Recent reviews by Rostopher

Absolutely wild ride from start to finish. Trippy visuals, smooth combat, a moving backstory for the Fadens and absolutely stellar encounter design. Technically flawless too - ran smooth even in super intense fights, and especially with those visuals, it's a sight to behold. Treat yourself, you won't regret it.

Listen. It does what it says on the tin. I spent 4 hours chopping down trees. It was good. Relaxing. Progression was neat. Ending was cute. Little easter eggs scattered around, also cute. If I had feedback, the jump kind sucks, and mapping sprint to LB on controller by default is mental. But hey, it wasn't expensive and I otherwise had a nice time.

Fun enough for the time I spent with it, but once you've achieved automation the game falls off quite hard in terms of being engaging, as the game never truly outlines a goal other than 'inspect parcels' or does anything to shift it around. All it does is gives you more holes that parcels come out of, and more holes for parcels to go into, but there's no incentive to actually utilise these extra parcel holes (I've now said holes a lot), or any particular tension in the game once you've automated everything. Maybe something like having the prohibition lists change and you having to manually tune the automated inspection machines to get them to pick up weight classes and such would've been interesting, I dunno.

It's fine though, I think I got my money's worth out of it, and the game plays nicely for your time with it, so it's a recommend definitely if you, like me, love conveyor belts.

Extremely silly - especially the full manual mode - and yet delightfully crispy gunplay. Slamming that magazine in and charging the weapon just in the nick of time to snatch a headshot on an oncoming enemy? Absolute cinema. A lot of folk are complaining that it lacks 'content', but I think it precisely stayed it's welcome, and was in fact just on the cusp of over-staying in that final encounter. Worth every penny, in my opinion.

It's just extraordinary. A genuine masterpiece. Everything that is great about games condensed into a meticulous, ingeniously crafted, pulse-pounding, nerve-shredding, heart-wrenching piece of actual art. Buy it. Persist with it. Beat the snot out of that mountain. Transcend your physical form. Start it again immediately.

Bought this on sale and finished it in one sitting. Loved the art style, the bone-dry humour and the way the story was woven into the languages that you discovered. Maybe a couple of nonsense puzzles, and for one of the languages, the structure was a little bit too esoteric, resulting in having to resort to Googling two of the puzzles in that language, as well as one instance of an item being so spectacularly hidden that I was wandering in circles for about 30 minutes trying to figure out where I'd gone wrong (thankfully stumbled across it just as I was starting to lose patience). But otherwise, an absolute delight from start to finish, reminded me of the classic point and click days, except I was collecting words instead of rubber chickens and pulleys. Thoroughly recommend.

Absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ miserable experience. 10/10 going into NG+.

It's good.

There's a lot of fun to be have here, but the game is marred by a ton of technical issues.

The good:
* Each machine is unique and takes a little time to get used to, but once you've got it mapped in your brain, you can do some wonderful smooth movements that are extremely satisfying to execute
* The breadth of jobs and contracts available is staggering, and the fact that you can choose either a quick version or an in-depth version depending on how long you're planning on playing is great.
* Detail on the machines themselves is impeccable, and combine that with excellent haptics on controller that makes each one feel really impactful.
* Multiplayer can be both chaotic silliness, and well-oiled machine - the potential for both comedy and slick teamwork is genuinely impressive, and it's a huge amount of fun to play with friends despite some issues (noted below).

The bad:
* Presentation outside of the modelling of the machines is very rough.
* Menu's are a nightmare to navigate, especially on controller - for example, you have to use the right stick to navigate, most things, but then the D-pad to select different sub-options, which is bizarrely unintuitive
* Biggest complaint is that it runs like absolute crap on the 3 different machines I tested on that more than met the recommended requirements, including on Steam Deck, which can run infinitely better looking games that this effortlessly. Even with graphics set to absolute minimum, and particularly if you have more than a couple of machines present at a job site. It doesn't run well out the gate, and seems to also suffer from a memory leak which leads to extended sessions seeing your FPS dropping to slideshow levels. Needs a fair amount of optimisation work, hopefully the devs will be on point for this.
* If you join a pal's multiplayer game, you get almost 0 progression on your character - all the money goes solely to the host, and whilst you do gain XP for character progression, it's basically negligible. It would be cool if they could figure out a system where you effectively bring your construction company to the table in someone else's world, sort of like a sub-contractor, and you can field all the machines you've earned in your single player game, and earn a cut of the XP and money for you own company in exchange.
* The M&K controls are extremely weird on some machines, particularly cranes where it's almost overly responsive to your inputs - having a controller on hand is very much recommended.

Overall, though, a tentative recommend from me as despite all the issues I found that I'd played for 10 hours straight and it was dark outside on day 1. It's conditional on the devs continuing to support with both optimisation and gameplay/UI improvements, but even in its current rough state, it's still extremely playable, so yeah, give it a whirl!

This game is genuinely a masterpiece.

It's a game about designing alchemy machines to synthesis molecules, it gives you a set of tools, the ability to manipulate these tools, and a target molecule, then says 'off you go'.

Few games out there can both make you feel incredible smart, then immediate slap you in the face saying 'look at all these people who did better than you!', and rather than that being incredibly offputting, you immediately go back your solution to see if you can figure out ways to improve it.

The intricacies of the puzzles are genius, and there's not a single one that feels unfair. The latter half of the game features ones that do initially look intimidating, but the learning curve is so masterfully crafted that by that stage, you will have learned a significant number of tricks to help you with build the more complex molecules efficiently.

Even when the game does say 'you didn't do as well as other people', there is genuine joy in finding solutions to these problems.

As well, the story that bookends the puzzles is really great - a factional struggle in a fictional semi-Venetian city, the final twist is some fantastically weird meta-storytelling.

The crowning glory is the wonderful 'Save to GIF' feature, that allows for easy sharing with friends to show them your weird-ass machines.

So yeah, if you like puzzles, I cannot recommend this game enough. It's weirdly relaxing, and and if you're like me, you'll lose hours of your life to perfecting your creations.