Recent reviews by Silver

My crew members will not stop beating the ♥♥♥♥ out of each other around the clock every time I start the game, I have no method of making them not hate each other despite having tons of comfort, their own rooms, etc. All my halls are smeared in gallons of blood and all of my crew is permanently sleeping off two black eyes and near-death injuries. I actually cannot play the game.

So, the game is actually really fun initially. The whole "shopkeeper sim" genre of games is woefully underpopulated, and I think this serves it well! The Paper's Please inspiration also fits nicely, as you meticulously look over items for suspicious details or flaws. Bartering with customers for great deals always injects a bit of dopamine into my brain.

However; there are some pretty big flaws I struggle to look past.
Firstly, the sheer amount of systems and mechanics for the game is... Exhausting. There are so. Many. Pages. To look over. So many minute details, so many specific brand quirks you need to re-read and remember to incorporate. You also need to look at the new information that doesn't update in your guide constantly. Papers Please also reached a similar level of intensity, however the game would also end shortly after that -- or back away from the maniacal detail-scanning as in game events relaxed and shifted. No Umbrellas Allowed doesn't have that. Once you gain a new mechanic, you have to deal with that every day for the rest of the game. Of which there are a whopping 40! 40 days is an eternity, especially when you spend most those days pouring over so many items.

Another small irritation I had that quickly blew up into a huge frustration were the customers themselves, and the reputation systems. In the game, you get a reputation for having accurate appraisals, another for recommending good items, and another for making people happy. All three of which give you super good bonuses if you rank them up high, so I obviously gunned to do just that. Eventually, you get customers that try to sell you an item ASAP, hurrying you to just take it without appraisal, and if you try to give them any negative appraisals they'll just straight up tell you to "Shut up, you're wrong." As if I'm not the one holding the material swatches and the microscope. At that point, I gained the ability to "hide" appraisal cards, so I figured "Oh what the hell, I'll just hide the bad appraisals. Yeah I'm not getting nearly as good a deal, but at least the sales are accurate." And buy the item at a price so high above it's true value I'll struggle to break even. But at least it ranks up my reputations!

...Until some woman walks in, telling me she's going to report me to the police because I've been hiding appraisals from my customers and using it to turn a huge profit.

What??? I'm literally doing this out of the kindness of my heart. I am letting these people FLEECE me, all so I can get accurate item appraisals, they're walking out with more money than I'll ever hope to make with what they gave me, and I'm SCAMMING THEM???
Oh, and if you tell those people to just ♥♥♥♥ off, and not take their scam items. They'll just hurt your reputation and sometimes say they'll report you anyways. And these people come in DROVES in the later days. To the point where I'm losing several percentages of reputation even though I spent all game donating all my money to people down on their luck, and I'm hardly buying more than 3 items a day because everyone else is trying to hustle. It's so maddening, it's an awful idea, and a truly terrible system. I should be able to eat the costs in hopes of building my rep so that I can get better deals later. Like an investment! But instead I'm just punished no matter what I do.
Either hide the appraisals and be labeled as a greedy bastard (WHILE LOSING MONEY ON IT,) Buy the item at face value/only with the positive appraisals I found and sell it again, just for some complete expert giving it a glance and calling out every obscure detail I got wrong and dumpstering my reputation while buying it for a quarter price, Buy the item and just never sell it, or tell them to kick sand and, again, get my rep hurt.

Preface: This is more of a mixed review. Not strictly positive or negative.

The idea of recording your expedition and playing it back leads to a lot of very hilarious moments. I think it was a brilliant idea. I've already gotten plenty of dumb clips just to share between my friends and laugh at all the horrific deaths and close shaves.

However, I think I still much prefer Lethal Company solely because of the whole money and gear aspect. Content Warning gets old fast, because you struggle to afford anything. If you want to buy one upgraded flashlight, it can cost an entire day's worth of profits, or even more. And your money earned doesn't scale with the players you have, unlike Lethal Company where more players would equate to more money, because you could grab more loot. A lot of the silly things in this game are prohibitively expensive, and while LC has similarly overpriced dumb things, you could actually make so much cash to afford all of it, as well as fully stocking 4 players. In Content Warning, playing with more friends just strains your shoestring budget further, and they may not have anything to do at all.

The game is fun, and I'll probably play it a little more -- especially when updates roll around. But at the moment it's more of a middling impression. I don't know if I would want to spend the money for this game, but I got it for free so I can't make that judgement accurately.

TSE was a gem that was buried before it's time, and TSE:R is a labor of love set to put it back out in the hands of players so the community can grow again. (And also finally fix some of the long standing bugs and tap down/up some of the best and worst performing strategies.)

Once I'm done badgering all my friends to finally give this a try, I don't think I'll be able to put it back down again. God this community is sweet.

Went in expecting silly derivative Pokemon, got exactly that, but I didn't realize the execution would be so good. To be honest, the gameplay loop is pretty fun. Setting up a fully automated base full of adorable toddlers wielding power tools is satisfying, and watching them sustain themselves indefinitely triggers the happy chemicals in my brain.
The game has a plasticky clean visage on the surface -- and then hits you with genuinely horrifying acts such as butchering pals with a blurry filter forced over it just to gain more resources, or the fact you can actually catch other humans in balls and they behave exactly like other pals, enslaved to your will forever. Or the very real, actual guns that crime-syndicate goons will brandish openly as they unleash hails of led on a penguin. Or the fact you can assault a man, and several armed S.W.A.T. officers will deploy on your location to breach and clear without warning. Or even the Dex entries that ring incredibly similar to mid-gen Pokemon games, with tons of horribly dark lines and implications out of left field. It's delightful.

One could write this as a ripoff, or a cash in, but this seriously just feels like a love letter to Pokemon, and what it could have been if GameFreak, TPC and Nintendo didn't languish. A lot of designs strike as "Legally distinct (insert Pokemon)" but that doesn't make it bad, inherently. The designs are still cute, even if some are incredibly derivative. It engrossed me in a way I genuinely didn't anticipate.

The only issues I've had thus far with the game are simply bugs. Automated Pals at your base can inexplicably waste hours, if not the entire day rapidly switching tasks and stuttering in place without actually doing anything -- and I've encountered a disturbingly high number of occurrences where my Pals get stuck in trees/on roofs, and will then remain stuck there permanently until I manually intervene and respawn them. Starving themselves until they gain some kind of crippling sickness. All of which seem to be entirely incurable without medicine, and some of those diseases need very high quality medicine that you can't make early on... Particularly frustrating when I god-rolled on a Pal with several absurdly strong passive skills for working, absolutely tore through his work schedule, and then got stuck and starved himself while I was out of the base. Inflicting him with a sickness that, after 10 hours, I still cannot cure.

Game is alright but why is the UI this awful? Why do I need to play several games to unlock the practice mode? New player experience is kind of important, and this is a masterclass in how not to handle that.

I'm a squeamish little baby when it comes to horror games, I could hardly stomach Phasmophobia. But Lethal Company has the best comedic timing of any game ever.

Do yourself a favor and don't look up things surrounding the game. So much of the fun is in discovery, like a true gormless idiot wandering an alien planet.

The development of this game has turned from utter contempt for it's playerbase to flat-out active self-sabotage. Even on a purely business focus, they've done nothing but make wrong moves. Nobody wants to see this thing fail as hard as Blizzard themselves do, it seems.

As someone who enjoyed the premise of the first game but didn't enjoy the execution as much, Darkest Dungeon 2 is an improvement on the pain points I had with the last installment. The first game was comprised of many short runs where you slowly leveled up characters and built up your settlement, whereas the sequel is the opposite: With far longer runs where a lot of the character upgrading is happening within the run.

Personally, I enjoy the longer runs. Though it does have a bad case of "downwards spiral" syndrome where if the run takes a particularly bad hit, you probably stand no chance of fully completing it now and you're probably better off ending the run and restarting.
Gone are the days of having to juggle an inventory filled with 4 different unique upgrade materials as well as torches, rations, bedrolls, shovels, vials of holy water, an extra pair of slippers, toiletries and a fresh change of underwear which I felt slowed the previous game to a total crawl. Now you simply have 1 upgrade material and a few currencies that thankfully stack much higher. Coupled with the fact that characters can hold an item, and also the wagon having a very generous storage space -- as well as permanent and temporary upgrades to further expand it, takes a lot of the annoyances out of the run. Characters also need nothing, they heal passively on the road, and the torch flame is restored by combats, events and a specific equippable consumable. So much of the bloat has been cut out, and you can much more freely collect and switch gear around based on what the next zones will be like.

The new system isn't without faults, however. While I do love how every character starts off at the same power level, not requiring you to individually level and manage a roster of 15+ poorly functioning alcoholics, the only permanent upgrades are either very limited and minor stat-boosts or small subclasses purchased with the upgrade material, or are locked behind finding a specific event, selecting the character you want to upgrade, and then either playing a "puzzle battle" or just listening to the narrator for a minute, and then you're rewarded with 1-2 new abilities. This is something you need to do five times. For every character. While I do appreciate the story, there's a point where "unraveling the mystery" just feels like it's getting in the way. I do think all the stories are interesting, but the process of slowly unlocking them, piece by piece, only if you're lucky enough to find those events, kills that excitement somewhat.

On the note of the narrative getting in the way: Starting runs. There's a very "cinematic" approach to it, which while it is a nice spectacle when you first start, wears out it's welcome very quickly. You need to ride up the road and then use your upgrade materials on permanent boosts. Then ride up the road and pick your "campaign." Then you need to ride up the road and watch a few still images float by as the narrator delivers a snippet to a story you've since forgotten because you only get two sentences every hour. Then you pick your characters. Then you ride up the road and kill a single group of enemies for your starting loot. Then you ride up the road to the starting inn. Then, finally, can the run truly begin. It's like 10 minutes just to start a run proper. When I said I liked the longer runs, this is coming from someone that plays eternally long modded FTL runs where you can setup a ship and start/restart lightning quick. This tedious parade of watching a carriage trundle down a road of nothing quickly starts detracting from the experience, rather than adding. And if you forgot to swap a character to a different subclass (because of course the game defaults to the basic subclass, not the one you last used) guess what you'll need to sit through all over again to fix it? More. Boring. Riding.

Difficulty wise, it's much harder than the first game I would say. Because by design each run is "All or Nothing." You either beat the campaign or you die/abandon. There's no inbetween, and therefore the challenge ramps up quite a bit more. Deaths mean less because you're not losing a character you've spent entire days leveling up, they're just some chump at the bus station that you suckered into this mess. While it doesn't completely remove stress from the game, it does make it less "♥♥♥♥ this I quit" when you lose an elite squad of demonslayers because of bad RNG, setting you back days of progress. I do think the addition of enemy death's door status is decently executed, as once they do drop to their last stand, they deal halved damage. And to be honest, I've exploited that more times than not. Killing all but the last wounded enemy and then going around, round after round, healing and de-stressing everyone while my tank blocks weakened swipes before killing them and moving on. Though I totally understand not everyone is really onboard with the change -- especially fans of the first game.

Ultimately, while I enjoy the game more than the first and think the artstyle is gorgeously translated. (I seriously forget that everything is 3d modeled at times.) There's definitely some clumsy execution in the jump between game styles. If you were like me and didn't really love the first game, this one may just fix what you didn't enjoy about it. If you were a fan of the first one though, then I'm not so sure. So much of the old game is just gone now, to the point where this almost feels like an overcorrection rather than an evolution. While most of the omitted content was stuff I didn't like, I know it was what made the game special to a lot of the fans.

The DLC itself is great! Leaders specializing and eventually becoming paragons is a really neat mechanic. The council seats offering perks per leader level and the agendas are also really nice. Really, agendas are probably my favorite addition because it lets me plan actions more effectively.

However, the hard cap on leaders is pretty divisive. Personally I don't mind it too much, as currently I have an empire spanning half the galaxy and I still have a governor in each sector. Though it does come at the cost of half my fleets not having an assigned admiral -- and only having a single scientist. Really, the problem becomes it's most glaring at midgame. Where you still want several scientists to survey, research, excavate, etc. But you also need more admirals for your growing fleets and multiple governors for your expanding systems. And I can easily see it being even more of an issue if you don't hard-specialize into leaders like I've been doing.

Also, the game's gleeful joy at killing scientists with random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at all points in the game feels much more harsh now, as any anomaly or excavation can just turn your valuable scientist into a wasted effort. And all but demands you permanently plop your paragon/head of research down on your research planet to assist, which is just unsatisfying and leads them to level up much slower.

All in all, I'd still recommend the DLC, as what it adds is great. But the system change to leader caps has some growing pains to work through.