Recent reviews by Bashfluff

Combining The Stanley Parable, I Wanna Be the Guy, and Undertale isn't as strange as it sounds. As games, they're very different, but the games are variations on the same theme: the relationship between players and the games they play. Undertale is about the relationship between players and NPCs, The Stanley Parable is about the relationship between players and developers, and I Wanna Be the Guy is about the relationship between players and difficulty.

Fever Meme is about how all of these relationships change.

To avoid spoilers, I won't tell you how the game explores that theme, but I will tell you how it made me feel. It brought back memories of playing Super Mario romhacks and I Wanna Be the Guy as a kid: the clumsy mess of art assets taken from other games, the janky code, the stupidly brutal difficulty, all of it. It reminded me of how those games can be endearing and funny and frustrating, but in a way that makes it almost impossible to stop playing. If you love those games, even if it can be hard to like them sometimes, you'll love this game.

....Then it takes those ideas and uses them to make something that feels more personal and vulnerable and revealing than any game I've ever played; like its influences, it uses absurdist humor to prime players for some genuinely heartfelt storyteling.

Aimbok, what you've made touched me personally, and I'm happy to have had the chance to listen to what you've had to say, the feelings you've expressed through your game, and the message you want to send. I want to thank you for making this game as a labor of love instead of focusing on making something that'd sell. I told you a few weeks ago when I heard about this game that it sounded like the perfect game to me, and it lived up to that expectation. It made me think a hell of a lot about games and life when I was done with it, and I'll definitely be working to earn that last achievement until that guy from Challenge Enthusiasts inevitably beats me to getting it instead.

So I'll have to settle for making this review so long that you won't be able to squish it to the same size as the other reviews without making it unreadable. That way, you'll have to manually update the game to move the next platform farther away. It's not the same thing as getting an achievement named after me, but making you have to change your game specifically because of me is just as a good. Now you'll know what it's like for one of your players to get the better of you for a change!

...Hmm. Not sure what I want to say for the rest of this review so that I can pad out the length enough to make that happen. I will say, for anyone who is reading this still and isn't sold on Fever Meme, it's hard to review Fever Meme as a game. The average person will (inevitably) ask questions like: "How much content does the game have? Is the game replayable? How hard is it? Are the graphics good?" when deciding if they should buy a game.

None of those questions matter with Fever Meme, because it's not that type of game. Brutal Meme would not be any better if it had fully voice-acted narration, cutting-edge graphics, multiplayer, or twenty hours of content--and for the same reason that I Wanna Be the Guy is perfect exactly the way it is. Everything that makes it jank is what makes it worthwhile as a work of art!

I live for those moments when you watch a movie and nobody talks about whether or not the film was good, because the film is so unconventional it doesn't makes sense to have that discussion at all, and all you can talk about is the feelings that the art brings out in you! If you feel that way to, you'll appreciate Fever Meme.


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Oh, and so that Aimbok can have a good laugh at me: I got a score of 300 in the Infinite Game section. Please point at me and laugh.

The aesthetics are nothing less than fantastic, but I would have liked the buttons to be slightly bigger. When interactable objects are small, it makes it difficult to see things that'd be obvious if they were bigger. This is, to me, why games like Portal and The Talos Principle had large interactable objects.

As an example, there's a puzzle that involves a rotating beam with buttons placed along its length. You have to figure out what sequence to press the buttons with to proceed. It took me a few minutes to figure out because--and I'm doing my best to avoid spoilers here--not everything that happened when you pressed a button was immediately obvious. If you imagine this puzzle scaled to a larger size, I don't think any player would struggle to see the critical information and would find the puzzle almost trivial to solve.

There are puzzles that--again, trying VERY hard not to spoil--involve pixel-hunting, but the buttons are so small it's hard to tell that's what you're supposed to do. If the buttons themselves were larger, again, it'd be trivial. I'm not sure this can be changed so late in development, so food for thought for prospective players. The game was otherwise excellent.

"Films have trailers and games have demos, because you need to play a bit of the game to get a sense of what it's about!" -- Yahtzee

If that quote is true, this is a bad demo.

Zachtronics games have needed to get better at easing players in for years, and that's what this demo does. The mechanics are simple to read at a glance and appropriately tutorialized. However, teaching players how to play your game shouldn't be the primary focus of your demo; it should be about showing us why your game is fun by giving players a taste of the full experience. What makes these games so fun--and addictive--is its unique blend of creative problem-solving and optimization. This demo has neither. If wasn't familiar with Zachtronics games, I'd be completely confused as to why the histograms were a part of this game, because player solutions are going to look more or less identical,

The demo consists entirely of a couple basic tutorials, which made it an almost completely thoughtless experience from beginning to end. I sympathize, because it's perfectly reasonable for the first chapter of a game to be light on mechanics and heavy on story, and I'm sure that the team would rather focus on creating the finished game than creating a separate demo. But in this case, it would have been better to let players get their hands on multiple chapters.

The trailer gave me a better look at what the game was going to play like than the demo, and that isn't a good thing.

If you like idle games, play it. This one is fully featured in the style that NGU Idle is. Lots of different unlockables to keep track of by filling an colorful array of bars, leaving plenty of room for optimization. It's lacking a few QoL features, like the ability to sort your inventory by item level, and some important things are hidden in the UI--read the information on every feature to make sure you don't miss anything.

But underneath the (slight) jank, there's an enjoyable second-screen game here.

Abandoned game. The last update for the game was over a year ago. The last excuse the developer gave for why the game wasn't being updated was six months ago. He always has some reason why he can't work on the game, but I don't see why we should believe any of them.

The game is (mostly) content complete, but it's unpolished--balance fixes and QoL features were the last things being worked on. It's still fun to play despite that, but I'd recommend buying it on sale, if at all.

You'll like this one. It's got more of what you liked about Talos 1 without being a carbon copy:

1. The puzzles are more consistently difficult. Better still, there aren't any puzzles that are mindlessly easy or make you want to pull your hair out.
2. The philosophy is even more profound and relevant. Plus, with more characters comes more perspectives to consider, learn from, and debate with, and they take full advantage of that.


The Talos Principle games are characterized by a sense of thoughtfulness. They submerge you in a philosophically dense narrative for you to reflect on while you solve a series of Portal-esque logic puzzles. As the story progresses, you'll be asked questions about your thoughts about the game's events, your own philosophy, and the Big Questions of the setting. Each part of the game is different, but they compliment each other so well that it's easy for the world of Talos to suck you right in.

If that sounds good to you, buy the game now.

If you still need convincing, know that

1. The philosophy is accessible without being overly simplistic. Unlike games like Soma or Bioshock, whose themes are too surface-level to be worth thinking about past the end credits, Talos Principle fearlessly takes on both historical and modern problems/perspectives without being pretentious, preachy, or regurgitating political talking points. Fundamentally, it's an exploration of how societies form and decay, the ways in which reality shapes our ideologies, and how societies can unwittingly transform their own good intentions into cultures of self-loathing.

2. The puzzles are top-notch. Imagine Portal, but with a new puzzle object introduced every ten puzzles. 50% of them are inventive, and 50% of them are iterative; half the time you get a mechanic that completely revolutionizes everything (teleportation and mind-swapping, for example), the other half of the time, you get one that interacts with the existing mechanics to increase the complexity of the puzzles. It's a great way to keep things fresh while preventing puzzles from becoming too easy as you get used to the mechanics.

There are 120 main puzzles (12 areas with 10 puzzles each). For the most part, the difficulty remains consistent, requiring about 5-10 minutes to solve each on average, with two exceptions:

1. The first few puzzles in each area are easy, since they serve to introduce a new mechanic.

2. The final few puzzles in each are are harder, since they're trying to test your understanding.

Better still, you only have to solve 8 puzzles per area to proceed, and you do get a number of collectible tokens that allow you to skip puzzles, so players of any skill level should be able to complete the game.


Talos Principle 2 is the right kind of sequel, that meaningfully expands the gameplay and themes from the original without losing its sense of identity. It's more than my game of the year--it's a one-of-a-kind game, and I can't wait until Talos 3.

This is the puzzle-game equivalent of a theme-park ride. Its atmosphere is what you're there for, with its simple puzzles to help pace the story out. Each puzzle you solve leads you to the next part of the attraction, accompied by some sort of creepy image or audio or change in your environment, and they are all so bizarre that I was never bored.

Destiny 2 has never been in worse shape, and it's due to the mismanagement of the CEO and c-suite.

Step down now.

The visual style is much less impressive than in 2013. The humor is much more annoying than it was in 2013. Gameplay is twitchier and based on testing reaction time and little else. This feels more like a SHMUP, as reflex tests set against a backdrop of flashy visual effects and bunches of projectiles is their thing, but you don't have the same sort of control and deliberate movements you do in those games. When the line between, say, a tiny jump and a large one is measured in milliseconds, victory isn't something you feel as much as feel that you luck into, and that's just not fun.


I love hard platformers, but the difficulty shouldn't come from having a lack of control over the character. That isn't how Super Mario Maker works. It isn't how Super Meat Boy works. Hell, I Wanna Be the Guy, a game deliberately designed to be unfair, didn't even pull this.

Hitman (2016) failed. Customers loved the game, but hated its restrictive always-online DRM, and with the episodic nature of the game spreading out the hype too much for it to catch on with the wider gaming public, the hatred of the DRM won out. Hitman (2016) bombed so hard that Square Enix let go of the studio and the Hitman IP. IO Interactive had enough money to become an independent studio instead of being shut down, but that new independent status and the extensive layoffs after made people nervous about what Hitman 2 would be like. What gave fans hope was that it wouldn't be episodic, and that without a AAA publisher, and after the studio almost tanked due to the DRM, IO Interactive had no good reason to bring it to the sequel.

IO Interactive did it anyway.

Customers voted with their wallets to show that they didn't want this, but IO Interactive doesn't seem to care about its customers...only their wallets. You may not think this sounds that bad. Customers can play offline, but Hitman 2's offline isn't worth playing.

If you play offline, almost all content is restricted until you reconnect. This means that in a game about replaying the same maps over and over again in complete challenges that give exp for unlockables, there are no challenges and no exp in offline mode. Your saves are separate in offline, too, so if you complete a challenge offline, you'll have to do it again online.

I wouldn't care so much if Hitman hadn't already had 3 hours of downtime earlier this week, following by 3 hours of downtime for Hitman 2 yesterday, and then more downtime earlier today. Maybe this will get better over time, but that wasn't the case with Hitman (2016) and I don't see why it would change. So it doesn't matter if your connection is good. You can still be left completely unable to play a game unless you want to play a gimped version that doesn't even carry progress over when it comes back online.

IO shows real contempt for its audiences for shoving this down our throats after the backlash, and I don't recommend supporting them as a company. Plenty of developers leave the AAA scene to go independent that have consumer friendly businesses, but those developers don't work at IO Interactive.

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As for the quality of the game, it's good, bordering on great...but only just.


Hitman 2 is more like Hitman (Season 2). IO Interactive didn't expand on the mechanics of the original to deliver something more than the original, but if Hitman (Season 2) is what you wanted, it's worth buying. IO Interactive learned from Hitman (2016) to give us maps in that style, but with that style all but perfected. Hitman 2 is Hitman (2016), but better. The added multiplayer mode and Sniper Assassin mode are both excellent additions and make this worth the pricetag. Not to mention that if you bought Hitman (2016), you can play visually upgraded versions of its levels inside Hitman 2, for free. It may be DLC that was turned into full game, but it's clear that real work went into giving you as much content as possible to justify the price.

However, if you wanted more out of Hitman 2 than you got from Hitman (2016), look elsewhere. It's not Blood Money 2. This game isn't even as deep as Blood Money, which had a number of features this game doesn't. Check this review of Hitman (2016) by the wonderful Coflash for details: https://steamcommunity.com/id/coflash/recommended/236870/

These are relatively minor features, but it shows that IO Interactive has made a game less advanced from what it made ten years ago, and that missed potential is visible the longer you play. There's only so many times you can go through these levels without the mechanics feeling simplistic and the AI too exploitable. Why don't enemies notice when you open doors? Why do thrown objects go through doors? Why do bodyguards let you follow the person they're guarding into the bathroom? It starts to feel unrefined, and some minor features would have gone a long way to stopping everything from blending together after a while, and that's not how a Hitman game should play. You may be able to play through maps again and again for a while, but the developers only included 6 new levels. Hitman 2 will feel same-y too soon for a game that will already suffer from the diminishing returns any sequel will have.


Hitman is an espionage simulator. You're given a target and told to kill them however you want. Discovering the unique and clever ways to do this is the fun of the game. Play it like James Bond and focus on blending in and picking up as much intel as you can to make your way to the target. Play it like a standard stealth game and sneak around avoiding guards to find the perfect opportunity to get close and strangle your target to death. Poison someone and follow them to the bathroom to drown them in the toilet. Disguise yourself as a mechanic and drop a skylight on the target's head. It's all up to you.

There are only six maps, but you're constantly discovering new things about them that help you do it all again, but better, faster, and flashier, until your playthroughs start to look like scenes from spy movies. The mechanics are a bit simplistic, but the maps are so expansive that just routing your way through them doesn't feel repetitive even after playing them over and over again. There is so much to each one that you can't see it all in just a few playthroughs. Characters are littered throughout the map, all with their own stories that can be exploited to help you complete your mission, and you unlock optional starting locations, weapons, and items for each map. Add on the contract system, which changes the target to potentially any NPC on the map, with conditions on how to kill them, and you have a recipe for success.

It's one of the most inventive and unique stealth games out there...it's just a shame that doesn't extend to its mechanics, which are simplistic and clearly a secondary focus compared to the maps. If you've never played one of these games, this is the best place to start. If you do buy it, just make sure to turn off Opportunies and Instict in the gameplay options AT LEAST, otherwise the game feels incredibly linear. If you're like me and want less handholding than that, turn off as many visual elements as you can from the HUD. The game plays fine without them (even the minimap) and it's much more immersive.


Hitman 2 is a competent successor to Hitman (2016), but nothing the game adds is able to elevate it beyond what is essentially glorified DLC. It looks more polished than it is (Again, why don't enemies notice when you open a door? why do bodyguards let you follow their charges into the restroom?) and I'm more excited for the game that uses maps these complex while adding more gameplay features than for this game itself. It may be worth buying if the description intrigues you, and this is certainly the most accessible and content-rich Hitman game for newcomers, but I can't support IO Interactive spitting in the faces of its fans. The game is almost good enough to get away with it, but not quite.