Recent reviews by Eileen the Crow

Classic. Ridiculous amounts of fun for a ridiculous price.

Deadwater Saloon: My Disappointment is Immeasurable and My Day is Ruined Edition

What an incredible premise and what a sharp, quick crash-and-burn. Here is a game with a lot of amazing parts that, rather than being more than the sum of, quickly becomes a negative balance.

I was swayed off the fence by a few now-questionably-generic 'I assure you' promises that specific issues had been corrected thanks to a number of updates by responsive devs. I picked up the game about a month post-assurances and found the same bugs, pitfalls, and frustrating mechanics front-and-center.

The concept of the game blends some of the best of the current flavor of sim/management games. You get to watch your town build from a wide dust-spot on the Old West cattle trail to a supposedly thriving boom town in which you become a tycoon in all the best boom town ways: liquor, cards, and prostitutes. You work with (or against) your fellow merchants, take responsibility for the infrastructure and well-being of your town, and build your reputation and friendships based on interactions with patrons and townsfolk as you build your establishment's rep through skill tree upgrades offering better food, drink, and entertainments. All good stuff with simple but fun build mechanics and a diverse selection of elements to improve and distinguish your saloon.

After three and a half play-throughs of the prologue:

The demo/learning portion of the game can be summed up as the scene in Last Crusade where the Grail Knight raises his hand to Indy as Petra collapses into rubble.

I was a little perplexed that most of your first day passes before your neighbor establishes themselves for you start doing business. You can't perform actions you haven't learned on the skill try, and once you've learned them you can't perform them until you source the correct materials. I waited most of my first day for the trapper to set up so I could sell liquor, only to discover I couldn't...sell liquor at my *saloon* because I hadn't researched the action. Given that the game has a day/night cycle and progresses to certain story events, I occasionally felt frustrated waiting on a new trader or merchant to establish themselves. The skill tree is an interesting premise with hinky execution.

The social and reputation feature is *arbitrary* and this encapsulates 90% of my issues with Deadwater overall: arbitrariness. Patrons and townsfolk have a bio, but it provides zero clues to their likes, dislikes, or personality, and each of these matters in how you interact, and how you manage exchanges that can be initiated by you *or* by the game.

My second playthough was the unintentional result of restarting when a character had a strong negative reaction to my response. On our next encounter I chose the second dialog option...and got the same result. Is this character just plain difficult? That would make for some satisfying nuance, but no. On my third and fourth play-throughs, their response was inconsistent. It didn't matter what I chose, I had the same random odds of winning. In one scenario a character strips naked in front of your establishment and your relationship depends on how you answer. With virtually no previous interactions with this person and no clues as to their personality, good luck on earning your reputation points. This is not an enjoyable way to navigate through a game that relies on rep-building.

World events are also arbitrary. Landslide blocking the road? I failed to successfully overcome this *sixteen* times in one play-through. These events require both action points and sufficient reputation to get the town behind your limited solutions. Earlier handicaps on the reputation front can leave you in an unwinnable situation here, and given that these disasters stop trade and arrival of merchants, further decreasing your reputation and income needed to fund the repairs...My brother in Christ, just give me a shovel already.

And all of this sinking into the quagmire and being consumed by flames occurs as Deadwater's version of the Van der Lin gang bears down on your budding empire, complete with a countdown to D-Day. You're on a deadline but you didn't say the nice thing to your neighborhood exhibitionist and now everyone is Very Mad that you can't, on your own and without their help, clear a mudslide that has sealed in all human and animal life but can't keep out a gang of murdering, pillaging
19th century bikers on horseback.

What could have been a challenging difficulty ladder becomes a slowing hamster wheel of exasperation that suggests the creators either equate struggle with progress or didn't think through the game play loop with a risk-challenge-reward system in mind.
What could have been a history-rich story framework in which the game unfolds is defeated by equating vagueness with mystery. Giving me limited information to make even small but crucial decisions but offering tools to figure it out is different than giving none and feeling justified in making me guess over and over.
If the answers and outcome can change each time...Deadwater is tagged as an RPG and this means playing a role, but it also means there's a cohesive story that drives me to want to immerse in that role, grow in it, and work towards whatever satisfying (though not necessarily happy) ending the creators have identified. Worse than my choices not mattering, I came away with the sense that choices the game made for me or guard-railed me toward locked progression at times to the point of making it unplayable.

Deadwater's description bills it as having a customizable character. There *is* a character sheet and your choice offers a 'template'. There are so many categories in which to spend points that it becomes overwhelming, and existing points can be 'subtracted' leaving your character with deficits that aren't immediately clear. Since the benefits of some stats also aren't immediately clear (medicine, or being better at litigating - this feels like NPS roles), it can be difficult to know where to dump your points. I tried creating a 'build' but didn't see any clear advantage. It felt my character was always struggling for lack of one stat or another, with no opportunity to circumvent that handicap.

The rest is a lot of nitpicks I could leave by the wayside if my overall experience had been different. The art is good but the female character portraits seem intentionally harsh-looking or ugly. Dialog is rough, with attempts at quirk or personality being overwhelmed by either vagueness or being too on-the-nose. Swearing would be period appropriate but the language when a character is frustrated comes off as frequently done for shock value and uses bizarrely modern expressions.

Yes, it's a demo and yes it's free. The aim of this is to entice players to give it a try, and then to wow them with that small taste so they're chomping at the bit for full release.
What doesn't work about Deadwater isn't build objects that won't delete or prostitutes that don't lay down in the bed - these are flaws I expect in a demo; The Sims include it as a feature, not a bug. The make or break is an impression that the developers have a big picture, and an understanding of their gameplay loop and how mechanics fit together like gears in a game's overall machine.
Deadwater is a ghost town for me, with the most enticing part being the game's description. That description was the promise that built my expectations, and I felt a lot of gameplay elements actively worked at lowering them. The sim and management aspects are so close but everything else keeps them so far.
Questionable reviews just ahead of the launch assuring prospective players that these issues are outdated leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Updates to infinity don't fix foundational weaknesses.

Where to start? There are so many aspects of Black Book to love!

A reader recommended Black Book to me because it reminded them of one of my novels, which is just a heap of compliments. Since the game builds heavily on ancient folklore and historical concepts of black magic and the occult, I had high expectations and wasn't let down. The game is by turns folklore-rich RPG, deck builder/card battler, management game, and choose your own adventure.

The Russian Revolution isn't my favorite era - it's one reason Help Will Come Tomorrow didn't hit for me. Not only does the game weave around the more crushing, politically infuriating parts of the era, it manages to capture a medieval feel I associate with other games based on Slavic and Eastern European lore, like Witcher. If not for references to the revolution, you could easily feel you were in a small village circa 1400. The brilliance is, this allows some modern conceits but keeps the mystical feeling front and center.

The story is a tried-and-true tale. Vasilisa, our protagonist, is destined to become a witch- a fate she attempts to thwart by marrying the man she loves. When Vasilisa loses her love under mysterious circumstances, she's forced to embrace the dark arts. With the assistance of her grandfather Egor, she summons the devil and takes the plunge.

The play loop is pleasingly structured. You journey along your map to the present objective, exploring side areas and occasionally discovering a unique encounter. Each sub-area offers choices for how to proceed. Your choices affect what you discover and how your encounters play out, and never feel rote. It's worth visiting as many places as possible for the opportunity to gather resources and reagents.
Vasilisa travels throughout the night which adds wonderful atmosphere. On her arrival home, a cozy cottage she shares with Egor, there is a queue of villagers to assist and your demon helpers must be sent out to do their mischief.

I usually prefer the 'good' playthrough the first go and was initially put off by some of the mechanics. This is a place to be patient if you're a good-ending player. For example, you're forced to acquire demon servants as you progress. Demons must be kept busy and this is usually at the expense of innocent villagers. Not only does this brutalize your neighbors, it causes you to rack up sins or pay the price for idle minions with a bit of your health bar. But the game quickly introduces an option for demon busywork, as well as perks for having a few sins on your hands, and the opportunity to eventually clean up.

Black Book's underrated strength is a breathless sense of excitement and trepidation that lasts throughout. The world feels fantastical, more so because its set on the edge of modern-day. We worry for Vasilisa and at the same time cheer for her and believe she can succeed. But what if she's in too far over her head? If she can't master the darkness she's summoned, all is lost. The story does a superb job of keeping us on the edge of our seats, breath held, hoping for a happy ending despite Vasilisa's dark pact.

I struggled with this review for days. I love Early Access games and some of my favorite games of the last 6 months are E/A. There's a joy in coming to a game on the ground floor and seeing where the devs take it in the coming year or two (or four; looking at you, Kynseed). I'm also painfully aware that negative reviews are a quick way to lower sales enough that an E/A game is abandoned. It was important to put some thought into why this didn't work for me and why I can't recommend it.

Some of Len's Island reminds me of a higher color palette Valheim. Your pleasingly amorphous character with just a few details between genders, the arrangement of the map and the wind trails. Even the opening menu with your character poised at a campfire between the pines. There's a lot of promising ambition here.

The game is stunning. Visually it's so gorgeous, and the periods of the day cycle just after sunrise and the afternoon 'golden hour' are as breathtaking as the real thing. The water, the flora, the appearance of the structures - all lovely.

There's hints of humor and heart. During character creation your shoe options are basically 'no' or 'not a chance, ever'.

The building system is enjoyable and a lack of penalty for deconstructing is a plus.

I didn't mind that, as one other negative review pointed out, the NPCs in town are essentially sign boards. In Hydroneer sign boards are literally all you get. But this is a detail I wish I'd paid attention to, because it was a hint of all the things I felt were seriously lacking.

What differentiates a playable E/A game from an unplayable one is the 'shape' of the finished product. A complete skeleton waiting to built up with connective tissue, muscle, attractive bits...that's a yes. Len's Island feels like a really beautiful shell with nothing inside.

There's no story here.

Buildings are vacant. Lots of them. Some have flavor text indicating a certain type of tradesman could be moved in but that's not available at this time. Not a big deal except that most of the main town is also empty.

NPCs have no dialog- and this is magnified by the number of NPCs who also serve no function, not even as lore guides. Knight Guinevere sounds like a pretty interesting resident but we're left to wonder. NPCs have no information about themselves, the town, their challenges. They don't care about you, either. No one wonders about you or where you came from.

Your island is cut off from the village when you arrive. There's no explanation as to why and this feels like a big deal because the townsfolk appear to have the time and resources to remedy the situation.

You're carried to your island by a small raft, presumably shipwrecked here. Who are you? Where did you come from? Will anyone miss you, or are you running from your past? Your character has no internal monologue, no thoughts about themselves or circumstances. There is a letter in the woods for you to find when you arrive and it accomplishes a drop of lore/storytelling but that's it. This mechanic isn't applied to more.

There are dungeons and monsters occupying nearby islands but again, there's no story or lore. Your character has no feelings or reactions. These dungeons are presumably important and matter to the townsfolk, too. Presumably this is why they destroyed the bridge but we're left to guess.

Resource gathering is tediously self-important. It feels meant to keep you busy until there's more to do. A weapon proc is well and good for combat, but my gathering speed being hindered by not proccing a tool? Building, the most fleshed out part of the game, became my least favorite.

This is not a $25 dollar game, and this is what I couldn't make peace with during the week I struggled with this review. The screenshots and description, the dev's information promise a $25 experience. Some E/A titles justify this price. After trudging through my fifth day of gameplay feeling like a robot on an island of other, different robots performing functions, I felt cheated.

A great game, almost without exception, needs a story. Not a great *story*, but there has to be something happening. God of War and Red Dead have powerful stories. Saints Row has a story that partly involves hitting Innocent pedestrians with a huge purple dildo, but there it is: something happening. Cursed Treasure? Don't let those meatbag heroes steal your swag.

Len's Island plays like a concept demo at a con. Here's the dungeons we have planned; here's how the town will be laid out. We plan on adding a guild, or a fisherman's hut.
There's a lot of parts, a lot of great concepts and potential, but there's no game here. It's just an assortment of tasks. Very nice house building mechanics in a beautiful setting, which is on offer in other more fully-realized games.

The addition of pagoda roof styles was frustratingly more of what already doesn't work. I don't want more build objects. No updated weather effects or sound effects. I want a skeleton, bare-bones but cohesive.
This is a game I can't positively review now but don't want to give up on. I want to play this a year from now and get what I anticipated the first time around. Len's Island desperately needs a story. It needs something to *happen*.

This is a niche game I wish more people would try on, especially if you enjoy games like Potion Craft, Strange Horticulture, or Spiritfarer. If 80 Days had been released during the pandemic it would have found a bigger following with those of us who came to relish a minimalist, immersive, story-rich game with a satisfying play loop.
The game has a wonderful, whimsical, dynamic story. Jules Verne would be proud of the adventurous steampunk spirit the writers captured.

There's certainly opportunity for drama, hijinks, and disaster but 80 Days is rarely anything approaching stressful. An outbreak diverts your ship; you're pick pocketed; your employer is in a salty mood today. It's an ambient, relaxing experience.

Like Inkle's other beloved title, Overboard, 80 Days has a wonderful historical polish. Steampunk, Gaslamp, and a hit of Victorian Era masters-of-the-universe with a lot of money and ennui racing to outdo one another with impossible feats. Fogg's club, his fellow aristocrats, the concept of the race itself and the social/political climate of the places you visit all steep the story in time and place.

80 Days' story telling has a lot of heavy lifting to do. And bro, it lifts. Characters are static images and the backdrops for cities and locations are evocative illustrations - nice but not enough to carry a game with play-throughs this long. From Fogg's taciturn but ultimately big hearted dialog with your character, his long suffering valet, to espionage, intrigue, and an unexpected romance, story and dialog create well-realized characters, fantastic locations, and and a race-to-the-finish ending that leaves you cheering when you win. Or furiously clicking your way into a new journey.

There are so many routes to take, achievements to discover, and events to participate in that I have no idea how to quantify the replayability. With 24 hours in I've explored just a fraction of the possible paths and had the opportunity to make one or two choices among an assortment on any given interaction.

80 Days has a permanent home in my library and I was grateful to have it waiting during the long stretches of lock-down. If you've never picked it up and feel you've exhausted all your chill ASMR building-gardening sims, this is a hidden gem.

Would love to see 80 Days have a renaissance, especially on the heels of the dev's new hit, Overboard <3

What a wonderfully macabre game!
Everything about Overboard is fun.
Veronica is unapologetically the bad guy. Her husband isn't exactly a winner which excuses the game's inciting incident. This could rob her of some agency/delicious malice, but throughout the game we see Veronica has a heart. Two sizes too small in most cases, but a heart just the same. She's not a one dimensional villain.

Overboard has 'best of the bad' endings - you're murdering at least one person even if you get away with it- (and one totally hilarious bat***t ending for an achievement) but there are no good endings. The genius of this is you're free to immerse yourself in the mischief of murdering, framing, and creating mayhem.

The game offers a nice assortment of challenges. There's the overarching deadline which triggers the final event, so it pays to watch the ship's clock. Some actions can be accomplished more than one way, leaving the player free to choose and saving something different for a future play-through. Rifling through, or attempting to rifle through your fellow passengers' cabins reveals a lot. Deciding what to use and how leads to some fun trial and error. A few of the secrets weren't revealed until my 5th or 6th run.

The consequences of an action aren't always clear and the game doesn't hand-hold. Some locations or objects offer interactions that I've never found a use for and in true Overboard fashion are probably nothing more than red herrings. Some actions really leave you believing you've gotten away with it. Then the final passenger meeting comes around and Oh, if it isn't the consequences of your actions.

Objectives are fun and varied, and while it takes several runs to complete them, there's not a moment of tedium. Each run is built around the objective you're currently tackling; framing someone, getting someone to confess, winning a pile of money bilking your shipmates at cards. This turns the objective into a satisfying run-long challenge rather than a box to check while playing through the same cycle of events over and over. Different objective, different series of events this time around.

One of the brilliant aspects of Overboard is that it's not a binary story line. You're not innocent/not innocent in the eyes of you fellow passengers. Some are on to your shenanigans, some have beef with you that predates your voyage. Some passengers have their own secrets to hide and will do and say a lot to make sure you don't discover the truth. This keeps the characters and storylines for each run from feeling one-dimensional.

If you've played Inkle's '80 Days' (and you should!) Overboard offers the same quirky historical immersion. The Jazz Era/pre-World War feel adds immersion with music, dialog, and costume. There are also references to historical figures or events of the time that enrich if you enjoy history but don't distract if that's not your thing. The flavor of the era never overwhelms the experience.

A small but fun conceit is that, if you fail a run or start a new one, Veronica 'wakes up' from the previous go treating it as a bad dream. She also frequently has a helpful tidbit for the coming run during this dialog.

Lots and lots of twists and surprises, the king of which is just what Veronica is *really* after. Spoiler: killing her husband was the beginning, not the end.

Each playthrough averages 12-15 minutes (YMMV while you get a feel for the ship's daily schedule and passenger routines. At about 13 hours I've done 60 runs easily and still have a couple of the more challenging objectives to tackle. Replayability is high and there's no reason *not* to play it all over again just for the voyeuristic dopamine rush of annihilating a shipload of people.

Value for time, value for money, pure fun each loop.

Help is never coming.

The game seems bleak for bleak's sake. If it has an opportunity to punish you via environment during a mission, it will, usually at the cost of a camp-mate.

The inventory management is exactly the sort I don't enjoy and find tedious.

Trying to pair up characters to perform life-saving tasks is bogged down by pettiness and differences that would either not matter in a desperate survival situation, or would have resulted in the necessary culling to allow everyone else to make it out.

The final nail is the mandatory campfire conversation. Your selection of characters already have bizarrely rigid and one-dimensional personality traits. You're forced to choose characters who have inherent conflict but there's no nuance and each negative trait is like a stick in the spokes of the other characters' bicycle. It's frequently not clear that what sounds like a positive/encouraging remark will generate a negative reaction. By several nights in, my topics had dwindled to nothing but hot-button. The script is so inflexible that even when a pair of characters had supported each other in a task or performed a successful expedition, their campfire convo was a guaranteed morale dumpster fire.

I quit this game feeling the real story is that a bunch of people too fractious and petty to cultivate fundamental survival instincts were loaded on a one-way train to Siberia and the army's *true* act of terrorism was creating a derailment that allowed these characters to remain within walking distance of any human settlement.

Too encyclopedic a rendition of the revolution.

The love child of Master & Commander and Bennet Foddy's 'Getting Over It' you never knew you needed.
Oregon Trail with ghost pirates.

Want to fish the oceans into complete extinction? GO!
Deteriorate relations with every major world power via cannon balls? Do it.
Trade your way to wealth that would allow you build a Bezos wiener-rocket if it wasn't the 18th century? Get after it!

*sea shanty intensifies*

Bigger ships! More amputations! Intrigue for the Crown! Intrigue against the Crown! All the harpoons you can carry!

*sea shanty crescendo*

Messages. In Bottles.
Gambling.
Plague.

This game was thoroughly British in humor and sense of superiority over other nations. Quirky, fun, and the fantasy mode is a whole other delightful experience from the base game. 10/10 weevils in the biscuits.

I don't have a single criticism except F*** the narwhal for killing Henry.

Early Access. The game is not complete but it's fleshed out enough for a satisfying play experience of around 8 hours with some in-development content several hours beyond. Along with the promise (not guarantee) that the devs will continue to update, this is worth the time and money.

This game checks a lot of my usual boxes: Art, sounds (preferably minimal), and a puzzle or discovery system that's intuitive and not hand-holdy.

The art is whimsical-medieval and though limited on screens, those areas are visually enjoyable. I like the mechanic of having your own garden and harvesting what grows for use in your lab (plus the garden easter eggs!).

The ability to back up on a potion headed in the wrong direction is a nice perk. I did feel the learning curve was a bit steep; if a customer comes in for a potion you've yet to master, your reputation takes a small hit.

Alchemy as a later-game mechanic keeps the play-loop fresh and feels like a natural progression.

I've enjoyed what's here immensely, with probably half the really fleshed out content left to go and the fledgling additions beyond that. With more content this will be a fantastic game. Worth the price as-is, imo.

My favorite roguelike in a long time, from a non-roguelike player! :D :D
After a spate of rouguelikes that seemed to relish a soul-crushing set of mechanics Loop Hero is a welcome change.
The game play loop is satisfying. There's an opportunity to base-build between runs and sparse but interesting lore with each upgrade.

It offers three classes to play; the standard sword-and-board, magic user, or rogue. Each have fun hooks but the warrior is the most well-balanced character.

Gear system is satisfying. After each battle your loot gets heaped into a window. Equip the best gear and let successive runs take care of the rest.

Perk cards occur at intervals throughout each loop. Their bonuses are cumulative and free from needlessly punishing negative status effects. Map cards occasionally have penalties, but perk cards are what they are.

I like that success in each run is largely dependent on how good a gambler you are. If you fail mid run, all your resources are lost. It requires you to be smart with the perk cards your dealt each go, manage any healing potions, and plan the setup of your current 'loop'.

A hint of deck-building adds to the pleasing simplicity. You have the option before each run to include/exclude cards you've gathered, allowing you to curate the creatures/biomes/perks loop by loop.

The boss mechanic is also novel. Playing resource cards on the map offers bonuses for your hero but fills your 'summon meter'. Once you've sufficiently leveled your hero and feel salty, you can summon the next boss and progress. Just want to resource gather and build your camp? Keep your cards in your hand.

Also: no talking, minimal sound effects. Since the lore of Loop Hero revolves around a bleak environment where our hero fights to rebuild civilization from oblivion, this makes for a soothingly somber experience. The sound effects that are included are reminiscent of old-school eight bit games.

My only ♥♥♥♥♥♥ is an absence of tutorial/item tips. Some mechanics/settings weren't obvious to me, for example I still struggle with how to use the artifacts meant to be placed in camp. For more intuitive players this is probably not an issue.

Rewarding, well-made game that's good for one or ten runs. Difficulty is challenging but not discouraging.