Recent reviews by Tyjan

-Acting is great all around. It's been a trip seeing this series go from "F**K YOU SOOOO MUUUUCCCCCHHHH!" to what we have now.
-A fantastic story with fun twists on the endings for how the SIMULACRA can be handled.
-UI and interface is snappy and I never had a hard time navigating around.
-Puzzles are mostly great, with only a few that might hold you up towards the end (One in particular needs you to verify by the month when certain people went missing, which might take you a while if you haven't been paying attention to where they are in each of the apps)

-Compared to the first two games (And Pipe Dreams if you like to include that), there is a lot more emphasis on chatting and a lot less focus on scares. This isn't something that particularly bothered me, but I do understand why a lot of people feel negatively about it considering how well known the series is for its balance of scares.
-Speaking of scares, there's exactly one jumpscare in this entire game outside of a couple of fail states. Even the usual background ambiance in 1 and 2 that's meant to throw you off (Like if you're wearing headphones) isn't as pronounced here, and I wish the game had more of it.
-While the cast is all around great, most of your time with them is spent texting. There's a lot less FMV and voice acting goodness this time around, but part of that is due to a mechanic later on that more than likely ate up most of the production budget.


I stayed away for a long time due to its 'Mixed' reviews, and I kind of wish I didn't. It's certainly weaker than the first two in terms of scares and the sheer amount of reading you do, but its story is pretty strong and it doesn't overstay its welcome. If you're looking for a more horror focused entry in this series I'd certainly stick to 1 and 2, but this is an easy recommend for me to play in an afternoon and get invested in the happenings of Stonecreek and its citizens. If you're unsure if you'd like it, I'd definitely recommend waiting on a sale.

-BUY IT
-IGNORE IT

I forget we can review demos!

I backed this on Kickstarter in 2022 with the premise of a Link's Awakening/Oracle of Seasons & Ages-like game with a variety of weapons and puzzles that take full advantage of your moveset, and even with a short half an hour-ish demo I'm not disappointed!

The visuals look great, with the beautiful sprite work making it easy to point out foreground and background details. The opening also does a great job with acclimating you to Mina's moveset without any tutorial pop-ups getting in the way of the action, and rewards paying attention to the environment. I love the chiptune soundtrack and can't wait to hear more after falling in love with Shovel Knight's OST!

If the full game keeps up the quality seen in the demo, we'll certainly have another stellar release from Yacht Club!

(Spoiler-Free Summary Review, coming from someone who's been playing DELTARUNE since it was originally 'SURVEY_PROGRAM')

-Chapters 3 & 4 offer a plethora of content for the money. The new chapters are considerably longer with a ton of optional bosses, minigames, and things to see/do.
-The writing is top notch, and knows exactly how to balance humor and crucial story beats even when the stakes are rising.
-Soundtrack has a healthy balance of remixes, re-releases, and new tracks that consistently keep every encounter fresh in your mind long after you've completed them.
-Lots of variation between chapters that never drags down the pace and mostly doesn't overstay its welcome.
-Pluey.

-To be honest, this game should be labelled as "Early Access". It's not the full release as you're only getting 4 of the planned 7 chapters currently, and the store page hasn't been updated to even reflect that Chapters 3 & 4 are included. Later chapters will be free updates and long-time Undertale and DELTARUNE fans will all know this, but the average consumer who wants to see what all the hype is about will certainly be confused as they roll credits on Chapter 4.
-Chapter 3 is front loaded with typos, animation errors, and crashes (Especially during the secret encounter). Said crashes happened on both my main gaming PC and Steam Deck. It feels like parts of it were rushed to move onto Chapter 4, which has far less issues.

An absolute achievement all around, especially when you consider how long it's been since DELTARUNE's initial release. Alongside Chapters 1 & 2 (which are free), you're getting a bevy of new content with Chapters 3 & 4 that stays true to the formula. If you're a fan of this world and its characters, you're going to laugh, cry, and curse Toby Fox for making you have to wait even longer to see the conclusion. My main gripes with the game are incredibly minor complaints and have very little to do with the quality product you're getting. I'll certainly be putting a dozen more hours in just to see all the content I may or may not have missed on my first run.

HOWEVER: If you are expecting a full, complete experience with a beginning, middle, and end, I'd encourage you to hold off on purchasing this. I'm a massive fan who knew it would be sold as an incomplete game to show support to Toby and the team, but others might not be as forgiving to want to pay $25 for something that currently doesn't have an ending, with no ETA as to when we'll see it. This isn't a slight on Toby or his team, as game development is challenging even when everything is going right. But it is a warning to those who think you'll be getting a finished product.

-BUY IT

-WAIT FOR SALE/PATCHES
-IGNORE IT

*Boots up the game*
*Hears the absolutely gorgeous title theme*
*Closes the game and buys the soundtrack*
*Boots up the game*

-Good quality of life improvements that get you in and out of hunts faster.
-Being able to save hunts as investigations really helps with getting certain monster parts/artian weapon parts.
-Focus strikes feel great to pull off no matter your preference of weapons.
-New monsters are a lot of fun to hunt.
-The story is fully low rank quests, and gets you prepared for the high rank hunts. You can get a good 30-40 hours just out of what's here until you hit HR50.
-Looks great with high resolution textures...provided your hardware will support it.

-Optimization is wretched. I have a PC that can handle this game at 120FPS in 1080p with the High Resolution Texture pack with frame gen, and I hate seeing the sentiment that "It runs fine for me, your hardware is bad". No, it's just bad and you have chosen to ignore it. Just because you and I are using hardware that is punching above the system requirements does not mean it's a flawless experience. Batman: Arkham Knight, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Spider-Man 2 were all lambasted with how awful their PC ports are, and Wilds deserves just as much scorn. Just because you think Capcom can do no wrong does not mean others can't call them out on it.
-The latest patch has introduced multiple crashes that happen at random intervals on a 7900XT, and it seems to be tied to doing Optional Quests and/or being in a Squad Party. I can play for hours doing random hunts but the second I try to finish one the last two quests I have, it keeps crashing. I've tried all the suggestions too: Shutting off frame gen, shutting off FSR, deleting the High Resolution texture pack, deleting and re-installing the shader cache, turn off Steam Overlay, doesn't matter. Once I do an Optional quest, it's not a matter of if it will crash, only when.
-Exploration is heavily discouraged. Sure, you can find pop-up camp sites, rare endemic life (That the game flat out tells you how and where to find) and resources, but the Seikret makes every zone fly-by territories that you zoom through to get to a monster. Your traversal options are also limited compared to Rise's Palamute and Wirebugs. Now it's all Seikret, all the time and you can't even do sick drifts with it like you can with the dog.
-The story, while interesting, drags on with shoddy pacing issues. 85% of the story quests are:

•Character asks if you're ready to go on mission, you select yes.
•After a loading screen, you get on your Seikret and walk slowly while everyone discusses what you're looking at. You use your slingshot to grab stuff and half pay attention.
•After walking for 2-3 minutes, you're stopped for a cutscene showing off the monster/characters talk about things before fighting a monster.
•You fight the monster for 5-10 minutes.
•After winning, there's a two sentence exchange you have with someone only for the game to fade to black for another cutscene.
•Repeat for the next mission.

-Multiplayer is still a pain to start, surprisingly so compared to the fixes they did for Rise. If you want to join a friend for a story quest, you still need to wait for them to watch a cutscene in order for you to hop in. I'm unsure of why this is a problem, since I beat the story before a friend did and there were cutscenes it forced me to watch again after a hunt. The technology to have the cutscenes play is clearly there, just make it so I can be there from the start.
-Absolutely no end game content yet. In World you got extra hunts for hitting HR50 and HR100. You get very trivial bonuses for hitting those, but outside of some Optional quests to do multi-hunts, you're fresh out of luck.
-So many control options that should just be the defaults. You need to change three separate settings if you don't want your Seikret to auto-move forward, even after pressing up and down on the D-Pad. Other useful features are buried under the settings menu somewhere waiting to be discovered.
-Let me turn tutorials off. After 40 hours of playing I don't need to be reminded of how to fish every. single. time. I cast the rod.
-There's no High Rank hunt of the game's final boss, and no weapons/armor set to go with it. You might think like me that maybe it needs a certain HR requirement or a special unlock. Nope, it's not there yet, and the only parts you can get from it are low-rank items that lose their usefulness the second you're done with that fight.

This game was not ready to be launched. Much like Rise locking off its true ending until a patch came by a month later to add it in, right now is the worst time to buy this game, especially on PC. You're better off waiting a couple months for patches to arrive, more content added in, and tweaks that will make both newcomers and long-time fans happy. As it stands, it deserves the Mixed (floating closer to a "Mostly Positive" at the time of this review) rating. I've mostly enjoyed what I played, but until some of what I talked about up top gets fixed, me and my friends are hanging up our Insect Glaives and Dual Blades in hopes of a better future.

-Buy It Now
-Leave It

Just have to do one more run to unlock all the endings, but this is a fantastic way to play the original game. However, it does have some notable issues:

-Controls are fluid, and I'm happy to see PC got mouse support and that you can rebind the keys.
-QoL improvements in Rewind are great for people playing for the first time. Jennifer rests faster, stamina recovers quicker, and the First Fear content being included is awesome, alongside having an Original mode to play it just like the Super Famicom version.
-Rewind and save feature seriously helps with unlocking all the endings quicker, instead of having to start a new game over and over.
-The motion comic, interviews, and other extras are all great to see for a long time fan of this series.
-Runs and plays great on Steam Deck, even with the touch screen!

-The pop-ups for unlocking extras take up the entire screen and are incredibly distracting. They should've either been a small ticker at the bottom of the screen, a notification in the corner, or only pop up once you're back at the menu. Having a big text box that says, "You unlocked a motion comic page!" the literal second the game's iconic villain shows up on screen is something I'm surprised got past playtesting.
-Strange slowdown issues if you play for over an hour straight. It goes away when you go back to the main menu, however.
-Some achievements are bugged are are unlocking too early. For example, a couple for defeating certain enemies unlock as soon as you encounter them, and not after defeating them.
-A couple grammar issues, such as Jennifer repeating a line of dialogue twice and instances of words being capitalized where it shouldn't be ("Lotte, You're still alive!!")
-This one is more of a personal preference, but I wish you could change the main menu's music. The vocal intro is utterly fantastic, but the option to not have it constantly on repeat while looking at extras would be nice.

Overall though, it's great for its introductory price, especially if you're a fan of the series, but it could've done with a bit more time in the oven.

Hoping to see Clock Tower 2 and, yes, even the abysmal Ghost Head get some modern ports too. If LRG is willing to throw money at Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, they can make it work.

I just wrapped up 100% completing the game, so I'll keep this very short and simple:

Then you'll appreciate all of the great quality of life features, including the ability to fast forward time, vastly improved survivor AI, new unlockables, restored cut content, and more! It might not be worth full price, but I'd say you're the intended audience for this game. And if you ever had a dreaded Xbox 360 Red Ring happen in your attempt to achieve 7 Day Survivor, I've got great news: The new fast forward feature works in that as well, along with the ability to suspend save!

Then you'll love the improved controls and really grow to love all of the above changes. Some of the jank is still there, but it's the kind of jank you grow to appreciate after a while of playing.

Then while I'll definitely say this is currently the best way to play it, there are some things here and there that got lost in translation (Some of them intentional), so while I do recommend you give this a playthrough, I'd also suggest playing the original right afterwards so you too can appreciate all of the new changes.

The new voice cast is more hit than miss, and while Frank's new actor really grew on me the longer I played it (But just as David Hayter will always be Snake, TJ will always be Frank West), Stephen and Brad and definite downgrades. I'm also not one to harp on the other changes made, as they seem to be more for selling the game in other countries than anything else. You can still buy and play the original game if they do personally bother you, though.

Tango Gameworks' games have always been hits for me, and seeing them get shut down after how well received Hi-Fi Rush was is a slap not only to the hard working developers, but to gaming as a whole.

The gaming space deserves more like it, and the consolidation of companies is only going to keep hurting this industry until there's nothing left.

A game being successful shouldn't put your studio at risk. And yet here we are.

Hi-Fi Rush is fantastic, and if it wasn't for Lies of P and Baldur's Gate 3 releasing last year, it would've been my game of the year, hands down. It deserves to be played.

Just finished the game 100%, and wanted to leave a positive review here to hopefully get this game to the "Overwhelmingly Postive" rating it deserves.

Seedy Eye managed to capture the goofiness and gameplay of the original CD-i games without the messy controls or wonky level designs where you could never tell what was a platform or just a part of the foreground. It doesn't overstay its welcome while encouraging exploration and even leaves you with a couple fun extras when the adventure is all done and dusted, and the soundtrack is just excellent all around.

There's some minor issues with the amount of backtracking you do, but the levels are thankfully short enough to where it doesn't feel like a chore (However, there's an item trade quest towards the end that sends you to one level, then to another, then back to the first level again), and some of the FMV video cutscenes don't look like they match the others in terms of quality (A few you can tell are just 3D models sometimes), but those are incredibly minor gripes in what is otherwise a fairly priced game that knows exactly how long it needs to be.

If you feel the need to go back to the YTP days of yore but with a good game attached to it this time, I guess you better get going!

The freedom of movement with the abilities you unlock could easily net this game a speedrunning scene in the future.

It's been a while since I played a 3D platforming with controls this tight and fluid, and they're really easy to get a hang of with both keyboard plus mouse and controller. The length-to-price ratio feels just right, and it'll take you about 3-5 hours depending on if you do any secret hunting.

If you like the flow of platforming in the trailer, don't even hesitate to pick this one up!