Recent reviews by RubiesAreRocks

A beautiful game in art, story, and voice acting. Game mechanics are just there to give your hands something to do for the first half, but even the standard hack-and-slash combat takes on more significance in the third act. A truly unique experience, well-worth going back to retrieve. Don't get too hung-up on making the combat hard for yourself and you'll have a great time.

The game is by all measures cute, thoughtfully-designed, and perfectly competent as a metroidvania, but Jesus H. Christ does the combat drag on.
I thought I was cool with long RPG fights, but as a matter of personal taste I simply don't have the patience to go through the whole process of buffing, optimizing for elemental weaknesses, healing and debuff mitigation needed to score well in the wild encounters, which is necessary to grind the food, held items, weapons, and experience needed to progress. This game is pretty well-explained and combat seems to have a lot of depth, but I'm not sure I have the temperament to explore that when wild encounters on-level routinely take three turns of three attacks on each side. The old school Final Fantasy players can ignore this complaint entirely and enjoy a relatively brief game compared to what you're used to, but I'm like 15% in at 4 hours and the chasm of item upgrades, level grinding, and figuring out where the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I'm actually supposed to be going swallowed me whole.

The character creation is awesome. Can have a beard over a mask and an eyepatch over my only functioning eye.
Sort of sets the tone for the game, honestly. The combat is very simple and presumably starts to incorporate the deluges of numbers the game throws at you at some point, but there's just not much of anything going on with the story that I'm interested in, so I don't really want to minmax my party no matter how great their eyepatch mohawk fursona vibes are. Still, if this was someone's first game, they did a fantastic job of it, and it certainly deserves more attention than its getting, because someone will love this.

A cute little game! Not super complicated in tone or complex, but all of its elements are pretty well executed.

Just won my first run, I guess? Apparently unlocked a new level, but at this point I think I've seen enough to know this just isn't for me. The game is a weird combination of frantic and simple, the kind of bullet-hell thing that just isn't to my taste, and having to open google every three seconds to check what my items do is more annoying than immersive. I know there's tons of DLC and other versions, but there's just nothing that interesting in Isaac compared to other roguelikes I've played, so I don't think I'll bother.

Apparently a love letter to the MegaMan games, a series I have never played before. As an outsider, it's a fun little roguelike for a few hours, but it's not too complicated in plot or in mechanics and has many of the roguelike staple problems. For example, I got walled a few times by the kaizo platforming going on in the final levels, but then I had a run where I was immune to knockback and could fly for a full two seconds, so they were completely trivial.
The real test of a roguelike for me is whether I want to engage in its optional harder difficulties, and while games like Crypt of the Necrodancer and BPM feel fluid and skillful, 20XX takes from its ancestors a very plain movement system and bullet-hell elements that mean even more pressure is placed on your loot drops. Maybe the MegaMan fans find it complex and interesting, but I feel like I've seen all there is after a few fun hours. Take from that what you will.

A very stupid horror game that's often more funny than scary. The story is obtuse, characters are generally annoying or barely-present, and the enemies are completely predictable and obvious. The game is terrified you'll miss important information, so it very clearly and carefully has every dying person write gameplay advice with their dying bloodstained hands. The central mechanic of having to dismember enemies isn't scary, if anything it's almost slapstick humor. The physics engine in janky in the way older ones are, so enemies often cartwheel away once you shoot them, which is less than intimidating. People die behind glass panes in psuedo-cutscenes so often you just assume it's going to happen whenever you see one of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ alive, same for zombies popping out of vents and slowly walking towards you down a brightly-lit hallway. Why do these things only run quickly when they're scripted and then slowly meander towards you when you're trying to shoot them? Why is everything so easy to see and navigate when horror relies on being unsure of your surroundings? Why are there five identical graffiti scrawls on this wall? The Dead Space experience. I would recommend watching a cynical person play this game, it's a great reminder that gore effects and custom death animations do not make a game scary. I can't even walk outside alone on a moonlit night without getting chills, and this game was only slightly more engaging than angry birds.

Besides being a penis joke, the game is a skillful little physics puzzler with a good little song to go in the background. Liked it.

While it couldn't quite recapture the pure shock and glee of Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, Turnip boy Robs a Bank is a delightful, surprisingly well-crafted roguelike with fantastic music and cute art. Fetch quests can get a little tedious with the randomly spawning doors, and the final boss should definitely skip the dialogue at the start if you die, but a good core loop and some challenging boss-fights make for a solid skeleton to put bits of meme flesh onto. The writing is where I'm underwhelmed - while you may get a chuckle or two from the occasional well-crafted joke, there's not really a ♥♥♥♥-your-pants reveal like the last game, and the fact that all the characters are a few lines of dialogue and a sprite means that very few actually have satisfying narratives alongside their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. With the shock of the prequel already established and no infinite dungeon for post-game, robbing a bank just isn't as noteworthy as tax evasion, but it's by no means a bad game, and I do hope we see more from this team - just maybe not more turnip boy.

I'd just watch someone else play it, it's tedious and the writing is awful. The graphics and overarching story look absolutely beautiful, but that's why you should watch someone else play it.