Recent reviews by Jake

Short but very fun. Sometimes it's impossible to survive, getting Crag + a guy at the window in different directions with portals on the floor is just bad luck.

Happy is bestest friend.

Good Riddance

Instead of slowly progressing through a large world and figuring out your objectives as you go, you do smaller targeted expeditions to hunt down a boss, that you complete in one sitting.
If you are unsure if that style of game interests you, your options are either A. Play it safe and just don't buy it, B. Look up some gameplay videos to see if it appeals to you, or I guess everyone's preferred option of C. Buy it anyway, then complain when the game turns out to be exactly as advertised (the store page makes it clear it's not the same style of game as Elden Ring).

The simplest way to describe it is if you threw a chunk of Elden Ring into a blender with Roguelike and Battle Royale seasoning. You start each run basically from scratch with your character's default weapon, looting items and killing minibosses to power up as the playable area slowly shrinks and pushes you towards the demiboss of the day. Once you beat that boss, the next day starts where you repeat the process one more time. On the third day you face against the final boss that you set out to hunt.

Win or lose you'll unlock items that can buff your character, making future runs slightly easier.

A lot of mechanics from Elden Ring have been removed to compliment the much faster, shorter runs you'll be doing. For starters you do not "build" a character like you normally would, you instead pick between a handful of characters that specialise in specific styles, and levelling up at a Site of Grace will automatically improve your various stats based on what character you are playing. For example, if you're playing Ironeye (Uses a bow), you will gain more dexterity, whereas if you play Recluse (Spellcaster) you're going to be getting more intelligence.
There does not seem to be a weight system and you cannot find new armor, and there is no fall damage, presumably since you're meant to travel around a lot quicker in this game.

Weapons come with "rarities" and additional modifiers (such as, reduced stamina consumption when attacking, or granting HP recovery upon killing a foe) and just carrying these weapons will grant those benefits to you even if you don't actively wield them. However, you are limited to only six weapons (three slots for each hand) before you must drop something; there is no inventory for extra items. My main gripe with this is when I find an item that has a handy modifier that I want to carry, it means I have to cycle past that weapon when switching weapons. I'd like to be able to toggle if a weapon is actually equippable so I can simply carry it for its modifier benefit without worry about accidentally attacking with a massive greatsword when I was trying to switch to my crossbow.

It is worth noting that the game is locked at 60fps and does not have ultra-wide support, and also uses Easy Anti Cheat which in my opinion is a garbage and invasive anti-cheat. If any of those are dealbreakers for you, don't buy.

The game is designed to be played with three players or solo, but you can queue up with 2 players and find a random player for your third, but as with most co-operative games, playing with randoms tends to be an inferior experience to playing with friends.

As always, avoid the Steam discussions like the plague, they are full of jester farmers and bad actors. Just look up some gameplay and decide for yourself if the game's worth trying. And if you like it, it doesn't matter if other people don't.

Took about 15 minutes to even try out the game because there's no option to jump in solo, had a UI element stuck in the middle of my screen telling me the keybind for dropping my weapon that wouldn't go away until I dropped it only for a zombie to spawn behind a car I had just walked around and get a hit on me. Then spent about 10 minutes slowly trailing zombies that kept popping up out of nowhere and hitting them with charged melee attacks until one of them decided that they don't stun him anymore and he just lunged through two fully charged 2-handed weapon attacks to the head and downed me.

I played for free and still feel ripped off.

Previously, this review was negative due to the constant crashing many people were experiencing when the game first came out. Whilst I'm still disappointed we had to experience it, I am happy to say the devs appear to have addressed the issues and pretty much everyone I have asked has said they no longer crash when playing.

With that aside, Bleach: RoS is stunning in both audio and visual design, and whilst the combat system isn't EXTREMELY elaborate like you'd expect from fighters, the game is more focused around mindgames and character knowledge as opposed to mechanical execution.

The systems and mechanics take a little to get used to but they're not unenjoyable by any means.

I wasn't sure how I'd feel about this game, based on the premise. It seemed like it would just be a walking simulator with tonnes of reading. And don't get me wrong, you do a lot of walking and a lot of reading, but it works well here.

You're dropped into a village with nobody in it, the remnants of a long-forgotten mystery still laying around, and your task is to uncover who was responsible for the murder of the village's most popular resident years ago.

Instead of telling you where to go, or what objectives you need to complete, you are free to just check things out. The game gives clear indications as to where the places of interest are, but it's up to you which ones you go to, and when. Most locations have a few puzzles to solve in addition to clues or items that either help you solve a puzzle you're faced with, or shape your understanding of the story behind the characters that once inhabited Painscreek. You'll see random things that might slightly pique your interest, only for it to receive significance later on by information you uncover.

Pretty much every character in Painscreek has their own thoughts on the others, and varying levels of involvement in one of the numerous events that transpired that leads up to the big "whodunnit" you're trying to solve. Characters you suspected might suddenly seem innocent, only to once again seen suspicious in a different way later on.

The story of Painscreek is filled with drama and twists that you don't even need to uncover in order to find the answer to the question you set out to solve, but it only makes uncovering the mystery so much more satisfying.

The game manages to nail the feeling of an abandoned village perfectly, as well as making things feel really creepy when you start to piece together what's going on.

My only real criticism is that the game could've done with an in-game system for logging your thoughts and notes, like a corkboard of sorts. A good example would be Shadows of Doubt's note system, which catalogues your findings as sticky notes, letting you add your own notes and attaching them together with strings to help you track your findings.

I respect the effort that went into this but I feel like this was a huge step back from The Painscreek Killings (the dev's previous game).

It feels like you're trying to solve a riddle where the information the game chooses to give you vs what you don't get feels completely arbitrary, to the point where it feels like the scenes were completely made up to be a needlessly difficult puzzle as opposed to a believable scenario that you're trying to solve.

In the scenario "The 4th Floor - Room 401" you're tasked with (among other things) figuring out who was murdered (which I feel like that information would be already known by the police who drew the chalk outline around the corpse of the person who was murdered, which only further feels like you're just going through made-up scenarios with no actual causality in the world, but hey I'm just a detective what do I know).
One of the big clues is that the main tenant of the apartment worked a job with clearly defined hours, with notes to a babysitter about when they would be returning home. Cool, so since we know times when one of our main characters would be out of the building, surely we can cross-reference that with the police report with information about the crime like we had access to in the tutorial level to potentially cross one name off our list, right? Ha, no, that would be too easy.

The game tries to give plenty of red herrings, which sure that makes sense so you don't just brute-force the solution, but it gets to the point where there's just so much useless information and nowhere near enough explanation for certain events that even if you bother to sift through absolutely everything to figure out what's relevant and what's not, you still need to make logical leaps and assumptions simply because you lack the information to rule out certain possibilities.

It feels artificial. The child conveniently kept an empty bottle of alcohol her father drinks because the smell reminds her of him, so you can conveniently match it to a receipt found in a wallet for the same brand of beer (as if it's impossible for more than one person to drink the same brand of beer, and you can never swap brands once you start). Thank god the mother didn't notice the glass bottle the child meticulously hid by... placing it directly on a table in plain sight, or else she would've thrown it away as she was going to check on the gun safe stored in her child's room for some reason (that also randomly has an etch-a-sketch in it for some reason).

TL;DR the game focuses way too much on trying to be "clever" and "challenging" but instead just becomes tedious, unbelievable and uninteresting.

I respect the developer for trying to expand and improve upon the first game. I think there's a lot of things he got right, but there were things I wish he hadn't kept from the first game.

It's a relatively short experience, but a good one. I look forward to his next game.

While rough around the edges and definitely has some things I'd love to see changed or removed, I absolutely LOVE the concept this game plays with. It also looks and sounds beautiful.

I have always loved the idea of a story where the ghost isn't just senselessly harassing you and trying to kill you for seemingly no reason other than "that's what ghosts do". Whilst the ghost in this game is still ultimately malicious, they still tend to help you more often than not and the way you communicate with the ghost almost endears me to it.

In that sense, it reminds me of Seven Nights Ghost (One of my favorite indie ghost games) and In Sound Mind (At least the first chapter with the mannequins that help you survive and defeat the boss).

Hats off to the developer for an overall great first release as a solo dev, I'm now preparing to play their second game, Supernatural.

I decided to write a review for every game I 100%.

Ravenous Devils took me just under 6 hours to obtain all achievements.

To get it out of the way, I did not like the story at all. It didn't really feel very compelling, nothing very interesting happens, and I just did not like any of the characters or events. Overall I just didn't like the dialogue, both in terms of the actual writing and to a lesser extend the voice acting - the voices themselves sounded fine and fit the characters, but the inflections and the way they spoke (which would be more the writing's fault than the actual talents) just irritated me. I actually paused the game at one point to see if there was a volume slider for the voices so I could mute it. I will say however, the developers appear to be Italian, so I'm willing to give them a bit of a pass if English is not their primary language.

As for the gameplay, it's honestly "pretty okay" with lots of room for potential improvements. I'll list a few at the tail-end of this review, but for now I'll summarise it as, it is rather fun trying to juggle two playable characters at once, doing things in tandem and managing your stock efficiently, however the lack of things like a proper task queuing system make it feel a little tedious at times and there definitely feels like Hildred has waaay more on her plate (haha funny joke) than Percival for most of the day, however Percival more quickly runs out of stock. If I could set Percival to do several things at once and go focus on Hildred I feel like I would've enjoyed it more.

On the bright side, I encountered basically zero bugs, which is obviously a job well done.

Overall, I feel like I have given this game a lot of criticism, but for a £4 game (that I got on sale(that was gifted to me)) I think it did quite well. Just needs some quality of life improvements and a much better story.

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In case the developer ever reads this, here's a list of specific improvements I would recommend if there's ever a big update:

- Corpse pile in the kitchen should show how many bodies you have as well as the total amount of bodies that can stack.

- It feels like the clickable area of the floor is very limited, sometimes making it difficult to have my characters wait near places I want them to, such as moving Hildred over to the dumbwaiter to receive items from the greenhouse, or moving Percival over to the sewing machine ready to grab the clothes when they finish.

- Even with an assistant and fully upgraded decorations and ovens, the tables were significantly more demanding on time than any other element of the game, and it was pretty much impossible to get the best satisfaction for their orders unless you already had the item pre-made or you wait around for the assistant to serve them gin to reset their patience (which feels counter-intuitive and makes multitasking more difficult). It was one of the few "upgrades" that felt like an active detriment. I think this could be remedied by either simply increasing the overall timer so you have enough time to see their order, prepare it and send it and get that perfect satisfaction. Alternatively, let us click on a table to make the assistant bring Gin to that table early, so I can get their patience up whenever I want without having to walk all the way up and do it myself.

- The game tends to truncate the trailing 0 whenever it displays money - For example, if you sell a Schnitzel on the self-service stance, it sells for £2.40, however the game will display +£2.4 and truncate the 0 at the end, which looks odd. It also does this when displaying how much money you have, and I think in the upgrade screen the £ ends up behind the numbers rather than in front. So if you had, say, £100.50, it will instead show 100.5£. This is a very minor nitpick, but definitely one that kept catching my eye.

- There's a very small queuing system for orders, for example you can click on the corpse pile, and then during the animation where Hildred picks up a corpse, you can click on the meat grinder, and as soon as she finishes the animation she will immediately walk over to the grinder and use it. I think this system should be expanded upon to some degree - maybe put a little marker above the item queued up to be interacted with, and maybe allow us to queue up more actions in a row. If I could queue up putting each item onto the baking tray it would improve the micromanagement aspect of the game.

- Moving back and forth to carry a single ingredient to the tray before going to the next one is very tedious, doesn't really benefit from the current action queuing system (which could be rectified somewhat with the previous change) and overall doesn't make too much sense. It would be much better if we could either A. Pick up multiple ingredients to bring to the tray, or B. Pick up the tray and carry it to the ingredients, and load them directly onto the tray from the stockpile.

- The clickable area for the 3rd (yellow) tray in the kitchen is a little off to the left, meaning that clicking on the right side of the tray doesn't actually interact with the item. I'd recommend increasing the size of the area you can click for that specific tray, or at least moving it to the right a little more.

- When refilling the self-service trays, if there's no room for all of the food you're currently carrying, it'll be discarded, even if it's worth more than what's currently on the tray. For example, if you have 1 service tray (3 slots) and there's 2 empty spots and 1 Burger Patty (worth £0.90) and you're loading up a full tray of Meat Platters (worth £3.35), you'll load up 2 Meat Platters and discard the last one. It would be better if we instead discard the Burger Patty to make space for the more valuable dish.

- It would be nice to have an upgrade to store finished clothes ready to be placed onto the mannequins rather than just leaving them on the sewing machine, preventing you from making more. There's a clothes hook visible on the wall right next to the sewing machine. Maybe make it a purchasable upgrade instead that can hold 1/2/3 sets of clothes (allowing you to further upgrade it to hold more clothes at once) ready to go onto a mannequin.