Recent reviews by PizzaSHARK

After 500 hours, I have these few things to say:

The base game is a little bit anemic, but depending on how much you enjoy "purposeless" self-directed exploration, you can still probably get 10-40 hours or more just from exploring and seeing all the pretty things. Hello Games adds new bits of content and things to do about once a quarter, but almost never add new assets (such as buildings, terrain types, colors, models, etc) so planets will become very same-y over time. You'll come back, do the new things, and move on. Considering that WoW and FFXIV expect you to pay a monthly fee for this type of thing, while Hello Games does it for free, I can't really complain.

But keep in mind that, much like Minecraft, the base game is a little bit anemic. Mods currently are limited in what they can affect (though the community is working on something that has promise for allowing deeper alterations to the game, so who knows what we'll see in a year or two?), but at minimum you can get things like rebalance mods, "cheats", and many different ways of altering terrain generation, adding new color palettes, etc. It will never let you transform NMS into another game (compared to total conversion type mods for Minecraft, Bethesda games, etc) but it does let you expand the possibilities of the game considerably. And that's why I have 500 hours in this game, and easily see myself having 500 more. I'll stop playing for several months and then come back and play for another several months.

It might have had a disastrous launch, but Hello Games really have made something genuinely unique and special.

It's not quite the gameplay I was wanting. I think I'd want a refinement of Cultist Simulator's card decks concept, but what Book of Hours does is certainly interesting, and the writing remains second to none. The guy genuinely understands what Lovecraftian means. Much of it sounds like nonsense, but you can piece together *some* threads of understanding... but never the full picture. It's wildly creative and a joy to read.

But like Cultist Simulator, be prepared to do plenty of reading and piecing things together. If you're willing to put in that bit of effort, you'll have a great time.

Fantastic little analog horror game. It's essentially a light puzzle game - you're given a list of possible answers, callers phone in with their problems, and you have to match what they're saying against your list of possible answers and pick the correct one.

The aesthetic perfectly evokes the feeling of Windows 95 PCs and programs, and all lines are voice acted, and frankly done pretty damn well! After beating the game, you gain access to an art book where the dev talks about the process of developing the game, as well as options to allow you to intentionally pick wrong answers without losing the game - if you get a call wrong, you'll receive a followup call later and some of them are quite good!

Expect 2-4 hours of gameplay. That's a little light for a $15 pricetag, but I don't regret my purchase one bit and I believe they're working on adding a randomzier/endless mode as well, and the nature of a title like this would make adding new callers, new "threats", and other things relatively simple. If $15 is too much for a short game, just wait for a sale.

Either way, it's an excellent game and a must-have if you're into analog horror!

Controls suck, and the game is quite boring. I'm told it gets good "a few hours in," but as far as I'm concerned, if a game starts boring, then it's a sign the devs should go back to the drawing board and find out a way to make the introduction more interesting or directed. Can't get my money back if the game still ain't fun after "a few hours," you know?

Moving around is unnecessarily cumbersome (who thought needing to "charge" a damn jump made any kind of sense?) and the lack of any kind of auto-regulation feature while moving around in zero-G (yeah, you can target something and press a button to match its velocity but there's no auto-stop feature) makes it all an unnecessary hassle. Something like the auto-stop feature (toggle on/off) like in Space Engineers would be very, very welcome here.

It's a story game, so I'll just watch some of the thousands of videos on the subject and just get my money back. I'm not willing to risk getting stuck with another game that ends up being not very fun even after the refund period has ended. If you can't make good gameplay to go with the story then write a damn book.

NOT COMPATIBLE WITH INTEL GRAPHICS!

I don't see it anywhere on the store page, but in the tech help section of the game boards, there is a known and recognized unavoidable crash with Intel graphics after the intro. The most recent ticket was from a user with Iris Xe graphics, but I am getting the same type of error with Arc graphics (A750), which exceed the recommended GPU specs in terms of power and performance. It appears to be some issue with Intel graphics in general, so if you got an Arc GPU, you'll have to give this one a pass until such time as the devs solve the problem.

The intro was cool, at least? I don't know if I can really comment on the game itself, but the intro was neat! Maybe someday I'll get to play the rest of the game...

Balance is in a really bad place. Monsters have a ton of cheap attacks and it's even more RNG-reliant than the first game was (because monsters have higher resists across the board while heroes have lower resists) bosses and large enemies get multiple actions per turn, and it feels like the game expects you to grind for 30 hours before you're allowed to play. You need to spend candles to unlock paths and trinkets and passive boosts, then you need to find shrines throughout the world to take your heroes to so they can unlock new skills. Blizzard could take a few lessons from Red Hook on how to really punish players and push their noses to the grindstone because even WoW wasn't this grindy at its worst, and Red Hook should probably look to other popular roguelikes for lessons how to make the game fun from session 1. I've got way too many hours in Dredmor, Isaac, Hades, Dead Cells, and more and it's because those developers all kept some things in common.

The first few hours were fun, but now I can't refund it. The game is functional but it's not worth $30. $15 would probably be a fair price, but it needs a *LOT* of balance work. I can't recommend it in its current state. It needs help.

This game had me ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ *hooked* right until the very ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ end. I really don't enjoy countdown segments in games, especially not when you combine questionable instant-death "platforming" with them.

The game is a straight 10 all the way to that point, and I'm sure I'll go back and finish it later but... man, talk about a 100 to 0 moment. Being told you have to start an entire damn segment over again because you took a little too long figuring out a boss's gimmick or because you died too many times to "not the best hitboxes" movement isn't very enjoyable.

Still think it was worth the price of admission, though. Several hours of good old RE-style fun!

Saw a speedrunner playing this game casually one day, ended up stopping the stream so I could buy it and finish it for myself after the first big reveal moment that made this game clearly more than it first looked. Definitely the right decision.

There's a little niche of, like... "real life simulator horror games," where doing a boring 9-5 type job is part of the gameplay. Something you associate with devs like Chilla's Art. But these folks did an amazing job and Happy's is definitely a great game.

It's kind of hard for me to talk about the game in detail without spoiling anything, but the basic gist is that you go to your job at a McDonald's imitator and flip burgers and serve meals to customers, and then you have free exploration after your work (as well as before.) Things open up and get weird and it goes from there.

Also, unexpectedly fantastic music in this game. Not really the kind of game you go into, expecting a good soundtrack... but it is!

Pretty good game, but there's a lot of bugs due to the aging engine used. Even got stuck in the moment right before the ending cutscene began, and had to repeat the boss fight! You're supposed to shove some rocks out of the way and I guess the game decided to try and walk over them? Got stuck in a wall...

Good game in the Alien: Isolation style. You have an invulnerable stalker that reacts to your presence and enters and exits areas via clearly marked objects, and while you can delay them or cause them to flee for a period of time, you have few resources and in some cases, those resources are also used to open up shortcuts, rooms with supplies inside, etc.

Save scumming was always an issue with Frictional games in the past, and it's still something of an issue here. While you can only save in a single central location, and things like door codes are randomized for each playthrough, the codes aren't randomized on a per-save basis. So you can, for example, go through an area and write down or screenshot the codes you find, go hug the monster for a trip back to spawn, and now you still have those codes - they aren't randomized each time you load the save file.

Though, frankly, given what a huge pain in the ass (and not in an interesting way, either) the Maintenance area was, I don't really feel bad about doing it. The monster is cool and interesting, the rats are not and they should have come up with something better and less binary. How the ♥♥♥♥ is our guy not picking up one of the many shovels or other tools we see lying around and just beating the tar out of them? Sure, they are Rodents of Unusual Size but you could still probably decapitate them with a good shovel smack...

I don't think The Bunker quite reaches the highs of Alien: Isolation, but it also doesn't overstay its welcome like AI started to by the end. Took me about 4.5 hours on Hard for my first playthrough, and that felt about right. I think it could've gone on for another hour at most before beginning to get tiring, so they hit the sweet spot here. I do like the layout of the map and think it's well done. Exploration was a lot of fun!

Too rough around the edges.

Looked fun on a stream I was watching, picked it up on sale because I like supporting indie devs doing niche content like this, and it looked well made.

Some substantial performance problems, but maybe those can be worked around? Setting it to potato settings made it run fine, at least. Bigger issue is there is no menu to show or customize keybinds, and the game is pretty bad about telling you what buttons to push and what they can do. First time I sat down at the computer, it never told me what button to push to get up. Had to tab out and ask google! Then, of course, next time I sat down at the computer, it helpfully told me the button to push was X.

Picked up a package on the roof, went to the door it said to deliver it to, and there's no prompt to drop off the package. No button to push to drop off the package. Nothing. This time, google wasn't any help. Whatever, I'll play a game that's actually finished while I wait for the developer to finish baking this one.

I'm going to shelve this game until it gets some more polishing done. I think there's a good game here, but in its current state I can't recommend it. I do look forward to when the game is polished and finished. Like I said, I think there's something pretty special here.