Recent reviews by Max Mnemonic

What should've been a fantastic trek through a bizarre and otherworldly rural landscape turned into a junk food resource collectathon which grants you the privilege of collecting 20 craps to give your car door a +15 health upgrade.

Much to my dismay, everything in the game is based around this resource collecting loop:
- Anomalies (the main form of antagonism in the game) are only there so your car gets damaged and you need to craft several fixer items.
- The levels are completely devoid of anything interesting, instead opting for small shacks and campers containing shockingly few resources, of which there are only about 3-7 per level.
- Huge skill tree, but you can condense it into 4 categories: More storage for resources, higher resistance armor, 'helper' upgrades (more protection, fuel/energy generation gadgets, etc.) and yet another layer of resources that you need to craft (plus things like a radio or an item destructor).
- The story has you craft a couple things at certain points, but mostly it's there only to push you further into the map, for which you ideally need better equipment and an infuriatingly large amount of fixer items.

I just described the game, so if you look at this list and think you'd like it (I did, nothing wrong with a bit of junk food every once in a while) this might be the game for you.

The BIG problem with this list, is that it really doesn't have to be this way. The same way everything revolves around resource collecting, everything can and should NOT revolve around resource collecting. The atmosphere is supreme, and honestly exactly what you expect when you look at the store page. The anomalies have personalities. The environments are pretty and weird. The car handles really well! If it wasn't in a game this repetitive, and I didn't have to stop every 5 meters to heal the car parts, driving would actually be really fun.

I didn’t like the story, which really isn’t much of a story and more of a dialogue between three characters, which culminates in them accepting a fault in themselves. One, they are mostly bland. Oppy, the hardheaded, work obsessed hermit is the most interesting character by far, also being the most involved in the lore events, and the more direct and “aggressive” driving forward of the ‘plot’. The gay couple was mostly background noise for me. Francis, detached and cautious, clashes with Toby, the optimist go getter, but they don’t serve any more purpose than Oppy does in terms of moving gameplay along and they were just boring to listen to. Two, the player involvement in the “story” is going to location and flipping a switch. Other than that, the player serves as the in-between for the characters banter, which I never paid attention to anyway because there’s always something immediate that needs to be done in the game, be it management resource or dodging trees and debris in the highway. And three, it’s just not very interesting, and it really has a barely tangential connection to the world laid out in the game. The only connection between the characters and the story is that they are physically there in the zone where weird things happen, but their banter and personal struggles are just cliched workspace melodramas that can be slapped on any setting.


All you would have to do, is have a story which meaningfully involves the player, put things you’d actually want to explore, COMPLETELY get rid of resource collecting, and bam. GOTY.

As it stands, I cannot in good conscience recommend a time waster. It's not that time waster are bad, but if I'm gonna recommend a game, it needs to have substance. Pacific Drive didn't want to have substance.

Oh, and also it runs like crap and it’s full of bugs, and I'm not talking about the vehicle.

How much playtesting should a jigsaw game have? If we're going by 'Pixel Puzzles: Japan' standards... none!

The hitbox to grab pieces is plain bad. Sometimes you grab it, sometimes you don't, sometimes you grab the one behind it or the one in front. It's a very "sometimes" hitbox, which, for a game that's 90% grabbing puzzle pieces, is infuriating. There is no way to grab and hold without pressing down on the mouse key, and you don't realise how much it stresses your hand until you let go of the mouse. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! I've had 9, 10, 16 hours gaming marathons with my hand intact! But with a medium puzzle, it started to ever so slightly ache after a while. Very rarely a piece sticks to your cursor, and those are the times you don't want it to! And there is NO SAVING! Better finish up that other half, or you get to do it all over again.

19 puzzles, but only one music track. When you place a piece correctly you get a congratulatory sound, but there is a bamboo stick that does almost the same sound periodically! You have to check *again*, over and over, if you placed a piece correctly or the stupid bamboo decided to drop down. The one track is boring; okay for a while if it's strictly for background noise but fairly grating by the end.

You cannot stick two pieces together on your own, they MUST be placed on the board, on the exact place the piece goes. The game shows you the puzzle image randomly. That is to say, every piece you place has a random chance to fill a bar, and when you activate the filled bar, you get about 10 seconds of the full image. This is worthless for placing any but 1, maybe 2 pieces you had your eye on, and I barely ever used it.

When you complete a jigsaw, what happens? Maybe, you get to see the thing you just completed? Does the ui fade away and the image slowly fill the screen, showing you the fruits of your effort? NO! An ugly and useless "Congratulation" pops in and obscures about 40% of the puzzle you just worked hard on completing. The game doesn't like you. "Fine, you completed the puzzle, despite my best efforts. Now go away!", it tells you. Guess what, the "gallery" image size is way smaller than the one you play with.

The puzzle images themselves are nice, but they have an ugly filter applied to them, which makes the detail noise worse than it already is. Can you identify this dirt from this dirt? Where does this leaf go? What about this piece of the wall? With everything outlined before, it's an exercise in frustration.

I'm sorry to say, not feeling very "enlightened" after playing Pixel Puzzles: Japan.

This game is a paradox: It simultaneously feels like a labour of love and a store bought template with very little added in.

Yes, the graphics are great, but everything is static. Off the top of my head, your only interaction with the world is: opening doors (smashing, hidden switches, lockpicking), talking to npcs, killing enemies, opening chests. You can't affect the world in any meaningful way, nor will your actions be ever reflected in game (with a few cosmetic exceptions).
Yes, the lore is unique, but most dialogue is bland and generic. Your mileage may vary, but I was glazing over dialogue for the most basic of knowledge I needed to have after the first town. Some dialog is good, great even, but it's interspersed by a lot of generic and mundane text.
Yes, the game world is huge, with 5 distinct biomes, but it's mostly empty with the same dozen assets or so sprinkled around the barren landscape. Level design is.. let's say, interesting, but you'll spend half your time running around in circles, trying to get yourself oriented in the very specific direction to your location because everything looks the same; a regular penrose world hub, if you will.
Yes, enemy design is great, but actual combat is non-existent on a practical level. All you do is swing your sword a couple of times, maybe kite the enemy if you're feeling spicy and then they die. This doesn't change even with the final boss of the game. Rewards for kills are generic and don't grant xp, which is why the dominant strategy is to walk past every enemy in the game. None will ever pose a threat to you, and killing them is more trouble than it's worth, even if you do want the meagre 2 gold or throwing knife their decomposed corpse will give you.
The story is hard to get going, and it's a huge wasted potential if you ask me. The gist is that you need to apprehend an outlaw, and for that you need to recruit her four former companions. The way you go about this is learning their location then doing a fetch quest for them. Sure, the fetch quest has layers and exposition along the way, but it's a fetch quest all the same, aggravated by the need to traverse the confusing landscape several times over. The game presents an "assemble the team" format and then does nothing interesting with it!
Sound design: What sound design?! There's two music tracks as far as I'm aware: regular 'crystal like' sounds and the adrenaline pumping battle track. If there's more than those two, I did not encounter them, nor will I ever encounter them because the regular music was putting me to sleep, no hyperbole. I have no idea what triggers the combat music, because it was absent from my first three hours of my gameplay, after which I put something else to listen to in the background. Everything else is equally as mindnumbing, but serviceable. Potions have a potion sound and swords sound like swords... whatever, next.
Bugs: There are bugs, and I'm not talking about the mechanised spiders. But the devs are working on them, so I don't have any complaints in this department. Making games is hard!

All in all, the game was not ready for release. You can put all sorts of subjectivity arguments, but I won't be convinced. It feels to me that the supposed '1.0 release' was to get a few more eyes and a bit more funding going. I can't fault the devs for making ends meet, but that screams 'marketing ploy' to me. What's there is great, it just needs a significant amount of polish and refinement. If people enjoy it (and it seems they do), that's a good thing. Me, on the other hand, will be kept wondering what this game could (or will, hopefully) turn into will a little more work and thought put into it.

The time frame for this anthology is curiously absent from the game's description, unlike every other entry. In the post game "thank you" video, for the game 'We never left', the developer mentions having finished the game two weeks before the publisher would require a build. SUSPICIOUS, ISN'T IT? What are you hiding from us, Dread X?! A mystery is afoot! A mystery perhaps more interesting than anything in this anthology, and this time I'm including the hub world.

Let's skip to the nitty gritty, this are the only games worth a damn: 'Gallerie' and 'Resver'. Runner ups: 'We never left', 'Hunsvotti' and 'Karao'. The rest are boring, ugly, uninspired, boring, or a mix of all four. No disrespect to any dev, I'm sure they are all a labour of love, but I call 'em how I see 'em.

There's talk in the forums of this being the last Dread X anthology, and maybe that's for the best. I'm saying it because it's true. Inside of us, we both know you belong with game jams. You're part of that workflow, the thing that keeps creativity going. If that weekend leaves the ground and you're not with game jams, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

We'll always have Dread X Collection 3.

Beautifully strange and strangely beautiful, this is a game that everyone that searches for new ways to tell meaningful narratives needs to play.

As such is the nature of this kind of bizarre allure, guarded by the obscurity of being a small indie game in a huge market domineered by towering hydras, it would be a disservice to comment on the story or characters in a review. But, please trust me when I tell you this game has something to say, and all it asks in return is your time and a few hand cramps.

The grind, while arguably drawn out, has a great payoff, and if you truly find yourself struggling with the excessive clicking, I don't find any shame in using an autoclicker, which will be made obsolete by the end game either way.

So, what are you standing around for? We have deliveries to prepare!

Well, after the fantastic set of games that was Dread X 3, we're back to business as regular with "The Hunt". But this time it's worse, because the timeline got extended to 20 days, so the fact that almost all of the games are bland and uninteresting is less excusable than previous anthologies.
To add insult to injury, there are 4 games that run like absolute crap. I have an old 1070 that has served me well for years but still there were big, common, game ruining fps drops on games that have 60 pixels on screen at a time, combined! I'm not gonna scream to the heavens that this is a gaming sin and the devs should all go to jail, but like, couldn't they have dropped a patch or something? The anthology came out over two years ago at the time of writing, and it truly ruins the experience of those games.
The remaining 3 are nothing to write home about, but at least they have the decency to be adequately playable. And so I arrive at the same conclusion as the second anthology: The hub world is more interesting than any game presented in the title.
I ranked the individual games of both the first and second anthology as a form of 'closure' or 'catharsis', but with this one I don't think I can be bothered anymore. Go replay 3 if you need more indie goodness in your life.

An amazing breath of fresh air compared to the first two. A lot more emphasis on comedy rather than horror, but straight up horror was never *really* the focus. It's more about the atmosphere, be it humorous, surreal or scary. And in this anthology, I really enjoyed it.

The hub world is on par with Dread 2 as far as aesthetics and puzzles go, but the inclusion of boring and sometimes cringe-y dialog windows drags it down a bit. All the games feel cohesive and unique, and I must say I've enjoyed aspects of all them, which is why I won't be doing a breakdown or ranking of them for this title. Even with a couple of game breaking bugs or long games without a simple checkpoint save feature for when you need to close it and come back later, they're all worth playing. Of course you will like some more than others, but that is the compromise you make when you have this level of diversity.

Big thumbs up, and for anyone new looking up reviews for all of the anthologies, I'd say skip 1 and 2 and jump straight into third time's the charm.

I hesitate to say this one is superior to the first anthology, because the hub world is more fun than 90% of both Dread x 1 and 2. If that was done in 10 days, consider me mighty impressed. Really it’s almost worth it for the hub experience alone, but you bought this for the games, so let’s see how they rank.

12. Squirrel Stapler. Why does everyone like this? It’s yet another huge empty map, except this time you have to search it thoroughly A LOT OF TIMES. You’re supposed to echo locate the squirrels you’re hunting but sound doesn’t distinguish direction, only distance by how loud it is. This leads you to waste so much time searching for them, following sounds that lead nowhere, getting baited by rocks that from a distance look like squirrels, and on top of that enemies are introduced that take 90% of your health, so you either get double teamed and waste progress or you have to trek all the way to a health icon. Awful. I had to play it over several sessions because of how mindnumbing it is, and finishing it was not worth it at all. The ending is a non-sequitur semi jumpscare. Great. Also who the ♥♥♥♥ likes to hunt squirrels.

11. Arcadletra. It’s almost so bad it’s good, but really it’s just bad. You press E about 20 times to see a couple of cheap jumpscares without even leaving the two room ‘arcade’. Basically the personification of why a deadline of 10 days is just not enough.

10. The Thing in the Lake. Ugh, this one goes to the wall of shame of ‘permanently unfinished’. The only reason to trudge through its one hit kills and enemies that appear literally in front of the exit you were about to go through is the achievement, but they must have knew, because the achievement unlocks when you exit the game, having finished it or not.

9. Undiscovered. This is from the guy that made Hand of Doom?! It feels and plays like a students’ first project! Maddeningly boring but mercifully short (could have been shorter with decent walk speed and less janky controls).

8. The Diving Bell. More like the Backtrack Simulator! Zing! You log in the terminal, something goes wrong, you go there, interact with it once, go back to the terminal, something breaks, rinse and repeat until death do us part.

7. Another Late Night. You chat with a cursed game(?) for about 5 minutes in a virtual old windows-like interface. I don’t get this one, but you know what? It’s really short, so I don’t have to! Next.

6. The Toy Shop. Promising but in it’s current state it really feels like a prototype. Bland shooting with cheap enemies coming out of nowhere due to the flashlight having a range of half a meter, boring ‘chase’ sequences, uninspired level design and, in my opinion, ugly assets punctuated by a really weird filter. I won’t comment on the story because it’s pretty much the only thing going for it, but if you think about it for two seconds the “twist” falls apart immediately. Having said that, it has one of the creepiest setpieces at the start of the second hub, maybe look it up on youtube.

5. Solipsis. X-Files reference?!!?! If not then it’s just another boring walking simulator. I’d say it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome but even with it’s very short runtime there’s a stairs segment that goes on forever.

4. To the End of Days. Two words: Bad Ass. Put them together? The voice over of ‘To the End of Days’. I’d play an entire game with bland shooting if it had this dude in it. Move over, duke nukem, there is a new survivor in town. Everything else sucks, though. Except maybe the collectable posters. Blasting dudes heads is alright.

3. Touched by an Outer God: This one was pretty good. It’s sort of a roguelike in that it gives you a random pool of upgrades each time you choose one, it’s pretty short and it has perma death. The enemies are mechanically generic, repetitive and a bit of bullet sponges, but they don’t overstay their welcome too much and the indie comic-like artstyle was as close to charming as you can get when you depict elder horrors and human mutations. If you die too much I can see the game become really frustrating, but that wasn’t the case with me.

2. Sucker for Love. Everyone and their grandma has probably heard of this one already, but even if you haven’t it’s not really worth discussing it as a part of this pack because: A) The full game makes it obsolete and B) They released the demo from dread x 2 for free as a standalone! So while it’s a fun 15 minutes, there’s no reason to experience it in this anthology. Go play the steam demo, it’s a good time.

1. Charlotte's Exile: Now we’re talking. The goal is to decipher the alphabet of an ancient eldritch language with the help of a grimoire of creatures. It could’ve used with some additional ‘management of dangers’ as you solve the puzzles, and a bit more depth to the decoding, but as it stands, it’s the most entertaining and cohesive one of the bunch. It feels like part of a full game you would pay for, same a sucker for love.

So really looking back at it I only enjoyed 3, maybe 4 of the games here. Even with the great inclusion of the interactive hub I would not recommend it, sadly. If you do decide to get it, look at my review of the first one for an easter egg!

A really weak first showing. Neat concept but with only a week to create a game it doesn't differentiate itself from a regular game jam, so right off the bat you know there's an extremely low chance for any game to be polished or fleshed out, no matter how small it is, so what you're left with is a bunch of either walking simulators or neat but badly executed ideas. I recommend just watching the playthroughs on youtube if you MUST experience them for whatever reason you have. Of course, if you know you are the type of person that would love spending an afternoon testing a bunch of prototypes made by fairly creative people, you'll feel right at home here.
I'll do a ranking of the 'experiences' in this pack based on my subjective enjoyment, but I'll try not to spoil what little there is to spoil:

10: Rotgut. A joke game that seems to be a low effort Cosmo D rippoff. This one should not be in a paid product in my opinion, but whatever, you could consider it an easter egg.

9: Mr. Bucket. Clever concept, but nothing interesting happens out of it. The real reason it's in number 9 is that this is the most repetitive and mind numbing of all of them, even rotgut, and it's incredibly easy to die the first couple of times without knowing what you have to plan for. The walking speed is atrocious and the map is fairly large for no apparent reason, so dying and having to do all that walking again was infuriating. First time I restarted on my second day because I could see the game over screen already, second I made a fatal mistake and died literally right before the ending and had to push through a third playthrough just to get the achievement. Also it ends on a really crappy song, so that's even more minus points.

8: Carthanc. Great atmosphere which is ruined by awful filters and a very poor source of light. First person platformers can work but I probably wouldn't try one if I only have a week to finish it, and here nothing of note is done with it. On top of that there are unkillable, very fast enemies that come out of nowhere and ruin a lot of your progress. They can't follow you into two of the four levels but they are an incredible nuisance that only makes you waste more time.

7: Don't go out. A 'card' game on the surface, but the cards don't do much and you don't need them to win anyway. Since the game lasts about 5 minutes I'll only say it's bafflingly simple once you realise the lose condition. The sprites are nice at least.

6: Pay is nice. Interesting lore but all you do is walk from point a to b. Also it kind of looks like a porn game, you know what I'm talking about.

5: Summer Nights. I believe this one to be the most 'unique' presentation but to be honest it's really boring. It plays almost exactly like those crappy tiger electronic games and that's it.

4: Hand of doom. Now we're getting somewhere. Somewhat of a throwback to old first person rpgs like the wizardry series, but very repetitive with also a low walking speed, slow camera turning and a map that's larger than it should be for how empty it is. But this is so far the best proof of concept and I'm willing to try the full game that came out of it afterwards.

3: Shatter. To be fair to the other games, this should not be as high on my list as it is. Large empty map with an annoyingly slow walking speed and a slow charging stamina bar. Lots of backtracking and the only interaction is static dialogue and a bunch of collectables. But I'll be damned if I don't love the post apocalyptic cyberpunk atmosphere this game oozes. In my eyes, this is the only one that deserves a full game expansion with actual gameplay, but I'm obviously biased.

2: The pony factory. Fairly engaging with an interesting use of colours and the only one that feels actually like a videogame, but it's also repetitive and you are fairly fragile, which adds to the repetitiveness when you have to replay a level. Moreover, instead of ending at the end you need to backtrack through most of the previous levels and exit the building. How many times did I say repetitive already?

1: Outsiders. By far the most generic of the bunch, which ironically also makes it the most effective at horror. Locked in a house with a mysterious force, it plays sort of like a bad point and click, having to search lots of drawers for keys and obscure items you wouldn't notice you had to interact with, and the weird addition of a timer and randomly placed objects. What?! At least they have the decency to offer a game mode where the things you need to progress are at fixed places. I ashamedly resorted to a guide for this one, but honestly with the time constraint and the ease that the 'entity' kills you it's not really worth it to play it blind. With more polish this one is fairly close to being a complete game, albeit a very short one. Also it has the best ending, bar none, and it's the only one that gives you closure, in a sort of twisted way.

Brave adventurer, I beseech you, do not play this cursed collection of games! Hmm, I see you are determined to brave the depths of insanity and boredom. Very well! I shall bestow upon you an incantation, stolen from the tomb of an ancient eldritch god, millennia ago. May it prove useful in your travels across maddening desolate deserts and bountiful oasis illusions!

Promising at first, quickly deteriorated. Disclaimer: I didn't make it very far into the game at all before deciding it wasn't worth my time continuing.

Let's get things out of the way: The assets are most likely all bought from stores without any further modification. I'm not against this per se, the island looks good and clean and things mostly fit (except the text overlays), but it doesn't feel unique or interesting, or that much visually appealing unless you like extreme realism.
Also, the game runs like ♥♥♥♥. Huge fps drops every time you move the camera, even in the devs' own walkthrough that he posted on youtube. Anything above low for most 'old' machines, and the game is going to be a pain to play. I have a 1070 and have ran games more graphically demanding than this.
Having said that, I don't personally think low graphics make a game bad, but in this case setting the graphics to low makes important clues blurry, which is just baffling. And while we're on the topic, I really don't think the realistic graphics justify the whopping 19 GYGABYTES that the game takes. This type of experience can work on any graphics because it's not about graphics, it's about the puzzles and the ambience. If you don't know how to work with demanding things, choose something on the lower end, it's not a crime and would probably make the game more appealing to fanatics if it had stylised low poly assets.

A lot of people report game breaking bugs, but the only bug I've encountered were objects clipping through each other. I'd probably be more mad if I was further along the game and couldn't easily restart, but I can't honestly say the bugs I encountered impeded my progress.

Now, the puzzles, the reason you're here, oh boy: The first few puzzles, while extremely easy, were enjoyable and set the mood well for an escape island game. It was mostly pattern recognition of number and color sequences, finding a key behind a rug and turning on a power generator to activate other regions of the place. Then the game haves you quickly grab a cube through a door that closes when the cube is not in place to use it for something else. This is not clever, has no connection to the other puzzles, or even is a puzzle in itself. If we go by the logic that if we were in a remote island we could physically do these things, then I could've easily have jumped over all the fences without activating anything, or broken the window to the house I couldn't get in. Just lazy, feels more like a speedrun strat than a puzzle. Also, the cube we get is used to open a door that was artificially closed after crossing it. That door is first opened by a puzzle, and it was the only door I encountered that closed after solving it.

The immediate next puzzle is a number code, which you find placed in a blurry, poorly lit and completely inconspicuous energy meter. I hope I don't have to say why this is lazy too.

The immediate immediate next puzzle has you get yet another code, this time with colors. There are 4 coloured vases in plain view of the area next to the puzzle, they are mostly the first thing you see when you enter, and they were obviously put there for the player to notice. This pattern doesn't work. Instead, you need to open a prop which I thought was just for decoration, survey yet another blurry, poorly lit and inconspicuous set of item and put that code instead.

After that I quit. While technically competent, this is a case of a first time dev that took too much on their shoulders and ended up delivering a sub-par product. Dev, if you're still reading reviews, I really hope you learn from the things you did badly and keep the things that worked, of which I'm sure there are many I didn't notice. There's really a lot of potential here, and I would love to see what you could do with all the knowledge you got while working on this game.