Recent reviews by CarlinFan

♥♥♥♥ combat, throwing stuff hits the intended target maybe 40% of the time, too maze-like just because it can, no jumping, endlessly respawning grunts. It's boring, tedious, shallow and ♥♥♥♥ and I really try to like it but I give up a the same point every time, No proper map, just that mini ♥♥♥♥? ♥♥♥♥ this.

No connection to any character = ♥♥♥♥ storytelling. Who the ♥♥♥♥ is this "dad" dude I got to see for 10 seconds and am supposed to care about his disappearance? I couldnt give a ♥♥♥♥ if the devs begged me.

No clipping/distortion protection whatsoever, the most horrid volume pumping imaginable even with "slow correction" enabled and at its lowest, Very, very few settings, all of which do next to nothing. The "advanced" settings are complete joke. Some sliders have vague, non-helpful pop-ups, others don't even have that.

The dev should take a long hard look at Stereo Tool, even the free feature set rubs this crap-app's face in the dog dirt.

~7€ full-price for this incompetent, basic and featureless amateur-hour crap? Pull your head out.

Interesting and charming art direction, servicable but tired/unoriginal sound effects and novel twist on the roguelike genre. One can see that initially there was lots of attention to detail. Artistically, at least. And the tiny little bit of music is okay.

The rest is still a looooong ways off of even becoming half-baked. The AI is totally braindead and not even able of the most basic pathfinding, other than running at you in a straight line. Some will even just casually step into bottomless chasms. The enemies will be utterly and completely unaware of and unable to deal with any and all obstacles in their beeline towards you.

Chair/vase/whatever in the way? They don't know what to do. They won't smash breakables to clear their way and even though they can push movables, they can't actually make any intelligent use of it. If the blockade is accidentally and unwittingly pushed aside by the enemy's movement, good. If not, they'll just run in place interminably until you clear the blockade for them.

If it is another enemy that's in the way, you're out of luck as well. They're oblivious to each other's presence and will neither step aside nor alarm each other.

The aforementioned novel twist forces you to replay the first couple levels over and over and over until you overcome the gating on level 4 (first boss)... of course, playing mostly the first couple levels over and over and over is kind of par for the course when it comes to roguelikes until you get better.

But most other roguelikes that I have played and enjoyed playing have much more variety and bigger levels. The levels are tiny and you go through the same tiny procedural building blocks over and over and over and over... everything is sooooo samey and boring once you've done it 5 dozen times. To be clear: this game gets extremely repetitive, grindy, boring and frustrating very, very quickly.

I have now spent about 60 hours. Unevenly distributed among these 60 hours are 5 hours that I learnt something new, a further 5 hours enjoying what I've learnt. The remaing 50 were spent on repetition, frustration, bewilderment and boredom.

The dev seems not to care anymore (if at all, judging by his adversity to/ignorance of feedback, not having responded to the "bug report" thread in over half a year), having already proclaimed his being fully focused on some other projects.

I paid about 9€ on sale and don't think it's worth it. 5€ non-sale would be about right for the amount of fun I had to forcibly wring out of this one over a way-too-long time period.

Nostalgia-wise it looks right, but plays soooo wrong.

There are NO QoL options to be had. Controls are not remappable and most of them are bundled around the WASD keys, so if you prefer otherwise or even have accessibilty issues - NO GAME FOR YOU!

But OF COURSE the devs have the odd menu function that is mapped to the return key, so you'll have to use both hands or reach over anyhow. Morons. Same inconsistency with the mouse: You can click things, you can drag things - but you MAY NOT SCROLL with the mouse wheel. WHY!?

The way the controls are hardcoded means that I can't shift while steering. Thanks, devs!

The "bumplock" you can get into when touching other cars/objects is ridiculously frustrating on its own, when it's your fault. Mind this, however: Traffic is oblivious to your presence and steers entirely randomly, changing across 5 lanes left to right without any cause, no matter what. And they move at quite the pace, considering I'm going 350 km/h. Guess what? Get bumplocked in a 2 lane section - traffic will just plough through you, bumping and instastopping you again, And the damage can get quite expensive.

The police can and will ram right through you, slam the brakes so you ram right through them and then rubberband and insta-accelerate to RAM RIGHT THE ♥♥♥♥ THROUGH YOU AGAIN, hitting you 3-4 times in half a second. While the idiotically oblivious traffic ploughs right through both of you. Until your car's trash. In under a second.

Sounds are cheap and awful, mix is abysmal (my own engine is almost inaudible) and the music is this disgusting "let's desperately try to sound like the 80s, even though they're long gone and we were never part of them" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, that can't make its mind up between wanting to sound like C64 chip tunes and boring mainstream 80s synth pop.

If your creativity/artistry can only be measured by how closely you rip off others - do something else. Become a chartered accountant or gas station attendant or something but please - don't make any more music. Or games.

This would be acceptable for free, but the 3€ sale price I paid is too high - not to mention the deluded 10€ regular asking price. For what, precisely? The people involved deserve nothing for this half-baked, shallow nostalgia rip-off that can't get anything right.

Neither worth the wait nor the money. The devs did not and do not understand what made HL great, so they go about ruining it by "fixing" stuff that was never broken.

Also, hire someone who knows how to model human beings. "Amateur hour" is being too generous a description.

TL;DR: It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, pass on.

Unintuitive, convoluted, illogical and crap.

Terminally boring "Gawking Simulator" where you are a camera and that's absolutely it. Every bit of gameplay is just an empty gimmick to keep you occupied.

Every interaction so far was 'press something' or 'click something' while being told exactly what to press/click, no brain required. When there is something to 'analyze', you don't need to do any analysis whatsoever - you press the prompted key for x seconds, the GUI plays a cheap janky anim and then it's "analyzed". Wow, what an effort on my part.

Might as well be watching a movie with a turned-off controller in my hands, mashing buttons and pretending to "play the movie".

The game has failed to make me give even the tiniest speck of dried-up fecal metter about anything that's going on or who the ♥♥♥♥ this floating ♥♥♥♥ is, why she's floating, why she's such a ♥♥♥♥ and why I should care.

Avoid at all costs, even at discounts higher than 50%.

***WALKING SIM!!! SAVE YOUR MONEY AND STREAM IT!!!***

Wonderful art direction, mediocre and uneven writing; the music is adequate and at times atmospheric, but ultimately unoriginal and utterly forgettable.

But that's all made irrelevant by the real disappointment: There is no game. You don't really actively explore anything. You do nothing but walk, press a button, read.

The genre is listed as "adventure", yet there is NO puzzle-solving whatsoever. There is no gameplay to speak of. You walk around the house in 2 gated loops (pre and post restoration of power, the 2nd loop being a retread of the 1st) and then a linear sequence in a cavern. You read/look at everything you see overtly lying around, watch a sequence and go to the next room to repeat it all. Had the genre correctly been stated as "walking simulator", I'd never even have wishlisted the game.

Frankly, I feel lied to by the devs for offering this without a clear disclaimer that this is a walking simulator, not a game.

You don't need to do anything but go through the motions and read. Again, positively NO puzzles, not a single one. Nothing that IMHO adds up to really exploring the environment, as there is no risk or peril, nothing really to discover (everything lies around openly and can be highlited).

Watch a complete stream of someone "playing" this on your fav streaming site and save your money. If I had known this, I would've tried to run through in under 2 hours and get a refund; alas I constantly thought the game was only just about to start and I like to take my time, sooo.... after 4 and a half hours including (!) lunch (left the "game" running") it's suddenly over. Also: No choices to make = no replayabilty. I just paid 8,99€ for an entirely throw-away experience with no lasting impact. I'll have forgotten about ever having "played" this within the next 48 hours.

At least I got a moderately nice story out of it, though it is a bit predictable at times, The story deals with emotionally complex and deep themes: There's love and the end of the world as main themes, with a side of child-abandonment, troubled family relations and corporate evil getting a quick shout-out.

But they are all handled in a disappointingly shallow and unchallenging way: "Love is great until someone dies, then it's sad but it's still the best - no matter if the world is at its end, for we all keep chugging along the best we can as human nature is so awesome 'coz emotions. Look - a tree!"

There's BIG TIME 'small world syndrome' regarding the background of Rik's Grampa. Extremely shoehorned-in. And the prof shouldn't have taken off her helmet in the end. Whatever little connection to the character I had was flushed down the drain by displacing it with a prefab clichéd wanna-be hipster poser from the future. I don't mind playing female characters at all - just not ***** like that.

Was it worth the 8,99€ I paid? Naah, no way. 3€ TOPS for a one-time experience, but provided one knows it's a short story spruced up by walking and pressing a button to stretch it out! I could've had a kebab AND a soft-drink for that money... shame.

Shame I can't refund anymore - unless the devs offer one - I'd accept it in an instant, Feel free to contact me.

Edit: added spoiler tags; thanks for the refund offer, will gladly take it. Again, the art is awesome but that's mostly (90%) it.

Edit 2: 2 typos, and: in 2019 I acutally could've gotten TWO kebabs and a soft-drink, as this review stated originally. But it's almost 2023 now... and times have changed, so I've updated this.

Just horrible. Ugly, boring, linear, too random, terrible UI and controls (non-rebindable, of course), cheesy voice-acting with extra cheese (can I have cheese on that?) performed by school drama group rejects, story/characters are just one big clichée, tedious, convoluted, sucking-the-life-out-of-me irredeemable drecky dredge poo.*

Everybody involved should be stripped of their rights and property, removed from their families and be free for us to be whipped naked through the streets till their skin comes off in ribbons.

Then, maybe someday, we could talk about letting them design a sequel and, provided it is an improvement, they may apply for readmission to the human race.


*On a bit of a serious note, a game like this was what I was looking for. It's just that Blackguards does everything it can never to let this gain any traction and it just sucks the will to live out of me. 3 days. 3 long, hard ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ days of slogging through this sh.ittymcsh.it.tyshi.ttsh.itfestbur.gerc.ra.psandwich.

I cry salty, bitter tears thinking about the 10 minutes of happiness with a kebap that the money would've bought...

Unskippable cutscenes/convos during tut = instashitlist

What's supposed to be better this time around? it's the exact same ♥♥♥♥ as it was.

Free is about 50 bucks too expensive for this.