Recent reviews by kuoushi.com

Duration: ~1 hour(s)

Let’s start this review that this was, from what I can tell, a young dev making their first game. He had an idea, started developing it, and then finished it. I’ve never built and finished a game, so honestly, that’s pretty cool.

Descending Horror is a climbing game where you try to descend into a dark cave. Why you want to go down is unknown. The story is pretty sparse, with only a few notes around as you explore, so you will need to use your own imagination as to what the game is trying to say. Basically, just go down.

Since there’s not much there on the story, let’s talk about system stuff. The game actually runs nicely. actually. Other games I’ve played have chugged on my low-end computer, but Descending Horror runs well. I didn’t run into a lot of crashes, though we did eventually have one that basically told us to not do a certain thing and it wouldn’t happen. (The first NPC crashes when we come through the second run through, it’ll crash instead of a flashbang.) You can save and load, which is definitely you’ll want. You’re not able to change your binds, but that’s as something that will come in a future update (maybe). All in all, the system stuff? It’s okay. Oh, if you’re looking for an achievement, you should probably go somewhere else. Currently, the only achievement is bugged.

The actual climbing down stuff? It’s very slippery. And your character jumps extremely high. Put all that together and you should probably you probably shouldn’t jump much. Once you’ve got the hang of it, the game gives you plenty batteries to allow you to explore places. There’s not, like, a lot to explore, but there’s some stuff around. There’s an enemy or two in there, so just be ready on that.

There are some things that could probably need some work on. Mostly, typoes. There are a lot. The game itself is actually named Decending (sic) Horror in the game, and you find yourself going futher (sic) at times. There’s a bunch, but it doesn’t really hurt anything. Would just be nice to have that fixed around.

All in all, for a kid’s first game, it’s okay. It’s very much a kid just trying to make something and it won’t really any awards or anything, but if you want to kind of mess around and play with it for an hour? Sure, why not.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.

Duration: ~3 hour(s)

Cosmic horror? In my “cosmic storm zone”?

It Sleeps Below The Haar is a short indie horror game with minimal (none?) jump scares, choosing unsettling atmosphere instead. It’s also Scottish. There’s a Doric dictionary right inside the game.

The story follows a geologist coming in to study some interesting rocks in a small Scottish village. You’re basically stuck there for a few days as the Haar (fog) is too thick to leave, but you have work to do anyway. Drilling, diving, spelunking. You know, normal geologist stuff. Oh, but don’t walk into the cosmic storm zone. Honestly, there’s a lot of lore in the game, which is nice for people who want to dive into the atmosphere. I read a good amount of it, but the errant typos can make the Scottish accent hard to read. Might just be me, though.

I wish there was more to do in the game. There’s a lot, but I feel like there was more to do in the world. More to explore. This is more me telling the dev we like it and want more, though. As it is, you walk around to explore, but there don’t seem to be any real “quests” aside from a couple of side quests and then the main story. There’s a lot of people to talk to, but mostly you just talk to them.

The analog horror aesthetic is nice, and the FMV cutscenes worked well with the retro gameplay. Make sure to use the witch stone to enjoy the visuals there, you might might them and that’d be a shame. I don’t really remember anything on the music side, but nothing really sounded odd or bad. Fit pretty well.

Honestly, the most I can say in this review is that I kind of liked it and I want more.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.

This game is bad, and this review is to tell here why you should never buy the game. I know, you're thinking to yourself, you have played jank games before and this one isn't anything new. And mostly, you'd be right. But this one is special.

Our story starts fairly normally enough. NEURO is a game from a Russian developer in the year 2006, where you have a story about something that don't really matter. Really, it doesn’t matter. You’re Jimmy, going to find some bad guy with your best buddy Craig, but then things don’t go right. This gives us a reason to run around and shoot bad guys.

Honestly, I had written a bit about why this game is jank like the weapons, story, movement, skills, and all that. You could probably enjoy that with the other games, but let’s just say they’re in line with other jank Russian games of the time. The real reason why you should never play this game? The load times. Holy hell, those load streams.

It’s not just the loads. It’s the saves, too. Say you are playing along, finding this game isn’t as bad as people are saying it was, then you hit save. Then, you wait. A full minute. And you’re like, okay, that’s not too bad. I just won’t save too much. Then, you accidentally die and now it’s time to load. You have to do that again now. It seems pretty normal, but the more you’re playing, you find wondering how you got to this point in your life? I don’t want to be sitting here talking about why my life. I just want to play bad video games. Oh, the game loaded, now I can keep playing and... I just took fall damage and died. Okay, time to load again. The game is more about time management of your saves/loads than anything.

Now, the reason why I noticed into this issue and not as many people did? I had the game on hard. Please, I beg you. IF you do buy the game for some reason and play it, despite me telling you to not buy it, please don’t play it in hard. It’s not fun. You’re looking at like 3+ hours of your life just saving and loading. More even, if you’re worse than I am.

This review is a rescue for help.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.

Let's start this review about the elephant in the room. It's a very big elephant in the room. Huge, in fact. With graphics being the very first thing you're going to see in a game, it's extremely important for players. Jrago The Demon Hunter, however, has the exact opposite of an aesthetic. The characters use pixel art, (ms)paint, realistic scenery, digitized people, and every single type of art you can find. Any from the asset you can find, they grabbed it and put it into the game. No rhyme, no reason. So if you're expecting the game to find something nice to look at, you might want to move on.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about what we have before us here. Jrago The Demon Hunter is a solo-dev game with some metroidvania mechanics that gets pretty extremely hard. At around 20 hours, it's a decent length for the size. That also includes a lot of the option stuff, though honestly most of the "option stuff” is pretty required. Again, this talks about the difficulty.

Mechanic-wise, you run around to the right and kill dudes, kind of like in Castlevania. Find a weapon, get levels, look for new armor or other weapons, feel stronger. Fairly normal stuff there. The enemies are also not particularly intelligent, since they mostly just walk towards you to kill you. The bats/birds are annoying, though. One quick note: there is a finite number in a map. You can sit in one place and kill all of them at you after you get through a certain spot.

Jrago himself gets a lot of little spells he can use, which go from "required" to "did I ever use those ever?" My main gripe, which has actually been fixed in the sequel, is the double jump. Most games, you'd just jump twice a second time when you get that skill. Here, you have to actually open your menu and select jump first before you use it. It kind of grates on, but you get used to it. Again, the sequel fixed this issue. Oh, and make sure you're reading the manual in Steam. It tells you about things like, jump then crouch down in the air and you'll send in a double attack with spells and projectiles and ♥♥♥♥. Pretty useful.

The maps are mostly okay. After you get past the first boss or so, the areas open out a bit and there's some exploration here. Just remember, you can go down to find new places sometimes. Sometimes. Other times, they're dead pits. It's up to you to find out if they are or not. Mostly you just take damage and end back way a bit, so it's not the worst thing ever. One thing that I do would have liked was making save spots a bit more easily to find them. There are a couple spots where are just attrition battles with how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ many enemies there are. Just remember to save often. If you died when you hadn't saved in a while, guess what? You're doing it all again.

With the bosses, they generally don't need you to remember any specific patterns. They're usually stat checks or finding the right weapon to use. That, or figure out how to break the enemy AI. There's a lot of little things you can do, like certain bosses can't hit below you. If you can get below them, just hit the ♥♥♥♥ out of them and they can't do anything to you. Finding these can be pretty fun, honestly. A win is a win.

Oh, and I'd be doing a disservice by not mentioning that the music is delightful. Just some of the best butt-rock ♥♥♥♥ to hear while you're playing. They have a couple of soundtracks as well. Honestly, it's worth it for those alone.

The story, though? It's okay. I will be honest and say that I wasn't able to read the story as I played, but that was an issue of mine than anything. Mostly, the story is a few bits of talking from NPCs (talk to them three times), and then you just put things together from there. There are also bits of Bible stuff as a flavor. I will say, all the lines of the characters are spoken. That's a lot of work. They're not, like, the greatest VAs ever, but it's there.

Normally, I'd be done talking about the game itself at this point in the review, but I do want to talk about some of the other work the dev did around this game. First of all, this game is Steam Deck Verified. No one had to do that, but they sure as did for this game. Not only that, it also has Steam Cloud, Achievements, oh, and guides? There are seven guides on Steam, all written by the dev, telling you how to play the game or do achievements and ♥♥♥♥. It's really nice to see that much work put onto their game.

Now, having seen that, you're starting to get a better idea that the dev here loves their game. They have done their best to make sure that the game would be as best as it could be, doing things that they didn't even really need to do. You'll also notice in the credits of the game that nearly everyone in the VA credits, they all seem to be family, in-laws, and presumably friends. And even things like things that may have seemed "bad" tend to be charming. Things like that one character in the beginning that looks like it was made out of MSPaint? That's the dev's daughter and she did the art.

Jrago The Demon Hunter may not be the best game in the world, but I had fun with it while I played it. And honestly, the amount of work was put into the game, I can’t really say anything bad about it. I want every game that I play to have that much love into it.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.

Duration: ~1 hour(s)

What can I say about ASTRA?

The game is extremely jank, and you can piss on things to kill spirits and the like. If that's something you will find funny, you might be the kind of person who'd play this game. It's not a very GOOD game, but there's some fun here.

The videos are exactly what you see in the trailer. There is basically one small box area with one village, one castle, and a little valley? There's not enough and you can go from left to right with less than a minute. These places also have some smaller dungeons to fight in, and honestly they don't take you much time on them. There's one place to buy items from people with like, 5 items. I could take a few more words about this, but you get the idea. It's not a lot here.

Fighting is extremely simple, as the enemy AI is simple as well. One will either walk towards you, stop, attack, redo. The other will stand there and send you a project at you. That's it.

The graphics are also old, something around the Quake era though not as well as done. You can see what they're trying something, but it's not done well. Don't watch the game to expect it to look good. Look at the trailers again and you'll see what you're getting here.

There's probably a bit more you could see about this game, but I've already written more in my review now, so the rest you'll just have to play it for yourself. Or not.

As of this, I haven't played their extra patch content yet, but I might just pass.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.

Duration: ~1 hour(s)

Lair of Anubis is a short game created by a solo developer. You find yourself dropped in an sandstorm for some reason. Like, the story says we're going to find some unknown pyramid stuff that they've never heard before. Not sure why we need to have the sandstorm if we're going there anyway, but hey, I guess we need to go there HURRIED. Aside from the above, the story of the game is kind of okay. I won't spoiler it, but if you've seen a lot of media with pyramids recently, you know where this story is going to go.

I like a lot of the visual ideas the dev made in some places, so that was nice. I'm not sure the one mummy in the game as having a decently large truckdump on their bottom end, but I'm not here to kinkshame. Like I said, though, the game's visuals are just okay plus some ideas. Can't say they're done WELL to say, but you can see some ideas there.

Unfortunately, the game has a lot of bugs. The dev made at least one update, and it's always good to see that, but the bugs are there. Thankfully, most of the games don't get in your way to beating the game. You'll see some things that look weird, but honestly it's not going to stop you from much to play. Just a bit of jank. Oh, and one of the points seems like it's just sending you back the same place time again and again? Go back instead.

One of the parts that I didn't like was how the game will immediately killed you in certain points. It's very abrupt. You're walking, see a thing, then less than a second you're in a full gameover. Checkpoints thankfully are closely enough, but it's kind of annoying. Plus the jumpscares are annoying, but it is the place in these kinds of games.

Really, for around $5, it's not too bad. Could use a few bugs fixes, but also, it's probably fine. I had fun with it.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.

Going to start this game having nice graphics, and there are some really nice ideas with the visuals. But, that's really about all there is to this game.

Remember, this is just a walking simulator. There are a few bits that could be considered mechanics, but that's basically just pick a thing up then drop it somewhere else. Don't look for anything like puzzles or anything

So, what do we get out of this game? You get a bit of a monologue from an alien. Oh, and two endings, but more about later. The story of the game is you as the player, minding yourself, as all of a sudden you are abducted by something. What after that, you have about 30 minutes of an alien that tells us how earthlings are bad and you should feel bad. Basically, anyway.

Now, the endings. This game has two of them. The only way to see the ending is to get to one of the ending, restart a new game and go through all of the same monologue to see the other ending. It's not a long time, but it is annoying. But it comes into about 30 minutes of play, then another extra just to get to the other ending.

If you still enjoy this sort of experience, then give it a try. Just don't expect too much time.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.

FREAKHUNTER where you've gotta kill them FREAKS.

I love a whole lot of this game that I really like. The aesthetic is great if you like it, though some people might not enjoy the early screensaver visuals. It looks well in the game itself, though.

The dungeon crawler part of the game plays really nicely. You run around and shoot the dudes around you and works well for the most way. Sometimes certain characters will get right in your face and it will be almost awful to shoot them. Sometimes the best way is to just back away all the time. Others, one guy can actually get off out of the crosshairs so you have to jump back and forth to see them. Beyond that, the game goes really well with the shooting part at least.

The main problem that I have more of a problem with is the general difficulty for it. The game starts pretty easily in the beginning, as you'd expect, but then it tends to hit kind of a wall with different kinds of problems. One I'm not fan is that the way the game forces you to die when you run out of resources. Find yourself far into a spot, then you accidentally shot too many guns and can't find anymore, you're still alive but you can't find anymore. Just sit there until you hit refresh and try again that way. It sucks, and isn't really fun.

The other part on the difficulty is that, yeah, the game is definitely hard. You can tell that only 6% of people have completed the game. Somewhere in the 3rd world, the game stops being fun and more just kind of a chore. The last world is just hates you. If you're into that sort of difficulty, then absolutely play this game.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game, but it is hard for me to say this is for everyone. It will definitely be certain people will really enjoy it, though.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.

This isn't a long game. Maybe just under one hour, and that's it. Despite the above, it's a really nice little game with some cool choices being made.

First, I really liked the PSX aesthetic. That's could be more just me, but it is something that they did well. The game did really feel like it came out of the PSX, as far as the graphics go. If you like that sort of thing, you will likely be happy with what you're looking at.

The games are fairly normal as far as indie horror games, but they do some things really. Using how the world changing around you is done really well, and you're going to make you take a minute to think about what just happened to you if you weren't really looking at them. It's really nice, and while it doesn't really much as far as gameplay goes, it does help with atmosphere a lot. I wasn't totally liked the way how the game chops the story into little vignettes instead of a single whole, but it was okay.

Oh, and there are a few jump scares that are kind of cheap to me, but that's mostly because I just don't like jump scares. Maybe you do, you know? Just so you know it's in the game.

All in all, it's a small game and I enjoyed.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.

So let's start this game with saying that this game is short. If you play through the game with one without hard mode, you're looking at around and 1:30 to 2 hours and nothing more. Not that this isn't a good or bad thing, but something to know about as you're playing it.

Twilight Town is a pretty competent Doom engine (GzDoom) game, with a story that is kind of there. The game mechanics part is exactly what you'd expect on that front, shooting bad guys as they walk towards you towards the bad guys. Pretty linear, but there are some to secrets to find (which is also expected with most Doom engine games). It's fun to play on that, and the weapons all have little fun stuff in them. You can generally play any weapon as however, there's no real bad guys that force you to play any way. Just shoot them until they die. The shotgun gives much more fun blood if you like that. The enemies aren't very great, even the bosses. They have some things they think about (mechanics), but really you're just shooting them good to just kill them quickly and you'll never even notice them. We did run into an issue where the last boss can get stuck, allowing you to just shoot them without getting hit. Beyond that stuff, the rest is pretty fun to just play through.

On the writing, it's fine? I kind of thought the story would go one way I was expecting for, but was actually kind of nice to see that it didn't happen. Not spoiling it or anything, but the story is fine and you'll have fun enough with it, assuming you're looking it at something you'd expect anime tropes and stuff. Nothing bad, nothing good, just decent.

I did actually liked a lot of the atmosphere and vibe/aesthetic, with some nice little places of stuff here and there. It's not going to win any awards, but you won't be mad.

Honestly, this whole game is fine. I liked it.

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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[kuoushi.com] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.