Recent reviews by Annie T. Mood

- Stupidly cartoon-ish.
- Can get really fast-paced.
- Can be cleared in under an hour if you don't die often.
- Has a nice balance of extremely low max-ammo carry-count and plentifully available ammo that are just everywhere.
- Plenty of nice secrets.
- Extremely cheap, especially on sales.

- No kill-count or secret counter for a fast game with plenty of enemies to kill and secrets to find.

- Amazing use of the "fear of the unknown" concept within a very small and confined area.
- Extremely minimal in numbers, but great use of jumpscares.
- Extremely interesting lore and mysteries.
- Very interesting exploration concept where you can't entirely see where you're going.
- Very cheap price, especially on sales.

- Can be cleared in around an hour.
- Extremely simple gameplay objectives.

- Only one ending when it's implied that there could be another.
- Despite the exploration aspects, there's very little to actually discover.
- The last, big jumpscare itself may look too lazy if you only get scared/surprised for a microsecond and are too quick to examine.
- Ending may be way too abrupt.
- Its fan-base can supposedly be cancerous.

Consume flesh and become big.
This is made by the same guys who made Butcher, but the only things similar about the two are the graphics and the gore theme.

There's no dialogue in the game, and whatever story that's actually there is extremely simplistic.

You get what you pay for with this game, you're a big pile of biomass consuming all who get in your way to get bigger yourself. The bigger you are, the stronger your offensive attacks are, but at the cost of being harder to move around. If you want to move around better again, you have to intentionally get hurt or drop off a part of yourself in safe areas to become small again temporarily. It's a little annoying every time you come across a room or puzzle where being small is needed, but you're currently three times the size you should be, making you have to backtrack to a previous room or two to shrink down.

Although you're just a pile of flesh, you do move around extremely smoothly and swiftly.
Combat just revolves around sneaking by armed enemies and flailing them around until they die, or dragging them toward yourself to eat them. It does get exciting being the monster in the horror scene crashing through doors and hiding in vents, but at some point that mindset tires out and it just becomes a light stealth game for when you need to kill, with a bunch of puzzles in between.
Even though you can be a huge pile of flesh, you're apparently really weak to bullets, although you could come up with the theory of them being special bullets.

The game isn't worth the price they're asking for though.
It only takes 3-4 hours to beat, even if you're going for 100%.
The optional collectibles are just upgrades to make this easy game even easier, and if you want to get them, you'll have to go through the weird routes you opened up and backtrack a long ways for them.
There's almost no actual challenge within the puzzles and combat, especially with how forgiving this game can be with its save areas to the point that it can be very relaxing to play despite its extremely violent themes.
There's very little reason to actually even re-play the game aside from speedrunning maybe, with how easy it is to clear rooms of enemies and how many puzzles there are.
The game's for sure fun, but it's not $20 fun.

Grid-based, dungeon crawling punching.

The story is that a tower appeared, and you're just some knight who punches his way to the top of it. He doesn't actually say anything the entire game, and his motives are only ever revealed at the later half of the game. It's got some fun character interactions as well to add some nice pacing to the dungeons.

Half the game is dungeon-crawling through very uniquely themed areas, and solving puzzles with their own really unique themes. The puzzles themselves are very well made, often needing you to move around with the map on the screen. The aesthetics of the game can be disorienting, often needing you to just look at the map for that, too.

The other half of the game is the actual combat. The game uses a "random encounter" mechanic and takes you to a separate area specifically for combats. The random encounters themselves can get really boring and tedious when all you're trying to do is walk around and solve difficult puzzles. Even worse is that they don't reward anything aside from specific monster drop items that are only ever really useful for buying potions from this one NPC that takes too long to reach every time you want to buy something from him.
The combat gameplay itself is great, but can also be extremely difficult to get good with. It involves a lot of reactionary timings, and if you're not very good with that, then it involves a lot of smart item-usage as well. If you're on keyboard, you're most likely going to have a very tired left hand, too.

Being a difficult game, it could really make do with the ability to skip cutscenes, especially for the late bosses where they're extremely lengthy.
Late-game fights can get so chaotic that it's a wonder if they're any fair at all without proper item-uses.
Even though the game encourages future playthroughs, replayability is terrible because it means solving the same long puzzles again.

It's a nice game overall that might take a while to beat due to its difficulty.

Indie game that's banned in Germany for being a game solely about being anti-DEI.

The big, obvious selling point of the game is its political stuff, how anti left-wing it is with many references to real-life stuff, namely in Europe: the degeneracy of the rainbow-flag people, the mass population consuming whatever the mass media craps out, the absolute absurdity of "fact-checking", etc. Its other piece of attraction is also how extremely "white pilled" it is.
The humor itself that's within is very hit-and-miss for me.

As an actual game, it's actually pretty good. Its difficulty when you're not playing the easiest is pretty legit. There are loads of bullets to dash away from or remove by dashing into, so it's almost a light bullethell at times, especially with the bosses.
The game does, however, turn from a skill-check into a gear-check at the last few levels due to the sheer amount of bullets and seemingly random spawns that appear. Being a roguelike, there's no sense of level design whatsover, so certain random-generated areas can surprise you too hard, and this especially goes for the last levels of the game.

It only takes an hour or two to beat the game. It's very forgiving, as well. The game has a "Hardcore" mode where it claims to have permadeath, but it's not even a true permadeath since you keep just about every unlockable and upgrade you find upon restarting.

There's only the one save file apparently, so you can't have a file where you have all your upgrades and simultaneously have another file where you can play the game from a fresh start.
There are a bunch of typos, there are weird camera issues when falling from a great height, and some other bugs and issues.
The game could use some polish and fixing, but it's overall still a nice game.

A Hideo Kojima delivery simulator.

The premise of the story is that you're a delivery man in a post-apocalyptic America connecting the last survivors of the country through the super-internet, and the game is that you have to physically go to these survivors yourself to connect them, traversing through rivers, climbing mountains, sneaking through hordes of inter-dimensional ghosts, etc. No one actually knows how the rest of the world is doing because international communications have been gone since the world ended. We don't even know if connecting people is even a good solution exactly, but it's apparently the only theorized good one that's around.
It's a crazy world with crazy happenings starring top name actors I've never heard of because I don't watch T.V. and movies anymore.

When it comes to Kojima's stories, he's known for having cutscenes that last an extremely long time as well as having lots of information just being dumped right on you, and this game isn't much different from them. Because this game is a more original thing, there's way more information to be thrown at you to the point that the excess lore has to be told through the loads of data entries you get, which you can at least go through any time you want. Or never at all.
Almost all the crazy stuff that happens have an explanation, but there can be so much to even remember, and the explanations can be crazy on their own.
Kojima's an amazing director when it comes to cinematics, but his problem with information dumping has remained.

The gameplay is as a lot of people say, you're really just walking or running or driving around the game's world to deliver stuff, barely any excitement at all. Just about the entire game is built around delivering, so you'll be constantly managing cargo, walking or driving from point A to B and B to A and A to C and C to B constantly. That's not exactly a bad thing in and of itself as it can be very relaxing and immersive with how the game looks and sounds, and it ties in with the game's little philosophical message as well. The further you progress the story, the more stuff you get to make delivering a lot faster, and it's really satisfying when you get them.
They let you know early in the game that delivering stuff is what you'll be in for the whole way through, but unfortunately, "early in the game" lasts way too long with this being an open-world Kojima game, so when you finally find out that this isn't your thing, it can be too late to get a refund.
The gameplay is built around the "delivery" aspect, so any actual traditional "gameplay" that the game has, shooting and general fighting, are pretty broken or unpolished, which can feel pretty awful, especially if you came from Kojima's previous game, Metal Gear Solid V. It's satisfying when you know how to make the fights work, but you're still at the mercy of the game's unpolished action mechanics.

The game is absolutely horrible at pacing when it comes to its side content and introducing new things. They'll open you to new places you can explore, but they don't tell you that there are easier ways to make the exploration more convenient until you progress the story, and a lot of those areas have no reward for being explored early. Only a limited number of side quests can be accepted at a time despite there being not even having a lore reason for that limitation.

The game has an online feature where other players passively help you by showing the stuff they create and placing them into your own game. In turn, the stuff you do and create can go to other players as well. The online stuff doesn't actually appear in a given area until you "connect" that place to the game's super-internet, which I think is what's supposed to balance the game's "difficulty" so you don't get help from the online function when traversing an area for the first time. That said, when the story wants you to go through an area again, and said area is connected to the internet, it can have a problem of suddenly being made too easy because the online function added other players' stuff. It makes the optional stuff far more convenient to do is about its only real positive aspect gameplay-wise.
It can be cool though, helping others and them helping you, even if you and them didn't exactly mean to. It is a wonder though how boring and tedious the game's side-content becomes when the online functions are finally taken offline.

It's a wonder if the people who say they liked the game when it came out actually liked it at all, because I'm thinking they just liked it for the popular names involved, pretty graphics, and/or release hype. The general concept of the gameplay alone doesn't sound like a mainstream audience appeal, just walking from A to B with almost no excitement.

2D Receiver.
If you've actually played that other game, "Receiver", then you'll notice that the similarities are very apparent with the complicated gun controls; even the way you mash the key to sprint is the exact same.
It's not a bad thing in and of itself, but there are a lot of other things in this small game that brings itself down.

You can't remap the keys like you could in Receiver, so you have to get used to this game's particular controls.
You can't aim manually, everything is subject to an auto-targeting system, which is really bad in a game that likes to show itself off as being tactical. For example, you kill a guy and you want to immediately aim at the other guy behind him after, but you have to wait a little because the targeting is still locked to the dead guy who already hit the ground.
The close-quarters combat the game likes to advertise is terrible and actually very ill-advised due to the enemies spawning endlessly.
Looting dead bodies for ammo is a nightmare when they're all on top of each other in this 2D game with a very limited inventory.

Being a one-dollar game, it only takes maybe an hour or two to finish, and by the end of the game you're told it's just a prologue to another upcoming game.

I assume this is the developer's first game or one of his first of this type, because it's ridiculously rough to the point that it's hard to want to keep playing it despite having some nice foundations.
It has a pretty interesting rogue-like and combat premise, as well as a pretty neat style, but the game overall is just put together just a little too poorly, and the guy that made this has already abandoned it years ago.

The game seems to originally be Korean. The lack of proper translations is horrible to the point that a lot of descriptions can outright mislead you gameplay-wise.

Most of the weapons aren't fun at all if just because those weapons can only attack one enemy at a time. It takes a bit of time into the game to finally get the few weapons that can attack multiples at once. Plus, cooldowns for the game's weapon skills take way too long, which would be fine for the ones that can hit multiple enemies, but this applies to the single-enemy type weapons as well, constantly making you play it safe. It doesn't help that there's an incredibly small stamina bar you have to keep in mind, too.

The game has plenty of mechanics that have absolutely no explanation on how they work, or you can't read their explanations until you decide on something that you can't take back. Like, there's a little quest that says "don't get downed on stage" or something like that, when it really means "don't get stunned/flinched in the next area or the quest fails".

Its rogue-like parts can get very rewarding, and the combat is pretty engaging, but the game is so ridiculously unpolished that it's hard to stay interested and re-play this game that's meant to be re-played, despite its very short length.
There's a similar game by the same publisher, AshenForest, that's a lot better than this, and the next game from the developer, A.R.M., is also just a better game in general.

A small wild west story-driven stealth/FPS.

The story follows two protagonists whose stories often cross with one another throughout the game. One runs away from a murder crime scene, while the other chases down the runaway because he thinks he committed said murder.
The "Call of Juarez" part refers to a treasure that's hidden within a town of Juarez, which one of the protagonists is unknowingly very involved with, and said treasure doesn't actually become relevant until halfway through the game.
It's not a very grand story, but it is at least somewhat interesting, especially when the narrations occur. It does often feel like the game should have had more focus on its story with the amount of characterization there is.

With the two protagonists, they both have very different gameplay styles.
One is primarily stealth gameplay, with some familiar elements from the classic Thief games, while the other is an FPS with a unique slow-motion mechanic.
Both their gameplay mechanics are pretty janky, with the FPS side being a lot less so.
The stealth can get really awkward at times, like how the game's tutorial tells you that you're supposed to be invisible within bushes, but it's actually only the developer-approved bushes that you're invisible in, as any other bushes that look the exact same are just props.
During the FPS sections, you're very reliant on the slow-motion mechanic, which makes it more fun. While generally cool to do, it's pretty awkward that the crosshairs have to first appear from the edges of the screen, so you're constantly having enemies on the edges of the screen before using slow-motion to make optimal use of the mechanic.
Cool thing about the slow-motion though, aside from shooting down bad guys with style, is that you can often see bullets coming your way, allowing you to dodge them with the game's lean mechanic. The stealth section has slow-motion as well, but you rarely ever even need it for there.

There are also plenty of very dated gameplay implementations.
There are a few dedicated fistfight sections, but they're horribly awkward with terrible animations and hitboxes.
There's one quick draw duel in over half of the chapters in the game, but I think depending on how sensitive your mouse is normally, you'll have to adjust the mouse sensitivity within the game to make the gun duels actually work properly.

If you can get past a bunch of the jank and dated-ness, it's not too bad a game.
It also only takes around 6 hours to beat on a normal run.

First-person horror game that just really likes Silent Hill.

If you've ever played any of the real Silent Hill games (1, 2, 3, and maybe 4) then you'll notice right away how much it takes from those games, from its artistic style, sounds, and ways it tells its stories.
The visuals and sounds really do blend extremely well to give constant feelings of uneasiness, especially when it looks like something is going to be there. It's also got some cool moments that often make you go "was that always there"?
It could make do with less of those moments where the game looks like it's bugging out but it's actually part of the game. It's not really scary or cool half the time, it's just confusing. Like, at the beginning of the game I can't even tell if the screen tearing thing is because that part is poorly optimized or if that's just part of the dev's love for buggy-like effects.

The plot itself is just that your dog fell in the sewer and you go down there to look for him.
As you're searching for him, all these unrelated horror things are happening along the way that you have to fight through. There's barely anything told in the story, everything is up to you to piece together the notes and such and come up with the conclusions on your own. However, not everything has answers so you're guaranteed to be at some level of confusion by the end of the game.
A bunch of horror stuff happens that you have to fight through, but much of the game is extremely vague so it's hard to say for sure why all the horror stuff is even happening.

The actual gameplay, just like any Silent Hill game, isn't anything special, they're just means to an end; surviving is easy if you don't panic. The one extremely notable enemy is pretty annoying, if just because it's one of those "look at it so it doesn't move" types, but what makes it really terrible is that it can teleport almost anywhere when you're not looking at it, including right on you.

It's a nice little horror game overall that probably won't take even half a dozen hours to go through. You don't have to make sense of it to like it.