Recent reviews by DR DICKNBALLS

>be me
>spend $40 on this game
>install game
>launch game
>"servers at capacity"
>not allowed to play game I just bought because other people are playing it

lol. Total joke. If the game is at capacity, why are MORE copies still being sold? Delist the game until you can handle more players, rather than allowing people to purchase a game they can't play.

Tutorials are poor, to say the least. Every once in a while a pop up would show up on the side of the screen for a brief few moments, then disappear. No way to get them to return, that I could find, so I just often found myself scrolling through the keybinds menu to figure out what I am supposed to press. One (unhelpful) tutorial was to let me know that if I am finding lots of empty search items, perhaps another player has been there. That's great, but I'm single player. Who else is around to loot them? No, they're just all empty by design.

Outside of that, the tutorials provide you zero information. Most of my first hour of play time was trying to figure out the absolute basics on my own, such as how to make an axe. Stones are all over the ground so that's fine, I made a stone axe head. But I can't get branches from trees or bushes, and none of the ones I loot on the ground have a stick either. So... how do I get anything crafted?

Oh, you use a stone *knife* to cut down bushes. You can't get sticks from trees, and you can't use the axe head. Instead you somehow slice apart a bush with a rock. Very intuitive. The same thing happens with the tree bark cordage -- is it made from trees? From bark? Logs? Nope, sticks. Huh? Oh, and during all of this, I have to recraft the stone knife. Because reasons. The quality on items degrades so quickly, you pointlessly have to just recraft stuff to keep up.

Well, whatever. I follow a Steam Guide to figure out what to do next. I craft a bow, now that I know how to get sticks and cordage. This requires another entire stone knife almost. And then, arrows are made individually. One at a time. Except oh -- I can't carry them because I don't have a backpack. The starting inventory space is so absurdly limited, I'm not exaggerating when I say you can literally carry one or two items until you find or craft a backpack. So, I get *one shot* against a zombie (or, sorry, "puppet") and that's it.

Which of course, since the game provides no crosshairs or literally any indication at all where the arrow will go, I uselessly launch it straight into the ground three feet away from the puppet, who then screams. I have yet to even enter a building, and a horde of about ten puppets all come down on me, spawning in within feet. Literally even the location I was just crafting in now has enemies on it. Apparently this is a new mechanic in the latest update and is intentional. Why?

Naturally, I die. I am charged "250" of some currency that was never explained. So now, I'm in "debt". To... who? To what? Why? None of this is mentioned anywhere.

I remake a character and try again. This time, "gearing up" is still tedious but now I know what to expect, and finish in about 20 minutes. I make my way towards the nearest buildings, sneaking as quietly as I can, and alas, there's apparently no puppets in this village. I wander around for a bit, make the smallest back pack possible which provides a tiny amount more space, and keep looting. Over all, I find a tomato, a kitchen knife, and a kilt. Just about three hours in, and that's it. Out of like five buildings, that's all the loot I got.

At that point I realized just how tedious the looting and gameplay loop was, and lost interest. I've submitted for a refund, hopefully Vavle will approve it on the grounds I spent the first hour looking up tutorials and scrolling through the keymap.

Writing this review having just finished Chapter 4, which according to achievements, is about half way through. NO SPOILERS. Figured I would write down early thoughts. Will update after completing. I'll also mention I have no knowledge of Snoot Game or whatever it is, nor have I read any of the drama regarding the developer, so my opinion isn't affected by that. I am reviewing only this game, nothing else. I see many other reviews, particularly the negative ones, bringing these things up, and I don't see the relevance.

I also have no idea where the narrative of "4-5 hours of gameplay" is coming from. I'm five hours in and just hit the half way point. I suspect these people are skipping all the dialogue or something.

Positive things:

Fully Steam Deck compatible out of the box. Literally zero issues. Resolution and controller settings worked perfectly. One of the smoothest Steam Deck games I have ever played, even better than most "Verified" games.

I love the characters. They all feel like different people and all act realistically. They all have different opinions on actions and all feel real. The writing is fantastic.

The method for picking Fang's responses is really interesting. Some tense situations have a timer for picking a response, and you quickly have to choose what they are going to say. Alternatively, there's some situations where a particularly strong option is available, and if you move over to it, Fang's thoughts will gray it out and replace it with why they changed their mind on it. It's a very cool way of showing what Fang is thinking without directly telling the player. I also like how the UI designates extreme responses; anger is on fire, sad is broken in half, etc.

The story, so far, is remarkable. I was a little hesitant about a game where the plot entirely revolves around teenage children in high school, because I just didn't think that could be all that interesting, but I was wrong. The school aspect isn't a major focus; it isn't like Persona 5, for example, where going to school is a major mechanic, it's more of a background setting here in GVH. Instead, the story revolves around the personal interactions between Fang and others, and to me, it works very well.

There SEEM to be a huge amount of alternative paths. I am only half way through my first play through and I am already excited to do a second play through with different choices. I am unsure how much they actually change later in the game, but that's something I'll update my review with later.

The rhythm sections are really, really fun, especially on controller. Think Night in the Woods, but more complex. I'm a big rhythm game fan, so this clicks with me really well. Love it.

Negative things:

Encountered a couple of minor bugs. One situation I simply couldn't advance the game because my A button input wasn't being accepted. It worked in menus, but not the game. A quick restart fixed it. There's also been a handful of graphical gliches with characters not lip syncing correctly, but over all, very minor issues, and far less bugs than any modern AAA game.

There's a point in the game where you are playing an in-universe version of Dungeons and Dragons called Legends and Lore (or L&L). These were... dreadfully boring. There's nothing happening because it is characters-playing-characters, so none of the choices (as far as I can tell) matter, since it doesn't actually affect the characters in "real" life. I don't get why this was added. Thankfully, this is a very small part of the game, and since the dialogue literally doesn't matter you can skip most of it if you wanted to.

Fang has a full-on fivehead. It's honestly a little distracting sometimes.

Two of the achievements require rolling a nat 20 and a nat 1 in L&L. Given the dice is random and I have not found a mechanic that allows me to influence it, these have the chance to be very, VERY annoying achievements to get.

Overall:

So far, I am absolutely loving GVH. Highly recommend, even as someone who typically has no interest in visual novel stuff. Night in the Woods is one of my all-time favorite games, and GVH is scratching that itch really well.

I'm a huge fan of grand strategy and eldritch horror, so when this game came across the store page for me I was instantly sold. A game where I get to BE the apocalyptic monster that slowly took over a fantasy world? Oh I'm in.

Unfortunately, this game did not click with me at all. The gameplay loop was tremendously boring to me; you literally just watch tokens on a map. No animations, no interesting visuals, just generic looking fantasy circles like you'd see in a D&D game scooting across straight lines. Taking actions would also be boring, as every action (at least, that I could find) was simply sitting in a town and waiting X number of turns based on your minion's stats, and this would sometimes range into the 20+ turns level of waiting.

Combat, which is generally one of the strong points in grand strategy games, falls totally flat. You can even see how limited combat is in the trailer video above; you literally have no input other than clicking "next turn" until someone dies (or you retreat).

The UI was maddening. Finding information was often incredibly difficult, requiring multiple clicks to figure out basic stuff, and things being just in bizarre places. One particular annoyance was the autosave function closing all UI elements I had open for some reason. I'd be clicking "next turn" and suddenly oops, everything is gone from my screen because autosave happened. Better go find whatever I was looking at and open it again for no reason.

Another minor annoyance was the fact that ALL characters are locked behind beating the game as the first character. Do one of the other playable monsters tickle your fancy and you think their apocalypse style seems cool? Too bad. You can't play them. You have to beat the game as generic lizard monster first, because... well, you just do, okay?

Maybe I just missed something here, given all the positive reviews this game is getting, but I found it tremendously dull. Your mileage may vary, I guess. Clearly lots of people DO like it.

Bought game on Steam. Now, in-game, whenever I attempt to buy credits, redeem a code, or even access my account details, I have to input an authentication code from an e-mail address from "@reg.150.fake.priv".

I have never seen this e-mail before. I have never added an e-mail to my account. Other users on Steamcommunity have reported this issue taking over two MONTHS to resolve via Glyph support tickets.

There are forum threads dating back as far as release day, and I can confirm that now, on Jan 9th, 2020, this issue is still a major problem that is occurring.

I mean, it does what it's supposed to do. It's a Warehouse simulator. Is it boring? Yep. But it doesn't lie about what it's going to be. If you like working in a warehouse, you'll like this game. Otherwise, probably not worth it.