Up front: I am not recommending this game. I DO heartily recommend that anyone interested should try out the demo (which doesn't seem to be on GOG, unfortunately) because I have no complaints at all about what I've seen. Which is to say: pretty much an already-finished game polished to an impressive mirror sheen disguised as early access, and it seems to be doing everything right. The only problem is that depending on personal preference, the central gimmick might drive you as batty as it does me. There's a hex-based world map, each hex is a level, and you build outwards from the center. There are different biomes and possible modifiers, different randomized starting loadouts, and a lot of stuff to adapt to in general. You'll start by setting up some basics and breaking into nearby glades as you deforest, some of which will contain (clearly marked) major hazards and rewards. There are two progress bars on every level: one which fills by way of quotas and objectives, and one that simply progresses with time. If you fill the first bar, you win the level. If the second one fills, you lose. Then you pick a neighboring hex on the world map and do it all over again. For all this game does right and for the impressive variance you get to deal with while repeatedly building up a bunch of settlements from scratch... that particular loop isn't really my idea of fun. It has the mechanics, resource management, and personalization you'd expect from a longform city builder, but a level-based structure closer to that of a procedurally-generated Warcraft campaign in which you're fighting the environment and a time limit rather than a conventional opponent. You never get long enough with any one level to get exhausted of it, but you also don't get long enough to really admire it, and after playing X levels the titular storm rolls in and wipes the world map clean. This was already driving me bonkers by the end of the tutorial. If that part doesn't bother you, it's a great game.
I quite like Webbed on a number of levels; the visual design, the webslinging and physics, the sound work, the concept, the playful absurdity of everything going on. Music is alright but hearing the same tracks over and over and over gets repetitive. The level design is a very mixed bag. On the one hand, it's great fun to fling yourself around to traverse wide open areas, but it's less fun when you spend 10 minutes manoeuvring through a series of rooms only to find yourself at an empty dead-end, or greeted by an NPC telling you to return later, followed by having to hike your way back manually. Because despite that you do have business here, you did things out of order. No, you were not given a specific order to do things in. I thought we figured out about 20 years ago that you DON'T want to waste the player's time like this. Then there are the puzzles. Some of them are good! Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much exploration of the premise of needing to build your webs around increasingly intricate terrain and hazards, not that I'm sure how far you could really take that concept. Instead there's a recurring theme of "just build webbing around this general area", which is no better demonstrated than by the recurring "fling a cog into the gears in the ceiling" puzzle. Which, to call it a puzzle is a bit of a stretch. The cog is heavy and always dangles a certain distance from you, so the only method of approach is building webs *near* the gears, then either try to wrangle the physics into flinging the cog upwards with a far greater degree of precision than you can reasonably expect of someone swinging around an object heavier than they are on a thread suspended by their butt -- or attach copious webs between the cog and gears and attempt to bump it upwards, which usually just snaps the webs. This asinine physics maraudery has been required of me at LEAST a dozen times, and now it wants me to do it three more times in the same room. It's a really terrible gimmick. And then after a few hours of bungling through all of that I managed to wedge myself into the ceiling WITH one of the cogs at the exact same time as a quicksave triggered. My save file is now bricked with me stuck inside a wall, and I am NOT replaying that whole slog.
The initial conceit for Graveyard Keeper isn't bad, you get isekai'd by Truck-kun and are suddenly the keeper of a local graveyard. There's some rather black humor as you're taught how to dissect corpses as they come in which quickly turns into your own personal organ harvesting operation for purposes of reanimating the dead, performing alchemy and blood rituals, and selling human meat back to the townsfolk. Nobody asks where the local gravedigger is getting all this meat from and nobody seems to care. And really, that's this game in a nutshell. A lot of setup, a lot of potential, but you're perpetually left holding your breath as you go through the daily routine for the millionth time waiting for there to ever be any real payoff. It's fun for a while as the steady trickle of features is introduced to you, but once that trickle begins to dry up you realize you're basically playing Zombie Harvest Moon except none of the characters stand out, nothing is written with the intent of taking it seriously, and the game's central driving force isn't to find your own pace or get better at your operation, it's to find all possible means of mitigating the grind while doing about 200 simultaneous fetch quests. Even after busting your butt to get a town pass, you never actually get to go to the town everyone's always yammering about. This is to say nothing of the moment to moment shortcomings with how much the UI fails to communicate, how terrible the game is at explaining itself, the ways in which you can screw yourself over, or the lack of direction as to what your primary tasks should be at any given time to pace yourself properly. It is a graveyard/farming sim with neither the writing nor the mechanical depth to sustain itself for the utterly ridiculous amount of time it asks of you to spend doing the same thing over and over (even once you've wrung out all its existing content) until some arbitrary counter is filled. It's a potentially fun but very shallow experience.
Viscerafest wears its Doom inspiration on its sleeve, from the weapon UI to the sprite-based enemies and environmental objects, while pursuing its own balls-hard slant on the combat -- and this is where it stumbles right off a cliff for me. The character, setting, music? They're fine. The manual limited checkpointing system is pretty clever. The level design, taken in a vacuum, is... alright. But the only way to survive in this game is by bunnyhopping around fast enough to avoid enemy projectiles, in extremely boxy and rather closed-in levels that don't really allow you the room to do this properly, while affording you an utter pittance of ammo and thereby expecting you to maintain pinpoint accuracy and punch the smaller enemies whenever possible. While trying to bunnyhop through claustrophobic levels and your targets are single-facing 2D sprites in a 3D environment. I don't think I should need to explain further why this comes together as a horrible clashing of elements. There is method to the madness, but it doesn't feel like I'm learning anything, adapting, or getting better. I'm just throwing myself into the meat grinder however many consecutive times it takes until just enough of the enemy shots happen to go wide that I don't die. Go look up some free Doom mods! There are probably plenty you haven't played yet that are a better time than this.
