Recent reviews by Yspaddaden Penkawr

A disappointing misstep. Heroes of the Kingdom I and II are pretty special, I think: they're very unique games that blend aspects of RPGs, hidden object games, point and click adventure games, and a little bit from time management games. Hero of the Kingdom III still has this unique combination of mechanics, but so much less refined than the previous games that it feels like an unpolished proof-of-concept prototype for its predecessors.

In HotK I and II, the gameplay is all about navigating your way through a fantasy's world's little economy. You spend time (and the player character's energy) collecting the world's limited resources, and have to figure out how to turn what you have into what you want, by selling, by bartering, by crafting raw materials into more valuable or useful goods, by doing sidequests. The games are balanced so that you always feel like you're just scraping by, like you might ruin everything and make the game unwinnable by making too many mistakes, and like you are getting the best of the game world's economy via hard work and cleverness. It's very satisfying in a way that is uncommon to video games; the closest comparison I can make is to the feeling you get from building a well-functioning city in one of the City Builder series games or Tropico. Maintaining this feeling requires the game to be delicately balanced. (And I suspect the game sort of "cheats" in a few ways to make sure you don't get too far ahead or fall too far behind.)

HotK III throws this balance out the window, and suffers badly for it. Every type of raw material or resource- from bird's eggs and mushrooms through game animals and metal ore- now respawns slowly but indefinitely, and farming them is essentially mandatory. There's no cleverness involved in navigating the game's economy anymore: you can overcome any problem by sheer persistence and repetitive resource-gathering.

Further, while making raw materials respawn like this could be a clever way of making it impossible to render the game unwinnable, instead every task and battle in the game is balanced to rely on the fact of the player's theoretically infinite resources: you will often be grinding for ten minutes- collecting game meat and then cooking it to make food to let you slooooooowly rest several times in a row to regain the necessary energy, collecting potion supplies then slooooooowly brewing one potion at a time until you have the half-dozen necessary, mining ore to sloooooooowly, one at a time, forge new weapons to replace the ones you had which inexplicably broke after two combats, etc- simply to fight and defeat one enemy. And in the mid-to-late game, you will be doing this many times in a row, because the game is extremely combat-heavy compared to its predecessors, and because later game enemies require large amounts of resources to fight. It is deeply unfun.

If you were hoping that maybe there'd be an interesting story or setting to make up for how dull the gameplay is, you are out of luck. The first two HotK games have generic fantasy settings, and very simple but appealing storybook-like storytelling. You start out as a simple young peasant, and end the game in a climactic confrontation with the bad guy. You have brief encounters with the people that populate the world, which aren't particularly detailed or deep, but which flesh out the world and make it feel more alive. It's simple, it works, it's satisfying.

(SPOILERS for the game in this paragraph, if you care.) In this game, unfortunately, that's all sort of out the window. The plot is communicated almost entirely through the protagonist's mysterious visions, and of the two main figures in the plot- the princess and the evil stone monster that imprisons her- the princess is portrayed as kind of dim and not particularly likeable (her predicament is sort of her own fault), and the monster is simply evil with no motivation or goals, beyond just imprisoning the princess. You don't meet the princess until the very end of the game, when the game awkwardly lampshades the cliché of the hero marrying the princess and then avoids it; and you never do meet the rock monster in person. There is no climactic confrontation with the monster- you just kill its three demonic guardians, who live in some random unrelated caves, and I guess the big rock monster just dies off-screen. It's not even clear WHERE the forbidden valley where the monster imprisons the princess is, relative to the game world you can see.

Anyway: overall this is just a deeply disappointing game. I'm struggling to come up with anything positive to say about it... I guess it's nice that you can directly access merchants from the map now, instead of having to travel to the screen they are on to trade with them- but the removal of all but a few waypoints to make room for this, so you can only fast-travel to hub areas, sort of negates this. The idea of a mobile campsite, so you can rest on any screen, is fine, although you'll grow to hate the campsite after having looked at it for so long while slowly brewing potions and cooking food. The art is fine, but basically the same as in the first two games, and the charm of it wears off as you scour each screen multiple times to find respawned mushrooms or eggs. The game never crashed on me, which is nice, I guess?

Well, anyway. I hope the developers can learn from their mistakes with this game, and apply these lessons to any subsequent entries in the Hero of the Kingdom series. This entry leaves a sour taste in the mouth, but the first two games clearly show that they're capable of making fresh interesting games, and I hope they can get back to doing that. I hope that this game is not an unfortunate tombstone capping the series.

More than EYE: Divine Cybermancy is a good game, or a bad game, it is an incomprehensible game.

Arcen produces yet another game that has confusing, unsatisfying gameplay loops; deluges the player with a tremendous amount of semi-relevant information, and expects you to triage and sort it; has barely-readable graphics; has a desperate over-reliance on randomization, resulting in bland, unmemorable levels; and feels like it wasn't tested by anyone outside the team working on it. I could copy-paste this review onto basically every Arcen game except for AI War and it'd be equally true.

I could tell within the first ten minutes exactly how the story was going to end, and the characters weren't compelling enough to make me want to join them on the way there.

Further, there is essentially no actual gameplay; the interest is meant to be entirely in the story, writing, and character development. However, the writing is so ham-fisted, and the characters are so dull, that it's really just not worth it.

ETA:

I actually like David Cage's games, but mainly because David Cage is a crazy person, and it is never actually possible to guess what the heck is gonna happen next.

The Walking Dead's story is stock-standard zombie fiction stuff, and if you've ever read more than one zombie book or seen more than one zombie movie or played more than one zombie game, you can probably guess what's going to happen to any given character within five minutes or so of their appearance.

(Maybe spoilers here but I'm not sure cause I haven't finished the game.)

IDK exactly what happens but the moment I saw Lee interact with Clementine, I knew that Lee was gonna sacrifice himself heroically to save her; and that Clementine wouldn't die, because she's a) cute, b) a child, and c) the game spends too much time on building up her (slight) character to kill her off.

Contrarily, the moment I was introduced to Kenny Jr/Duck, I knew he was going to die, both a) to produce development and interest for Kenny Sr's character, and b) because the developers probably wouldn't saddle the regular cast with TWO small children- that'd risk irritating players too much.

The dialogue writing is okay to good, which is unusual for a game, but the characters and story simply don't grip me or make me care what happens to them. In contrast, I really liked and cared about the characters in the Left 4 Dead games, because they were more consistently funny, and because the games never really try to wring drama out of their interactions, except for with the Passing thing.

If you like being deluged with enormous amounts of unfunny, tedious text, and expected to keep track of a dozen different meters, the indicators for which are buried in said text, then you will like Redshirt. If you like games that are fun, you won't.

probably the greatest game ever. the citizen kane of games. proof games can be art.

the only thing that'd make this game better would be if it were fully voice-acted since the wolf sounds like tommy wiseau

best trippy flash game ever

this does a lot of things wrong but the stuff it does right is so awesome, or at least so ambitious, that you should play it

best roguelike ever

even if it's not a roguelike