Recent reviews by 完全進行

fun game, it's 2D ff14 raiding with simplified versions of the jobs, but with added roguelite elements in each run that offer better build diversity than you get in 14. movement is smooth, hitboxes are clean, the mechanics are fun and straightforward to understand for someone who has raided before, and the netcode is good. fights are fairly short and paced well, i never felt like a fight dragged longer than it needed to or got cut short, even though some of the mini bosses can be downed in under a minute. the only downside so far is that the visual clarity is atrocious at times; a bit more often than i'd like, but there are some options you can fine tune in the menu so maybe i just haven't found a good setup yet.

think it's probably best enjoyed with at least 1 friend though, the solo run i tried wasn't bad, but i don't think i'd have that much fun grinding the higher difficulties by myself, and normal mode can be beaten pretty quickly. there's matchmaking/public lobbies and in-game text chat, but i haven't tried it so i can't speak to the experience. if you've raided with pugs in an mmo before you probably know what to expect though... it's also just more fun to grief your friends and be in vc, truly an irreplaceable part of the raiding experience.

Cool idea I guess but after getting through the first two chapters I don't think it's for me. It's like the possession skill in Dishonored was made into a game, except it's not fun?

Movement feels horrible and has some really janky physics, especially when dealing with any kind of verticality.

Ego jumping is the core mechanic of the game but it gets old really fast. There had to have been a better implementation for gaining ego points than constantly jumping into static nodes with zero meaningful interactions and immediately jumping back out (and you'll be doing this a lot).

The main issue I had though is that the ego jumping mechanic makes all your options feel contrived in a way that possession in Dishonored never did. I turned off all the UI hints/indicators from the start, but the "gamey" feeling still comes through too strongly. Possession in Dishonored is robust and intuitive: you can possess any living being and do whatever they do in that form. There wasn't any confusion about what you could possess, possession targets could be placed organically, and the capabilities of each of possession targets remains clear and consistent. This resulted in possession feeling like you were manipulating the world around you. Ego jumping on the other hand is messy. Most machinery is controllable, a large majority of it just door and elevator controls, but some machines have unique actions that you can only see once you possess them, leading to lots of guesswork about what you even need to do. Some nodes also have an arbitrary ego cost that contributes to the feeling that you're just playing through a "video game level". All the robots are controllable, except some of them are blocked for progression reasons. Progressing through a space invariably ends up with you holding CTRL and scanning for nodes first and trying to figure out the paths that developer has set up for you, instead of looking at the space itself and letting that determine your actions; it's like stealthing with Dark Vision on all the time, but worse. Also there's absolutely no sense of place in this game, maybe this improves once you play more of it since I've read it opens up a bit, but there's no feeling that the levels you're going through are part of a real place. Hallways, vents, and pipes blend together, gates and random blocks are put in places that don't make any sense, there's no logic in the design of this space station other than to be a level in a video game.

Sekiro if Japan was a real place.

Jokes aside it's about an hour of very solid sekiro style fights, animations are clean and combat responsiveness is very smooth, could see myself going for S ranks on every fight eventually.

Also there's no reason the Foxgirl Corrupted Monk fight should be allowed to be that much of a banger.

Very elegant puzzle game, its biggest strength is how simple it manages to keep puzzles while still being challenging. My favorite part about this game is that it's so easy to reconstruct the levels in your head, I've solved multiple levels in the shower, doing the dishes, etc. There are only a handful of throwaway puzzles, so it's around 45 levels of extremely tight design, totally worth playing. My only complaint is that the platforming/movement feels a bit rigid and hard to control, but there's an undo system that minimizes any frustration there.

It's got a lot of cool ideas and an awesome aesthetic but feels unfinished:

• The early areas have exceptional level design, atmosphere, and secrets, but that falls off a cliff in the final few areas.
• Alchemy is clearly under baked, it might as well have been removed from the game.
  
• All of the bugs I encountered were during the endgame, including some weird sequence break that ruined a boss fight, and two crashes.
  
• The final boss fight is bizarre, and not in a good way.

Turns what could have been a great game into one that's kind of just okay; enjoyable enough to play through but mildly disappointing.

Ever hang out with your friends and you suddenly think of a really funny joke? And after you tell it, you and your friends are too busy laughing to care about the small details like how you fumbled your delivery a bit, or how the timing of the punchline was rushed, or if you REALLY think about it, it didn't make sense?

That's how I feel about this game. It's a fantastic idea: let's make a game that's a mix of Slay the Spire and FTL! Cobalt Core delivers on the concept so well that the details don't matter that much. There are areas where the game is kind of rough, like the unwieldy UI, or the cards being a little unbalanced, or the combat being simplistic, but I can just sit back and ignore it because the overall experience is so charming. This is one of those games where it's just a joy to play through the main story, but if you were to try and dump 50+ hours into it, the cracks would probably begin to show; you probably know the type of game I'm talking about. Basically, if you're looking for another Slay the Spire, Cobalt Core probably isn't it, but I don't think it's trying to be. Go in expecting a fairly good spaceship battling rogue-like deck builder with fun character dialogue and you'll get a very enjoyable 10-15 hours out of it.

hour 1: haha stupid bunnies look how i am easily outsmarting you
hour 5: these furry little ♥♥♥♥♥ are cheating
hour 10: i am master of space and time no bunny can escape me, i will capture their entire bloodline
hour 20: organizing multiverse spanning bunny orgies to unlock the gates of hell

Let me talk about the one thing I think Void Stranger does best before I get into its problems. The atmosphere in this game is great. You might not be able to tell from the screenshots, but the story, music, and art all coalesce into this claustrophobic and vaguely dream-like feeling that persists throughout the whole game. It reminds me of the similarly brilliant atmosphere in last years SIGNALIS, though Void Stranger doesn't have the same overt horror elements and is more light-hearted, even funny at times. Very impressive for a game like this.

Now for the problems.

The puzzles. If you don't like sokoban puzzles, you will 100% not enjoy this game. "Okay but maybe I can push through them if the rest of the game is good enough". Wrong. You won't be able to push through them. Sokoban games are some of my favorite puzzle games (SSR, Monsters Expedition, Patricks Parabox) and I had to force myself to push through the puzzles here. The reason you won't be able to deal with these puzzles isn't because they require galaxy brain levels of insight, but because they're extremely tedious and punishing. The levels themselves are mostly quite simple, and if you're used to sokoban games you'll rarely get stuck. However, the game is structured in a way so that you need to solve puzzles in sequence to progress to the next one (to get to puzzle D, you need to solve puzzles A, B, and C) and there is NO UNDO button; some mistakes can set you back to the very beginning of the game, which means that you have to redo every puzzle you already solved to get to the point you were at before. In fact there are a few "traps" that are intentionally placed to send you straight back to puzzle A, and not from puzzle D or whatever, but from like puzzle Q. Not every puzzle is like this, but it happens enough that it's a detriment to the game and the gameplay justification is clumsily implemented. why are you not given an undo button while voided? or when using the infinity brand? The lack of an undo is especially egregious for the hard puzzles because some of them end up having only 1 real way to solve them that consists of 100 or more steps. These levels often have moving parts, so you're just solving the first 50 or so steps over and over again just to try your solution that might be incorrect because you miscalculated where one of moving parts would land 12 moves down the line. The puzzle solving ends up as a mediocre experience on balance because they're either too easy or a tedious slog (and also somehow not that interesting even if you ignore the tedium), with barely any room in between; and the worst part is you have to re-solve these bad puzzles multiple times to even attempt to progress with how the game is structured. Again, there are gameplay justifications but that doesn't change the fact that Void Stranger is just a subpar puzzle game.

The way the puzzle solving is done directly negatively affects the exploration in this game. I'm not going to bother spoiler tagging this one since it's extremely obvious, but there's more to this game than just the sokoban puzzles. The game clearly wants the player to chase after its secrets, it's just that doing so isn't very fun. The way you navigate around the world is by solving puzzles, so if you want to chase down a clue you're forced to solve a bunch of puzzles you've done multiple times already just to move around. Solving the same puzzle for the 5th time isn't an engaging gameplay loop, and even if it only takes a couple minutes to get where I want to go it just feels like a giant waste of time. In another game, these puzzles might have been replaced by combat encounters, or maybe some platforming, or even DIFFERENT PUZZLES you haven't seen before.

There are also some minor annoyances I have:
Whats the point of some of the sequences force closing your game instead of just booting you to a load screen, it's just a slight waste of time?
The game requires taking a ton of screenshots, and there's no in-game way to take notes or pictures. This isn't a problem specific to Void Stranger but this sort of notekeeping should be diagetic in some form.
Some of the cutscenes should really be skippable but they aren't.
Visual clarity can get really bad in some sections, which was surprising for a game with this artstyle.

I appreciate what Void Stranger is attempting to do, but it's basically impossible for me to recommend that anyone play this since it fails to execute on most of its core elements in a satisfying manner. It's not a good puzzle game, it's not a good exploration game, and while the way the game presented its story was interesting, it's just not good enough to deal with the rest of it. Most of the top positive reviews mention something to the effect of "I can't tell you why this game is so good because it will ruin the experience", and they're right.. kind of. If you play this game, it's going to be for the secrets, but they just aren't good enough to put up with the boring gameplay; I ultimately ended up feeling like my time was being wasted. I don't regret trying Void Stranger, but there's not really anything in this game that will be extremely novel or surprising to you if you've played enough games in this kind of "meta" gaming space, so you aren't missing anything crazy if you skip this.

Never played the original game so I've got no nostalgia, but this remake still holds up in 2023, it's just a great game; highly recommend playing if you like any of the games that this inspired. Prey (2017) is in my top 10 games of all time and it's cool how you can see the inspirations and early iterations for so many of the amazing ideas in Prey when you play through this game. There are definitely some places where the game shows its age and the design decisions seem a bit rough in a modern context though.

If you decide to play: Level 3 difficulty on everything except cyberspace. Set that ♥♥♥♥ to 1 and thank me later, unless you like painfully bad 6DOF shooters.

GOING TO GET A WARNING OUT OF THE WAY FIRST: This is NOT a rigorous puzzle game, solving puzzles is the main gameplay loop in the game, but I'd say the focus of the game is more on the world and narrative than the puzzles. It's like 40% narrative and characters, 30% exploration, 30% puzzles, so just be aware of this if you decide to play the game.

The Talos Principle 2 is a beautiful game, but I have very mixed feelings on it as an overall experience. The first half of the game was a potential GOTY 9 or 10 for me, but the game slowly falls apart as you keep going and I was feeling more ambivalent by the time I finished. It's still a good game, like a strong 7, but there are a few major things that soured my experience.

STORY/WRITING:
The story is a follow up on the first game, though you don't need to have played it to understand what's going on as TTP2 does a pretty good job of bringing you up to speed. I know this because I basically forgot every important plot point in the first game since it came out like 9 years ago. The story starts off strong, introducing a handful of memorable characters and presenting some interesting ideas, and the plot advances at pleasant pace. When the writing starts to dip into the philosophical themes for the first time it isn't as self indulgent or clumsy as some other games tend to be, and even when they are they're presented so earnestly that it's easy to still appreciate. This all kind of gradually fades away in the back half of the game. The interesting ideas that are presented are never really built on, and the story devolves into a very cliche "good vs bad" ending. I mean the game does offer a choice, but while it showed restraint at the start, it really does end up heavily pushing you towards one side and caricatures the other with not a lot of nuance. Look, I don't expect a video game like this to start parsing Hegel and Sartre or anything but all the philosophical stuff just ends up feeling like window dressing for what ends up being a fairly shallow story. I feel like the first game was able to pull this stuff off better because the scope of its narrative was much more focused, but it has admittedly been a while since I've played and maybe it was just as bad and I'm getting nostalgic.

GAMEPLAY/PUZZLES:
This was the real killer for me. Like the story, the puzzles start off pretty strong. The first few areas you go to all introduce a new mechanic, spend a few puzzles making sure you understand how it works, and then throws maybe 1 or 2 final puzzles at you that require you to think for a little bit to really apply that new mechanic. I was having a pretty good time in the beginning because the new mechanics they came up with are pretty cool, and was excited about how cool the puzzles in the end game were going to get since they gave us these new toys to play with. Unfortunately, those cool puzzles never come. The format for the first few areas in how the ENTIRE game is structured. Introduce a new mechanic, tutorialize for a few puzzles, mayyyyyybe 1 or 2 (if you're lucky) puzzles where you have to think for more than 30 seconds. And then it's over, on to the next world! The puzzles never really increase in complexity and mechanics rarely interact with each other in any meaningful way, old mechanics are just discarded or used in isolation so that they barely interact with new ones; there's not a single puzzle in the game that uses every mechanic, or even the majority of the mechanics. The puzzles in first world and the last world will probably take you the same amount of time to solve. The bonus/secret puzzles are a slight increase in difficulty, but I couldn't tell you the number of times, even for those, that I solved a puzzle and thought to myself "wait, that's it?" An overwhelming majority of the puzzles in this game feel like they're missing two or three extra steps (I could even think of some ways to add them on the spot!), and as a result I felt as if I was playing one very long tutorial, just a very unsatisfying experience. The worst part of the puzzles in my opinion is that the designers seem to crutch on the "where" aspect of the puzzles, instead of the "how". It's just not as fun to run around the area looking for WHERE they hid the puzzle elements, I want to be thinking of HOW to use them instead. The worst offenders are the open world puzzles, searching a gigantic map for a particle effect which you then have to chase around isn't a puzzle, it's mindless exploration. Scanning the horizon for a connector you can just barely see isn't a puzzle, it's a test of patience (and the quality of your GPU/monitor). Again I feel the first game did this much better, because its levels weren't these massive open worlds, but I'd have to go back and play it again to be sure.

Okay so I've been pretty negative in this review, BUT I still recommend this game. It's easy for me to list all the problems I had with it, but on balance it was an enjoyable experience, and I do respect the ambition in trying to expand the scope of the sequel to this degree, even if I think it ended up mostly failing.