Recent reviews by BinarySplit

Short and unfortunately dead. It seemed pretty interesting, but ends abruptly after 30 minutes of gameplay. While I hope that the devs come back and finish this, I can't recommend a game where 30 minutes is considered enough content for one episode.

Fantastic translation work if you're learning another language and want to practice (I played in German), great if you like story-driven games, pretty tedious if you expect any sort of action or gameplay.

The good: Good story, cool setting, awesome premise. You're a ghost detective investigating real-world crimes. You can walk through walls, read peoples' thoughts, mess with cats, etc. There are numerous optional side stories described in the in-game lore that contribute towards the main story, and it is all neatly wrapped up with a satisfying ending. While the gameplay isn't point-and-click, it gave me the same enjoyment I'd get from a good Wadjet Eye story-focused point-and-click game.

The bad: It's a collect-a-thon, and the detective gameplay is weak. Most of the game is just looking around the environment finding clues. About 3/4ths of the clues are for backstory or side quests. With main quest clues you occasionally have to solve a puzzle by selecting the right clue to answer a question, but you get unlimited retries and often you'll be left wondering how you could have known which answer was correct. The "survive demonic spirits" parts were thankfully short, as they were just boring stealth sections that didn't really add anything.

The ugly: The high price & short length. Don't buy it at normal price, it's only 7-10 hours long. Wait for one of the 85%-off sales.

Recommendation: If you're practicing a supported foreign language, absolutely get this game. Otherwise it all comes down to how much you like story-focused adventure games. Regardless, wait for a sale.

My Time at Portia is pretty amazing. It's basically 3D Stardew Valley - you adventure, craft, farm, socialize, mine and fight to help progressively improve the community you've just moved in to. It's so much fun it has been ruining my sleep schedule.

It's surprisingly complete for a game that has just hit early access, but there are a few rough edges and a few places content seems to be completely missing. I got 10h of gameplay before content seemed to start slowing down, but at 19h I've yet to hit the wall where content runs out.

I highly recommend My Time at Portia, but even though it's one of the better early access games, whether you should buy it now or after release depends on whether you're willing to start playing it again in a few months/years when it's released.

BUY IT ON GOG, NOT STEAM. The Steam version is broken and nobody bothered fixing it. You can't get in-game, it just crashes.

As for a review, I remember playing the demo ~15 years ago and being completely rapt by the game world. However, trying to play it these days is an exercise in frustration due to the controls. Your character moves like a tank. Strafing is possible, but so slow you'll regret even binding those keys. I really love this genre and have enjoyed the crap out of some of Piranha Bytes' other games, but Gothic's control scheme is just too annoying for me to recommend it.

To address all the people saying this game is "abandoned" - as far as I can tell after 10 hours, it's a mostly complete game. There are a few bugs, a couple unimplemented items that say "(SOON)", but it seems like everything you need to play the game is there. I don't know if there's an ending because I'm never going to get that far, but I get the feeling that a lot of people are salty that the devs didn't spend years and years adding new free content like Terraria.

That said, Edge of Space isn't terribly fun past the first 5 hours. At the start it's very similar to Terraria - you kill, mine & craft your way up the tech tree. However, the higher you progress, the more you get bogged down with useless items, needing to use many different machines to craft each of the different alloys, clunky menus, stale combat, mining scarcer and scarcer materials, etc. Basically after 5 hours it becomes a joyless grindfest - higher tiers of tech stop bringing new mechanics and instead just bump up the numbers, but each tier is progressively harder to achieve than the last.

Was it worth the US$3 I paid for it? Yes, it was fun for long enough. But it would have been a Recommend if it were just a 10 hour fun game, instead of being 5 hours of fun, and probably 50ish more hours of grind.

It's a great puzzle+comedy adventure game, and I hope they make many more. It's not in the same league as masterpieces of fiction such as I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, or The Longest Journey, but it's certainly at the top of the league of puzzle+comedy adventure games, giving me more enjoyment than Full Throttle, Day Of The Tentacle, and almost all of the other SCUMM games.

One thing to note: The Casual difficulty doesn't just make the puzzles easier, it also cuts out about 1/3rd of the game's content, leaving many plot threads unexplained. Unless you're going for every achievement (takes ~18 hours, vs ~9 for one full playthrough on Hard), I'd recommend you only play on Hard. There's a very good built-in hint system if you get stuck, but most of the puzzles are at just the right difficulty level that you won't need to use it often.

Mixed review - I recommend you check back later.

At the moment Planet Nomads plays almost exactly like a very early alpha of another game,
Planet Explorers. The similarity is uncanny - huge alien world covered in different mineable biomes, destructable terrain, crafting, jetpacks, land and flying vehicles, exploration-driven storyline, etc. but Planet Explorers is a (mostly) completed product, has multiplayer, and is cheaper.

Although still in Early Access, in some ways Planet Nomads feels a little bit more polished than Planet Explorers. The building is easier, and it doesn't have an awkward colony management system. It has the potential to be a better all-round experience, but I'm hoping that they'll pivot a bit and pull Planet Nomads in its own direction, instead of following Planet Explorers so closely.

If you want to play a survival crafting game now - get Planet Explorers instead. If you're on the fence, it wouldn't hurt to wait a bit to see if Planet Nomads turns itself around.

I got stuck on a bug early in the game in a location called The Anechoic Lazaret. In the forums, tens of people have complained about this bug and 11 months have passed since the first report. Someone in the forums have actually posted how to edit the game files to fix the bug, but the developers haven't even done a minimal amount of work to patch that fix into the game.

The developers have clearly abandoned this game in a buggy state. This is really disappointing, as it had a lot of potential. Save yourself the frustration and avoid this game.

The gameplay and exploration are really fun. Well worth the price.

I loved Gone Home, and I found the basic gameplay of Tacoma quite enjoyable, but I don't recommend it.

Firstly, it's way too expensive for a 2-3hr game. Although the backstory and personality of each of the characters is incredibly detailed, the plot is actually really thin and the ending not very satisfying. The conversations between the characters are fun to follow, but the story keeps interrupting and detracting from the main core of the game.

If you liked Gone Home and you find Tacoma for sale at or below $5, there's a decent chance it'll be worth it for you. However, if you haven't played Gone Home yet, you definitely should get it first - it's a much more enjoyable experience.