Recent reviews by Snort Egg

Although I'm apparently at least halfway through the game, maybe three quarters at best, this game is one hell of a hidden gem. TL;DR at the end for anyone who doesn't want to read this college-level essay.

On the gameplay side of things, imagine the deceptively simple artstyle of Geometry Dash, combined with the fluid platforming of Hollow Knight, alongside a combat system not unlike Bug Fables with the difficulty turned up to 11. Don't worry about dying, though - if you lose a fight, you're sent back to... right outside of that fight, within a second at most, having lost nothing. Fights are also few and far between, and once you win one, it WILL reward you. Literally every fight gives you one of few currencies which can be spent on the game's skill tree, and each point in the skill tree is a whole new ability for you to exploit in future combat. Which currency you'll get is obvious - blue fights give orbs, red fights give diamonds. If you accidentally reduce the enemy's health to 0 without absorbing them, you don't get the currency, but you can respawn them immediately after until you do. However... *PLEASE* use a controller. I don't have one and at this point, I need to resort to button mashing for stuff that's new, and trial and error for stuff that isn't.

When it comes to environments, I... don't think I've seen a prettier game. There's some good competition, such as Hollow Knight, Baldur's Gate 3, maybe OneShot if pixelart is your thing... but this game just barely jumps over all of them. Every location is a stark contrast from every other location, and all of them are gorgeous. They are never given names, so you can call them whatever you like - I personally call them by whatever color and shape is most present, such as Blue Circle, Orange Square, or Pink Triangle. The music complements each area WONDERFULLY - Blue Circle's music is tranquil and feels about as "home" as you can get. Meanwhile, Orange Square's music is almost industrial by comparison, and Pink Triangle's music feels enchanting and mystical. Despite no words being spoken about ANY of it, the ambiance in this game is second to none.

And now for the lore. I haven't found too much of it - yet - so take my words with a grain of salt. All I know is that the summary for this game on Steam includes the words "In a newly born[...] universe." I can imagine the characters in this game, then, being some kind of fundamental, or at least subatomic, particle. The blue things are matter, the red things are antimatter, and from a hint given by the only speaking character in the game, I can extrapolate the stony fellas are somehow related to dark matter. Or maybe the blue things are electrons, and the red things are protons, and they fight each other because of their innate electrical charge? Maybe this is also a hint at how each area represents their own fundamental particle, themselves - I just kinda found myself relating Orange Square to Gluons a lot of the time, simply because of its inorganic and mechanical feel. All I know is that this game doesn't just leave you in the dark - it turns out every single light and caused the heat death of the universe. I dunno, though, that might be your jam.

Although this game could use some amount of difficulty settings, I think the difficulty it currently has is incredible for how quick the player can get back into the fight. When I tell you defeat doesn't really matter... I mean it. You can restart a fight INSTANTLY. I genuinely don't know if it takes longer than a second or two. The only game I've seen with faster respawning is ULTRAKILL, which gives you a death screen on the same frame your HP reaches 0 - no fanfare whatsoever - and a single press of a button during or after that frame gets you back on your feet. If you weren't expecting to die, you probably won't even know you did until you saw that you were back at the last checkpoint. Somehow, this game gives even ULTRAKILL a run for its money in that regard. This lets you die, over and over again, and shrug it off dozens of times in a row. Although... the game doesn't expect you to actually die dozens of times in a row - If you find yourself doing that, either try finding an easier fight, or switch up your strategy a bit. Some of the enemies flee if you don't do a certain thing, so they're more like puzzles or QTEs than actual combat.

The only thing that might be problematic is the game's replayability. So far, it seems like a one-and-done scenario, where once you 100% it, there's no more enjoyment to be had. However, it is pretty damn cheap and extensive even for one of those types of games - and trust me, every other point I made will give you one hell of an experience.

If you're personally not sure, I recommend the demo. It includes a lot of the first area, with a few changes, and ends after you beat that first tidbit of game. I'd say it takes 30-40 minutes, maybe an hour if you take your time. If it's not on sale - PLEASE try the demo to make sure it's your kind of game. However, if it is on sale, or if it's your kind of game, or even if you're just looking for something to do that's new to you, I'd say, go for it!

TL;DR - Platforming is very smooth, combat is very difficult but losses do NOT affect you, lore is quiet but not exactly a selling point, and the ambient energy is literally second to none. Trust me, I've played some games with ambiance. This game is somehow able to dwarf the likes of Hollow Knight, Baldur's Gate, the entire Crysis series, hell - even some feature films such as A Quiet Place and Hunger Games. Best impulse buy of my entire life. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLAY THIS WITH A CONTROLLER.

As much as my friends love this game, and as much as I WANT to recommend this game, I just kind of... can't.

Don't get me wrong here. This game is extremely high-quality, with procedural animation for anything that can move and be moved, an extremely diverse and complex ecosystem, and lore-rich world that can only be described as a cross between a jungle and a concrete jungle. I want to call it a "Cyborg jungle".

However... this is where my praise ends. This game is not for the faint of heart. It's harder than almost any game on steam, some moves are only possible with kaizo-level accuracy, or even beyond that, such as the backflip. Anything in the game can and will instantly kill you, from the smallest lizard to the largest apex predator. Some creatures, such as the Scavengers, are better than you in every conceivable way, coming with free equipment, enhanced mobility, and extremely complex teamwork.

There's a tooltip in the game that says something along the lines of "Don't kill everything, or everything will kill you." However, everything kills you anyways. Everything is faster than you, hits harder than you, is tougher than you, or is literally designed to be a harmless food source. Almost everything in the game is starkly black, and the difference between terrain with and without a hitbox is a few shades of color.

And now, the karma system. Every time you survive a "cycle", the in-game day counter, you gain one karma. Every time you die whatsoever, for any reason, at any point, you lose one karma. Certain doors need you to have a certain amount of karma for you to get through them, called "Karma Gates." Your first playthrough will have you dying 10 times more often than you survive, or even more than that, over the span of multiple hours to even several days. This means you will have to master survival in the environment you're in before you can progress, only to be met with a different environment that you have no chance of surviving in. Such is the gameplay loop of Rainworld.

I got stuck about halfway through the game, after 10 hours, having used in-game developer tools and *still* dying to enemies that are undetectable and inescapable, simply because cheats *don't work on them*. The camera system causes you to die almost every time you use the noclip or fly tools, which bring you to the position of your mouse, which you cannot see unless you use yourself as the pointer. When the camera system works by snapping you in-between certain frames of vision, this causes you to teleport to the end of an environment if you're using the noclip option, or causes you to instantly die of kinetic damage if you're using the fly option.

I bought the DLC of this game, Downpour, because I thought it would help me in some conceivable way. I saw my friends playing with it, and it having both a threat meter and breath meter, both of which do not exist in the base game. It did not give me either of those things. It only gave me more objectives, harder challenges, and different gameplay, but only after I can get past the initial roadblock that is your first entire campaign.

Call me a skill issue all you want. I prefer easy games like Geometry Dash or RLCraft or Dark Souls.
Don't buy it. Don't get yourself caught in the Cycles, like my masochistic bitchass.
I don't get how my friends can enjoy this game. I'm sorry.

The many ridiculous things you can do in ULTRAKILL include...
> Reflect a lightning bolt back at the sky using a quarter
> Turn your shotgun pellets into bombs by punching them
> Shoot at a floating face until it dies
> Load up a game of Garry's Mod
> Grow more than 5 arms at once
> Get an archangel to throw themselves into a bottomless pit
> Go fishing
> Have fisticuffs with the Colossal Titan
> Have heart attacks for multiple reasons
> Beat women
> Beat psychic hyper-women made of metal and plastic
> Die
> Die again
> Die even more
> Adopt a cat
> Shoot the child of God and Bruce Lee with a drill cannon
> Die in real life and go to hell
> Die in hell after a GoPro decapitates you with a sawblade

11/10

One of the greatest games on steam. You can do almost anything here. Let me list a few things:
-Want to be a small miner on the outskirts of the galaxy? You can!
-Want to be a massive industrial powerhouse with the ability to eat entire asteroid belts like popcorn? You can!
-Want to be a missile platform with enough nuclear missiles to level a continent? You can!
-Want to be an absolute monolith of a tank while protecting your glass cannon allies from harm? You can!
-Want to be a huge carrier with enough population to rival a small country, and then take manual control of some of your own fighters? You can!
-Want to fly a giant, for lack of a safer word, genital through the galaxy and have it punch through other ships like a charging rhino through grass? Well... as long as you're on a private server, go ahead? I guess?

So basically, imagine your classic tower defense game as a pie, shove a giant dose of Factorio into the pie, and then coat it in RTS flavoring and you get Mindustry. Probably one of the best games on steam, if I'm being real.

Imagine Dark Souls 3, now take away immunity frames, add guns and jetpacks, give it graphics like borderlands 1, make the dialogue feel more bland than a day-old bowl of oatmeal, give it a story like literally ANY OTHER GAME (your brother leads some faction and kicks you out of it but you survive and all of your stuff gets stolen), and release it alongside games like, say, TF2's Pyro Update, V. R. Skyrim, Subnautica, and Overwatch. It feels like this game was set out for failure, and to be honest, if i craved games like Dark Souls while also loving the mechanics of borderlands (i already do), and this game was released sometime back in 2012, then yeah, i'd rate this up. However, the only thing i can really enjoy about this game is the music, which i can just look up the OST for on Youtube. Legit, the worst game i've ever had the displeasure of playing since Unturned. There's one main thing that insults me, though; THE FACT THAT THE DEVS THINK THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH SELLING THIS GAME FOR FIFTY WHOLE DOLLARS. Hollow Knight and Oneshot, both games i absolutely ADORE, are generous enough to just need 15 bucks to play, but no, THIS game has a price of 50 dollars, almost TWICE the price of BOTH GAMES COMBINED. I've actually hated the ~40 minutes i've put into this game, and i want those back. If you play this for the gameplay, get dark souls 3 or crysis, if you play this for the graphics, play a borderlands game, if you play this for the story, shame on you.

This is the best game i've ever played since Crysis Warhead.

Pros:
-INCREDIBLE graphics, comparable to a 2-D version of black ops 3
-Constantly ballooning scale
-After city of tears, no area is specifically "The next one"
-AMAZING intro
-HUGE enemy variety (i'm pretty sure there are 142-ish total enemies including bosses)
-Free DLC (if you were EA or bethesda, each one would cost 20-ish USD and be half as big)
-Player-made mods
-Interesting map system
-Very unique areas
-Difficulty is huge, but so satisfying to overcome
-Unusual and effective upgrade system
-100+ hours of gameplay for 15 USD
-I get to watch my friend try to 112% the game and record it, under the title "Hollow Knight is easy" on youtube, when it comes out.

Cons:
-Sequel isn't out yet
-Can get slightly confusing at times
-Platforming is PUNISHING AS HELL
-Primal Aspids are smelly
-Path of Pain lives up to its name
-The last two pantheons of Godhome... mmmmmm...
-Too many reviews saying the game has a lot of bugs, even though this is one of them
-A lot of bugs

pretty noice, if i could do the ok hand emote from discord i would.


Pros: nice graphics, unique classes (ish), pretty differentiating worlds, pretty cool storyline, and genuinely fun to play.
Cons: too little variety (the only variety you get most of the time is look), somewhat pay-to-win, takes way too long to see something new, way too costly for things like getting penta-forged shadow souls (if the player market didn't exist, i would probably still be in the 3000's in power rank) and ARBITRARY WAIT TIMES! YAY! (HOLY SH*T!)