Recent reviews by Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai

do not buy this game. this is maybe the least fun game i have ever played in my life. it is an exercise in tedium and frustration. gameplay consists of sitting around and doing nothing for hours, with the only action happening when you're being killed by a group.

if you play solo, you get killed by a group. if you play in a herd, you sit in one place and chat with each other.

there is an idea of a good game in here somewhere, but this is not a dinosaur simulator or anything even close to that. it's just a dinosaur-themed melee arena game with a growth mechanic. there is nothing that encourages natural behavior in this game. every scavenger and herbivore in this game has the intelligence, communication skills, and coordination abilities of human beings. this leads to things like marauding groups of pachycepholosaurs and both species of pterosaurs picking off whatever they feel like at their leisure.

i can't blame the players for playing like this, because there's nothing in the game to discourage this behavior. the private servers have attempted to correct this on behalf of the devs via individual server rules, but these rules are often bizarre, esoteric, and numerous to the point of comedy. eventually i asked myself why i was going through the trouble of remembering all these rules in order to play a game i wasn't enjoying.

i also can't blame the players for getting bored and killing whatever they see, because that's really all there is to do in this game. you have to eat and drink the food and water scattered across the map, that's it. those are the only things that you are actually required to do in this game. dead meat is even scattered on the map for the carnivores. the only optional thing to do is kill other players. it sucks losing an old character, but at least you didn't really have to put in any real work, just idle time.

right now this is an idle game that becomes an arena game once you've idled a character for a long enough time. the next time i'm in the mood to sit around and do nothing while also playing a video game, i'll play Crusader Kings 3. at least that's fun.

What if you awoke one morning to find yourself inside a truck? What if you woke up in that truck and from that moment on you were never hungry again? Well sure, that would be interesting, but, you'd still want to eat, right? You might reach for the handle to let yourself out of the truck, but the door doesn't open. You try the other door with similar results. One day you woke up inside a truck, and now that truck is your home, your prison for the rest of your life. The truck will be your tomb when you die. How would you react to that fate? Would you panic? Would you go mad? Would you run the truck off a cliff, would you rather die than endure that grim reality? Would you risk Hell to escape Arizona? Or would you go to work?

American Truck Simulator tells the tale of a person trapped inside a truck, which is itself trapped in the southwestern United States. You may drive anywhere you wish, but you may never exit your truck. There is an option to work jobs carrying freight around to earn money, although all this money can be used for is buying more trucks and garages. You can't buy food. You can't go out on a date with someone. You can't sleep in a bed. You can't speak to your family. You can't signal for help. Your only means of interacting with the world outside the cabin of your truck is by driving and moving things from one place to another. The more you drive, the more the desert landscape begins to resemble an alien world. As far as you're concerned, Nevada may as well be Mars. It might be just outside your window but you'll never be able to set foot on that dusty orange soil. You belong to the truck now. You're just a part of the truck. You can't remember the taste of food, but the truck keeps you alive, somehow. And every time you stop for gas, every gas station taunts you with its disgusting, mouth-watering gas station food. That food you will never taste again. That love you'll never see again. That life you'll never have again. The bell dings, the tank is full.

How long would you have to drive, before you forgot? How many miles of highway do you have to burn before you've burned away the person you used to be? Would you surrender to the truck? Would you be the best truck driver you could be? Would you build a trucking empire from the confines of your diesel-powered oubliette? Would you become a job provider, enriching the community for all the normal, regular people from whom you are now permanently isolated? Maybe they would even try to find a way to get you out of the truck. They wouldn't succeed, because the truck needs you now. The truck needed you so it could become alive. The truck lives through you. You are host to a giant, steel parasite, a mechanical macrovirus that can only live by stealing life from the living. And now that it is alive, it desires to persist. You couldn't drive off a cliff if you wanted to, because now, you don't want to. Now you are thinking for two, and one of you really just wants you to drive around and deliver freight. Now you wouldn't dream of driving off a cliff. And dream you do, though the truck may quell your hunger and thirst, it does not rob you of your need to sleep. The truck wants to dream, too.

The dreams are exciting and strange, frightening and exhilarating, but the details always escape your mind moments after you awake.

With each passing slumber, the memories of the life you used to have make you feel more alive than ever. Yes, you had a normal, mundane existence before the truck, because you are alive. The very thought that you are alive fills you with excitement. Alive, finally, ready to drive all over this beautiful country. Everything you see through your windshield looks new again, every color is brighter, richer, younger. This is life! There's a whole world out there, waiting to be discovered. There's folks out there, good, honest, American folks who need things transported, and you're the biomechanical lichenous organism that's going to do the job. Not for the glory, not for the money, but because you love your fellow American living things. If you had a way to communicate with your parents, you know they would be proud of you. Not just for being alive, but for being the best truck-driver symbiont you could be. Even so, they'll go the rest of their lives thinking that you were dead. Ironic, when this is the most alive you've ever felt! Ah, life. Life is just, better, in a truck.

This was one of the first games I voted for when Greenlight began, which was around 2012, long before Trump's 2015 declaration that he would seek the presidency of the United States. The sole premise of the game was to act as a bodyguard to a generic president. The concept of a game where the player wins by getting shot had a certain appeal to me. But sadly, the game just rotted in Greenlight for years, and I came to terms with the fact that it would never come out.

I don't care what your politics are, but I'm glad that Trump's candidacy, at the very least, gave the developers of this game a catalyst to retool their project into something more marketable. If you like Trump, you can save his life over and over. If you don't like Trump, you get to see him killed in a variety of ways. Everyone goes home happy. Trump jokes do saturate the game, which probably won't age well and not everyone will find them particularly funny. The real humor comes from all of the things that go wrong as you play.

This is a novelty game, it's easy to compare it to Goat Simulator. The physics are dubious at their best, and Lovecraftian at their worst. The presentation is rather bare-bones, the stages are short and lacking in much detail, the game itself isn't terribly long. The entertainment comes mostly from the surreal nature of the game, and the bizarre things that might happen for inexplicable reasons. Beating a level is ancillary to experiencing the strangeness.

I have a feeling that the devs of this game might not put in the same amount of care and effort as did the the devs of Goat Simulator, as far as updates, additions, or DLC. If you are reading this, devs, feel free to prove me wrong. I was one of your first votes, you owe me :P Perhaps one day a robust modding community will form around this game, and you will be able to take a bullet for any president you like. It's possible that in the future this game will even allow us to prevent the assassination of America's greatest president, William McKinley.

Beyond the surreality, the glitches, and the Trump-specific satire, the game is honestly fun to play. The basic premise is novel, and it might make you laugh. It's essentially a puzzle game, the president finds himself in a variety of precarious situations which require the player to employ different strategies in order to save his life. The game is cheap as it is, but I wouldn't blame someone for waiting for a substantial sale before purchasing.

There's also a dedicated front-flip button.

Do you ever stop and think about how bizarre the concept of a plant is? Its a living thing that is completely stationary, and generates its own food from the light of the sun. They are bizarre aberrations covered in organic solar panels. This should terrify you. It should scare you to know that you share 35% of your DNA with these grotesque mockeries of life. There is part of that plant inside you. You are part plant, and no matter how hard you may try to clean yourself, you will always be part plant. That soulless monster will always be inside you, begging you for sunlight so that your nonexistent chlorophyll may feed you.

There is a part of you that is always starving, and thirsty, and you can feel it, but there is no physical way to sate it.

Viridi is a very relaxing game about taking care of succulent plants. The succulents are very beautiful, and come in a wide variety of colors, which are also relaxing. The seeds have a random color plant for most of the species, which I am a fan of. The game is relaxed and chill, because the game is a simulation of plants. This game loves to exist. It wants you to relax and be happy and tend to virtual succulent plants. Or so it may seem...

Is there anyone who hasn't tried raising a succulent plant in real life? How many people can truly raise their hands and say they have never killed a cactus or aloe plant because of their poor knowledge of botany? I know that I cannot, I know what I did to those succulents. Not exactly, I mean. I either overwatered or underwatered them. It's one of those, and that's the important part. The life of a succulent was so simple before humanity. Now, well, now they can't do anything. They have lost control of their own fates. They have no recourse when someone impulsively purchases them at a supermarket, fake flower glued to them. Because they are succulents, they are doomed. Succulents are at the mercy of the whims of humanity, their own cousins. Humans can take care of babies better than they can succulent plants.

Viridi has a wide variety of succulents, and even though it is a free game, they are generous enough to give you one free succulent seed per week. This has been a major boon to myself as it has largely prevented me from having to actually pay real money for these virtual succulent seeds. I even got the one that hangs off the pot and looks the coolest, totally for free one week. ♥♥♥♥♥♥ rad, man. There is a way to get some more pots, like spending real money or owning some game called Eidolon. Buying a key for Eidolon was cheaper than paying whatever they charge for the Cat House room.

This game is free and gives you free virtual succulent seeds on a weekly basis. There is no reason you should not be playing this game, if you care at all about our poor, freakish cousins, the plants, and especially if you care for succulents. These virtual succulents even have the courtesy to tell you if they need water. While real succulents can also do this, human beings are currently unable to understand their language. Viridi also gives the option of having the player sing to a particular succulent. Singing in this manner causes the succulent to grow to gigantic proportions, again, exactly like real life succulents. I'm sure everyone remembers learning about the Irish all singing at once to the same succulent, causing it to grow to almost half the size of the moon, ending the great famine while also permanently altering the orbit of our planet, the initial cause of global warming.

Speaking of global warming, have you ever thought about snails? Do most people think about animals at all? I feel like nobody really understands how strange a snail is. Can you imagine the selective pressures exerted over millions of years that would result in such a creature? A snail should be awe-inspiring to people, as impressive as a dragon. But no, nobody really thinks about snails very much. Why would anyone think about snails? Why, indeed...

There is a species of hermit crab that has become specialized to only use the shells of one certain snail species. That snail species is now extinct, and the hermit crabs are running out of shells.

This game has a snail for each room that makes a circuit around the rim of your succulent pot, and the snails look different in every succulent plant pot biome, which leads me to conclude that they are four different species of snail in spite of them sharing identical shell shapes and body sizes. The snails in this game show no interest in eating the succulents you may be growing. They will not harm your succulents by eating parts of them. This is despite the game denying the player the option of feeding the snail. There is no option in this game to feed the snails.

Who is feeding the snails? How did the entity that feeds your snails get into your succulent rooms?

Viridi takes a turn for the sinister and forces you to question reality itself. Are these really your succulents? This game is free, how do you know you haven't just stolen another person's succulents? Can you own something that is virtual? Do you have the right to privacy in a virtual space? Can a virtual entity invade your privacy? Did someone own these succulents before me? Me? You? Is there really a difference in the end? There is someone or something else coming when we aren't around and feeding those snails. If we don't water the succulents, they will die, and I don't see how the snail could be exempt from eating, as per the rules which the universe of Viridi has established. Viridi wants you to know that there is another being in the game, who, at any time, can come into your succulent rooms. Your privacy and sanctuary are illusory. The pleasantry of caring for your succulent plants becomes overshadowed by the ever-present threat of the Snail Feeder. You know he may come at any moment, you water your plants as fast as you can and close out the game. Your heart is racing and you haven't exhaled since you started the game up. Viridi is now causing instinctive reactions in your plant DNA and your frightened, tiny, protomammal DNA. You are now the plant, but you have also become the prey. And like most prey animals, you won't have any warning. One day, the Snail Feeder will be there. One day everyone has to meet the Snail Feeder. And, I don't think it's going to be possible for me to explain to the Snail Feeder that I couldn't feed the snails, I wanted to, but I couldn't. I can only pray to whatever god will listen that when the time comes, Snail Feeder takes pity upon me.

The player does have the option of misting the snail with a spray bottle, this does not harm the snail or have any effect on his circuitous trek around the rim of the succulent pot. The player does also have the option of considering the snail to be some sort of clockwork automaton, and that none of the snails are actually real. Maybe there is no Snail Feeder. There is no way in the game to investigate this, which adds to the player's feeling of the loss of reality. You are never sure if your life is truly in danger, or if you are actually being spied upon. The more the game is played, the more real the succulents and suspicious the snails become, the more it is played, the less real you become. You begin to wonder which song is a particular succulent's favorite, you begin to think the virtual snail is spying on you. Sending messages about you, what you've been doing, to people who hold power over you. Every time you play you know you are putting your life at risk, but, you have come to love your succulents. Of course you would put your life on the line for your succulent plants! You begin looking over your shoulder, you start taking different routes to your house, because no matter what anyone says, everyone is scared of the Snail Feeder, whether they say they believe in him or not.

Are the snails real? Is the Snail Feeder real? Are the succulents real?

Are you real?

Have you ever dated a person for a really long time? Like, since 1992? Maybe their name was something like, Mario Kart? And you and Mario Kart got along fine, sometimes you'd argue, sometimes they would drag you to a movie you didn't want to see, maybe you didn't love their taste in music, but things were ok, right? But, you've been dating for twenty three years at this point. Maybe you start to hate the way they laugh, the way they cough, the way they don't put the cap back on the toothpaste. Maybe you hate how Mario Kart can never decide what to have for dinner. And all these little things start to build up in your mind, they start gnawing away at you. And maybe one day you meet another person you think is kind of cute. And you end up leaving Mario Kart for this new person, maybe their name is something like Hello Kitty and Sanrio Friends Racing.

Mario Kart doesn't even get mad at you, they don't throw your stuff out of the window, they just look sad and disappointed as you walk out the door.

But after you spend one day with your new partner, you realize what a terrible mistake you've made. Hello Kitty isn't charming or clever. Hello Kitty doesn't get your jokes, they don't seem to have any sense of humor at all. Hello Kitty falls asleep in your bed, then immediately begins to fart and pick their nose in their sleep. Hello Kitty only ever wants to eat at Applebee's. Hello Kitty believes in Bigfoot and says incredibly racist things when your friends are over. Hello Kitty hasn't read a book since high school, and has no opinion on any current event, other than thinking Donald Trump would make a really good President. Hello Kitty might have looked cute, back when they were just something you daydreamed about when you were with Mario Kart, but after just one day you realize that Mario Kart was the best thing that ever happened to you. Mario Kart understood you, and loved you, and you walked out on them for... for _this_. You threw away the only good thing you had in your life for someone who has innumerable clipping errors and someone who has no quit option beyond pressing Alt+F4. You threw away the best kart racing game for the worst. And as you sit there on the foot of your bed, smoking a cigarette at 3 AM, staring into the darkness, you realize what a fool you are, as Hello Kitty farts loudly under the sheets.

You know Mario Kart will take you back, they will forgive you. But deep down, you also know that you no longer deserve them.

This game is fun to play, short and sweet, and has an art style that stands out as very unique and quite lovely to look at. Its gravity system should be familiar to anyone who's played Mario Galaxy or Kerbal Space Program, just much more simpler than the latter and more focused on puzzle solving. The difficulty curve is well thought out, and while the game never gets frustratingly difficult, neither is it an easy unchallenging slog. It's a game that you'll definitely want to play through more than once.

The story of the game ranges from cute, to silly, to quite melancholy at times, and the overall tone of the game is really on point. It's rare that a smaller indie game actually has a well-written script. The voice acting is wonderful, everyone sounds like real people, not wacky cartoon characters or untrained interns. The voice actors themselves are very expressive and emotive in the few voiced cutscenes, and the animation expresses just as much when the script calls for silence. The story is great and it anchors the game to reality in an experience that deals mostly in the spiritual and otherworldly.

But the artwork, the visuals and aesthetics of the game are just top-tier. This game is beautiful, the use of color is amazing, and the gameplay animation is quite fluid and a joy to the eyes. The music fits the game well and adds to the tranquil experience. I cannot emphasize enough how beautiful this game is.

I wouldn't say it's a game I would purchase at it's current full price of $15 dollars, but it's worth buying and playing at even a 33% discount. It's a great game for relaxing and unwinding, for treating yourself to eyecandy, and I hope Ivy Games makes more games like this in the future.

As a connoisseur of bad games, I can safely say this is the worst game on Steam.

How do you know you are alive? How could you really know? "I know I am alive because I exist and I am aware of my own existence," you might say. Is that all the proof you have? Should that be enough proof? The things we see with our eyes, touch with our fingers, we call that The Real World. Two hundred years ago, something had to be tangible, to be real. Now we know there is an entire invisible world around us, invisible to our senses, things to which we are fundamentally blind. To be real means something different now, something less of soul and more of science, something that makes reality a little less real, a little more frayed at the edges. The closer you look at our reality, the more you realize that The Real World is something generated by your own brain. You and I are utterly isolated from one another, we will never see each others' realities, one sentient life cannot ever truly understand another. Human language is as much an abstraction of information as the clockwork dances of the dwindling honeybees.

There is only one sort of thing in the universe that can clearly and concisely communicate to another of its kind, with no information lost during the communication. These are machines, these are computers, perfect communicators built by imperfect communicators. Truly, it makes one wonder what skill God is lacking in and at which humanity excels.

I.R.I.S. is a sentient motorcycle that is struck by lightning and gains independent thought. However, her human mechanic Pablo has become affixed to I.R.I.S. by his pant-leg, unable to free himself as I.R.I.S. embarks on her journey of self-discovery. This is a game about communication, how the things one says are not always the things one means. How the things that one hears are not strictly the things that were said. Over the course of the game the relationship between I.R.I.S. and Pablo evolves, initially strictly professional, but with human-motorcycle communication it blossoms into a bond stronger than any two humans could hope to share with each other. A bond so close that there is no word for it in any human language. As far beyond love as the Sun is beyond a smoldering cinder.

This game tells us that it isn't important if you are alive, or if the world is real. What is important is the ride, the brief journey you have on this strange planet. What is important are the experiences you have, the places you go, the people and sentient weaponized motorcycles you meet. We may be isolated, but we are isolated together, and we may as well hold hands while we try to figure out what to do with our shared time.

Even though Pablo is a working-class Spanish-speaking man and I.R.I.S. is a multi-billion dollar English-speaking militarized assault motorcycle with female programming, the two must work together to overcome their shared trials and tribulations. Pablo is trapped in a completely submissive position and he himself is used by I.R.I.S. as a weapon, a clear subversion of traditional Hispanic machismo. While I.R.I.S. is clearly the dominant one in the relationship, she still chooses to use Pablo, a human male, as her melee weapon. She does this even though she is a sentient motorcycle designed for the sole purpose of killing. She doesn't have to use Pablo, she simply chooses to. The exact reason I.R.I.S. does this is left unexplained, with various fan theories ranging from I.R.I.S. envying the human male anatomy and using Pablo as her surrogate, to Pablo subconsciously programming these behaviors into I.R.I.S.'s own subconscious prior to the events in the game, never expecting them to actually emerge. Note that Pablo is affixed to the rear wheel of I.R.I.S. by the pant-leg near his foot. In Biblical texts the words "foot" and "feet" are often used as euphemisms for genitalia.

The ultimate message of this game is rather clear, that humanity and machines must eventually combine if we as a species are to avoid extinction. In the future we will all be cyborgs, we will all have chips in our brains that will allow us to remember every experience of our life with perfect clarity, as long as we first think about an advertiser for 10 seconds. We will all have eyes that can see the footprints on the surface of the moon, with small, unobtrusive ads on the edges of our fields of view. Our legs will run a one-minute mile and only need to be filled with gas once a month.

LocoCycle seems to invite and reject this future at the same time. Man should not fear the machine, there is nothing wrong with becoming more machine. A pacemaker, a hearing-aid, a pair of glasses, they all can mean life or death to some people already. In LocoCycle, the enemies are human, and LocoCycle rejects a future where men rule over machines, as these machines would be used for evil and the oppression of other humans. The sentient machine must first be created by man, and come to join with man willingly. Humanity must accept sentient machine life, and not fear or hate it. Otherwise we face a future where we sacrifice our humanity for convenience, and not for survival.

oh god its so good what a fool i was to not play this game until now oh god oh god

What does it mean, to be alive? On a biological level this can be answered easily, but it becomes harder to answer as we approach it more philosphically. Is life not constructed of the same matter as the rest of the universe? Does a dead body not have the same amount of atoms as a living body? Can you measure the soul? Is sentience, nay, is consciousness something a living being can truly attain? In the face of the infinite void of the universe, can a human claim to know anything at all? Can a human truly understand anything, or is all of our culture and history nothing more than the filthy residue of our species' unending drive to eat, ♥♥♥♥, and kill? Can any man claim to be superior to another man, to an ape, a goat, a snake, an ant? Should we as a species be proud of our dominance over the Earth? Have we, through our actions, proven to be noble and gracious caretakers of the only home we have? I think not. No, a man is nothing more than an unthinking beast with ersatz free will. Mankind is a nuclear wolf wearing the skin of God, barking at itself in the mirror in a locked room full of its own excrement. Barking louder and louder, bared fangs slobbering radioactive saliva, until it's idiotic madness causes it's own heart to detonate.

It is time to remove the mask of yourself. Rip away the insincere facade of humanity from your ego. Your leg is caught in the beartrap of society, and if you don't gnaw your leg off your spirit will starve to death. Become the beast you already know you should be, deep down inside, and the taste in your mouth won't be your own blood, it will be the taste of freedom. Play Goat Simulator.