Recent reviews by Diogo

Very nice little game.

It's a cozy, wholesome 3D platformer. You jump and glide around, collect things, and do little errands for the characters, getting involved in their little schemes and dramas.

There isn't much to it - all you do is jump, double jump, and hold to glide. Those are the mechanics, and they're all available from the very beginning. You can go anywhere right away - except for the endgame. Which is what I did. I love this kind of freedom in 3D platformers (I recently played Grow Up which played similarly, in this respect).

There is no real challenge in the game. Everything progressed rather naturally, without ever getting stuck looking for a needle in a haystack, which is good. And it doesn't overstay its welcome at all - 2.5 hours to fully complete it was just the right length.

It looks great, like a modern ps1 game (none of the visual artifacts that so many try to emulate these days), and the music complements it well.
The controls felt great, for the most part - the only bugginess, to me, was when switching between modes (say, moving and dialog), where sometimes the game would "forget" to give you back move controls (usually due to an achievement pop-up as you exited a conversation). But these were solved by simply talking to the character in front of you again, so no harm no foul.

The falling animation was a bit weird, the way the character was stretched, but this is a nitpick.
Another nitpick - the end-game gate character is too easily accessible. It was one of the first characters I met, though I needed to "collect stamps" before advancing. This is fine, but it did take away from the late game, where I finished various characters' tasks and was rewarded with info about where the endgame was located - which I had known from the very beginning.
Final nitpick - one of the early characters in the game very excitedly says that comets are like flying stars - come on! Let's foster wonder through truth, instead. :)

That's about all I have to say. This is what I'd like to see from Sokpop - small games that nonetheless feel complete and reasonably polished. They could be shorter, 30 minutes, or so, but still have a full and satisfying journey from beginning to end.

If you enjoy cozy and relaxing platformers, definitely give this a go. It was an afternoon well spent, winding down.

Kinda cool idea, with neat presentation, but it's way too crude and unpolished to be worth playing. The minions get stuck all the time, the rules are unclear (especially about minion growth), and even the AI sometimes just stands there doing nothing.

I don't like it when I complete the campaign and still have very little idea about the game's rules - whether I win or lose, the outcome seems rather arbitrary. Did I do something right, was I just lucky that the way bugged out, or perhaps I simply got a better starting map position? I couldn't really tell you.

I like the idea of Sokpop, but the more games I play, the more they seem glorified game jam games. They have all the veneer of a proper game, it looks good on video, but once you start to play them, you suddenly realize how very little time was spent on the design. Rules are unclear, there are imbalances all over the place, etc.;

This is a neat game!

Very short (It took me 21min), but the visual and audio design go great together, and the mechanics, though simple, form a satisfying little loop.

It's relaxing, not punishing (I just tried Guardener, which is extremely frustrating because there is no room for error), which I actually like, in this case.

There isn't much more to it, but you can definitely squeeze more out of it if you want to polish your skills and speedrun it. My favourite Sokpop game so far, for sure -which isn't saying much because I didn't enjoy the others, but hey! - if you're on the fence, I recommend it.

I usually enjoy older games, but this one dated horribly.

Not only is the point n click interaction terribly clunky, the combat starts by having you (and enemies) miss 70% of your hits (I am not exaggerating). After 3 or 4 hours, if you put all your points into dexterity, you'll only miss about 40% of the time (which feels like heaven in comparison). Except that, at that point, the game decides that it would be very nice to throw enemies at you that get intermittently invisible, which means you can't target them, half of the time. Oh, and they also run away when they have low health, so you'll chase them around, clunkily stop your run animation when attacking, which misses while they run away even farther.

Just... no.

It might get better later, but the game has given me absolutely no reason to keep playing, at this point.

Having more party members doesn't help, because the combat isn't at all squad based like baldur's gate or dragon age. In fact, they get in the way, and often die pointlessly. Their only redeeming feature is the extra inventory space.

There is no real strategy to the combat, it's largely just mashing auto-attack. The second boss I fought (which was a bit difficult) was just a matter of restarting until it missed more than me so that it died first.
Some of the quests are equally irrelevant. Here's one of the last: "go from castle to cemetery to have a hunchback tell you you need a goblet of blood to enter the tunnels, so you run back to the university (which is back on the way to the castle), the lady simply gives you the goblet, and you run back to the hunchback and yea, ok, you can enter the tunnels now".
How was this interaction relevant in any way? It wasn't, it's just disrespectful padding.

Soooo yeah. I've got better things to do with my time.

Hopefully Bloodlines will be better.

As others have said, the game has a very unsatisfying pacing, by giving you some too-powerful upgrades early on that let you reach essentially any location very easily. Essentially, in 2 hours you can reach the "endgame" zone, but they you realize you've missed some ship parts along the way and need to go back to collect them.

This becomes a "needle in a haystack" problem, a bit.

Soooo yea. From what I remember (it's been many years), the first game was much more satisfying, better paced.

That said, I love what these two games do. There is a real sense of freedom, being able to go anywhere you can see, exploring nooks and crannies, climbing, flying around. It's wholesome and great.

I'd fully recommend the first game as something special - something rare. This one will probably be enjoyable if you want a bit more of the same experience, but I doubt I'll replay it.

Second Sokpop game I've played, and I'm afraid I'm still not impressed.

I guess being so prolific comes at a cost - the games end up being little more than a "first draft", with all the awkward and undercooked design that entails.

Berry People is about going around a map taking photos of berry people. These are almost always round smiley faces with a star-shaped leaf on their head - different colors are about as much character as you can expect to them.
There are 100 of these, I have successfully photographed 97; after going around the whole map once more, I decided I wasn't getting anything out of it, so I dropped it.

The biggest is that the berries lack unique behaviour, for the most part. Most stand around, some run around, a select few hide when you get too close or are hidden/camouflaged.
But it's not as if you need to learn the specific behaviour of a berry to take a photo or anything. Most of the time, if you missed one, it is simply because you passed it by and forgot to take a picture, or perhaps it was behind a bush - nothing too interesting.
There is a hint of a better game underneath - perhaps you're trying to catch urban legends based on rumours, where behaviours and clues matter.

There are perfect and "normal". These have to do with framing, proximity and facing. Some of the berries are awkwardly placed, so the "perfect" photo actually looks worse than a normal one.

Your camera's roll is also very limited - with 5 or so photos - so you need to go back to a revealer, at which point you place the new photos in the book. This can be annoying, at times, but I think it ends up being the lesser evil - almost every map has one, and it prevents you from overcrowding your camera's memory, which would make sorting and cataloging them pure hell later on.

That's about it for the game, really. The maps aren't too interesting. Maybe there is a pond, a well, or a posh courtyard, but most things look the same.

The photobook is terribly designed, too, especially at the start. Although there is a specific spot for each berry, this isn't clear at the beginning. If you have two photos of the same berry, the book flips between the correct spot and the last page, where you can place any random photos you want; but it looks like random and buggy flipping. The design is very awkward, again, because it is a first draft.

The secret room is nice, the feel of the game is very wholesome, and the the binoculars are a nice detail (where you can a distant parallaxed scene).

It's not terribly, it's just... innocuous?
It doesn't add anything to do the table, and the actual game part (taking photos of specific things) has no substance to it.

Really disappointing.

I have never played an auto-battler before, but this doesn't seem like a good example of one.
The UI is very poor, with hitboxes for hovering feeling finicky and not updating when, for example, units move in the course of battle (the hover shows the previous unit until you move the mouse out and in again).

There is no fast-forward feature during battle (which is terrible in the beginning of the game, since it is both difficult and grindy, as you don't have any real skills or items to try out different builds).

The inventory UI is also clunky.

Ultimately, I guess this is a auto-battler that emphasises the idling part (i.e. waiting for battles to end in the background, and repeated grind) rather than the build creation part (i.e. what requires meaningful engagement with the player).
It is inherently misguided.

Sooo yeah. Maybe there's something good underneath, but it has spent too little time in the oven to be worth my (and I assume your) time.

This is the best game I've played in a long time.

In some ways, it seems tailored for me - as we share many of the same influences.
I don't read comics, but the ones I did read and love are Moebius and Obscure Cities, both of which are clear influences on the game's visuals; BLAME! is another, on the manga side.
I'm also a huge fan of Ted Chiang's Tower of Babylon story - one about a tower so tall that the peoples at various heights develop very different (you could say unintelligible) cultures. And, of course, there's "Story of Your Life" about deciphering an alien language, the basis for the movie Arrival.
There's even a hint of Piranesi and Escher towards the end of the game.

Above all, though, it's an extremely well made game. Each culture in the game has its own distinct ideology and game mechanics, which go hand in hand.
Various ways of creating language and writing systems are used to create game mechanics in ways that aren't merely thematic - the languages are functional and you really must understand them in order to solve (at least some) of the puzzles. It is very unlike many games nowadays, which user a certain theme as a thin skin under which everything is automated and filled by the game so that you don't really need to understand mechanics in order to finish the game.

I have played a bit of "Heaven's Vault", which I think falls into the trap I described above. You never really have to understand of piece together the language yourself. Instead, you just navigate around the map, collect words, choose "meanings" at random, and the game tells you what is right or wrong, so you just change the wrong ones into another arbitrary meaning until they all click.
I think it was a laudable effort, but ended up being too long and unrewarding and I dropped it after maybe 12 hours.

Chants of Sennaar takes a similar idea but executes it in a far better way. I mean mechanically, above all, but every other element is also really well done, so kudos to the small team.
For example, there are several kinds of "rosetta stones" in the game, to help you figure out one language from another. These clues are, of course, not complete, but they help you at the start.
One language is unique is its treatment of numbers, so you'll need to figure out how digits are composed.
Different languages treat word order differently, or how plurals are written, and so on.
Maybe verbs and nouns have a different overall shape, or maybe you can compose symbols together to form more complex ones.
The game's ideas are simple, but very effective. And they come together beautifully.

Without spoiling anything, I'm also happy to say that the game does have a message, which only becomes clear later on. Of course, it's difficult to provide an adequate payoff after 10+ hours of game, so I can't say the ending will change your world, but it is nice and again, very well executed.

The one aspect I must admit irked me a bit is how "real cultures" are used to represent what are very stereotypical cultures within the game. I'm perfectly okay with using stereotypes to convey a message, but not so much when those stereotypes are superimposed on real cultures (which do not conform to such a stereotype).
An example is how the warrior culture clearly takes imagery from the "vikings", as violent sea-farers who write in runes.
The bards, too, clearly take after india, with a sanskrit-esque alphabet (edit: I should have said "devanagari" writing system; sanskrit is the language, not the writing system, and it doesn't seem to be an actual alphabet, but hey, my ignorance is not that relevant to the point :)) and a very recognizably indian violin and table-esque drum in the soundtrack (although this is only really noticeable in the first scene).
There are other strange choices here and there, like how the most advanced culture in the game, technologically, architecturally takes after Timbuktu's adobe buildings.

This is really a very minor point, though. Most of the time, the game does look unique, and the effort was clearly there (unlike most fantasy games which use a mixture of gothic arches and art noveau ornament for elves, and every ancient ruin looks greek and roman).

There was also one or two points in the game where I think things could have been a bit clearer; but, overall, I am extremely impressed with how smooth everything was, given how unique and ambitious the design is.

If any of what I wrote sounds intriguing, please buy it. It's an extremely good game which deserves all the praise and attention it can get!

Very intriguing world building.

Music is nice and eerie, but feels a bit out of place, somehow.

The characters' voices feel a bit off, too. Too modern, and too stereotypical, I guess. Don't like how cynical and childish some of them sound.

Gameplay-wise, it was a bit disappointing - mostly because the game tells you the steps needed to perform the ritual, but the actual ritual gameplay is a mini-game that has nothing to do with the steps described.


The demo has very little to it in terms of gameplay (there is one "reactive choice" and two mini-games), so it doesn't make expect much of this as a game.
But, as I said, the world-building is unique and seems quite well developed, so I'm curious to see more.

This is the most "standard" trading game you could get. It's compelling to play, but in a mindless way and doesn't nourish you in the end.

It looks quite good. The setting seems original but its shallowness is revealed by the music - which is just oriental. Obviously fits the trading theme, with all its Silk Roads connotations, but it completely undermines the "original" setting in the skies.

The writing and backstory is very minimal (even though some characters are wholesome), which is another source of disappointment.

In the end, the game is all grind. You never have to really think about anything. Buy low, sell high, eventually accumulate enough money to buy islands and produce higher level goods yourself (which aren't sellable, mostly, but are simply there as a second-phase grind to complete other grindy quests).

I will probably gather my thoughts and write them up properly. For now, this shall do.

It's not a terrible game, by any means, but it is so shallow that I cannot recommend it as worth anyone's time - surely, the world has enough interest to look for something more than mental numbness.