Recent reviews by Szmerk

This is the 45th review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I can recommend this game, and as a numerical score I’d give it a 7/10. The game is visually consistent and there’s a lot of small details in its sound design that give the game a complete and holistic feeling. Backed by an intuitive and engaging gameplay experience with minimal problems makes this game a pleasure to experience. The game has some minor setbacks with how vulnerable it is to some in-game exploits, some controls and interactions that could be minorly improved on, and one achievement that just keeps getting away from me in a very frustrating way.


In Game Time Glizzys, you play as a reputable hot-dog stand operator that has come back from vacation to find your rink-side restaurant in disrepair after entrusting to some lad named Ace. Your appliances are busted and are in-need of repair, your stand’s reputation has been dragged through the mud by reviewers, and the bank really wants all $1,000 it loaned you some years back in seven days.

The gameplay is really straightforward, and because over half your shop is busted up you can only deliver basic hot dogs on warmed bread, or a hot dog on a bun with ketchup and mustard. Once a day, you can opt to repair / re-enable one of your appliances to expand your shops’ offerings including more toppings, drinks, and a side. All-in-all, this is likely to over-complicate your workflow since now the orders will get way more diverse, but in turn you’ll end up making more money. If you want to bust your back, you can enable the second register to take twice as many orders and that turns this game from a casual cooking simulator into a hyper-focused, precision-point, clicking cookery since you’re a one-person gig.

Each playthrough (of seven days) takes about ~45 minutes, and after four and a half hours I got six out of the seven available achievements. We’ll talk about that seventh one later. Other than the sixth achievement, the game was a joy to play, and I’ll tell you why.


The game has a lot of good things going for it, and I don’t think any element is any better than the other because they’re all so high-up. To start with the visual design, we’ve got models and assets that are fitting and appropriate, from the ingredients, to the kitchen, to the patrons, to the hockey rink your glizzy stand resides in. There’s some great small details such as the change in color for warmed glizzys, or the hockey puck that appears for a quick second if it damages any of your appliances.

In the realm of the audio design, the game has a lot of care put into it in this category as well. I think the voice acting is all sound for the limited performances that were demanded, from the phone calls to the overhead announcer to the sound effects that play at each gameplay element’s appearance. The varying announcements from the overhead announcer about scoring, fights, which team wins or loses all add a considerable amount of liveliness to the game.

Then lastly, I wanted to commend the gameplay. It’s highly intuitive, but there’s a quick little tutorial that comes up to make sure you get rolling. There’s a lot of things to engage with which will cause your shifts to go quickly — you might not even notice that they can get up to six to eight minutes long! If you’re feeling a little shady, you can use the same tablet you’d use to order appliance repairs to send Ace to do some bidding on your behalf. You can send him to the competitors in the rink to cause a power outage, break their equipment, or even commit a robbery. Your competitors are capable of the same and if they see you succeed, well, they’ll do what they can to make sure you suffer from success. Who knows if that hockey puck that slammed your fully-loaded glizzy-grill was actually an accident? There’s little time to think about, just yoink those wieners off the floor and throw ‘em back on before anybody notices. Not like anybody cares, but you know… for posterity.


The smallest of the offenders is that this game has two exploits that will aid in the players’ favor — one should come with context that this game gives you twenty seconds to prep your stand at the start of every shift before the orders roll in. If you’re receiving a phone call that day, you can just not answer the phone, and you’ll have as long to prep as you’d like. I found myself using this because otherwise the prep times do not feel long enough and it boiled down to a simple setup of me going in the walk-in, take a step out, throw hot dogs or buns onto the floor in front of the grill for reloading mid-shift. The second is that you don’t actually have to warm or cook the glizzys — as long as you have a warm bun, you can put them directly from the package into the bun and your customers do not exercise any restraint and will ask for three more plain dogs.

After the exploits, there’s only some minor inconveniences caused by controls — I’ll pick on the tablet first; it’s kind of rough that you have to use keyboard keys to go back to the home screen or put the tablet down. It’d be great if these were clickable buttons, or if at the very least Escape puts down the tablet since it has no functionality when the tablet is up. Another one is that there isn’t a Restart button in the pause menu. This button would be helpful because otherwise you’re closing and starting the game back up to start another run. On the smaller side, if you want to pay your loan in one go you’re stuck holding the (+) button for a minute or two since you can’t type in numbers and there’s no ‘pay in full’ option. Then lastly there’s the serving bell — you can hit this bell a bunch of times and it’ll cause a “Failed Order” on each press, even if your shop is closed This isn’t really a big deal, but it’d be nice if the bell was inactive when there’s no customers active so it doesn’t accidentally ruin a Perfect Game run.

Then lastly, my biggest point of contention was based around the perfect game run. I tried several times to get this achievement but something always went wrong. Sometimes it was a really impatient customer, sometimes I’d be working too fast and send the order early, but there was this one time where I did not know what happened. I didn’t notice the failed order until I got to the shift summary screen but I got my reasoning several hours later. While editing my review video, I found that at the end of Day 6, while I was paying off the loan after the shop closed, someone came to the stand without me noticing, and since I was holding that (+) button for a minute or two, they left before I could notice ‘em.


Anywhoo, that’s it. This game was a blast, and I hope this review helped tip the scales out there. There’s a great amount of care put into a game that’s priced at $5 USD, and despite the frustrations I still think it was worth the time I put into it. Now that I have some understanding of how I failed that last run, I’ll probably come back for that seventh achievement sometime soon. I just won’t pay off my loan this time because the bank can stuff it. I’ll take the $1,000 I should’ve given them and open up a baked potato stand next.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those. Did you like this written review? Check out the spoiler-free video review for visual and audio compliments to the review:

https://youtu.be/Hf_C9G0rc8k

This is the 44th review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I don’t recommend Stray Souls and as a numerical score, I’d give it a 4/10. On the plus side, the environments and models look great, the leading voice actors did a great job and the sound effects are strong, and lastly the game is unintentionally, very funny. For its detracting traits, the storytelling is rough with its heavy-handed reading pieces and at times, unbelievable character actions and performances. The gameplay has several faults like unintuitive puzzle controls, poor enemy pathing, and lackluster boss battles. Finally, the worst of the detractors is that the game cannot maintain its immersion (or illusion) of fear and tension.


I found Stray Souls while doing some wishlistin’ back in April of 2022 — its trailer back then looked a little bit different. The horror genre is fun and wishlisting is free, so it was a simple add. So to see it get rated the way it has a year and a half later was surprising, and I just had to try it myself.

In this game you play as Daniel who recently turned 18 and as a reward for the hardships of his life, has been awarded his recently deceased grandmother’s home, leaving it and all her belongings to him. Daniel however, was adopted and knew nothing about his grandma until the time of her passing. You learn that when the house was handed over some rooms were inaccessible, and Daniel doesn’t care to look into it until he connects with a hot single in his area (Martha) who lives right next door and has all the dirt on Daniel’s late grandma. After getting goaded into investigating the mystery of the locked rooms, the sussy-bus adventure begins which will take you through Daniel’s history, the nearby city of Aspen Falls, and all the mysteries that’ve taken place in the shadows.

Through all six chapters, you’ll be expected to solve puzzles and explore levels and after the first chapter you’ll be leading a lead-based exorcism on the newly-encountered horrific inhabitants you encounter. It took me a little over six hours to complete the game and I was able to play it on an Xbox controller without issue, though something of note is that the game doesn’t offer aim assist. The enemies aren’t hard to take down, so it wasn’t a problem for me — but if you suck at shooting, you might have a rough go as there appears to be limited ammo in the game without any lead-free alternatives (melee).

That’s enough for the foundation, so let’s elaborate on what I liked.


The game’s environmental assets are its best asset — the game looks good and the models (both character and enemy) are appropriate and fitting with the horrific aesthetic. The levels do carry this dreadful and mysterious atmosphere, and that’s successfully conveyed through its presentation. There are some faults in this section though, such as character models clipping through things (in-game and in-cutscene) and some models being incomplete. Also, when you kill an enemy they just explode which seems a little lazy.

A bit behind that would be the sound direction — the voice acting is top-notch and in specific the actors for Daniel and Martha do a great job. There is this “other character” who I don’t think fits in tone, but thankfully they’re not a significantly present character. The environmental and character sounds, such as the noises that the enemies make are the good-kind-of dreadful, since that’s what the game’s going for. Disappointingly, the music wasn’t really prominent and I can’t think of any song other than the credits song that was even the faintest bit memorable — I even thought that the electric guitar in the opening-scene might’ve been a bit dominant and heavy-handed.

Lastly, and this is unfortunate because I really don’t think this is what the game was going for — but the game was a pretty funny experience. I laughed a lot more than I would in a horror game that wasn’t leaning into the campy experience. Things go wrong on a technical level very frequently, such as the characters’ facial expressions can be inappropriate despite the scenario, and some of the game mechanics can become a recurring joke. For example, when you’re damaged you gain more blood stains on your clothes — accessing a medical station heals you fully, which I’ve joked is just an elaborate cloth-washing attempt since Daniel behaves no differently when he’s near death other than he just looks like he had a wild night out at the local ketchup factory.

That’s about all that passed the vibe check, so let’s talk about what I liked a little less.


To start with the lesser of the evils, the storytelling is a bit rough. I thought the story was overall fine, but the complications I had with it largely came from how clumped up the notes that further elaborate on the lore are. The notes have to be read where they are and they’re really long. Having to read several in one chapter hurts progression and can disenchant the player with their environment and objective. Another thing that’s tangibly related to storytelling is that some characters behave in what I’d consider unbelievable ways. Daniel makes a reference to understanding the formerly-human identity of one of the bosses, but there is no information that alludes to that (though with context, as the player, I could make a guess), characters have some misplaced priorities (fireworks, for example), and a non-zero amount of story beats happen during a fade-to-black cut which are really jarring at worst and lazy at best.

Moving on to another tough point which is gameplay. To start, some of the puzzle controls are unintuitive, such as the clock puzzle. The left/right arrows on a controller operate one hand, instead of alternating between your hand choice; and the button to move the hand is labeled “Select”? Then for combat, enemies (and Martha) get caught on environment pieces all the time and can’t path to you correctly, making them insignificant in many circumstances. The bosses in this game are overly basic and flat — their attacks aren’t hard to dodge, and you simply just shoot ‘em up. Then lastly, there’s two significant parts where you need to find a specific environmental clue or area to advance the plot and these obstacles are really muted, which even with what can be considered thorough searching might result in a frustrating, fruitless session.

Lastly, the greatest adversary I think to be weighing against this game is its inability to maintain its immersion. The scares are ineffective — even the ones that are intended to be jumpscares as they’re either highly predictable or poorly executed on in terms of timing or presentation. Horror and dread can be a delicate atmosphere that can be difficult to maintain. Whenever a small technical bug hits, like one of the several poor camera rigging that throws the camera into Daniel or somewhere else breaks the fear. Things that give relief, whether intended or not, detract from tension and this game is unfortunately incapable of restoring it quicker than it loses it through all the aforementioned disparaging traits this game possesses as there are a lot of oddities that will break your immersion like it was its full time job.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those*.* Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:

https://youtu.be/kQFOigUpi-Q

This is the 43rd review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I don’t recommend this game and as a numerical score, I’d give it a 4/10. On the up, the environmental art and most of the music is well constructed. However, this game is held back by a couple of game-breaking bugs, poorly implemented speech in conjunction with an overall hollow world and story, and roughly functional gameplay with pointless designs, poorly thought-out knockback system and suspected dropped inputs when the game features precision platforming elements.


I came across this game via a coupon that Steam gave me for putting together a Hades badge, because Steam loves it when opposites attract. Seeing that the game wasn’t doing that good made it a perfect Redlight candidate.

In FalconDev’s first and only game The Princess Adventure, or TPA for short, you play as a nameless, seemingly silent princess in a war-torn nation whose main economic tools seems to be that it’s an Amazon fulfillment center with how many boxes are shown throughout the first stage. There’s even a warehouse(?) that’s made up entirely of boxes? Unfortunately no boxes inside of boxes.

Anywhoo, the story beat, if you have the patience to watch it scroll by at its own pace, is that a Prince has come from another nation to bring the two regions together and end whatever strife has been occurring. In his infinite wisdom, he Naruto-ran ahead of his traveling party so that he’d have more one-on-one time with the princess. This witch shows up to exact vengeance against the Prince’s nation, and what better way than to kidnap him while the Princess stands idly watching? After the abduction, the Princess consults her guards who say that she should locate the Princess alone otherwise their mobilization efforts may alarm the Prince’s nation. Exactly how far ahead did this Prince get from his party?

The gameplay elements are plentiful, but simple. Of the most important, there’s you get to swing a sword, jump, throw some knives, self-heal, and collect coins. If you manage to bunch up 25 coins in your coin-purse, you get another life in this limited-life game. You’ll travel through four distinct biome — the plains ft. an Amazon warehouse, a cave, and a swamp and along the way this game will challenge you with four bosses. If you’re more comfortable playing with a controller, the game is partially controller compatible with only the menu elements requiring a keyboard and mouse for input.

In terms of total gameplay time it took me 2.7 hours to beat the game; if not for some faults I probably could’ve beaten it in about 2 hours. The keenest of eyes will notice I have no achievements, so bestow upon me your sympathy.

That’s about everything I need to cover, so let’s talk about what I liked.


The game features some great environmental art — the character sprites are perfectly fine but the level visuals are by far and large the best aspect of this game. While the cave is a little more drab than the other two biomes, there’s not a whole lot you can do with them I feel, and I think the developer did a commendable job in that space all things considered. The one gripe I have is that one biome just has circular saws strung up on wire and it seems out of place.

Trailing that, I found the music largely okay. Each biome has its own song and The tracks are suitable for the game that they’re in and aren’t over-produced or overly theatrical. I do have some reservations about the boss song which is consistent with all four encounters and there’s this light-hearted bell (chime?) that is ill-fitted for an otherwise antagonizing track.

That’s about all that I really enjoyed, so let’s talk about what I liked a little less.


To start with the lesser of all the evils; I ran into two game-breaking bugs. One repeatable, and one at random. For some context, there exists a downward spike attack that you can do by jumping and pressing the down directional button. When doing this shortly after concluding the main story beat’s dialogue, I had the Princess perform this on an enemy which resulted in her getting stuck, unable to move and forcing me to reload. This happened twice before I decided to stop doing that move out of fear of losing progress and time. For the other, the game just randomly crashed at a point where I was heavily frustrated with the game in the swamp biome, so it came at a terrible time.

Next up are the story-telling elements. Speech in this game is really frustrating. There’s no voice-acting, so it’s all text-box scrolling. In some instance you can press a button to generate all the elements, but the main dialogue between the Princess and the Prince at the beginning seems to be misconfigured as if you press any button twice (to generate the text and then to advance the bubble) you skip the whole exchange with the Prince, the Witch, and the Guards, missing the entire dominant plot point and I had to restart the game three times because I just thought I was doing something wrong and didn’t want to miss the dialogue. This frustration in combination with that this world is missing a lot of world-building details just leaves this void that isn’t appropriately filled at any point in the game by any of your encounters.

Lastly, the gameplay is feeling really rough around the edges. For the smaller things, there’s some dead-end gameplay designs — for one there’s no real need to gain lives in this game as there’s no advantage to having lives since you can just reload from the plentiful save points the game introduces to you. Additionally, there’s when you get hit your character gets knocked backwards and there are no invincibility frames, leading to some instances where you’ll get hit and them immediately get knocked back into a herd of enemies that’ll kill you in a second. Moving onto the boss fights — only the very first one was a challenge. The others you just stand (or jump) near and just… hit ‘em. Sometimes you might want to avoid damage, but you hurt them a lot faster than they hurt you. Then lastly, there was one very precise platforming section where your inputs will need to be on precise and I really don’t think this game was configured in a way that reconciles with what you’re seeing on the screen. I went as far as setting up an input register to see if I was misinterpreting my own skill for the game’s shortcoming, but after seeing the input register I feel like there are some improvements to be made in the wall-jump mechanic’s hopping window as it’s far too tight.


For a first game, the game isn’t bad. But at this price point and no sign of the developer making further improvements there are little reasons to play TPA when there game doesn’t even want to give you achievements for your patience and perseverance. :(

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those*.* Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:

https://youtu.be/3V-6a7CqVv8

This is the 42nd review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I don’t recommend i crossed over into the world of magic and as a numerical score, I’d give it a 1/10. The sound effects slider doesn’t work (and the sound effects are pretty overwhelming). There’s too much happening on screen with all the visual effects. The game fails to convey anything, leaving me with a feeling that there’s nothing to observe, enjoy, or take part of, and even as an Early Access Game, it’s too early in this game’s development to give any meaningful feedback that isn’t what I’d consider outright foundational.


I was originally drawn to this game because it had a super elongated title; then I saw the trailer and it answered exactly zero questions I had so I knew the game was going to be an experience, and I was sort of right?

In i crossed over into the world of magic (or “this game” for short, because that’s way too long), you play as an unnamed female who is surrounded by auto-attacking magic that is fending off her various uncles? Or maybe it’s just one uncle from different multiverses, because there’s like 6 different dressed-up versions. It’s hard to really tell. They come from everywhere — including falling straight from the sky.

The main menu features the game title in four different languages plus four somewhat-identifiable buttons. There’s “Axe” and “Arrows” which both launch the game, settings, and then the “quit” button. I can’t tell what the former two do because they seemingly launch the same game. As far as the user experience goes, you run around with WASD, sprint with Shift, and you can “look behind you” with right click. Notice how there’s no ability to control the zoom. Your camera is at the whim of whatever’s in front of you, so there’s a chance the camera just gets smashed into the character’s chest if you run into a hill or a tree.

The game features not one, not two, but three colored bars. They’re blue flavored, green flavored, and red flavored. Not too clear on what blue and green are for, but you learn pretty quickly that red is for health. In the “Axe” game mode, eventually this yellow bar comes up but since I can’t tell what it’s for I just assume it’s the bladder-meter.

That’s about all the foundation we need, so let’s talk about what made the game difficult to enjoy.


The least of all the evils is that the sound effects slider doesn’t work. For one reason or another, the game launches with all three sliders turned all the way down. I also can’t tell what the third slider is — it looks like a kitchen timer, but I can’t tell what it changes. Anyway, after turning the sound effects up, I learned pretty quickly that they’re really loud, and really obnoxious, so I tried to turn them down mid-game by pressing Escape. The settings menu comes up in a foreign scripture, I die with the settings menu open, and then I can’t open the settings menu back in the main menu. I was able to open it by pressing Escape and attempting to re-open it. After turning sound effects down, I restarted the “Axe” game-mode and heard sound effects at the previously set volume.

When it comes to the User Interface, none of the four buttons are labeled, so I can’t tell what Axe and Arrows do — they both launch the game, but I can’t tell any meaningful difference between them. My guess is that one’s Story, and ones Endless, because those modes are talked about on the Steam store page, but that’s just a guess. Something also worth mentioning is that I play at 1440p, and I feel like the game may have been designed at a smaller resolution. When you open up the game, you can tell that some modules are just pushed off to the side, such as the settings container box. These items persist even after you start the game — they’re not really in the way, but you can definitely see them, so that’s a bit wild. Then I also talked about zooming in/out a bit earlier, considering this game is so visually busy, the ability to control your zoom is imperative and this game lacks that basic feature.

The visual elements are truly an attack on all senses — for a smaller, funnier bit, the in-game leaves don’t fall they just 360 spin in the air and then eventually disappear. It’s kind of funny to think that the falling animation couldn’t be applied for the early access release as opposed to just leaving the leaves out of the game. Then for all the other elements, the orbs that surround the main character are bright, big, and distracting. Those orbs combined with the restless slew of uncles charging it’s hard to discern what’s happening on the screen — there’s just too much. I talked about the humongous, oversized bars also not being labeled earlier — not sure what green, blue, and yellow mean.

Lastly, the worst of all the offenders is just that the game isn’t able to convey anything. There’s no reference to the story outlined on the Steam store page, I can’t really understand anything about what’s happening in the game, and I never saw a boss or noticed an improvement in character attributes. Maybe those latter bits aren’t included in the game yet, but the Steam store page makes them seem like they are, but if they are — I can’t tell. And that’s the biggest problem I have with this game, I just can’t understand anything. Like, why is the character nude if the nips are covered? There’s so many questions and I can’t convince myself to invest anymore time into understanding this game than I already have.


That’s about all I’ve got for ya. Thanks for reading.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those*.* Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:

https://youtu.be/drYdEq1QP9c

This is a spoiler free review. It's accompanied by a spoiler-free video review that can be found here.

In summary, I don’t recommend Failure Drill, and as a numerical score I’d give it a 3/10. This visual novel has some well-made visual styling, but it lacks in copy / proofing, no sound direction, some clunky puzzle interactions, and storytelling that felt both rushed and shallow.


I picked up Failure Drill because the art looked interesting and I’m a sucker for psychological horrors. Found on the All New Releases page.

Failure Drill is a 2D adventure game that largely plays as a visual novel. You spend most of your time reading text with only an occasional need to interact with stuff, typically for puzzle-purposes. Otherwise, it’s clicking on an element to advance the story.

In this game, you play as Claire, a young woman who gets brought into a military academy. It’s not too clear as to why, but what I’ve inferred is that it’s because she lacks empathy, I suppose. She comes from a relatively stressful environment, with familial problems in combination with her not doing well in school. She seems apprehensive about the idea, but after a loving conversation with her brother and a small speaking-to with a fabled hero, Claire decides to join the academy. For some reason we learn that Claire is both an “interesting candidate” while being absolutely terrible at basketball, while one of her classmates appears to be the next Lebron James. Their first training assignment is to watch over this outpost for any enemy stragglers, as this population is at war with something.

The game has a runtime of about 30 minutes if you’re a slow reader and get caught up on any one of the puzzles. I ended up completing the game twice just to try and grasp a better understanding of the story, so my playtime’s a little off.

An excellent premise, clearly one that can be built off of. Let’s talk about what I liked.


The art, one of the two things that originally drew me in does deliver. All the scenes are well done, and there’s a scene in particular that showcases some shining light visuals on a panning camera in a game that overall does not offer any animation. For character animations, characters move by ‘teleporting’ and fading in/out instead of traditionally animated movement.

That’s about all that I could take pleasure from, so let’s talk about what I liked a little less.


It didn’t take long for me to run into some grammatical / spelling errors, which for one reason or another were mostly centered around the beginning of the game. For a visual novel this is kind of a tough pill to swallow since your focus is mostly on the text, second to the art that comes behind the text. It’s possible that English may not be the developer’s first language, as the shorthand for “December (DEC)” is spelled w/ an I instead of an E, which is usually found in Spanish or Italian languages.

Next up, the game was awfully devoid of sound, especially in the beginning sequences in the game. Up until Claire’s assignment, there’s very few sound effects, almost no music, and absolutely no voice acting. This felt really disconnecting in a crucial time for players to try and emotionally connect or sympathize with the cast, and that opportunity was challenging without sound cues or audio pieces to use as a vehicle. Sounds and effects were more prominent later, but still much less than I would have hoped for.

To swallow another big pill, the gameplay was a bit clunky. There’s only two puzzles to solve, both involving knobs or levers in some way. Something that's pretty annoying with these two puzzles is that the mouse cursor must stay on the knob or lever to turn, which, again, is a bit of a nuisance. For the levers, they could be simplified to being a clickable on/off switch, because 99% of the lever’s position is off while 1% of it is on. The lever puzzle (which is a temperature-related puzzle) is also really ambiguous in its goal — essentially, Claire wants water that’s not too hot, not too cold, and you have a rather large thermometer to work with. It’s mostly trial and error on what she wants, but I also forgot that the water valve needed to be turned on the knob and not clicked, so I spent more time than I needed to there because I didn’t realize I wasn’t using it as intended.

Lastly, which is considered the biggest of offenders, is the storytelling. It feels really rushed. If you look at the About This Game, the advertisement leads you to believe you’re going to wrangle with belonging, identity, and purpose. That’s kind of hard when a game only has 30 minutes of playtime, and maybe no more than 200 dialogue boxes. There were plenty of times where the scenes transitioned and there was no establishment on how much time passed at almost every point in the game, which makes it hard to connect with characters when you can’t figure out how long you’ve been by their side. There are some parts of the game where time is easier to tell, but once again the introduction is lacking in this aspect specifically.

Another thing to tack onto the previous point is the lack of worldbuilding or character development. Like I mentioned, we’re supposed to be wrangling with identity, purpose, and belonging. Well, if Claire’s the focus, there’s clearly no benefit in following up with either of the two people I mentioned in the Introduction… which, the game must believe in, because we don’t. We don’t know their fate, there are no hints, they’re never even mentioned again. The enemy or the threat at large is also a bit mysterious. They’re definitely interesting — but we’ll never really be introduced to them or their threat, so don’t worry about having to think about ‘em, so we’ll leave worldbuilding to the birds. So, with all the focus on Claire… certainly we’ll get plenty of monologues, internal strife, how she deals with emotions, compromise, conviction, or etcetera. …

… or maybe not. We’ll just give Claire some conviction with the most minimal amount of thought, wrap up the game with a very literal ending, and we as an audience will never see the impact of her actions. I can’t consider this a story-rich drama, and as far as psychological horrors go, the most applicable to that descriptor is the game’s conveyance of the heavy topics it wanted to talk about.


This game could’ve been better as an episodic web-comic because the art is really nice, but fighting for space in the $6 USD range is kind of a tough fight since for what you get out of it.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those. Did you like this written review? Check out the spoiler-free video review for visual and audio compliments to the review:

https://youtu.be/5xJyDXMamU0

This is a spoiler free review. It's accompanied by a (mostly, marked) spoiler-free video review that can be found here.

In summary, I can recommend this game, and as a numerical score I’d give it an 8/10. The game successfully establishes a layered atmosphere of beauty and terror through its visual and audio elements. Additionally, it does execute on environmental storytelling without much sacrifice. Negatively affecting the game have at least one extremely punishing section and some confusing Points of Interest.


♥♥♥♥♥ ni (lol it’s censored, “Sni” for short hereon) is the first release by developer and self-publisher LuN and takes some heavy inspiration from a cult-classic called Yume Nikki. The game operates on a heavy aura of mystery, so anything within “Quotes” is self-named.

In this game, you play as an unnamed female protagonist (”Dreamer”) who is unable to venture outside her bedroom and the balcony in her room. With the only meaningful interactive being your bed, you’re sent into a dream realm to confront some internalized thoughts.

The game is composed of five initial dreamscapes that I’ve also self-titled as “Hand Drawn”, “Red Eye”, “Forest”, “Swamp”, and “Trippy”. More often than not, you’ll venture around these dreamscapes without much more notion than the knowledge that you’re looking for anything. These “first-layer” dreamscapes typically lead to other dreamscapes, typically becoming more unsettling, more volatile, and at times, more violent than its predecessors; which brings us to this game’s title. The game title comes from a Japanese word that means under or beneath, which could mean that descending is the objective. In the instance you get stuck or just outright spooked at your environment, you do possess the ability to wake up right away to restart your journey.

That’s about enough of the foundation we need, so let’s look towards what I enjoyed.


“Sni” captures its atmosphere masterfully through its art direction, both audibly and visually. I feel that the aspect that’s most captivating is the sound design. The game appropriately tracks songs that are fitting for the environment — it conveys a range of emotions including warmth, calm, discomfort, tension, and danger. The music is composed of loops, some that are more noticeable than others, but not disruptive to the overall experience. I’d even go as far to say that some of these songs could function as ambient working music. It’s all very intentional and masterfully implemented.

Not far behind the audio are the visuals; the “first-layer” dreamscapes are easy to spend time in, and more often than not you’re able to “anchor” something to your screen to help orient yourself to cover ground effectively to determine if you’ve been to a place before. This becomes less true for the “lower-layer” dreamscapes, which can be more sparse and spread out. Additionally, there are some genuinely unsettling art pieces — and I don’t just mean shock-horror where the developer tries to show you most disruptive images possible to bait a reaction. Sometimes it’s the indescribable shape or posture of something that’s hard to describe until you stare at it and start to piece together what you’re really looking at.

Lastly, I was wary at the idea of environmental storytelling by a solo-developer’s first release, but I’m glad to say that the caution was wasted as I found the experience incredibly sufficient. There’s plenty of abstract encounters for people to interpret, speculate, and discuss all the while there are things that are extremely on-the-nose that give you some level of base to ground yourself with.

Those are the things I enjoyed the most, so let’s move into the things I liked a little less.


One of the lesser evils that caused some confusion in some of the dreamscapes are when things don’t respond to being interacted with. This game is full of points of interest that have no flavor text or anything to indicate that it serves a purpose beyond eye-candy. It’s understandable that the game is leaning into its minimal text aspect as part of the game, but from a gameplay perspective it can be a bit frustrating to think you’ve explored everything in a zone, only for something to become active later on because of ✨reasons ✨ unbeknownst to you. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for actionable points of interest to provide tool-tip clues, such as something that looks like it’s missing something could include a self-thought of“…lonely…”; I don’t think that’s too out of place, but maybe others would feel that this undermines a core belief of the game.

Lastly, at some point, there’s a puzzle, and it’s really mean. Excruciatingly punishing in terms of time required to complete it. I won’t talk about it in great detail because it’s apart of the discovery, but in essence if you fail the puzzle, you get woken up, and you have to make a decently lengthy trek to re-attempt it. It technically does get easier with each failure, but all in all it took me a little over an hour and a half to complete this puzzle. I unfortunately encountered it really early on (around the 20 minute mark), got frustrated with it enough to decide that I was going to finish it so I never had to come back, and that lead to piling frustrations. The rest of the game was much more enjoyable beyond that point, but there was a real walking-on-razerblades moment in that specific event.

Anywhoo, those things are mostly minor overall; both frustrating at points, but overcome due to resilience and the lure of a better experience on the other end of things.


That about wraps up my thoughts on the game - I don’t think I’ve found everything this game had to offer in the 8.5 hours I’ve played it. I’m hopeful that more will catch onto this game so I can see other peoples’ interpretations, explanations, and crowdsourcing of solutions and encounters. I do worry that the price may steer some people away because $5 USD can be steep for people in a niche game type; here’s to hoping those worries are wasted.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those. Did you like this written review? Check out the video review for visual and audio compliments to the review:

https://youtu.be/Ga5p-SrOfpk

This is the 41st review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I don’t recommend Beauty Shooter, and as far as a numerical score goes, I’d give it a 2/10. I initially bought the game after the incredibly enticing Steam store page description, only to find a game with lackluster sound design, shallow gameplay, and some questionable art decisions. No nuts busted, no bricks upped.


Beauty Shooter is a short shooter (kinda shmup, kinda top-down) game that uses the burst clothes system, which is a rather unique way of saying you explode clothes to claim your prize. I originally bought the game because I wanted to use new CGs after clearing customs.

The game is pretty simple — hold left mouse button to shoot three swords, collect an emphatically phallic radish to upgrade to five swords, press right mouse button to consume radish and invoke a screen-clearing explosion. The game features small octopi-like enemies, that upon closer examination appear to be… ninjas? They fire projectiles what feels like every once in awhile, so they don’t really want to hurt you. If you shoot directly at the woman (and her clothes), you can blow up pieces of the clothes. Burst enough clothes with this system, and a boss comes down. The boss doesn’t attack though, by the way. Destroy boss, clear customs, use CGs, just as the description stated. I don’t value my time, because I did try to make the boss come out without bursting clothes since the game has point-scoring for whatever reason, and that just didn’t happen.

The game features probably about ~15 minutes of gameplay for the best, as there’s only twelve levels. Twelve levels, six models, six prize scenes, and six scenes that serve no purpose than to be a distraction. You see, each model has two outfits — her “battle” wear, if you would. Beat her the first time and on the next level you’ll battle her again this time in her “sexy” wear. Beat her then, go to view her again, click on the little photo icon, then the gold-emblem icon afterwards, and you now are given the ability to dispense nut with your choice of radish-scene one, and radish-scene two (if you even need it them that point, I mean, you’ve waited so long). You’ll also be given an achievement that has no relation to the game other than the fact that the game gave it to you.

That’s all the foundation, so let’s move onto the likings.


I really liked the art of the achievements. I can proudly display them on my profile without outright revealing I earned them from a hentai game. The achievements are named after roles or ranks in nobility, so for example after defeating the third girl, you unlock the achievement “Earl”, which, also happens to be a name. So, her name must be Earl. Hot.


As far things I liked a little less, the sound design was the first thing that stood out. The game has two songs - the menu song and the level song. In a way, the game being short is beneficial because you don’t have to spend a lot of time listening to either in addition to the repetitive sound of the enemies dying. The real woes come from the prize scenes — all the girls use the same two moaning tracks, except the last one who does have one unique track, I think. The sounds also happen to sound like they’ve been recorded through someone else’s speakers as they sound extremely washed out.

The gameplay is shallow, and that’s usually okay. The game should provide stimulation to your brain, or your head. One of the two. So if the gameplay isn’t that entertaining, the prizes should be, right? Put a pin in that. The game just isn’t that difficult; the enemies don’t fire projectiles often enough, they have predictable flight patterns, and the boss literally does nothing other than float around. It might be to this games’ benefit that projectiles aren’t commonplace — the hitbox for your character is super large than what would be considered acceptable by most shmuppers.

Lastly, the art is kinda wild, and not in a good way. There’s at least two outfits that just really don’t belong on the models - and they happen to be the “sexy” outfits. They didn’t look sexy on the Runescape characters they seemingly were ripped off of, they don’t look sexy on these models. Additionally, some of the poses are just so unnaturally funny that I had to laugh, namely the second lady who also happens to be in the trailer in her skeleton-samurai-garb. Like, I get it — the battle wear is not why we’re here, but like, I have to experience it to get to where I’m trying to go so you can bet I have something to say about it as I mosey on by. Then lastly, some of the animations in the prize scenes are just whack — one of the prize scenes for the banner model straight up looks as if she’s breaking her legs during her performance. That’s crazy commitment; I might never meet a lady like her, and not just because she ain’t real.


Anyway, for two bucks you can’t expect a whole lot, but I was hoping for something a little more fulfilling, however you wanna catch that drift.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those*.* Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:

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This is the 40th review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I cannot recommend Cyber Girl - Zombie Hentai, and as a numerical score I’d rate it a 2/10. The game’s music is the best thing about it, the ”consequence scenes” are uninteresting, but the gameplay is really short, the game offers no challenge or replayability, and finally the game is held back by a critically game-breaking bug.


In Cyber Girl - Zombie Hentai, you play as a seemingly nameless protagonist in the midst of a zombie apocalypse in a familiar cyberpunk aesthetic. We’ll call her Bunny, though, because that’s her name in the info/tutorial screen, it’s just never mentioned again. Featuring a slightly diverse weapon-set and her infinite endurance, she’ll clean up the streets of as many zombies as necessary to get her fill of that shmeat. Also, the zombies drop money, it seems. Or maybe you’re getting paid a bounty per kill. Who knows. It took me about 45 minutes to beat the game and only three minutes beyond that was I able to get all of the games’ achievements.

The game plays as a third-person shooter with some mostly typical 3rd person shooter controls; some notables would be that you can’t jump, but you instead can roll. You’ll fight off against a few waves of zombies that spawn within three different environments across nine stages total. In between each stage you’ll have the option to power up either health or damage. If you clear stage nine, you’ll have completed the game. When it comes to the zombies themselves there’s three different types in the game — the slow and shambling zombie, a slightly-faster zombie, and then a butcher-zombie that acts as a “boss” that deals more damage with a larger health pool.2

Weapon purchasing and upgrading exists but can only be done when outside of your completion attempts, so if you fail you’ll have an opportunity to spend the cash you earned from knocking off the heads of zeds. The weapon-set you can have access to includes the hand-gun you start off with, in addition to a submachine gun, assault rifle, shotgun, revolver, and finally a katana. You can also have no weapon in your hand, for whatever reason that is as there’s no melee functionality. All the weapons are upgradeable up to eight times except the katana, which cannot be upgraded at all. Upgrades grant additional damage and and a larger clip — ammo itself is infinite, you can reload as many times as you’d like.

When it comes to the more adult aspects of the game, the protagonist will remove articles of clothing as you progress through the stages, leaving her entirely nude by the last stage. In a somewhat masochistic act, she dodges, ducks, dips, dives, and dodges all across these nasty post-apocalyptic streets while letting it all air out. Zombie kills unlock the gallery - once you rack up 250 kills you’ll have all 8 scenes you rightfully earned, and if you finish stage nine, you’re given a “little surprise” in the main menu. If you die or complete the game, you’re given a ”consequences” button you can press, which just activates the latest adult scene you’ve unlocked. It’s funny that “consequences” is the verbiage if you clear all nine stages, like — why am I facing a consequence for completing the game?

Anyway, that’s about all the foundation ya need, so let’s talk about what I liked.


The most commendable of all the items is that the game gets a point for having some good, well-looped music. It subsequently loses a point because the Store Page advertises synthwave music and this doesn’t sound like that, so it evens out to moot.

That’s the only notable, so let’s move onto what I liked a little bit less.


To start off with things I didn’t like that ultimately didn’t affect scoring because they’re so minor; in the Settings menu you have the option to adjust the music, sound, and voice volume, but there’s no feedback to tell you if the sound or voice volumes are at a desirable level. Music plays in the background on this screen, but there’s no sound or voice that plays while adjusting the slider to help you figure out if you want Bunny to be moaning at [s]nut[/s] ear-busting levels. Also, the currency is an ethernet plug sign here, but in the purchasing menu the currency are dollar signs. I couldn’t actually figure out where my money was at first because of the icon inconsistency. Anyway, onto things that actually matter.

The lesser of all the evils is that the game doesn’t offer any challenge. The only difficulty you face is on your first run when you can only afford the pistol’s first couple of upgrades. Between the unlimited sprinting, dodging, and the instantaneous reload, you can put some distance between the zombies and yourself, enough to deliver a couple of headshots. This becomes futile later because there’s just too many, but unlocking the shotgun or the assault rifle puts you on autopilot for the nine levels. The game would really benefit from limiting stamina and slowing down the reload on some of the heavier weapons.

For the next dig, the graphics don’t hold up well mechanically. Like, sure, they look nice - but functionally they’re vapid. The level aesthetics are the only thing cyberpunky about the game aside from the eligible sound tracks. Bunny, the zombies, and even the weapons don’t really fit the intended theme. The blood graphics are laughable, some of the environment obstacles can be walked through, and the CG zom-boning scenes are sterile. It was in those scenes I learned that zombies have pants and that they have normal-colored genitalia, despite their green skin. Out of all of those, the only one that requires further expansion are the sex scenes - like, that’s really all this game should be redeemable for because let’s face it, the gameplay is just a means to that end, but they are just so uninteresting. DeviantArt’s got better stuff. Just to dig that ditch a foot deeper, the audio track has no synchronization with the scene, which makes sense because the audio track is like thirty seconds long for a five second loop.

When it comes to the gameplay, the game is held back by the lack of quality control leaving the bugs to run rampant. For example, there’s at least one safe space in each level where you can stand and shoot at the zombies. There’s also a way to leave the boundaries in each level and just wander beyond the walls. Walk far enough, you’ll fall through the floor forever. If you’re lucky enough, you might get permanently stuck on a level fixture. Then lastly, I refuse the believe that the katana, which can’t be leveled up because it’s “God Level”, was tested in any capacity.

Lastly, the worst of all the offenders is another, but game-breaking bug. When I purchased all the weapons and upgrades, I wasn’t able to pull out any weapon. You normally start the game empty-handed and have to strike a key on your number line to pull out a weapon, but those buttons no longer worst post-maxing everything out. You also can’t die, you just sink into oblivion. Just like my feelings about this game. Reinstalling fixes it, but the fact that it’s a problem at all is a critical oversight.


Well, that’s about everything. The game is a vehicle to deliver sex, but the sex ain’t sexy.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those*.* Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:

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This is a spoiler free review. It's accompanied by a spoiler-free video review here.

In summary, I’d recommend this game, and as a numerical score I’d give it an 8/10. Azazel’s Christmas Fable offers a charming story, an interesting and unique cast of characters, some well-crafted music, and some logical and compelling puzzles. I found that it was only minorly held back by by some questionable UI elements and some display complications.


In Azazel’s Christmas Fable (or ACF for short), you play as Azazel, a devilish imp that’s not that good at fulfilling his servitude to the Gorgomon the Great. Gorgomon sends Azazel to the North Pole to infiltrate the elf community, find this “CLAUS” character, locate a reported “source of joy” and destroy it. For gameplay duration, I was able to complete my first run of the game in about three and a half hours. It took me another hour and eleven minutes to get the rest of the achievements, leaving me with a 100% completion time of 4 hours and 41 minutes.

This is a simple point-and-click game that contains the usual suspects: collect items, interact with characters and the environment at large (sometimes with items), solve puzzles, and finally combine those gameplay elements to unravel the ugly Christmas sweater that is your over-arching story objective. What may seem like an innocuous set piece actually could turn out as being the stepladder that helps you overcome one of your greatest obstacles, and you’ll kick yourself in the butt after wasting ~20 minutes thinking of clever arguments as to how you could do this with that so you didn’t need this. Those types of situations still exist in this game, but that’s where you tap into your best companion suspension of disbelief because otherwise you’ll never be satisfied.

As you talk to the characters that inhabit the North Pole, you’ll find that your objective is far from as straightforward as it should be. It starts off as an ultimate, single objective (”Destroy the source of joy”) and eventually becomes a smorgasbord of fetch-quests and logical puzzles all serving as additional objectives. It’s kind of like real life, where the base objective ”survive” eventually becomes bogged down with things like “pay taxes” and “take your kid for a walk with their monkey backpack leash”. Very realistic, very relatable, even if I haven’t had the opportunity to serve the dark lord myself.

I think that’s about all the foundational stuff we need, so let’s talk about what I liked.


To start off with the greater of all the goodness, I want to commend the gameplay most of all. ACF features what I’d consider five traditional puzzles where you’re staring at a screen, clicking interactables and determining patterns before finally making the solve. Realistically, the whole game is a puzzle in the form of a ‘big shape sorter’ puzzle (you know, the star goes in the star slot, circle in the circle slot) because most collected items have one, maybe two uses before being ‘consumed’, and those also all carry logical reasoning. I consider it a great experience when I can make it to the end of a puzzle with little frustration, feeling like I’ve fully understood what was asked of me. Out of the five traditional puzzles, I’d consider two of them to be difficult and take more time than the others (”Master Decoder” and “Master Builder” are related achievements), but are by no means unreasonable.

Another thing that I really enjoyed was the music in the game - it remained thematic and pleasant to listen to during my playthrough. There are some really impressive songs, such as the ones related to the “Rock God” and “Expert Navigator” achievements. The songs were good enough to avoid that feeling of overplaying its welcome — you know, that feeling when you spend too much time in a zone, maybe because of frustration or confusion, that eventually you just start hating everything about that zone? Anyway, in a similar vein - even though I wouldn’t call the voice acting phenomenal, it definitely added more to the experience as opposed to detracting from it. I think it’s thoughtful and somewhat incredible that there’s a voice for every character you talk to.

Following that previous avenue, I think the story and its cast compose a charming little Christmas fable. The game has that specific kind of charm where the game can appeal to adults with some of its humor because younger players won’t understand some of the jokes, or fail to understand the humor in some of the relevancy to the games’ meta commentary, but the game is clean and engaging enough for younger audiences. The characters also manage to avoid relying on tropes which allow them to feel unique with some semblance of dimension. Brad is one of my favorites and even comes with his own conflict! This 2D game has some 3D character design.

Lastly, and I didn’t actually account for this in my scoring, but the Developer responds really well to feedback. I think it’s awesome to see that someone posted feedback on the Steam community board and they took that into account and made changes — that’s why the game is nine dollars instead of ten and is also how we got achievements! Like, yeah, I guess the suggestion of one person made it happen, but it took (at least) two people to make that change, and that should be recognized.

But that’s about it for all of the commendations! Let’s move onto the things I liked a little less.


Oh hey, this one got updated today. Pay it no mind. I like to start with the least of all the offenders; I have one minor gripe that ultimately didn’t impact scoring. There’s a safe that relies on a specific code, and (hint) that code is a date. That code is given and could be interpreted differently based on where they live in the world; it wasn’t a problem for me because I don’t live in one of those places, but I could see it causing some confusion to some folk.

The only ”real” problem I had with the game, has to do with the UI and the display complications. The game is rendered as a 320 x 200 resolution, which was the resolution of MS-DOS point-and-click games. The game plays in full-screen by default; you could flip the game into windowed mode with ALT + ENTER, but the game doesn’t have cursor lock which means when you may click outside of the game window as you click the edges of screens as you’re expected to do. Also, for whatever reason, pressing ESC doesn’t bring up the Menu, it just skips to the “Quit Game?” prompt, and oddly enough there’s no “Return to Menu” button in case I needed to load from another save. Then for display complications, related to the “Master Decoder” achievement, the symbols on the pad are very difficult to make out and don’t necessarily resemble the key you’re referencing to. These are rather minor in the grand scheme of things, but are still worth mentioning.


That’s about it for this review; I enjoy playing a Christmas game once a year. These games aren’t considered lucrative because they hardly get acknowledgement within the holiday they were made for and it’s even worse for these games outside of the holidays. If you’re like me and enjoy holiday games, I’d ask you to consider this one.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those. Did you like this written review? Check out the spoiler-free video review for visual and audio compliments to the review:

https://youtu.be/3osPl0I0z0I

This is the 39th review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I can only recommend Succubus with Guns if it were on sale, and as a numerical score I’d rate it a 4 out of 10. It being closer to a five than a three. The game is visually strong and the Endless Mode is enjoyable, but comes up short in terms of story, audio direction, and is further weighed down by some deeply repetitive, frustrating, and occasionally game-breaking buggy gameplay.


In Succubus with Guns you play as a nameless protagonist who has got a hell of a way with her sway and a bunch of visible skin to help you smack the shmeat. No sexual content though, so the imagination will have to do for some of you. The bit of story setup in this game is that a ritual has gone wrong, and for reasons that are unbeknownst to us, our protagonist has to go and kill hundreds if not thousands of enemies across six different realms (stages) to right the wrongs of some ne’er-do-wells. The six unique realms feature several waves of enemies that spawn once you clean up the current wave, with the last wave being a biome-specific boss.

The enemies in this game vary from healthy to extra thiccc, some being melee, some being ranged, and some enemies in both of those combat types capable of doing big damage. Each level in the Story Mode contains a new weapon to add to your arsenal, some additional health, as well as ammo for your weapons. The weapons you have access to include a sword, several different bullet-based firearms, a rocket launcher, and a plasma cannon rifle beam boomer blaster. While ammo seems scarce in some levels, you can conserve your ammo by using your melee attacks or by hitting headshots for extra damage.

If you happen to die, you’ll be given the ability to respawn by picking up some bushy red balls if you aren’t playing on Hard mode. You can pick up to ten during your respawn timer and each one you pick up represents 10% of your health; you can pick up as little as one or as many as ten. The game does have a stamina meter which limits your melee attack frequency in addition to your sprinting and jumping capabilities.

When it comes to Endless Mode (EM), you fight an endless wave of enemies that spawn at some randomized frequency. Each kill gives you resources you can use to purchase ammunition, additional weapons, or buildable items like turrets or traps. EM does have an auto-save function and you’ll be able to start from your last checkpoint if you wanted to keep racking up the score to place on this games’ global leaderboards.

For those who care about achievements, it took me a little over four hours to get all of them, but those who are better gamers than I could probably get them in three. The additional game time comes from other endeavors.

That’s about all we need for the foundation, so let’s talk about what I liked.


The most notable commendation I’d have to give this game was the enjoyability from Endless Mode (EM). EM is way more exciting, challenging, and fair than the default Story Mode. While EM isn’t perfect, it’s the reason I spent more than just the bare-minimum amount of time in this game, and that’s driven largely by the leaderboard aspect. At first, you have to strategically engage enemies until you build up a considerable amount of buildables. Even when you think you’ve monopolized murder, a group of very healthy units will spawn to reset the playing field, keeping EM consistently engaging and challenging.

The other worthwhile mention for me are the graphics — whether they’re premade assets or not. The lighting is excellent, the [s]titty bounces[/s] animations are smooth, and overall the game is easy to enjoy visually.

That’s about all the mentionables here, so let’s look at what I liked a little less.


The weaker of my criticisms come from this games’ story. The game does give you a couple of cutscenes without much dialogue to explain some of the motivations of anybody in the game. From here, it just seems like the Succubus wants to take the opportunity to engage in some casual genocide of the other six realms. For the most part, I get it, the focus isn’t on the story. But… it’s here, and it doesn’t do a lot for all the questions I have. We’ll revisit the story in some later criticisms.

Another thing that I found less enjoyable was the games’ audio direction. I don’t consider the sound effects to be that poor, but the music is incredibly lackluster if not downright forgettable. There’s at least one very quiet song that plays and if it’s the same as the title screen’s you’re listening to this singular, quiet song for just about your entire gameplay duration. It’s disappointing there’s no change in music between realms or bosses. Also, the Succubus randomly says these lines, ”I love you”, “Oh”, “I’ll never leave you” (plus some others) without reasoning and sound are poor in recording/playback quality. The randomization does lead to some comedic timings, like when you deliver a shotgun slug to the head of a zombified waifu and the Succubus follows up with an ”I love you”.

Lastly, the gameplay brings up some concerns. I’ll only talk about a few for character count. To start, the AI is easy to manipulate. If you aren’t dealing with any ranged opponents, just hop on a vertical platform and lay down the law since they don’t really jump. Unfortunately most bosses succumb to the same type of exploit. If you’re into melee combat, just continue walking backwards, briefly stop, strike, and resume backwards walking. You’ll avoid most melee damage this way.

Another gameplay element that mixes with story is that some levels force you into specific weapon paths, such as being forced to use the sword with no explanation, even though you consistently keep your guns and ammo for all but two levels (including the sword level). These types of inconsistencies could be explained away by some general writing, but instead you’re left wondering on the conditions of the level that are the exception to the regular gameplay experience. As a side, the plasma weapon is unique to Story Mode, while a bow and arrow is unique to Endless Mode. These two weapons are unavailable in the alternative game mode, and I’m not quite sure why.

Lastly, there’s a game-breaking bug that you can encounter when you shotgun a downed enemy. By shooting the shotgun at an enemy that’s prone, you have the chance to knock them beneath the surface where you can no longer hurt them with any weapon. If you’re playing in Story Mode, this means you can no longer complete the level and will have to restart it. This did happen to me twice, and you should be able to avoid this by just not doing that. A more minor bug is that in Endless Mode, if you close the purchasing window too quickly after buying a buildable, the resources will be consumed and you won’t get the buildable since it takes a second to enter your inventory. This one can be overcome by just waiting for an extra second, but could lead to some frustration if you don’t understand what happened.


That’s about all I’ve got. I think this game is a perfectly acceptable $5 game considering one of the two modes is enjoyable, but $15 really raises the expectations for this game and a lot of them just aren’t met.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those. Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:

https://youtu.be/ayV3tMygSHI