Recent reviews by CodSalmon

The board game is phenomenal, and this digital version serves as a proper rendition. If compared to a standard video game, Scythe: Digital Edition could be found lacking in certain areas, but for fans of the board game, this is the most convenient way to play.

It's hard to talk about this game without spoilers. It's simply something that has to be experienced.

In writing, "Show Don't Tell" is a very well-known rule. This visual novel breaks this rule throughout its very short runtime in order to expedite the point that our main character is suffering from some unspecified mental illness, has been on and off various medication, and are generally traumatized. I feel the handling of said subject matter felt inauthentic, cliched and shallow. It feels like a cop-out to lean on mental illness as a crutch for surreal storytelling when I think this story could have functioned just as well without it, had the author given the main character some type of personality beyond being traumatized and mentally ill. The creepy pasta aesthetic has been done well by so many other games and short animations without the issues I have cited above, after all. This feels like something I would have enjoyed and found inspiring in middle or high school, which coupled with this game's price point is likely why it is so well-reviewed. Unfortunately for me it just didn't hit.

Otherwise, the visuals are nothing special and the game itself is a bit buggy (doesn't matter since it's so short). I did like the music, though!

It's free, short and enjoyable. I haven't read many visual novels but I am familiar with the tropes. I don't think either of those are a requirement to enjoy this game. It's hard to discuss anything about this without spoilers, so I'd simply recommend you give it a shot if you're interested.

This is basically a Romance Visual Novel that does a lot of 4th wall breaking and subversion of expectations. Less in the way Doki Doki Literature Club is famous for doing, and more in the way the end of Evangelion is famous for doing. So kind of like a bit of existentialism, a bit of ghost in the shell, and some reflections on romance in general. The dev does a lot of interesting tricks to keep you guessing, which I liked. It's not perfect, and I don't think any of the ideas expressed here are going to blow a seasoned media enjoyer's mind, but it was enjoyable and I could see this being hugely impactful for certain audiences.

I felt that the runs were slow and grindy with a sudden difficulty wall that ends runs. It's difficult to tell what impact my decisions are having when I build out my team and upgrade their equipment. There's a lot of complexity, but I'm not sure if there's depth if that makes sense. The meta progression felt slow, and was oddly bound to achievements rather than some currency you gather in runs. I think this could be a good game, but in its current state I'm not interested in playing more.

The autobattling aspect of this game was fun to play around with for a moment, but the team management aspect was barebones and uninteresting. There's a general lack of clarity regarding what impact stats are going to have. Battles will play out identically given the same preconditions as far as I can tell, so once you find a winning comp, you can just run that with no incentive to change anything. I think there's a lot of interesting ideas here, but this game needs more polish and a better onboarding experience.

The art, aesthetic and music are all really good. I'm not too deep into the "story" yet, but it's alright so far.

The core gameplay loop is boring. The decision-making in the ~45 minute runs is obvious and often arbitrary, resulting in an easy, boring, slow experience. Most of the upgrades are just "Upgrade Tower" or "X% More Damage/Speed/Range" rather than something like Slay the Spire where there are various interesting synergies to explore. You unlock new cards and characters at a decent clip, but the runs really need to be shorter for that to matter. I'm 4 runs and 4 hours in and I've started to unlock things that seem more interesting than what you start with, but I'm too bored of this game to start another run.

This is a great game, especially for the price. I have a few complaints, but overall the game is great.

What I like:

- The core game idea is interesting, but familiar. It's like Vampire Survivors but you summon, upgrade and fuse minions instead of weapons. This concept is executed very well. The minion AI works well, the minions are always doing what I expect them to and never seem to get stuck or anything like that. The enemy variety is more interesting than Vampire Survivors.

- The pacing of the runs is well done. Hero souls seem to drop at the perfect rate. Difficulty ramps up well. There is a good amount of variety in the enemy waves, and bosses further spice up the pacing.

- The variety of minions is good. Every minion does a different thing. There are multiple factions of minions. Different upgrade paths.

- Lots of synergistic relics to try out different builds.

- A bunch of different classes that all encourage different build paths.

- Meta progression system with the ability to add/remove upgrades so you have a lot of control over your runs. The pace you unlock meta progression is also well done. If you have a good run, you'll be able to fully unlock a class's meta buffs and try that class at full power. There are meta upgrades that unlock entirely different features of the game that further let you sink meta currency into.

- The amount of content is insane. There's like 15 different classes. A large amount of relics and spells. A large amount of meta progression content. A large amount of "contraptions" you can place around the playing field that do various things. A bunch of cosmetics you can unlock. Different play modes besides the standard roguelike run. Online leaderboards. Heck, there's even a card game in there. I'm 10 hours in as of writing this and I still haven't tried out half of the classes and modes.

The things I don't like:

- Performance issues: The game will sometimes freeze for a second or two at a time. This seems to only happen when the gameplay pauses to offer you a minion/relic/spell/traveler choice. The music continues playing, but the visuals freeze. This is probably the biggest issue with the game, but I imagine the developer will fix it with time.

- The game can be a bit cryptic about what things do. Not nearly as cryptic as something like Binding of Isaac, but there is a certain amount of things that simply need to be experimented with. Like you don't know how much damage a minion's attacks do, how often they attack, etc. and you don't get to see how upgrading the minion affects those numbers. So when you're making choices about whether to summon a new minion or upgrade one, you're kind of shooting in the dark.

- Compounding with the issue above, there's no option for damage numbers, so it's difficult to determine the efficacy of any individual minion. There is a stat page for the minions within the run, but it looks like the calculations here are total damage and total damage / time to give you a DPS. So you can parse out general efficacy, but it's a bit of a chore.

- The visual clutter is insane. When you get into late-game, and especially NG+ runs, there is so much stuff on screen that it's very difficult to tell what's going on. I'm not sure what could be done about this issue, I suspect it's a side effect of the core game design. When you as the player have 10+ minions running around and doing different attacks to 20+ enemies on screen, enemy projectiles flying around, various passive abilities activating, and the floor is strewn with items to pickup, it's essentially impossible to parse what's happening. I have died many times and not really known what happened. Did I walk into a projectile? Was I just standing on top of an enemy? I will never know... To be fair, the game does offer visibility options to customize the experience and make it a bit easier, but it doesn't come close to making this a non-issue for me.

- I'm not a huge fan of the humor or aesthetics. I know some will find them enjoyable, and they don't get in the way of my enjoyment.

- Boss balance is a bit off. Some of the bosses are extremely easy to deal with, but some bosses are very difficult. Not a huge issue once you learn their patterns. The archer boss, for example, is extremely easy. The boss with the spinning spiky balls and the Lord of the Land bosses, however, can be quite challenging. All of the bosses can be trivialized if you upgrade dash a few times and have the super dash.

Those are my nitpicks, and besides the performance issue, none of those matter too much. I'm being critical here but at the end of the day, this is a fairly original $4 game that you could easily sink dozens of hours into. It's pretty great.

Fun game. The art and audio are excellent.

I don't really understand the hype behind this one. The first few hours are fun, but once you get to the point where you have to start mining ore and crafting food and mead, the game becomes an extreme grind. The combat is bad. The enemy AI is horrible. Exploration is a bit of a farce as all of the biomes of the same type are virtually identical, and going into any biome that's above where you "should" be is a death sentence. The punishment for death feels a bit extreme and further adds to the already steep grind.