Recente recensies door Sea Burial

Tightly designed, fun to play and full of content. Visually appealing, great audio design, and interesting progression/character changing mechanics. It feels like a genuine pleasure to explore and never wears its welcome thin. Highly recommended for any fan of metroidvanias.

In short: while not a perfect game, Masquerada is an excellent game: something refreshing for strategy RPG fans who want an innovative take on the genre, and something lovingly crafted for fans of caring, attentive design. A tragically overlooked game that deserves much more attention than it's received.

PRO:
-Visually a delight - extensive use of color and themes which are very rarely used in gaming.
-Excellent voice acting - there are some pretty big names for the size of this game, and they try their hardest.
-(Relatively) engaging combat - while I don't view the battle system as by any means perfect, it does enough different and offers enough in the way of options to let you develop your own style.
-Very good music - Someone more than earned their salary, and the few tracks with lyrics are absolutely the highlight.
-A story that kept my attention throughout, and left me interested in seeing what comes next every chapter.

CON:
-A heavy reliance on reading. While it makes the world feel more organic to not have characters immersed in a society need to discuss basic details of it, the player is faced with the arduous choice of either proceeding through scenes and learning based on context clues (which is what I settled into after a certain point) or stopping many times during an act to read each new lore entry on culture/history/characters/magic/factions/etc. I feel bad saying this to an extent, because whoever did that writing really, really cared about what they were doing and I love that kind of passion, but more of an attempt to make me meld into the world without needing to read a pause menu novel would have gone a long way to smoothing over the flow of the game.
-Limited growth - Early in the game you pick from one of four elements, which follow certain archetypes for play style, and commit to it. You can select abilities from your chosen element, and manage which skills you use within those confines (so someone could play earth mask very differently than I did), but your involvement in your character's growth largely ends there. There is no equipment to manage, really only two statistics which matter, and no real way of feeling like your character is 'rewarded' for winning fights other than the occasional, seemingly random skill point drop. The nice thing is that if you hate the way you're playing, you can easily and freely (as there is no currency) reset skill points.
-Combat is kind of easy - there are a few fights that were troublesome, and it may also play into the fact that I focused on my abilities in such a way that health going low was more or less impossible, but very few encounters posed any level of a threat to me after a certain point in the game. This is fine, and it still felt fun, and perhaps I would have even liked the game less if they'd been harder fights, given the lack of character growth outside of abilities, but I feel it is probably a net negative.

I decided to post a review after the dev has, in recent history, released a number of major updates for the game. I have not had an opportunity to check out the most recent, which seems to be a pretty big addition, as of this writing. Instead, my intention is to highlight the positive experience I had with DashBored originally, and to give a boost to a creator who's still taking the time to update a 5 year old game with new content.

If you want a very well constructed, oddball, and often creepy RPG experience, I can't recommend it highly enough. My play time was around 7 hours, and I consider it time well spent, especially for something that costs $5.00. Worth full price, worth your time.

A perfect blend of puzzles, music and getting stepped on.

Truly an innovative game - I never would have thought of creating skills that SOMETIMES work. There is nothing I love more after a hard day at the office than coming home and hoping that dash and deflect decide they feel like doing their jobs too...or that dash slash doesn't get cheeky and decide to ram me into a spike wall.

You know why people love Shovel Knight and The Messenger? It's not (only) because of what they look and sound like - it's because they offer tight gameplay that rewards considerably more than it punishes, and because they always keep the enjoyment of the player in mind. There are a lot of things that Cyber Shadow gets right, but that isn't one of them: it takes so many lessons from the older titles it seeks to emulate but doesn't recognize why we've moved on from doing things that way. There's not a particularly good reason to pick this instead of just doing another playthrough of SK or TM.

The thing about me is that I'm a coward when it comes to scary titles, but I want to not be. The first jump scare that pops up in most things pretty much does me in, and that precludes me from enjoying a lot of horror games and movies. What's left for me is pretty is pretty much atmospheric horror, and while I wouldn't say that description fits YS perfectly, it's still a pretty good fit. This game manages to find that sweet spot of spooky, funny and gripping in a way that I think very few things even attempt to do.

I don't want to talk about the story a lot, other than that I liked it: unwrapping that mystery is why you play things like this, so why let some dude on the internet ruin that for you? Gameplay is a mix of solving puzzles and occasionally hiding from monsters. The dev has by and large made it so that you can play a good chunk of the game out of "order", which I appreciate a lot more than repeated scary hallways with occasional branching paths to the same goal. While it's not total freedom of exploration by any means, the ability to feel like I can explore parts of the building that I'm not supposed to be in yet helps a lot with my immersion.

If you even think this might be for you, I'd suggest picking it up. The writing is good, the jokes are good, the art is great, the story is interesting. Outside of a couple of small sections that felt a bit frustrating, I have no complaints - and certainly they weren't bad enough to put them on blast in a short review. Pick this up, and check out the dev's other title as well.

This is a game that likes to set out on the road to a nice restaurant, when they're in sight, swerve away from them to buy gas station sushi. And maybe if you just got that sushi once, it would be fine, because you're tough and you can handle it, and you got such nice food every other time you took a drive. You might have even picked up a nice dinner the very next day. But ultimately it just keeps swinging back to that BP.

I usually don't like to post negative reviews for games. If it's not for me, it's usually not because I think the game did something wrong, but because the game and I just didn't mesh on expectations or wants. But I just keep going back to this game and thinking about it, so here we are.

It's a metroidvania, so you know what you're getting into to an extent based on that. It's a great genre and I love it, because exploration is almost always rewarded - peel back that onion a little more, go back through past zones to scoop upgrades every time you get a new ability, feel the world open up around you as you play. Unfortunately this creates one of the two main issues I have with this game: that I feel actively punished for exploring at the wrong time. I hit so many instances of going up to an area and getting through some of it, being stuck by a different type of barrier, and having to backtrack a huge distance due to the shrine waypoint system the game employs. And when you get what you need to clear that barrier, thinking there surely wouldn't be yet another after? Well guess again.

I don't mind backtracking. Feeling out a zone is great in these games. But when I feel slapped on the wrist every time for doing it, my takeaway becomes that I should only explore when the dev wants me to explore, and otherwise stick on their path, and that is just...not what you want from this type of game.

The other main issue I've got here is damage given vs damage taken. The siren boss is my best example of this, because it's the one that almost made me quit the game. Underwater controls (in this specific instance) that don't feel quite right for the fight mixed with a health sponge boss that, like all enemies in the game, damages you for physical contact and which does half of your health (if you've been keeping up on your armor and heart upgrades) with every blow. Later areas suffer the same problem to an extent, with enemies dealing heaps of damage and/or clogging the screen.

It's a shame these two issues are there, because in general there's a lot of love put in to this game. The music is largely fantastic, the sprite work is good. Someone gave a damn while making this. But I just don't think that I could actually recommend that someone else who enjoys the genre pick this up.

As someone who's a big fan of strategy RPGs, I would say that Fell Seal is probably the closest thing, mechanically, we've seen to Final Fantasy Tactics (or Tactics Ogre) since the original's release. While I'm making no effort to compare it to the storytelling of those games, I feel that the essence of what makes those titles ENJOYABLE is what has been captured: challenging missions, customizable characters, interesting worlds to explore.

PRO:
-Enjoyable SRPG gameplay, customizable units with many classes.
-Strategic depth - sort of addressed in a con below, but there are so many combinations of classes and skills that you can really get free reign to make some cool combinations that suit how you want to play the game.
-Lengthy campaign - my playtime came to around 35 hours doing 95% of the extra content.
-Graphically pretty nice - the style might not land with everyone, but a lot of work was put in to the designs and you can tell.
-Difficult enough to pose a challenge - until you start breaking stuff over your knee, you're going to have a decent struggle with quite a few maps.

CON:
-The story is GOOD, but not what I'd call deeply memorable. I think it has some solid beats, but you won't find yourself fondly thinking back on the intricacies in 20 years.
-The "campfire scenes" - little bonus scenes with the characters that you can view between missions - seem kind of front loaded, and from my recollection are spread a little too thin as the game progresses. It's nice to see people just chat when the world isn't on the line, and it helps build your understanding of who they are.
- This could be a pro depending on how you look at it, but certain class/skill combinations are just massively more efficient than others for late game. While I don't know if it's necessary to toss together that stuff to win the game, it makes some things feel like a plain ham sandwich compared to a croque monsieur.

This game is probably worth full price, and is absolutely worth the price at discount (at time of review, 66% off, which is an absolute steal.) If you've enjoyed any kind of turn based tactics game in the past, you'll be missing out if you pass on this. The devs also seem like very friendly people, and happy to engage with their community, and it's because of that that I decided to write a positive review.

It's an inexpensive, well-designed murder mystery that you can finish in one evening. The story is engaging, and a lot of work was done to make the small environment feel distinctive. Zero complaints.

"Do I look unconquerable to you?"

Furi is a challenging game that exists in the best tradition of its type: it wants you to beat it fair and square. The tutorials that it gives you are sufficient to learn how to play, and the core mechanics are not bogged down with gimmicks or weird tricks. Every boss fight has its own distinctive theme and challenge to overcome, but the true test is always in your skills: your mastery of the prisoner and his weapons.

There are a lot of other tough games out there, but few that exist with the sheer style of Furi. The music, the visuals, the enemies, everything about it sucks you in, drives you onward, pumps you up. Outside of questioning whether or not you're actually trash on your 20th death to the Edge, there aren't roadblocks to slow you down - no time wasters, no padding, nothing but a refined, honed experience that sticks with you.

Honestly, full price is a steal for this one, but if you can get it for under ten dollars it's a must buy.