Recent reviews by CrazyGoblin

Maybe you've heard about "That Space Dwarf Game" being mentioned somewhere, or you've seen a couple snippets of gameplay and got curious, or you're here because people are being weird on Reddit again. Well, yes, this is absolutely a game about Space Dwarves™... But it's also so much more than that.

A masterclass in game design, graphics that focus on art direction rather than technical fidelity, a by-and-large remarkably friendly and helpful community (which in an online game is really saying something, even with the qualifier) that is both listened to and interacted with by the developers. Deep Rock Galactic may entice with the promise of Diggy Diggy Black Hole and soaking digital beer into your luscious flowing locks of beardhair, but it holds your attention and respect with an incredibly solid framework of game balance, carefully sacrificing "realism" for fun and quality of life, incredible sound and music design, and a downright *honest* approach to providing the best experience for its players that is a space-breath of fresh air when looking at several problematic trends in modern gaming.

It's of course not a game for everyone; I don't know of any title that can authentically claim to be such. But if you are the kind of person who enjoys jolly cooperation, free range to decide your preferred alignment along the sweaty/meme spectrum, and who is intrigued by a bit of RNG which absolutely can make an otherwise simple and straightforward mission turn into an exceptionally spicy adventure down into the infested depths of this savage planet's tectonic crack... This is it.

It's a very up-front concept that opens up into surprising complexity and replayability if you dig into it (hah), makes sure the assets and environment support and enhance the core gameplay, and sprinkles on enough random generation to keep things interesting.

Want to swing your pickaxe in the space-mines before returning to celebrate the payday with a few foamy mugs of ale? It's got that. How about blasting into hordes of alien beasties with some *incredibly* satisfying guns, sounds, and giblets? Got that too. Got an appreciation for crunching numbers and combining multiple different tools together to create a streamlined and efficient build that's more than the sum of its parts? Yup, that's in here too. Feel like making your friends ask serious questions about your sanity as you enact excessively violent stages of a master plan their puny minds could never comprehend? You can play Driller.


At the end of the space-day, we're all here to have fun; and that's a concept that DRG understands and embraces. So go ahead and grab your pickaxe. strap on your beard, and put some money towards a group of developers who are worthy of the payment and your respect. Rock and stone, miner!

Earthtongue is a curious little beast, and the glowing satisfaction of seeing a stable ecosystem take shape is matched only by the complete vexation when starting your first world and not understanding how anything does anything.

This isn't strictly a game, per se... Yes, there are achievements both ingame and on Steam, and some of them are even remarkably difficult to get and will require a fair amount of either tactical thinking or dumb luck (although it doesn't hurt to have both), but Earthtongue is by and large what you might call an "interactive screensaver". You make a few small adjustments, attempt to nurture a balanced world, and mostly just sit back and watch everything interact.

It's fairly simple; there aren't very many special interactions between species... There's one beetle that's immune to the grasping tendrils of a particular carnivorous mold, there's a moth that acts as a pollinator by spreading the spores of whatever plant it's just eaten, and there is of course an implementation of the horrifying Cordyceps fungus. For the most part, everything else reacts by either eating or ignoring whatever it comes across.

But even with these simple functions, remarkably complex ecosystems can arise and thrive. The wasp eats the fly and its body is turned into nutrients for the soil, the fungus consumes the nutrients and grows full stalks, the beetle eats the stalks and attacks the snail to defend its territory, and the body of the snail is eaten by a fly. All for your viewing pleasure!


The actual life cycle is a teensy bit bizarre (nutrient dust falls from the sky? What is this, a fish tank?), and by no means are all the basic lifeforms balanced properly (locusts... Oh god, locusts), but that's part of the appeal! You don't just come in with a cosmic blueprint and know exactly how an ecosystem works and how to put it together, you need to see the creatures and plants for yourself and watch how they interact and how they survive in different circumstances. Observe, experiment, observe again... Or just let nature run its course through random events and see if something sticks!


It's definitely "zen", and despite its small annoyances I found it to be a remarkably compelling experience. It's not for everyone, but if you've been looking for an ecosystem simulator to poke and look at... This is exactly it.

An extra bonus is the developer, who added a couple brand new modules (thus introducing entirely new ecosystems that you need to learn and understand in order to make them bloom) as well as workshop support for community-made modules that extend the game's lifespan immensely. And that's all after having said "I probably won't be working much on this anymore, so don't expect any big updates"!

Now excuse me while I add on a couple more worlds from the workshop and chill out while poking at the natural economics of alien plants and animals...

Sadly, I can't really recommend this title.

The graphics are lovely (with the odd aside of crafting materials found during levels, which look somewhat out of place), and the setting seems quite enjoyable. The problem comes from the controls and the pacing.

Now, it's possible that the game works better with a controller instead of keyboard, but if there is some kind of signal lag exclusive to keyboards, then that should probably get fixed. As it stands, controls are extremely floaty and "slippery", while the levels demand precise maneuvering and exact combinations in order to perform specific moves. The initial keyboard command layout is also atrocious, but the game does allow you to easily remap the controls so it's a non-issue.

Pacing, on the other hand... Now, this game would've worked very well as either a more freeform RPG, or as a linear arcade stealth-em-up. As it stands, it tries to take a middle road, where you're left with linear level progression, but randomized rewards and difficulty and no ability to "farm" anything in order to progress further. Levels have fixed terrain layouts and enemy spawns, but AI patrol paths and behavior are randomized, and while one attempt may have essential tall grass to hide in a particular area, the next attempt may leave it barren.

Chests can also be found, containing a random amount of gold and a variable number of crafting materials or usable items. These chests are also randomized for every attempt you make at completing a level, so while one attempt may result in a chest spewing forth 24 (immensely powerful) impact-fuse incendiary grenades, if you die and retry from a checkpoint the chest may now only contain 18 basic 1st-tier crafting ingredients. Or it might be a single potion of invincibility, it's impossible to predict.

Progression is also simply bizarre... Upon completing a level, you're presented with a scoreboard showing your statistics, such as how many times you were spotted (sometimes unavoidable due to random NPC behavior combined with punishing placement, such as hidden offscreen or positioned in such a way that you must move directly past them, unstealthed, in order to proceed), how much damage you received, how many times you had to retry after falling prey to unpredictable controls and unforgiving encounters, and so on. From these statistics, you are presented your "score" for that level. You will also be presented with a nickname indicative of how well you did, such as "Turtle" or "♥♥♥♥♥♥".

I'm unsure whether or not the score is actually bonus XP you receive, or if it's just a useless number. If it's XP, then that's quite harsh considering you're apparently expected to perform a 100% clear run on your first attempt, but if it's not XP... Why is it there?

After level completion, you're given the option to either return to the hub village, continue to the next level, or replay the one you just finished. I believe replaying will wipe whatever gold/items/XP you accumulated during your first try and is basically just there to let you attempt a better score, but I didn't test it out. There doesn't appear to be any way of retrying a level if you don't select "replay" here, as both "continue" and "village" will lock you to the next mission in line. Even if you didn't have the unlockable ability required to complete that level's objectives, which it didn't tell you about until you'd already started.

I can't really comment on the crafting system, as I didn't get to play around with it much. I will state that some of the basic/intermediary crafting ingredients look a bit too similar to one another, and since none of the ingredients show their names in the crafting requirements, you might end up using a rare ingredient to make the wrong type of powder.

In fact, very few things show their names. This gets confusing when talking with shopkeepers, particularly those selling recipes, as you'll simply see a picture of what the recipe is for. You'll have no way of knowing whether it's a smoke bomb, incendiary, explosive, "soporific", timed, impact... Yeah. Unless you've already found one, you're not going to know what the recipe is for.

Regardless, considering how wildly variable your access to crafting materials will be (especially as you can't "farm" levels to get a chance at more of whatever it is you need), I don't know if I'd spend much time trying to work with it.


So, fiddly controls, unpredictable AI, unforgiving level design with important elements left to the RNG... It needs work. I only fought the first boss before putting the game down, but it was actually quite fun. Sure, the writing was incomprehensible, but English isn't the dev's first language (and let's be honest, it's not a particularly easy language at that) so I can't really fault him for it. Only real gripe I had was how long his fire cloud lingered, and how unclear the game was about it lingering (difficulty in telling apart the "this will set you on fire" flame graphics versus the harmless and inert flame graphics).

But hey... At least the game motivates you to do better by calling you a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ after a poor performance!

A surprisingly clever little game with an excellent spell creation system that lends itself to hours of experimentation and abuse. The writing is remarkably decent for such a small game, and the price is perfectly adequate considering its level of polish and depth of gameplay. On sale, it's an incredible bargain.

There's also refreshingly little hand-holding featured. The game actually features some amount of puzzle-solving, to help encourage more diverse experimentation with the spell system, and nicely offsets the somewhat laid-back explosive festival of sparkly death (oh god, so many sparkles) that makes up the rest of the gameplay.


The primary criticisms would be the occasions where you might experience slightly too little handholding, and end up in a situation where you need a particular spell effect that you hadn't assigned in your loadout for that mission (the game is usually pretty good about this though, just make sure to actually read the mission briefing); and the fact that the game is rather short all in all (there is a New Game+ mode though, which in this case actually offers a fair amount of replay value).

But, all things considered, it's a credit to the game when your biggest complaint is that you wanted more of it.

While the concept and art might be enticing, the actual gameplay is incredibly mediocre.

The platforming is fairly standard, nothing too interesting, nothing too absurd for the most part (at least as far as I'd gotten in the game), and the graphics are really quite neat.

The problem comes from the combat. While the first level or two is purely centered around hopping over things or running under them (and is as such the best part of the game), you'll eventually pick up a harpoon gun. This is where everything starts going wrong.

The gun controls are awful. There is a very long windup and recoil for every slow-moving projectile you fire, and making any sort of movement will cancel the entire animation. That's right, you must stand completely still in order to operate the gun. The only exception to this is a bizarre interaction with jumping; if you jump at the right point in the windup animation, you will fire the harpoon in midair. Then when you hit solid ground again, you'll start a new firing animation without any other keypresses. This is essential if you want to actually attempt to play this thing, as jumping up and down will cancel the animation faster than it would cycle on its own, and is thus the only way to improve your dismal firerate.

Combine this with enemies who almost universally require two or more shots in order to be killed and who, in contrast to most retro platformers, will happily break their standard back-and-forth patrol and hop off the ledge they're on in order to attack you. Then just start placing more and more of these enemies so that you spend all of your time lining up shots and firing your little harpoon.

As if that wasn't enough, there are bossfights! The first one sends a swarm of enemies at you in seemingly random patterns where they only sometimes line up with the extremely limited area you can actually hit them with your projectile. Fail to kill the enemies quickly enough, and there will soon be too many of them activated for you to survive. There simply won't be any room left to stand or jump without getting hurt.

After a great deal of trial and error, I managed to pass the shark swarm... What followed was an actually quite entertaining (comparitively) chase sequence, followed by the next "Act" of the game: Undead pirates.

The pirate zones are a condensed and purified example of everything wrong with the combat system. They're fast, several have ranged projectiles (including the infuriating demolitionist pirates, who not only have pinpoint accuracy for throwing their long-range AoE explosives, but who also somehow manage to light sticks of dynamite underwater), and there are far, far too many of them (about 40-50% of my very little time spent playing was in the pirate zones, wherein I managed to get the "Kill 100 pirates" achievement. Remember that these take anywhere from 2-4 shots with a 1-shot-per-second harpoon gun, and the ranged variants can block your projectiles with their own).

The boss of the pirate zone was where I hit the 2-hour mark and finally called it quits. This boss is an absolute mess of poor design and poor English translation software. Prepare for a mid-fight cutscene that does not actually prevent the boss from firing at you, but that does prevent you from moving or doing anything to defend yourself. Prepare for the game to suddenly decide it wants to be part bullet hell, with the slow and slidy controls you have to operate your character with. Prepare to walk the entire run-up to the bossfight every time you die, regardless of which of the three (that I know of) segments of the fight you died at.


No. I paid less than a dollar for this, but I'll still be applying for a refund and hoping my 2 hours is the right kind of 2 hours. You'd get more entertainment from taking the nickels you would've used to buy this game and pretending to magically find them behind your own ear.

Give Deep Ones a pass.

This really isn't a full release yet. This is still an indie Early Access title. That's something that any potential buyers should be made aware of before making the purchase.

That said, the game has a lot of heart... It oozes Warhammery goodness from every pore, and the sandboxy nature lends itself to a great many rather interesting and unexpected results; such as the pirate island of Sartosa suddenly staking a claim to mainland Remas, or a massive three-way war between Kislev, Marienburg and the high elves.

The "campaign" is very lightly structured, but this does mean you're allowed a fair amount of freedom in doing what you want to do. You'll also find that you're by no means railroaded into being a Goodbeard the Friendly Privateer... Indeed, most of the custom missions and sub-campaigns involve you performing acts ranging from "unsavor" up through "shady" and straight into "outright war crimes", and it's a pleasant change of pace.

Ship combat is combination of amazing maelstroms of furious pyrotechnics, and frustrating wonkiness. The melee combat system is *awful* for the most part, and many of the boarding mechanics are fantastically glitchy.

This is where we get into the "cons" of the game... Placeholders are everywhere. Glitches abound in the most bizarre ways and places. The naval trading aspect is, like every other naval trading system, complete ass. The RPG aspect of upgrading your character and ship is hysterically unbalanced and at times completely broken. The sea monster battles are also often quite glitchy, or just generally very poorly designed and implemented (the Black Leviathans being a rare but exciting exception to this rule).


There are more things to list, but I don't want to bog down this review with all the negative nitpicks I could scrounge up... Yes, there are a lot of things wrong, but that list is *shrinking*. The developers have been nothing but helpful and receptive to their playerbase and they're working hard on patching the game into ship-shape, one catastrophically broken update at a time.

Last time I played, the game got worn a little thin towards the end of my almost 100-hour playthrough... And that was when it was even more broken than before. Also note that I hadn't even tried the Khornate champion campaign for chaos, and now they've added a Nurgle champion to play as!


So, try to not expect a finished game... This isn't Black Flag: Emprah Edition. But if you manage to scale your expectations back enough to accept an in-development fan letter to the briny coasts of Warhammer Fantasy, you'll find enough character and excitement to entertain you through many (fairly buggy, but quite enjoyable) hours of seafaring.

This game has elements of greatness, but unfortunately they're somewhat buried underneath everything else... Everything else being a counter-intuitive, arbitrarily unforgiving slog.

While the game presents a huge variety of training regimes, assistant upgrades, equipment and so on, there are primarily just two viable paths of getting anywhere. One is to send 1-2 warriors into every possible fight until they become superheroes capable of decapitating 15 people in a single strike, or you can spread out the experience to a larger number (say, 4-5) gladiators, and then make sure to sacrifice several slaves to unwinnable matches so you can keep a good number of "lost" battles in your stats.

The reason for this is that the relative difficulty of each fight (be it in the local marketplace, at the sponsorship of the local leaders or even in the coliseum at Rome) is mostly determined by how many combats you've won overall.

So, if you have one champion who is capable of taking on Rome's best and bravest, your fresh slaves will be unable to compete anywhere as their opponents will be scaled towards providing a challenge to your single best warrior... After a while spent in a campaign, you no longer have any low-tier fights to train people with.


That's probably the worst offender, and the one that's bothered me the most (aside from when the game gives you a match against 28 enemy gladiators, causing so much sound lag that the game shudders to a halt while trying to process everything).

Also included are:
*Vast quantities of fresh, useless slaves heaped into your training field that need to have personal, individual management (you cannot set standard training regimens for new warriors, and they won't automatically stop training a particular skill when they reach the cap, requiring you to manually check through everyone to make sure they're not just standing around being completely useless).

*A combat system that requires an upgrade to allow you to manually control a gladiator in a fight, and that requires skill training for the AI to fight by itself. Also featuring "hit thing until it dies before you do" levels of system complexity, which eventually gives way to a surprise cameo from the Dark Souls PvP scene, wherein everyone is rolling everywhere until someone pulls off a swing that defies all laws of physics and hitboxes in order to instantly obliterate anyone unfortunate enough to be in its general vicinity.

*A direct-upgrade path of equipment upgrades, wherein some upgrades are actually worse in all ways to the required step before it. And yes, in order to equip a soldier with one gladius, you first need to buy him a dagger, then a wooden gladius, then finally the metal gladius. Again, no way to define a preset loadout for new warriors, so you need to inspect each one individually and mash the right mouse button for each weapon, pauldron, greave, torso and skirt you want to equip on your little dress-up dolly.

*The cringiest, try-hardiest ambient swearing/insults I've heard in a very long time. Thankfully this can be turned off, as there are only so many times you can hear the painfully drawn out slurs before you begin to feel bad for everyone involved in the voice recordings for this game, especially since some pre-match insults are so long-winded that they take longer to finish than the actual combat.


So, in summary, this is a gladiatorial combat management sim with bad gladiators, bad combat, bad management, and also bad sim.

It's not, however, a *bad* game... Just a deeply disappointing one that doesn't live up to its potential.

You know what Hotline Miami really needed? A turret section. Specifically, a turret section where a random number of the enemies would glitch out and not actually approach the turret, so you'd have to leave your spot and venture out into the blank not-intended-for-play wilderness to try and find them.

If Hotline Miami had thought of something like that, it might've been truly great... Almost as great as this game.


12 may be better than 6, but it's not better than a lot of other games out there. The story might have been interesting, but it's riddled with poor translations ("I must recharge my revolver"), along with an absolutely schizophrenic route through the various places and plot elements, and sprinkled with hilarious amounts of racism. I honestly can't tell if the devs put it in as "period accuracy", a plot element, or just because they don't know how else Mexicans are supposed to act. Or ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, for that matter.

The trailer boasts "skills!", as though there's some matter of choice in how you develop your character. This isn't strictly a lie, however the choice in this case is simplified into "yes" or "no". "Yes, I will purchase this one upgrade that is available at this place and time in the story", or "No, I will not purchase this upgrade because I am allergic to upgrades". At various stations in the story, you'll find yourself in some town-like area where you will find a person offering a specific perk upgrade for an amount of cash you almost certainly have managed to scrounge up by that time, and a fellow offering a randomized replayable mini-mission you can keep running in order to grind up the cash to purchase the upgrade; if you happen to be a bit skint for some obscure reason.

There doesn't appear to be anything else in the game that you can use money on, so... Yeah. Might as well by the upgrades. Also, you can't go back to a town at will, you can only visit each location as fits the storyline, plus random encounters while you're moving from set piece to set piece. As such, if you *don't* buy the upgrade, you will never be able to change your mind and go back to get it... Heck, I don't even know if the next part of the story opens up until you've purchased the upgrade, I didn't test it out.


So with that rambling out of the way, what's the actual gameplay like? Well... It's a bit... Eh? Sure, it's always nice when you manage to gun down a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but the weapons are honestly a bit of a pain to use, and in a few places you can just sit behind a corner and rapidly stab every idiot that comes running around to see what all the fuss is about, thus avoiding all of the game's gunplay entirely.

In an effort of making things more "interesting", the guns need to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ while firing. For a revolver, this means you need to hold the right mouse button before every shot. For the rifle, you need to tap it once after every shot. This means the revolver, which is supposed to be your "fast-acting" gun, is an absolute turkish duck when you're trying to fumble between the mouse buttons, since you need to release and then re-hold the right mouse button for each bullet...

Now then, reload mechanics... You'd probably expect something this "realistic" to have an in-depth reloading system, right? Well, that's probably what the intention was... However, in practice, you just mash "R" repeatedly until the gun is in perfect condition again. There doesn't seem to be any kind of "down time" when reloading, and you can easily shoot down more enemies while you're in the process of jamming bullets into the gun.

Speaking of weapons, there are five of them. The knife, which you always have with you, a revolver, a repeater rifle, a shotgun, and a bow. That's it. Those are your options. Luckily, there's a quick and easy method of stockpiling ammo for the one gun or the other, so you don't have to keep swapping out all the time during combat. All you have to do is hold "R" to pull all the rounds out of your held weapon and put them in your pocket. If the new number of carried rounds exceeds the number of bullets you can keep in your pocket, the excess bullets will be consumed by the eternal darkness hidden within mens' souls... That, or they just disappear because the game didn't think to leave any in the gun.

Once you've done that, you can move over to an enemy's gun and then swap yours with it to see if they had more ammunition chambered than you did on your last one. Rinse and repeat, and you've got full ammo for the gun of your choice! Hurray!

Oh, right, I almost forgot Dynamite... You can pick up stacks of dynamite which you may then throw at enemies taking out entire groups of them at a time. This is balanced by the fact that the game will randomly delete the number of dynamite bundles you're currenly holding, and/or just prevent you from actually activating the "throw dynamite" key. Maybe you've had a bit too much tequila and you just can't remember where in your poncho you hid the explosives.


Individual levels are about 50% too big to show all of it on-screen at once (exploration!), but they tend to be strung together in somewhat janky assemblies that go on for 2-3 of them at least... So there's that.

Also, the music is a bit... Bizarre. There seem to be two, maybe three tracks, and they vary between "pumping electric guitars and drums" and "pumping electric guitars and drums, plus something inspired by native American chanting". I suppose that's close enough to a traditional Western soundtrack for a contemporary game like this.


Sadly, I wasn't particularly inspired to keep playing beyond the 111 minutes I put into it. Sure, I purchased the game at a significant discount to its already quite reasonably price, but... Yeah. Still want my money back.

Even having the game glitch out halfway through and give me infinite revolver ammo wasn't enough to keep me going long enough to learn the true story of The Nameless Mexican, who ends up getting several names as the game progresses.


Final review: 12/6, would not recommend unless you really, really hate ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Great way to kill some time if you're bored.

Also wolves. Great way to kill some wolves.

It's a physics-based puzzle platformer. While the images/videos might hint towards a slightly more open-worldish type affair, the levels themselves are fairly straightforward with the exception of side areas you can muck around with for the sake of increasing your score... Which is just a score, there doesn't appear to be anything interesting associated with the number other than that deeply satisfying feeling of watching something get bigger because of you.

...*ahem*.


Now, from my handle and profile picture, you might presume I have a certain appreciation of all things goblinoid. This is true. I suppose I just feel a natural sense of connection with small, green, warty little beasts that are regularly and often deservedly reviled... So seeing a game where you play as a goblin, surrounded by other goblins, beating up entitled tin-can heroes using deviously improvised traps and pitfalls felt like Steam had finally answered my prayers and delivered an indie title that wasn't completely terrible. The charming art style only added to that impression.

The problem is... The art style is pretty much the one good thing here. The player controls are manageable once you get used to them, certainly, but there's always the occasional hiccup associated with being something that tries to obey the fickle laws of video game physics. The main problem arises from the fact that you don't have quite as much, if any, control over everything else in the game that is also having issues trying desperately to not exist in the same physical space as something else.

Dragging a massive boulder will of course be slow going, until the boulder suddenly and inexplicably flips into the air and sails over your head if you're lucky, or onto it if you're unlucky. Crates and barrels will sometimes be perfectly obedient, other times they will bounce just high enough to count as being lethally dangerous when they touch you again.

Unpredictable, bizarre and frequent deaths are really just part of the fun with doing anything in a game with a physics engine though, and the game is kind enough to have a mercifully short turnover time in regards to respawning.

However, you can't just run around willy-nilly and smash your bristled little green head against the puzzles until you find the right solution, despite several of them only being solveable by doing just that.

The reason you can't use trial-and-error is that, first of all, respawn checkpoints are limited. I mean this in the sense that you can only respawn at a specific checkpoint a certain number of times, after which you get sent back to the last checkpoint before that one, and so on until you're respawning at the very start of the level again.

This doesn't make the game more difficult or challenging, it just makes it more tedious. The only thing you have to do is just run and jump a bit more through old territory to get back to where you were, only to die to the same puzzle again and have to make the trek one more time. Or, if your luck's particularly foul, you get sent to a checkpoint that was before a point-of-no-return, so you actually CAN'T get back to where you were and need to restart the whole level from scratch.

Second, even if you don't have a particularly fatal puzzle at hand, it is entirely possible in far too many circumstances that you end up accidentally pushing something too much or not pushing it enough, in which case the thing you needed for the other thing gets irretrievably jammed into some spikes somewhere, and you have to start the level over since no amount of blood sacrifice will make the spike-gods relinquish their prize of a small throwable pebble.

Now, again, there's a chance for redemption here. Games with puzzles that can lock down like that will generally have fairly short levels and a quick way of resetting the puzzles so you can give it another try... Not so in Goblins and Grottos. The game shows off its really quite wonderful art style by having these large, sprawling maps for you to explore and maneuver around... Which is great in and of itself, and was really what I was looking for. The problem is when you combine that with tricky puzzles that can permanently stick themselves to the point where you need to do all the exploration all over again. This is particularly irritating when the only reason things got borked was because the physics engine ♥♥♥♥ itself while doing a routine calculation, and sent something inexplicably flying (which, let's face it, is one of the biggest reasons we love physics engines in games).


The game basically needs to decide what it is... Is it a casual, quick little puzzle platformer with difficult trial-and-error puzzles? Or is it a slightly more open exploration game for fiddling around? Trying to combine the two just results in a puzzle platformer that takes too long to get anywhere and that you're too scared to explore for fear of accidentally jamming the system again. Considering the game has already been released and doesn't even bear the cautionary label of "Early Access", I think it's fair to assume that Goblins and Grottos isn't going to be making any particularly big changes to its fundamental gameplay anymore.


I really, really wanted to like this... I really did. Again, the art style is fantastic, and the humor wasn't nearly as irritating as it potentially could have been... But it's all just a bunch of polish on a game that isn't there.

You can't make a game that requires tight controls and exact reactions, then throw in a chaotic physics engine to make things interesting. You can't make a puzzle that demands trial and error, and then punish the player for not getting it right the first time.


On the plus side, the game does have a map editor... So I guess you could just make your own maps that have nothing to do with how the rest of the game runs, and then just marvel at how pretty it is.