Recent reviews by Techbane #FreeHK

I swear I'll get to the review, but I want to try and contextualize this a bit first.

I first discovered Cavemanon only recently via The Algorithm making a big stink about their last major project from a few years ago. I checked it out thinking, "There's no way some random group of yobbos from 4chan could make an ace-tier visual novel representing minority characters twice, right?" (The first one was Katawa Shoujo. Has some issues, but there's genuinely nothing else out there like it.)

At the time... that held true. It was snappily written with some genuinely great jokes and a couple good character arcs, BUT it spectacularly missed its opportunity to realistically portray and potentially help bridge demographics, in a time when society could genuinely benefit from some actual examples of compelling character narratives in contemporary media to contextualize such things.

Here, somehow not even four years later, is the same team's redemptive arc. It follows a similar blueprint: off-brand Anonymous finds romance in a high school full of dinosaurs, but they wisely pivoted their efforts to original character designs that aren't attempting to represent a group of which they only have the most fleeting of an outsider's perspective. Or at least, if nobody on the team has personally dealt with someone in a wheelchair, this time someone did do enough research to make such a character properly believable and develop it as an aspect of their character rather than have it feel entirely token, or act as a substitute for character.

Somehow, lightning has now struck twice; two separate groups of people out of 4chan, of all possible places, have managed to deliver some of the most compelling and introspective visual novels ever made. And this time they didn't even feel obligated to cram in any adult content! The characters, the art, the writing, the animated sequences, the couple interactive segments, the way the paths are built on believably intricate decisions in specific character interactions, the fact that it continued to defy expectations and throw two or three more amazing little twists even while closing out the fourth and final ending... really, the only points I think I could dock it for are some of the music loops being a bit grating, and a handful of typos. Besides that, this is wonderful. Genuinely peak fiction, and I would recommend it to just about anyone -- as long as you don't let the gut punches of endings 1 or 2 stop you. Endings 3 and 4 are thoroughly worth the finagling to experience.

Cried enough that my throat dried out / 10.

The first thing you need to know about this game is that it's very much steeped in the survival-crafting genre, with the twist that most of what you're crafting is upgrades for your car. It's really overbearing to begin with, where runs will probably take you upwards of an hour as you loot everything not nailed down (and half the stuff that is) because you NEED those materials. Once you'e over the hump, runs can go by a lot quicker and you'll start encountering more interesting hazards, but the core loop still involves a lot of parking, looting, and maintenance once you're back at the garage. It's not going to be for everyone, but it's compelling to me. The fact that they removed the demo is aggravating, because it was a great vertical slice to help would-be buyers figure that out risk-free.

The next thing you need to know about this game is that you can't save mid-run, so you need to budget your time carefully, and if you criticize this element of its design you'll be dogpiled by weird elitists telling you you're wrong for some reason.

The third thing you need to know is... at least as of the launch window, it's buggy. Real buggy. Not the sort of bugs that will necessarily manifest themselves constantly, but there's everything from UI elements bugging out, other visual bugs and clipping issues, to a dozen different game-breaking bugs that can force you to alt-F4 out of a run and wipe a bunch of progress, or worse yet, end up breaking your save file outright because a mandatory progression flag broke. They do seem to be rushing diligently to patch these, so I'll likely flip my review to recommended at some future point, but right now I'd advise giving it some room to overcome its growing pains.

20 years ago, you were part of a secret expedition team sent to a border world beyond the modern star map, ending up stranded there with a cache of 100,000-year old lost alien technology during Earth's ongoing conflict with the terrifyingly powerful Ur-Quan. Managing to build only the skeleton of a new, super-advanced starship from materials on-world, you finally return home to find that Earth is not at all how you left it.

I've dipped my toes into this game repeatedly over the years but not to the point of obsession, so I hope to offer a balanced take on what it's like to play in modern day. Right out of the gate... it can be pretty rough. Heck, when I first tried it in the mid-2000's the absolute first impressions were kind of terrible. The local planetary map operates on a weird series of zoom transitions based on how close you are to either the central star or the nearest planet, and your starting barebones ship has next to zero maneuverability. You'll start off flying wide of your intended target over and over again, desperately trying to course correct as you waste an agonizing amount of time just trying to get your fat ass to turn back around for another pass. Rest assured, you can learn to steer this thing, and you can upgrade it to be less of a pain.

There's a lot of really nice music, animated character portraits, and genuinely impressive voicework (the latter of which is from the enhanced 3DO port back in the day), and those will go a long way to selling you on this game. There's a whopping 25 alien races for you to interact with, each of them wonderfully oddball and unique, and enough celestial bodies to give No Man's Sky a run for its money! But for as ahead of its time as it was in so many respects, it very much retains its roots as a DOS game. It offers no hand-holding, and plenty of opportunities to screw the pooch.

There is no quest log or ingame journal of any kind. You need to pay attention to the dialogue, and anytime someone mentions something interesting, important, or just generally noteworthy-sounding, WRITE IT DOWN. Notepad, text editor, phone app, doesn't matter, just have a place to collate your notes and keep tabs on what you're doing. (You can pull up what was last said with Spacebar while talking.) Also be prepared for some hints to be based on fairly esoteric knowledge; things like being told to visit the "Bugsquirt" star system, which is a pun on Betelgeuse. There is no autosave, so save often. Also save if you're anticipating any big dialogue trees, because it is entirely possible to permanently mess things up with poor diplomacy or miss certain info. Avoid combat as much as possible until you have a respectable fleet, and run if you must; you can weather a few hits (your health is measured as "crew"), but having one of your ships destroyed early on can be crippling in the long term.

And lurking in the background of everything else going on is something that might be considered a spoiler and/or somewhat ruin your enjoyment of the game, but I would also consider it decent form to warn people of this: you're working under a time limit. The closing chapter of the game will initiate at a certain date, whether you're whatsoever ready or not. And that, while appropriate given the context of everything going on, is what festered in the back of my mind to ruin my enjoyment more than anything, considering how contrary it runs to the open-ended exploration aspect that the game otherwise builds itself on.

To date, I have never finished this game, and I may never do so. But even if it had an entry fee of ~$15 today I'd still recommend it as being worth the time I spent with it for how uniquely colorful the experience was. So considering it's free, yes, I'd call it worth your time. If you're in it for the exploration, there's plenty to find, just be aware that it might take a couple playthroughs to gain the foreknowledge required to save the day. There are also Mac and Linux ports, and a collection of really well-made remixes available on the Ur-Quan Masters sourceforge page, which I can only surmise haven't been included for opaque legal reasons.

PS: Fwiffo's theme samples the Taco Bell "Bong" sound. You will never be able to unhear this.

Slaughter untold thousands of Y2K-era Geocities clipart entities, in a mashup of Vampire Survivors meets Touhou with a splash of Yume Nikki. Compelling aesthetic and soundtrack, pretty good weapons and fun upgrade trees, and I actually want to know what's going on with the story.

I know some people abuse gamma sliders to take some of the horror out of horror games, but I legitimately cannot see a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing in this game without one.

On its surface, Lethal Company is an ugly, slightly janky early access survival horror game with a very limited scope and not a great deal of content -- and it's hard to say for sure how much it may or may not be padded out before it hits version 1.0, how much post-launch support is really planned, or how quickly a lone dev can realistically be expected to crank out updates.

That said, the limited content still works for its intended purpose: as a delivery mechanism for emergent chaos, which is the true appeal of the game. You're going to die horribly, often, and when you do, you get to spectate the rest of the match and chat with anyone else who dies. On the occasion that you don't die it's usually quite a rush to salvage what you can and escape, and the unwinnable, closed-loop nature of the game means there's little if any frustration to the inevitable failstate when it comes.

It's a Horror Comedy Party Game, and while it's early yet for me to say just how much staying power it'll have, it's been well worth the price of admission already.

The game itself is an interesting Cowboy in Wilderness Simulator, with an interesting story attached, though there are many places where good game design sense was very deliberately eschewed in favor of making things staggeringly more inconvenient in a misguided attempt to invoke "realism". That being said, I'm generally having a good time playing it.

The reason I'm not recommending it is because of the multilayered DRM making it almost completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ impossible for me to play the game I bought... twice. I have bought this game twice trying to get it to work and it will only actually let me play it in roughly 1 of every 6 attempts, after I spent a month back-and-forth with Rockstar's support trying to fix my account login which had broken for unknown, unrelated reasons.

If you absolutely must get this one, get it on console. If you don't have or want the consoles it runs on, don't bother. It's not worth it to have to fight this hard for the ability to play what you've purportedly purchased.

This is a brilliantly conceived and executed puzzle game that I can't help but liken to the Zachtronics style of puzzle design to an extent; a simple, reasonably minimalist concept that gradually peels back more and more layers of complexity until you're dealing with some real brain-melting challenges. Unfortunately, the one place Solas 128 really fails is in its communication. It's minimalist to an absolute fault, to where it can be a minor challenge to even work out how to navigate the frontend to resume your saved game instead of deleting it or starting a new game by accident. Very much a sign of things to come.

Naturally, this extends to the puzzle design. Something a game like this desperately needs is clear introduction to new puzzle elements as they're incorporated -- you make it clear that something new is happening, then you demonstrate basic applications of it, and then you can start taking the training wheels off and integrating it into the ongoing puzzle design. Solas does somewhat introduce you to new concepts in relatively simple environments before working them into more complicated puzzle design, but the bigger issue is that you're given no indication of the fact that you're being introduced to a new mechanic in the first place. You can never be sure if you're missing an element of the current puzzle because you need to complete more of the nearby rooms first, because there's some new mechanic you don't know about yet, if you're maybe just being a bit dense at the moment, or possibly a combination of all three. Moreover, the hint system works swimmingly for some rooms and seems to outright break or mislead you in others because it, too, is extremely limited in what it has been designed to communicate. I have repeatedly had to reference video playthroughs to be able to continue, and I've rarely been disappointed at spoiling the solution for myself because nine times out of ten it leaves me shouting at my monitor, "How the ♥♥♥♥ was anyone supposed to intuit THAT for themselves?!"

Currently I'm stuck on a room that is so horrendously designed and dependent on a complex series of maneuvers involving timing-based manual dexterity that, even with the video walkthrough on hand. I've not yet been able to complete it. It looks like some sort of harebrained unintended solution one would use to solve the puzzle because they can't figure out how it's actually intended to be played... except that is, in fact, how it is required to be played, and it is egregiously bad. Which is a shame, because aside from these particular hideous and pronounced warts, it's a really well-designed experience with some masterfully crafted puzzles. And sure, I'd still recommend picking it up on a decent discount, but if the game weren't so adamant about keeping its lips pursed and expecting you to just figure it out, bro, it could've been a far, far less frustrating and no less enjoyable experience.

Cleanup feels like an attempt to staple more content onto Heavenly Bodies in a format modified to get by on a much tighter development budget. Instead of navigating a series of wildly different and unique levels and setpieces, you are confined to a single, small, bland space station that starts off in rather a state of disrepair, which you must get back into working order, a few tasks per day, with the use of some new tools that you get to play around with -- which are fun for about 5 minutes each until the grueling, finicky, chorelike nature of using them to drag around and manipulate other physics objects sets in. Said tools are mandatory for most tasks although you won't always know which ones will be required in advance, and despite the ability to clip them to your suit or PMU, they are extremely easy to get lost and softlock yourself.

Even leaving aside everything taking place on the one station, part of what makes the DLC feel so stale so fast is overreliance on the new PMU. It's like if you took the pod from the asteroid mission in the base game, stripped away everything fun about it except for the thrusters, and made the majority of your activities dependant on using it, which will almost always involve trying to weave your arms through the tangled mass of tools and bungees clipped to it and your suit and pray you successfully grab the 1 of 3 overlapping interact points you're trying to. Then, when you're tasked with doing activities further away from the station, the only place you can check a map to actually verify the location of objects you're supposed to be traveling to, is back on a terminal in the middle of the station. So if you lose track of your objective, go back to the station, finagle the airlocks, crawl back down the central corridor, doublecheck the map, then go all the way back and try again. THEN when you finally get to your destination, discover that you're SOL because you lost the magnet somewhere (and there's no way to check where), requiring you to start all over again.

Making matters even more complicated, objects and tools remain scattered where you left them between days... unless you restart the game and pick Continue, which puts everything neatly back in place. The PMU has a hands-free operation mode which makes dealing with most things, such as the metal debris, about ten times easier... which is never explained to you except via a tooltip that only shows up on day 5, after dealing with all that godforsaken debris on day 2. You have much less instruction to go by for most of your objectives, which can lead to a lot of trial and error, wasted time, and frustration. And as of halfway through day 5 (out of 7), the entire DLC has been a series of boring, frustrating, tedious busywork tasks that feel more akin to a banal sequel to Getting Over It than anything to do with Heavenly Bodies, while I keep wondering when the hell anything fun or interesting is going to happen.

The base game I would recommend in a heartbeat, at least on sale, or if you have someone to co-op with. I really can't think of a single reason to recommend Cleanup.

This game is ridiculous. The one thing I will say is a bit of a shortcoming is that the "random" map every time you go diving is really just one out of what feels like maybe 5 different prefabs, each of which has the exact same placements of the exact same pickups every time you happen to get it in the shuffle. On the other hand, this does ensure balanced placement of the all-important air refills, but the map does end up feeling pretty samey before long, despite the constant shakeups due to various events.

That aside, the mechanics are satisfying and the story events and gradual unlocking of mechanics keep piling on more and more stuff to manage each day, to where it's hard to tell if you're playing a restaurant management sim, a diving game, Harvest Moon, fish farm, or some sort of oceanographer game, and most of these things are treated with an absurd amount of production value, including one-off gag events that nobody in their right mind should have allocated this kind of development budget towards, but they did anyway, and I still haven't seen the full extent of it. This would probably be indie GOTY for me if Mintrocket weren't a subsidiary of Nexon, but it's a really good game nonetheless.