Recent reviews by Moldy_Turtle_Burgers

Very entertaining game, for free!

Some people deem it as too grindy/punishing, and I did see it as that when I first started playing. The key is to focus on collecting as many perks as possible before doing tons of farming. It makes it much more bearable.

A surprising amount of content is in game. Sometimes it gets recycled (some monsters/bosses get a 'skull icon' and a size increase to indicate they're more powerful) but there's enough to keep it refreshing.

The main negative is that it takes about 2 or 3 hours to beat the game, and there's no way to save, so you have to have 2 or 3 hours of spare time to complete the game set aside. If you're playing solo you can just pause, but with friends it can be a little upsetting if someone has to leave.

There are little to no bugs, at least in my experience. There are some latency issues when people spread out in multiplayer. Sometimes standing on an angled mountain causes the same latency, even in solo play. But that's literally the only bug I've noticed.

Overall I highly recommend the experience. It took me around 3 or 5 tries to complete the game, each run lasting around 40 minutes to an hour, with the final one being 2 hours long to complete it.

Here's why I don't recommend this game right now, put as bluntly as possible:

The majority of the reason I play nowadays is to just shoot people and amass stupid amounts of money in different servers, because really, that's all there is to do once you pass 10 hours of playtime and realize that that's all there really is to the game content wise.

The developer (yes, singular, despite having a support network as massive as Devolver Digital to get more help) doesn't, or at least doesn't *seem* to care much about how fast the game is developing. Seemingly trivial-to-fix, sometimes game-breaking bugs like being able to corner/door glitch into bases, windows causing graphical issues, physics based entities (including players) being randomly flung to the stratosphere, voice chat bugs, AI issues and more are all ignored and left unpatched for months to even years while things like explosive barrels ( https://twitter.com/crypticsea/status/1416175774172733440 ) are prioritized and developed upon for no particular reason.

The only real news source we have is the developers personal twitter, which randomly becomes inactive, private or posts random, unrelated stuff, which also links to the game's official Discord news channel. So you'll be expecting news on the game, check your pings, and then be greeted with examples like these:
https://twitter.com/crypticsea/status/1399444127104724997 https://twitter.com/crypticsea/status/1397435265136746497
https://twitter.com/crypticsea/status/1401240308730318849

What's left of all these issues is a massively flawed game that has to be picked apart and improved upon by the impressively talented community, which has kept itself alive through sheer force of will all these years. Elaborately constructed cheat engine mods seemed to dominate for quite a while and offered a unique gameplay experience, but even those eventually lost their luster, and now we're in an era that's slowly seeing the playerbase degrade. Many servers that would previously be constantly full are now down to around 35 concurrent players at peak hours, and the numbers are still falling.

Does all of this mean that I will stop playing the game? No! I still find it fun in some aspects, and my experiences, both past and present, help me deal with the current issues that the game has.

Do I recommend it to a new player? No, I don't. The game in its current state is just not worth twenty dollars, or a new players attention. Try to come back in another three years time, and maybe it'll be worth that then. Unfortunately, the more likely outcome is that it won't have improved much at all or will even be abandoned.

Whichever happens, I still enjoyed and am enjoying my time with the game, and hope to see it thrive. But currently, I just cannot recommend it.

Update on Jan. 6th of 2023:

Pretty much all of what I said previously in the review still stands true, and it has been for quite a while. But to catch up on some details, the player base has been reduced to around 30 concurrent players AT ABSOLUTE PEAK and servers are dead from early morning till ~5pm EST. The main dominant world mode server is modded and allows you to play world mode in the round mode map which is a massive improvement to the game, but it lags out if too many people are playing at the same time, and doesn't have much mission variety. Missions that do work break often. But at the end of the day, it is a mod, not the game itself.

In terms of if the game will see development in the future or not, this is unlikely. It turns out that the Devolver Digital contract that the dev agreed to completely fell through (his fault) and now he owes them money. So instead of working on his most popular game to accrue more funds he has moved on to developing a racing game that reuses models from Sub Rosa, which he has apparently been paid for...?

Anyway, that is literally all that has changed since I first made this review all the way back in 2021. No official news on the games status, no updates, main community Discord server is pretty much dead and game is dying.

Update Sept 15th of 2023:

This game is dead. At peak player count maybe 6-10 close-knit people play at once, and when they do it's on a heavily-modded boxing/melee server. In the morning or late evening no one plays. When this group of players leave, literally no one will be playing Sub Rosa. Playing the game at its baseline is impossible besides loading up a local practice mode game, since people only play on the boxing server and occasionally round mode.

There are no updates as to the development of the game. The Twitter bot linked up to the official Discord server broke and no one has fixed it. The last few posts captured by it are the dev tinkering with the aforementioned racing game.

I'll check back here in another year, or when/if something big develops.

Update February 6th 2024:

The main community Discord server got hacked, every channel was deleted and then malware was posted in the announcements by hackers. Shortly after that the entire server was deleted.. probably years of community content destroyed. Most days at 6pm servers are populated but die out shortly after.. the entire rest of the day it's dead.

IMO this should not be on Steam let alone released to the public.

The game is simply too early in development to be considered playable. Around 25 of the 30 minutes I spent playing this game was spent trying to load into the game. One server I loaded into, the only one that was sufficiently populated with 8 people (in a massive map), happened to be in Europe. I knew that my ping would be high as I live in the NA area, but I thought it would be manageable. I was wrong. My ping while on the server was usually 100-150ms, which is usually playable for most any game, but the way lag compensation in this game is handled is that it delays the actions you have inputted before they are displayed to you. So, if you turn, walk in a certain direction, etc, it takes time for your character to even do that client-side. The game is practically unplayable in this state, as all of your inputs are delayed simply because of ping.

The second server I joined was a North American server with two other people on it. After the usual ten minute load time, I finally got to start playing the game in a playable state. I began doing typical survival game things, hitting trees, checking my inventory and crafting.

But one of those things DIDN'T work. Can you guess which one?

Crafting! I couldn't craft anything. Even after acquiring all the resources necessary, and the icon relating to the item lighting up indicating that I could craft it, I was told that I simply didn't have the items required to craft what I desired. So, great. Now I couldn't progress, even up to primitive stone tools. Not wanting to endure yet another loading screen by rejoining the server to see if it would fix the bug, I simply switched off the game and now I'm writing this review.

Having followed this project for some time all I can really say is that I'm disappointed.

You can see my video review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MizGNXfq8UM


Think about all of the classic shooter format DOOM games. Then, mod them to ♥♥♥♥ and have them all have a struggle snuggle with Hotline Miami in an alleyway, and have the result of that come out addicted to PCP and looking somewhat like an episode of Rugrats.

That’s essentially what Post Void is.

On the bottom left of your screen is your idol. Think of it as a health bar. As soon as it runs out of this mysterious white liquid, you’re dead. You lose health not only through being damaged by enemies, but also by simply existing. The only way to recover health is through killing enemies. I’m sure you get the gameplay loop here. Go fast, live. Go slow, die.

The game not only encourages you to use this playstyle through the ever present fear of death, but also throws mechanics like one shot headshots and sliding into the mix to not only encourage instant, mind-blowing erections but also the swift dispersal of enemies and their respective gray matter.

There are eleven levels divided between three acts in Post Void, all of which are randomly generated but progressively add more and more challenge, along with new enemies. This might not seem like a lot of content, but considering the replayability of the game, that really isn’t a problem.

After a while of playing Post Void, it starts to feel like the game is playing you rather than you playing it. It has that trancelike quality similar to Hotline Miami. The game is fast, brutal and addicting, and combined with the utterly asinine visuals, the game pretty much forces you to go into this state to cope with the sheer amount of pixels moving rapidly on-screen.

One thing to mention is that Post Void is currently on sale for the low low price of 2.88 canadian bolivars, or approximately 1.2 million Runescape gold as of the time of this writing. Not that the original price point was really that massive, but seriously, give this game a go. You won’t regret it.

Overall, I give this game a 10/10. It’s simple, fun, has a ridiculously low price point and a unique artstyle. What is there not to love?

Much, much too unpolished to justify the price tag.

A lot of mechanics and game aspects feel off. For example, to craft more than one bed, you need to acquire boards and bricks in order to make a sheep farm before you can create any sort of bed. That means your survivors are constantly on the brink of tiredness early-game until you breach that hurdle of acquiring those hard to get resources.

Trading also seems off, almost as if it's balanced for the endgame from the beginning. There's just no scaling to be had.

The graphics leave a lot to be desired. I understand that graphics don't make a game good, but I wouldn't call this game a looks masterpiece. It feels like the developers were shooting for 4 different artstyles all at once. Characters look like 3D, almost like they're out of Runescape, while the rest of the environment was all created in a 2D stylization.

And by god, the sound design. Instead of opting to have certain sounds play rarely or mix up the sounds by adding a pool of them that are randomly played, the developers opted to just make it so the same, bland sound effect plays over and over again. A survivor of yours completes a task? Here's the same pop effect you've heard 10000 times over! Crafting an item? Allow me to play a wood hitting sound effect 20 times in a row! In the little play time that I have, I feel as if I've heard that stupid pop sound effect racket through my ear drums at the very least 200 times. This game is best played with SFX off, or audio in general off.

Overall I feel as if there's just so many more games out there that provide what this game has, but better. More polish, proper stylization, etc. And it's not like I'm comparing this game to AAA titles. There's plenty of colony sim games out there that just do all this better.

The game appears to have been in an identity crisis for years and years now. So many mechanics etc. get changed by the developers, and for every one that becomes better, two other things become worse. Some examples are:

- Horde nights. These have become progressively underwhelming. They used to come at you all at once, now they just come in nicely ordered waves for you to shoot at on your own time. Yawn.

- Loot scaling. Loot used to be... alright-ish, but now loot scaling is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ horrible. You have to spend so many bullets and medicine etc. just to plough through massive POI's full of zombies now, only to be rewarded with crates full of loot that is either ridiculously underwhelming or only slightly helpful. If you're really, really lucky and have all your looting perks up, you might just find something really really good, but for the most part you're going to get ♥♥♥♥ all compared to what you invested in killing dozens of irradiated super zombies that are next to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ impossible to kill without proper weaponry.

- Speaking of perks, Leveling! Leveling/Perk progression is, in my opinion, better than before in this current iteration of the game (A17) than before, but it's still in need of serious improvement. Currently, unless you want to jack up your xp-rate in game, perk leveling is a massive time sink. The best way of doing it is farming zombies, but it still takes a massive amount of time to get anywhere sound. For example, suppose you want to get tools better than sticks and stones. You can do this by increasing your intelligence skill and then speccing in forge recipes. Now, suppose you finally do do that, and you get your tools. Now you go to dig anddddd... oh yeah, wait, you need to spec into different skills just to be good at using tools. Back to zombie killing it is, then. Rinse and repeat until you run into another dilemma.

Some other general complaints are:

- Updates for the game are really sporadic. There's no set time in which we get them, which is no real big deal, good on the devs for being independent and all, but it still sucks ♥♥♥♥. There's been large, no, massive gaps in updates in the past.

- The time it takes to get anything done is stupid. It takes years just to construct simple walls. Good luck trying to creatively build anything interesting without either adjusting the settings of your world from the game's intended settings or investing a ridiculous amount of time harvesting resources and crafting.

- Vehicles suck. They're extremely underwhelming and guzzle gas.

- Performance is ridiculously bad. GTX 1070, 16gb RAM, i7-7700 @3.60GHz and the game still runs like complete ♥♥♥♥ on horde nights.

- Networking in multiplayer games needs a lot of work. Lag makes it considerably more difficult to or even impossible for certain players to use melee without getting damaged despite dodging properly. This is my observations on privately hosted servers, dedicated ones might be completely different.


TL:DR: Game still needs a lot of work, despite being out for so long. Lots of performance issues, including some network lag on privately hosted games. Mechanics are commonly changed for the worse. Base game is extremely grindy and tedious, discourages creativity in building etc.

The game itself is good. Have no doubts about that. Especially with friends.

Sky Noon, however, fails fundamentally at retaining a playerbase, which I believe is due to the lack of replayability in the game.

The game lacks replayability, despite being a round-based game. This is a massive issue, and the main reason the game is unpopular. The lack of replayability is most likely due to the nature of the game itself. The game has the exact same formula, every single round. It's simply "spawn in-shoot-kill-die-repeat". This isn't exactly helped by the lack of content in the game. There are a total of 4 guns and 5 powerups in the game, if you include the thunder in a bottle, all of which quickly lose novelty and are rather transparent, meaning they only really have a few or no uses outside of their main purpose. This paired with the fact that the game is a "brawler-type" game just digs the hole for it even futher.

There are also multiple different gamemodes, but because of the small nature of the playerbase, they are mostly left untouched. They are all also somewhat flawed in some way, meaning that FFA is usually the only thing played in the game. This just leads to the exact same issue of a lack of replayability being amplified when the game is virtually the same no matter what if you want to play with other people.

There is no bot support, either. So unless you conform to what other people want, you're pretty much screwed and can't really play the game.

This situation really sucks, as you can clearly see the amount of time, effort and love the developers have put into the game but there's just no player base surrounding it simply because of a single core issue. I'm sure there could be a resurgence of playerbase if the developers added more content, but alas, the future doesn't look that bright for the game.

One of the most fun and perhaps even most well balanced brawlers I've ever played. Quite simply a masterpiece. One thing to beware, however, is that you should be picking this game up with some friends. Public servers/matchmaking are pretty scarce for players and the players that do remain are ridiculously skilled. But other than that the game is pretty much perfect.

Please do not install this game. *It is malware*. How is it malware, you ask? When you download the game it installs a launcher that does not uninstall when you uninstall the game. This launcher runs on startup and also forcefully reinstalls itself if you attempt to remove it. Not only that, but while the launcher is running it uses CPU power (spiking between 25 - 35% CPU usage on my pc), which could be used to mine cryptocurrency. This is alarming seeing as how such activity may severely slowdown and even kill some PC's which are not rigged for those types of activities. Please do yourself a favor and just avoid this. If you have already downloaded this and need assistance removing this malware from your pc, please refer to this guide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiPoooMOJRE

An absolutely superb game. There are some balance issues, but it really all adds back to the experience. I have yet to have another game deliver the feeling I have playing this game other than S.T.A.L.K.E.R, in which I actually constantly feel in danger while also being stunned by all that the game world has to offer me. The game is also aesthetically pleasing in the same way S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is in the sense that everything is very rustic/post-apocalyptic, similiar to other titles such as Rust where there is a true sense of a civilization that has once collapsed, rather than just a few abandoned structures placed willy nilly there are actual houses/cities in a tile-based environment with lengthy descriptions attached to them that are an absolute treat to read into.

The game also hosts an excessive amount of content, so much so that you could play hours upon hours of the game and still be enthralled by it. Every piece of content you discover serves it's own purpose as well. Even the most redundant looking of things can be used in their own fashion. Being chased? Just throw rocks at whatever is chasing you. I guess what I'm trying to say is that no content is just there to be there. Nearly everything serves it's own purpose, be it sinister or not.

Speaking of sinister, the game's lore/backstory is probably one of the most interesting to read into. Within ten minutes of launching the game and starting your first run the first few thoughts you will be having is "Just how did the world end up like this?". The best part of it all is that this question is never really specifically answered, (at least it hasn't been for me yet) but there are multiple pieces of information scattered around the world such as old newspapers, the conversations you have with people and the creatures you come across that allow the player to make their own conclusions on the subject.

One thing that must be said about Neo: Scavenger, however, is that the game is not for the fient of heart. Those who have a hard time wrapping their heads around a plethora of game mechanics will quickly find themselves dying unfairly from a rather large amount of things simply because they do not know how to approach the subject. One of the game mechanics I got stuck on for a while is the combat. I was dying from some of the easiest foes rather quickly because I did not know how to properly fight at all. I had the proper equipment, but I just was simply pulling it off all wrong. This was especially annoying because of the fact that Neo: Scavenger has a rather punishing perma-death mechanic, but in the end it all became clear and soon I was dispatching those same enemies with ease.

While I was having a relatively easy time with those enemies, they certainly weren't underestimatable. A swift blow to the head by one of them could land you concussed or stunned and make the fight unexpectedly more harder for you. Certain enemies also exhibit pack-like behaviour, (not just dogs!) which could land you in some sticky situations. Every fight I've ever gotten into in this game feels like a real fight for my life, and the outcome is never truly understood untill the fight is finished. Sometimes it isn't even the fight that kills you, but the wounds or other effects afterwards that can send you to your grave, such as the Blue Frog cult, a dangerous cult that intentionally infects people with a disease they worship.

Overall the game is very pleasureable (in a masochistic way) to play and extremely punishing yet rewarding. The blend of mechanics in the game is superb, the combat is superb, the lore is superb, the feel of the game is superb, just everything about it is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ superb. I highly reccomend this game to anyone who is even a slight fan of rogue-likes, survival games or just a fan of a fun challenge.