Recent reviews by Hazuki-chan

Been playing this one on and off since early access, and at the end of the day, it's... not great.

The art is cute. Kind of a weird choice for a game about slaughtering tens of thousands of monsters, but it is. Furthermore, to say it doesn't take itself too seriously would be a severe understatement: Expect to see mummies wearing DJ gear, trolls slinging pizzas, mummies wearing traffic cones, snakes playing saxophones (that one might be a Rick & Morty reference?), mummies holding modern-day road signs...

Anachronistic is one word for it, given the apparent fantasy setting otherwise. Only, unlike, say, Adventure Time... it doesn't sprinkle little hints of a past apocalypse or ruins of a modern society around. No, it's pretty much just a bunch of cartoonified Diablo locations full of very, very random enemies. I mean, a lot of the enemies make sense for their locations. Others are sort of just spread to other locations for variety's sake, seemingly. And then there's all the ones that blatantly scream "Yeah, I just felt like drawing this guy! LOL!"

To fight the infinite hordes of random things, you have a lopsidedly balanced arsenal of mystical attacks ranging from useful (massive damage shadow shuriken stream targeting the nearest enemy) to meh (rotating fireball thing that requires you to move really weirdly if you want to consistently damage things) to utterly useless (the crappy garbage tornadoes that push enemies away while dealing very nearly no damage, meaning you WILL be overwhelmed if you ever pick them).

As a positive, each playable character has an interesting special ability with some usage restrictions, and will gain a synergy bonus from your chosen starting weapon. As a negative, if you want to unlock the meta progression upgrades you'll definitely need for higher difficulties, you need to play Challenges, where your starting weapon is always set for you and may or may not gain a synergy bonus. Unclear. Probably it does, but doesn't that kind of mean a lot of them are pretty forgettable? Some are cool, but that just railroads you into picking certain things over and over (i.e. the mine cart guy with a djinn so you can get free extra pet upgrades, which help a heck of a lot more than "start with two levels in fart speed" or whatever).

All in all, it's not the worst game in the world. It's a tolerable, workmanlike imitation of Vampire Survivors, which tries to jump off and do its own thing in a few ways, with varying levels of success.

Forgettable, to be honest. The video game equivalent of a TV show you watch because you can't quite be bothered to change the channel or fetch a DVD. And that's coming from someone who, according to achievement metrics, played farther than about 85% of players...

Not particularly recommended, unless the unexplained silly anachronisms sound absolutely hilarious to you.

It's that game you really wished you'd gotten to play when you were a kid.
It works quite well.
It costs nothing.

Thank you, good developers. Thank you. <3

The smug nature documentary narration gets really old after the seventh attempt at one sodding mission at "medium" difficulty. Especially when it outright lies to your face.

Then you get the hang of the mission, mostly by playing it "wrong", learning what you need to start doing before you're told you need to, and make real progress. And the game crashes. There's no saving during a mission, by the way. And the missions are up to an hour long, if not longer. So that's a neat feature.

Edit: Ended up going back and finishing the game out of spite. It has its upsides, but the central flaw remains; this game is too stressful and tension-inducing to really recommend. The concept of dungeon keeper but with ants is neat, the attention to detail seems quite good, but at the end of the day... this is a game that expects you to try, fail, try, fail, and eventually just memorize the absolute optimal way to play each scenario, and then do that. No "do it your way". Certainly no picking of upgrades based on preference. If you want half the damn achievements, or to get through the game, you'll probably need a guide, or just to minmax everything yourself.

This is barely a game any more. More of a dramatic, vindictive sort of chore to be overcome and then never thought about again. Well, at least I'm at the "never think about it again" part now.

A sweet and content-rich parenting / life management sort of game where you play the role of a small girl's father, and also of the girl herself. You visit places, decide how to spend your energy each day, how to develop your character... which classes to take, what your ambitions will be. And you meet people, get to know them, become friends... or not, it's really up to you.

The game has a fair amount of depth to it, as well as width; lots of activities linked to various statistics of your character, including a fishing mini-game, a little RPG combat expedition system, horse catching, horse racing, acting at the theater, working at the bath house, farming and cooking by the lake, and developing your various characteristics with activities like reading or sketching. Some activities earn you reputation, which you can then spend to have the wise old guy at the church help you get through more classes. Alchemy can get you furniture and potions that help increase your stats, too, but requires some money and mental aptitude. It all fits together rather elegantly.

The atmosphere is calm and cozy for the most part. The game's setting is not an ideally perfect world, but the people in it tend to have enough diverse qualities to make you want to get to know them. Mileage may vary, but overall, a nice vibe which is also helped along by the music and (somewhat limited) voice acting.

Heartily recommended for anyone who thinks they might enjoy a cozy life/parenting sim sort of game set in a curious fantasy world!

This game's been out for almost two years, and they still haven't optimized it for half a damn. Frame rates are garbage even at the lowest settings. You're looking at 2-10 FPS or so. Barely playable. Again - that's at the lowest settings. You might hit 60 on occasion - if you run into a corner and stare at a wall texture. Sadly the game is all about huge, wide-open spaces and ridiculous polycounts. Would look great, if it didn't flow like a severely stuttering video game.

Oh, and you see those system requirements on the store page? Yeah, they're a blatant lie. Never mind the "minimum" (the game will not run on that, it just won't) - I'm running it on a gaming computer which is almost exactly the same as the "recommended" requirements:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT processor, check.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card - not quite; cards on the table, I have an RTX 3050. ONE model older. Frigging thing costs $400, you telling me I'm supposed to upgrade every single time they shift one arbitrary number? (They go in 10s, you see, I suppose it 'sounds better' that way.) Still an RTX card and fairly new, you'd think that'd count for something. But nope.
RAM, 16 GB? I have 64. Probably doesn't make much difference, but check.
Got an SSD for my operative system but Darktide's not on it, so that's sub-optimal I guess. Counterpoint? The loading times are absolutely obscene, and not everyone WILL have an SSD with room enough for a bunch of unoptimized games.

And I have gradually wandered down to the very lowest graphical settings simply because there's no other way to make the sodding thing even halfway playable. This is a 'tide game, a very active first person action game where you need to be aware of what's going on and react on a split-second basis, continuously. It's great fun when it flows smoothly. Vermintide is living proof.

This game, on the other hand, does not flow smoothly. Much of the time, it barely even manages to trickle, sludge-like, through your monitor. This is not remotely okay, and nothing is being done about it. No optimization. No tessellation. "Serious Sam? What's that? Oh, a game with a frick-ton of enemies on screen all at once, in 3D, that ran amazingly even on mid-tier hardware?" (Granted, the newer Serious Sam games largely forgot how to do this, but still.)

There's a whole pack of AI "enhancement" options, like a pack of bargain-brand band-aids to ineffectually plaster over the gushing severed artery that is this game's clusterfrick of goofy graphical programming. Lemme explain to you how these work:
First, the graphics menu will blurb you some sales pitch like "NVidia UltraTech SuperResFidelityMegaFX uses a cutting-edge AI algorithm to consistently deliver extremely high quality visuals and fast frame rates".
You go "Huh, neat." And you tick the box.
Then you look at the game. It appears to be running at about 30 FPS, a resolution of 320x240, and a massive amount of blurring all over. Such quality, much frame rate, wow.

I'm tired of waiting for some devs who so obviously give zero ♥♥♥♥♥ about you or me or any other player, to fix their complete frigging mess of a game that won't even run decently at its lowest settings. They've earned this thumbs down. There's stuff to love about this game, sure - but the game barely even runs. That's not acceptable, or at least it shouldn't be. If they ever get around to optimizing it semi-tolerably, maybe I'll reconsider the verdict. Maybe.

A remarkable space trading, combat and exploration game, chock full of narrative content to explore, as well as an array of ship types, a myriad of ship components, countless crew skills to stitch together and form a tailored arsenal of situational responses for your particular ship and captain...

You start off by picking strengths and weaknesses. Then you get saddled with some introductory missions to start earning credits and, hopefully, some much-needed upgrades to help keep your ship ahead of the competition - whether that means pirate vessels trying to rob you, or the military of a faction that hates your guts for something you did for another faction, or lawmen trying to stop you from plundering their system. You can be a defender, pirate, merchant, adventurer, artifact-hunting black market profiteer, or even a loony xeno hunter out to slay the nastiest xenomorphs this side of Prometheus. Or perhaps most likely, some combination of the above.

Your captain and officers can pick three classes each, while the remaining crew are limited to one. Just about every class is good for something; utility skills (like a Ship Ops saving throw that stops a disaster while travelling), ship combat abilities (like two or three turns of evasion bonus), and ground combat abilities (like shooting some jerkoff in the face with a pistol). Some classes are arguably more useful than others, but this is quite situational. The more familiar you get with the various crew roles, the better you'll be able to judge exactly which specializations to fill your available bunks with. Specialists like Spies, Smugglers and Gundeck Bosses might not help much in terms of running the ship, but their skills might help you evade combat altogether, shoot down enemy fighter-bomber craft, and the like.

Ship combat takes a bit of getting used to. Much of the outcome is decided before the fighting starts; your ship, their ship, the components and crew all determine things like chance to hit and evade, ability to escape or close in for boarding. The dice system is a bit complex, but the core is this: More dice are always better. You want as many as possible. Crew give you dice in ship combat, but only up to a capacity determined by the ship and its components. Say you have a dozen gunners and only one weapon; you'd have loads of excess gunnery skill, but no capacity to benefit from it. The weapon will have a sadly low hit chance. Solution: Add more weapons, and/or targeting components. That kind of thing. Navigation, piloting and electronics components for defence. Equipment locker upgrades for crew combat when boarding or on the ground during missions or exploration planetside (or on a derelict station).

The crew combat is a bit like Darkest Dungeon, but with more player control over which abilities each combatant can bring to the fight. Notably, each participant can have many more abilities than in DD, which can help them adapt to different situations. Again, expect a bit of a learning curve as you map out which ground combat classes get what abilities, and which weapon types you like to give them. A lot of weapons have range limitations, but if all else fails... a Soldier with an assault rifle and the basic Roaring Barrels attack skill can always attack at least one enemy, regardless of positioning.

The story is quite intricate and frankly fascinating in places. Your mileage may vary, of course, but a Dune comparison springs to mind; political intrigue, diplomacy, forces moving toward peace or war... and you, sailing right down the middle of it all, wondering what the next era will bring while trying not to get shot to pieces by angry faction zealots or eaten by xenos.

The animation is a bit basic, but there's a good variety of outfit customization parts for your captain, officers and the rest of your crew if you so choose. Gameplay is challenging, sometimes quite brutal, but there is usually something you can do to prevail or squeak by without too much damage - you just have to find out what it is.

Very heartily recommended overall. An excellent game with a massive amount of content updates under its belt. The developers really do seem to care about making this the best game it can be, and it shows.

A barely functional game with no story to speak of. Some neat ideas with the physics and building that amount to "better make your own fun, 'cause we sure didn't bother". The introductory bit is virtually non-existent; your ship crashed, go run some water buckets to it, find a power cell, use the basic crafty-bot to craft parts for a wood-and-junk car, then bumble your way to someplace more interesting, I guess.

There's something called the "Mechanic Master Trials" or something to that effect, which appears to serve as a sort of teaching experience. Except it doesn't. It serves as a "look how crap our physics engine is" experience, or possibly a "we don't know how weight works" experience. I recall the vehicle in Mass Effect 1 behaved much the same, except that game, many many years ago, had already understood one more key issue - when your vehicle is that wonky, you NEED to give it the ability to flip back upright after it inevitably ends up upside down. Scrap Mechanic does not do this. It does not let you get out of your car and flip it manually. It only lets you edit a trial vehicle after it has fallen off the trial map, which is not always an option if it got stuck or flipped. In summary: A garbage mode that forces you to repeat way more tedious steps than is remotely necessary.

Then there's the survival mode.

After eight years in early access, we have a sledgehammer for fighting boring robots, where you swing with the left mouse button and block attacks with the right mouse button, except that doesn't even work. At some point, presumably, you get some guns and better parts and whatnot. Unclear how you develop this capability, but I would presume it involves crafting a crafty-bot at the Mechanic Station. The resources needed for that? You fight the boring robots for, with no block button. Hope you like spamming swings, jumping diagonally and hoping for the best.
This does not spark joy.

After eight years in early access, we have increasingly long periods between updates and not a lot of word from the developers.

After eight years of early access, we are still in early access.

Something is wrong here.
An eight-years-in-development game is not supposed to be THIS unfinished.

Jank as frick and there's about seven hours of "essential" tutorials, but once you figure out you're not supposed to use Designer Mode in the main menu to design your stuff, it's pretty fun. Lot of possibilities with the build system. Proper review pending, I guess...

A fun little game for anyone who ever dreamed of swimming around in the primordial goop as a cheerful little cell, feeding on drifts of chemical compounds and (potentially) smaller cells. There's a good amount of science, but you can get the basic gist of things without reading too much of it if you prefer; glucose good, ammonia good, phosphate good. Swim swim, hungry. Evolve, improve, repeat!

Well, okay, it's a little trickier than that. At some point, you need to decide whether you'll be subsisting (at least primarily) on iron, sunlight, heat (non-life-as-we-know-it mode only) or smaller cells (if there are any). Destroying larger cells for their chunks and minerals is drastically less efficient than even upgrade-less digestion, which is a bit of a shame for any plucky cellular revolutionaries out there. Perhaps this will change in time.

The multicellular stage and whatever comes after that is... currently not much to talk about. Hopefully, continuing development will produce something exciting and interesting for the player? Time will tell.

So yes, once you've learned the game mechanics, the environment properties and the functions of the various organelles and whatnot that you may incorporate into your cell as it evolves, there's really not much more to it. Fun, though. Relaxing, too.

A fun, relaxing game that's well worth the current price, and may be an even better deal as more features are added and things are polished further. Highly recommended!

A promising game with some serious issues. It should be noted that as of writing this, the developers have recently fixed a couple of quests that were previously not working; on the other hand, new problems have cropped up, likely the result of ongoing optimization work. In short: Expect some jank if you play it now.

The premise is interesting. You are a fugitive fleeing a magical disaster, exploring realms of forest, desert and swamp land as you seek out... well, the guys who sell crafting recipes, mainly. And the various sources of Essence, a currency used mostly to buy those recipes. It's a core gameplay loop, of sorts.

Bonus points aplenty if you manage to forget about all of that and just lose yourself in exploring, gathering, camping in the wild, painting the sky strange colors using your realm modifier cards, and fighting off wild beasts for the joy of it all.

Crafted equipment derives its colors and textures from the materials it is made out of. An excellent feature, in theory. Currently the implementation is lacking; fabric types are few and most of them make for dull beige sack-cloth clothing, regardless of the design. This is sad, as some of the designs are otherwise splendid; you can see on the equipment selection screen of the character creator. Yet, those starter clothes are with you for about five minutes of gameplay before you are quite heavy-handedly forced to abandon them in favor of leather potato sacks to pass a "gear score"-based progression gate. Sadge, as the hip kids might say.

With leather materials, the problem is somewhat the opposite; there are many, many types of leather, though most creatures drop either Prey, Predator or Bug type leather; species-specific types make up all the rest, but only drop from each species' "legendary" examples, which are rare and mostly found in Hunt realms... or more rarely, from random resource sites, which tend not to grant enough material of any one type to work with. Consequently, most of the leather materials just look... random. Or terrible. Or blurry. Out-of-focus. Too zoomed out, not enough uniformity in mottling so they just look like a single color with a large blotch or two of an entirely different color, or with strange patterns that don't work with the outfit models. "Clown suits", people have said, and this is probably what they're talking about.

Now, there is some hope. A dye system is being worked on, or so I have heard. If it lives up to what one might ideally expect, and one may actually wear something approaching the gorgeousness of the starter outfits, then this game will take another large step from "mostly pretty" toward "quite stunning indeed".

I must also mention the balancing. At first, it had me a bit confused; I had selected "Hard" for my starting realm, and neglected to consider the game would not necessarily guide me toward crucial progression-related crafting recipes in any kind of order. I ended up missing that I needed to visit a specific realm type for the Refined Workbench, which is needed for the making of proper metal tools and weapons. This led me to cheese a too-hard realm type unlocking event using far too many fast-breaking bomb satchels and an unreachable vantage point or two. I then entered the new realm and wondered why it felt so sodding impossible to survive it.

Well, part of the problem was the lack of better equipment and the means to craft it. Part of it was that I did not yet understand how Nightingale's game mechanics work. And they do work, just differently than many games. See, in a lot of crafting games, if you put a material with something like "+20% melee damage" on a piece of clothing, that attribute will be discarded or just ignored. In Nightingale, it makes a shirt (for instance) which, when worn, makes all your implements hit harder in melee. Combine that with a powerful axe and some other melee-focused clothing, and you're in business, even against enemies with seemingly obscene amounts of health. Throw in a nice healing enchantment on your axe, learn to block a hit, dodge and cast the heal spell, and you're surviving. Or abuse the frick out of the sickle's right-mouse technique, which trades the axe's humble blocking and bash capability for a wicked ninja sickle boomerang toss. Great for when a cluster of enemies have entirely too many of their heads still attached, just mind you don't hit a wall or it'll stop. So, it takes skill to use the cool moves? Yes indeed!

Alternatively, you could get a big old rifle or shotgun and pump up with ranged damage outfits. Your upgrade bench lets you infuse essence into all your things to multiply their effectiveness. Better upgrade bench = higher multipliers. There's a great deal of potential to make yourself powerful enough to laugh your way through Extreme difficulty Ascended realms, the hardest current content I've been able to find, which is a good, satisfying feeling to have after 90+ hours of wrestling with the multitude of resources and recipe options available.

Cooking works pretty well too. Lot of possibilities, some meaningful boosts to health and regeneration and whatnot.

All in all, there's a lot to love about the game. The story is a bit flimsy, but the character of Puck carries the early bits quite well in my opinion. You can build a big fancy house to hold all your stuff - just wait until you reach an Abeyance realm, or you might lose a lot of progress.

All in all, recommended to anyone who finds the aesthetic and concept appealing! A diamond in the rough currently, some unfortunate technical issues, but still in active development and with some great potential.