Recent reviews by Yorick

I know Gloomhaven is a complicated game, but there's no excuse for how awkward and buggy this is. It's somehow more of a chore than just setting up the board game.

The Medium is by no means a perfect game. The ending in particular is weak and (in ways) fairly film-student. Many of the things that actually occur in the game have no explanation - which is frustrating given how much time we walk around trying to piece together the logic of how this world works and what has happened.

An ambiguous ending for a game that has no intended DLC or sequel would be fine, if the ending felt despite that that it was satisfying, but while the ending cutscene is GREAT, it still leaves more questions that I wanted answers to, while simultaneously taking away player agency. This would have been the perfect opportunity for a branched ending (I can think of 3 immediately that would easily have worked).

But these complaints are ones that come to the surface particularly because the game was so engaging. It feels in many ways like an old point & click game, and I mean that as a compliment. The puzzles are fun and interesting, switching between worlds and hearing echoes of the past is a really interesting way to explore, and when it's scary, oh boy is it scary.

The camera work and gameplay remind me a bit of the older Resident Evil entries, but I found this more enjoyable than those. The idea of having to hide from creatures that you can't fight also felt more enjoyable in this than games like the Amnesia series. It's not perfect, but it's very good at what it tries to be - it's interesting, engaging, and one of the more intense gaming experiences I've had in quite some time.

This is not a terrible game, but not a great - or even good - one. It's a "Maybe pick it up on sale when enough time has passed for patches to drop" kind of situation. It's a fairly generic looter-shooter with laughably terrible "grim dark" young adult-tier writing and voice actors who sound like they'd rather be anywhere else. There are constant cutscenes that rarely add anything to the game, and most of the quests are the same thing over and over.

All of that I could look past if the game were actually fun, but it isn't. The controls are shockingly bad, and the gameplay is bland. The game early on introduces a cover system, but it doesn't actually want you to use it. No no, that's only for enemies you see. They get to hide behind things and use grenades, you have to rush around like a headless chicken and shoot everyone. And only when shooting people do you regain health.

That idea of frenetic combat worked really well in Doom 2016, but that game also had both the controls system and the AI to support it - this has neither. I expected it to be on the same level of games like Destiny and Borderlands as far as the feeling of polish and - more importantly - fun, but it's not even in the same ballpark.

At the time of this review, Zone 4 has recently become released.

I went through Labyrinthine as it exists with a couple of friends a few nights ago, going into blind and unsure of what to expect. And there was definitely a part early-ish on where something caught me off guard and I yelled. The atmosphere, especially early on, is very creepy, and while games of this nature are typically more single-player, I feel like this one really works as a coop experience. There's a lot of "Where are you?" "I... I don't know", and that's scary. Hearing your friends yell for their lives because a monster is coming for them gets the blood pumping, especially knowing that there's nothing you can do.

I will say that we hit a bug in the first Zone that rendered the monster incapacitated, and honestly, that may have made it more enjoyable? The random nature of monster spawns can make for a very different experience for players. I went through all of Zone 2 almost never being killed, and found 4 of the 5 puzzles myself, while another member of party was beset pretty constantly by horrors, and was struck down several (maybe a dozen?) times - and found nearly nothing as a result. I really like the monsters that are in Zones 2 and 3 and even a particular one in 4, but by the time 4 rolled around, I'd started to feel a little bored by them.

Having 1-2 monsters chasing you and not knowing where they are is terrifying, but Zone 4 features a ton of monsters spread out, and it just makes you more reserved to your fate. Death is neither permanent nor has a cost, so Zone 4 felt like a lot of "I'll get as far as I can, die, and try again", which, fair enough, but doesn't super feel in line with the theme of the game and also isn't the most interesting thing that can happen. It's a bit like stuffing my own corpse in a catapult and seeing how far I can launch it.

But overall, yeah, it was a fun experience. I look forward to more (and especially more puzzles!) being added to it in future updates.

Pretty fun little puzzle game. I expected the Lara Croft aesthetic to be just tossed onto something generic, but the puzzles / monsters and discovering relics all feel really appropriate. The game has a really nice art style, the puzzles run a good degree of complexity, and the vases give reasons to revisit chapters.

My single complaint is that it's clear that this game was designed Mobile-First and the PC version doesn't take advantage of things like having a keyboard. Movement is still done by click/dragging your mouse as though you're swiping on a screen. It's not intuitive, and is sometimes actively frustrating with a vague gesture has an unintended action.

Still, a small price to pay for what is a really enjoyable little puzzle game.

I jumped into this game with a few friends and it really hooked us for the better part of a week, and my interest began to taper after that. There’s so much that this game gets right, and the thrill of exploring things together in a PvE environment carries you through the problems with it - for a while, at least.

I’m always hesitant to review things that are Early Access, knowing how much they can change, but the roadmap for this game suggests mostly that “more” is coming, not necessarily large changes, and the problems I have with this game are less with the amount of content, and more that I think it has some real flaws. And I don't just mean the bugs where support pillars don't actually help your structures.

When the world is randomly generated, you can have to go quite a long distance from your “home” to find particular things that you need, and that’s exciting. There’s a sense of adventure and exploration. But after you get about 50 feet from your front door, you realize how much the combat in this game sucks. Everything drains stamina. It takes stamina to run (and many enemies are faster than you), it takes stamina to attack, it takes stamina to block. You even lose stamina if you get hit. This means that you can very easily get into situations where you cannot recover during a fight, and simply get pummeled into the ground. A small group of enemies can reduce you to death like a school of piranha, leaving you no opportunities to even really react.

So you die, and your skills are reduced, and whether that matters or not is subject to debate. They supposedly make you “Better”, but the gains are so minuscule that you often don’t even notice them. Your food is also reset. In this game, food gives you particular buffs - increased stamina, health regeneration, more hit points, etc. This should be a fun way to get some extra buffs, to be more prepared for a tough situation, but instead it’s often “necessary” to have the best food or you’ll get killed in one hit just walking around.

And finally, dying means all your gear is still on your corpse - which you have to use the map to find, and may be very far away. So you head out from home again - only this time you have absolutely nothing. And you have to get back to your body. If you die again, the same thing happens again, except your map updates to your latest death (removing the first one). Where was your previous corpse? You know, the one with your best gear on it? You better hope you remember. .

These things combined don’t simply make this game difficult, they make it not fun. It’s not fun when you get ambushed by a troll and immediately die. It’s not fun when a death-mosquito charges into a different biome and kills you several hundred miles and a boat ride from your bed. It’s not fun to feel like your progress is constantly being reset and pushed back.

Because it isn't just an annoying setback. It's time that you're now spending "playing" the game, where you aren't even doing that - you're just trying to get from point A to point B to get back to where you already were - and that can take 10 minutes, more if you happen to get killed while trying to do that. You can spend hours playing this game and get absolutely nowhere - if not be in a worse position than you were when you started.

“Okay, I died, I should make a sword to go get my body. Okay, I need bronze, and for that I need copper, so I should go get some copper… Okay, mine was on my body so now I need to make a pickaxe…” Like, going through that process for something that felt largely out of your control in the first place is frustrating at best, and leads not so much to rage quitting as a resigned “I don’t have the time or energy to deal with this right now” - which is what you already feel about Life, you don’t want to feel that way about a game you're meant to be enjoying, too.

I've been living in Boston for about a decade and aside from the rampant zealotry about sports, the subway system might just be my least favorite thing about it. It's slow, it closes down early, and for some reason there are five different stops for the Boston University campus.

I think most people who live in cities that rely on subways have complaints about them, and Mini Metro poses the challenge of "Okay, let's see you do better". What follows is equal parts really relaxing and really stressful. There's a great feeling of accomplishment that comes with creating a system that just works, and likewise, a feeling of panic when a new city wants to get on the map and is nowhere near any of your existing lines. While Mini Metro unfortunately doesn't offer Boston as a location, it's incredibly fun and satisfying to design subway systems for places like New York, St. Petersburg, Osaka, and Cairo, among many others. Never before have waterways been so frustrating.

The art is simplistic and very clean, and again, satisfying to look at. More than once I wanted to own a poster of the subway system that I'd made work for a city. With the right amount of randomness, there's so much room for replayability, and it's so addictive that I often find myself wanting to start a new game as soon as one ends. This is one of perhaps a dozen games that I keep installed at all times, so happy to go back and play a few hours of it here and there.

I knew next to nothing about this game when I picked it up (the art and RPG-esque appearance of it grabbed me), and would not have guessed either that it's 7 years old, or that it was a mobile game first. It's a well-crafted, little metroidvania RPG very much in the style of the Zelda games - particularly A Link to the Past (one of my favorite games) and Windwaker.

It very much leaves you to your own devices, with little handholding, and a "Go forth and adventure!" kind of encouragement. The story is interesting, soundtrack is great, puzzles are often appropriately complex. The controls can be slightly frustrating at times, especially during puzzles where pushing a box from the correct side matters, but it's such a small complaint. Would definitely recommend picking this up if you're a fan of the Zelda series.

I think this is a Bad implementation of a roguelike / push your luck system, and the reason for that is that in its pursuit of "randomness", it creates scenarios that are unwinnable, and while the game is quick, it's not so quick that it isn't still irritating as ♥♥♥♥ to have spent 20 minutes playing only to hit a wall and die and have to start all over.

The dice are random, the enemies are random, the gear is random, and I think it simply goes too far, creating an environment where nothing is certain. I've had runs where the very first item I got solidified the win for me, and runs where a single die meant dying on the boss. Because of how random the game is, it didn't feel like I was in control in either scenario. In a push your luck / deckbuilder game, the highs and lows should be a rollercoaster, but victory or defeat should still feel like it occurred because of decisions you made.

The runs of this that are fun are overshadowed by those that are frustrating, and I feel like it fails at being a successful push your luck game, because when everything is random to such an extreme, the degree to which you want to push your luck, or even whether it is worth doing, is debatable. Every decision you make isn't "do you want to push your luck" so much as it is "Do you want to push your luck 8 times in succession with this one action", and often either result is unsatisfying enough that the real answer is "Actually, I'd rather just... not play."

Good ideas, but an infuriating and lackluster implementation.

I got this game as part of a pack on itch.io but wanted to get it here as well to support the developer - so inflate my hours played as appropriate (probably in the 6-10 range).

MewnBase hits a lot of things that I love - notably it's a survival / crafting / exploration game, with an adorable cat protagonist (henceforth called a procatgonist), and is a labor of love made by one person, who has put a lot of thought into it. The risk/reward of venturing out for artifacts, having to have the fuel to keep your base powered, and the terrifying moon nights come together for a really satisfying experience.

Early access is often hit and miss but I feel like this is one of the games that does it right - what's still to come is more content, but what we have now already proves out that this works. I think I actually find it more fun than Don't Starve, which is the game I think it can most closely be compared to, and that's no small feat.