Recent reviews by Cross

While I love all the DS Castlevania games...

Order of Ecclesia is, in my mind, the greatest Castlevania game ever made, and is the SOLE reason I purchased this collection. While I don't mind the anime aesthetic of Dawn and Portrait, Order of Ecclesia EXCELS in Gothic horror, and I fully believe it is the strongest art style the franchise has had and where Castlevania peaked. For my tastes, the music in Ecclesia also charts in the top 3, very likely to take the top spot right next to SOTN. It's genuinely difficult to choose between them, it depends on the day and my mood. Everything in Ecclesia comes together in a near perfect blend, from the art, the music, absolutely everything about Shanoa (autistic goth gf, my b e l o v e d), the high difficulty, high damage enemies and the AHA! moments of realizing how you can break the game's balance in half (Dominus Agony Lightsaber back dash cancelling LMFAO).

The only two issues I take with the game are that the story is too short, and attribute points discourage glyph experimentation. That's it. In the whole game, I can only find two faults that detract from my potential enjoyment of Ecclesia. And of those two, one of them isn't even really an issue, and is more of a "Please God I wish there was more". The story in Ecclesia is one of the most emotionally resonant in the series, and as an older brother myself, Albus remains one of my favorite Castlevania side characters to this day, with Shanoa being my favorite protagonist possibly not just in Castlevania, but from any Metroidvania I've played. If you are as big a Castlevania enthusiast as I am, please do yourself a favor and play all three of these games, and officially support this series.

Konami, release Harmony of Despair on PC next. It would be a baller move.

I backed Selaco on Patreon because I had faith that the developers would deliver on the vision they were promising. The game isn't finished yet, but even back when all we had was the demo I knew this was a special title.

To give your mind's eye something to compare Selaco to, it's a mish-mash of Doom, FEAR, Half Life, and a TEENY TINY little droplet of System Shock. What Selaco excels at is presentation. The GZDoom engine is being pushed to heights I can scarcely believe. My jaw dropped on the floor when I saw what they managed to do with paper. PAPER. It goes flying EVERYWHERE, and each sheet has its own physics. They'll lightly swoosh through the air when you walk through them.
This is where the FEAR aspects really come into play. FEAR was inspired by John Woo films, and Selaco, being inspired by FEAR, has the same level of intensity to its firefights. When the bullets start flying, the blood starts being drawn, the cleanest most well-put together office space turns into massive clouds of smoke, electrical sparks, oceans of purple blood, limbs, heads, torsos, fire and of course, paper flying about every direction. You can REALLY tell a fight broke out after you exit a room.

The star of Selaco however, is far and above its AI. You can declare all you want that, at the end of the day, it's really just an illusion, and that the AI isn't actually this super intelligent, calculating mastermind that's always trying to outwit you. Yeah, of course it isn't. What I'm saying is that the ILLUSION that the AI provides in Selaco is so masterfully done, that you will always have a little thought in the back of your head thinking "What if it's smarter than I think it is?" And believe me, even if the AI isn't extremely intelligent, the way the developers have programmed the illusion IS.

You will hear call outs, you will hear panicked screams of the grunts as their commanding officers get brutalized by you. You will hear soldiers declare their intent to position, their intent to flank you, their intent to get behind cover, to throw grenades at you. And they will DO it. They will spread out throughout a combat arena, they will try everything in their power to get in your blind spots and to shoot you from behind, from the sides, from above. They will attempt to flush you out of cover, sometimes they'll get extremely aggressive if they know you're low on health and they'll declare to their allies that you're wounded and to press the advantage. They even have a self preservation instinct. Sometimes if you get the upper hand immediately and it's clear they're losing an engagement, they will FALL BACK, laying ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AMBUSHES for you if you get cocky and try to push their position without properly getting a head count and asking yourself "Where did that third guy go?" No two firefights in Selaco will EVER play out the same way. All the while, the spectacle of whatever combat arena you've found yourself in will gloriously turn into an absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of destruction, gibs, and the screams of the dying. I've even seen grunts cut in half by my shotgun crawl on the floor as a torso, coughing up blood and trying their hardest to get away from me. They fail every time. The illusion of intelligence is sold so well in this game, and their version of the Replica Forces is quite possibly the most entertaining foe I've ever fought in an FPS, surpassing even the military in Black Mesa in fun factor.

By the way, Selaco's shotgun is the best ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ shotgun ever put into a first person shooter. It's LOUD, it KICKS, and it KILLS.

Lost Branch in Legend (henceforth LBiL) takes numerous queues from games like Slay the Spire (STS), which can be considered the current dominant game in the rogue-like deck building genre, Magic: The Gathering (MTG), and intentionally or not, even Hearthstone. According to one of my friends who *has* played Slay the Spire, the similarities are actually more like straight copy-pasting. LBiL has keywords that act identically to certain mechanics in both STS and MTG, and board progression is much the same. Scry, Retain, Block, Exile; if you've played either game you'll immediately be familiar with these mechanics. This acts as both a blessing and a curse. Having familiarity with either game means comfortable understanding of how cards work on a moment to moment basis and gives you a much stronger impression of how the deck building will work upon your first run. It allows players who have intimate knowledge in these two games to draw enjoyment from it right away. The curse, however, can feel at times like LBiL lacks an identity of its own. So many ideas and mechanics are one to one with the inspiration it draws from, and depending on your views on game design and creative expression, may rub you the wrong way. My stance on it is simply this: "If it ain't broken, why change it?" STS and MTG are apex predators in this design space for a reason. They've pioneered and paved the way for games that follow after them to perhaps break off the trail that they have set.

This is where LBiL truly shines. It takes what has worked in the past and pulls it off with respectful panache. It's very easy to believe you are solely at the mercy of the cards you are given, that your run is entirely dictated on whether the RNG gave you a viable deck to tackle the challenges that each Act throws at you. You are given a plethora of options to mold your deck how you see fit. The challenge is knowing how to manage and mitigate risk. The shop, gaps, and card selection you get at the end of each battle will help you make informed decisions on where you want the direction of your deck to go in, and not only that, but the pool of cards you can select is limited to the colors of mana you have access to, so seeing the same cards and keywords within a specific color is inevitable, controllable, and most importantly, predictable.

If you only have White and Red, you'll only receive White and Red cards. If you're playing Reimu, you'll get cards specific to Reimu on top of Red/White neutral/mixed color cards, whose archetype revolves around generating buffs, losing buffs, receiving bonuses as a result of losing buffs, making metric boatloads of barriers, upgrading cards in hand or deck, and bonuses upon having an existing barrier. You can even skip adding a card to your deck entirely in exchange for receiving more money to potentially help you find a new card, upgrade existing ones, or cutting cards from your deck. That last one is particularly important, as managing your mana costs and card powercreep is crucial to having a run be successful. If my basic starting attack card is 1 neutral and 1 red mana and does 10 damage, and I add a card that is the same mana cost, does 4 more damage and draws me a card, it is a direct upgrade to the inferior starting basic card. To the point where drawing that starting basic card will very quickly become detrimental to the quality of my deck, because what I WANT to be drawing is the attack card that cycles itself when played. All of this combined means deck building and coming up with an idea is extremely sharp in LBiL. So sharp to the point I am able to consistently, across multiple runs on the same character, build a nearly identical copy of a deck I've had prior success with. It's incredible.

There are some caveats I feel like are worth mentioning. Some are a minor personal nitpick rather than something objectively wrong with the game, but it can sometimes actively detract from the otherwise well rounded and stellar encounter designs. The difficulty is hit or miss, and it can often boil down to what keywords you enjoy using. Some of the encounters can feel TREMENDOUSLY difficult to clear without a supremely high quality deck. Doremy Sweet is quite literally, and very fittingly, a nightmare to deal with for any deck that cannot output 300+ damage before she spawns her first add (which is always a boss character, complete with ALL their mechanics, who by the way are IMMUNE TO BEING DAMAGED) or has enough mana to routinely discards the Nightmare statuses she throws into your hand for 4 whole entire neutral mana (which, this point, you likely only have 6 MAYBE 7 mana to use). So often do I feel like by the time she spawns the first add that I'm already dead. Between Junko annihilating my mana pool for having the audacity to play a card, Remilia having a 7 cards played limit, and Doremy's continual addition of negative statuses, it is beyond overwhelming to deal with. It's fighting three whole entire bosses and their mechanics at the same time, as an Elite enemy. That's right, Doremy isn't even a floor boss. She often comes right before the ACTUAL floor boss, sometimes without a chance to avoid her or even knowing that she's going to appear. It feels like very specific deck ideas will handle these no problem, but if you're an archetype that has a slow gradual build up of power, you're going to struggle hard. Unstable Potion Marisa is one of my favorite builds to shoot for, and going against the drones and Doremy is utterly hell. My deaths in a run almost always feel fair and like I could've played, drafted or cut better. But in the case of Doremy and the drones, it often feels like "Oh, I'm playing the wrong ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ character, silly me. Should've played Barrier/Upgrade Reimu instead" rather than any decisions I've made up to that point cascading into a loss. And this is just on the Normal difficulty without any modifiers. I genuinely shudder to think about how awful it will be to fight them on Hard or Lunatic WITH modifiers.

The last minor complaint I have is that the True Final Boss is hidden behind a trade quest chain. Granted, you are always offered the exhibit in question to start the quest chain in Act 1, but the exhibit in question is incredibly useful at generating more money, which means more consistent decks. The follow-up trades feel like they are actively decreasing in quality, ending in an item that is required to be in your inventory in order to access the final fight. You CAN randomly stumble across this item through standard exhibit selection and spaces you'd find them, but I feel it's far too restrictive a requirement on your exhibits to pose "Do I think I'll survive up to Act III as well as BEAT Act III, or god forbid will I survive an encounter with Doremy, and is it worth giving up another high quality exhibit that isn't the quest item?" Sometimes I just want to try out a new exhibit I've never seen before. I hate feeling like I'll be locked out of actually finishing the run and testing my deck against the True Final Boss and I wish the consistency of the quest item showed up elsewhere so that I have a little more leeway to experiment with exhibits.

LBiL is still in Early Access, and not all of it is feature complete. The game is still missing its final character at the time of this review, lots of cards lack flavor text (if it's intended to exist for all of them), Story Mode hasn't launched, and Free Mode has elements that feel unrefined (such as the True Final Boss requirement). But other than that, if you loved or even liked Slay the Spire, Hellcard, Balatro or any other high quality rogue-like deck builder, you will enjoy Lost Branch in Limbo on principle alone, regardless if the Touhou IP is something that interests you. It is simply a solid, addicting solo deck builder that I've been searching months to sink my teeth into ever since my friends and I started playing Hellcard. Trust me, the layers and depth are fantastic.

My favorite survival horror game of all time. It's a surrealist work of art that might not be for everybody, but if a game about dreams within dreams starring cute android waifus taking heavy queues from Resident Evil Remake, Silent Hill 2, Robert W. Chamber's "The King in Yellow", and Hideaki Anno's "Evangelion", you are in for the biggest treat of the last five years.

If you know anything about "The King in Yellow", you can view Signalis itself as yet another story in Chamber's collection of short stories. This isn't Lovecraftian horror. It's Chambersian horror. And I think that's really neat.

Incredible dungeon crawler and SMT/Persona-like. Extremely easy to understand type countering, and the sacrifice mechanic lets you pretty much indefinitely keep your favorite Sleepers in your party line-up, something I wish was more effective in Persona 5. Taking full advantage of everything the game gives you, in terms of items and money, you can and will absolutely dominate. But neglectful planning, poor decision making, and being too greedy results in you receiving a blindsided haymaker to the cheek. I.E. the balancing is remarkably rad and not frustrating. I've never felt like it was the game's fault for losing a Sleeper, or Sumireko getting KO'd.

This will go down in history as one of the greatest RPGs ever conceived. It is a full, complete package from beginning to end. It demands no more than what you are willing to invest into it, and the mind bogging amount of options at your finger tips in terms of content, decisions, and character builds is something I can scarcely believe. You can spend nearly 30-40 hours in each Act alone. This game is, in an nutshell, the Mass Effect Trilogy condensed into a single title, except imagine that a grand majority of your decisions do in some way come to drastically alter the content you are exposed to, and genuinely influence the game's finale. That 150 GB file size is not screwing around.

Did you know that this game has 4 player multiplayer on top of it?

There are some caveats to multiplayer, however, such as certain character quest lines simply becoming completely locked, as those characters need to be present in the party to progress. And that, as of the time of this review, multiplayer created characters cannot leave the party through any method (but they just recently made a patch announcement a few weeks ago that they are implementing such a feature, so this will soon be irrelevant).

But on the whole, the experience that Baldur's Gate 3 delivers far surpasses anything that has come out in the last several years. I straight up forgot I even had Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, this game sucked me in that badly.

Given the remarkable number of positive reviews for Fata Morgana, I will first advise some caution. Temper your expectations. Try to go in as blind as possible and make your own opinion. It's easy to read the thoughts, feelings and opinions of others and be swayed by the manic joy, to feel their glee and readily accept it as your own. Will you begin this tale, your mind already sullied by the jubilant masses? Or will you choose to create your own perspective? And is such a thing even possible in this day and age, where with the press of a button, you are exposed to an unimaginable number of people's thoughts, hopes and dreams?

There is so much that could be talked about regarding Fata Morgana, and discussing even a fraction of it poses the risks of spoilers, so if you have even a passing interest in reading Fata Morgana, I highly recommend distancing yourself from the steam review page and picking it up for yourself.

With that said... If reading was a boss fight, Fata Morgana would be it.

This is undoubtedly one of the greatest stories I have ever read. Yes, there is an immense amount of praise for this visual novel, and yes a vast majority of it is well-deserved and spot on. The art, writing and music all work in tandem together to create an unforgettable, gripping tale of love, loss, grief and reconciliation.

In terms of writing depth, Fata Morgana has some of the sharpest, most actualized character writing I've ever experienced in a work of fiction. That depth only increases further and further you get into the game, and once the mystery begins being solved, you will discover that it is very much intentional design. The story is very easy to follow along, but there's an incredible amount of hidden detail that can pass by you, especially as your progress along the True End route. And catching these details clues you in that there is something more to what's going on.

There are several points where the story weaponizes how Visual Novels work against you, and if you aren't focused or paying attention, it will trap you. And coming to that realization was one of the most cathartic feelings I've felt reading a novel ever since Steins;Gate's. This story, in the best sense of the word, tries to gaslight you. From the moment you boot the game up and begin reading, you are already an essential part of its plot. Whether or not you can realize the truth and are exposed to the mid-game twist reveal is up to you. This might honestly be Fata Morgana's strongest element; Fata Morgana directly challenges your ability to believe what you are told, and whether or not you take things at face value, and your actual skill in reading comprehension is tested throughout the entire front half of the novel. It's delightfully brilliant. Fata Morgana takes full advantage of the visual novel medium, even utilizing the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BACKLOG as a weapon to pull the wool over your eyes, to fool you into believing one thing is reality when the truth is far more sinister.

If reading was a boss fight, Fata Morgana would be it.

I see Beat Saber notes every single time I close my eyes.

I'm going to marry the Herbalist and you can't stop me.

The depth of role-playing and character building in Morrowind is unmatched by any other Elder Scrolls game. If it's your first time playing, I highly recommend using OpenMW. It's a more stable engine, with a few QoL upgrades (like saves being sorted by character), whilst keeping the original experience in-tact.

Also understand that you live and die by your build. Many first time players pick up that little iron dagger in the census office, and are baffled to why they can't hit anything, when in Oblivion and Skyrim you could pretty much pick up anything you found. If you don't have Short Blade as a Major Skill, you WILL NOT hit anything with Short Blades; this applies for everything in the game. Your skill level is a representation, in role-playing terms, how efficient your character is at utilizing that skill. If you've never done public speaking or don't understand Vvardenfell economics, how will you cut a great deal? That's represented by a default level of 5. But if you've studied or have knowledge regarding those topics, that's also represented in a higher skill level of around 40-50.

Weaknesses in your character build create interesting problems that require you to think outside the box. You won't be struggling for durability with a combat specialization, but it comes at the cost of the many allures magic brings with it. Magic and stealth builds typically won't struggle with opening locks or traversal, due to levitation, teleportation and speed amplification spells, but combat specs will need to think about the options available to them. They can lightly dip their toes into magic as a major skill, so they have a bit of utility, or they can purchase scrolls as a gold sink alongside training. On the other side of the coin, magic builds need to think about how they're going to survive the early game, as mages are usually made of paper, and alchemy is usually a staple of such builds for the purpose of making gold to afford training and spell-making (easily the best mechanic in Morrowind). You're always planning, prepping and building your character's adventure, from the moment you start character creation to the moment you're assaulting Red Mountain to defeat Dagoth Ur. And it is utterly enthralling.

The Elder Scrolls is a strange series of games, as each consecutive game in the franchise slowly loses and bleeds features and design philosophies with each release. Morrowind lost things that Daggerfall fans loved, Oblivion stripped concepts that Morrowind players kept coming back for, and Skyrim took it further by being so wholly unrecognizable to even die-hard Oblivion enthusiasts. And inevitably, if the trend continues, Elder Scrolls VI will alienate the Skyrim audience by further eradicating any semblance of "Role-playing" in an "RPG". None of these games are bad games by any stretch of the imagination. Dated, perhaps, but the philosophies are sound. But it just goes to show there's an untapped market for people craving a genuine sequel to Daggerfall, or Morrowind, or Oblivion, with the design elements refined, focused and improved in modern engines, instead of throwing out ideas from game to game.