Recent reviews by Finn The Inhuman

Heard joke once: man goes to mechanic. Says he's depressed. Says game seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels naked in a threatening world with a broken weapon he can't repair and is spiralling into defeat. Mechanic says, "Fix is simple. Each area has great room that spawns lots of enemies. Go there and spam Homing Ninja Star until they drop enough green dots. That should fix your weapon." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But mechanic... my broken weapon IS Homing Ninja Star!"

Moral of the story: Homing Ninja Star is your friend, use it often.

A fun roguelite/platformer. It feels like Binding of Isaac got blended with Metal Slug, set in a weird cyberpunk world with inspirations from Greek mythology. The pixel graphics are neat and the controls and responsiveness are amazing; with a controller, the game plays smooth like a dream even on my relatively old laptop, which is important for its particularly frantic gameplay. Much like a lot of modern roguelites since Rogue Legacy, it also implements an upgrade mechanic in which after each run you return to your base and can unlock further characters, rooms, bonuses and so on to make successive runs easier.

The main thing to note however is that for all that it's pretty fun, it's definitely a game that requires you to pray to RNGesus quite a lot. The game isn't too harsh, but each run tends to be decided in the first one-two floors. If you find bad items and start struggling, you're likely to lose. If you find good weapons or items that synergise well, then you can easily snowball and then can stroll through the rest of the game with your eyes closed. Some items are broken, especially in combination with others, and the better you do the more keys/gems/money you can save, which allows you to open more doors and chests, find more loot, and so on in a virtuous loop which ends with you being an absolute god of destruction laying waste to everything around you in instants. Which is satisfying but not what you might enjoy if you're looking for a tough challenge that keeps you on your toes for the whole run.

So I'm going to give this a positive review, but mostly, this is influenced by the fact that the game is free. Interpret it more as a "maybe". You get to try the game and see if it works for you, so do that, but there's very good reason why it might not be your cup of tea.

"Get in the car, loser!" is a hybrid of a Visual Novel and a JRPG about a group of adventurers going on a trip to stop a great evil called the Machine Devil. That's about it. The protagonist, Sam, is a lesbian, the Machine Devil is a clear stand-in for bigotry of all sorts, and in general the whole thing is themed around this, but in the end, the plot seems as simple as they come, and most of the dialogue is just idle chatting between the characters.

The big pros: the pixel art is GORGEOUS. Seriously, look at it, it's amazing. The game feels very polished. The music is good too, and there's a vocal track backing the combat that reminded me a lot of Persona, as well as some over-the-top visual effects for a certain special attack that I appreciated.

The love-it-or-hate-it: the writing, mostly. I'm not crazy about it, but it's very subjective.

The cons: the gameplay loop is what really hurts this game. You travel on the road, which means pushing a button repeatedly and reading dialogue. Depending on the lane you pick, this will be interrupted by fights. Now, these fights actually are a bit of a hybrid between your traditional FF-esque turn based battles and a quick time event. You need to rapidly press your buttons to attack, then you can wait for cooldowns or cycle through various sets of readied attacks to pile up the damage quickly. This gets very repetitive and doesn't allow for much thinking or strategy, because you need to be quick. The attacks are only two per character and depend on which trinket did you equip them; the trinkets are random objects and can be powered up by spending lower tier trinkets, and that's about it. You buy trinkets, equip them, raise them in level until you can buy the next tier of trinkets. The enemies are a choice of two or three set parties, always to be fought the same way, which is not even especially fun or interesting, just a lot of button mashing. Over 1.5 hours into the game, this is all of the gameplay I've seen. I guess at the end of the act there will be a boss, but I have no idea how to tell how long it will take to get there, and how many more of these same, identical, fights, and this very grindy equipment mechanic (no loot, no magic or special items, no drops except for money, no exp and levelling up). In other words, it's kind of a slog, which again, is a real pity, because the premise and interface already look so cool. A properly fleshed out combat system would have done wonders for this game. Sadly, as it is, it's kind of a Visual Novel with an extra helping of fights that only serve the purpose of slowing down the dialogue. Still worth trying since it's free, but I probably won't buy the DLC, and that's a pity because I was very willing to if I enjoyed the game even just a little bit more than I do.

Forget Unity, forget Unreal Engine - if you're interested in game development, especially as a beginner who only wants to do amateur projects, this is the software to use. Completely free, open source, great community, incredibly light and fast to run, intuitive, powerful. Godot Engine is absolutely the best game engine you'll find out there for your personal needs. If you care about making 2D games, possibly with pixel graphics, in particular, then it's sure to be the optimal choice.

A short-ish (I pretty much completed all the important content in my 11 hours of playtime) but very satisfying investigation game. The best way I can describe it is: Vaporwave Danganronpa in a Lovecraftian setting. If that confuses and intrigues you, read on.

Setting aside, it's a classic whodunnit kind of story. You play as Lady Love Dies, an investigator called back from exile to find out who killed the Councile of Paradise Island, a weird metaphysical reality bubble created by a group of immortals called the Syndicate in a bid to resurrect ancient dead Gods from outer space. There's a previously convicted murderer who escaped his jail and was found at the scene of the crime with the blood of the victims on him, so it seems an open and shut case... but of course, it's not that easy. Talk with the residents, snoop around, solve a few puzzles, find clues, and eventually, start a Trial and make your case. The gameplay itself is pretty simple, and it's basically a Visual Novel with an open world setting, but the setting, character writing and dialogue are fantastic and are worth alone playing. Great atmosphere and a really good mystery too - I enjoyed a lot piecing together all the various hints and information as the many mysteries and conspiracies in the island unfolded. Definitely recommended, especially if you enjoy detective stories!

Brut@l is an action game that makes use of an aesthetic drawn straight out of the old ASCII roguelikes. Make no mistake though - it has basically nothing in common with those. There's randomly generated dungeons (and potions), and there's permadeath. That's it. Other than that, it plays like a basic kind of Dark Souls-ish game, or if you've played that, think the combat sections of Hand of Fate. Swing sword, toss potion, dodge, jump, parry, throw shield. It's meant to be played with a gamepad, has some RPG elements like a skill tree but definitely nothing like the complex builds and strategies you'd be able to pull off in a proper roguelike.

However, in itself, this would still make for a pretty fun action game. So why the negative vote?

Because this game's actual design is pretty poor.

There's some pretty baffling mechanics that just appear out of nowhere now and then and seem a one off. For example, some enemies are zombies. These need to be killed with fire, which you won't have access to unless you have an enchanted weapon or an explosive barrell. They're the only enemies that have this property. Why? Who knows. They're annoying, pointless, and stick out like a sore thumb. Potions are random, you can only toss them or drink them to find out what they do, and some do pretty bad stuff. In a game with permadeath, this sort of lottery can cost you dearly, and is another aspect that is insanely more difficult than the average fight. But the worst thing of all are pits. So to make it clear, you can fight hordes of enemies and have a decent chance to come out alive. But you know what will 100% kill you and force you to restart the game? A single bottomless pit. Which are rare, random, sometimes pop up from outside the screen while you're running one moment before reaching them, and sometimes are wide enough that you need to really time well your jump to pass them - except that if you fall, you lose your entire game. Look, platforming is one thing, but don't put HARD platforming elements, with controls and camera fighting you, in a game with permadeath. This one thing alone is so frustrating, sincerely, it makes the game hard to recommend. Pass, there's much better games with the same kind of combat compared to which this offers nothing of value.

Do you enjoy mecha anime? Does "a roguelike 2D platformer/shooter with anime girls fighting ALIENS from a SECRET BASE using EXOSUITS while a MYSTERIOUS CONSPIRACY brews on their own side" sound like exactly your jam? Then buy this game now.

I received this in a Humble Choice a few months ago when it was still Early Access. It was already pretty good, but I decided to leave it for when it was finished so I could play it in one go, and for now, it's not disappointing at all. It's a pretty cool game; the action and combat are not especially innovative, but they're varied and fun thanks to a great range of attack options; your character's "Metal Unit" has a melee weapon, a ranged weapon, various other implements that activate in different circumstances, and a cute AI drone companion that can provide support. The game has loot and skill progression, as you gather "Core Crystals" that you can then spend on a simple ability tree. In itself it's not mindblowing, but it's very well done. What really sells it is the art and the atmosphere. The art is top notch, and as I said, if you DO like the idea of playing through a mecha anime (think Evangelion for a pretty straightforward comparison - though the robots here are much smaller), then this is your game. A lot more dynamic than any VN but with lots of art and story to still create the perfect mood.

A very short (check out my playtime...) but very sweet point-and-click adventure. The puzzles are all quite straightforward, there's a few moments where you need to do something in a short time span but it will simply repeat if you fail. Overall a pretty relaxing and fun adventure that I'm sure children would like too. The real highlight is the animation, it's simply fantastic, some of the best work of its kind I've seen in an adventure game. Lots of moments have dedicated animations that are fluid, detailed and expressive; it's a lot like playing through an interactive cartoon!

Pretty short and fun spy-themed puzzle/adventure game. It has a pretty naive James Bond-like atmosphere and very straightforward story, but the main draw clearly is solving the various puzzles to keep advancing, using objects to interact with the environment, the usual stuff. It's very straightforward and you'll rarely if ever get blocked thinking what to do next. Keep in mind that it doesn't last long, but if you enjoy this sort of thing, it's 3-4 hours of good fun.

The ideal platformer: fun, fast, responsive and skill-based. The gimmick is the use of coloured gel (remember Portal 2? Something like that) that are sprayed all around the levels giving peculiar properties to floor, walls and ceiling alike. You go around with a water hose that can clean up the gel as well as kill some enemies; each level, besides simply reaching the end, has the additional goal of finding six little masked workers and gathering enough "gold paint" to free the seventh at the end. You can go and replay levels for 100% completion if you fail the first time.

It's great, really. Lots of fun, very nice art, and the right amount of challenge. You never feel really stumped about WHAT you need to do, but it's another matter to actually DO it. If you like platformers, a must buy.