Recent reviews by TwistedBOLT

Overall the game is fine. It's a lighthearted and cozy, chill adventure that I don't regret experiencing. An interesting thing about slower games (as compared to fast paced ones) is that you spend a lot more time thinking about the stuff you're doing while playing. This is a double edged sword as although that allows you to spend more time focusing on beautiful landscapes or the soundtrack of the piece it also means that if there's a spot of irritation in it over time it turns in to Chinese droplet torture.

Pros:

• Neat looking and sounding, relaxing experience.
  
• The dialogue is sharp and interesting and there's not too much of it to the point where you want to start skipping.

Cons (I'm sorry but I can't sugar coat it):

• The map is vast and empty, although the initial excitement of exploration feels great soon it becomes tedious to the point where it feels like you're combing the desert for a needle.
  
• I don't think I can be honest with calling this a puzzle game. Although there were a few neat moments (big beetles, archer path, crossing swords) overall the little puzzles there are, are extremely simplistic and forgettable.
  
• Most of the rewards you find are sorta worthless. Clothes do nothing other than change your appearance except for a few masks and there's not that much point to change your bike parts often unless you find one with a higher top speed (which happened twice for me).
  
• Non-skippable animations. Usually I'd write this off as a nitpick but watching 10 mask granting ceremonies and over 100 chum egg animations pissed me enough to start alt tabbing to stare at literally anything else.
  
• Bugs, although no progress losing bugs there were quite a few that forced a game restart (Hercules beetle not moving, intractable items not being intractable, wall clipping) as well as some horrible UI bugs when using the mouse (moving the mouse while navigating the map makes it spazz out, the mouse pointer just disappears from time to time in menus.)
  
• Performance issues, for some reason the longer the play through went the worse FPS got, restarting helped but not much.
  
• The quest I spent the most time on to solve a mystery ends up being left open to interpretation. If I spent 20 min thinking about the seemingly only challenging puzzle in the game just to be told "your choice doesn't matter, lol", I'd like to donate a punch to the designer of said "puzzle".

As well as many annoyances/nitpicks:

• Bikes flipping out constantly even on almost perfectly flat terrain.
  
• The fact that stamina goes up but not stamina regen so later on you just sit there for 10 sec at a time to regen to full.
  
• The low FPS animations create a horrible whiplash effect contrasted to how smooth most of the game is.
  
• Some quests having the "I've already done that" option but not all. I love when that exists as an option and it's a shame some quests don't have it.
  
• As far as I'm aware dialogue choices don't matter much. Also shame that there's no voice acting, but oh well.
  
• Lack of an auto walk/climb button. In some sections you're just forced to hold W for 30 seconds at a time and pressing a different button and alt-tabbing would have at least made such sections less painful.

So do I recommend this game... eh... kinda, it's another one of those where I'd rather give no grade but since steam forces me, 5+/6- out of 10. It's worth the try but there's definitely better games out there.

Indie games, man, without corporate ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ looming overhead the full creative power of the devs can bleed through every pore, resulting in something truly brilliant and innovative. From the memorable characters, unforgettable music and all the trippy moments that tie this game together to the crazy gameplay loop and hilarious humor, EverHood will forever be enshrined in my memory as one of my favourite games.

Imagine a beautiful world with a great art-style, fantastic special effects and incredible music, now imagine your own eyes glazed over as you spam G for 8 hours straight, while your dissatisfaction with the time invested grows slightly slower than your need to play it due to the sunken cost fallacy. Spending hours accomplishing absolutely nothing, just for the small dopamine rush of the skill level up sound being played. People complimenting the freedom you have in the endgame but all that boils down to is picking which background and music is playing while you pick up a box and move it 2 meters to the right. The PvP is fun and has potential but the progression in the game is just painful, the same, repetitive set of actions: talk to NPC, kill a few things, interact with object, walk to a place, click items if the arrow on it is blue, use the same skills, over and over again... I honestly have no clue what people see in this pile of busywork.

I really, really enjoy this game so I'm going to try to give it some tough love in the cons section:
Pros:
* Fast paced arcadey shooting action.
* Lots of interesting randomly generated loot.
* A geometrically simplistic, neon coloured landscape filled with well designed enemies.
* Hysterical puns.
* Great soundtrack.
* The single dev making the game's a very cool dude and the game gets regular content updates and bug fixes. Hell, I'm delighted to say that one of my cons on the list below got patched after a short talk with them.
* The game's very much worth its asking price.
Cons:
* Basically no matter how you slice it the game just isn't finished at the moment.
* The quests can be ran through in under an hour if you know what you're doing but if you take your time and space them out you're getting more than your money's worth out of the game.
* There's a dissonance between the quests and the gameplay as none of the actions you take within the quests have an obvious impact on the virtual word you're in. This makes it harder to get attached to the characters in the quests as ultimately all you get is an email stating what happened. Show, don't tell, although I get that that's much harder to say than do and what not.
* Some non-gamebreaking bugs but if you take your time to report them thoroughly to the dev there's a very good chance that they'll be fixed in the next patch.
* The enemy variety is somewhat lacking although modifiers that add unique abilities somewhat make up for this fact.
* Finality, the final fight is somewhat anti-climactic.
* Pretty much any additional criticism I can think of boils down to the game not being finished but considering new content is getting constantly added I'm very optimistic about the future of this game.

Overall: I very much recommend you try the game out. The sheer potential it possesses is worth its weight in gold.

Major puzzle spoilers but in all honestly this is a skip:

Alright, so first let's go over the basics of what makes a good puzzle because this game does not seem to understand the basic concept. A good puzzle should be solvable without brute forcing once you know exactly which elements are a part of it.

Providing a random set of characters and telling the player to go "solve" it without giving you any clues is garbage.

Hints should be there to actually help the player that's stuck, not be a mandatory part of the game, they are additions, frustration decreases for those in need of help.

You gotta connect stuff so that it makes sense. If you want someone to use a Caesar cipher, put a picture of Caesar somewhere, or hell, hide a few of them in the room to instantly tell people how much to rotate by. Using random ciphers with random keys with no hints on what to do is not even a puzzle, it's boring busy work that just leads to frustration. Especially when you wanna give us a lesser known columnar transposition cipher or the horrible
final Fibonacci shift at the end that came out of the left field.

Want us to shift by Fibonacci? Then put some spirals somewhere, put a bunch of candles in the pattern near the place where it's needed.

On top of the issues with the actual puzzles in this "puzzle" game, there's issues with the visuals (constant white rectangles appearing behind every object that's moving), issues with the menues (spamming the hint key will permanently leave a second hint screen over your screen and require a restart), issues with interactable objects (both the candle holder and book failed to work), issues with instructions (the game tells you to input something in to the journal where that was completely pointless), issues with movement (The character moves entirely too slow and opening the journal will cause you to continue moving even if you let go of W) and issues with information providing (Two of the three initial books get called book two at one point and the last letter on the table should be an L not an I).

Overall I am very sorry to say that I do not recommend this game.

I've read countless of negative reviews but decided to buy the game anyway. I regret it. Maybe the single player is decent but the PVP combat is just horrible. The game looks flashy and seeing all characters cast their big abilities is satisfying the first few times but any sense of wonder quickly fades away as you realize the best way to play is to just hold block until you can cast your skills. The high base price and the fact that you have to buy all the characters is icing on the cake.

TLDR: Looks good but that's about it.

I want to start this off by saying I hate steam's binary yes/no rating systems that forces you to slap one of two grades on these reviews.
If I could properly rate this game it's be somewhere in the middle but considering the relatively small team behind this game and the effort and passion that went in to it I can't bring myself to give it a negative grade so there, overall positive.

The synopsis: The game's a very pretty first person shooter with kinda but not really super powers a kinda but not really magical sword and a linear story. You move through scripted set pieces, killing dudes with an occasional boss.

The pros:
The environment looks stunning both from the visual and audio aspect.
The guns handle well although primary fire on some of them lacks a kick.
The movement is smooth and well crafted.
The powers feel great to use.
The difficulty is slightly on the easier side but overall it's fine.

The Cons:

The length. The game's short, from start to finish It took me less than 3 hours to pass it and that's after giving up trying to fix issues with it for half an hour on day one. (Thankfully said issues have already been fixed).
The price. It's 20 bucks for a 2ish hour experience, not the best bang for the buck.
Lack of replayability. Once you finish the story you can play again if you want to but that's about it.
The lack engaging mobility mechanics during combat. Wall running/jumping and using the grappling hook only happen during scripted events optional grappling locations or walls to run on during boss fights or just normal enemy encounters might make the running about the place and shooting about the place elements of the game blend better together.
The upgrade system is boring and the points are so plentiful you'll have almost everything upgraded by the end.
The facial animations aren't nearly as polished as all the other visuals creating a jarring effect.

The Odd (Mostly nitpicks):

The lack of a forward dash? Like hold to sprint tap to dash has been a staple in many games, it feels weird that it's not a feature here.
The mandatory stealth section that can mostly be cheesed by rushing like a maniac and 1-2 shotting enemies before they have a chance to shoot you twice.
The mandatory vehicle section that's entirely too easy, too short and honestly just not very memorable.
The mandatory press F to continue bits... Like... what do these even add? Why do they happen so many times?
Boarded doors needing to be meleed to progress. Why does shooting not break the planks...?

So overall the game's fine if it's 5 bucks on a sale or maybe even 10 then consider picking it up for a very short albeit pretty experience.

This game is a drug, I'm aware I'm addicted but I don't care. The community is a complete mixed bag of some of the best and worse people I've ever met. Losses can physically hurt. Wins can make you smile years later through recollection. You'll need around 100 hours to learn the basics, if you're not ready for a commitment to this cruel mistress don't bother. DotA2 is my faviourte game of all time, I love it almost as much as I hate it. So come around and play a game, or two, or a thousand, there is no escape from the trench.

Puzzle games with genuinely innovative mechanics are incredibly rare these days and this little gem in the rough is a perfect example of something brand new that's easy to pick up but incredibly hard to master.
The simplistic graphics, smooth, minimalistic animations, fantastic soundtrack and the exponentially steep difficulty curve all culminate together brilliantly.
For just 5 bucks you've got access to the 5-ish hours campaign (including a secret level that you unlock by inputting the Konami code) and a plethora of community made levels.
Buy this game if you have any interest in puzzle games or just want something new. It's a mindbending, brainbusting experience you won't soon forget.

I'd absolutely love to give this game a positive rating, the gameplay and progression system are quite fun and the number of odd items that combine in interesting ways makes for some quite fun builds. But I cannot do so with a clear contentions considering how often the game crashes. Losing all my progress 3 runs in a row is just heartbreaking.

Devs, please, I know it's been a while but please fix the various crashing issues if you do so I'm flipping the thumb around the moment the update goes live.