Recent reviews by Velorien

How Alan Wake's American Nightmare got made:

BOSS: Oi, you, you've played Alan Wake, right? What's it got that we can use for a standalone expansion?

INTERN: Everyone loved the original for its plot, with its many twists and turns and slowly-unravelling central mystery.

BOSS: We can't live up to that, so don't try. Make the plot basic and tell the player everything within the first third. We've got the budget for one twist, tops, so you may have to reuse it.

INTERN: Uh. There's its quality as a thriller. It's great at building suspense and managing an ebb and flow of tension that keeps the player emotionally engaged from start to finish.

BOSS: Not interested. Make the game emotionally flat, with no real highs or lows, and a minimum of surprises. Any other ideas?

INTERN: I guess there are the characters? They're not super complex, but they're vivid and engagingly portrayed, drawing the player deeper into the narrative.

BOSS: No way. We can't risk another Barry Wheeler. You can have three dull characters, one trope each, minimal agency. Maybe they get a second trope if the player has the patience to work through their optional dialogue. The villain's allowed more characterisation, but make sure it's delivered through missable collectibles that force the player to stand still and stare at a tiny screen for minutes at a time--and don't even think of making him complex or ambiguous.

INTERN: What about... the survival horror elements? The original did a decent job of forcing the player to manage their resources, not knowing what was coming next and forcing the player to constantly choose whether to fight or run, since running out of light or ammo in a fight would be game over.

BOSS: That sounds too hard. Let's shower the player with ammo and batteries just lying randomly all over the place, plus some regenerating loot boxes that set everything to full. It used to be a cheat code, now it's a feature.

INTERN: But what does that leave?

BOSS: Hey, wasn't there that clunky combat that everyone thought was the worst part? Let's make an entire game which is just that. Maybe chuck in a few new guns and extra-annoying enemies. Oh, and nerf the flare gun for no reason whatsoever. Then we can just sit back and watch the money roll in until it's time for a real sequel.

I wanted to like this game, and at first, I really did. The unusual format is interesting. The detective work is fun, though for the most part unchallenging. Then came the big twist. It's a good twist, clever and interesting... but then you look back at the game up to that point, and you realise that none of it makes sense anymore. There's at least one early ending that should be physically impossible based on what you learn. There's little worse than a mystery game that doesn't play fair, so with a heavy heart, I'm getting this refunded.

I'm not normally a fan of RPG Maker games, but this one is something special. The concept is original and well-explored, and the characterisation is solid. There is little dull or cliched dialogue in this game, with most conversations being in some way tied to the characters' unique circumstances and how they shape their perspective on the events around them.

The game respects the player's time for the most part, constantly unlocking shortcuts to stop you having to retread too much old ground despite the looping nature of the game. There are always new things to discover, so the time loops never get tedious (unlike a number of time looping games--Twelve Minutes, I'm looking at you).

If the game has a weakness, it's the combat, which is merely passable. Field encounters are generally too easy, and since they usually offer no rewards, they end up just being roadblocks which drain your HP by attrition. Boss battles can be challenging, but many can be trivialised with the right gear (by design), and there are never many tactical options, so you will generally end up using the same few strategies from the beginning to the end.

Also the sex scenes. You can, of course, just not install the free patch, but if you do, I can tell you that I found the writing unoriginal and formulaic (in stark contrast to the rest of the game), and the art mediocre, with only one base image for most scenes. Do not come here for the sex.

It's hard to give a detailed review while avoiding spoilers, but if you're interested in time loops or "meta" narratives, and play RPGs more for the writing than for the combat, Ouroboros is definitely one to check out.

Most of what I'd like to say has already been covered by other reviews (good writing, respectful and intelligent treatment of mental illness, lack of anime tropes, mature characterisation), but one thing that stood out to me in particular is the dialogue choices. While a little let down by often being meaningful only in aggregate (when what matters isn't what you say but where it lies on a spectrum of e.g. trust versus doubt), the variety of dialogue options is thoughtful, and reflects things a real person might say, rather than being transparently "here is a branching point in the story". For example, someone might ask whether they're doing the right thing, and the options aren't only "yes" and "no", but also things like "I'll respect whatever choice you make". It gives the game a distinct feeling of realism and immersiveness.

If you enjoy lovingly-crafted, twisted and macabre descriptions of your own death, this is the game for you.

A text-based Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with occasional illustrations, this game excels in its writing and atmosphere (which variously play with Lovecraftian, psychological and body horror).

However, you will die a lot. And while your deaths will be creative, and described in oh so much detail, every death means having all your progress reset. Since the chapters are largely linear in structure (though you can attempt them in any order), and most puzzles have only one solution, you will find yourself retreading familiar ground over and over again with increasing frustration. This also disincentivises experimentation - many times it will be clear to a genre-savvy player that a certain option will lead to an interesting, well-written and horrible death, but you won't want to try it out due to the hefty progress penalty involved (there is, of course, no saving).

With that said, a complete playthrough (which, sadly, involves going through the exact same thing multiple times if you want all the endings) will last you a few hours at most, If that's an investment you're prepared to make in the name of some well-written horror, then I would definitely recommend this game, especially given its low price.

After two hours, I've completed every route and seen every ending, and I still don't know what it is I've just played.

If you're not on board with the possibility that this could happen to you too, you should probably give this game a miss. Otherwise, well, it has great characters, and is a brief but thought-provoking exploration of adolescence and identity and... something? But whatever that something may be, I get the feeling that the game explores it really well.

I emphatically advise you to avoid this game. Even if you get it for free, it is a waste of your time.

This review contains minor spoilers, but nothing you can't rapidly discover yourself.

Here is a breakdown.

There are nine pieces of art in this game. One animated main game screen. One hacking image. Seven ending images.

You will spend 99% of the game on a single screen, which has a few menus. You will spend most of that time staring at a progress bar at the bottom of the screen, which indicates work or chat progress. Occasionally you will look at studying progress instead, or at the studying tree when you need to pick a new project. You will look at your money and stress counters.

There are no instructions. There are plenty of typos, but you will quickly learn to overlook them because they are the least of the game's problems.

There is an unlockable hacking option, which merely tells you if you succeed or fail. There is a chat option which involves staring at a progress bar while being treated to incoherent and looping dialogue. There are rewards for chatting, which include increased living expenses and additional alimony payments for your mother (a bug reported on the forums but not fixed). One of the more common ones is a money reward that vastly eclipses anything you can earn yourself (at least until endgame). There is a shop that does not tell you how much things cost until you can afford them.

Pursuing one branch of study, with long research times even with every available speed bonus, will progress the main story by giving you brief pieces of text. When you reach the end, you will be treated to a likewise brief, predictable ending which contains most of the artwork in the game.

Once you have grasped/unlocked the basic systems early on, there is nothing left to do but perform research and unlock new options which are like old options but with better numbers.

The overall feel is that of an idle game, except that it cannot be played as one. At the end of every day it is paused by a summary screen, and activities must be selected anew every time. Some are only available in the afternoon or evening, and must be clicked on before the timer (pausable only by entering certain menus) scrolls you past them.

I finished the game in three hours. I regret it.

If this review sounds dry and lifeless, then I have succeded in conveying the overall feel of the game.

Avoid unless you are a compulsive achievement hunter. Even then, bring a book or be prepared to alt-tab out into something more interesting on a regular basis.

This is a spoiler-free review.

Who Is Mike is a very enjoyable way to pass an hour or so.

Pros:

- Great art, especially for a free game.
- Good writing, moreso than in many of the indie VNs I've played. It can get repetitive when the protagonist is angsting, but in a believable way.
- Unusual plot that keeps you guessing until the last minute.
- Free.

Cons:

- Short. Which is fine, especially for a free game, but if you like your VNs long with many branches, this is not one of them.
- Lack of variety in player choices. For most of the game, you'll be faced with the same decision again and again in slightly different contexts.
- Non-intuitive branches. Maybe it's just me, but it took a lot of trial and error, followed by reluctant use of a guide, to figure out how to get all the endings that branch off from the main section of the game.
- Inconsistent storyline. This is the one truly bad thing about this game - instead of the endings gradually giving you more and more bits of the puzzle, like in a good mystery VN, different endings reveal that you were playing different scenarios all along. It's a bit like a murder mystery where the the murderer turns out to be a different person depending on the choices you make during your investigation, even though the clues are all the same each time.

In the end, I definitely recommend it. It is a distinct and memorable experience that costs no money and not too much of your time.

RT a very traditional roguelike. You go into a dungeon, and you vanquish monsters and obtain treasure in a turn-based, procedurally-generated fashion. You die horribly through carelessness or bad luck, and then you create a new character and try again. So what are its specific strengths and weaknesses?

Strengths:

- Difficulty. RT is much harder than any other roguelike I've played, and demands both careful attention to your actions, and learning from your mistakes over countless deaths. It does not hesitate to brutally punish carelessness and lack of foresight, so when you finally conquer your first dungeon, or finally get a character to level 10, or finally slay one of those thrice-accursed cave bears, you feel a sense of accomplishment that most contemporary games will never provide.
- Strategy. The game is fair, in the sense that all enemies work by the exact same rules as your character, and will also typically be of your level or just below (only bosses and special encounters violate this rule). When every enemy is your character's potential equal, you can never win by overwhelming force, but only by intelligently exploiting every possible advantage, from positioning to equipment to creative use of spells and special abilities. And RT really comes into its own when you find yourself in the middle of a pitched battle between two or three different factions, each of which could individually wipe the floor with you, and gracefully manoeuvre them into destroying each other with the aid of stealth, mobility, precision damage, and that wand you've been carrying around for half the game but never quite dared use.
- Reward. While insanely hard, RT provides tangible milestones in the form of heritages, which grant permanent bonuses to every character you will ever create (including the one who unlocks them). This grants both motivation (you may not be able to even imagine beating a game at this rate, but if you can just survive for three more levels and find a training dummy, that starting sword and board set is all yours) and progression (unlock the leather armour set, for example, and animal foes go from lethal to merely threatening). For those who have made a fair bit of progress in the game, there are also challenges, with cosmetic rewards such as character titles and colourful cloaks.
- Variety. While the level of content on offer here can't compete with the titans of the genre, every playthrough is a distinctly new experience, as even a single decent item can make a huge difference to your playstyle and odds of survival. Likewise, the different principal playstyles feel distinct from each other, and even simple choices such as sword and shield versus two-handed make a tangible difference. This is even more the case when playing a caster or hybrid type, as between the three different spell schools and the heavily random access to spells, you may find yourself playing a magic-armoured pyromaniac one game and a demonologist who harvests the souls of those slain by his summoned daemons before using them to enchant his equipment the next.
- A good manual. The author has put a great deal of effort into a comprehensive manual on the game website which both lists nearly everything you can find in the game, and explains how all the mechanics work. This is one roguelike where you won't be forced to rely on a community wiki for essential information.
- Addictiveness. That "one more turn"/"one more character" quality? To those who are not turned off by high difficulty, Rogue's Tale has it in spades. Death is swift, and character generation is swifter. The knowledge that your dead character was just off the requirements for that amazing-sounding heritage will inspire you to roll another one even when it's late at night and you have work or school in the morning.

Weaknesses:

- Difficulty. The RNG is strong with this one. As you unlock heritages and learn the ins and outs of the game, you will become able to defend against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to some extent. Even so, you will have many great characters who die because procedural generation puts them in a situation that they simply have no way of surviving. You will have initial (pre-heritage) characters that die in two turns because they started the game next to multiple monsters. You will have characters get hit with early-game poison attacks when there's no chance of you having found and identified an antidote - and poison in this game is fatal more often than not. You will spawn in dungeons where the only way to progress is to fall into a spiked pit and hope you can climb out before it kills you, because you're in a narrow corridor and there's a door that stops you from just jumping over. And, of course, you'll face monsters in contexts where they are simply too powerful and you haven't yet found enough items to swing the balance or secure an escape (cave bears at level 10 say hello).
- RNG-dependent character builds. Specialists have far higher odds of survival than generalists, so it pays to put all your starting points in just two of the four stats. Only there's no guarantee that your tank will find decent armour before you face a truly deadly enemy, or that your archer will have a decent supply of arrows (and the prices in town are murder). You may find a Blessed Amulet of Ghost Form that lets you laugh at dual-wielding berserker daemon hordes (an actual thing), or you may be slain without ever seeing anything better than leather armour and a dagger. You may put all your starting points into Strength and none into Agility, but then only find archery targets to learn new talents from. And it gets so much worse for a caster that it's worth a separate point.
- Creating a caster is hard. Dedicated casters, while potentially obscenely powerful, are hard to get off the ground, to the point that you shouldn't expect to play as one until you have the more advanced heritages. It takes getting to level 9 (of 20), finding three altars and learning three talents before you can efficiently use magic for damage or healing. That's 8 levels with no offensive or defensive abilities, just basic bashing things with a stick. Then you have to find spell tomes, which are pretty rare, and hope they're of a school you can learn. And you have to hope the first spells you learn are the useful ones - the offensive "orb" spells, for example, or Summon Daemon, rather than something like Consume Soul (which is useless without its twin, Release Soul) or the merely mildly convenient Telekinesis. And, of course, the spells that don't run off Stamina use Charisma, and if your character's two high stats are Stamina and Charisma, that means you're useless with any and all weapons. The situation is a bit better for paladin types, since Celestial spells don't suffer from armour/shield penalties, and hybrid types are viable as long as you focus on physical combat first and then aim for support/utility magic, but you're still increasing the amount of luck you need in a game where the RNG is always out to get you.

Overall verdict:

After (probably) triple-digit hours, I still love this game. The big stumbling block is that it is hard, and you will die. You have to recalibrate your expectations. You're not sending heroes on epic quests that are destined to inevitably save the world through the power of quicksave/quickload and perhaps GameFAQs. You're sending thousands of faceless rogues against impossible odds, each time hoping that this one is different, that they'll be able to achieve or learn something that none of the others before them could. Each achievement comes from climbing atop a mountain of past rogues' corpses - and, accordingly, seizing it will briefly make you feel like you're on top of the world. That is this game's greatest weakness, but also its greatest strength - it does absolutely everything it can to kill you, and that makes every victory feel fully earned.