I think I have maybe 100+ hours in Jupiter Hell now... some of the end-game challenges are insanely hard and a little grindy, but the journey has been heck'a fun. This is just a great Doom-inspired roguelike with really cool weapons and perk synergies. Would love to see them add more classes, more levels, more modes... if you like turn-based games or roguelikes at all, I think you should take a chance on this one,
I'm sure Nox itself is a great game and was eager to try it after watching Grim Beard's review but I've tried a bunch of compatibility settings and can't get the freaking game past the opening cinematic without crashing, and sometimes it crashes before the opening cinematic has even finished. I get the same "blinking" issue other people are reporting so this is a common problem.
I want to be clear that this review is for Nightdive's KEX engine port of Blood, not the game itself. Classic Blood is one of the best first-person shooters ever made and it still holds up today even if you're playing it on DOS. Now the port: Nightdive has done some good work in the past but this port feels a bit off to me. I remember playing the older version of Blood that used to be on GOG and I never recall having any issues, it worked flawlessly to my memory. I preface all of this by saying that you might not have any of the graphical bugs happen to you that I experienced on my PC. This version seems to have something wrong with certain maps, specifically the cryptic passage maps seem to have graphical issues. I've tried a bunch of settings and nothing fixed it. I even tried running the game files with Nblood and still had graphical issues, like there's something wrong with the actual game files. This really stinks because those were the maps I was most excited to play, as I have played Cryptic Passage the least of the add-ons and that's probably the case for most people. There are definitely quality of life and graphical improvements in the port (ambient occlusion is a great upgrade) but none of that matters to me if I'm getting unplayable screen-tearing for 15% of the maps, that's just unacceptable. Everything else is just dressing. If you look up 'Blood: Fresh Supply bugs' online, I'm definitely not the only one getting graphical bugs. "It's something wrong with your computer". Yeah obviously dude, but that's the whole reason I'm buying a modern port; it's meant to work on modern systems. I'm running a $1600 3-year old HP Omen here, it's not some ancient ThinkPad or something. Why is it my problem to solve? That's on the developer. You might try Fresh Supply on your PC and it may work perfectly fine, but I can only review my experience, not someone else's I'm upset that I spent $3.99 on this game, I would be very angry if I bought it at $10 or more.
I've owned Darkwood for years and done multiple playthroughs. Everything about this game, everything, has such insane attention to detail and consistency. The dread is palpable. The survival is white-knuckled. The horror is traumatizing. And yet, many people still sleep on this game. You will never forget your first time with this game. You have not played a horror game before where the monsters casually decide to burn a meat sacrifice in your front yard at night. That image the first time I saw it was burned into my retinas, not because it was particularly grotesque, but because at that moment I was fully immersed in the hellish world of Darkwood. Probably one of the only things I don't like is that (and this is nitpicking) Darkwood has very barebones randomization on each playthrough, essentially just wiggling the map around and shifting a few locations around, while item spawns remain identical. The problem is that it's not random enough to make each playthrough feel fresh but it's just random enough to be annoying and prevent you from learning a route (which I'm sure was the intention). I would almost have preferred no randomization, as then I could have a different kind of pleasure memorizing the optimal speedrun route. If the devs had developed the randomization further to include items and enemy spawns, this could have given the game much more replayability and they still could have had a "default seed" for people playing the game the first time to get a consistent experience. Just a missed opportunity, especially because we never got any DLC :(.
