Recent reviews by AVI

Great, addicting game that is terrible for real life productivity. I stayed up so late last night building that I slept in and was late to work. 😬 This game will get its hooks in you like nothing else.

I really don't know how to summarize this game. It's not just that the narrative and characters are fantastic and multi-layered - it's not just that their low-concept science fictional world is incredible - it's also the staging, the framing of every scene, the shifts in gameplay, the cuts...this game uses visuals to heighten and enhance the story being told. Using visuals to demonstrate metaphor. Using surreal set pieces to represent an event and let you FEEL what it must have been like.

I feel an aching in my chest when I am not playing this game. It is going to be over soon and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself afterwards. This game lights a fire of inspiration in me that I don't quite understand.

I own Slay the Spire on every available platform, and between each platform I probably have 500 hours.

This is truly a game meant for experimenting, creating fun/strange/broken builds, and challenging yourself. You'll be saying "one more run!" and then it'll be 3am.

I bought this game 3 times on 3 different platforms. It's one of those games that you can lose hours to. Kept hopping back in for one more run. Well worth the price.

Fifo's Night is a fun, Halloween themed platformer. It's free (and short, supposedly). But I don't want to recommend it due to a bug that soft locked my progress. I can see it's been reported in the discussions many times, but it doesn't look like it's been fixed.

There's an area where, there is a switch that will make a platform move left and right automatically. Once you pull it, you can't interact with it anymore. If you pull it, then quit the game (or turn it off, or leave for any reason), when you next log back in, the platform is once again still, but the switch is in the non-interactable state. So you can't make the platform move again, and you can't continue the game.

This bug happens near the end, and technically you could just replay the whole game up to this point. But it controls clunkily enough that I really don't wanna go back through the annoying parts again. I won't recommended this game until it gets fixed.

I'm making my way through the Blackwell Series, and so far I've found the games to be a nice little treat. But Blackwell Deception made my eyes open, it made my heart hurt. I enjoyed it so much that I took to writing a review.

The Good:
- Characters: Joey and Rosa have their characters built up though the first 3 games, but this is the one where you can tell there's been an evolution. Entertaining but generally one-note in the first games, in this game we learn more about their pasts and can really see how much they've bonded through their shared adventures.
The other ghosts, and the major side-characters, also feel more fleshed out this time around. This was the first time I've been really sad about one ghost's story, and really angry at another's.
The voice actors have definitely grown into their roles. they have gotten much better as the games have gone on. They really land some key emotional scenes. (A huge difference from the first game, where I played it with the voices muted.)

-Plot: There are a lot more plot threads to follow in this game, and they tie up really neatly at the end. Rosa's driving motivation in this game is a lot more personal, making her seem more driven and passionate about solving the case.

-Music: Excellent music. The music's always been pretty nice in this series, especially in Convergence and in this game.

-Art: The character portraits get better every game.

The Bad:
-Animation: The animations of the sprites were a bit wonky. When Rosa walks, for example, her top half just glides along instead of bobbing up and down. Weird unnatural movements happen like this a few times in the game, but it honestly didn't detract from the experience.

I'm very excited to play the final game in the series! Deception had me at the edge of my seat so I expect great things!

Pros

+ Supernatural events with the radio interface are exciting and suspensful
+ Naturally-flowing dialogue
+ A well-paced narrative
+ Relatively enjoyable characters
+ Excellent visual design

Cons

- No fast travel
- A couple of predictable moments in the story
- Controls didn't always work

After one playthrough, I can definitely recommend this game. The narrative was quite enjoyable, weaving in the creepy events of the island with the character's own personal stories and troubles. Depending on the choices you make, you're free to explore either of those as much as or as little as you want, or you can solely focus on getting everyone out of there safely. Conflict is both internal and external.

The radio frequency mechanic was quite cool, and I loved how the interference translated into the game's interface as well. When combined with the game's open spaces, it felt like a cosmic horror story. I never felt quite sure if the choices I was making were what I really wanted, especially near the end. (The climax and conclusion of the game are pretty great, by the way.)

The characters were teens, and for the most part they were believable, although sometimes I felt like they weren't freaking out as much as they should have been. Characterization-wise, I was expecting them to be a little stronger, as character relationships are pretty important in this game, but their interactions with one another are pretty enjoyable. And I actually wish I'd gotten to know a few of them a little better, but I guess that might be hard to fit in there with the supernatural side of the story given the length of the game. I suppose that's the replay value, then.

My first draft of writing this review complained about there being no way to pull up a map, but watching other playthroughs revealed that this was not true. The problem was that the button used to pull up the map (ctrl) didn't work for me. So there you have it.

All-in-all, this game is definitely worth your time.

What Grow Home has in it's favor:

+ A world that feels large and wonderous
+ Lovely, polygony visuals that make excellent use of color
+ 3D platforming that feels boundless
+ A cute little enthusiastic robot
+ Climbing, falling, and tumbling physics

What Grow Home has against it:

- Bugs
- To go into more detail here, I had initial issues in which the colors of the game were greatly desaturated and the graphics were low-res and blurry. This was fixed after I restarted the game, but it's a glaring blip in design that may turn away a few people who don't know how easily it can be resolved.
To that end, every once in a while the physics get really wonky, and the robot will tumble around even when you're standing still, or freak out if you're standing to close to a surface and the camera is backed up against that surface.

Final verdict:

Play it! Despite it's very infrequent shortcomings, Grow Home relaxed and charmed me. It's immensly fun to play and easy to get lost in.

Poignant and creative. The puzzle design is charming and imaginative, evoking a sense of childlike wonder. The allegory is rather blunt, but effective. It ran a little slowly on my PC at times, but that didn't detract from the overall atmosphere of this game. I enjoyed every moment playing it and felt a thin blanket of sadness hanging on me when it ended.

A charming, inventive little platformer. The 2D/3D perception flip is a wonder to behold. The initial game feels accessible enough that anyone can play and enjoy it without getting frustrated. But the 100% completion stuff is more suited for the achievement hunter who likes a bit more challenge. (A ridiculous amount of challenge.)

The visuals are colrful and immersive, and the environments and animation bring a great deal of personality to the game. Overall, it's definitely worth your time.