Recent reviews by Woodside

I feel compelled to leave this positive review to contrast my negative review of the game itself.

I did not originally know that it was an OST for a game. I had thought C418 simply made a new album in his own time. I listened to all three hours of it one day and fell in love with it.

Unfortunately I do not have much to say about it beyond that. It's very good.

"Farewell" made me cry, and may be my favorite song on the album.

It pains me to say, but I do not like Wanderstop. To such a degree that I have requested a refund with 2.1h of playtime.

Other negative reviews remark on the game's buginess, the "lack of actual gameplay," etc. Those are things that I agree with on some level, but wouldn't have alone caused me to leave a negative review.

It's instead the dialogue, in particular from the protagonist, Alta -- and subsequently the game not really being cohesive between gameplay and thesis.


A bit of background: I listened to all three hours of the OST by C418, not initially knowing it was an OST, and enjoyed every moment of it. I was elated to learn it was an OST for a game by Davey Wreden, as "The Beginner's Guide" was very influential to me. I have not played "Gone Home" so I do not know about Karla Zimonja's tastes and influences here, so I am going only off of what I know from Wreden's work.

Wreden is no stranger to sarcasm or comedy. But Alta's dialogue goes beyond her being a snarky character. She seems down-right mean-spirited. It's not funny, it's just uncomfortable (and not in an introspective way).

I understand that the point is Alta is driven to the point of being broken, so some immature behavior is expected. However, the dialogue seems very "self aware" and 4th wall breaking. Again, not something unheard of from Wreden, especially in Stanley Parable -- but here it feels different somehow. The snarkiness doesn't feel like it's Alta's, but the writers'. To put it bluntly, it feels like I'm being mocked for trying to engage emotionally with the game.

Towards the end of the two hours I played, I would end up skipping dialogue after something quippy was said, because the way it was presented completely pulled me out of the experience.

Stanley Parable was through-and-through a satire and an irreverent comedy, but Beginner's Guide was more thoughtful about emotions. Wanderstop seems as if it is trying to be both, but in my opinion it fails to be either.


And I said that game mechanics alone wouldn't have lead me to leave a negative review for something like this -- but they do tie into a conclusion:

The game mechanics are a meta-commentary about how people cannot feel satisfied without having a goal, something to build up to. I see what they were trying to do with this. I think the broad concept could have worked. But I think it was not executed very well. As someone struggling deeply with burnout and exhaustion, I do not feel "seen," nor do I feel any sort of spiritual relief being actively pushed to not have a goal. Instead, I just feel worse. It makes me frustrated for "wasting my time." It makes playing the game feel pointless, both spiritually and practically. I'm not bored (as critics of this criticism might concluded), by the lack-of-goal, nor am I provided relief by it -- I'm distressed by it. Plus, despite the game telling me to not have a goal, it still presents me with chores. It doesn't feel cohesive.

I recognize the subjectivity of the statement I am about to make, and I am not trying to make accusations to those who like the game. Merely I am expressing how the game made me feel. Though, if anything, that might make it more damning. But here is the conclusion: It does not feel made for people with burnout. This game feels like it's made for people who consume art, to feel as if they're being sympathetic towards burnout by playing it.

To be clear, I'm not insinuating Wreden is pretending to know about burnout when he doesn't. His entire catalog of work might as well be an anthology about burnout. And that is exactly why I am so baffled at how shallow the topic is presented here. My expectation is that he could do better. Granted I only finished the first chapter, but judging off other reviews it doesn't get much deeper. We're shown Alta is suffering exhaustion and burnout... and, that seems to be all there is to her. Besides the aforementioned mean-spirited dialogue.


I don't get it. I "get it," insofar as the usual deflection of criticism of art is concerned. I get what they were trying to do. I get what the game wants to convey. But I "don't get it" insofar as wondering how this, narratively, fell so short for me.

PS: Buying the OST stand-alone though. I really really like it.

This is a really hard one to choose "yes" or "no" on.

I'll start with some critical bulletpoints:
- Game-critical bugs (e.g. resources not transferring between sectors even though they should be able to).
- Frustrating lack of QoL (e.g. resources CANNOT be transferred directly to/from a ship dock from/to another sector, you MUST have an intermediate storage unit assigned to the resource in the sector with the ship dock).
- Lack of telegraphing player direction (e.g. an event will say it's happening, but nothing actually happens for several cycles. Leaving me to wonder if the game has bugged [which did happen once], or if I just need to wait).
- "Gotcha" game design (e.g. if safety levels dip below Optimal even for a FRAME, a building will sometimes instantly blow up.)

Towards the end of my playthrough, due to the structure of the game, I was incentivized to either save-scum science encounters*, or just look them up. It seems like the encounters are meant to add replayability, but the core campaign is too linear and long for me to want to play it again any time soon.

But to be clear, I liked the science encounters. They added good atmosphere and broke up the city-building elements in a pleasant way. Even when looking up what they did, I still felt invested in them. But at the same time, they feel mechanically out of place -- I shouldn't have to feel compelled to look them up. I'm not normally someone who does that kind of thing, as I enjoy mystery.

Ixion is a novel take on a city builder that, when it behaved, I genuinely enjoyed playing. The story was something I was pleasantly surprised by, as well. I think a couple of minor patches that fix bugs and add some QoL alone would elevate this game so much. Ultimately I will give it a thumbs up.


*additional context for those unfamiliar with the game, Ixion has the player build science ships that can investigate points of interest. These mechanically are like mini choose-your-own adventure events. Usually, one gains resources from these encounters. But sometimes the science crew gets killed and the ship they flew, destroyed.

PULL UP

A little bit feature incomplete and a little bit jank at times compared to the other one.

That being said, smaller, quieter community. Much preferred for someone like me.

Additionally, unique features (props, etc) that only remain viable when playerbase is relatively small. Tragedy of the commons sort of thing.

EDIT:
I have to put this at the top and pray the devs see this. The jumping spiders are EXTREMELY f-king annoying. They're not scary (to someone without arachnophobia, at least), they're not difficult, they don't enhance the atmosphere as-is.

They're just tedious (so much health) and unrelenting (they NEVER stop chasing you). They are frustrating to fight because they are usually in areas that make them difficult to see, and the skitter around so fast. I dread passing through caves because I know my flow-state for the game will crash and burn.

Every other enemy you can just circumvent one way or another. Hogs you can trick off cliffs, spitters largely leave you alone once you run away. The spiders force you to engage even if you just pass by them.

Yes, I can just turn the game to passive mode. But I want to keep some environmental danger. I beg the devs to just make the spiders less obnoxious.

It's not about difficulty with them, it's just that they're very irritating and unfun to engage with.


"Actual" review:
I did not think I would like this game as much as I have. I always found that automation-style games were a bit disjoint and necessarily had mechanics that pushed against one another. Satisfactory has shown me that it is possible for an automation game to have many mechanics that do compliment one another to form a cohesive whole.

It's a game that wears its creator's after-dark interests on its sleeve. But for what it is worth, there are no outright sexually explicit scenes.

Initially my review said "it's a poorly disguised fetish game," but upon thinking about it, I'd say it's something of the opposite. It is a game with a really precious story, disguised as a fetish game.

The game touches on loneliness in a way not many games I've played have. Interactions with the major friendly NPC (Puro) are very sweet.

I have one actual criticism of the game though, and that's the painfully unfair mechanics and controls it has at times. Enemy movements are often impossible to predict, but consistent enough in a way that works against the player. As a game, I think it does fall a little short.

However, I the story was sweet enough to pull me through the unfair sections. Additionally, there's a Special Edition being worked on that will address the game issues.

It's pretty nice not having to deal with GogoLoco in VRChat.

A couple of features I'd like to see:


- Being able to change the height threshold for "laying down." I have a couch, and I'd like to be able to lay on it and have the virtual tracking reflect that. A possible implementation is being able to disable sitting down pose, so that one goes from standing up to laying down pose directly. -- This was added, awesome.

- Resetting the rotation of the pose. Sometimes whenever sitting, for whatever reason, Standable will get confused and think "forward" is pointing a bit off to the left or right of where I'm actually facing. Right now the way to reset it is to stand up and sit back down. I'd like a way to tell it directly "the direction my headset is currently facing is forward."

It's blender

Cool but please remove EAC* and stop spying on users**.



Criticism of any kind is met with vitriol and disdain by both devs and organization partners of VRChat.

They've fired one of their best developers, Merlin, whom was working on Udon 2 for seemingly frivolous reasons. Then they scrapped Udon 2 because none of their remaining devs understood what was being worked on. Instead, the endeavor is being replaced with Soba, a meet-in-the-middle approach between Udon and what was the goal of Udon 2. Wouldn't have been necessary, if Merlin was not fired.

There was a time I would have wanted to buy VRC+. That time has long past.


*There are people who will claim EAC is necessary to mitigate crashing. This is simply false. Anti-Cheats, at best, uniquely combat cheating -- wall hacking, auto-aiming, etc. Issues which, in my strong opinion, are negligible for a social game.

Crashing is a separate issue, and is caused by exploitative, corrupt, or overwhelming data. While a hacked client makes sending malicious data easier, it is the duty of server-side infrastructure and code to validate data. And while well-built server-side infrastructure cannot stop DDoSing nor shader-based crashes, an Anti-Cheat cannot either.

Anyone who argues EAC is necessary to mitigate crashing, comparing it to the difficulty of preventing cheating in highly competitive games like Counter Strike, is being dishonest or themselves is being mislead.

The Anti-Cheat also does not prevent avatar ripping but merely makes the process less automated.

Anti-Cheats are extremely privacy invasive and liable to brick machines. They should be a last resort.


**Recording user sessions is being sold with anti-harassment promises, and any criticism is met with "nothing to hide nothing to fear" rhetoric. I'd encourage any reader who finds this observation acceptable to consider anything they may have ever said that could even be taken out of context.