Recent reviews by Amber Starlight

It's not Disco Elysium by any means, but most of what's there is good, and there's dialogue to be had about the reality of situations being more complicated than they seem at first. The available choices and their repercussions do tend to make sense, but can seem a bit shallow or limiting. The game takes itself seriously and genuinely, though the topics covered (and more importantly, omitted) make that seriousness seem a bit misplaced at times. I'd put it firmly in the "young adult novel" category, between "storybook" and "historical fiction."

This game "stars" a cast of characters, each with their own sets of complex and humanizing motives. You have a hand in all of this, though it is strictly a 'tipping the scales' sort of effect, rather than taking charge on any side of the multi-sided issues presented here.

I would not hesitate to compare this to The Hunger Games; the violence is very tuned down, though they do use it at least once for shock factor. There's no gore, and firearms are exclusively story objects, rather than anything the player has access to. I did find it a bit contrived when the felon on the run for some reason specifically still complies with the firearms possession laws, and instead carries a nailgun, which he forces you to use at one point for self defense, instead of an actual firearm. The near extinction of firearms in the general populace is seemingly not covered or is implied not to be the case, though I want to say the fact that they were handled this way was due to the developers not wanting to stray too far into American left-right issues, regardless of their importance to the authority problem. That, or the intent to make this for younger audiences.

The politics of this game would be best suited to people who are interested in authoritarianism vs anti-authoritarianism, but are unread on specific ideologies and existing governments and how politics actually work. A good portion of the game is spent in order to provide a more eye-opening example of how propaganda works for the uninitiated, or the naïve and young. The main character being a teenager all but confirms this was the intent, to me.

More specifically, this game seems to lean away from left-right politics and focuses on authority, giving the player typically 1 of 3 options:
- Independent / "Centrist"
- Reformist
- Revolutionary

The focus on this hits less hard and seems a bit reductive, though I get what they were going for with the "appeal to a younger audience" thing.

Largely, the choices boil down to whether you (the player making the choice) believe the regime in which the character you are playing lives can be reformed, or if it needs to be overthrown entirely to be fixed. The independent options are typically presented either for the sake of saving the PC's skin to get them out of a bad situation, or as a general discontent / uncaring sentiment. There are very few opportunities to roleplay as a bootlicker, and that side of the story isn't really ever discussed with the same care that the individual characters' stories are. One of the "stars" is a cop, and you get to see a few story beats from her position, though her whole 'thing' is that she's supposed to be the "good cop," where every other cop depicted is just an incompetent power-tripping bureaucrat.

The game's politics all but force the player into the point of view of an anarchist, without realizing why or how the system they're in became that way. They do thankfully delve at least a little bit into the politics of revolutionaries, at least to the level that is appropriate to show to the player character given they are meant to be a child, but as a viewer, this feels lacking. The story is more about the characters, ultimately, which I suppose is fine, and is where the strength of this game lies. The political revolt is an interesting backdrop, but is not and does not become the Main Course, as it would be in DE.

There is a point to be made that Libertarianism is an acceptable stance to hold, though ultimately, any government will need to become Authoritarian to be successful, as any state needs a security organ to protect itself from other overthrows and revolutions, lest you let your newly formed People's Republic fall to the global Capitalist menace again. The game seems to leave this point unanswered entirely, depicting each option as equally successful, despite the examples of inhumanity by the incumbent state reaching levels of absolute tyranny, and the main antagonist literally being named "Tyrak." The developers' intended answer seems to be the "reformist" one, though with the levels of abuse depicted, I would personally argue revolution was more appropriate. In the endings: the revolution happens in one, where Tyrak is deposed and his opposition is put into office. In the second, he is voted out and arrested, again with his opposition taking power. Nothing changes in the third, you only escape. These are the 'revolution,' 'reformist,' and 'independent' endings respectively.

The ending options being limited to 3 is very reductive given the number of unique choices you can make in the game. I regret not being able to detonate the bomb at the end of the revolution ending. Especially since they let you punch in the disarm code and allow you to get it wrong, though there is no consequence for getting it wrong 10 or 20 or 30 times.

These aren't tied to any specific ideology or are even a parody of an existing government, though the issues presented seem to be a mix of issues from WW2-era and post-millennium America. Similar things have been done by many countries, though if I tried to list every one that put people of specific ethnicities or beliefs in camps, or limited international travel, we'd be here a loooong time.

Gameplay-wise, it's very simple, though very comparable to DE. Walk around, click on stuff, lots of reading, few interactive elements that are mostly reserved for side content and minigames. This is a game you play for the story, not to 'fiddle.' I completed a run in one sitting, at about 7 hours with a few breaks in between.

On a technical level, the game is fine. It never crashed or softlocked on me, and the worst bugs I noticed were distant objects flickering. There's no FOV slider, though the default FOV is acceptable, if a bit low. The vertical and horizontal mouse sensitivity are different as well, and there's no way to change this in the game's settings menu, which upsets me, but it wasn't a deal breaker.

The soundtrack is fine, nothing special really. The use of a few lyrical tracks as background audio for such a dialogue-heavy game is confusing, though they at did decide to quiet the vocal tracks when characters are talking - likely in response to QA testing saying precisely this.

The art style is very Firewatch-y, though to this end, the game comes from the same era as Valorant where that kind of flat and softened-angular style was popular. It felt like they were stuck between the painterly style of The Long Dark and the Pixar-y flatness and softness of the aforementioned games. Some places lack detail, some are too noisy, some have too much detail but it's smoothed out with the posterize filter. Many of the art assets are unusually low-res, even with the settings turned down, which was confounding. I did also notice many of the background assets like photos suffer from overuse of Photoshop's posterize filter. A few of them are just regular photographs or edited stock photos with this filter used, which feels lazy, but given they weren't replaced, I suspect most people did not notice or care in testing.

I wouldn't recommend this as universally as I would do for a game like DE, though it is still an intriguing story. Pick it up if you enjoy reading or audiobooks, and are not completely averse to auth/lib politics.

Proteus is one of those things you pick up again once in a blue moon. A few months, a few years, however long. It's both calming and interesting, visually and aurally.

It's more of a digital place, than a game. It's a wonderful space to explore and roam in. It is an ancient digital garden for you to relax in.

It will last as long as it is welcome. Take all the time you need to wonder and explore and think.

Few other pieces of media offer similar experiences. Even fewer still are as nice to come back to a second or third time as they are the first.

Rimworld is a simple kind of fun. It's not intending to tell an enrapturing story with a deep and engaging plot and characters doing things that make sense. As the developers put it, it is a story generator. Much in the same vein as Dwarf Fortress and Kenshi, it is looking to simulate as many systems as would make sense for the stories it wants to tell.

Much like these other games, it also ends up telling a very disjointed and mostly nonsensical story if you are not attempting to give it a little bit or role-play with the characters you have. Like good stories too, part of the fun comes from losing and dealing with that loss. Every great victory has a crushing defeat to follow. Sometimes all you can do is flee and hope for the best. It is not a game that you "win." Rimworld is a game that is meant to be played for as long as it is interesting. Many of your colonies will end in relative security and stability. There is a "win" condition, technically. Multiple, even - but they're not really goals to be sought after. They are just ways for people who want an ending to get to one. Aside from the 'main' one, that is meant to be the driving force for most players, which is "build a ship so you can GTFO," they don't really make sense unless you have made some kind of story with your colonists' behavior around it.

I can't really write a review without mentioning mods, either. This game does have DLC, and it is perhaps the best integrated of any extension, but the mods are the meat of the content for this game. From total overhauls like Combat Extended to new systems like Pawnmorpher, to simple additions and quality of life stuff like Vanilla Expanded and PUAH, if you have a problem with the game, or think there's a feature you want but it doesn't exist, someone has probably made a mod for it. Like any well-supported game, there is of course a whole list of fetish mods outside of the workshop as well, but I'll let you find those on your own when you've exhausted your fun with the base game. No shame in having fun.

Give it a try! See where it leads you. try to learn the endless number of systems in place and pull your hair out when all of your dudes get wiped because a bunch of bugs rained from the sky, crashed through your roof, and then destroyed everything you spent hours making in a matter of minutes.

Very strong mechanically and incredibly polished. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys fast paced shooters like Counter-Strike, modern Doom, or Titanfall. Many people have also rightly compared this to F.E.A.R.

The only bad thing I can say about it is the fact that every single NPC in the game uses the same walking animation that makes it look like their pants are full. Aside from that, nothing really stood out in a bad way. The game is too short for asset repetition to become an issue and every location feels distinct enough from one another, but it's as long as it needs to be, I think.

Given the short length for completing the main story and 'side' campaign stuff (that feels the same as the 'main' story), there should definitely have been a Trepang1, and there should still be a Trepang3, but there's already a lot to do here, and what's there is replayable for a decent bit. I'd have enjoyed an expansion on the story, and as-is it's a little short, but if the goal was to make it playable and consumable in a single sitting, I think the devs did that well (at least for people who are decent at these kinds of games). It doesn't feel like there are really any truly 'slow' portions or any buildups that lack a payoff, the game is paced properly and strong throughout. Everything you can do in the game feels like it received the same amount of care.

The developers clearly had fun making it and the game doesn't ever take itself too seriously (or shackle itself to reality or the logic therein. Like having a giant skyscraper on an island all on its own in the middle of nowhere), but also doesn't devolve into Reddit-tier self-deprecation / verbosity / repetition humor, or lampshading of such plotholes. The story is as interesting / deep as it needs to be, and there's some 'logs' written about it so the people interested in lore can explore that avenue, but the game almost entirely focuses on the shooting, and handles it well.

If it matters at all, much of the game's story / setting content does feel derivative; there are a lot of tropes and references that make up a majority of the game's content and even major story beats, but it's mostly hand-waved away or just not mentioned, as with most of the story. It's mostly flavor, though. Every story needs a setting, and I suppose if you just want to shoot dudes, this is perfectly serviceable and funny at times.

My recommendation is to learn the game on "Normal" and then play the rest on "Rage Mode." Most people could beat normal mode without dying once as long as they're paying attention. "Rage Mode" is still absolutely doable but requires you to actually use all of your abilities and tools effectively, on top of playing smart, rather than just jumping around everywhere and grab-throwing everyone you see. Treat it like STALKER; "Rage Mode" is the standard difficulty, everything else below it is just different scaling in the favor of the player.

NaissanceE is a very strange game. It was definitely made by people with an artistic goal before anything else, that much shows in the first few minutes of playing. It is rough around the edges, and it oozes that crusty low-fidelity 2014 Unity / Unreal Engine 3 look that so many games from around then had, like the original Receiver.

I can best describe the experience as being lost in an airport at night, or being in somewhere you've seen before, only empty and dark. Other people have called this 'liminal.' I think it fits. The aesthetic and artistic goals are a far cry from any sort of backrooms / liminal space world, though.

Go walk around your home town at night, late spring or early fall. You'll feel much the same way you did on your first run-through here. It's serene.

Mostly anyway. This game has its surprises too.

Play this before your 20s are gone and you forget what it means to live.

And go in blind, if you can. You can only experience it once. Every time after is just rehearsal or grasping at straws and wishing there were more. Like looking into a mirror and realizing you're 30-something, having wasted the only good part of your life stuck indoors, with no friends other than the talking heads you speak to through a screen.

It would be a waste to experience this through the lens of anyone's life but yours.

Let it be good before it ends. Let these stupid little animal shapes help you learn how to be human.

After the early access period, the game seems to have developed a stronger sense of identity as far as what it wants to be and do goes.

To put it shortly, the game is a very fun and semi-realistic representation of real-life police encounters, complete with use of force penalties and so on - only instead of court and paperwork, this is handled rather bluntly with 'points.'

Like Metal Gear, and other anti-war games, it lends itself to the idea that you should do your best not to kill people, even if they are trying to kill you, with how it penalizes you for killing enemies instead of using non-lethal weapons or making them surrender, and it's only possible to "S-rank" or get a perfect score on each mission if you do so. In this case, it is realistic to the stated goal of our police force, and in theory it is possible, but it is also incredibly, horrifically difficult, and appropriately illustrates why our police rely mostly on lethal, and do not often "Just taze them" or "just shoot them in the leg." For anyone who has ever posted such a thing online, I implore you to play this game.

The gunplay is good, the movement is tanky but functional, and the ability to lower your gun so you don't flag your teammates appeals to my particular flavor of tactical-tism.

It's far more punishing than a game like Call of Duty or Insurgency Sandstorm, but it's not quite so drawn-out as a game like Squad. I would recommend this for people who want something a bit more serious, but don't want the actual bureaucracy of what Squad offers.

The one major downside is it supported windows 7 and 8.1 at launch, but doesn't anymore, because the devs updated the engine.

among us but better

it has a "town of salem" / werewolf style mode among others. tons of features (including proximity voice chat), more polish, overall it's just a better game.

most cosmetics cost real money but they gotta turn a profit somehow. nothing else seems to be paid.

i don't need to say anything else, there's no larger draw to this game.

I cannot describe with words alone how much of a let down this was. At the same time, we should have all seen this coming. We are fools for buying this game and believing it would be anything other than the same slop Bethesda has put out every single day since the launch of Skyrim and its DLCs.

The story sucks. all of the stories here suck. There is not a single interesting narrative chain here to be explored, in the maybe 10-12 stories this scatterbrained experience tries to tell all at once.

The gunplay is improved! the stability is better. the graphics are fancier. Does any of that matter? Does that make a good game? A good exploration game? Combat is definitely most of what you do here, but making it smoother and more streamlined, adding floating health bars and a fancy UI... What's it all for, ultimately? All of the guns feel the same, they sound wimpy, energy weapons are categorically underpowered and you will never find ammo for them. I thought I was choosing 'hard mode' when I specced my guy into old-school gunpowder weapons but no, that's just what everyone uses. Choosing the obvious option is the hard one.

The economy is broken. There is no purpose to make outposts and they take up so much time and so many resources. It's not "intentional design," it's just padding.

This feels like a repeat of Fallout 4. They copy-pasted Skyrim's formula and tried to give it a fancy hat for marketing, but took away a lot of the charm that made it worth experiencing. That game at least still had a story to tell, and had enough effort put in that it at least acknowledged that you were playing along with two DIRECT ENEMY FACTIONS at the same time and made you choose one or the other at SOME POINT, rather than making them more like neurotic American housewife stereotypes who just act passive-aggressive around each other but never actually do anything meaningful to strike at one another.

Unfortunately, this time around, they also cut away all most of the content. There's nothing here. There is no story. Nothing in this game made me think. I made myself think about ways that this game might account for my actions! None of them were thought of. There is exactly one way to do everything in this game, and if you do not do it The Right Way, you are Playing The Game Wrong, and you May Not Progress. It'd be fine if it were like Skyrim and most things at least made sense, but here, everything feels like an idiot plot. There are obvious solutions to problems that nobody bothered to do even within the confines of this game's lore and technology rules. The plot and logic holes here are so gaping it's hard to tell where the substance ends and the hole begins. Morrowind's lore made more sense than this, and that was made by one dude on a week-long drug trip.

The whole game is like this. Everything is watered down. Almost everything the player can do goes un-accounted for. Every story is like walking into a vacuum chamber, where nothing outside of the bounds of that specific quest can affect it. There is no room for problem solving or critical thinking. I can remember exactly one quest that had any decisions in it that actually changed the outcome, and it's the one where (spoilers) you get to choose which 'timeline' in a 'time distortion' becomes reality, and which becomes fiction. Ultimately, this turns into whether one man disappears, or all of his friends disappear.

They don't do anything when the quest is done, they don't even join your ship as generic followers (that you can't use for anything anyway). They just sit there. With generic dialogue. Then you leave.

The dungeons are copy-pasted to such a degree that I was consistently running into literally the same exact cave, that insultingly had literally not a single interactable thing in it, 500 meters away from the previous same exact useless empty cave. Even the buildings with enemies in them only have maybe 12-13 prefabs, if that. There is no variation between them. You see both "moon base" type prefabs, you've seen them all.

The planets themselves are worthless. They're empty. The creatures look cool, sure, but it's not worth your time to scan them (for a measly reward that you need to scan EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE PLANET FOR), or even to harvest them for their ingredients, when you can just buy them all from generic vendors on one of the 5 planets in the game that has anything designed by a human on it.

And there are so many loading screens. In their replies to negative reviews, they try to excuse this by saying "b-but there's so much data!!" like every other company for the last 5 years hasn't been using texture/data streaming or at least designing their loading screens to work as efficiently as possible instead of Bethsoft's method they use in their inventory where changing a weapon with your favorites menu has to re-check every single legendary effect on every single item in your inventory (including your ship's) for some reason just to swap out your weapon. Like ???? what?? Was this designed by an intern? By someone who has never programmed before? Never written an inventory system before? Or is this an old code scar left over from Skyrim. That game did this too! It just wasn't as much of a hit to performance. And here they are telling us "we did optimize it! Get a better computer!" Like, no. You suck at programming. It ran fine 12 years ago when Skyrim came out. You've been on the same, limping, sludge-filled engine since Morrowind, you just keep tacking more weight on until it can barely even shamble. That is called being lazy, not "Updating The Engine."

Other people have said it but they could have done here on one planet what they felt the need to do in 1000 (more like 1600?) for marketing reasons. This leaves us with 5 cities spread out over 5 planets, one unique satellite, and then hundreds and thousands of generic, boring, empty planets and locations with the same, copy-paste garbage there that we've already seen.

They don't even go as far as Warframe does, or DAGGERFALL DID IN LIKE THE 1990s!! Where they procedurally generate the dungeons themselves! Wouldn't that be crazy, use this "fancy new technology" called RANDOM NUMBER GENERATION to RANDOMLY GENERATE templated dungeons! So we at least have a different experience each time! We've known this for longer than most people that will play this game have been alive. They aren't just reinventing the wheel, they're denying its existence and trying to move a cart by chanting incantations and demanding that it fly.

Each dungeon here is hand-crafted, yes, but it is insular and specifically must be generic and not related to a quest, because it has to be copy-pasted all around! It feels bad. It's badly designed. It's poorly thought out. This would be the same case with procedurally generated ones, but at least then it would feel like a game-y feature that was well thought out and not an insult. Even the story content uses copy-pasted rooms and dungeons. It's pathetic to ask 120 dollars for this. That it took them 8+ years to sh!t this out.

For a studio this old, priding itself on having members of the same team that made stuff like Morrowind and Skyrim, making a mess this big? On their first new IP since they purchased the rights to Fallout in 2004...?

This isn't embarrassing, this is shameful. They knew better- know better than this. They have known better than this for years.

I can't even blame Microsoft for this. If anything, the M$ money made this game as polished and crash-free as it is. It gave bethesda more than the 10-ish voice actors that were in Skyrim and Fallout 4.

This is just what happens when you let management make your game for you.

We should have seen the writing on the wall with Fallout 76. Bethesda doesn't make games. They make money.

I will not be buying TES6. You shouldn't either.

To sum it up, Goodbye Volcano High is a short coming-of-age story. It doesn't get too deep in the weeds it creates around its premise of the literal end of the world, or to any of the drama it creates, but it has fun characters and great art and music. I would not praise it as much as the obvious comparisons like Night In The Woods or Snootgame, but what's there is still decent, and I would rate it highly, if only given the rocky development history it's had.

The story is lacking and there are some confounding design decisions, which sucks, given it's a visual novel.

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Having played the demos released what feels like half a year ago now, I can say confidently they've fixed most if not all of the bugs I experienced there. I didn't notice any significant hitches in performance, any major game-breaking bugs, any crashes, or really anything else that soured the experience. The game also works fine on keyboard and mouse. The worst I saw program-wise were minor visual oddities and audio hitches that seemed more on the part of the choreography team than the programmers.

There is a little bit of jank to the game, some things don't sound quite right, or cut off too soon- some animations are choppy, some scenes have strange framing, and so on. Most people would not notice or care, but it is a little off-putting sometimes. It's not bad enough to be jarring, but for how long this game has been in development, it's definitely rough around the edges. The developers went through a total story rewrite at some point in the game's history, due to their lead writer being canned for some fanfiction they wrote years and years ago, and the length of the story (and to an extent, its content) seems to reflect that. There's a certain "catching up" feeling to everything. There was love put into the game, absolutely, but it feels panicked at times. Some things are just Good Enough, not quite as perfect as they probably could be. Some things make sense at a glance, but when you think about them, really, really don't.

The art and music are without a doubt the best part of the game, though I don't know what else it would have to stand on, being a visual novel. There are some oddities, though having a fair bit of art experience myself (7 years of drawing and painting as a hobby, now), I can say they were probably unavoidable. Front-facing snouts are always going to look strange on humanoids, that's just how it is. They did the best they could with the style they chose. The style clearly is where the love is, and it's wonderful visually and aurally.

The rhythm game sections are nice, though it feels a little weird to play. The main arrow keys (joystick) input is done on hold, not on press or release. It goes against everything anyone will ever learn from any other rhythm game and any conclusion anyone would intuitively come to. if you're supposed to jam out to the music, you intuitively press and release the key or joystick, which results in missed inputs because it only allows input before the button has been released, so you have to be constantly rushing or EXACTLY RIGHT, and it feels off. It just doesn't make any sense. The other parts work fine, though, WASD (ABXY) popups and the Q/E (shoulder buttons) arrow things are forgiving enough to be accessible but have extra indicators for precision and seem to be timed properly.

The little details like the extra photos, the flashbacks, the little social media tab, etc, are all really charming and cool as well. Not sure if they left in a placeholder asset or something, but one of the social media posts you can see in the auditorium is verbatim just a discord screenshot. The media tab is probably the funniest thing about the game. It adds flavor.

***UN-MARKED SPOILERS AHEAD***

As for the story, it's okay. For the generation who was still in high school in 2020-2023, I think this would really hit home with them. A lot of the topics covered are really pertinent to highschoolers who lived through Covid, but only some of them seem applicable to a more general audience. The game covers themes of friendship / relationships, love, life goals, aspirations, and it feels like it wants to say something about having empathy and understanding what other people want despite your own desires, or how to compromise or something, though I'll get into why that doesn't quite work out a little further down.

It feels a little bit... Padded, maybe? The first 2 chapters of the game felt like there was a lot of time where not much was happening. most of the game feels like not much happens. Not much drama, not much intrigue. Just life happening and going on for people who are in a school and have a few friends around. What drama there is, aside from the obvious meteor thing that hangs over everything like a giant cloud of dripping pitch, feels forced. Most conflict is caused by what seems like intentional bad faith rather than misunderstandings or lack of information or however arguments in real life usually start. One character will say something inflammatory or slightly angrily and then another character, rather than trying to assume the other is just sad or angry about something general (they are usually friends or have been friends for a long time), will take it personally and start a half-hearted, mostly mean-spirited argument.

This happens on multiple occasions, and it feels fabricated. Like the argument itself was manufactured specifically for the purpose of creating drama in a story, rather than anything anyone cares about in that way. This does not feel or flow very good, it just makes me groan at how bad everyone seems to be at listening. Fang is especially guilty of being mean like this with little or no instigator, which feels awful, seeing as I am the one making decisions for them. I Have shouted out loud, "why are you making it worse?" It's just so obvious that these things did not need to be said. There could be a lesson about understanding others, like I mentioned before, but in the situations provided, the answer seems closer to "people will get over it eventually." The characters never seem to learn to just shut the hell up or think before they speak. Naomi, Trish, Fang, Reed; all of them end up saying something inflammatory that absolutely did not need to be said, or could have just been phrased better. And everyone else somehow manages to take it completely the wrong way, seemingly on purpose, exacerbating the problem for literally no reason. This would be less of a problem if the characters' reactions to others was less immediately aggressive, or if they actually learned to not do that.

The ending is very wish-fulfillment-y, which feels like it takes away from the impact of the story. We never see what happens with the whole meteor thing, only that people panic and get freaked out. There is something to be said about the whole meteor thing being blown out of proportion or how modern news media exists to spread bad news and create worry because it creates panic and divides people, but I don't think that was even a sparkle in the devs' eyes when they included the 3 or 4 scenes that have a TV playing, or the social media tab on the pause menu. It seems more like an afterthought.

Kinda like the whole non-binary thing, too? That was pushed big in the marketing, and that was something a lot of people brought up when this game was mentioned (on top of being the crux of snoot), but it was barely mentioned in this game, and never brought up again. I get the feeling this was done in a similar vein to the whole LGBT thing with Fang x Naomi and Reed x his boyfriend, where it's just supposed to be a normal thing, which is an agreeable way to handle it, but with today's society, and what was advertised, I think it leaves something to be desired. It ends up as just a label that allows discriminators to discriminate.