Recent reviews by D.Mentia

I think the most important thing to say about this game is that the words really don't matter, in the same way knowing how to poker doesn't matter in Balatro.

The longest word in my last run was 'Z2ALI6OAI'. The game did find a real word that somehow fit that, but I was just trying to meet the conditions my trinkets needed, and only found out afterward what word it fits (most of those letters had special conditions to let them act as a different letter). There are so many wildcards that there will almost always be a word for your craziest combos

For reference of another run, my longest word was '♘♞♘♘C♛♛♕♞♗PE♝'. There is a word somewhere that fits into all those wildcards, there always is

And it is very fun, with good strategy and variety, and has a lot of content and difficulty options (once you unlock the basic characters). And of course, I like looking back at the runs and laughing at the extremely cursed 'words' I produced

But with all that said, they do intentionally hide a lot of information, with minimal descriptions that aren't always clear about what they're doing and why. It's pretty rare that you hit a scenario where it matters, and even rarer that you can't figure it out pretty quick, but it's a little annoying that they did this. For example, one of them is something like "if your word starts and ends with a different curse, x3 score", and you're left wondering if a blue-tiled 2 of hearts is a different curse from a red-tiled 5/4 of clubs, because they are both suited but are different suits different curses, and they're both numbers but are fractions considered a different curse from numbers, and is tile color a 'curse', and etc - and then when you don't get the multiplier, you're not even sure why (and I still don't know if numbers and fractions are considered different curses, so I can't tell you the answer to this one). That's my main gripe, but it doesn't usually get in the way

I thought I was softlocked out of progressing the story because I hadn't found the right monsties to get past a weird looking wall, so I accidentally spent 30 hours building up the perfect team to take on some of the extra bosses you're supposed to come back to during endgame

But at no point was I grinding - I was just checking out the next cool thing and trying out new ideas, exploring new areas, and just generally doing the usual catch'em'all. If I could accidentally spend 30 hours in just the first little area, it must be a good game, even if I eventually realized that the wall in question was destructible (and subsequently steamrolled the end-of-act 'boss' in 3 turns, which was fun)

... that said, the gameplay is strange and slow, introduced with long text blocks that you probably won't understand until you're digging through the menus after getting annoyed that the characters never seem to do what you want. But once it all makes sense, it gets interesting

It's just a remake of the original game, in godot instead of unity, with a few very minor tweaks and two new characters. It's disappointing that they just copy pasted the characters and most of their cards and many of the enemies and the audio and the everything, but still a good re-release

Oh, and it has multiplayer co-op now, which is impossible to balance and doesn't really make sense to do for a turn based card game, but people apparently wanted it

A fun roguelike with a neat atmosphere. RNG is only an issue at the start of each run, where getting the wrong items can end the run at the first checkpoint, but they're quick to restart, and combos feel great once you get them going, with a lot of variety. It has distinct and achievable goals for the end of each run, but continuing into an endless mode is so seamless that you almost don't realize you're doing it when you answer the "do you want to die now" prompt

I didn't play enough POE 1 to compare them, but overall it's just a polished and fun ARPG with a lot of flexibility. I never feel like I'm forced to look up a meta build, everything I try mostly just works whether I plan ahead or not, and you have a lot of flexibility to change things later in the game if you didn't do it right. It can get repetitive, but all ARPGs do, and the seasonal content keeps things fresh enough to come back periodically and enjoy it all over again

After two pretty big hits, I expected this to improve previous systems, but in all cases they seem the same or worse

The graphics are distractingly bad, where I found them tasteful in previous games, DOF seems to be applied at random and it just starts to look lazy instead of a stylistic choice

Conversations are similar - in previous games they felt alright because they were a small indie studio, so bad voice acting and bad pacing were expected, but I expected more of them at this point. For example, you choose a voice for your character and during the first cutscene they speak, and yet during all later cutscenes and dialogue they never speak again, just showing a "..." and others respond as if they actually said something. The dialogue itself feels inane and repetitive, which wasn't a problem I noticed in previous games

The actions you can perform on NPCs no longer seem to depend on your party, and you no longer can choose a starting character, and instead customize your own, which seems to go against the whole 8-path thing the game was named after (at least, at the beginning)

And of course the combat seems unchanged, and was always a bit of a slog

Overall it feels like a sloppy and rushed product, which was fine in previous games from a small studio with few successes, but I kinda expected them to improve the bad parts

If you're into Telltale style games, this one hits the mark

I really enjoyed the creepy vibes, as well as the research-based puzzles that have you examining items closely for markings, touch, smell, etc, and cross referencing multiple books, other tools, and common sense to work out what they must be or do

Has a nice hint system that gives incrementally more obvious hints until it basically tells you what to do, if you get stuck - and some of the puzzles are pretty difficult, I used it a few times myself

There's no real pressure, and failure is only punishing enough to prevent trial and error, but in order to choose new endings you just have to speedrun through the game again, which is trivial if you remember what everything does from the first time

It was good enough that I went back to play Strange Horticulture, and it's worth noting that this game is significantly more polished and interesting than the previous; identification rarely feels like a guessing game, the play area is a lot less cramped, UI and interaction feels better, and you've got a lot more depth to things - such as categories you can group items in (even before identifying them), extra tools to help identification, multiple books, etc

While it's a bit short at probably 6-8 hours for a playthrough, it seems worth it to me

Honestly just boring. Didn't have crashes or framerate issues, but they've stuck with the same old skill tree where each node adds a 2% chance to tickle the enemy, and none of the classes are interesting. It's like an APRG with ammo management and one skill per character

An enjoyable time waster, though it's really very simple and a bit too easy at the start. It's not a roguelike you can devote entire days to, but fun for what it is

With only 9 cards per king, there's just not that much variety - it's very easy to target specific builds when you get to pick from 3 (out of the 9) cards each round and can reroll them for pretty cheap. You get to pick cards from each king you beat, so you see more than 9 cards each run, but you usually just farm them for the one or two good cards each king has