Recent reviews by Worldfox

One of the weirdest, greatest games I've ever played.

There are the bones of a good game here, but all the flesh on those bones is rotten.
Credit where it's due: the art is nice. The puzzles were pleasantly mild.
For a game named epistory, the story is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥:
"A girl gets broken up with in the woods, but she picked up her head and carried on bravely.
College was hard, but she tried her best and persevered.
The City is scary but she never lost sight of her dreams."
Basic. Mild obstacles that everyone encounters, overcome by aphorisms and platitudes. Reads like a 40-year-old wine-mom's throw pillow. And then whoops the whole thing was a dream. ♥♥♥♥ that.
Also, you'd think that a game where a girl is riding a fox, the fox would do... anything. Or mean anything. Or have any sort of interaction. Nah. Girl coulda been riding a walrus, or a rhoomba, or a sentient cloud of farts.

There's a myriad of problems with the game mechanics itself. Not game-breaking, but guaranteed to frustrate. Like, you get the ability to knock enemies back when you hit them, but you can knock them off the screen, and when you do so, it stops you from being able to hit them again until they slowly crawl back on screen. Or an ability that lets shots ricochet and hit other enemies, except it moves slower than you can type, so sometimes you're typing the next word and it disappears underneath you.
Sometimes objects in the foreground obscure the words. Sometimes enemies are slow to come out, leaving you hanging for seconds without anything to do. Sometimes the background is a too-similar color to the words you're supposed to type, so it's hard to read. Sometimes two or more enemies have the same word, and so it just randomly selects which one you hit, which could be incredibly dangerous if it chooses the wrong one. The map is too far zoomed out to be of any use, you can't scroll the map to see where anything is, and your only option is the zoom the map out EVEN FURTHER. Sometimes the game will throw random enemies at you while you're trying to solve a puzzle, and there's no indicator or warning noise, so every once in a while a little bastard crawls up from the bottom of the screen and ganks you - although, credit where it's due once more, the checkpointing is pretty good, so really all enemies hitting you does is waste your time.

Up front, the art style is quite good, but it turns out there's only, like, six different enemies in the entire game, and the only thing that differentiates them is how quickly they move towards you, and how long the words are. Sometimes it requires you to swap elements to kill them, but they're literally the same models, and all you have to do is type an extra word.

I want to throw this game in a river.

Tedious dice twiddling, carefully plotting out a clever strategy that will prevent you from being hit (a must, your HP is too low to not play defensively) while still either setting up your next move or dealing a blow to the enemy - except you forgot that moving that one die makes it so that your opponent goes first, making the "right now" defense bonus ABSOLUTELY USELESS, and then you die.

EVERY. SINGLE. BATTLE. from minion to boss, is a LONG. BORING. STRUGGLE. The enemy is constantly counterpicking you. Which is I guess the point. But LAWD is it annoying.

If you do this thing, then you can't do that thing. If you move the dice around to do this other thing, then you don't have the numbers to connect a hit. But if you put the dice over here, then you don't have enough to do the move you want to do. But if you put this other dice over HERE, then you'll connect, but the enemy will strike back and kill you. GUH.

You just have to force yourself to play SUPER defensively. But then the second character they introduce you to CAN'T PLAY DEFENSIVELY, so while you're learning this game, you get bopped over and over again. And then, the biggest advantage you have over your opponent - being able to swap dice around after you've placed them - is completely undermined by the VERY FIRST enemy you face with that character. AND THEN THE ENEMIES CAN BOOP A LITTLE EXTRA JUICE INTO THEIR STATS, AND THERE'S NO ALERT FOR THAT, SO SOMETIMES YOU THINK YOU HAVE EVERYTHING JUST RIGHT BUT YOU DON'T YOU IDIOT YOU COMPLETE NUMPTY YOU JUST DON'T.

AND BOSSES CAN MOVE THE EXTRA BONUS AROUND AT WILL AFTER YOU'VE ALREADY RESPONDED TO THEM PUTTING IN THE BONUS AND IT DOES NOT ALERT YOU WHEN IT DOES THAT SO YOU GO TO DO THE THING AND THEN YOU GET BOPPED BECAUSE YOU'RE A MORON WHO DIDN'T SEE THE LITTLE YELLOW NUMBERS CHANGE PLACES.

The absolute worst part is that... It alerts you when an attack won't connect (you don't have enough attack to beat their defense), they have a very clear marker for that. BUT IT DOES NOT ALERT YOU WHEN YOU AREN'T GOING FIRST ON ABILITIES THAT ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE YOU TO GO FIRST IN ORDER FOR THEM TO BE USEFUL. So you go, "Aha, I'll gain two defense!" and then the enemy smacks you and THEN you get your defense and then you ragequit because WHY WOULDN'T YOU?

I want to like this, I really do, The animations are wonderful. It is so close to having interesting gameplay. There's a few things they could fix that would make it less ragequitty, but then there are some things that are just inherent to the way the game works that irks me so.

I love this game.
Bought it on WiiU a while back, but gave that to my lil' bro, so when I had a hankering to play this game again I just bought it on Steam.
On sale, but still. Some games I wouldn't buy twice if the second time cost 25 cents. If I somehow lost access to my Steam account I'd buy this game again on Switch.

It's a 2d action platformer metroidvania kinda deal, strongly in the style of Zelda 2. If that sounds like jibberish to you, I'm sorry. It is a sequel to the game Finding Teddy, but you don't need to play that to understand this game at all. Every relevant bit of info you need is explained in this game.

This game, while it has some foibles, has FLAVOR FOR DAYS.
My favorite part is the Musicom. The language in this world is musical, and you find Runes which unlock notes to play which gives you access to more language. You learn words by finding talking to people, and with those words you can unlock new passageways, find hidden collectables, and decipher writing you find throughout the world which helps you progress further. I love this so much. I know that, to some people, that might seem boring, but those people should read a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ book.

Graphics-wise, it's got a pixel-art style that's breathtaking. There are some areas that I linger in just 'cause it's so pretty. The protagonist is animated very well, moving smoothly from one animation to the next.

The music is beautiful, mostly ambient. I dunno how to talk about music other than I like it, for whatever that's worth.

There's plenty of secrets to find, puzzles to unravel, and challenging platforming, and I appreciate the map highlighting rooms where I haven't grabbed the chests from yet.

Some things I'm not a huge fan of, but am willing to overlook because, as a complete thing, this game is great:
-You can get stun-locked sometimes, turning a single mistake into a brutal beatdown and sometimes death. It's only a couple boss fights where this happens, but it's there.
- I'd appreciate a dedicated run button, as some enemies require you to play a bit of footsies, and double-tapping in a direction means you go sprinting directly into them when you only meant to scooch forward twice. Also: you hit the up button to pass through doors, and it's too easy to do that when an enemy is on the other side of the door and you just wanna jump but end up going back through the door you just went through. This is a problem in all games that do this, and I wish it would stop being a thing.
- you sometimes have to use the Musicom to make a platform avaliable to jump on, and there's strings of these platforms where you're constantly delving into a menu on a tight time limit. It's not the worst thing in the world once you get the flow of it, but it's a bit tedious, and I coulda done with less of that.

With all that in mind, I still highly recommend this game.

Oh man. I didn't think I would like this game. I normally don't like Roguelikes. Turns out I just don't like bad roguelikes. This is a good roguelike. A space roguelike. It pulls you in. It wraps you up. It takes a bite out of you. And you love it. You do it all over again like the good little space burrito that you are.

THIS GAME IS FUN TO PLAY!
Everything else about it is ♥♥♥♥.

First and foremost:
How would you like to fly a piece of tissue paper against an army of ginsu knives? Because that's what the matchmaking will do to you. They have tiers: different levels of planes that follow a semi-chronological order of how the planes were developed and improved throughout history. But, in matchmaking, the tiers mean nothing. Have fun flying a bi-plane against a jet. The matchmaking used to work, but then they upgraded it, and now everything is terrible.

Secondly:
The interface is awful. I hope you like opening menu after menu after menu. There's no real explanation for anything, and there's a lot that needs explaining (matchmaking, upgrading planes, what the currencies represent, what do my crews do, what does upgrading them get me, why aren't my friends getting my invites to my team, etc.). The only thing that's obvious is the "start battle" button.

Third:
The game is fremium. It isn't 'pay to win', since there's only so much you can upgrade the planes, and they're minor upgrades anyway, but there's a constant siege of "pay money to not have to grind this." It's not really a big deal, but if that sort of thing bothers you, then watch out. Honestly, before they bungled up the matchmaking thing, I would have gladly paid money for this game. It is fun, when it isn't horrifically broken.

Fourth:
The chat interface needs work. Nothing too major, just smooth it out a bit, make it carry conversations from out of game to in game, so I don't have to constantly swap between steam chat and ingame chat.

Having said that, the game IS fun, when it works right. When you're not being instantly shot down after five minutes of flying towards some dot in the distance. When your weapons can actually do something against the enemy npc targets. (Both are matchmaking problems).

So. Until they change the matchmaking system, I'm not recommending this game. It's great fun. Stay away from it for now.