Recent reviews by Cadrin

Good game, but awful publisher. I'm one of the few clowns who bought the game years ago for the story mode. And the publisher fired the Mane6 devs and stopped active development, so I'm never getting more than Chapter 1. For shame.

If you're under the age of 18, don't play this game. It contains sexually suggestive themes mixed with cuteness. I disagree with the game's developer's proposed rating of 12+. I think it's dishonest of him to rate it that low and claim innocence.

For those of you who are over the age of 18: if you're inquisitive like me and like furries, then I think you'll enjoy this game. You probably learned of this game because of Puro the black latex goo wolf. He's a character in this game and I think the game is worth getting for him alone.

For the 5$, you actually get two games: Changed, the base game, and Changed-Special, a work-in-progress extended edition, currently available as a demo. This review only focuses on the base game.

On a meta level, there is a rabbit hole attached to the game that's intriguing to explore as you play. Take a look around you in the Steam reviews. A lot of them are exaggerated for humor, but the curious ones read dead serious and cast allegations against the game and its author. Are those true? Well, you don't need to own the game to look into that, YouTube is a good starting point, and I don't wanna suggest an answer, but it was fun to investigate as I played, and I encourage you to do the same, trying to exercise critical thinking and keeping a fair, impartial mindset. The process of drawing my own conclusions made me disgusted, apprehensive, made me want to stop playing, and made me dig around for clues and carefully evaluate the evidence. It was a journey.

In the end, I kept playing to completion, despite the controversy surrounding the game. I was willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous cases. This game fetishises furry transformation, a process of being turned into an anthropomorphic animal referred to as "transfurring". And it's not open about that, it just sometimes puts characters in suggestive poses for no reason. It's weird and creepy. But there's more to the game than that. There's a real story there, a sometimes contrived, nonsensical one, but nevertheless it made me care more than I thought I would. A lot of it concerns Puro, who is a genuinely interesting character, and every bit as adorable as I was told. He's a real gem here, a diamond in the rough. The game just wouldn't be the same without him.

The game's chases are indeed difficult. This is by design, as a large part of the game is watching "death" scenes of things that caught you transfurring you into one of their kind. Part of the difficulty comes from its jankiness: the controls are very stiff, because it's an RPG maker game with grid-based movement but non-RPG gameplay, kinda like Yume Nikki. The game can get frustrating sometimes, but fear not: it's not truly on the level of I Wanna Be The Guy. However, your F12 key, which is bound to a quick quit to the main menu (the game doesn't have automatic game loading after dying), will still see a lot of use. There's an easy mode, too, but it locks you out of most endings, so if you care about seeing them then you'll just have to get good.

The game warns you that it won't give you any clues initially, but they are there. Almost every room is like a little puzzle to solve. There are some actual puzzles in there, too, which are about finding a password to progress further. But I encourage you to do them without consulting any guides. They're perfectly doable, despite what some other reviews had told me. No puzzle in the game is impossible, in fact they aren't too hard, and they got nothing on real logic puzzle games.

The game is actually pretty fun to play. I think the gameplay design is decent. The game paces itself to introduce you to new concepts, it drops clues about what you will have to face next, it gets progressively more difficult, it's reasonable about its save points and deliberately builds up tension to good effect when they're spaced more sparsely.

When the game isn't being creepy with its lewd overtones, the furries you encounter are plenty cute. The game's very simplistic art style has some charm to it. The music is... serviceable. It's okay. A sizable chunk of the game doesn't have any music, which often feels too empty.

I think user tags classifying the game as "horror" is a bit of a misnomer. You probably want to get caught by the monsters to see the transfurs. There isn't anything really scary about the game. I guess maybe it goes into some more psychological horror, especially further in the game, as you contemplate the secondary effects of transfurs causing mind assimilation, and how the lab you find yourself in feels oppressive, with death lurking around every corner, but that's it.

In the end, there are three things the game did not make me: attracted to furry transformation, attracted to latex, or attracted to minors. I was never any of those and I still am not. The game's suggestive themes did nothing to me. Two other things this game did not make me: a gay furry - but I think it could have, had I not already been both of those going in. (There are definitely homosexual vibes in this game.) This game did not change me. I am still the same person I was before learning about the game. One thing it did succeed at was, it made me love and care about Puro. He really is the best. It also made me rethink my relation with NSFW content and the state of the furry fandom, particularly regarding said NSFW content it produces.

TL;DR: don't play if you're underage, actually decent game even if you don't care for the NSFW bits, get it if you're a furry and found it through Puro, you will not be disappointed

The Binding of Isaac Rebirth is a fun game. You explore randomly-generated dungeons and unlock stuff by beating endgame bosses with each character. Every iteration and expansion adds a bunch of new items to try. Get Rebirth if you liked the original Flash version, as this one vastly improves on it, adding a lot of synergies between items, and introducing much more varied room layouts, including impassable pits, narrow rooms, and double- and quadruple-sized rooms. There's now also a possibility for mods, which I personally don't care about much, but there are reportedly some great ones out there, like Antibirth (more on that one later). The graphics have been downgraded from infinitely scalable vector graphics to a faux 16-bit style, but it grows on you eventually. The music has also suffered a downgrade from DannyB's great one to Ridiculon's lame one. Luckily, you can mod Danny's music back in.

A great addition is local co-op for up to 4 players, however in Rebirth everyone who joins only controls a little baby familiar who shares the primary character's attack's characteristics, and borrows from its health pool. It's nice that it's a drop-in feature where anyone can join or leave at will, but a more involved co-op was only added later in one of the expansions.

Now, a word about the expansions. Afterbirth came first, and further expanded on item synergies, added a fun new endgame boss, and a not-so-fun alternate game mode. It also added an alternate layout to the pre-cathedral/sheol floors. Overall it's very worth getting. This is also the expansion where Ridiculon's music started getting better. It only applies for music added in the expansion, however.

Then came Afterbirth Plus, spelled "Afterbirth+", which was widely despised for making the game unfairly difficult and broken, by adding portal enemies that continuously spawn other enemies to many room layouts even on starting floors. It also added tiny boss rooms which sometimes made spawning devil/angel deal rooms impossible on top of making boss fights a real pain. Another endgame boss was added with its own floor. The floor literally reuses all previous floors, and so does the boss - it barely does anything new, it just transforms into other bosses in the game. People also disliked the game for mostly adding bad items to the item pool. Skip this one.

The two great things Afterbirth+ did is, it incorporated the popular Missing HUD mod which provided exact character stats and info, directly into the game under the name Found HUD; and it provided a mod API and integration with Steam Workshop for super easy mod installation and management.

Lastly, there came Repentance. Getting it requires you to have Afterbirth+, but it fixes most of its shortcomings by removing bad design choices (no more portals or tiny boss rooms). It also is the integration of the Antibirth mod, which was incompatible with later expansions, to the official game. Antibirth's content is accessed as an alternate path you can drop in and out of, and is very fun, but quite difficult. Speaking of difficulty, the game is made harder by increasing some eniemies' bullet speed on hard mode. Antibirth adds a TON of content, more than tripling the amount of things to do compared to Afterbirth. A lot more synergies and cool items were added, and the new characters are a mixed bag. Some of them are not fun to play, others are amazingly fun. Some of them are very challenging, even more challenging than the challenge character from Rebirth who dies in one hit. The best addition in Repentance is true co-op, which lets up to four players control their individual character and play through the game together, sharing bombs, coins and keys, but each having a separate health pool and items.

In its current state, the game is maybe a bit too bloated in content. It'll take you a few hundreds of hours to unlock everything in the game, which includes defeating every final boss with every character, of which there are dozens. It's a completionist's nightmare. But if you can endure falling into these compulsions and like the core gameplay of exploring random rooms, finding random loot and learning the rules of the game so you can win almost every run and maybe even break the game sometimes, you'll have tons of fun.

If you don't enjoy learning by trial and error what each one of the 700+ items and trinkets do, you should refer to the Isaac Cheat Sheet at platinumgod and the Binding of Isaac: Rebirth Wiki. The Extended Item Descriptions mod is a must!

Undertale was made mostly by one guy (Toby Fox) (not his real name) in GameMaker in a bit over two years, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

It's a somewhat short action-adventure game posing as an RPG, whose trailer says that nobody has to die. So... not to spoil or anything, but you're gonna want to leave some of the NPCs alive, or most of them, or every single one of them, to see what happens. That's the gimmick. Not killing people. You can murder them in another playthrough if you want, the game has both options covered. Game saving/loading is also a plot point, so whatever you try first, your choice(s) will probably be referenced on your next attempt. This feature blew a lot of minds back in 2015.

The game mostly relies on its writing to keep the player interested in not just killing ♥♥♥♥. It is full of humor, although said humor is of the quirky, whimsical variety, bordering on nonsensical at times. The humor is visibly influenced by internet culture, although it does not straight up reference stale internet jokes. As an example: at some point in the game you are likely to face an enemy that is an airliner wearing an odd bonnet. Upon closer inspection, the airplane seems to like you, but when it talks (and it does talk), it denies having any feelings towards the player, and calls them an "i-idiot". This enemy is called a "tsunderplane" in the game. It is a reference to a certain trope in Japanese works of fiction, called "tsundere" (popular on the internet), and a play on words since the "ere" in "tsundere" sounds quite like "air" in English. Hence, tsund-airplane. If this example of humor (before it got ruined by my dry explanation) provided some amusement to you, then I recommend that you try out the game. Don't be distracted by its ugly-as-sin graphics, you will probably like it.

In fact, Undertale is barely a game. It has very rudimentary mechanics, mostly turn-based combat, where your only options are whacking an enemy with your weapon, or trying to do something to make them stop attacking. It is rather tedious, but made slightly more bearable by playing a very short (usually no more than 3-5 seconds) minigame during the enemy's turn, where you dodge their bullets by moving around on a small 2D playfield. Every enemy has a unique set of patterns, and they overlap if facing multiple enemies. There are also bosses, and every one of them adds an special twist to their fights. Whichever approach you pick (violent, non-violent, or running away), battles are typically over before too long. Unfortunately, enemies you made peace with will keep coming back to harass you, even if they're the type you've already seen. There is usually only one way to "spare" them (not counting the almost universally effective way of beating them within an inch of their life and letting them go), but at least you can typically flee from the fight after one or two turns. On the other hand, killing enemies will eventually exhaust their population in an area, meaning you will no longer be bothered by random encounters after some grinding, which is nice.

The soundtrack, also composed by Toby, is the strongest point of the game. It ranges from mediocre to very good. All in all, the game is worth the ten bucks, but only if you like the writing. Merely killing everyone is not very fun, because of the way combat is implemented. Be sure to play the demo first before making a purchase.

Deus Ex remains a very fine game to this day. It strongly rewards exploration. The world created by Ion Storm is fascinating, and the story is very interesting. The cyberpunk atmosphere really speaks to me. The graphics are dated, but well-crafted. The music is okay at worst and phenomenal at best. The game mechanics have just the right amount of complexity. One of the best games I have ever played.

If you like difficult games and playing for score, you owe it to yourself to try this game. Especially its "expert" mode, Unlimited. Playing it well requires great dexterity, a lot of memorization, and a non-trivial amount of motivation and commitment. The music is decent, and the graphics are nice. There are lots and lots of screen shake and explosions if that's your thing.

A very simple reflex-based game that tricks you into persevering just to test your limits. You will learn a couple dozen obstacle patterns to beat it, and notice how previously insurmountable hurdles become trivial to you. The game then becomes an endurance run with mostly static difficulty, and a self-imposed challenge to see how long you can stay focused and if you can beat your own best time. There are ingame online leaderboards. Though the first places are typically littered by cheaters with ludicrous times. The music is good. Turn off v-sync in game options.

This game has no substance. It's its biggest flaw, and a major one. It has about... I don't know, a combined total of about 15 minutes' worth of content, randomized infinitely to pad out the gameplay. Different game modes add little to the variety.

The music is good, - really good sometimes, even; I really appreciated Mike Smith's contributions to the soundtrack, - and the graphics are... well, flashy and sometimes the colorful chaos is enjoyable to watch, I'll give it that. However, it turns out it was a _terrible_ idea on Boss Baddie's part not to try and make enemy bullets and other hazards extra visible and perhaps unaffected by all the graphical distortion effects going on and particle effects flying by, obscuring your vision. As the game's difficulty increases and the screen becomes cluttered with all sorts of randomized junk, it becomes nigh-impossible to tell what's going on, and what hurts you and what doesn't - and it is entirely the game developers' fault.

The feeling of being utterly confused is fun for a while, but gets old rather quick, like Mister Pineapple's comments heard throughout the game. (He has about 20-30 lines he says from time to time, those can be turned off once they get repetitive.)

There are numerous other shortcomings that I'm not going to discuss in detail, because while a bit annoying, they can be overlooked and the game can still be enjoyed to an extent in spite of them. (resolution locked at 720p, restricted aiming with the mouse, game rules are not explained clearly enough, the library only provides vague descriptions instead of pictures of objects in the game, often making it even harder to figure out what exactly it describes, expo mode in the options, game always crashing upon exiting)

I don't think you can get more than about 6-7 hours of entertainment out of the game, and that's really stretching it. Unless maybe you have some friends to play the game with - I asked a friend to play with me, but I showed a gameplay video to him and he refused, turned off by the chaos on the screen. Your Mileage May Vary, I'm pretty sure Boss Baddie stated at some point that their game was designed primarily for co-op with up to 3 others and should be played on a machine with a good sound system, with the bass turned up a couple notches.

I mean, all in all Really Big Sky is kinda okay, definitely playable to a degree, a solid 4/10 if I had to grade it on a scale, but I'd say forget the game and just buy the rather awesome soundtrack if you can get it somewhere (and then turn up the bass), or risk getting RBS if your friends are willing to give it a shot as well.