Recent reviews by protagoras

What a nice 2-4 hour journey! The animations/style are lovely. The music is great but never overbearing/repetitive (can always switch it up with your cassette player anyhow). The core gameplay (taking photos of subjects) barely gets old - I feel if this were much longer the devs would have had to add more variations on the gameplay theme. Here, though, it's fine throughout. Highly recommended if you want a short, peaceful journey across a happy little world.

There's a nice, casual game in here with lots of "old" (tried and true) ideas mixed up into a 10-15 hour entertaining package.

The core concepts and story are reasonably good. There are times they don't mix quite as well as you'd like; there's monotony that sets in over time (while filling the gas tank is fun the first 10 or so times, it becomes rote aside from certain longer expeditions); the story as of right now falls off a cliff/abrupt conclusion in the end with little fanfare or reason to continue after. I found the endgame portion to be very buggy as well - I'm sure this will be fixed. I did encounter a bug or two here or there (biggest one I remember is going to sleep and the animation looping such that I had to quit the game and lose a few minutes of progress), but nothing major and I never lost sizable progress. I dislike that the only in-game option to report a bug is a link to the dev's discord (yeah, I already have too many discords right now, thanks, no) The combat and balancing needs a good amount of tweaking right now particularly in the Swarm area. You can get OP rather quickly and as other reviews have mentioned you can cheese fights. Base building is still in progress as there's not tons to do yet. There's only so many puzzle variants and most are trivial to solve (probably a good thing because the game isn't touted as a puzzler).

I've said a lot of bad here but that's only because the game is EA. Overall Black Skylands is quite nice. I enjoy the "open world-ish" feel, the island mechanics, and the ability to drop in, clear out an island, and take a break. There's good stuff going on here as a whole and I wish the devs good luck in polishing things up a bit as well as their future endeavors.

I'll recommend Mundaun albeit with lingering, hard-to-pin-down reservations.

There's a lot to digest here in roughly 5-7 hours. A lot of strange. Some fear (no big jumpscares though). Some deaths. Light survival mechanics. Stats and stat boosts. Stealth. Fighting. Inventory management. Exploration. Intrigue. Reduced color palette. Hand-drawn looking textures. Low-ish polys. Vehicles. Murder! Mystery! Blood pacts! Beautiful music (although a bit sparse/"off" in a couple situations). Swiss Romansh voiceovers with captions. Just... a lot.

After completing the game, I feel satisfied but wishing there was more - even after that long list. Perhaps what is frustrating me is I don't know what I would change. Mundaun is fine as-is. Stands on its own, stands perhaps a bit higher than, say, Amnesia (which is a fair comparison, I'd say) in terms of accomplishing what it feels the creators set out to do. This is a more open, more tale-focused Amnesia with some mechanics added.

Perhaps if a few things were tweaked here, a few things were polished there, I'd feel better.

Or perhaps... perhaps Mundaun is what it is and there's nothing you can change.

Ziggurat 2 improves on Ziggurat 1 in almost every respect. This is a more polished, more coherent, more enjoyable game. You've got the campaign which gives you a high-level light story and some low-level proc-gen/semi-randomized reasons for doing what you're doing. The weapons are varied and plentiful, the enemies are juuuust varied enough (for me). Sound and graphics are top notch for the series. I do feel some of the missions get a bit long in terms of levels (2-3 are ideal for me and my play/lifestyle) but you can usually choose shorter missions if you want. Boss fights get a bit repetitive at least at the lower level I'm at. The roguelike progression is... fine? I can't say it's novel but it does seem to work out fine.

Overall, I'm very happy with how this turned out. It's what I personally wanted in a Zig 2. Early Access was handled well. Wishing the devs best of luck in their next game(s)!

Short, engaging point-and-click! Octavi's art is amazing.

(EA review; will try to keep updated)

More of the same and the same was great. Right now there is roughly 3 or so hours of content here.

If you haven't played Rogue Legacy 1, hold off on this for now and go play that!
If you have played RL1 but weren't overly thrilled, hold off on this for now and play something else!
If you've played RL1 and loved it, show Cellar Door Games some more love, buy this, and enjoy!

This feels like it will end up being a bigger, prettier, more side-questy RL1. There's good roots here and I have confidence the EA will end with something along the lines of RL1. No massive innovations here yet but stay tuned!

Quite a nice, short hike. I really enjoyed the atmosphere. Cute, easy-going game with just the right amount of progression.

There's stuff in here, wrapped up in aesthetic but... not much else?

Surely I've approached this incorrectly. Surely it is me, the consumer of the Art that simply lacked the requisite receptors to receive the feeling or did not work hard enough to extract the meaning.

I do appreciate this is someone's blood, sweat, and brain cells but it's a fever dream mess throwing tropes on the floor and not caring if you care, if this world exists, if the next world exists, if Del'Hafketh is your deity, if you've had a turkey sandwich today, if you might want a cracker tomorrow, or an arm, or a jump scare, or driving for 10 minutes, or magnets, or literary evolution, or heat death of the universe, or global conspiracy, or PSX shaders, or tankies, or justice, or empathy, or cellular reproduction, or or or or or. If that's what you're in the mood for - check it out.

I don't know what happened here. Jens Matthies reprised his role of director but can't seem to replicate the magic of The New Order (TNO). I could make guesses, but let's stick to the facts.

The story is linear (as expected) but goes in the same direction as TNO. You visit similar set pieces, the motives and actions are similar, even major plot points feel recycled rather than fresh. This - to me - is TNO's story with fresh paint and slightly different spices. Even the main antagonist was thoroughly tired of all this.

There were several points during the game where I met an objective but had no great indication of where to go next. I'd end up resorting to the map to find the objective (which even then is harder to use than it should be, yeah?) yet still ask myself "Why do I need to go there? Why wasn't this hinted at, even lightly? (finds spot) Here? I have to go here??". Perhaps I expect too much in 2018 for a game released in 2017. Perhaps the level design was not as on-point as it could have been.

I found the combat boring, so much so that I essentially turned to the lowest difficulty. Limited amount of guns, head-shots and explosives the only real option against bullet sponges. Maybe I've played too many FPSes. Maybe the fact that you get a BFG-like weapon towards the end but only have a couple of real uses of it spoiled me. Maybe this game doesn't know what it wants to be anymore.

The art direction is the high point for me. Aside from the rare janky cutscene animation, all the environments look brilliant. There's little outside of the "main path" in terms of set pieces. I'm not going to count all the collectibles here - I'm so tired of being fed little pieces of worldbuilding via picking up trinkets like I'm some toddler playing with scraps of irrelevant information and a pat on the head for a job well done. Designers, it's time to re-think this mechanic and change it up or possibly lay it to rest.

Levels felt relatively small. I'm not saying this is bad, just.. small.

I didn't really buy the design of the Venus level. I understand the need to keep it "period accurate" but c'mon we're on Venus and I expected something more bombastic. This is the rebooted Wolfenstein saga - give me bombastic!

I really, really, really wanted to investigate the mentioned Da'at Yichud pyramid under Roswell. That was a highlight for me in TNO and it felt like a completely missed opportunity here. Why, why, why did they not take you there? It's like someone said "naw, we don't have time/money for that" even after throwing in the God Key and doing absolutely nothing with it! I think that's my greatest disappointment from this game.

The sound... the sound was polished and adequate. No problems with casting, but nothing stood out. The music was a bit disappointing given the fond memories I have of TNO's and DooM 2k16. If only there was an option to get rid of the vocals in the credits song... (the instrumentals in that was reallllllll nice though)

I do not run into any major technical issues. Zero crashes. I did have a bit of trouble with the constrictor contraption: either I missed the instruction or was expected to figure out that you need to LOOK at the floor opening while crouching in order to activate it. Seems superfluous and unnecessary. Thanks to whichever post I found that explained this because otherwise I'd be saying this was horribly bugged. Wait, it is horribly bugged because it makes no sense to me even after finishing. :) The dual guns and attachments were slightly unwieldy on keyboard, but again, I mostly skipped the combat so no comment.

I was going to give this a thumbs up as I understand these AAA games contain a large amount of effort, it's a pretty game, I found no major technical issues, and the series really is something to take in - if you're a fan of linear FPSes. After writing all this up though I cannot do this. There's too much that bugs me at the core here, particularly the combat and design decisions I disagree with. Play this if you enjoy the series and if you want another linear FPS that does not come close to the magic of TNO.

I wished this was the end of this series until the next reboot in a decade or so. Youngblood and 3 are in the works, though. I'll probably play those at some point. Maybe I won't be as disappointed.

What a well-executed package. Even though I have yet to read the books, this adaptation kept me interested from start to finish. The art style fits perfectly, the sound is spot on, voice acting was excellent, just all-around great and a worthwhile visit.

You are living through the stories of these people - not creating your own. Also, it's a slow-burner of a story and requires some patience as the epic dramatic climaxes are few and far between. Keep that in mind and you'll love this.

Excuse me while I go check out the books.