Recent reviews by apocalyptech

Blocks That Matter is a cute little puzzle platformer which is good fun, and has somewhat unique mechanics. I'd played this game years ago and just recently replayed it to 100%, and definitely enjoyed it the second time around as well.

The game's not without its downsides. As many others have mentioned, an 'undo' function would be greatly appreciated, though in general the levels aren't really long enough for that to be a terrible problem. There's also three "Big Mama" levels which require you to race forward as a gigantic insta-death Slime chases you... Those levels aren't too bad if you don't care about 100% completion (in fact, there's an option to skip them entirely from the pause menu), but if you ARE the sort of person to get hung up on 100%, they can be an excercise in frustration. Especially the last one, which requires near-perfect gameplay to get a star on the level. Many of the levels must be solved more than once to get 100%, as well.

Despite those drawbacks, though, I'd definitely recommend the game to anyone who does enjoy puzzle platformers. There are some very nice "aha!" moments when a previously-unsolveable-seeming level clicks into place, and its charms far oughtweigh any problems it might have.

(I do feel compelled to mention that BTM's sequel "Tetrobot and Co" takes care of many of the issues which are found in this game - there's no even vaguely arcade-like sections like the Big Mama levels, an Undo function is available, and the levels can always be completed to 100% on the first time through.)

Trine 3 is an interesting addition to the series. The transition from 2D to 3D is actually handled reasonably well, and I had a good time playing through with different mechanics from the Trine 1+2 platforming. Fortunately, the game retains Trine's lush visuals, so it's still a treat to look at, and the newer mechanics made possible by the move to 3D are fun (though I missed the more fluid rope-swinging that Zoya was capable of in Trine 1+2).

The transition to 3D is helped out somewhat by the level design, which for the most part allows you to play individual setpieces as if they were still a 2D puzzle. It's true that sometimes player positioning becomes an issue, and occasionally you'll end up misjudging where you are in relation to where you're jumping, but overall I didn't have any problems with it really. I did have a few unintentional deaths due to my character not being where I thought she was, but since death is only a minor inconvenience in the game, it never bothered me.

Character abilities are restricted compared to previous Trine games, to account for the increased complexity of dealing with them in a 3D environment, but it's nice that the characters start out with all of their abilities intact. The "trineangles" you collect in Trine 3 no longer count towards character upgrades, but to unlocking levels. This could've been problematic, but the Trineangles aren't super hidden, and when you select a level section from the menu, it'll tell you from which sections you're missing Trineangles, so it's much easier to hunt down missing ones. Unlike with previous Trine games, I'd very often finish up a level to discover that I'd gotten all of them first time around, so I did far less replaying than I'd done in previous installments.

The biggest drawback, of course, is that it's definitely a shame that Frozenbyte wasn't able to create the full-length Trine 3 that they'd set out to create. The ending is certainly abrupt and leaves the storyline hanging, and anyone not prepared for that is likely to be quite disappointed. It helps, certainly, to go into the game knowing that it's a truncated storyline. It's also shorter than the other Trine installments, for the same reason, but I got a good eight hours of gameplay to get through all the content, which I was happy enough with for the price.

So yeah: certainly not a perfect product, but IMO it's a worthy addition to the series.

Borderlands: TPS has taken a lot of flak for a variety of reasons, including game length, lack of DLC, sometimes-awkward humor, impressions that some game areas were rushed, and other complaints along those lines. Certainly there's truth to a lot of that, but the game is quite solid overall, and I've had a great time with it (played through the main storyline with three characters so far).

Mechanically, I think the combat in TPS is better than that in B2, mostly just because of a wider variety of weapons thanks to the lasers, and the added low-gravity boosting and butt-slam techniques. When I hop back into B2, I've found I miss those quite a bit. I've been finding the player characters a blast to use as well, with some fun skill trees to explore. Humor's subjective, of course, but to me the jokes land far more often than they miss, and I'm quite fond of the pervasive Australian influence.

Complaints about the amount of story content are difficult to shrug off when compared to B1 and B2, which were both longer and featured far more story DLC, so your hours-per-dollar ratio is going to be lower than with the other two. However, TPS really only suffers in comparison - there's plenty of story to be had here, and even though it seems likely we'll only ever get the Claptastic Voyage story DLC, there's a lot to keep you amused.

It's certainly a shame that we don't seem likely to get more story DLCs, though. Likewise, some areas do certainly feel like they were rushed. Vorago Solitude feels particularly empty, for one. The TPS narrative is a little underwhelming as well, partially because it's acting as a bridge between two already-established plots, and partially just 'cause the Vault Hunters seem to have less agency this time around than usual. (Not that you ever did anything but accept other people's missions in B1 and B2, but I felt more like a spectator this time around.)

Still, I can't imagine that anyone who enjoyed B2 wouldn't also enjoy TPS, so long as they're not mentally expecting something "bigger" than B2. B2 is almost certainly the better game overall, due to the sheer amount of content and relative tightness of the plot, but TPS has been keeping me well amused for some time now, and I'm already looking forward to diving in as another character.

Short but sweet: if you enjoy nonogram/picross puzzles, you will not be disappointed! The narrative conceit is cute and works well with the game, and the puzzles themselves are well-implemented and easy to work with. If you like this kind of puzzle, dive right in!

Also: thanks for putting out a Linux port! Working flawlessly on my system.

A lot of vitriol and "joke" reviews on this one, so here's something a little more sincere:

The central "XOR" mechanic which probably eludes non-programmers is based on the bitwise "XOR" operator, which means "exclusive OR." It's an operator which, when comparing two bits, will only return true if exactly one of them is true. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_or#Truth_table

How that relates to the game is that when you click on a "room," it compares the room you clicked on with the one your character's currently in. It'll then apply the XOR operator to the states of the four doors surrounding both rooms. Effectively, it means that if you want to move left, and your current room has a closed door to the left, you'd look for another room *without* that door open, click on it, and the door in your current room will change.

That's further complicated by the fact that there's an inner and outer set of doors, which you can change with left-mouse and right-mouse respectively.

So: doing things in the game world (collecting arrows, rescuing princesses, etc) will accumulate points, and those hounds apparently will take away points unless you've visited the "chest," and you use this XOR mechanic to open/close doors as you go. Apparently spacebar will fire an arrow at the hounds, though I admit that I never got to that point.

In practice this turns out to be a mostly extremely frustrating experience, compounded by the fact that every few seconds the door states on the map seem to randomize. The map's very visually busy despite being so simplistic, making it difficult to find a room to click on before the auto-randomization timer starts up. It ends up being a relatively aggravating experience.

I think there could certainly be an interesting game created from using bitwise operators to navigate through mazes like this, but this one doesn't really succeed.

I've played through nine other Artifex Mundi titles to completion and have enjoyed them all, and I'd definitely recommend checking out anything else from their catalog. This one, however, I don't think I could recommend to anyone but a die-hard Hidden Object game fan.

My main complaints are basically:
* The Hidden Object components are far more frequent than they typically are in other AM titles. Other titles feel more like Adventure Games which happen to include HO puzzles, whereas this one is very much a HO game which happens to include a few extra elements.
* The central Museum area HO puzzles, which you'll apparently do seven times, are all set in the same room and feature a distracting throbbing-light effect
* Inclusion of spot-the-difference puzzles as well
* The interface is clunkier than their later offerings... One specific problem I had was the 17th Century chemistry puzzle seemed to get locked in an unfinishable state, with the "Skip" counter no longer even moving forward (so I couldn't complete the puzzle, and also couldn't skip it), which was the final thing that led to my uninstallation.

On top of those, there was the typical absurd and nonsensical plot, which I can typically just roll with and enjoy for having the surreal fever-dream like atmosphere which other Artifex Mundi plots cultivate, but combined with the frustrations above, it didn't do anything for me.

So yeah: check out some other Artifex Mundi titles instead, especially if you're new to the genre. The two "Grim Legends" titles are the ones I'd finished just before starting this one, and were superb examples of the genre, IMO.

This is a charming little puzzle game where you guide a pleasantly-expressive snake-bird hybrid around some devious maps, munching on fruits-and-such as you go. It's breezy, colorful, and might just kill you. As it seems to be doing to me.

The Linux port works great, too. Thanks for the port!

This is a pretty great point-and-click adventure game. It's rather long, the puzzles are for the most part reasonably straightforward (I didn't do too much random-clicking-to-see-what-happens), and the humor is often extremely well-done. The voice acting is also top-notch, which is a nice feature.

There's a few annoying technical issues if you're on Linux. For one, the "Settings" menu crashes the game unless you manually swap out one of the game's bundled libraries. For another, I couldn't find a way to set a windowed mode, or consistently set a windowed resolution, without hex-editing the main binary. (Editing the generated config files in ~/.bout achieved nothing for me.)

Additionally, anyone who's concerned about the representation of women in video games nowadays will find plenty to complain about in this title.

Still, the good parts far outweigh the bad, and IMO the world could use more adventure games of this caliber. I'd certainly recommend it to any fan of the genre!