Recent reviews by Israfene

The blade arcs and sings
Death's shrill aria --- I miss
Swish! UI is rough.


Disclaimer: This was the first time a game had ever inspired me to write a haiku. Results terrible.

Blade Flash Death however, is the opposite of that. This is a great rough sketch, meant to display a neat little idea as opposed to a fully rendered game. The neat little idea is to control your samurai frame by frame via a timeline while enemies whirl towards you in a pre-determined path. If you've got the finesse, it's like choreographing an elegant dance of death (with a number of bumbling missteps if you're me). Or you can just keep twirling around your dude like a Japanese death-copter.

Even though the art is endearingly uncomplicated and there's no story to speak of, there's a certain poetic ambience in the game, like when a cherry blossom petal momentarily obstructs your top-down view as it silently floats across the scene.

If you don't mind having bum sex with not-Hitler while he shouts at you in German.

If you got offended by the previous statement.

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• if you want a lovely, lighthearted game
  
• if you enjoy offbeat games with personality
  
• if you enjoy very clever visual and audio design
  
• if your inner (or outer) child wants to play

• if you want a meaningful CYOA
  
• if you are bothered by repetition
  
• if you are bothered by awkward controls
  
• if you are bothered by slow walking and transitions

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2560442356

When it comes to style or substance, these burly men have fully embraced style with their big and strong man-arms, leaving just a tiny bit of room to squeeze in some substance (but not enough of it, If you were expecting a meatier adventure). To be sure, the style is the very best part of the game. The vector art is so clean and crisp, like a perfectly ironed shirt with nary a stain on it. It's very pleasing to look at if you're into minimal art or graphic design or men with circular beards. And now imagine the visuals being paired with equally brilliant audio. The music is catchy, jaunty, and appropriately punctuated by mouth-made sounds. At one point, the men ended up swimming in the sea while the background music played along with what sounded like someone gargling a mouthful of water. It was completely absurd and genius and made my favorite scene in the game.

And what about: substance? There's not much, unfortunately. Burly Men at Sea, like its aesthetic, is intentionally simple. There is barely any interaction with the world and each decision is as impactful as a drop of rain splashing into the ocean. So while there is something admirable and pure about a casual CYOA that doesn't overextend itself by stuffing in extra bits and baubles, Burly Men's minimalist approach inevitably funnels you into a narrow and repetitive experience. Pursuing the other branches of the decision tree quickly becomes unsatisfying because you're only rewarded with trivial variations to the main story when there are actually only TWO endings and there's no way to speed up or skip scenes you've already encountered.

But it's a very wonderful experience the first few times you cast off into a new voyage. It's an adventure that is positively awash with delightful and whimsical moments... until the novelty wears off. The game is like a kiddie pool version of a CYOA, it's amazing for a quick splash of fun but I wouldn't go looking for more than that. So if you're at the edge of the water, wondering whether you should wade into this sunny but imperfect little world, it's perfectly all right to step back and walk away. But if you're in a playful mood, consider giving it a visit on sale.

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• for the main storyline/major side quests, they're well-written with compelling but underutilized story NPCs
  
• for the very fantastic visuals/screenshots
  
• for the audacious and atmospheric cyberpunk setting
  
• if you want a Polish game

• if you want a Polished game
  
• if you want a fully finished game, the main story + endings are complete but some missing content is noticeable like inside the Pacifica district
  
• if you want a new kind of rpg with fresh mechanics
  
• if you are interested in the open world, it is generic and bland and best if avoided

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2381207373

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game of contradictions, deliciously ironic contradictions. CDPR's anticipated magnum opus turns into CDPR's apologetic mea culpa. Cyberpunk seethes and bursts with BURN CORPO ♥♥♥♥ outrage, only to be undermined by its very own and very corporate master overlords. The game is good but sometimes it's... bad. Gah!

Imagine a famous artist is meticulously crafting individual pieces for a massive masterpiece. He announces when he will unveil his work and everyone is very excited. However, he encounters a myriad of problems, halting his progress but not the reveal date's as it looms closer and closer. He delays the unveiling a few times but eventually decides that he is done, after all, and reassures everyone of the quality of his work. As the curtain lifts, the onlookers are presented with an unmistakably rushed and unfinished product. In his haste, the artist had cobbled everything into an amalgam of fine, intricate details and rough, crude shapes. Some of the beautiful craftsmanship is apparent, but it is altogether a bit of a bloated and awkward mess that is held together by duct tape, delusion, and deception. That is Cyberpunk 2077.

However, for a game that was vomited out at the last minute, Cyberpunk does have some impressively redeeming chunks floating around in the muck. For one, the game looks quite amazing. It is the perfect canvas for creativity, with Night City posing as a gorgeous model for the one too many screenshots you will inevitably take. Unfortunately, the city itself only serves as a beautiful cardboard backdrop and not much else. It manages to appear full of life and yet it's lifeless at the same time. The excellent writing at least infuses personality and vitality into Cyberpunk and is the greatest strength of the game. When I beat it for the first time and got my first ending, it was a bad ending and I absolutely loved it (that particular ending is still my favorite after experiencing all the others). I was genuinely fascinated by its very cynical tone and the dark questions it raised about life and technology and the latter's ability to define the former. But whatever significance you might like to draw out of Cyberpunk's thought-provoking narrative, it's diluted by the large and empty open world and dull filler quests. This kind of self-sabotage happens throughout the game. CDPR will dazzle you with a bright little gem, only to dunk it moments later into a pool of rubbish.

And so I treasure the small but brilliant positives of Cyberpunk, glittering in the morass of bugs, glitches, half-baked bits, and a swamping of other problems the red-thumbed reviews will elaborate for you. If anything, in the few areas that CDPR succeeds with Cyberpunk, it succeeds extremely well, and well enough so that, for me, the game ends up more good than bad despite its issues. But Cyberpunk is a mixed bag to be sure, and one that requires waiting for a sale, careful sifting of the contents, and a willing blind eye to overlook the flaws.

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• if you want a game to play with a non-game-y friend
  
• if you enjoy games as an experience
  
• if you appreciate mostly cinematic, story-driven games
  
• if the idea of a "true" collaborative co-op game sounds interesting

• if you plan to brute solo the game, there are parts that are impossible alone unless you are one half of a Siamese twin
  
• if you want a combat-oriented game
  
• if you want a challenge
  
• if you want a long game

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435517156

Even though the game's brilliant mechanics seem bluntly obvious in hindsight, A Way Out was kind of a revelation when I first started playing. Most co-op games I've experienced involved playing parallel to somebody else, where your respective lines rarely intersected in a significant way except during combat when you both happened to whack the same guy. A Way Out tangles up your lines and throws the two of you into sticky predicaments where you have to work together, and not just fight together. Communication and coordination are very important and you are just as dependent on your companion's poor timing as they are on your shoddy aiming. This results in some genuinely tense collaborative moments and a good amount of laughter (under which some quiet grumbling can be tucked away) when things don't pan out.

Fortunately, the game is fairly easy as its main focus is the narrative and the interaction between the two protagonists. The story is the third protagonist by the way, and it provides the perfect premise for your synchronous shenanigans. But it also does so much more, as it is the main driving force behind the whole game, propelling your characters into one scruffy escapade after another. The puzzles and fights you encounter, while very light on gameplay, are woven cleverly into the narrative. Your mutual efforts feel practical as well as natural, and reinforce the two men's cooperation through your own blundering attempts at assisting one another. The sense of striving and failing together seeps from the real world to the game world, smudging your own feelings over your character's in a nebulous blend, and creating an incredibly immersive and convincing co-op experience.

Sometimes a pretty, tear-streaked face is all you need. GRIS is simply too pretty to give a thumbs down. The exquisite art direction single-handedly elevates this ordinary puzzle platformer up.. and up... and up to the lofty heights of games as art. But, if you can bring yourself to resist the emotional tug of sad music and sad girls, and if you can lift that veil of ethereal visuals, you will see that GRIS is a very limited experience.

The gameplay, despite some clever and elegantly simple puzzles, barely exists. That is intentional because GRIS is meant to be serene and therapeutic. And it's not necessarily a bad thing because you expect a compelling story to make up for it. Unfortunately, GRIS fails to commit to a definitive narrative. Its attempts to use environmental storytelling are so weak and vague that it succeeds in telling you only two things: that GRIS is an exceptionally good-looking game, and it's supposed to be sad. If you want more than that, you'll have to fill in the emotional blanks yourself and write in the story that the devs have artistically omitted. For all its shimmery delicate beauty, GRIS comes off as a well-meaning but shallow portrayal of the pitch black depths of mourning and loss, flitting across grief's surface but never truly descending into it in a meaningful way.

But that's not to say GRIS was a complete disappointment. For a time, I did enjoy my journey across the lovely dreamscape, my meticulously animated dress fluttering gracefully in the breeze. But after a few hours of daintily traipsing through the scenery with vast, yawning stretches of absolutely nothing happening, I realized I didn't really care about this unhappy blue-haired girl, even though the game clearly wanted me to do that. Fortunately, it soon ended in a crescendo of appropriately sentimental music and fancy animated scenes before I could begin to dislike GRIS.

And that's why I'm recommending it, for creatively concealing its flaws with its extraordinary presentation. GRIS lacks gameplay and story, and artfully waves that away with dramatic flourish and sophisticated style. I didn't rub away all the dazzle from my eyes, and I'm keeping it that way.

A very solid and compact game if you're looking for a quick fix of metroidvania that's quite decent and polished. ITSP has a fantastic comic book aesthetic with bold strokes of inky black and wide swaths of cosmic-hued gradients for your plucky little spaceship to glide through. The planet twitches and writhes spasmodically, an organic yet sinister entity that's intriguing to traverse. But for all the forewarning in the game's title, there isn't much insanity nor twisting involved in this shadowy (but surprisingly straightforward) planet. The only "insane" thing was this horrid guided missile segment where you had to manually maneuver a missile through narrow, swerving tunnels. The missile would drunkenly wheel and veer about your pointer before it finally scraped and smashed itself into non-existence. This was a special kind of frustration only a true sadist would implement, and it left a sour taste in an otherwise short and sweet experience. Still a good game though, just use a mouse for that annoying bit.

Extremely basic in a thumbs-down-do-not-recommend kind of way, the game tries (unsuccessfully) to fluff it up with charm and humor to hide its bare-bones story and play. Frog Detective is advertised as 1 hour long. Most of it will be spent trying to click past all the ellipsis-only dialogue ( like so: "..........." ) until you encounter actual words and you can finally cringe your way through the awkward, unfunny conversations. The rest of the time you'll be fetching items with the thinnest of contexts. Frog Detective feels like the devs fell in love with the color scheme, the random humor, and the quirky characters of Donut County and ended up creating a scrawny effigy with a sad fetch quest mechanic. And if the similarities are by chance, you might as well play Donut County instead. Same vibe, superior game.

Mostly I'm angry that Frog's magnifying glass doesn't actually magnify.

While I appreciated the developer's commitment to the button-pushing theme, I ultimately realized that the buttons being pushed were mine. The game wasn't bad bad, but there was this completely unnecessary mechanic involving hidden buttons that could only be revealed by rotating or sliding panels that could only be activated by... other buttons. This seemingly innocuous mechanic of push-the-buttons-to-push-the-buttons rubbed my brain the wrong way because it was hurting more from the tedium than from the challenge. The puzzles by themselves, without the hide-and-seek bits, were actually well-designed. I pushed on and eventually got through the last of them, but it was with a numb, weary sense of relief that it was finally over.

If you are a fan of The Lord of the Rings (moreso the books than the movies), this is a free game worth downloading into your already crowded library. The original developers, Turbine, paid gracious and attentive homage to the stories. There are many references that lend the game the authenticity and familiarity of a well-worn and much-read Tolkien tome. While there's a bit of acrobatic stretching undertaken with the lore, you can tell the devs did their best to translate LOTR into an mmo.

Unfortunately, the gameplay loop is somewhat dull, even by mmo standards, with archaic and poorly designed elements that have not aged well. You really only play this game for the chance to roam Middle Earth, encounter familiar characters, and roleplay a constantly screaming hobbit. Just be aware that the paywalls and microtransactions are decidedly more aggressive than Sauron himself. You might find yourself impeded by some inconsiderate, financially-motivated methods as you venture through this flawed but beautifully realized world.