Recent reviews by Dracasis

Arizona Sunshine 2 is a fine sequel to its predecessor. I co-op played the campaign in just under 10 hours on hard and enjoyed the experience. Controls are fine, story is amusing, gunplay works well and sound design matches well.

Unfortunately it's biggest drawback is that the game is very barren. I don’t know if its just stripped down for Quest but the environments are very lacking in detail. Not distractingly so but there were several instances where the area we were in was noticeably empty with little love or detail added to make the environment feel compelling. The low frame rate, frosted glass, zombie-attack windows were the biggest distracting detail that I thought was just a buggy loaded texture or something the first time I saw it. But no, that's just the way it is.

The game also takes away your equipment on a few occasions which was particularly annoying because you're encouraged to scavenge, collect and hoard throughout the game to ensure you have enough ammunition to fight through the hoards that you'll run into. So when the game just tosses all that careful preparation out the windows multiple times, it sours its own gameplay.

The dog is a fun addition to the lone survivor formula, even if the story surrounding him is terribly off the rails.

This makes it a difficult game to recommend at its full retail price. At half-off its probably worth getting if you like zombie shooters with decent gunplay and a fun, if a bit goofy, story. If you've got some friends that want to hold out in the hoard mode for a while, you'd get your money's worth out of it I think.

As a game, Helldivers 2 is quite an enjoyable co-op experience that I have few complaints for. Multiple very different factions to fight with a variety of customizable equipment in several beautiful environments. Sound that pops, music that fits thematically and a regularly evolving game world.

It is not a perfect game though; there have been a fair number of crashes throughout my, currently, 100 hours of play time. Most of them have been non-impactful, occurring at the very end of a match and the game provides its rewards immediately upon completing the match so crashing during the outro is only a minor inconvenience. However a friend of mine crashes randomly mid-match with mild frequency so your mileage may vary.

While the music is very thematic, it also gets very repetitive after a while. The stinger music when combat breaks out has worn out its welcome by now. A few more tracks or something different for each planet would have been nice.

Progression is a bit of a mixed shotgun. Because all individuals get the medals for completed major orders, you can put the game down for a week and come back to hundreds of progress points. There's also no 'end game' so once you acquire all the upgrades there's no incentive to collect samples, medals or requestion slips which are a core collectable of the game. Would be nice to have something to do with your currency post-completion.

The kernel level anti-cheat is less than desirable and who knows how much of an impact it makes considering the cheating that still goes on but it’s a point to consider if you're looking into this game.

Overall though, its still a fun experience. Not sure who this review is for because everyone I know already has the game but, if you're looking for comments about it still, worth the buy in my opinion!

The Room VR was a fine little jaunt into the VR puzzle room space. At 3-5 hours though, I cant recommend it at full price but, on a decent sale, its not a bad pick up. The environments are pretty cozy and puzzles range from baby mode to head scratcher.

I was disappointed that it only has teleport movement and it dose suffer from the point and click, stick your inventory items into every space you think they might go until it works, syndrome. But the story is interesting, graphically its pleasing and I enjoyed it enough to keep me coming back for 4 sessions to finish.

If you find it for a good price and like puzzle games, its not at all a bad grab.

Cult of the Lamb is an enjoyable little mixmash game. I would describe it as a higher octane Stardew Valley with a lower energy Hades gameplay. It's got a satisfying gameplay loop with pleasant art style, good sound design and excellent controls and humorous satire.

It's down sides are that it is very grindy doing the same actions over and over again with slight variations. The grind factor turns up to 11 for the second half of the game with the amount of grind you go through increasing quite a bit for very small upgrade chunks. By the time you're just down to the final upgrades I really would have appreciated the randomness turned off so I could just buy the ones I want (if you know you know).

There are only a half-dozen weapons in the entire game with 10 or so enemy types in each zone (not including bosses) and 4 zones so it wont take long to wear out the variety.

There's a bit of a roguelike aspect with random upgrades which are nice that they are strictly upgrades. However, it does have the drawback of, when you unlock a new upgrades that you don’t like or are not useful to your play style, it just dilutes your pool of interesting upgrades you can find. It would be nice to be able to disable 1 item per X-items you've unlocked, similar to Vampire Survivors, to help remove the least interesting finds.

Midas sucks. Having spent an hour post-credits upping my stock only to run into his event, then carefully working to up it again only to be hit a second time was extraordinarily frustrating. I'd have accepted it if you had an opportunity to get all your money back in the last encounter, but since you only get what you lost in his last hit, I found that extremely frustrating. Literally hours of effort were erased by the unavoidable encounters.

Lastly, the game isn’t entirely stable. I had 2 CTDs and 1 softlock. They were all at the cult though so, thankfully, not much was lost but 3 crashes in 50 hours of playtime is still quite a ratio.

Overall, I did enjoy it and would recommend if the gameplay looks like its up your alley.

Winds of Change was an interesting visual novel. The game is basically just a story in game form so its going to be difficult to review it without spoilers so, rather than tagging a hundred different little spoiler snippets, I tagged the entire review.

The TLDR version is:
The game suffers from a lack of ample time passing to let things congeal in a more natural way, has a lack of branching paths and could use better game-options for interactions and readability but overall was an enjoyable story and worth the price if a fantasy pick-a-path book is your jam.

For the rest of the details

I enjoyed Winds of Change overall. The story was quite interesting and I found myself curious as to where it would go the entire time. It's got some good twists and an intriguing plot. Its not great, there are some really big holes in it that keep it from being amazing but if all you want is a good story, you could do worse than this.

Gameplay is basically non-existent. There are no puzzles or battles or collectables, its entirely just a book where some of the story requires you to rewind and choose different options to get all the content. Its not bad but go into it expecting to just lay back and read a book with pictures for a couple hours. Its honestly probably better to play on a tablet (if possible) so you can lay back and just use the touch screen to select your choices. A wireless controller is your next best option.

To that end, you have to click a LOT more than is necessary. I really would have appreciated a continuous story option that just keeps going through the content and only pauses when a decision is needed (or when a player pauses). 80% of the game is fully voiced and a lot of it is just inter-character dialogue that didn’t need me to click through.

MAJOR SPOILERS
To that end the plot holes aren’t huge or something I couldn't suspend my belief over but, as far as I can tell, the entire story happens over about 2 weeks' time. Because of this, a lot of the things that would take longer than that to developed feel as rushed as you would expect. The deep war-time bonds developed between friends are much more believable than the romantic relationships. Even if you play a hornball nymph the entire game, the fact that a considerable romantic relationship forms over two weeks (or less for some characters) feels gamey and unnatural. You also go from basically being a pampered priestess that's never wielded a weapon to being able to go toe to toe with one of the best trained assassins in the same time with almost no training…

However, I do appreciate that a lot of the interactions feel very natural in the beginning though, choosing a romantic or sad or sarcastic response all felt very appropriately responded to. They did a really good with the interpersonal relationships which, I suppose, was the main premise of the game. Sovy's redemption arc at the end is the exception as it felt very shoehorned in. I enjoyed it but, while everything else progressed naturally, having to run around the various maps to find his points, the fact the he doesn't have a marching sprite and even that his loyalty meter doesn't have the 5th grey heart just makes it feel very out of placed and terribly rushed.

Lastly it appears the game suffers from Mass Effect red pill/blue pill issue. No matter what you do throughout the game, you only get the same two choices in the end. If effects the prologue which is a nice little extra tidbit post-game but I had expected a 'choices matter' game to end with more than zero branches.

Still, in the end it was a good story and I can't-not recommend it if this sort of thing interests you.

I generally don’t like buying Early Access games but Phasmophobia has been a pleasant exception my experience with EA games. My group and I play exclusively in VR which adds a bit of jank and a lot less precision than most PC screen gamers but, that being said, its an great experience and a lot of fun to play. The game has evolved a lot since its initial release and gotten a ton better. The devs seem pretty committed to getting it fully out the door and, while the VR aspect has certainly been relegated to a second-class citizen, its at least not ignored and is fully functional.

For the good, its very atmospheric, has a lot of difficulty options for players to find their own level of play and is good by yourself but great coop with friends. Being a deduction game, the devs have done a good job making each ghost unique enough to stand out on their own but close knit enough that you still need to (generally) do a fair amount of work to figure out what you are dealing with. The game has a good learning curve and, while the in-game tutorial could use a lot of love helping newer players understand how to play, its enough to whet the appetite. At present, the game is best played with another, more experienced hunter who can guide the new player.

The horror elements are punchy and have enough spice to make you jump without being so overwhelming that it becomes difficult to play. Very active ghosts can be so active that you become numb to their antics while very quiet ghosts can surprise even veteran players with a single event. And everything in between.

As for the bad, its still an EA game and subject to all sorts of sweeping changes still yet.

VR players get a bit of the shaft as mentioned and the game lacks some longevity (I say with 136 hours at time of review). While I very much enjoy the cooperative puzzle solving aspect with some stakes for failure, once you've seen each location a couple times and succeeded with a couple ghost hunts, you wouldn’t be remiss for being done with the game. Daily/weekly quests are usually completed very quickly or with only minor active input by the player and the cash reward is only used to unlock new equipment which is used to make the game easier.

Game has a continuous set of rotating bugs. Generally nothing massive and the active dev team is on anything game breaking but its not hard to find things that are just wrong, off or broken for months at a time.

There's not much more for additional players to do. Game is great with 2, fine with 3 but will often leave a 4th player with little to do. More challenges or useful things for additional players to do would be a boon.

But, overall, don’t regret the purchase in the slightest. If you've got some friends that don’t mind a few jump scares and a fun puzzle to engage in, the game has a surprising amount of depth if you want to dive in to the deeper difficulties.

Baba is You is a game that is hard NOT to recommend if you like puzzle games. Its premise is very simple to understand; the rules are objects in the game, make new sentences to out of the rule words change the rules and complete the levels. Baba is You does a pretty good job introducing you to the game's concepts and then expands the puzzles to include new and more complex rules to play with. It’s a really fun game to sit and think until that moment it clicks and then you feel big brained.

Its downsides are that the game doesn't evolve past that concept: you always push words to make new sentences to change the rules to finish the levels. New words and ways to interact with the levels are regularly added but they are generally variations of similar functionality that dose not change all that much.

The later levels also rely more and more word locking, i.e. putting rules in inaccessible locations to force those rules to be always true and I find those levels to be significantly less appealing to play on. It narrows down the list of possible interactions but Baba's entire premise is messing with the rules.

Lastly, some of the game concepts are never explained or at least poorly explained to the player. Most notably the ability/requirement of moving a text object into another solid object's space. The one puzzle I had to look up a solution for involved moving text onto my player object. Since normally the player objects(s) move text if they collide with it, the idea that my player object could ever be in the same space as a text object never occurred to me and, unlike most of the (pretty good honestly) concept tutorials, there are some obscure concepts later in the game that are never taught to the player.

Still, even if you only play a dozen levels and/or look up solutions along the way, its still a really simple and neat game that's easy to get into and leave when you're satisfied.

Dredge is definitely one of those 'neutral' recommends that Steam doesn't give the option for. Given that the game has some fairly large flaws and I found myself frustrated on several occasions, I ended up leaning toward the not recommending side of the needle.

To clarify, its not a bad game by any means and I wouldn’t say I regret my purchase of the game. Art direction is perfectly acceptable, sound and audio is quite nice; nothing to write home about but it gets the job done without feeling overwhelming or irritating. Controls fine for both K/M and controller and I dutifully appreciate the ability to select your button overlay for which controller type you are using.

However, the game is basically just one giant yack-shaving fetch quest that gets pretty dull after about 4 hours. There isn’t much variety and while the story around it is also fine, there's nothing much really to sink your teeth into. World building is great but you learn pretty much everything you're going to learn within the first couple hours. You won't know that till the end but then it feels kinda disappointing that nothing really evolved or changed throughout your journey.

The upgrades the game gives you access to generally feels pretty meaningful and provides a bit of leigh way to choose what kind of game you want to play but it does a really bad job gating the upgrades and spacing them out to keep the journey interesting throughout. Once you reach the second island (of 5), you have access to all the materials you need to fully complete the tech tree, you just need to make money and buy the materials. This feels good while it lasts but if you take the time to fully deck out your ship in the beginning, there's really nothing to look forward to after that other than the story and the story is pretty mid.

Perhaps it was just how I played but the day/night cycle felt basically trivial as well. I played it pretty safe once I figured out the ranges; dock at 6-8pm, sleep till 3-4am, run the day as normal with no risk. I only went out at night when a night fish was needed and even then it seemed pretty harmless so long as you didn’t linger or ignore being in paranoid land. Spent 100 in-game days at sea to finish the game and I felt no pressure or reason not to just rest for 12 hours straight and start the next day early.

At any rate, it’s a fine game just, if I knew then what I knew now I'd probably have spent the money and 15 hours on something else so that’s what is in my review. Perhaps it will help someone else in the future :)

Egression is a fun game if very short. Didn’t realize there were only 2 rooms. They were both comfortably fun if not the most challenging puzzles. Since they’re pretty reality-based game rooms, there isn’t any out of the box thinking to be had; if you can interact with it, its either part of the puzzle or decorum; not really any red herrings to be had.. The first puzzle is about an hour and the second is 1.5-2 hours. The lobby puzzle took the most time because it takes advantage of more video game-esque-isms to do things you couldn't reasonably do in real life. And also, the poster puzzle is something you probably won't ever be able to solve on your own without accidentally stumbling upon its key interaction. But at least the puzzle as a whole was enjoyable to solve.

Little disappointed that the 5-hour experience wasn't bug free. Had my flashlight disappear our me once, just completely gone and the final tool on the pod just would not work so had to restart the puzzle twice. Still enjoyed my time otherwise.

Sound design is nice, Joe can be a bit irksome with his dialogue but it never got grating, more cheesy-eyerolly after a while. My only issue with sound design was that the out of bounds noise is quite loud.

Controls were very easy to use and understand, the variety of controls and menu manipulation felt very natural so I did appreciate that. Index controls worked quite well. Would hope for additional maps and DLC but considering its been a year, cant imagine much more is coming?

Can’t really recommend a 5 hour experience for the full $20 but if you find it on a discount and enjoy puzzle/escape room type games, you could do worse than spending your money on Egression :)

Tribes of Midgard is a fine game with very minimal gameplay intrigue. I don’t have a problem with the game as a whole, provided you just put blinders on and ignore all the microtransactions and habitual daily quest bullshittary. The problem comes that there isn’t much else to the game. What you can do is super low level with no real gameplay beyond the intrigue of the initial discovery.

Combat is very samey and boring. Different weapon classes act a little differently but how you use them is pretty much hold left click, occasionally press right click. There's not much in the way of nuance or fun to be had overall.

The world is large but made super small by teleporters. You explore an area once, plop down a teleporter near anything important and, whenever the little wait to respawn timer goes away, you just plop back for a quick murder before heading home. Unlike games like Valheim where teleporters are a thing but are difficult to make, maintain a hub and have restrictions to keep the world feeling large, Tribes crushes itself down to a list of grindy points to interact with.

Base construction is pretty awful. The system itself isn’t terrible other than being unable to remove a single piece of an area, you have to dismantle the entire vertical stack but its hyper limited in what you can actually create (there's a friggen 'complexity' meter that tells you if you've built too much stuff; wtf?). Using what you've built is also really bad if you want to add a roof or second story. We found just sticking everything nearby the dump chests to be way less frustrating than trying to have things sensically added to a multi-story home.

The farming system is pretty meh. You click once to dig a hole, click once to plant a thing and, after a while click it again to collect your prize. It and the fishing thing seem like they were added soley to tick off the mandatory 'survival' game requirements more than anything.

Mentioned the microtransaction and dark pattern habits the game tries to get its players into but worth mentioning again.

There's, unfortunately, little reason to play the game and after, like, 5 hours I was already bored. Stuck with it to play with friends until they got bored too so now we're all quitting.

Spend your money elsewhere :)