Recent reviews by Ricotez

A cute, sweet Metroidvania-lite game. The game is fairly short (my first playthrough took me exactly 5 hours and I had to go back to every area to look for that last cassette), but thanks to that it doesn't overstay its welcome and can tightly compact its ideas into a bite-sized package.

Running around in the suit makes you feel powerful (especially with the optional upgrades), but if you grow overconfident, you could be looking at an ass-kicking, especially in the boss battles. You also occasionally have to leave the suit so you can fit into a cat-sized tunnel. This makes you feel very vulnerable but much more mobile and you become able to climb walls. It offers a nice contrast with the bulky suit.

The music is also very good, feeling somewhat reminiscent of Metroid but not afraid to experiment and find its own groove.

The graphics are effective and nice to look at (although I recommend to pick up a few cassettes and switch to a palette that is easier on the eyes), but because there are only two shades on the screen, it does sometimes get a bit hard to see what is happening on-screen during the more hectic moments of the game.

The game also throws a lot of save points at you, which does make certain areas of it a lot easier than they seem to have been intended. Once you have a bunch of health upgrades you can tank through most regular enemies, because you can be certain there'll be another save point right around the corner. On the other hand these save points are the only way to heal up, there are no health drops in this game. The aforementioned boss battles also do get quite challenging and that is where I got my main challenge out of this game.

Overall my nitpicks aren't really very big and did not have a major impact on my enjoyment of this game. I really enjoyed it a lot, and I fully recommend it both to fans of Metroidvania and of other platformers.

The new area is beautiful and extremely stylish. The layout is confusing at first, but I would not recommend activating the guides because the zones are such a joy to explore. After a while you will start unlocking metro tickets and shortcuts, and getting around becomes a lot easier.

The music is also awesome.

Update: With the full game out, I can finally write a proper review about the full experience.

An excellent sequel to an excellent game.

Below Zero tries in several ways to not just be a retreading of the first game by introducing a new, modular submarine, a stronger focus on character-driven narrative, and a significant portion of dry land exploration with its own mechanics and hazards.

If you like the first game, you will like this one. The dry land exploration seems a bit weird at first, but is actually implemented pretty well, even if it's weird to suddenly be confined to gravity again. Fortunately the game gives you maps for these areas and you are going to need them.



However, I have some criticism on how the game's story develops. I will avoid spoilers in this review, but if you want absolute zero knowledge of the game's story, this is where I recommend you stop reading.

Without spoiling too much there are essentially two different storylines developing in tandem. Unfortunately these storylines lack any real interconnectivity. Although both of them have resolutions, only one of the storylines will actually lead you to the end of the game, and the other one seems to not be much more than a driving force to go exploring.

But perhaps that was the intention, and perhaps the game doesn't need more than that. The first game's narrative was also primarily a force to push you into certain directions, and find the stuff you need to finish it.

Celeste is a good platformer. But it is also an excellent story about dealing with depression, thanks to the metaphor of climbing a literal mountain. It hit very close home to me. The music is top notch as well, capturing the mood of the areas you traverse and alternating between quiet, moody segments and thrilling crescendos as the story and the levels unfold.

The best horror-survival-game I have ever played. There is something inherently terrifying about the unknown depths of the ocean, and during your exploration you'll come across gorgeous alien landscapes and wildly varying alien creatures. Not everything is dangerous, but the real horror comes from finding out how far - how deep - you can go. There is always a bigger fish.

By the time you own a Cyclops with its own renewable food supply and docked PRAWN suit, you'll scarcely remember the time when you were just a scared diver in a big ocean. You will feel like lord and master of planet 4546B - until you tun into one of the really big fish, watch your hull integrity vanish at an alarming rate, and push your engine until it nearly catches fire as you run with your tail between your legs.

Of course, the game is not without its flaws. The main problem is that, in order to unlock new technologies, you have to scan objects or find data chips in the world. It can take a long time to find some of these unlocks, even if you end up looking at a map out of frustration - which I recommend you don't, because a major part of your progression in this game is the knowledge that you yourself gain, learning what the dangers of the world are, which areas you should avoid, and in which places you can find what.

Finally, this is a game with a very good story, one that slowly unfolds as you progress through it. There are some pretty good twists in there, so make sure not to spoil yourself.

Just don't go into the Dead Zone.

Excellent game with excellent writing. The levels are a mix of open worlds that give you a goal and let you figure out how to platform there, and more linear levels where there's really only one path you can take. The real magic however comes from the major differences between the various worlds you'll visit: their storylines and characters, and how the levels are incorporated into these. In one world you'll be doing chores for an evil forest spirit after you sold your soul to him, in another one you have to help two director birds who both want to win a movie trophy. The music is absolutely top-notch, Your Contract Has Expired can compete with Megalovania in terms of catchiness.

Unfortunately the game suffers from Super Mario 64 syndrome: your greatest enemy is the camera, which is constantly trying to reposition itself and gets in the way with the more trickier jumps. More than once I've had to make a leap of faith because the camera decided to move while I was in the middle of a hard platforming section and didn't have time to readjust it. Fortunately the game has much more to offer than just pure platforming, so this problem is not as bad as it could have been.

SimCity 5 dropped the ball and single-handedly destroyed the good name of its franchise, which was kind of inevitable after all the bad choices made during its development, but also threatened to tarnish the genre as a whole.

But Cities: Skylines swooped in to save the city simulator genre and become the new industry standard. The game is obviously heavily inspired by the older SimCity games, but iterates on them and improves them. The game has its imperfections, but if it continues to receive updates maybe those will be gone eventually as well.

The DR games are always full of references to other installments and love to predict player expectations, only to go off into a completely different direction, and this game is no exception to that. So please, if you have any interest in the series, play DR1 and 2 before you play this one.

The game itself is amazing. The characters are great, the cases are complicated and interesting, the new visuals are very nice, and there are tons and tons of plot twists.

The ending is... I don't want to spoil it, but it's divisive to say the least. You might like it, or not. I liked it, but I also have to acknowledge that it may have been better if it was something else. Or maybe not. Danganronpa wouldn't be Danganronpa without an ending that flips the table so hard it goes into orbit.

Cute story that will make more sense if you've watched the Wakfu series, although it isn't necessary to do so first. If you can stand subs, I recommend to watch it with the original French audio and English captions.

Amazingly atmospheric, far better than most horror scifi games. It's like someone combined System Shock with Bioshock, then took the guns out and poured a hot sauce of existential dread over the result. Never before have I seen a video game tackle the Mind-Body Problem this well. Recommended for fans of psychological horror, regular horror and cyber philosophy.

I do agree with the sentiment that you could remove the monsters and still end up with the same game, though. There is a bit of a disconnect going between the strong narrative that the game tries to tell, and the classical gameplay from Penumbra and Amnesia. However, without the monsters... There wouldn't be much of a reason to be scared. Atmosphere will only carry horror so far, at some point there has to be an actually scary thing to make all the times when there is no scary thing but there *could* be a scary thing that more frightening.