Recent reviews by Alex EatDonut

Devilmayquake.com

I am rating this, fully aware that it is an 11 minute tech demo.

As a free teaser it's fine, even good, but it has glaring issues, as it looks noisy and hard to read, runs pretty bad and has serious issues with camera shake that you cannot disable.

The UI recreating the Source UI is honestly a bad idea. It makes it hard to put a large amount of options in the options menu, and you'd honestly expect the switch to UE to benefit the game UI to spread its legs and not be bound by 2004 Source engine.

Hoping the full experience fixes those.

When I started, I thought I hated the game, it made me anxious like crazy and I was barely making any progress.
Then it clicked, and I will happily play more.

KH fans will play peak KH gameplay only to make a 16 gagillion hours video to say it's mid.

"There is a traitor among us" is an actual line in this series.

"...сon lentitud poderosa" is literally peak music and already worth spending money on it. I want it played when they lower my casket into my grave.

Getting into Kingdom Hearts is a lot like doing drugs. You'll be happy, you'll be sad, and once it's over you'll be wondering what the ♥♥♥♥ just happened.

I believe this app is bound by the same issues as the xbox game streaming on the windows xbox app. That means that it is extremely weird when it comes to forcing a controller to be connected to the streaming app... even when the controller is literally connected to the xbox because your setup just has the xbox on a shelf next to the PC.

It's baffling that this is basically the Xbox game streaming test app i've used in 2021 and uninstalled for these very reasons in 2023, repackaged yet still as bad as ever.

I guess the value of this app comes from being able to use it on linux (and thus steam deck) but geez, you're not gonna even fix the horrible user experience ?

It still baffles my mind that the first thing this app did in 2021 and STILL DOES on PC is add a non removable overlay of a controller with mouse control. It serves 0 purpose, nuke it, please. Or at least give me the option to just outright get rid of it without it being dodgy like setting its opacity to 0%.
I want a disable button, not an opacity slider.

I just wanted to stream the xbox game to my pc, it worked, but then this app made so that every button has turbo mode on it, making long press inputs impossible. My guess is that this app is a repackaging of an already flawed app, that microsoft had clearly no intentions on fixing, even in 2021.

I just wanted to see my xbox screen on my PC as a window and play throught that, and you somehow fail to do it.

Despite many hours spents, despite getting every achievements, despite getting max bond level with every party member and after having experienced pretty much all of the content outside of the ranked missions, I still can't recommand this game.

Now don't get me wrong, this is one of my favourite games out there, I love it, but not because of its gameplay.

Comparing this game to something as old as Kingdom Hearts 1, released in 2002, Scarlet Nexus is an embarrassement. It is the bare minimum that an action RPG can provide. The hits with normal attacks feel weak, there is no magic but instead you have Psychokinesis, which is just Telekinesis. You can throw stuff on your enemies but it isn't satisfying, nothing is satisfying in this game. The enemy design is wacky, and most enemies have attacks that are hard to telegraph.

The gameplay is helped by powers of your party members, but they aren't interesting, they momentarily buff your character, but it doesn't help the sheer dissapointement and lack of feedback of your attacks. The game only become reasonably okay when you unlock the combo visions, which deal good bursts of damage, but they come too late, at that point, I wouldn't be surprised that you already refunded the game.

All of these problems are slightly mitigated by the "skill tree", which is just slight stat increases and things that you should of had from the beginning. There also are items that you can equip that gives you upgrades to some mecanics that should have been permanent. The game is baffling in its design, it's barely fun at the end game, you're only saved in the end by being overlevelled compared to everything, which, by the way, it takes 20 hours to go from around level 60(that you naturally reach at the end of the game first playthrought) to level 99. It is a grind that isn't fun, with barely no way to speed it up, especially considering the 20 hours were WITH whatever EXP boosts i could find.

Watching a friend play FF7 remake and explain to me the mecanics of that game made me realise how bare bones Scarlet Nexus is, it has no strategizing, you do the same things again and again. There is no build you can make, you can only give stat boosts to your characters, this is a nothing game. I have never felt such resentement towards a game, because it promises so much, delivers so little and just fails at being an interesting game with depth and variety. There is nothing special to do, all you can do is grind, complete arbitrary requests and try to S rank every mission with their arbitrary requierments. The gameplay is shallow with artificial replay value. It is a frustrating mess.

So why do I love the damn game so much ?

Well, the story struck a cord with me. It talks about many things : humanity, humility, pride, worth, responsibility, purpose, life, death and mourning. There are so many themes, and all of that just make the characters feel human, even despite the very "anime writing". The characters breath life like no other game I've played yet.
I legitimitly wanted to hang out with the cast, even those who seem annoying at first glance. Getting to learn everything about those characters drove me to keep playing the game. The standby phases where the game's focus was on character developement were the best parts of the game, and they could last as long if not longer than the story phases.

The story is not good writing, I won't even go to that direction, but the characters feel human, they all have flaws, emotions and ambitions, you get to know, understand and support what drives them to do what they do. The characters are the reason you keep playing the game, because they and the world of Scarlet Nexus are written extremely well.

There is so much content in this game, a lot of it is gameplay padding, but the sheer amount of dialogue, character interactions definitly go a long way to make this game one of my favourite games of all time.

I honestly have no idea how good the anime is, it might miss out on the party member bond chapters, and if it does, it will be hard for me to recommend any of the two. Pick your poison, I guess.

I don't know how to end this review, I usually rate games on a scale of "it's ok / not ok", but I'll sit out this one. This game is just too special for me to rate it.
If you get into the stories of games you play, go for it, but if you never pay attention to stories of game you play and don't care for anything any game will show you, this game will leave an extremely sour taste in your mouth and you will most likely take a long time to recover.

I watched Pyrocynical's Cruelty Squad video 11 times in its entirety and I will do it again.