Recent reviews by Epic Eric

Perfect game

Fun, simple, interesting, sometimes quite challenging, and oddly addicting! I already enjoyed playing the free browser version daily, now I'll be playing this one too every now and then!

Um dos melhores jogos de Sokoban que já joguei - curto e completamente gratuito.

On the positive side, the game has a charming visual style, and the writing starts off pretty strong. The characters stay mostly consistent, and it's witty and funny. The difficulty for the Picross puzzles scales reasonably, and I managed to get through them without any prior knowledge of how to play Picross, learning more techniques as the game got harder. The soundtrack is good, and it's at a decent price for the amount of gameplay.

However, my experience with this game ended up being far more negative than I expected. The game has too many bugs (resetting a puzzle will blast multiple sound effects at once; and I had to turn off my controller emulation software in order to play because that's buggy as hell too), which is hardly excusable for a QA'd multi-person project. The Picross and narrative portions don't mesh well together - you'll often get a few lines of dialogue interrupted by long stretches of Picross. When you solve a Picross, it turns into a piece of evidence, but the sprite maintains the low-res - and some of them are too confusing to even comprehend. The "investigate" mechanic is pretty much an afterthought, with 90% of the time just being a game of hot-and-cold, and should've been simply removed from the game. The Picross puzzles are way too overused - by the end of the second case I got tired of it, and that's not even 40% of the game's length. When you're late into the game, getting pushed into a new Picross puzzle to solve felt more like a chore, and it was more despairing than rewarding. The story and gameplay elements sometimes play well together, but in general, they didn't - and the Picross moments often killed any momentum that the writing has.

Speaking of, the story slowly gets worse as you progress, and the fourth and final case is just an absolute mess - people acting out-of-character or just plainly dumb, with contrived and nonsense explanations, and a few central characters and plot points are completely dropped for the sake of poorly written payoffs. I don't mind clichés and plot holes if it serves the narrative, but this game doesn't go anywhere with what should've been a neat conclusion. It was a very disappointing end with abysmal writing for a plot that started off so strong.

While I appreciate the unique combination of Picross and visual novel, I think there are better options for puzzle-based visual novels to pick from. If you're only interested in playing Picross, there are probably better games out there, maybe even for free.

NOTE: After writing this review, Capcom has allegedly decided to add a dubious DRM to this game that is akin to a Trojan horse. I can no longer recommend this title. FOR SECURITY REASONS, DO NOT INSTALL THIS GAME.

The best narrative by Shu Takumi so far, and the port is good enough. I enjoyed replaying this game, I think it's definitely worth a try even if you haven't played any of his other games before. And yeah, the stealth mission is the worst as is the case with stealth missions.

Fun but crashes every other match.

TL;DR: If you liked the first game, you'll like this one. If you didn't, you won't like this one. If you didn't play the first game, go play that one instead.

Compared to the original Somnium Files, the engine has improved, systems are expanded, there's a lot of plot and fun side-dialogues (I took about 34 hours to beat the whole game), there are more Somnia and they are more fun and dynamic, soundtrack is a banger, new and returning characters are cool. They added some side systems (pet minigame, Aiba's/Tama's Room) that I really don't care about.

If you haven't played the first game, I can't really recommend this. Sometimes it feels like it relies too much on the first game for established character development or recurring jokes, and on the genre for murder mystery visual novels, so you might not enjoy going into this one first if you haven't played the previous game and/or Zero Escape and don't know what you're getting into.

Like I said, this game improves on some aspects from the first game (mostly technical and gameplay stuff), but from a story perspective, (very minor spoilers ahead) the twist at the end didn't feel earned or interesting, and left me more confused than engaged (even as the game holds your hand to explain it), and looking back, it probably ruins the story for me the harder I think about it. (minor character spoilers ahead) One new character specifically feels like a self-insert from the makers of the game, and although they get a concluding arc, I don't think their actions or motivations made a lot of sense inside of the narrative, especially as it pertains to said twist. But other than that, I have no big complaints overall.

Demora um pouco pra entender os controles, mas você consegue pegar o jeito, e depois fica bem fluido de conseguir se movimentar pelo mapa todo. Como o jogo é todo simulado, acabei encontrando alguns bugs (não os insetos, rs), mas nada que realmente quebrou o jogo. Ele é curto -- dá pra coletar tudo em 6 horas ou menos --, mas é divertido, a historinha é bacana, e vale à pena pegar pra jogar se a mecânica de teias parece interessante pra você.

It doesn't get any more ultra or deluxe than this.

Reportar outros jogadores não resulta em nada, nem quando fazem saudação n*zista. Jogo sem moderação nenhuma.