Recent reviews by D3c4d3nc3

Very fun game that almost nobody will play :( Arena shooters need to make a comeback

If you haven't played Rabi Ribi, do yourself a favour and play that game first. Otherwise, continue on.


TL;DR
This game feels like a half baked expansion pack to Rabi Ribi, but is not necessarily bad, just not as unique or as fun. If I could give this game an "Okay" rating I would.


The Good:

1. Updated shading systems and background scroll allow for a lot more detail and variety than Rabi Ribi
   
2. Combat systems from Rabi Ribi got a pretty good feeling makeover
   
3. FPS is not locked to 60 like in Rabi Ribi, and will consistently hit a completely flat frametime @ VRR'd 237 fps on my machine
   
4. Game in motion looks sublime and responds quicker due to more frames, making me wish that Rabi Ribi felt the same
   
5. Impressive selection for the Japanese voice acting cast, they have the tsundere and the WRYYYY vampire guy in non one liner roles
   
6. Movement system is mostly copied from Rabi Ribi with some extras, but omits hidden tech walljump unless in Free Roam mode 

The Bad:

1. Hard feels extremely easy in comparison to its predecessor Rabi Ribi's Hard, I only died 17 times in my blind playthrough and almost all of those were during exploration to get quick heals
   
2. Bosses felt like pushovers, most fights I would get hit less than 3 times, dying only once in a bossfight across the entire game
   
3. Overbearing story gets in the way of gameplay, and feels more suited to a JRPG than a "metroidvania"
   
4. Dialogue between characters feels too long most of the time, and takes itself way too seriously
   
5. Base game is not designed around sequence breaking like in Rabi Ribi, this game is almost completely linear
   
6. All exploration upgrades are gated behind story sequences, this feels more like a bad version of Ori WoTW than Rabi Ribi

• At least Ori WoTW had the decent idea to have multiple areas that you could access for a wide selection of new abilities, which is not the case in TEVI
  
• In the default mode, you WILL pick up all abilities in the EXACT order the game intends you to pick them up, NO EXCEPTIONS
  
• It took about 6-8 hours of playtime to feel like I had any meaningful exploration upgrades in my blind playthrough, and that doesn't mean much if you know where the next big movement ability will be due to the game spearheading you toward progressing the storyline
  
• Took me 6-8 hours to reach the point of the game that was shown off in the playtest and demo

The Ugly:

1. Story isn't really all that interesting even though the background lore appears to have a lot of effort and thought put into it
   
2. CG art (IMO) appear similar to rough drafts rather than a finished piece of art
   
3. Character designs feel somewhat bland, not really too fetishy nor too mainstream
   
4. It is yet to be seen if the unlocked framerate removes or breaks "zips" (speedrunner trick) as seen in Rabi Ribi. (If anyone knows LMK)
   
5. Game stutters when changing BGM if you have a slow HDD, but I doubt many will have as slow a HDD as mine
   
6. Currently no postgame content other than 100-percenting the map, free update coming soon according to dev
   
7. When game has been cleared once, Speedrun mode is unlocked and applies small changes to the map to allow for sequence breaking
   
8. Free Roam mode is now available on first launch, though the game tells you its not the way to play your first playthrough, as all story is omitted.
   
9. I was only in control of TEVI for 12 out of 32 hours of my blind playthrough, the rest was either spent in cutscenes or me going AFK
   
10. The English localisation seems okay for the most part, but still has noticeably bad moments that have no resemblance ofwhat was actually said.
    
    • I only know this because I skimmed a walkthrough and their language was set to English. I played through the game in Japanese.
    
    Translation fail example, with spoilers for late game item
    Screenshot of Stats
    
    
    17/12/2023 EDIT: Additional info about linearity and quality of localised text
    28/12/2023 EDIT: Small adjustments to review, devs patched out having to beat the whole game to unlock the good mode, still awaiting post-game patch

rabbit rabbit

Extremely well made game with witty dialogue. The developers really did think of everything and reward you for thinking a little outside the box.
Holy shizers this game is SO impressive for what it is attempting to do. There are bugs sometimes but I'd think it'd be a Windows issue most of the time. I kinda expect this game to break when new Windows comes out so play it while you can. This is all of the spoilers you are gonna get, go play the damned video game. ITS FREE!

A suggestion to dev:
It might be worth making a remaster where the game has its own desktop environment, much like how Oneshot did theirs.

I tried to get into this game when it came out but was not a fan of the turn-based beat-em-up mashup. I also had problems running the game at resolutions above 1080p (Still is a problem, though technically its on purpose as everything is hand-drawn and then mastered @ 1080p). This was before refunds were really a thing on Steam, and I kinda digged the soundtrack, so I let Transistor sit there in my library.

Come 2023, close to a decade later, I decided on a whim to boot the game up on my Steam Deck. And the game finally clicked for me. Absolutely no problems running the game on Deck (as the screen is only 800p) and the Linux port is superb, bar a few things that I touch upon in my report on ProtonDB. [www.protondb.com]

Gameplay-wise the game is still a little clunky (I kinda already hate turn based games for the most part), but you need to push through and attempt to understand the clunkiness to actually get anything out of this game. Finding out new combinations of abilities as you progress through the game is fun and rewarding if you take the time to get out of your comfort zone, with the added reward of extra lore for mixing up your abilities. I think I would've liked this game more the first time I tried it years ago if the tutorial was more upfront about how you probably should play the game. It is best practice to never fully deplete the Turn() bar (unless you are about to end the fight), otherwise you will be stuck in the horrible debuff status of "Recharging", where you become a headless chicken attempting to remove a bunch of ants crawling up your legs. Not sure why the devs just didn't either A. have some sort of punishment other than complete revokation of player agency when fully depleting the Turn() bar or B. make the narrator say something like, "You're really living on the edge here, maybe hold off on exhausting me" or something of that nature to lead the player away from doing that consistently. I don't think it was obvious that Turn() bar recharge time was proportional to how much you used it, when I first played the game this really caught me out and was quite frustrating.

Just about everything else other than that is well thought out, from the lore within the character interactions and mini biographys to the general cohesion of the game thematically. Knowing more about programming now than I did then I can see a lot of little tongue and cheek jokes scattered throughout the game, and its all very endearing. Hopefully when I get to playing Hades at least some of the DNA from Transistor is in there.

EDIT: Typo and extra clarification

free cheevos waow.
RANT TIME!
Things that I'm sure other people have already said, but I will repeat because I agree:
Game feels intrinsically good during gameplay but is plagued by bad company practices on the extrinsic side, so its probably not worth playing. Its hard to take this seriously as a competitive game when playable characters are hidden behind a grind/paywall and not having said character(s) can and will lose you games. Monetisation is so utterly greedy and doesn't even fund PvE because Blizzard cancelled it. It also doesn't seem to fund the competitive esport scene, which is dying a slow and painful death because of greedy exclusivity contract deals.

Things I care about that are a little bit more niche:
This game also has improper Steam input support so all controllers will show as Xbox controllers because Blizzard didn't put the time into making the Steam experience seamless. (Steamless? It's honestly the same with or without Steam, just that they get less money if you spend on microtransactions here) This is disappointing because this game actually has one of the best implementations of the Dualsense's adaptive triggers (different feeling on pulling the trigger for every single character in the game) and playing through steam will rob you of that unless you forgo all of the benefits of Steam input. (gyro, flick stick, universal rebinding tool) It pains me to say that Fortnite is more of a competitively viable game than this because it has better controller support, with explicit flick stick support across all platforms that allow controller and DOES NOT hide different playstyles behind a pay wall.

This version of the game is perhaps the worst version of the game. It is an abandoned port that never got any of the upgrades that the Switch version got, and has no widescreen alongside broken controller support. Better to just play the original from cavestory.org and/or play it in your favourite source port. I recommend using doukutsu-rs despite its growing pains. Maybe if Nicalis wants more money they might update this game to match the switch version in terms of feature set but I doubt it.

RIP Onward. Lobbies are filled with screaming children who don't appear to have any parents. Older 1.7 version which did not have screaming kids while also having better graphics and gameplay than current build has been discontinued. Thanks Zuck for killing just about every good VR experience and sending the VR market into a recession.

A free game from the people behind Stanley Parable. Humour in the same vein.