure game which is predominantly a visual novel, Little Red Lie offers phenomenal writing and artwork and gets a very strong recommendation to narrative game fans for both its small cost and short, but adequate length.

The developer of this game first came to my attention a few years ago with Actual Sunlight, a similar game about the protagonists struggle with depression and thoughts of suicide. Despite the dark subject matter, the writing of the game was humorous, touching and witty, putting a very human face on the very serious problem of depression and suicide.

Little Red Lie is more about society than mental illness, but the take on society is every bit as dark and dismal as clinical depression. And, its not wrong. The issues brought up by the game are very real and the arguments are very convincing. The two protagonists are fully alive, with their own struggles, personality, and experiences shining through. I feel like I know Arthur and Sarah like real people and I am glad I got to meet them.

Although the writing, dialogue (much of it internal) and characters are excellent, the game struggles a bit with the story arc and game design. I like that the game is short, but I think it could have been much longer, and would then justify more art, music and writing and really move beyond Actual Sunlight in terms of scale, scope and value.

Nevertheless, I couldn't stop playing this one until I got to the end, and I recommend it to any narrative game fan or gamer who likes to read, or write serious literature.

Some other narrative VN/adventure games I have played and enjoyed would also include: All 3 Zero Escape games, The House in Fata Morgana, Steins; Gate, Yumei Nikki, Mad Father, Higurashi when they Cry and of course, Actual Sunlight.

Changing this to a recco now that its performant and awesome and they've shown a great committment to making the game stronger and stopping cheats.

Hyper Light Drifter is an outstanding, perhaps superlative quality adventure game for every platform with control pads (that’s consoles and computers, although consoles aren’t going to be out for some time).

It is a truly adventuresome, world-exploring 2D pixel art based game. Set in a crumbling ruin of a once-advanced civilization, Drifter takes this old standby setup for an adventure game and colors it in a rich dream of purple and magenta hues, black shapes, and angular symbolism, like a living graphic novel painting.

Real life palettes are used to show a safe place, but increasing degrees of palette limitations indicate the descent into the Drifter’s perilous work of wading deep into the bastion of nasty, murderous creatures (their grievous offenses told to us in charming comic book panel stories from their anthropomorphic animal victims), and bringing vengeance upon them.

The game is challenging but not difficult, reminding us of the games of our childhood but with the play aides to allow us to enjoy it as busy adults with other responsibilities than playing video games. It is also not very long, because the game was crowd funded and the development team kept the scope small to ensure they could complete the project with a high degree of quality, which they did.


I’m going to go kind of off the rails in this review. and go off into a really long, boring and hopefully rewarding (for you) personal reflection on this game, which is of great importance to me.

one of the things that’s really important to me is video games. in recent years that’s about as unique and cool as think-framed glasses or having a 415 area code. despite how ♥♥♥♥ those facts are, I’m too old to try to hide the fact that all of those things are simply elements of who I am.

Ive wanted to make video games as long as I have been playing them, and when I got to be patient enough to actually go through the tedious process of programming, I started trying. And after many years of trying, I’ve rarely succeeded at making anything even remotely close to good. That’s how hard the process of making games and reconciling what people can and are willing to play with what you can and are willing to make truly is.

I am not the only person that was so greatly moved by the childhood experience of playing games, and then wanting to make our own games. Not so much as a vocation, but more so as an artistic calling. There are thousands of us, we call ourselves indie developers, you may have even heard of some of them. One such indie developer is Alx Preston, the creator of Hyper Light Drifter.

Like many indies, Alx didn’t just regard games of his childhood and young adulthood as merely fun, but as powerful, challenging formative experiences and much-needed escapes from the often difficult world of being a kid. He wanted to make a new game that expressed those qualities.


Fortunately for him and us, Alx is a brilliant painter with a keen eye for color and unique shapes and designs, and is also a skilled animator and along with some friends, was able to create a very compelling kickstarter trailer for a campaign that managed to raise just short of a half a million dollars.

The trailer music in particular I found moving when I saw this back in September of 2013. Unfortunately, the composer, Baths, did not contribute to the soundtrack. It was incidentally, composed entirely by the composer Disasterpeace, of Fez and It Follows, and is excellent in its own right. However, I would have truly loved for that critical aspect of the original vision of the trailer to be maintained in the final product in some form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VslU2On9kkU

One of the realities Alx was probably finding an escape from in Zelda and Diablo was his long-term health problems. Making video games is already an extremely difficult task, and to set out to do this when you aren’t sure how much time you’ll have to spend managing a disease or maybe even how long you will live is courageous to anybody, but to other indie developers like me, who have seen hundreds of hours wasted on projects nobody ends up playing, it is almost unthinkable.

Music and film made for artistic and not commercial reasons can often succeed, because of the nature of those mediums. To just sit and watch or listen to something doesn’t have to “work” the way a video game does. For this reason, indie games almost always fail at being good “games”. It’s just far too much to ask for a game to both be rewarding and fulfilling creatively to the creator and also be a game experience that is rewarding and fulfilling for the player.


However, this is where Drifter is truly exceptional. It’s a great video game. It has things to explore, plenty of things to do, challenging combat and exploration- it is a fun and rewarding toy, and not just a work of art, even though it’s that too. Is it Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto? No, it doesn’t have the scope or content of those kinds of games. Its smaller, and shorter, and there’s less to play with, but there is still a game in there and the game is good.

What it has that those things don’t have is a very coherent, unique and clear artistic vision, and a world that lives on in your brain even after you turn off the game. Like a great comic book or a sci fi novel, you feel like you’ve been somewhere truly weird and special- inside the mind of just one creative person.


Heart Machine, the company Alx created with the Kickstarter money, did an incredible job of bringing the vision that had inspired so many people to invest in this project to life. They kept the project within scope, used inexpensive and well-established tools to bring their game to life (GameMaker Studio), and kept costs under control so they could spend the time they needed to refine the game to what it needed to be.

I sincerely hope that Alx and Heart Machine can bring us more games, but even if they don’t, they have brought us something even more important than that: proof that crowdfunded, wild eyed artsy ideas can be made, through careful planning and skillful development, into truly great, playable, fun and exciting video games.