Daniel Mullins is a game creator at some kind of a peak. and i thought he gave enough when he made Pony Island, a game that everybody should play. I finished it for the first time and i have seen some kind of an ending. But with a Mullins game I am never really sure, if I did finish it. Or maybe I just got sample of the first act and only on NG+4 will I get the real real ending. It's both scary and great. To which i I say, just forget your instincts, and touch the new option that has just opened up. Let the creator take you on a journey like no other. Through the medium and as meta as you can get. Pony Island was a perfect game. For me it was. The Hex jumped around so much that it wore me down. And now we have Inscryption and we will try to talk about it in 5 years and we will still be pretty clueless. Because the mind of a Mullins will break you and bend you and you will think about these games when you really think about the power of video games and the medium's possibilities. I was a fan. But after 4 hours i was unbiased and tired of building my deck. A wall. No progression. But then i learned to exploit it (with the cards i had created after every defeat). BEAR, 1 blood, 7 and 7. And this would have been a great card game. But i don't think he understands simple or straightforward. Or anything less than experimental. Always risking to tell a bigger story. And we will be talking about these games and Daniel Mullins with the greatest reverence because he is actually trying to do something special. And he is succeeding. A great artist who is trying to make his piece. You will not be disappointed in Inscryption. But your brain may hurt and you will see the same themes repeating. And still it deserves both the praise and the hype (a big thank you to Sterling for reviewing Pony Island and giving it some much needed attention). Sacrifices: you will learn it at first, you will learn to exploit them, but then in the end it will not matter because the game is ... itself.
Ahh, bittere. I still hear it in my head whenever I make a great cup of coffee. I will tell you that this game is something like Darkwood and Disco Elysium. They play differently. They never look alike. But they all tried to give you as complete a slice of their cultural history as possible. Mundaun is just as amazing at accomplishing this as those games. If you play it, you will feel like you know the world and you should know it because you just experienced an actual story. An actual complete story that starts as you end it, with some great and grave bits and pieces in between. I would compare the gameplay with Edith Finch, only here you actually have something to do when you move towards the next story segment. About 7 hours long. Hard to die. Some missable upgrades, none of them necessary. Small world, easy to learn and quick to traverse through, some forgivable backtracking. Great story. Great art direction. Multiple endings. A lot to keep thinking about. A lot to take with you. Makes you feel at home in a strange and foreign land, possibly because every culture has their version of a Devil (except for Merica. They don't have anything, so maybe they won't get this story or why it's so great. some advice: I suggest that you lower the resolution and tweak the brightness until you see the difference between an item and a wall. Use a guide if you get stuck on an objective. The overall game has so much to offer, that you really won't spoil anything looking for one solution. Forget about the combat. The game has about 4 combat encounters that you can't avoid and you will know these when you get to them. Some of it is just cheap and tedious whether you engage in it or try and avoid it. It makes no sense to seek it. Finally. Tell your friends about this game. Not everybody subscribes to Ragnarox but anyone who appreciates atmosphere and distinctive art direction and complete slices of other cultures in video game format, should hear about this game. Great stuff.
Any time a release compares itself to something that came before, is when they don't believe enough in their own product or are actually trying to copy something that came before. This game is not FTL. Probably nothing ever will be another FTL just like there really won't be another Dark Souls, except an FTL-like is not a real subgenre. I do not see the similarities between Crying Suns and FTL, other than they involve spaveships and the map. Foundatio, maybe. THoguh rather than having to do with millions of years and unrelated events, this story is about 800 years of humanity living with those squidlike robots that control most of everything that humans do or are allowed to do, because humans are stupid and they would die out on their own. And this is where the story starts from. The robots have shut down and now humans are dying and killing each other because its been 20 years now. And the story is the only really interesting thing about this game. But the problem is that this needs to be a game as well. And as a game this is about as varied as the 4 enemy types, 4 stances of Ghost of Tsushima. Meaning that there are 4 types of offensive squadrons and each one of those has a specific squadron that they are the strongest against and the weakest against. There are 6 ships that you an unlock. They wary only by their max cap and starting stats and by the end of a chapter it will be maxed out, even though some stats just seem useless if you've learned how to use the 4 squadrons. There are other things and tidbits in here but i never found them engaging or useful or necessary. Buy it for the story and don't expect an FTL. Though this might work better as a Pan Science Fiction paperback rather than as a game.
You ever play Liero. (A game that had colourful 4 pixel snakes trying to murder each other and where a banana gun created so many effects that it froze up your Windows 95). Well this is like Liero but even better. If this game had split screen co-op or a free for all then i would gladly buy it again.
The game is perfect for those players that know how to get creative with these permadeath rogue-like games. The game does have the great mechanic of often giving you something new to play with. You unlock a new card or you learn some mechanic about the game. This is a great game up there with the likes of Hades, Children of Morta and FTL. But if you don't know how to experiment, how to get creative with these one run skilltree creators, then you probably won't spend tens or hundreds of hours on this. Good game. Would play again. The game has: fast progression 4 classes 3 levels hundreds of cards lovely characters and a lot of options to get creative The game does not have: anything to make me creative.
This game only has one issue. It is the name. Most reviewers can't pronounce it and they don't know how to recommend it. I had no idea about this game and this was a completely random encounter. It happened because the GOG browser often freezes my phone and it sometimes puts a game in the cart that you have to manually remove. Instead I took the gamble, and if you find the art style intriguing, then i suggest you take that gamble as well. If you don't like adventure games, i don't, then it's a gamble. For me it was a win. It is charming, it is only a few hours long. It has a nice sound. There are healthy chechpoints. There is a message and a warmth to this. You can relate to this, if you have a kid or if you have ever been a kid. It's a good game. Would play again.
A maybe-baby for the horror walking simulator genre. The game is good at presentation. The visuals look nice. The game directs you on a very linear path. It is about 4 hours long. It is more about creeping up to the story and as you progress you´re supposed to wonder as to what horror the playercharacter has done. If you want to find it interesting or engrossing, then you will. If you expect all the story told to you through cutscenes, then you´ll be missing about half of it. Though that part wasn´t all that engrossing either. The horror of it will be lacking for any veterans or lovers of the genre. Yet as a horror title it suceeds in really playing at the horror of a persons longing. Sure there are cliches and you´d really have to want to feel for the characters, yet the game did make me question the lenghts of longing that were hinted at for the character, the painter. How bad did his cliched longing for renown take him. Those some little questions did keep me on til the end, yet it wasn´t really worth it. The lacking gameplay and few puzzles don´t help. Also the turn mechanics were just awful. The bad. I went in expecting a horror game. Because the internet adobted it as a horror game. But a game in which you can not die. Where you have no place to hide. And where the first time you get grabbed and see that shacky nonsense and no death, then the game has lost all of its horror. What lingers is the question of the emotional painter. Yet the character was never developed. His emotional voice ranged from mean to sad and then whining behind the toilet and, in a house with like 30 bathrooms, whining to be let in. A 3 out 5 for the effort and not being broken and actually having some heart to try and be noted in a sea of saturation. Yet if you play the DLC, then the question of the child would be answered and the game would be a 2 out 5. I keep it at 3 because the game does include multiple endings and that multiple endings need praise.
