Recent reviews by adam1224

Tentative no.

The good news:
-It's more picross/nonogram, with some alright customization (you can turn off mistakes, freehand or straight-line filling, etc)

The mixed:
-You can unlock some extra backgrounds, which is nice, a random unlock costs you 100 points, and a 5x5 puzzle gives you 50. But then I don't really understand, why would you swap the colour-in / cross out / mark as unsure signs to intricate and visually noisy tiles, like a splatter. (Also, the feature is so weirdly implemented, that you can spend more on the unlocks after getting 100% unlockables - and the game will still show you a NEW tag on the category, without anything new there. Which shows the general lack of thought and care, or testing regarding the feature.)

The bad:
-There's barely any challenge, the biggest was 15x15 maybe, and while the picture is colourful, there are no multi-colour nonograms like in some other games (Great old flash Picma comes to my mind as a gold standard)
-The game automatically grays out the helping numbers, often giving more information than it should. It can literally tell you that you found and cornered the 3rd "1" out of the 5 in the middle of an empty sheet.
-Mistakes reveal the tile, so you can force solutions within your mistake-limit (though you can turn on the bomb mode which makes you lose on a single mistake... but it's not the real deal.

Along with the small puzzle size, way too informative numbers on the border, and the general lack of letting you making mistakes it's more alike the puzzles you have as a minigame in other games/apps for a daily credit, or like you have a daily (easy) sudoku in newspapers.

It's hard to say anything about the game. It's a walking sim, where you carry a stone with yourself, as an analogue to Sisyphus, and in the game it also symbolizes your guilt I think?

Through the game you can push for two endings - religious (a much easier route, and you listen to Bible/religious excerpts as you light the fire at the end of a level to burn your rock - or the philosophical, where you use your stone (is it a guilt here too, or just a tool?) to smash entries to caves, read short notes about The Absurd Man (some more at https://www.thehumanfront.com/the-absurd-man/) that stems from Absurdism, and apparently is based on the "theory that the universe is irrational and meaningless. It states that trying to find meaning leads people into conflict with a seemingly meaningless world." (from wikipedia). So gameplay-wise two different narratives exist.

But the game itself is just horrible as a game. The screen is incredibly bright. The lights are just bleeding on the picture, and there's a shockingly strong chromatic aberration at the edges. There's constant, slight headbob, that gets worse if you carry the stone for too much at a time. (Maybe the lights were better before the 2023 November update? It doesn't look as mild as in the store video and screenshots)

As gameplay goes, it's a questinable mix of walking sim and a (light?) precision platformer, which is a really weird choice as you constantly have to carry the stone in front of you, blocking quite a bit of the platforms you have to land on. And of course the game is "wonderfully" meta as if you let the rock drop down from the platforms, or a moving element crashes it, you have to restart the whole game. You can turn off this feature, but the game only tells you about this, after it already happened and it's irreversible. It was a joy to find that out on the last level.

As a further note, the game got released in September 2023 , costing 5€. Note that number.
They raised the price to 10€ in December (Unsure if related, it was featured in the Yogscast Jingle Jam 2023 Charity bundle in that month).
Then after spending most of the year at a 90% discount, they jacked up the price for a shocking 30€ at the end of September 2024.
You can find different numbers mentioned as a price in different reviews, this is the reason. The developers raised the price 6-fold, likely to make the 90-95% discount more appealing, as it's only 1.49€, right?

It's just not worth it. The philosophy may be interesting, but not in bite sized pieces, while I try platforming with a rock blocking a good part of my screen, while the floor makes my eye water.
But as I'm sick and this seemed to be a relatively low effort game to play at a slower speed, so I got one ending, forgot the game open while I had a nap, and then got second ending. It's really not worth your time, it's not good, fun or challenging as a game, and I bet you can find a better 20-30 minutes long video on Absurdity on Youtube for free.

So, I bought Wavetale at 2,24€, for I think 93% off (already had The Gunk, so their bundle was cheaper) - this is the price range we're talking about. Full price is quite ridiculous for the length and "depth"of the game.

Wavetale seems to be the first and so far only third person game of the developer, and considering that it's pretty good. It has its strong and weak points, and it's a rare case that the negative steam reviews are accurate. You may be more patient or forgiving towards some aspect, but the negative reviews are correctly identify the game's shortcomings.


Things I loved:

• The movement abilities are great, and there are ways to build momentum (more on this later)
  
• The voice acting is pretty solid
  
• Characters argue, and yell! There is an identity to the (few meaningful) characters, and this makes the characters scenes more believable.
  
• There are elements of "grim"realism that are a rarity in these games (character who lost one of his legs, bad things actually happening in the game, sometimes you're just late to be the hero.

Most of the weaknesses of the game stems for the game containing different elements and systems, but they are not grounded, or interacting with eachother. Overall it feels like the devs made the game through a checklist, not an interconnected experience of systems. Examples:

• You have a system to glide and dash, but most of the game's areas are vertically stacked. You just press a button to grapple to fixed points.
  
• Multiple times you can just ride the waves for 2-3 minutes, while nothing happens, because of the needlessly big map. And despite the looks, it's basically linear.
  
• The map has collectible sparkles (?), but they can only be spent on skins. You could take out both sparkles and skins, and lose nothing of value. But then the world is needlessly big (and empty), and the game is already short.
  
• There is combat in the game, for the sake of having combat. It's having a slow aoe attack, and a fast spammable. Enemies are stunlocked by being attacked, and you regenerate health/stamina. It doesn't add to the game, it's not challenging, not fun, and doesn't gel well with the movement system.
  
• The movement system is severely bottlenecked. The maximum speed/momentum you can build is low. When traversing the map, most slides and jump rings are placed too far from eachother to efficiently string together. (gliding slows you down). You're pretty slow on ground, and you can't really speed yourself up on water either. Most of the map is water.
  
• There are side missions that are exclusively finding items, that are either super close to the quest giver, or just somewhere in the region. And the reward is exclusively sparkles (often offensively few, like 5), to buy more skins. They are not worth your time
  
• The story and events start to ramp up by the end of the game, but the beginning is just slow, almost like if you mix a walking sim with a linear, cookie-cutter platformer.

Overall it's a mechanically competent game that is not a good game per se.
The last 10 minutes and the timed challenges are the best parts of the game, otherwise it severely limits its own potential, despite the excellent fundamentals for a more movement-based game.
It fails to populate the map with worthwhile NPCs, set pieces, stories. There is no proper way to reward the player, because there is no challenge or any tricks to the movement, no unlockables, and the skin system is just not worth to strive for.

Lighthouse Keeper is a weird game that was updated last time 3 weeks after its release, September of 2022, and it shows.
There are topics on the forum of different issues - crucial items not spawning for some, or gamebreaking bugs if you do something too early in an "open world" game, but it remains unaddressed.
The game is not taken care of, nor was left in an acceptable state. It has variety of features, but all of them are underbaked, barely working, and shows numerous times how the dev only cared about getting the feature into the game, not to make it make sense, be enjoyable, or in some cases - work.

It sets out to do so many things, but then ends up doing the absolute minimum of it, while cobbling different ideas into a patchwork of a world. While this variety seems to be good, they lousily connect to each other, and the lack of "repetition" on the developers side means almost none of the ideas is well-conceived, thought through, or was implemented competently.

Just to sum up the first island - your home, that supposedly got the most attention.
You start the game in a motorboat that has no sound at all. Then I stopped looking around a bit, paused the game. Then through the pause menu the character, in the middle of the ocean, just states "another
Then I went the the Lighthouse Island, where I immediately entered the Lighthouse through the basement, because the dev only locked the front door as an attempt to write story. Then went to the grave of the previous lighthouse keeper, noticing that only 2 out of 5? 6? steps make sound, and they are also out of sync. I stopped to smell the flowers, that (randomly) grown on solid rock, and under seawater. Then reached the grave, where I got a note about how lonely it is to be a lighthouse keeper, and that my predecessor knew how to automate the lighthouse, but lacked the items. The note didn't tell me how to do it, only that I should do it. That's the main story.

You remember the part about it's lonely to be a lighthouse keeper? Except everyone bothers me daily with their missions. Varied NPCs with rich backstory of lands, nations, countries and wars that are never shown are infodumped on me, while they sit in their boat without any animation, not even blinking. When the night comes, they turn their boat around with their mind, and drive their unblinking bodies through my boat (later ship) to the sunset and despawn at the horizon, only to return tomorrow to stare into my soul a little more.
Their quests are full with weirdly phrased things that apparently wasn't proofread. Things like "Few people are able to see the beauty of crimson sky and grey clouds. I hope you're not one of them." or "human is like a leaf that leaves its tree in autumn and the land is death. You were all born to fall" which is an awesome line for a demon or an antagonist, but this was supposed to be... like a grandpa? (I don't know, every character is immaculate skinned and young, no matter the narrative or that they have waist-long grey beard and bald head)

The game has an "Open World Survival Craft" tag, which is mostly off. I think you need only a single potion to get a required item for the game's ending. You need to collect fabric from plants called "fabric" because the dev is lazy like that, and mine iron from "iron sources" to upgrade items, or build a farm. You need a farm because a quest requires it, but the farming is hollow, clunky, unpleasant and slow, not to mention not rewarding. It's pointless...other than you need to do it for a quest.

The game has fishes and fishing. Yet when you fish, it spawns an animation-fish to catch, you can't catch the visible fishes. You can only kill a shark, that drops a teeth, that you need for a - guess what? - a quest. Otherwise it's pointless to hunt, it doesn't serve any further goal, you can't sell items, and it's just... not well done to begin with.
Chests can't even auto-stack items, so you end up multiple stacks of half a dozen yellow flowers, because only your (super small) inventory can combine stacks automatically.
The dev made "rubbish" to spawn in the water, I guess some environmental message or something like that. But what's the rubbish? Metal coat hangers, yarns of ball and horseshoes FLOATING IN THE WATER.
This is such a good example of having an idea with the recycling machine, but didn't give a rat's ass about the implementation, likely just used some objects from a premade pack without caring how it will fare in their world.

There is an energy system in the game that mostly recharges by waiting or eating. You can sleep in the game... but only at night, and it won't recharge any of your energy.

The game is just a mishmash of survival/open world features thrown together, released and forgotten. It's just not worth the time.

The second location is an unmanageable mess of a city, with changing camera angles, and like a dozen new streets added, compared to the SINGLE street of the first chapter or city or whatever?

It's frustrating, it's messy, I literally can't find how to progress the game, and chapter 1's gameplay was on par with some shoot 'em ups. It's artsy and special I guess, but I can't find an thimble's worth of fun in 1.5 hours of two session's worth of gameplay.

Has an interesting setup with darksteel making the wielders immortal, with some good consequences.
Music is alright, art style is neat.

But the gameplay is just repetitive, multiple screens of caves filled with bats and bandits, where you have to defend, then counterattack by imputting strings of attacks, using two buttons. If you miss and end up dying, everyone respawns, and you have to restart the section, which just makes the boredom even worse.

It's a very resounding no from me. Simplicity is good, and there are good simple games, but Guild of Darksteel is so boring in its repetitiveness that my mind just goes blank after a few minutes.

There is definitely sparks of awesomeness in the game, but sadly the game doesn't tell us enough on the go, and the fundamentals are boring.

The main story is in short: you are crowned to be Chancellor of the city. You send your "working" mages around the city to focus on aspects of it, use the aether (money) to build and upgrade buildings, or buy things. You have to face tempest events which consist of days of: physical/magical attack, exploration, or "harvest" days, semi-randomly, not letting your defenses to fall and the Important Tree to be destroyed. All of this happens so you can propel through a quest that is collecting diary pages of your precedessor, because he disappeared and this isn't fishy at all.

The game takes place entirely on the single screen you see on screenshots. Through "storms" are called tempests in-game, the UI is entirely different from the one shown on the screenshots. The small, round icons used for items in the lower left corner are much bigger. Trait bonuses on the top right are huge rhombuses, the red guard - blue mage circles are filled in, while they are cropped out at the bottom of the screen, at 1920*1080 resolution. Like they swapped the PC UI for a mobile one, or did a complete overhaul since they made the screenshots for the store page.

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3248656568

(Last depot update for the game happened in 2019 July, almost 5 years ago, and there are no news of the game since August of the same year)

Good things:
-You can unlock traits with your advisors, and in your next game if you pick them, they bring their scaling bonuses to the table. Many of these traits unlock (and level) though multiple playthroughs.
-Persisting story between "roguelikeish" gameplay
-Mechanics are being unlocked through quests and new runs
- Random events are fun, but they get repetitive as you're on your 4th-5th-Xth run

Bad:
- Each game basically starts the same, the only difference is your current stage in the quest, some advisor bonuses, and the semi-random order of... 3-4 different events during a tempest. There aren't really gameplay differences, no strategic depth.
The game is riddled with spelling errors that a simple spellcheck could have solved. Missing letters, mixed up letters, and sentences like "and are beathe owners are beaten"
- The advisors are quite different, but I think there are 10? and you get to pick from two at a start. And you still have to collect money, build-upgrade everything, and have 2 mages in every scenario. Overall it feels like the endgame is just being dragged further and further, while you always have to dredge through the very slow, and uninteresting start.

Everything considered, it's a game that has potential, but the weakly implemented restart-revive system leaves much to be desired. The story is not interesting enough to keep me going, and the game is repetitive and uninteresting enough that it's just not fun to play it to get the story going. A game can be really enjoyable if the gameplay or the story is strong enough to carry the product. In Mittelborg's case neither of them is up to the task, and considering the non-present developers, I don't expect this to change.

It may be worth to keep an eye on the devs, the concept is good, with enough polish it can turn into a good game.

A Tale of Paper: Refolded is not really outstanding, but it's overall a nice and creative game. It has its issues, like the 3D environments aren't presented the best way because of the moving camera, and tend to lead you off ledges and planks, but its pretty generous death-respawn points make it acceptable. If you exit the game, however, checkpoints only work at the beginning of each level. Better to know this, but not a real issue on its own.
You also can't rebind the control layout, and you can only change the master sound settings from the main menu - music and sounds aren't separate, and nothing can be changed while in-game.


I'll leave up the remained of the review for history's sake, the developers finally removed the bugged achievements until they have the time to fix it (if...)
Aaaanyway, with the issue with non-caring developers out of the picture, I see no reason to turn the review to a positive one. It's not a perfect game, but it's well above average, so it worth the change.

OLD REVIEW FROM NOW ON, BUGGY ACHIEVEMENTS GOT REMOVED AS 2024, 11TH OF JULY

Gameplay-wise it's a fairly competent game that really wants to be Little Nightmares, but at least uses its "paper identity" for movement abilitires, setting them aside from it.

It's the best if you don't care about achievements (Ignoring them makes one's life better, but here am I, making a clown out of myself) - the game has broken achievements that were promised in 2022 to be fixed, and nothing was done.
Then after a recent update of 19th of April also promised a fix, and
the developer also bumped negative reviews that addressed the broken achievements positive, but without even trying themselves if the update fixed it.
As you can see from their own bug report topic, that they ignored for 2 years that the promised fix did nothing.

(The update was not advertised, isn't in the news section, seemingly they only refer to it in their comments on negative reviews)
I guess the sudden upspike of dev activity can be linked to the upcoming PS5 physical release, but it would be nice if 2+ year old bugs would be actually fixed based on their promises. Also, checking their own update before going around advertising how successful it is would be a good touch.

Owning up mistakes and actually fixing them is better, than promises and shoddily done "fixes" that end up doing nothing.

Absolutely amazing game, if you like paranatural themes in your media like The Fringe, The X-Files, SCP or such. There's a plethora of collectible information about the paranatural items, how they work in theory and practise, how they were discovered, transported, contained. You get a look into the life of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) in its full glory, petty squabbles, personal vendettas and disregard of safety that at points rival Black Mesa's security. Overall it's a rich, lore-heavy game.

The gameplay and the actual story is heavily narrated, while you choose dialogue options, the main character, Jesse Faden gives her piece of mind about the events, so it's a triple mystery - what is the FBC, what's going on, and what does Jesse has to do with it.

The repeated mentions of paranatural items suggest (as you already may well be aware of) that as Jesse, you'll unlock special skills and abilities as you play, plus different forms for your Service Weapon..gun. The variety is good both in weapon types, and the unlocked movement/combat abilities, and the skill points and resources you get from playing the game and doing side objectives give some substantial upgrades. Even just the % bonuses can rack up pretty nicely to make the player character more formidable, but a shield ability can be turned into two offensive attacks, or having your skills affect more, or bigger range of enemies.

Enemy-wise the game presents threats in a gradual and well-paced manner, and has the lore and narrative backup for most stronger or unique enemies, but most are just possessed security/armymen. Though there is a bit of tactical approach to combat, the generous use of telekinesis and seize/hypnosis skills is the go-to tactic, supported by your favourite choice of firearm. It's foolproof, it's nice, but even as a telekinesis aficionado, I felt that the game started being repetitive around 80% of its story (while doing all sidequests), if you don't find throwing stuff at enemies as fun as I do, you likely feel the combat fall flat a lot earlier.
Combat-wise the game offers a wide variety of assist mode changes - invincibility, ammo / energy regeneration scaling, or one-hit enemies. As far as I know it still allows you to get every achievement, so if you're here for the lore, you can still enjoy the game!


About the DLCs: Neither of the two DLCs are direct continuation to the events in the base game, they just handwave "things are more or less okay" and do their own things, they are side-content.

The Foundation: lots of lore about the early days of the Oldest House, which houses the Bureau, and its discovery.
Mostly plays in caves, and expands on the lore and story regarding the Astral plane and its denizens, both friendly (?) and foe. No new form for your weapon, and a new traversal/combat skill that is only usable within the Foundation. To be the new melee enemies felt more annoying than threatening, as they have the tendency to stunlock you for a few seconds. In the combat the lack of weapon + ability progression definitely made it more tiresome as it was in the main game as it was just more of the same, but the design focused on giving most enemies a dodge ability so your (by that point really powerful) telekinetic abilities were less useful.
There is some sequel-baity to its themes, but I'm all in for more Control! Overall a nice lore DLC that promises a future, but the "present" gameplay is a bit meh.

AWE (as Altered World Event): Basically an extra spinoff chapter to the developer's Alan Wake game, inside the FBC's building. Lore from TWO franchises, a guest antagonist from Alan Wake, you got to chase it through a new sector. More Bureau intricacies of the past are uncovered, some more info about AWE events, a new enemy type or two, and a new weapon mode that is pretty good counter to the dashing-dodging enemies. Instead of different bossfights you have a single boss with multiple encounters, which are environmental puzzles with some movement challenges instead of just guns-blazing action. Which is fitting, as you need fight with light, as you did in/with Alan Wake. In my opinion the DLC made a great call by not having every single enemy wrapped in The Darkness as in A.W, so the moment to moment gameplay remains mostly the same, while keeping all that Alan Wake flavour to the actual boss. Overall it's really the exploration and gameplay of Control with a generous dose of Alan Wake in story and bossifights, and it works pretty well as (I think?) they scaled back the general difficulty a bit.

Something is very off with this game, despite it being marked as Steam Deck verified, it didn't track any of the changes made through 4 hours of gameplay on Deck. As my screenshots show, I got to world 3, yet my stats are stuck at ~100 bytes collected, and only 19 enemies defeated.
Now I logged in on desktop, and despite having cloud saves, it refuses to access the saves made on the deck, instead uses multiple years old save files, with not even a mention of my gameplay from a few hours ago.

It has its ups and downs, but if it has issues with steam's own systems like cloud saves and achievements, while also being marked as officially verified for Steam's own machine, then there is no way that it deserves a thumbs up. I'll try to uncover some more in the coming days, but its disheartening.