Recent reviews by CascadeHush

I've enjoyed this for a few hours but reached a point where the management side of the game became a bit tedious and I moved on to other things. I see they have drones now so that will probably help with the busy-work I didn't like.

This is a labour of love from a small team. I certainly think it's well worth the money. I am keeping an eye on the updates to see when I want to jump back in. So many games to play.

All these years an still no proper controller support, or even a recommended default in the steam controller setup.

Returning to this game after about 2.5 years, I don't know what it was expecting, still as buggy and convoluted as it ever was. They keep bringing out these headline updates and don't fix basic stuff like UI issues and PROPER CONTROLLER SUPPORT!!!!!!!! I tried some of the top rated controller maps and most of them simply did not work at all, or only had some stuff mapped, and none of the would let me FIRE MY WEAPONS WHILST FLYING. Something that is kinda important.

I just could not be bothered to explain all the issues with this game or why I keep coming back hoping it will be playable now.

The star map is complete &*$(. I played for a few hours today mostly just using my existing network of startgates to travel around and build stuff, but the minute I actually needed to go anywhere in my ship, forget about it. And when I found a ship beacon, do you think I could find it on the star map, no way. And there I remembered just how terrible this game could be at some very crucial UI stuff.

Steam says I've played for 116 hours but the game save says 75 so I don't know where all those other hours come from because I don't have that much AFK time.

I never understand this school of gameplay design where the enemies are bullet sponges, but never mind, there are ammo packs anywhere, and a ton of enemies will spawn on top of you, but never mind, there are health packs everywhere. Why not balance the game around a reasonable number of enemies with reasonable health pools and a reasonable amount of survivability? You spend more time hunting the pickups than you do the enemies. Also I don't understand why there are so many different kind of health packs. Why do the one's the enemies drop look different to the one's that are placed on the map?

Also, for a game that seems to be about fast movement, I spent a lot of time confused about the next step. Turns out there is some switch somewhere, but even when I did find it it was often really hard to see. Given it glows a pulse of yellow it's still very hard to find. It's like the game wants to help you on the one hand, but not too much. They could have just made the important stuff more distinct. I don't think it's supposed to be as complicated as it is but the game did grind to a halt several times.

Having to walk over the top of a codex entry to pick it up is also really bizarre. I missed picking up the first one because apparently I did not get close enough to it, and there was no prompt to press the E key. Then accidentally walked over the top of the second one and figured out that was what you were supposed to do.

The game does not explain the adrenaline meter at all. It would have been nice to know this early enough in the game where it actually mattered because later on when the enemies really start to come out in force it's pretty useless.

Also, it was never clear if I needed to hold the space bar in or not in order to stick to the wall. Sometimes you just stick to the wall anyway, sometimes you don't stick until you press the space bar. All these parkour games seem to work the same way and the control scheme never feels right.

The mechanism of stunning and enemy and then meleeing them so they drop more stuff is useless in actual gameplay. It never seems to actually work and usually there are other enemies around that will damage you if you try to get close to a stunned enemy.

In the end I turned player damage up to 2x and that felt about right and enemy damage down to half but that was probably unnecessary when I started to see how many health packs there are littered around. As I said, I really don't get this kind of thing. I finished the first level. In the end I thought I'd be having more fun if I just replayed Hard Reset Redux or even Super Cloudbuilt.

Between this and Fashion Police I think I have been cured of my desire to try a boomer shooter. Both games do what the do, but in the end didn't carry any interest for me. Fashion Police was better at being what it was.

After almost 2 hours in the game now I can't do anything because my food meter is at zero and my mum won't let me cook the food that is in the fridge. Seems like the game should at least recognise that as a failure state and give me the dignity of a game over... or else what? I take a walk around town to advance the clock until mummy dearest lets me cook again?

The main problem with this game is it takes too many brain cells to be an idle game, and not enough to be an actually engaging story.

The progression tree is pretty pointless to, since you are always going to just unlock the next thing as soon as it becomes available; the game may as well just give you your upgrades as you earn them rather than making you go in and unlock them manually. It's the illusion of choice and pointless busy work all at the same time. Actually that last sentence pretty much sums up the game.

10 hours ago I had never heard of this. Now I've just played it for 10 hours.

I came for Icey, but I fell in love with S-17.

I guess this game walked (literally) so Icey could run (jump, tumble, slash, dive, etc).

It was a weird confluence of events that I stumble across this in my back catalogue about a month after 'finishing' Icey. Scare quotes because the only way you really finish these things, assuming you want to figure it out yourself, is to decipher the achievements and I'm quite over that for now. I've also done quite a bit of that in the Neptunia series of games, fwiw.

So I don't know, maybe I'm in a bad mood. Did enjoy this for a couple of hours, and there are a couple of threads I would like to see the end of, but not enough to mess around with it any further.

To paraphrase Seinfeld, we play/watch/read these stories because, unlike our real life problems, these artificial things end. And yeah, it's fair game for an artist to subvert that, but it's also fair game for me to give it a thumbs down as a result. In the end, it's about how I feel walking away. Was it good times, or more of an annoyance?

My favourite part was the museum.

On of my pet peeves is sinking 10's of hours into a game and the discovering that something doesn't work the way it was described, or has some hidden penalty, or there is a bonus that hasn't been triggering, or that you didn't meet some prerequisite, or some other catastrophic underlying design flaw that destroys all confidence you have that the game respects your time and can be relied upon to reward you for your efforts.

It took me 50 hours but I found out the game has been screwing with me.

There was so much to like here. For about 40 hours anyway.

Why does the race start when I'm not ready? This is the only racing game I've played in years that just goes ahead without waiting for a button press. Then the game penalises you for restarting when it's not my fault.

I don't understand why I have to play the entire game with the right trigger pressed. It seems to add nothing to the game. So I redefined the fire button to be space bar and sat my bluetooth speaker on it to hold it down and this made the game 200% better. But it wasn't a complete solution because it interfered with other UI stuff so I had to keep picking it up and putting it back down.

There is an electricity gauge that builds up, and the tutorial keeps telling me to use it but whenever I did I just died. Also it takes forever to build up.

And for a game that's supposed to be about music, I wasn't blown away by the tune. It's not terrible, if it was another game and it was background it would be fine, but here it's a main part of the game and it's just not good enough for that. Neon Echo did the rhythm combat better, and had better music, shame it got abandoned.

Maybe there is some accessibility option somewhere that would make this game playable by holding the button down for me, like an on-off switch., but I didn't love it enough to be bothered fixing their game.

Most roguelikes get boring after an hour or two anyway, I expect this would have been the same, but I live in hope. I got this in a key trade so I'm stuck with it. The upgrade system here doesn't help, it punishes you for specialising so you are always just going to put your points into the next cheapest, thing, so there really is no choice there.

Very well crafted puzzle game with a very dark story.