Recent reviews by 25¢

Fantastic atmosphere, excellent writing and engaging tactical gameplay. Near-perfect game.

It can get a little tedious towards the end, but just remember that you don't have to do every sidequest and exhaust every plotline before facing the final boss and you should be fine. Plus, there's all kinds of difficulty settings to play with.

A bit buggy, but if you can live with that it's absolutely magical.

Don't let looks fool you. The Consuming Shadow has flaws, but it knows how to work with or around them. The graphics may be nothing but ♥♥♥♥♥♥ paper cutouts, but this game knows how to turn those shadow puppets into your worst nightmare. The innovative roguelike adventure game gameplay is elavated from interesting to groundbreaking thanks to the wonderful atmosphere created by careful visual and audio design coupled with downplayed but incredibly disturbing writing.

At its core, The Consuming Shadow is a logic puzzle; your task is to deduce which of four Ancients is attempting to invade the earth and discover the incantation that can banish it. The game takes some notes for you and has a helpful chart for keeping track of your data which manages the difficult task of respecting your intelligence without being frustrating.

It sure as ♥♥♥♥ isn't for everyone, but if you can stomach the Newgrounds ca 2002-level graphics and you enjoy horror, brain teasers and/or shooting yourself in the head you owe it to yourself to try this one out.

Subterrain starts promising, but it gets real dull real fast. The game world is littered with food items and crafting ingredients, turning the survival gameplay into obnoxious inventory management. The oxygen and thermal canisters add nothing but an annoying ticking clock to your exploration, necessitating that you either clog your inventory with canisters upon canisters or backtrack all the way home every 20 minutes. The research system is just a glorified upgrade booth where every new piece of tech is exactly the same as the previous one except with slightly bigger numbers. The ability to "Customize your ranged weapons using modular parts!" is just a big, fat, stinking lie, because the only difference between one heatsink and another is that one is strictly better.

Combat is monotonous, offering only a handful of distinct varieties of enemy and three kinds of guns with which to kill them. On top of that, even the useless starting enemies that could barely kill you if you let them can take several seconds of sustained fire to bring down, making most fights more of a chore than a threat. And when something interesting does happen, the uninspired audio/visual design and murky UI conspire to make it feel more like a momentary annoyance than a tense life-or-death situation. I played with permadeath on, and I still couldn't even be bothered to get upset when I was beaten to death by super mutants because it just felt so anticlimactic.

Perhaps all of that could have been forgiven if there was some meaty lore to dig into, but unfortunately the story is unimaginative, the characters are uninteresting and the writing is mediocre at best.


In the end, Subterrain feels nothing so much as unfinished, like it's still in the late stages of early access. It's functional, but lacks the finishing touches that would have made it great as opposed to (barely) palatable. 5/10, play NEO Scavenger instead.

One of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. Every aspect of VVVVVV is top notch.

If you've ever wanted to be a starship captain, this game is for you. It's simple enough, but wonderfully immersive; you often find yourself unironically spouting dramatic clichés like "divert all power to shields" or "I'm sorry, I can't risk the well-being of my crew on such a reckless maneuver." The perma-death mechanic adds an element of genuine concern that is vital to the experience, but the game is not so long or difficult that it feels like an unsurmountable setback.

One of the best game I've ever played. Satisfying gameplay that blends perfectly with a rivetting story. Play it!

It's disgusting, repetetive and cruel. The random dungeon generator regularly puts you in deep ♥♥♥♥ for the first few levels, because you just don't get enough bombs/keys/whatever to actually get at the tresure you know is just behind that wall. Even if by some stroke of luck you manage to get at it, it turns out to be a one-armed bandit - that you can't even play, because you have no money.

All of which makes victory just that much sweeter. t's disgusting, but in such a strange, over-the-top fashion that you can't help but laugh. It's repetitive, because you do the same things over and over, but in different dungeons, with different equiipment, against different enemies. It's cruel, because the Random Number Generator doesn't give a rat's ass about your success, and neither do the multitude of very, very scary enemies, but that makes you feel oh so clever when you beat them.

Hands down one of my facorite games.