Recent reviews by TBBle

A couple of hours of pulling levers to see what goes clunk.

There's a bunch of stuff I didn't do, e.g., on the overworld map, I picked the correct island first, and then went straight to The Lighthouse, so I missed some achievements; I honestly don't feel like playing it through again, since I think 90% of the joy was in the discovery. I died once, but once I realised it's basically turn-based (it actually mentions this on the store page I realise now) I had a few close calls but managed to not die again.

Suffered a bit of UI stuttering/unsmoothness on my (underpowered) machine even when reporting 60 fps at Low Quality and fairly low res. Once I have upgraded my machine (or it appears on GeForce Now perhaps) I might run through again at High Quality/Res and see if I can find the missed achievements.

Anyway, I got it (on sale) for a few hours of pulling levers and making things go clunk, and it delivered precisely that.

Genre:
☐ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☑ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☐ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??

I played this game over the New Year break. It consumed 100 hours of my life (over 13 days) and I regret zero hours of that.

That's it, that's the review. It's exactly what it says on the box.

⚔️🔨🎣🌱🌵🍰

10/10 for delivering on the promise, and an extra billion points for the save-game tech.

Genre:
☐ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☐ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☑ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??

---

Okay, maybe some detail is warranted.

It's light on the survival side: Dying drops a corpse with your undeposited mats (except a couple of limited-supply or quest things), dying while the corpse exists loses the old corpse and the mats it carried, and no other penalties.

There's a little grinding for materials, but my pack-rat tendencies meant that the only serious mat-grinding I did was for one of the post-main-quest weapons, and I really only had to knock down a half-dozen buildings, and clearfell a forest or two. The rest of the time, I knew what I needed to collect, and mostly collected it in-passing as I played.

There's an Ubisoft-level of points-of-interest; after 100 hours, I had 100%'d all but the ones that aren't physically visible on the map (fishing spots and buried treasure), and because I'd resurrected all the perma-killed monsters, search every square meter of the map (or just the waterways) was going to be a hassle. So that's parked for when I pick up the DLC and come back to it, next time I can afford to throw 10s of hours at a game.

---

I had two heat-related crashes, i.e. not the game's fault, and in both cases I lost basically zero progress. Like, seconds or less. The only way I can see this working is if the game is doing some kind of continuous journal-based recording of every action you take (or world-state change you make), and then at "save" time (auto-save and save-on-exit), it's just processing that journal down into a data store for (I guess) each region or zone. The world was also seamless in movement, and notably fast in teleporting across the map, so whatever world-state streaming they're doing, it's nice.

And after the crashes, the game knew it'd crashed, and offered to submit the save game as a bug report if it wasn't a system crash.

Basically, it's the ext3 of savegames, and everyone in this industry should be making this a minimum bar. It's very much a slap-your-own-forehead idea, and now I've seen it, I can't unsee the large gap in every other game.

(To be fair, other games that haven't suffered a system crash might have had the same feature, but I wouldn't know. I can't think of any other game I've played that has suffered a system crash and lost zero progress, so this is the first time I recall benefiting from such a tech.)

I harp on about this both because I'm a video game developer myself, and appreciate a nice technical design, but also because it is a microcosm for something important that permeates the game and the discussion board, and is my meta-tl;dr review:

The devs greatly respect the players' time, and it shows.

tl;dr: There's something almost compelling here, but it's barely too much micro-management for me. And it crashes and loses progress way too often to push past that.

---

For the first 14 hours, I was pretty frustrated, getting to day 7 or 8 and being overwhelmed without having found the weird/rare resources I apparently needed. I reached the point of restarting almost immediately if I couldn't see the things I believed I needed, e.g. accessible fuel supplies, close enough to reach.

At about this point, I realised that I didn't need to fully repair the chopper, just get it repaired enough to take off, and refuel it enough to take off.

Once I had that realisation, the game become much more manageable. Taking off to a new building resets the zombie load, so you can quickly arrive, harvest whatever fuel is available and try and advance the chopper's repair status, and then move on. In this way, my next game went through four or five buildings in 11 in-game days, with a machete-equipped team, fully repaired and fueled chopper, and a large pile of (I believe) hard-to-find supplies and consumables being carried from building to building.

A few annoyances became clear in the gameplay at this point:

• Micro-management is annoying as most tasks are either really short or really long: You can pair up your people, and I basically played this way continuously by this point.
  
• Zombies seem to always attack the most-damaged person in range, and there seems to be no way to force the character who can self-heal to be the target; in fact, because he's self-healing, he's almost never the most-damaged.
  
• Repairing fortifications is ridiculously slow. Basically pointless. I'd be 0% surprised if one of the developers looked at this in future and said "Oh, that decimal point is two places left of where it should be", it's that slow. It takes 3 hours game-time to build, and it could easily be real-world hours to repair.
  
• Weird bugs. Random buildings becoming inoperable, occasional items that don't seem to work (tools and toolboxes), and in one case, I left a building and got the same building again. This last one was handy 'cause I knew exactly where everything was, and could just run down and grab the aluminium and fuel and a few other bits, and fly off again.
  
• There's a long gap from "Things seem stable" to "Whatever happens next". Higher levels of the skill trees have interesting stuff that looks like it'd upgrade the chopper even further, hinting at an end-game of leaving the city. But I was nowhere near unlocking those by Day 11 (as I'd needed to unlock other skill trees first), and by this point the game loop was a bit boring, as I was just wandering around trying to find enough screws etc. to cover my escape, and then hiding from the zombies overnight. Progress felt like it'd come to a grinding halt, and crafting unlocks are very slow to deliver new gameplay interactions.
  
• You arrive at a new building at 9am or so, and the daily skillpoint is awarded at 4am. So moving to a new building, it's definitely possible to miss a skill-point opportunity. I'm pretty sure this is how I got to Day 11 but had only earned 8 skill points.
  
• No save slots. Starting a new game wipes your existing save.

These issues were not, even in total, enough to put me off the game yet. I did want to see what happens after this point, what the end-game is. Escaping the city, possibly pushing down to the ground floor once you have better weaponry, I dunno.

In the end, ti's the crashes that have ended my time here. There's a commonly-reported crash that happens at dawn, i.e. immediately before the daily auto-save, and hence the worst possible time. I played through day 12 three times, on the last time I has hitting "Save and quit" every few minutes so that if the crash happened, I'd have less to resume.

I got off that building, and in the next building it seems that every time one of my characters is attacked the game crashes. I can't afford to keep her our of combat, so that save game is basically kaput, and with it, my time with the game.

I have the terrible feeling that this crash happens due to having a certain upgrade (big pockets), since that was the last skill I unlocked, and if so, then even if I started again, I'd hit the same problem at this point in the game.

So yeah. Putting this aside as "An interesting idea, poorly realised". I'm interested in recommendations for a game somewhat like this but less crashy and maybe with only one player to control.

Genre:
☐ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☑ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☐ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??

It's a short intro-story which someone manages to build more frustration than enjoyment over its brief lifetime.

Between only activating most interactions after the character says it needs to be done by being blocked elsewhere, the slow movement and actions of the character, and the unskippable cutscenes, it was a two-hour play-through the first time, and probably an hour to play through the second time (picking up missable achievements) despite knowing the solution to every puzzle now.

It's also slowed down by having a couple of multi-scene chapters that require moving back and forth between the scenes for each step of the chapter's main puzzle.

One thing that does speed the game up is that you only get to explore one dialog branch with each character, rather than being able to ask more than one question. So that's also a negative.

Apparently the devs thought the game would take much longer, as only one of the three trading cards had dropped by the time I finished. The second dropped right on the 3-hour mark.

I imagine that timing ideal was set before they took the least-obvious puzzle in the game, and set the objective marker to just give you the answer if you don't solve it fast enough.

Either that, or I'm just experienced enough with adventure games to not have struggled with anything except hunting for the newly-active hotspot in a different room each time a puzzle advanced slightly.

And as a nitpick, the character ice-skates at points in the walking animation. It's like the character has greased toes and heels, once you see it.

Genre:
☐ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☑ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☐ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??

I'll save you the trouble: The entire joke is the first 30 seconds. It turns out if you remove all but one mechanic from a game, sometimes you invent "incremental games", and sometimes you cost a person an hour for all the pleasure of a paint-drying minigame.

This one's the latter.

I spent the whole hour wondering when it was going to tell a second joke, or advance the deconstruction or something, but it never does.

Genre:
☐ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☐ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☑ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??

69 minutes to see everything. There's not much here to see. The only time I had to pause and wonder what to do next, was because I'd solved a puzzle early before the clue was given, so when I got a clue for a puzzle I'd already solved, I had to work backwards to get back on the designer's rails.

To be fair, I played their later effort (Tested on Humans) first, and there's definitely some growth between the two in puzzle design, length, guidance, so maybe my expectations were too high?

Perhaps pick them both up in a bundle on-sale, and play this one first, so you can experience the improvement, rather than the disappointment I feel.

Other negatives: Overdone "bad guy voiceover" and "spooky" ambience (which I turned off almost immediately); and lack of body meant I had mild motion sickness the whole way through. Also, ending was telegraphed way too early.

On the plus side, only one puzzle seemed to require external knowledge or logic: I'm sure there are multiple solutions to the chess puzzle that fit the given criteria, I went through a couple before finding the one that triggered the 'correct' noise. Perhaps there's some "chess puzzle" expectation I'm unaware of, or I missed a clue. As is often the case, a limited solution space means brute-forcing the last few possible variations is feasible.

Genre:
☐ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☑ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☐ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??

It's a qualified Yes for me.

First off: It doesn't say this, but it's saving all the time. I'm not sure when exactly it saves, but there's no save button or indication that it's saving, nor suggestion about saving when you quit.

The core game-play itself (driving, running around) is serviceable, but not wonderful. It wasn't bad enough to make me stop playing, nor good enough to make me just want to drive around and enjoy the city. Every system (the map, the driving, dialog, shopping, etc) felt just a little clunky, not quite nailed down.

Anyway, you're playing the game for the story. It's nothing special or exciting, nothing world-changing in the future-dystopian genre, but it's well-told, the characters are mostly rounded (except the MC, who seems to jump back and forth a lot). Maybe I'm blase to the genre, but there wasn't anything particularly new here, like every element was something I'd seen elsewhere before, so there was no real surprise or moments of shock. Every Chekov's Gun was fired, sometimes in as little as three lines of dialog between introduction and action, sometimes with long periods without addressing it.

I did find myself at the end, having done all the side-quests I'd seen, thinking "Is that it?"... I don't have the DLC, but I also don't really feel any loose threads tugging at me. Partly because it seems like a few of the "so whatever happened to X" stories, that really didn't need any further resolution, got wrap-up conversations transmitted one after another after the story's climax, while the gameplay itself was idle, no nav-point to follow or particular direction to go.

At a couple of points, I found I was parked, waiting for unskippable dialog to complete, and one dialog I had to listen to three times as I managed to trigger a bug where the elevator to the final scene left without me, and I had to ALT-F4 and reload my save as my camera and movement were locked, just staring down at the rainy scene below me; the auto-save had been right before a long unskippable dialog, but the position was where you ended up at the end of the dialog (or part-way through, if you were driving reasonably efficiently). I think the unskippable dialog is supposed to cover long drives, but the timing was rarely accurate.

If you do find you bounce off the gameplay, or the MC's inconsistent moral approach, perhaps you'll find some satisfaction in the similar story and atmosphere of Beneath A Steel Sky, which is free, and a classic, and which I just learned had a sequel released in 2020.

Genre:
☑ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☑ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☑ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??

It may not scratch your itch, but oh my goodness did it scratch mine.

If you enjoy the moment where your own inner monologue goes "But if that's the case, then... and so this... and... Oh!", then it'll probably work for you.

The whole thing is about discovery, so there's no details I can give about this that wouldn't be a spoiler. It is a bit of a slow start though, and it's certainly not going to feed you answers, but if you don't bounce off it early, the payoff is worth it.

It also doesn't feed you achievements... I managed to finish the entire game in 20 hours with no achievements (which possibly means I missed something, but I can't see what it could be), and unusually for me, I want to leave it like that, because the achievements look generally like fiddly mess-abouts, and slightly detract from the feeling of relaxation and resolution I have now. (I did go back and do one trivial achievement, "Kill yourself in the first 60 seconds", and felt like I had cheapened the experience by doing so)

The only downside is some annoying capsule physics in a 3D work bouncing me around a lot, but the need for precision is infrequent, and the penalties are small.

I also needed to consult a guide once to work out how to do something, it turned out I was trying the right thing, but had failed a few times and assumed it was the wrong thing and moved on.

Genre:
☐ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☐ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☐ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??

... Okay, it falls into none of these. I guess if you win a BAFTA for Best Game, you're allowed to defy categorisation.

A six hour walking-simulator (floating simulator?), that I played through in one sitting, because I wanted to see how it ended.

More satisfying and less frustrating than Subnautica, which I never finished, despite wanting to see how it ended.

Genre:
☐ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☑ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☐ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??

I came for the space lighthouse button-clicking and lever-pulling, purely based on the screenshots.

I was rewarded with an engaging narrative adventure, that also delivered plenty of button clicking and lever-pulling in a space lighthouse. Hence the possibly-surprising genre assignment at the end of this review.

None of the puzzles were particularly hard, but I did have to ask the AI assistant for a clue once or twice. None of the puzzles seemed to require cuckoo-cloudlander-logic or only-makes-sense-in-retrospect solutions, which was nice.

Not very long: about 4 hours for my first playthrough, another two or three hours for a second playthrough to pick up a few missable achievements; the replay was slow because it lacks the 'dialog-skip' options of a Ren'Py-style visual novel, or any kind of chapter-select. You can roll back a savegame backup (instructions in a pinned Discussion) if you forget to do something before ending a day, but otherwise you have to start again if you miss one.

I saw it twice, and I'm still processing the ending.

Genre:
☑ Something Terrible Happened To This Sad Child
☐ Something Is Horribly Wrong In This Space Station
☐ Can You Collect All The Power Orbs??