Recent reviews by Aethyr

I realise I have an extremely specific use case for this software, but for that purpose, Pixeluvo is excellent. I primarily work with 3D art and render times can be extremely long, so if a finished render isn't quite where I want it to be, it's typically a lot less hassle and far quicker to use a 2D image editing program than it is to make tweaks in the 3D software and do another render. There's features in Pixeluvo I've used time and again that have really made my renders look much better than they did untouched, and it's now invariably the software that I'll fire up first if I want to make a render pop. I haven't attempted the same process with photos (I don't take my camera out much these days) but it would logically follow that if you can turn an okay render into something really good with this software, then you could do the same with a photograph. It's not expensive (about half the price of Affinity Photo, which is probably its nearest competitor, not accounting for any sales) and I've not experienced any bugs, crashes, or other technical issues even when working with pretty large high res images.

Sure, there's probably other software that has the same or similar functions, and there's nothing here that's revolutionary - though I'd rather have 10 features I use all the time than 100 that I'll use maybe once each - but I find the way things are laid out in Pixeluvo to be very intuitive - nothing is buried under layers of menus, and I really like that every change you make has a preview mode before you commit to it so you can toggle it on and off to A/B the image and see if the change is really worth making.

TL;DR if your goal is to make an existing image look better, then this software fits the bill very well.

Cautious recommend. Probably not worth full price due to being a bit light on content, but if you can get a 33% discount or better and you know what you're getting into, knock yourself out.

I like ACG's rating system of "buy, wait for sale, rent, or never touch again". This is definitely a "wait for a sale" title.

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I went into this thinking I wasn't going to like it, if I'm honest. I was expecting it'd either be Tumblr bait, a low effort meme game, or a little of both. And yeah, there are some minor elements of those things, but it's surprisingly well written and quite sweet. It's not utsuge/nakige[tvtropes.org] tier, and doesn't try to be, but I felt way more involved with the characters than I expected to, and they're not just big obvious stereotypes. It was a refreshing change to play a VN that had a predominantly upbeat tone and a story/setting grounded in the real world, and while it's not 100% played for laughs there are moments of genuine humour as well as some emotional scenes. Overall I liked it way, way more than I was expecting to.

The main downside to the game is that it's pretty short. My first playthrough clocked at under 2 hours -- though I'm quite a fast reader -- and while I've occasionally played shorter VN's, it's definitely on the low end of the scale. As far as I can gather there's also not a huge amount of branching routes; I believe the surrounding story stays the same with the only changes being which of the six dads you decide to date. (I think the store page description is wrong when it says there are 7 options.) Again, this isn't a deal breaker, as there are plenty of kinetic visual novels (i.e. ones with no choices at all) that manage to be really enjoyable, but if you're replaying to see what the routes are like with other characters you're going to be doing a lot of fast forwarding. Personally, I can't see myself replaying it to see every route as there were some characters I just wasn't very interested in, but that's down to personal taste.

I also experienced a few technical issues with the game. The most obtrusive was that certain sounds were much louder than others, in contexts where the sound has no reason to be that loud. This made playing on headphones somewhat uncomfortable as I never knew when I was going to get ear blasted by a high volume clip. The second hitch is that you click to advance the text, but the choices are in the exact same place as the regular text, so it's super easy to accidentally reach a point where you have a choice and click on one of the options before you can see them properly. I had to reload on a number of occasions due to this problem, and I feel like it would have helped to have the choices in a different part of the screen. A more rare issue (only happened twice) was where the game was stuck on a loading screen for an unreasonably long time.

Apparently some of the achievements are bugged. I do not care about achievements, though, so it's not something that matters to me personally, but YMMV.

Overall it's by no means one of the best VN's out there, but it's certainly not bad. We're talking 7/10 material here; it has a good deal of charm and wit, but it's probably not going to stay with you for a long time. Unless you draw Rule 63 fanart and the internet sends you death threats.

Pros:
+ Decent writing with good humour
+ Game is generally light and positive
+ Art is pretty nice if not mindblowing
+ Pleasant, unobtrusive music and SFX; nice theme song
+ Makes a change to see a dating sim focusing on M/M relationships

Cons:
- Character creator is somewhat lacking
- Sometimes sounds are REALLY LOUD for no reason
- No proper voiceovers, just short nonverbal clips and a few single lines
- Short length and mediocre replay value

You know how Puzzle Quest took match-3 games and added a level of interest to them by mixing the abstract puzzle-solving with some light RPG elements?

The short version is that you should play that instead.

Slightly longer version: This is another zero-effort mobile port, where you play Match 3 on a pretty small board, so you can summon up soldiers to do battle in a crappy Newgrounds-tier animation. It rapidly becomes a grindfest, so unless you're willing to shell out real money for in-game currency or repeat levels a bazillion times, it's hard to make progress. The problem is, it's not even a very good game. Match 3 has been done to death and it was hardly the world's most compelling idea in the first place. On the one hand it's free, but on the other, there are many many other things you can do for free that are more entertaining than this.

Also, your dudes fight skeleton warriors, which spray gouts of blood, because... reasons?

A distinctly short offering -- clocking in at maybe two hours -- Deadlight has aspirations to fuse puzzle-platformers like the classic Flashback or the more recent fellow XBLA port Limbo (from which it draws no small visual inspiration) with the zombie-apocalypse survival setting of titles such as The Last of Us and Day Z. However, it ends up being more like Canabalt with delusions of grandeur, being in large part concerned with running to the right.

The game lacks direction and can't seem to settle on whether it wants you to have weapons or not, taking them away and returning them capriciously. The setting is similarly inconsistent; although largely urban, a fair chunk of the game takes an inexplicable detour underground to what to all intents and purposes is a puzzle dungeon, a series of trial-and-error traps and jumping puzzles that drags on far longer than it needs to.

While trial-and-error gameplay is not particularly egregious in and of itself, Deadlight's poorly designed approach often means that you can suffer instant death from something you had no chance to anticipate; rather than finding the best solution for a challenge, it's more a case of rote memorisation. This is certainly not helped by finickity controls and a number of bugs; one particularly aggravating example was near the end of the game, where I'd repeatedly have to restart a checkpoint only to find my character spinning on the spot, unable to do otherwise.

In terms of story and characters, Deadlight leaves no cliché unturned, with the characters being barely more than stereotypical ciphers and the story, such as it is, loosely stitching together every zombie trope in the book. There is some genuinely atrocious dialogue in the game -- some of the worst writing I've come across in a long time -- delivered with at best forgettable voice acting.

Although clearly tolerable once through, despite its many flaws, it's impossible to recommend due to its brief duration and frustrating gameplay. Crucially, there's nothing here that hasn't been done better elsewhere; it adds nothing to either the puzzle-platformer or zombie apocalypse genres, and even its two-hour length feels like a waste of time.