Recent reviews by klew

The various powers that you can use don't rearrange the cards remaining in the game, but randomly replace them with new cards. More often than not, this actually leaves the game in an unfinishable state. For example, you can end up having an odd number of cards remaining when you need pairs to clear them.

This game uses arbitrary scaling to artificially counter your upgrades. I went up against a boss and it dealt about 50% of my health on hit. So I doubled my healing power, and then the same boss started dealing 90% per hit. They change the boss damage based on your ability to heal from it. I would guess that similar things happen with your damage vs boss health, i.e. a completely fake stat system.

This is a psychological horror-themed walking simulator, with the occasional secret, puzzle, or pixel hunt to encourage looking around. Though there are different endings and optional paths through the game, some of which seem like mistakes, you cannot actually die or lose. The gimmick of the game is that it takes place in a manor whose layout seems to be changing all the time. Although the game actually progresses in a linear fashion, you have no way to predict what will be through the next door. You may find that a room repeats itself with different versions, or takes you to a completely different part of the house. The idea seems to have been inspired by the PT/Silent Hills concept demo.

+ Beautifully detailed indoor environments
+ Some of the scares are well-executed

- Picking up objects that cause a voiced memory to play will also slow down all of your actions, and can't be skipped
- Some of the scripted sequences are less scary than obnoxious, such as when using loud, high-pitched ringing
- Focuses on overused horror elements (zombie ghost lady, creepy dolls)

Overall it is a bit lighter on gameplay than I'd prefer, but it's a quality effort and that makes it worth playing if you enjoy the themes.

The game's tagline implies that you are going to explore the factual nature and learn something about the Dyatlov Pass incident, but it's a complete work of fairy tale fiction with almost no connection to the event it's based on. It casts some generic spirit beings as the cause behind the incident. It's a badly executed stealth-only survival horror type of game. You die as soon as an enemy touches you, and they can spawn right next to you. Aside from a short introduction, the entire game takes place on one big and mostly empty map, and all you do in it is try to reach points of interest.

For a small game, it has some pretty big bugs. The most obvious one is that it doesn't save your progress properly, so reloading your game can put you entire chapters behind instead of at the last checkpoint. In most cases you can make up most of the gap by manually loading from chapter select. If you die, there is an odd freeze that can last anywhere from a few seconds to indefinitely, during which it is eating up the CPU and making it slow to bring up task manager so you can kill the process. Because of these issues combined, I ran into a huge problem at one point where every time I died I had to relaunch the game and replay several sections because there was no save in between. I don't know how this game was with previous releases but it sure feels like a garbage port to me.

Gameplay is like a 2D Oddworld game set in a cookie-cutter zombie apocalypse. By every other comparison it's just inferior to classic puzzle platformers. Even so, it's not a completely terrible game, just completely unoriginal and forgettable. With the technical problems added on top, it's not worth going out of your way to play it.

For most people looking to acquire DLC, this is now the only sensible option. One purchase will get you everything for the same price as a single expansion.

But if the expansions are what brought you here, be warned: most of the DLC packages for this game (rune/warband) consists of what are basically cheat codes that give you godlike runes at the very start of the game, making most other runes that you earn through gameplay almost worthless. This ruins the progression system that the game was designed with. So if you're not interested in getting boosted, I'd recommend keeping all of those packages uninstalled.

I'm ambivalent about this game and could be considered neutral but I don't believe that the cost of keeping up with the game is fair or worth it. So while the game does have a solid concept that can be fun with the right matchup, that's usually not what happens when you queue into a lobby. There are a few issues in particular that stand out:

Pay-to-win, DLC baiting:
Let me start by saying that the game does offer a free in-game currency that can be used in lieu of RMT for some (not all) DLC. However, the amount awarded for playing is paltry. You can expect to play somewhere around 100 hours to have the currency to unlock a single character. For killers, character mechanics are unique and in order to play licensed killers you must purchase them with RMT because of the contractual arrangements with the IP owners. For both killers and survivors it is possible to obtain the related perks using the in-game currency, but only on a randomly rotating basis. But because the currency is so difficult to obtain, it feels inefficient to spend it this way when you could be using it to purchase characters whole. If you are not willing to purchase the game's numerous DLCs or spend hundreds of hours grinding, you will not have access to many of the game's stronger meta perks.

Lack of proper balancing between match types:
All players are put into the same matchmaking queue. Both solo players and Survive With Friends are made to play against the same pool of killers. Because SWF players are able to communicate over external voice chat, they share all information and can coordinate all their efforts. In response, the devs have buffed killers, which punishes solo survivors.

Lack of compensation/penalties for disconnects:
When a survivor disconnects or suicides to quit the game early, it unfairly punishes the remaining survivors who now have less time and map presence. While the devs claim that they have an automated system to detect players who disconnect excessively and ban them, this does nothing about suicides and in any case appears to be a very lax system requiring an extremely high rate of disconnects to result in a ban.

Emblem system and removal of player agency:
When the game initially launched, the ability to pip was based purely on the bloodpoint system. While there were point caps for repetitive actions in the game, players were generally very free to earn their points how they saw fit. After introducing the emblem system, all players are forced to earn points through a variety of actions. It becomes very difficult to pip by focusing on a couple areas of play, and for survivors puts them in a situation where they will have to compete with each other for available actions like unhooking. Conversely, for killers it is difficult to pip without performing 3 sacrifices, despite the availability of other emblems which take too long to provide meaningful progress if the killer isn't already eliminating survivors. You can easily have 20k bloodpoint games as a killer and still depip.

This game plays like a single-player/cooperative MOBA with a setting that is reminiscent of WH40K, or alternatively, it's based on extreme PvE custom maps from Starcraft. Whatever description you choose, the game is a bug-ridden mess and the developer posted a note in 2016 that regular updating had ceased, leaving the game largely broken and under-developed. Some very basic issues are still present in the game like abilities with placeholder text failing to describe what they actually do, and natural progression blockers caused by poorly implemented scripts.

About a month or two after release, the game stopped working. Apparently due to a compatibility issue with newer versions of drivers or runtime libraries. Check the forum, lots of people are having this issue and it's been about 18 months with no fix.

Something like a casual rhythm game but not based on musical timing. You will need to master the hotkeys in order to fill orders accurately and quickly. Game is simplistic but fun and can offer a compelling challenge. The only real weakness in gameplay is that food selection is easy to minmax. The difficult time-consuming recipes aren't rewarding enough, and once you have the most efficient foods unlocked you'll find yourself constantly rotating between the same dishes unless you're forced to pick something else.

Graphical presentation is largely 2D and static, with a colorful, polished art style that makes the food look appetizing. The game seems well-optimized and has a snappy response to user input even on older hardware. A gem of indie design, it showcases that even when you have a small budget you can still make a good game by prioritizing tight gameplay and focused production values over pure aesthetics.