Recent reviews by Skye Is Tired

Rewritten to reflect the fact that our main character is now canonically a trans man. (As a joke from the same still very phobic and bigoted developer[s])

tl;dr for anybody who doesn't want to read a few paragraphs, developers are still transphobic, anti-mask weirdos. Game honestly used to be fun to break but now that it's more balanced while interesting to figure out the first time, once you know what you're doing you're hardly even playing it in my experience, and legitimately just watch someone else who already owns it play the game if you really want to see what can happen.

I'm someone who bought and played the game back in 2017, before the main character had come out as a trans man and before many many patches that changed the way the game would be played. Back then levels for your gladiators were uncapped and the game was a bit more bare bones in terms of what you could do between fights and it was very fun to take 1 unit and upgrade their equipment and AI, then keep them on speed training so they could demolish the competition and become a hurricane of destruction on the battlefield.

Now in 2022, the gladiators have limits on how far training can take them, the main character is a transgender man, I'm no longer a closeted trans girl living with her dad and terrified to death that I'd be out on the streets, abused, and mistreated by anybody who knew I wasn't comfortable in my body. I'm a woman living with a roommate in an apartment in a city with almost nobody in my life knowing that I'm trans besides those I trust. All of this to say that being trans is a struggle, even now. I couldn't imagine being the main character and being public about being trans in a time and place where putting yourself in that position is easily even more terrifying than it is now. In a cisgender male dominated field a trans man who likely would have to face even more pushback and having that written in good faith seems very compelling and interesting. Even more so if he transitioned more like I had and was hiding his identity as trans and hoping to be seen as a man. The uncomfortable struggle and paranoia that someone knows your secret. The awkward dance of avoiding getting too close to anybody until you can fish out enough from them that you feel they won't blackmail you, come public with the information, or think lesser of you. In such an environment that you could be found out and killed or have everything in your life ripped from you the way some trans people imagine would happen if they were public would be a breath taking thriller narrative backing the game...

But this isn't what the devs intended. It isn't what they want from their game and they make that abundantly clear in their transphobic, anti-mask, anti-masturbation, anti-sexwork comments casually thrown into the dev logs and patch notes. Sometimes as jokes, sometimes as seemingly out of nowhere rants that persist for way too long when all they actually have to say about the game is that they fixed 2 or 3 minor bugs. This behavior of hate spreading is what I can't endorse. If you bought the game already and it's too late to refund, the money's already in the pocket of a bigot and that's unfortunate. If you're still reading and got through all my words and just wanna know about the game, putting aside the "politics" side of the reviews, here you go.

Without the ability to buff up one gladiator to the point of absurdity the game is a lot more of a gamble from fight to fight since you could lose people you've sunk the time and money into, which is good, that change makes considerations of what you want your gladiators to use as weapons based off their AI styles something to learn and consider, makes you wonder how much you should sink in to your gladiators and makes you really want to hold off on your special matches until you're sure you can beat those challenges which makes the final moments before the finale tense. That said the game's better played as a management sim in my opinion. Controlling characters is uncomfortable in my opinion and the AI generally plays well if you give them the training time to meditate until their AI reaches level 100. Unfortunately most of the cool stuff is left to random events which as far as I'm aware have random outcomes, from killing you and deleting your save in some of the more extreme cases to giving you a horse, lion, or other unique unit that unfortunately can't be utilized in any complex ways but still can be used to give your playthrough a little bit of unique flair, considering that most of the people you can hire are worthless, or while okay in their own right are incredibly worthless in comparison to having the classic support combo of a medic to keep your units alive without interrupting training and requiring you to click them and manage them personally, a faber to give you random equipment upgrades and keep equipment from breaking, and your architect to build up training equipment, daily free supplies, and passive buffs that will take all year to build but is also one of the only units that can be fired to make room for a different unit towards the end of the game to give you a little extra boost with one of the C tier supports. All this adds up to the game having very little replay value. You might, like me, come back to it every year or two for a run or screw around on endless mode until you get bored, but as a management sim it can (and often will in my experience) become nearly entirely automated and just requiring you to pay half attention to mess with a slider, click on a few boxes, and watch some carnage by midgame. You can really just skip this and watch someone else play it for the experience of playing it yourself.

From the from the ashes of depravity rises the phoenix of quality.
How else to describe The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe?
Such a revolutionary step forward in the lineage of one of the most beloved video game properties of all time!
The additions and changes made to this expansion will surely resonate in the annals of the history of all media ever made.
It is perhaps true to say that no mistakes are forever etched in stone for the stone into which The Stanley Parable was carved has itself been transmuted offering a message of hope to those who have ever erred in their judgement.
You are not beyond redemption.
You may change, and you may become more, so much more, than you were before.

If there is any message to be taken from The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe it is this...
What a fortune, a privilege, a joy it is to have had such an experience.
It leaves me hopeful that as a community - as a world there is time for us to become our greatest selves, as great as we ever could dream of in our wildest, most ambitious vision for a brighter future.

I played through this game once, and reset the last day for a few different endings before starting a new campaign that I couldn't make myself finish, I played both on normal difficulty and reset my first campaign partway through when I learned how to prevent people from losing their personality completely.

With all that said, it's not hard to play this game as a good person who doesn't erase personalities (completely) and it's harder to start hurting for cash. Unlike papers please there was never really a point for me personally where I felt like I had to do something I think is wrong, I was never tempted to declare someone who needed help sane just because I really needed that 3 bucks, and I never saw fit to take someone who's against the structure and declare them insane for more money. In that respect this game is definitely NOT like Paper's Please. If you expect to get bribed by someone for a declaration of sanity or tough decisions that need to be made to get paid, you won't be finding that on normal difficulty.

What you will find is decisions that will make you question what quantifies "Sane" That guy with an imaginary friend he thinks is real, a pathological liar, a person who just really seems to like water, a person who's emotionally distant, sees life as a game, the "issues" that don't seem harmful, in a world where YOU decide what is sane, do these people need help? That guy who thinks he's an actual rat based super hero could hurt someone but this guy who doesn't like fantasy and abstractions who's perfectly content with that personality, do you really want to waste time "fixing" something that someone else decided was an issue? Is it even an issue to fix in the first place? That's the kind of question you'll be asking, will this person hurt themselves or others if I don't step in?

That does lead naturally to another strength that does potentially hurt replayability of Mind Scanners, every person you run into is unique. In Papers Please 90% of people you deal with are just faces in a crowd, if you've worked in a restaurant you know what I mean, you have the people you recognize and the haze of people you've probably seen 3 times this week but you won't recognize them anyways, while Mind Scanners your role is much more personal, your customers might not be recurring, but they're all trying to be the special one of the crowd you remember, and while it's nice to have more defined and fleshed out characters, that's also why I quit my second playthrough, I was running into the same people again and remembering what I thought of them and not feeling particularly experimental I just went the same route again, they are randomized for who spawns so that does mix things up a fair bit, but skimming dialogue and ignoring my patients makes the affair much more boring, and I rarely ran into new people to treat anyways, the game made me feel like I saw it all and left me with nothing to come back to, so I don't think I'm going to see all the endings personally.

Since I'm left with a binary choice of good or bad, I'll say good. I liked it, it's not Paper's Please but it doesn't have to be, it's its own thing and all I'd really change or want changed is giving the player more to spend money on, I imagine not being able to pay your rent is an instant game over and you have to load a save or start a new game, but since you're never going to get there you need more to do with your money so you can absent mindedly push yourself to needing to care about your funds again. You can buy pills that prevent stress gain and personality drain but using them is again, something I never felt a need to do, you get minigames to fix the issues that the pills are supposed to help you avoid, and since you need to buy them and equip them before going into a treatment you probably aren't going to have the foresight or waste your time and money on pills, but something you might spend money on is a time extension, that has a more tangible return on investments, you know that you got your moneys worth or that you wasted cash if you finished treating someone with 49 seconds left after buying a 50 second extension, and if it's limited to one per day, like deciding if you have a morning coffee you prevent players from breaking the game by downing 10 espressos and burning all their cash then treating all their patients with 500 seconds left since at some point you do have to protect players from themselves.

So yeah, that's too many words to say game's fun but here's things I don't particularly like.

The game's fully released now and it's pretty okay. They reworked the way religious beliefs work so there's a bit more flavor to each choice, but it still all feels like ultimately pointless flavor.

My religion now is based off of generosity, I tried to make the generosity sensible but it seems like my followers are insistent that any achievement has to be a shared one and personal wealth is a grave sin. I don't mind this, it's taking what I intended to an unintended extreme. That's all well and good, but after I adopted the turn the other cheek doctrine that forbids attacking people with anything other than your words, I still see a lot of violence being justified within my religion, my people simply refuse to attack in self defense but I can still ritually sacrifice people and there's flavor text about internal violence. I mean I guess only my most devout followers actually practice everything I preach(?) but then why do I have the ability to say "Yeah I know we don't hurt people who do wrong, but now I'm also gonna specify that someone disagreeing with you is not grounds for execution."? Not excommunicating people is fine but not murder them just seems redundant.

Anyways on to the actual game itself and not just the outside of combat flavor. Combat's still boring and completely hands off, but you do get more agency in letting your people develop skills, as well as needing to manually unlock new classes for people to be able to use. This is where your religion type seems to matter most, it dictates which classes you can pay for and which ones are banned. As a religion that worships generosity and hates greed however some of the banned classes seem more like the devs said, "We couldn't figure out what would be strictly forbidden so we just got rid of some stuff." because among the banned things one that stuck out to me was a lust priest, which doesn't sound greedy, especially when your core doctrines being about lust is a valid religion and is opposed with "purity" which would be better named "chastity" considering that it's a matter of opposition with the rest of the classes War opposing peace and greed opposing generosity with madness having no order opposition for what ever reason. But back on some sort of track there's not really anything to talk about beyond certain classes being banned. The game decides who will be targeted and what attack will be used, you can modify your follower's stats by random events with flavor based on your doctrines that don't actually matter, and you can raise stats by telling your followers to do stat raising tasks or making them preform miracles. The game forces you to attack people after 3 rounds of raising stats, and keeps you from grinding by making repeatable attacks reduce your follower happiness just as much as losing a fight, so it's something you only want to do when you're confident that you can't win. And if you somehow "cheat" the happiness mechanic (which I haven't seen any way to exploit) you also have a turn limit before you can no longer attack certain enemies that have worth while rewards. It's a good way to prevent grinding but it also demands almost perfect balancing, but how do you balance combat in a game if you reduce every attack to rolling dice with no agency? Well for the devs it's simple, you just make the combat stupidly easy except for the optional challenges where you might win or might lose, but no matter what it was never your own fault that you won or lost, you threw your hand to fate and the moment you hit button to start combat. I've had rounds where I lost turn one because the enemies won initiative and all attacked the same unit, they lost all their HP everyone went home upset with the mission a failure, after 3 turns of stat raising I went back and decided to bring along a cook with 2 slots dedicated to healing since the enemies are clearly heavy hitters and then I won because my units dodged the enemy's first 2 attacks and really laid into them. I didn't feel like I lucked out or won, I just watched. It was anticlimactic and the way the game railroads you into challenging an enemy every turn definitely didn't help me feel like the time I took helped at all. Even my units using their heal ability is a crap shoot, sure my cook rolled a heal, but the heal heals themselves and whoever they target, on several occasions I was glad to see RNG go my way but then my cook fed the wrong person so the guy who was near death just watched in disbelief as Greg got a fresh meal to heal his papercut before getting finished off by an enemy.

But yeah, what else is there to say? I haven't finished the game yet but as a Sun Goddess I'm disappointed in my followers.

Its been a while since I thought about this but there's 2 types of randomness in a game, input and output randomness, input randomness.

Input randomness is randomizing in games that happens independent of the player and the player is otherwise aware of before it takes an effect, for example in this game your stats are randomized. You pick between 3 people and their stats and abilities are randomized but you know their stats when you pick who of the 3 you want. Input randomness is good for avoiding frustration but runs the risk of being boring when you know what's going to happen before it happens.

Output randomness is where the player takes an action and then the output is randomized. Like a chance to miss an attack or get a critical hit. The entire combat system is output randomness. You choose who to send in the attack and then through a series of random dice rolls, a winner is determined. You mind as well be given a percent chance to succeed based on how well you prepared and then let the player know if their 84% chance to win happened to be good enough. This is the kind of RNG that everyone hates and blames when it doesn't work out in the player's favor, and the game is rife with it, it's dependent on you winning out on dice rolls, and mechanically your only actions in the game are trying to increase the odds of you rolling a good number. Granted this type of randomness isn't STRICTLY bad, but rarely is anybody happy about missing an attack or failing because of something out of the player's control. Just about the only good kind of output randomness is critical hits and player dodge chance. If you have a low chance to get something good to happen to you but you have no influence over it, it feels good to have just gotten lucky. I have no doubt people like this game, but it's disappointing how little control I have when worse comes to worst.

That was my dumb review and little talk on what I think the main reason why this game is just okay, but for the TLDR;
Game's randomness means no matter how good you do you can still lose to sheer bad luck
Flavor text feels surface deep and as my religion gets more complex flavor text contradicts my other beliefs.
There's no way to get attached to my followers and the most pressure to succeed comes from the fear of needing to start over or just keep loading save until luck goes my way
And in a game where flavor text doesn't matter for much, some of the stuff that's restricted seems random or pointless.

I'd give the game like 2 out of 5. It's a good way to let the hours tick by but it's not good for just about anything else.

I'm not an RE fan whatsoever, I shy away from horror because it's usually just jumpscare bullsh*t anyways, like "Oh my God, a natural reaction to something unexpected happening where you put up your guard so you can assess the situation! That must mean you're scared!" It's just 2 for flinching nonsense everywhere I see with popular horror games and it's such a turn off.

Resident Evil 2 isn't as much scary as it is tense, and that's a good thing. First time through as Leon I fumbled around trying to grab every little thing and clear out all the zombies like your typical shooter and found myself low on ammo and generally just banging my head against the wall, then I treated ammo more like a consumable, like I would a grenade, emergencies only, and I flailed awkwardly around zombies trying to get the hang of the new way to play. It was MUCH more fun that way, although it did lead to situations where I was trying to walk to avoid pissing off a licker while the guy in the fedora was ready to crush my skull and 3 zombies didn't want to wait their turn to nom on my stupid brains, which lead to no healing items or ammo in my inventory because I absolutely panicked and almost died. I got a B so apparently I did better than expected for a first time through.

Round 2 as Claire, It seemed a lot like Claire was just going through the motions of Leon with different motivations, I went to most of the same places, alot of what happened to Leon happened to Claire, but she plays a bit differently, she's a bit faster and has a completely different set of weapons, and I'm glad I played as Leon first because when a game gives you a grenade launcher as your second weapon you're gonna blow up anything and everything that dares get in your way and don't even pretend that's not true. Since I (mostly) knew what I was doing my only issue was getting stuck in a few crowded hallways when fedora guy shows up.

I'd say that the best way to play this game is with no guide in sight and rather than a fear or hatred of zombies, a mutual understanding that those basic zombies aren't usually worth the ammo when you have a knife in your pocket.

This has been your spoiler free(ish) review by your friendly neighborhood pyrotechnic, and I give this game an 8/10 because I don't much enjoy that Claire does most of the stuff Leon does in his campaign and they weirdly act like it's happening in generally the same timeframe. But that bit of being grumpy might be gone when I play the B side campaigns or the extras, but I haven't gotten there yet and Steam is forcing me to write a review so... v( '-')v

Love the Monty Python references, I love the stupid "insults" you can make, I love that the character get triggered from hearing you mention the thing they're sensitive about, way funnier to say this parrot is old and watch an old lady get insulted than to make it you are old, my favorite thing by far is to make complements like "Your sister secretly adores your sense of style" and watching the enemy get upset. The complements are kinda hard to make sometimes but you can almost always say something that doesn't make any sense like "this train would probably murder for a train ticket" or saying "this whole bloody pet shop turns into this parrot" But you can make actual insults, it's just that more often than not you'll say something tame or something that just doesn't make sense. If I had to put a rate in it, 8/10.

Should you download this game? Yes. The less you hear about it before playing it the better. You'll love it, or your money back.

This game is awesome. It's hard, but not this is total bullsh*t hard. There are also a few bugs, but nothing major and only one that resulted in the game crashing with an error report. I feel like this game will be even cooler if/when it's finished. I just hope they don't release MOAR ITEM DLC $4,99 or WAY OP CHARCTER PACK DLC $9,99. I'd love to see this completed, and some achivements made into a thing. Preferably ones for the eastereggs and unlocking with a hint at how to get to it. I'm still not sure how to unlock the characters that say unlock by ???. I assume that's a We haven't come up with a way to unlock these guys yet so... just press that cheat button if you wanna use these guys. I would prefer a fight against them as if they were random bosses to appear in the game if you're having trouble thinking of things. Fighting a future character sounds like a good way to learn how I should/shouldn't be using them so long as they're actually going to have the same skills as the fighting counterparts. but now I'm rambleing with stupidity so I'll just go now k luv u bi

My cousin demanded I try this game, I spent an hour trying to make a game start and become his friend in the community of this game. He got pissed at me for being pissed at the game, and then I tried joining a match, then I just didn't like the game, maybe it was just the fact that the game took an hour to allow me to try playing, maybe old war games just isn't what I'm down with, maybe it was because the game threw further in game shenanigans and lag. But in the end I just don't like the game and it's as simple as that.

I'm not sure how good this game is for some people, but I got a glorious copy. I mean I turned on the game. Got to answer a few questions that would shape the game for me. Chose my character's looks. Then the moment I spawned, I died. I don't mean that I messed up and got killed early on. I mean the second I started I heard a weird sound and the game said that I died game over. And this lovely game took me to a page with a list of improvements put into the game with no way to do anything. All I could do was copy that info on a clipboard. I closed the game and ran it again hoping that I could actually play the game, then was taken to this page again. I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it and it still took me to that page. Gotta tell ya, 10/10.