Recent reviews by SoftQuartz

adding extra ropes seems to do something to the speed bonus. I got at least three speed upgrades and the rope never came close to the speed shown in the trailer.

anyways. funny concept. nice polish. relatable character motivations.

I played a bit of this on switch and I wished I'd stuck with it. I've enjoyed taking another crack at it on PC

A+ puzzles
the story is well voice acted, but I didn't connect with astra the way the narrative seemed to expect me to.
the setting doesn't integrate into the puzzles quite as well as portal 2 does, but that's an insane standard to hold this to.

there are a lot of puzzles. there's a lot of walking around, and there's a lot of listening to various characters talk. after all that you are rewarded with the knowledge that nothing changed.

So. awesome gameplay, the puzzles scratch the itch of portal style mechanics.

graphics, style, and gameplay are nice. I'm not a huge fan of the tutorial just being a bunch of pages to read, but I'm just spoiled by playable tutorials I suppose.

The equipment, shopping, and upgrading systems are all smooth and well incorporated, and the process of unlocking letters to find out what villagers are saying is hilarious and fun

however, I'm dropping this because the fire tower makes my eyes hurt. its SO red. the well was already pushing the viewability with so many enemies blending into the background but I'm not going to continue playing a game that makes my eyes hurt even if the gameplay loop and sounds are superb.

very fun game. It could use some quality of life stuff like the ability to bulk sell boxes and indicators on what upgrades can be purchased at any given moment, but I still had a lot of fun. rr

the recorded reactor startup feature didn't work for me, and the prestige points seem to be given out a little too freely, but altogether the regular gameplay made very nice visuals and sounds, and the warp mechanic was amusing. I felt I was able to trivialize the progression by repeatedly restarting and spending prestige points much faster than is possible with any of this game's peers. I do however appreciate that this makes the game altogether quicker to 100%, because I'm not totally sure I would enjoy this game as much if its progression was as slow as cookie clicker.

i had a bit of a slow start and the value of the progression tree items doesn't seem all that balanced to me, but altogether I enjoyed this take on the old classic. it reminds me of how I played a little asteroids clone on some lego starwars game for the nintendo DS.

Great music, great aesthetic, novel gameplay. My only complaints is how much it punishes you for attempting levels you cant complete yet. it can be truly infuriating to be stuck on a level and repeat it over and over again for meager rewards when the best way to get past the difficulty is to farm the last boss you completed.

maybe i missed some tooltip reminder on the death screen, but it seems like that would be a really good place to suggest powering up, otherwise the game counts on the player to notice how much less you get if you die on the final enemy of a level

watched friends play forever ago, tried and dropped it a while ago because it was just too slow.
recently decided to give it another shot as a joke because Aloy is in genshin impact and I am very much enjoying it now. having a good controller with Gyro aim is pretty essential to the feel of the game because its designed for controllers but using a stick alone to aim is frustrating. once that control feeling is streamlined everything falls into place and I find a groove of being more assertive in combat scenarios rather than hoping to one-shot everything like a skyrim archer.

Best advice I can give is to not wait for the perfect moment to attack. make the moment, maybe die trying, and then use what you learned to outplay the bots.

im not sure if i'm going to keep playing. I've gotten kinda used to rougelike games requiring some learning the game and strategy that isn't obvious from the beginning, but I've done three runs. I won the first one, and on the second and third i raised the difficulty each time. Still, I won.

as a deck building game it has plenty of novelty, but I cannot raise the difficulty any faster and I'm still not using whatever the little trinket thing is you get for completeing a run on a character.