Recent reviews by Patchlamb

Another awesome game from Limbo Lane! While I found the gameplay to be very simple and easy (there are really no consequences for messing up), the story and art are just as delightful as their previous game, Smile for Me. Except with an even broader cast an an even deeper story to unfold! The 3D Gods were so pleasing to look at and it's just fun watching them emote. This game is like bringing concept art to life without sacrificing anything, as so often happens when transferring from concept to finished piece.

And as always, I appreciate the genuineness in the production of the game, it's dialogue, and themes, as is also present in pretty much anything Limbo Lane and Yugo makes. I could eat this game right up.

Since I'm bias to already like whatever comes out of this little band of indie creators it's hard to think of cons... I would say the game is very short which some people may not like, but short should be expected from this genre and indie dev so if you're looking for a 12+ hour game you're barking up the wrong tree. It's also way too easy, the focus is much more on the plot and characters than the gameplay itself, which may be a downside for anyone who wants something more challenging and action-packed. Other than that I can't think of anything else!

This has been on my wish list since 2022 and I finally snagged it on sale, about a year after it released. And like many games that I say "that looks cool, I'll add that," it ended up being a disappointment. This is NOT a $30 game AT ALL. This is borderline unfinished. Getting myself motivated to play this after the first go was very difficult, but I gave it an honest try.

My experience of 2.6 hours and half a month in game: Immediate frustration and confusion at the controls and then disappointment upon seeing the human NPCs (why are their names the same color when speaking? They couldn't even so much as make them distinct??). I kept getting lost in the map because all the hills and bushes looked the same with very few landmarks. I needed more cash because everything was very expensive but the only way to earn money was to grow crops, which took days, and the only thing to do in between waiting was smash debris and do quests. But the quests are fetch quests and some were even "grow a bunch of crops" quests... and some involved picking plants I never even found despite scouring (dandelions). After a while I just started waking, watering the plants, then sleeping, so they'd grow and I could finally get money to buy things. Bought a$100 ($100!!!!) pastry to befriend a new dino, just to be rejected when that dino didn't even like them. Got frustrated and called it a night because I just wasn't having fun.

Pros:

- Cute dinos and pretty environment. You get to ride the dinos which is awesome.
- ... I can't think of anything else.

Cons:

- Unpolished, clunky controls and UI. Why is the character on a grid when walking but when moving a dino forward you can turn smoothly? That was a clear choice made and it was a bad one.

- The human characters look kinda... unappealing and samey. They look cheap and uninspired, just uncanny to look at.

- It's in the same genre as Stardew Valley but... not very fun. Slow grinding, boring surroundings, flat characters, fetch quests with little reward, items are too expensive, you can't skip the eating animation when trying to befriend dinos... etc.

Overall I wish I could say "meh" instead of no. Because really this game, from what I've seen, is just... meh. It's a little cute and riding dinos is fun. But everything else is just unfinished, unpolished, uninspired. It's missing that special something to make it worth playing, and riding dinos, especially with such poor controls, is just not it. There are way better games in this genre out there :(

I was a teen when Flow, Flower, and Journey came out. I adored both Flower and Journey ad re-played Journey frequently, so much so I would be in the white robes. I was sad when I learned TGC's next game would be a tablet exclusive, because I neither had one nor wanted one. I was very happy to see Sky ported to desktop!!

PROS:

- Beautiful, just like their other games. Just wonderful art direction and design. Everything is so easy on the eyes, composed in a pleasing way, and shaped.

- They took the best parts of Journey to re-use in this MMO, and doubled them. Lots of cool character designs, flight, sound, meeting strangers.

- Customization for your lil' guy, and you can make and add friends to play with.

CONS:

- This is a tablet port, some people may not care for the lowered graphics and low-poly style. I don't think it's low quality, though, just evident that it's ported from something much smaller.

- They took the best parts of Journey to re-use. I love Journey and all, but some may be disappointed that this isn't exactly a 100% original title. There ARE original parts, but it sometimes feels not very fresh because of just how much they yoinked from their prior game.

- I couldn't figure out how to customize my guy :( I kept buying new hair styles from spirits, but when I'd visit the kiosk to change my hair they were always grayed out. It was confusing. I also made a friend just to learn it was an "impermanent" friend, who did not join my friends list after we parted ways. I didn't get to thank them for the help. :(

Overall, this is a solid and fun play, and feels much like their other games. I think it takes a little too much from Journey for it's story beats and assets, but I do like that they increased flying and singing ability. I think I'm just ready for something new from them- ACTUALLY new! But give it a play if you loved their other games from the past. It's like a nostalgic breath of fresh air.

But as far as the MMO aspects... idk man. My guy lost all its flight and customization when it re-started, I don't know how fun it would be to play the same thing over and over again just to restart each time. MMOs can be kinda predatory and grinding isn't fun. Journey did something fresh with its username-less, chatbox-less random multiplayer. Sky is kinda cute in that it's similar, with lots of emotes (someone kept sending me kisses!) but this is also the kinda game that feels like it ought to be played alone. Yet, I have to see the shapes of strangers everywhere all the time. And when you accept their candle to see their avatar they always have tons of fancy customization and you just kinda wonder dang, how'd you get those? Grinding, according to some of these reviews.

Well, the in-game messages left scattered around seem to be positive and loving and friendly, even if I didn't quite care for the social aspects. So some people DO love it, and the calm, slow-paced atmosphere of it's MMO aspects compared to other loud and in-your-face MMOs.

Great game, but VRChat is 100% what you make of it.

Do you want to play mini-games with strangers? Do you want gender euphoria? Do you want to roleplay as your favorite cartoon/anime characters? Do you want to make strangers uncomfortable and start debates? Play kereoke, go to drinking clubs, slowly accumulate life-long friends or be the wedge between online couples?

For me, I play in fandom worlds and got a small following of nice LGBTQ+ children and teenagers who like to chat with me as an older LGBTQ+ fandom person. They are kind, silly, and I love wasting time learning about what its like being a kid/teen in 2024. But I also made friends with an adult who added me on Discord and badgered me everyday to pay attention to him. Then made jokes about groping women, forcing me to unfriend him after two weeks of what I thought was a new friendship. Truly, there are so many great and awful people in this game, but the laughter and smiles I've gotten from the good ones have outweighed the bad.

Your experience could be very different. If you linger in highly populated locations with NO safety settings on, prepared to always be bombarded with slurs, children, and crashers. If you stick to a few specific worlds and increase your safety settings, your world will be quieter and lonelier, but safer. Explore, find your niche, and while the reviews about yucky people being in VRC are true, don't listen to people who claim VRC is "just ERP," or "just furries," or "just full of children," etc etc. VRC never has been just one thing- it is MASSIVE. Those reviewers are not exploring the full, gigantic scope of this place. If you feel "stuck" in VRC, go explore and learn something new! Because once you start finding "your people" it's the best!

I enjoyed this relaxed, atmospheric, slow-paced game!

PROS:

- Really relaxing and not particularly scary, but has a continuous air of mystery to keep you thinking what will happen next.
- A handful of fun puzzles, places to explore, and optional secrets to "dredge" up.
- Very pretty, but simple, graphics. I found it satisfying to pull up new fish, especially... messed up fish. The colorful cast of characters was also wonderful.
- Who doesn't love a little bit of existential horror these days?

CONS:

- The slow pace may not be every player's cup of tea, even with puzzles and story thrown in. There is occasionally some grinding for items and money, but once you start to make bank it gets almost too easy.
- There is no dread for something as dreadful as lovecraftian horror. The ocean having freaky monsters in it is sorta treated like a normal occurrence in the game, removing some of the fear and mystery.
- I found the twist cool and unexpected, but the endings to both be anticlimactic. For example, the game tells you there's no going back and you can't save once you agree to do the ending, but you just move your boat to a point and a cut scene plays, then it ends. Why give a warning in the first place? It isn't like there is any decision making once you start the ending.

Overall, I can see why this is a game a lot of people like, and I had fun! But I could also see why someone might prefer just to watch a lets play of it instead.

This is a short, pretty little game.

PROS:
- You play an elderly woman, which is different than most games. I found it to be a unique perspective.
- It's a simple farm simulator, with cheese making and gardening.
- Just short enough to tell its story.
- A pretty, simple polygonal style that is pleasing to look at.

CONS:
- As an elderly woman you walk sloooooow. Some days later in the game there is nothing to do but wander around slowly.
- A few small glitches, for example you can see missing polygons in the goats around their udders if you look close enough.
- Lack of tutorial; most things are obvious, but I had no idea I could collect eggs from a *dog house* until several days in.

I liked the odd, almost whimsical story. Abstract fantastical tales which come to you only by letter delivered by foot every day. My only note on the story (SPOILERS) is that the final scene, the death, was not nearly emotional enough. Instead of keeling over in the snow... imagine if, on the last day when winter comes, you click and do not leave the house. You click again, still nothing. Then the credits roll atop the snow. The assumption would be dying in her sleep, your mouse clicks no longer rousing the character. A quieter death would make more of an impact imo than simply... falling over. That's it.

I'm actually quite surprised this game has such a highly positive review history! It's not as if it's awful, but... it's incredibly basic and bland. It makes beautiful screenshots, but the gameplay and story itself leaves a lot to be desired. So much so that, after about two hours of playing, I can't find the motivation to keep playing to actually finish it.

PROS:
- Beautiful, has that low-poly, unpolished quality that's so appealing of many indie games.
- The general concept is fun! It's cool to change into different animals to do different tasks.
- It tries to have a fleshed out world and express a moral value (one I haven't figured out 100% yet, and probably won't, since I can't find the need to finish).

CONS:
- Bad voice acting with annoying dialogue. If I had a quarter for every time that little orb asked me a dumb redundant question with the fakest inflection I've ever heard- I'd have like, $500 bucks. Is that you? Is that your dad? Is that the moment you got extreme PTSD? Enough!
- Big wide open areas with nothing to do. You can run through them to get to the next area in 5-10 min. This game has too many maps for how simplistic the plot is. It could have been cut and half and been much more emotionally effective. It's padding and the "awe" factor with the graphics loses charm fast, once boredom sets in. I just kept trying to move through these huge boring maps as fast as I could to get to the actual plot points. You could argue looking for collectibles is something to do, but... who cares about collecting mushrooms...?
- Rarely any point in changing to different animals, except at very specific places. Why be a slow waddling wombat exploring the map when wombats are only good for sometimes rolling down a hill or going under a tunnel? Just be the wolf and run through the map, instead. The only exception are hummingbirds who have OP speed. You can skip whole maps as hummingbirds.
- The plot itself is- odd. (Spoilers) Bad people get turned into beasts, good people go to Heaven. You're a wolf, the orb therefore thinks you must have been bad and strives to help you find a way to redeemed yourself. Turns out you weren't bad, you were complicated; you did steal and kill and cause war, but against an oppressive upper class who stole from and killed those of your village. There's probably some twist at the end, like, that maybe the annoying orb is actually your dad and you're there to redeem HIM instead, but I just don't care about or like these characters enough to care... something about the "animals stupid and bad and are punishment, humans good and get to live in Heaven City" feels shallow and preachy.

Overall, this little indie game clearly has a vision of what it wants to be. It wants to be like great indie games- Journey, Abzu, Rime. But it's slow, maps are long and uninteresting, plot and dialogue are uninspired. It needs to be about half as long and would honestly be a lot more engaging as just a short film. The plot is just not nearly attention grabbing enough to want to spend hours blasting through empty maps to get to the next slow, half-animated cut-scene. Cannot recommend.

Looks pretty, but very little to do.

PROS
- If you like house decorators, here you go.
- Owning and decorating apartments to tend to tenants sounds fun.
- Has a story.

CONS
- Buggy. Ex: If Uncle is cleaning while a voice actor is speaking, clicking causes the dialogue to repeat sometimes.
- Another bug was a man with a tinfoil hat had white skin in his dialogue box, but the in-game avatar that evaluated the job was black. So the avatars don't always match their speaking counterparts...
- Repetitive but not in a satisfying way. Uncle is slow, even when leveled up. You can only spay roaches and plaster walls so many times in 5 hours before you wonder where the gameplay is.
- Inadequate tutorial. Tutorial taught me only what a small fraction of the UI does, 5 hours in and I still don't understand "prestige."
- Poor pacing. The next step in the story is to earn $8,000/month, but the game has got me limited to 2 tiny apartments and 4 tenants. I think I'm supposed to grind jobs until I get better items, which will increase apartment value, in order to raise rent. But It's taking so long that I've just gotten bored. It makes me feel like I'm stuck watching paint dry.

Overall, the game feels very shallow. It has the pretty graphics and voice acting, but its gameplay is extremely lacking for a tycoon-esque game. And, for a game called "The Tenants," the tenants themselves feel flat and impersonal. I'm not sure there's really enough gameplay in this for it to have felt like it was worth the 16 bucks. Do yourself a favor, just get The Sims apartment DLC and play that.

Glitchy as all heck, confusing and teeny-tiny UI, a character creator with tons of options but absurd sliders... basically unplayable except for the most dedicated of MMO players who just love the character creator.

Not good, not fun, barely lasted 30 minutes before I got bored of wandering because I didn't know what to do. yawn.

Dreams do come true!! It's finally out! After all the delays it was awesome to see it come out as one solid game instead of in separate chapters like the first one. I've been a big fan of Bendy since the demo and I'm so glad theMeatly's passion project has come so far along! Spoilers in this review.

PROS
- BATDR is a great sequel to BATIM, expanding upon the whole story and giving us an explanation for the 1st game. While to some it could feel like they just made it up as they go along to explain away confusing things in the 1st game, this isn't a bother to me because I just love the whole world and vibe, so a little goofiness isn't a deal breaker for me.

- A much bigger world with more friendly characters, so you don't feel so lonely. The city was awesome.

- More mechanics to expand your gameplay, such as short-form teleportation and upgrading your Gent pipe.

- Bendy is utilized a LOT more as a character, as well as both "Joey" and Henry. If you were in love with the ink demon in BATIM but were sad how little of a character he had, well here ya go.

- Little Bendy! Yes!! YES!!! Heart eyes

- Getting to PLAY as Bendy at the end? Priceless. He sure could use a little more meat on those bony cheeks, tho...

CONS
- Probably about as long as the 1st game, so not much extended playtime. The lore is sooo big in this game that it's a shame it wasn't given a little bit more length to it in order to feed you that lore slower. For some people it might feel a little too crammed...

- Some glitches; more than once Searchers got stuck while walking. One got stuck just standing on a sidewalk...

- Bendy's scariness was... watered down quite a lot. From hearing his voice with no anticipation or build up, to him not stalking/chasing you with an ACTUAL model, to "Bendy is coming, hide" popping up randomly while Searchers are everywhere disallowing you to run... perhaps this one is my biggest gripe! Somehow having Bendy immediately start talking to you when you discover him, and him detailing what he wanted to do to you, sort of dissipated the mystery and eeriness of his predation. "I'm going to devour your soul grrr" is a lot less scary than having him creepily searching for you and grumbling, catching you, and then ripping into you. And the short amount of time you have to run when it tells you he's coming? Absurd. You only get about 4-5 seconds before he's there, and sometimes if you run you'll alert Searchers, which makes it to where you can't use boxes/barrels to hide because "you're in combat" if you alert them. It was cheap. I miss the walks and floors turning black and him ambling after you to where you can actually SEE him reaching for you...

- Screw Artist's Rest! Hardest place in the game! Respawning Searchers? Few places to hide? Searchers are alerted as soon as you pull the trigger? Searchers walk SO SLOW! Takes forever to wait for them to get out of the way and when one walked away ANOTHER two show up, just as slow! I spent at least an hour in that stupid area dying to them and Bendy's random appearances. Ugh.

Overall- love it! But if I'm going to be honest, gameplay is not as good as the art, story, and lore of either BATIM and BATDR. BUT, gameplay in BATDR is leagues better than BATIM. I did have fun, even though occasionally I was frustrated. So if you've been infatuated with the world of Bendy from the 1st game go for it! And even if not, it's still a fun, scary continuation of a unique and awesome piece of art.