Recent reviews by Ch4bby

Tony Hawk Pro Skater but without the skateboard.

It's wild to me that games that focus on the grounded, technical parkour experience like this don't actually exist, beyond Mirror's edge 1 and 2. I've been scouring the internet for them for years, yet not a single one even comes close to what Mirror's Edge has done. Assassins' Creed's "parkour" is "hold X button to parkour." Dying Light's parkour is a bit better, but it's still just hold shift + W and jump sometimes. (The grappling hook also ruins the whole point of the movement system.) There are several more examples I could give, but the gist is that all of them use parkour as a backdrop for the gameplay or story they actually want to deliver. None besides Mirror's Edge have ever focused entirely on the movement, and it has irked me for so long.

Rooftops and Alleys delivers, though it's still rough around the edges; needs a bit of fine-tuning on the game-feel, along with more maps and features and generally just more content. But the movement system is genuinely solid, and the developer knows EXACTLY what niche he's aiming for.

Finally, FINALLY, a game that scratches my decade long parkour itch. I am incredibly grateful this exists, and I can't wait to see what the future of this game will bring.

Void Stranger. The game that desperately wants to be a cult classic. The game that could have been one of the best games ever made had it been released 30 years ago, but falls short due to certain archaic game design choices.

I want to love this game. I really, really do. But I have a love/hate relationship with it that favors the hate side.
I will use metaphors to explain why.

Void Stranger is an innocent but sprawling mystery box. It's a desert with a large outer layer of sand, where if you scratch at the surface, you find an inner layer of convoluted hallways and catacombs. And then you'll dig past the catacombs to find complex machinery, which itself leads to another fascinating area, and this goes on and on. But every now and then, you'll catch a glimpse of what's at the core of this mystery box. An inkling of what you might find, have you the patience and fortitude to keep going.

I want to say that it's Lovecraftian in some way, through the idea that in a split second flash, you're introduced to much more than you can comprehend, before being ripped out of it and put back into wherever you were initially. You can only wonder at the colossal depth behind that vision.
And in that sense, Void Stranger delivers.

...Almost.

I'm packing away the metaphors for a bit, because the major issue the game has is what kills all that imagination for me.

The game's idea of delivering that mystery to you is by teaching you to be afraid of experimentation. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself; games can be very interesting when you're given limited and punishing choices. But those punishments need to be reasonable and fit the context of not just the game, but also the player's experience. Void Stranger is a sokoban puzzle game, where you inch your way forward floor by floor. There's a LOT of floors. So imagine thinking "hey, what if I try doing this random thing" and it turns out that thing is a built-in reset for ALL your progress until that point, with no way to recover any of it. Why wasn't I told about this? Why do I have to do a whole 60 floors AGAIN just because I was curious?

There's also a separate secret that consumes all your current lives to skip forward several floors. (I'll get to the lives part in a bit.)

Another thing, too: if you get a cutscene and exit the cutscene, then you can't see that cutscene again unless you reset all your progress. That's precious information lost because you wanted to see what happens.

Void Stranger romanticises older mystery games and ideas, without taking note of how modern video game design has evolved. I won't lie, these ideas are really cool at times. But they come at the expense of the player's experience. They kill immersion, and teach you a very harsh lesson of "Don't make mistakes." But how is the player supposed to know what even IS a mistake to begin with? The game doesn't teach you anything about those mistakes until it's too late, which creates a fear of experimenting that leads to death of immersion and, very possibly, a permanent uninstall.

At the time of writing, I have 18 hours in this game. I used a guide to beat most of it.
If for ANY REASON I feel like I absolutely NEED a guide to beat the majority of a game, then there is a massive problem with how the game is designed.

But why did I need a guide to begin with?

Simple. The lives system.

You collect these cicada creatures from chests that serve as your Super Mario 1-UPs. If you run out of 1-UPs, you get a cutscene that offers you a choice: keep going from where you died, or reset all your progress.

If you choose to keep going, you get infinite lives. Cool, right? Except by the time you're finally approaching the 200th floor or so, the game plays what is designed to be a very emotional, very moving sequence that has you wondering what's going on, but in a very good way.

But hey, remember that choice you made when you died? It cursed you, locking you out of finishing the game. You're told that in order to get further than the 200th floor, you need to play the whole game again, without losing all your lives. And this is where you learn that one secret that lets you reset the game.

WHY.

WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?????


And that's why I ended up using a guide for most of the game. It gets obscenely difficult in the later floors, and I can't afford to lose even a single life.

But when you reach that final floor and get your conclusion, guess what: now you have to play the whole game AGAIN to continue the story. And when THAT run is done, you have to do yet ANOTHER run of the whole game to continue the story. It's like ghosts and goblins, because when you beat the game, you need to beat the game again. But that game is 40 something years old. Do you see what I mean with archaic game design?

I want to emphasize that Void Stranger's lore and vibes are absolutely brilliant, like genuinely top notch in that specific circle of ideas. The secrets are SO cool, and sometimes even absolutely mind-shattering in the ways you find them. But all of them are held back by gameplay ideas that would fit better in a 1990s home console instead of on your computer on Steam.

And that's why I can't recommend this game. I've heard a lot of people say that it deserves massive mainstream recognition, but I'm sorry to say that it got exactly the kind of recognition it deserved; a niche hidden gem that's absolutely brilliant but also frustratingly difficult and repetitive in all the worst possible ways.

A hilariously chaotic game in the vein of Lethal Company.

(I hope they add a 3AM potion that you can drink)

How do you explain a game that is best left unexplained?
How do you convince someone to play something that they know nothing about?

The simple answer is: you don't. All you can do is hope that they'll decide to play it someday, and then join you in this curious dilemma.

I'm seeing a lot of negative reviews cropping up, so I thought I'd leave some of my thoughts about Mordhau here.

First thing's first: Mordhau is not a realistic medieval combat simulator. Get that illusion out of your head. Yes, that's how it's advertised, and it's also the best way for it to attract a casual playerbase. But in reality, Mordhau is an extremely deep, complex and technical melee combat game. Beyond the basic feints, chambers and morphs, there's drags, accels, footwork, body manipulation, matrixing, 1vX, target switching, the list goes on. These are the things that break the illusion of a realistic medieval combat simulator, and reveals that Mordhau is something else, something that wants to break out but is stuck hiding behind a mask.

Most people leave the game once they see a glimpse of what's hiding behind that mask, but some decide to stay to see what's behind it. Mordhau is extremely difficult, but if you have the will to get good and can learn to accept how stupid mid/high level play looks, you'll have an extremely challenging and rewarding game you can enjoy for thousands of hours.

Super Animal Royale (or SAR for short) is a 2D top-down battle royale where you play as genetically enhanced animals. If you've ever played any mainstream battle royale before, you'll find the mechanics easy to pick up and understand. Weapons, armor and health pickups have multiple tiers, with higher tiers meaning better equipment. Even with the removal of an entire dimension, it's still easy to understand what's going on.

The gameplay is fun and surprisingly well balanced. Weapons have well-defined roles, and even the top-tier weapons only acquired from mole crates don't feel overpowered. There are plenty of areas to explore, and loot is easy to find, so you won't often be screwed over by lack of firepower. You can also cut grass and smash crates with your melee weapon to get extra loot, like ammo, health and tape, which you can use to repair armor.

The artstyle is great. Very simplistic and cute, probably the biggest draw of the game in my opinion. It's fresh and uncluttered, and doesn't diminish the BR experience. The cosmetic system offers a lot of options and an unlocking system that I wish more games had. There are no microtransactions, you unlock new animals by using "DNA" which drops after games (the amount increases depending on your performance), and cosmetics are unlocked both as drops and from completing challenges. That's not to say it's perfect however, unlocking stuff takes a huge amount of time, so you better be ready to grind a lot. And some of the best cosmetics are behind rng, which kinda sucks. There are some systems in place to make up for it, but they are merely band aids on the bigger issue.

Conclusion: I heavily recommend this game. I played it for less than an hour before I decided to buy the full version. You have nothing to lose from giving this game a try. The demo version offers the full gameplay experience for free, so if you like the what you see just go for it.

More of a college student project than a game.
It also got abandoned by the developers, so there's that.

So I was an undercover detective on a train ride and this sketchy crow in a brown coat asked me what part of my body I hated the most.

The prompt requested 6 letters, so naturally I typed in the name for the female reproduction organ.

I was then rewarded with an achievement called "Why" with the description "just... why... ?"


If I ever meet the devs, I'll take them to a bar and buy them some beers.

For those of you who completed the original OneShot game and are wondering if it's the same content, I can safely assure you that it's not. The base areas like the Barrens, Glen, etc are similar in style, but not identical. There are also new areas, and the puzzles are very different.
Also, quitting the game won't kill you this time, thankfully. But it does affect the in-game world somewhat.

Anyway, about the ending...
...
......I won't spoil it for you. Find out for yourself :)

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