Recent reviews by BrainyPepper

Coming from a Scumhead fan, a Metroid fan, and a survival horror fan, this game is audaciously bad and broken. It needed so so much more time in the oven and I just don’t know if it’ll ever receive the updates to make that right. Among numerous other problems, In my playtime the death screen graphic was consistently cut off at the midpoint of the screen. How do you mess that up?

Controller input issues plus when Dahl comes into the picture the game immediately goes from an 8/10 to a 2/10. I don't know what they were smoking or if Bethesda was knocking on their door at that point but the game design swiftly fell into the garbage and it made me want to blow my head off. Not sure how it's possible to ♥♥♥♥ up that badly. I find it hard to put into words just how infuriating this sudden turn is. If you plan to actually finish the game I really don't recommend it. You will want to die.

Insufferable gameplay

I watched my dad play this when I was a little kid. It brings tears to my eyes to see and hear these things and remember those days like they happened just a year ago. This game stands on its own as a masterpiece but my association between it and my dad alone is enough for me.

Still alive.

A short, relaxing experience. Great writing, fantastic music, and great vibes. I feel Off-Peak's strong ties to music culture and I love it.

The ending had my jaw hanging for what felt like hours. How do I even begin to describe the mind ♥♥♥♥ that was this game's last chapter? I won't. Just buy it and play it and get your mind ♥♥♥♥♥♥ too.

Look, I love Scumhead's art, but this is more of a tech demo than a game. It's infuriating to play.

This review is gonna be LONG. TL:DR: worth 10 bucks if you like the art in the screenshots and like fun movement, but if you want combat with real depth, go elsewhere. My critiques: Fantastic art, great sound design, great movement, cool enemy variety but disappointing weapons and bosses, and the game has so much potential but doesn't capitalize on any of it.

Movement: done through dashes (midair included), double jumps, and shooting the shotgun downwards while jumping to increase jump height, which was my favorite and probably isn't an intentional feature. Devs, please normalize each weapon in games like this having their own associated movement techniques. It increases the fun factor ten times over. Oh yeah, there's also turning into a little ball and rolling around, I guess, but it's not well programmed and is generally pretty finicky so I generally avoided using it to get around.

Combat: not balanced so well. The pistol and machine gun have an absolutely useless alt fire, but the shotgun's alt fire is better, though not the best. It's a homing shot, turning your carefully aimed short range shotgun blast into a mid-range projectile you can shoot around corners and which aims itself for the most part. I really like the idea and it's executed well enough. The pistol easily outclasses the shotgun if you rapid fire it (which I'm not sure is an intentional feature), until you upgrade the shotgun from trench to double barrel, at which point the damage output between the shotgun and pistol is roughly identical as far as I could judge. I will commend that at that point they both have their own unique niches to fill, but once you get the machine gun, the pistol is useless. It should've replaced the pistol like how the double barrel replaces the trench shotgun.
As far as melee goes, I like both usable melees, but ammo being infinite gives little reason to use them if their damage doesn't match that of the guns (and also makes up for the risk of getting close enough to actually use melee), and beside that I'm absolutely perplexed that you don't get to use Umadermadine's sword as a weapon during the final boss battle. It seems like such an obvious design decision to make, and would've made that fight more interesting.
As well as the weapons, I wish the movement were better tuned to the game's combat, or at least that the enemies, and especially the bosses, were designed with the movement in mind. The dash ability is almost useless during all of the game's bosses, and there's no intentional utility of the double jump in that area either. And on the topic of the bosses, I wish the bosses had more interesting movesets, because it takes so long to take them down that it becomes boring. Could be most easily mitigated by giving each boss a second phase at half health. As well, I wish every boss played more with the bullet hell aspect that some later ones do, having deliberate patterns to dodge through instead of mindlessly hopping around and hoping not to get hit. The cherry on top of the combat, though this wasn't a problem TOO often, was that when you take a lot of damage the screen is covered with a half-opaque red overlay, making it hard to see anything, which might be a stock GZDoom feature, but I'm not sure.

Aesthetics: absolutely fantastic. Not only the visuals but the soundtrack and sound design as well. I LOVE the mixture of medieval fantasy with WW2 era and also sci-fi technology. The best show of this is the Scorcher, an enemy in full medieval plate armor with a hefty flamethrower. Or perhaps it is the Sentinel, a towering templar-esque cyborg soldier with a massive sword, using its cybernetic legs to barrel towards the player with inhuman vigor. Or maybe it's the Sniper, with its night vision enabled plague doctor mask and sci-fi sniper rifle that fires the exact same beam with the exact same sound as the Quake 3 railgun (yes, I noticed it. Cheers, Scumhead). Point is: the designs and concepts are absolutely fantastic, and the world they create is brilliant. Beside the visuals and designs, the sound design is up there too. The hydraulic depressurization of the Nephilim's mechanically enhanced legs when he jumps or dashes adds a lot of weight to the movement, and not to mention the screams of the damned that accompany the dash as well. I thought that sound would get super repetitive, but somehow it didn't. Maybe not everyone who plays would agree, though. Also, the soundtrack is so good it outclasses anything it's scoring. Not to say this game isn't good, but this soundtrack deserves to score something much grander and more exciting. It's fantastic. Turn the music all the way up if you end up buying the game.

Miscellaneous: I wish this game were designed with a high skill ceiling in mind, because it is absolutely primed for it and it wouldn't take changing too much to accomplish that. For such a short game, having no replay value really kills its appeal. The only replay value is in the secrets, most of which are pretty easy to find. It seems like Scumhead didn't recognize the exploitability of the shotgun's kickback midair, because having some secrets utilizing that would be awesome. In fact, it seems Scumhead didn't realize really any of the grander gameplay potential, which is very disappointing. The movement is great and if the game were designed more deliberately around it as well as more weapon comboing it would be fantastic. But as it is, it's just alright.
Also, the story of the game is pretty amateurish and most of the character, location, or object names are just random words taken from either mythologies or random parts of the English lexicon, which doesn't exactly create the effect the developer had in mind. It isn't done very tactfully. I would say the story is easily the weakest part of the game.

This game is HOT GARBAGE. DO NOT BUT IT!!!!!!!! It is either a scam or made by someone with a delusionally high opinion of their abilities, because this game should not in any conceivable universe sell for more than 2 dollars. IT IS 15 DOLLARS. I can't tell how many of the game's assets are original, but the music sounds like it's royalty free stock music and the enemy animations are stock mocap animations. The movement coding is bad and the gamefeel is nonexistent. When I finished the first level the audio settings reset, blasting my ears out, and that's when I gave up. THIS GAME DOESN'T EVEN LET YOU PUT IT IN WINDOWED MODE. That is not a mark of quality. DO NOT BUY THIS

This game is worth at most half of its normal price. With the default audio settings, you can't hear the characters talking over combat, and this game LOVES to have the characters talk during combat. Beside that, there's no option of playing the tutorial over again. Good luck if you're returning to this game after a while of not playing. This game lacks all sorts of needed quality of life features. You can just tell it from one look at the options menu. And by the way, not being able to play the intro again also means not being able to see the intro cutscene again. That on top of it being so hard to hear the characters talk over combat brings me to the conclusion that this game doesn't care about its story. So why have a story? This game is a jumbled mess and it just doesn't work. Don't even buy this on sale like I did. Watch someone play it and - from the repetitive gameplay loop to the lack of quality of life features - you get a better experience than actually playing it.