Recent reviews by Problematic Plant

This game has lost a lot of it's appeal for me after recent seasons and some baffling design choices but even with that, this game is still a must own for me, Which should speak volumes for how good the base game actually is! There is nothing quite like low poly drunken Dwarves fighting bugs for minimum wage in randomly generated janky UE4 caves while management yells at you for demented rituals involving gold and mushrooms. ROCK AND STONE!

This game is the perfect storm of dumb and actually scary. It's a ton of fun but certainly a game you'd want to have friends to play with.

I never could have imagined that yet another port of TETRIS of all things could be so beautiful. This really isn't just a game, It's a experience. Thank you so much for bringing this to Steam!

This game is so criminally underrated!

The physics are hard but satisfying to master, there is are good reasons to use either airblades or rollers, the item pickups are generally well balanced and I find myself actually using all of them depending on the situation and the ability to sacrifice one pickup to supercharge the other is super cool or you can choose to fire the left and right ones individually. The pickups start to struggle on Hyperspeed but it's worth it for that chaotic F-Zero experience!

The tracks are a bit of a mixed bag. There are a little too many tunnel maps for my liking and Constructed Chaos is affront to god (but that can be fun in it's own way), but there are also some real gems in there with a good mix in difficulty. Even if the difficulty rating of some of the tracks can be a little off. I still wish we had workshop support for maps though.

The soundtrack is... eeehhhhh you can add your own custom music so don't worry about it.

The balance is also mixed. It can be pretty good or absolutely terrible depending on how you have the lobby set up. Generally me and my friends have found that catch-up assistance actually makes it less fair because Tanks can pretty much negate the slowdown. But that's what is nice about everything being so customizable. Most of the cars are also well balanced though Aggressors can sometimes feel like they are the worse of both worlds instead of a healthy mix of Acceleration and Speed.

The main lowpoints for me have to be the Tutorial and how unstable online is when people are actually playing it. Especially if you have custom music on which lags the start and only gets worse the longer the session goes on. The main campaign also isn't great but it's not like it's bad either. It's just kind of there.

And lastly, The VR Support. There are no cockpit views sadly and sometimes it just refuses to work at all (though that could also be Steam it's self) but as for actually driving like that, you know it's actually not as bad as you'd think. It kind of makes everything feel slower and having a free camera while driving is very nice. I feel like I am more specially aware.
Like, I know the VR support is more of a joke thing but it's surprisingly not bad.

Overall I love it! I wish there was more to it but for what it is it is still one of my favorite racing games!

This game's atmosphere and exploration is exactly as advertised but there isn't anything beyond that. There are some minor scenery changes that are pretty cool but they don't last long and then it's right back to repeating hallways, which I guess is the point to be fair.

Eventually the game just kind of suddenly ends with no sense of completion after just barely over 2 hours. Just enough to avoid a refund. If you sprint the entire time and are lucky enough to choose the right paths you could probably get it done in under 2 hours.

I don't want to be overly critical to a small project like this, but VRChat offers this exact kind of liminal exploration for free. It's almost exactly like VRChat in fact. With the only interactions being able to sit in some chairs and push around some objects. Even down to being nearly impossible to run at a decent frame rate. Like, The video memory this game uses is insane!

The plus side is if you have to lower the resolution to 480p like I did, it does fit the found footage aesthetic perfectly. But it's the fact that I have to do that to begin with. I feel like this game would be so much cooler in VR but with how it runs now, there is no way that would work.

Overall for me personally, I'd give it a 3/10 and I feel like that is being really fair. There really isn't much else beyond the trailers and demo.


[EDIT:] The community is very easily upset and taken to harassing me on my profile, misquoting or completely making up things I never said I disliked about the game.

I know it is supposed to be just atmospheric. I knew there would be no monsters or entities to chase me (Although spoiler: That isn't exactly true). It is mostly as advertised but it runs terrible and the rooms / halls are just boring with few exceptions. Sometimes they are even literally copy and pasted.

There are better liminal exploration experiences just like this to be had for free, so it's just not for me. Plus I can barely run it. Simple as that.

I originally gave it a 3/10 but with how surprisingly toxic this game's community is, I've decide to change that. 1/10, I will never consider revisiting this again.

This game was such a awesome concept when I started playing back in Beta. It's been through many ups and downs but as fun as it still is I sadly still cannot recommend due to the game still suffering from:

Cheaters,
Broken Matchmaking,
A subscription fee to make progression less of a grind,
Fake players to make the game seem less dead then it is,
AFK Grinders / AFK players from the games regular crashes,
No team coordination due to how the game rewards being selfish and punishes going for objectives,
A broken and boring meta,
Badly unbalanced weapons,
and the usual greifers you'd expect.

This game would still be so much fun in a close environment with just friends but unfortunately the rest of those issues are kind of unavoidable if you want to actually be able to build anything beyond vague shapes as most of the building parts need to be grinded for and doing that just by building and playing in private matches takes FOREVER.

It's free so still give it a shot but don't go in expecting much. I still can't call this a good game.

DLSS 3 IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH! (but we can make it playable)

[How to mitigate Motion Sickness with the MANY fake DLSS fames]

Hit ALT + X and turn DLSS OFF entirely first! Tweak the settings to get the performance as high as you can without serious visual sacrifice. Then turn it back on and choose "custom" and set it to at LEAST Balanced to avoid serious flicker and ghosting. Quality preferred if your GPU can handle it.

Bringing the real frame rate up as high as you can is simply the best way to mitigate the issues DLSS 3 has.


[Review]

Even VR has never made me sick but the magnitude of fake frames on every setting is disorienting on high and low FPS. In real FPS the game reaches around 20 FPS or less on a RTX 3080 OC Edition or a RTX 3080 Ti at max settings 1080p.

It's free so I'd recommend giving it a try for yourself but the fake frames and artifacts are causing eye strain and serious discomfort in my case. Most VR headsets also interpolate frames but the difference being that unlike my VR headsets where it is every other frame, in this the Majority of the frames are fake.

The low real FPS also messes with some physics calculations. It should be fine to an average player but if you are a long time fan that knows the game inside and out you are going to feel how weird and delayed the physics interactions are acting.

Graphics are nice enough but I have seen better in Minecraft Shaders with a tiny fraction of the performance hit here, and that is running on the coding disaster that is Java Edition.

In short, This is a benchmark test. As a Portal reskin it is fine but not impressive given the actual performance.

I wish I could give it a mixed review because I am keeping this for sure as a benchmark test which it is fantastic for. As a game though, No. Just, No.

A great tool in concept but in practice practically nothing works with it and the few things that do are very buggy and unreliable. Even something as basic as first person capture is better done in other programs or even Steam VR capture it's self depending on the headset. The custom avatar calibration leaves a lot to be desired as well. The distortion when scaling the model and the terrible hand calibration almost makes it unusable.

Between the lag spikes, constant crashing, the avatar issues, and very few common titles being supported it's just not worth the effort unless you are out of options for green screen VR capture.

I just wanted to test a VR model I have been working on so I did not need this program to do much.

Even with low expectations and requirements, after changing the language and dealing with the AWFUL max resolution, I was disappointed to find out that all it really does is open the mouth when I speak and tilt the head. Emotions are presets and eye tracking does not exist.

VR Chat on a headset without face tracking can do more then this. Even on desktop you could test it better.

First let me start by saying that I wish I could post a mixed review instead of positive or negative. Because "Do I recommend this game?" Mmm yes and no...

[Positives]

Ok so it's early access and even as an early access game there are some good hours worth of fun to be had here. Certainly better with friends but it seems like a lot of games are anyway. I like the concept of the game and the execution while not graceful, is done well. The various gadgets are done pretty well and I like how you go about trying to identify the ghosts or haunting types. I am never a fan of releasing a unfinished broken game for full price and just patching in the fixes and promised content later and thankfully that is not the case here. There is just enough to do to be worth the current asking price and of course on here we know it is early access as we get into it. So as the base game certainly I recommend it, especially if you have friends to play it with.

[Negatives]

My issues mostly come from this being a VR game or at least attempting to be a VR game. The good news is that no matter what kind of VR setup you have whether it be a $1500 kit or a $20 shell for a phone you will all be in the same boat because the VR in this game is awful! You can glitch your way through walls, fall through the map, by default everything is on a toggle, there are no animations or indications to show what you are actually doing with your hands, and expect to get stuck in doors a lot.

(Also a minor note I forgot to add is that when turning your head the display inside the headset is delayed by a tiny bit. Just enough to get annoying. Not sure if that is the game or the Rift acting up but it consistently does this.)

The plus side of VR here is you can actually use both of your hands or at least try. The belt seems to have trouble following you sometimes in VR and it's very noticeable by others as well. If you can it's best to use a mouse and keyboard instead of any Touch, Vive, or Knuckles controllers because they really don't add anything for the experience aside from being able to hold two things. I'd say just wearing the headset sitting down for that extra little bit of immersion is definitely the way to go... but because of the poor animation quality at this time I really mean just a little bit of immersion.

[Overall]

As a game it's fine. You'll get bored eventually but it's not the type of game you are going to play constantly anyway but as a VR title this does less then the bare minimum. It just sucks. Plain and simple. I do expect that these issues will mostly be solved as the game is developed further but as it is now I wouldn't even call this a Virtual Reality game.

It's the VR equivalent of looking through a viewfinder but you can see more scenery by sliding around on the floor.