Recent reviews by bluefootednewt

-scene from Ratatouille where the critic flashes back to his childhood except it's me playing EarthBound-

Another victory for democracy!

Immediately was struck by the feeling early Minecraft gave me, where throwing a lot of gameplay mechanics in a blender and letting the player decide which they wanna focus on has worked spectacularly. Tons of fun with friends too, this is the first game in a long time where I've seen crazy builds and thought "I can do that". The pals tie it all together.

Quite a bit more difficult than I expected (especially in the personal missions), and frankly I wasn't expecting it to be a true roguelike in the sense that your character always starts out with a random assortment of items and you don't share items or money, but I really like what I've played so far. Hopefully I get better at it soon, though, I have yet to get past an audacious mission.

Psyonix: "Our purchase by Epic will not affect updates on Steam going forward and we will continue to support it for existing purchasers."

[PRESS X TO DOUBT]

"Well done on achieving this great feat. You persevered and you triumphed. We hope you enjoyed yourself in the world of Hollow Knight."

I did, I really did. This game does just about everything right.

From a presentation standpoint, the game is pretty much perfect; the animations are beautiful, the environments are gorgeous and varied so the game never feels repetitive, the music is atmospheric and lonely when it needs to be and intense and blood-pumping when it needs to be.

The story is interesting, though it's not something that's at the forefront. A lot of environmental storytelling, a lot of lore that you'll find if you seek it out, but it's never in your face and most of it is quite good, it's just not obvious about it. But that's fine, because the focus is clearly meant to be on the gameplay. Speaking of which...

The gameplay hits pretty much all the right notes. Learning enemy movements and how they're meant to work alongside your own is the key to getting good at this game; the movement feels nice and the combat is simple, but the enemies are complex enough to keep you on your toes (especially the bosses). The charm system is great, too, allowing for a wide variety of experimentation and seeing what works best for you.

That being said, the majority of the game I wouldn't say is difficult. There are a few curves here and there, but there really aren't any massive off-putting spikes in difficulty except for one, which I'll get to in a moment. Aside from that, the game hit just the right balance for me most of the time; never too easy to be boring, and almost never too hard to be off-putting.

There's one area I need to talk about, though, and that's The White Palace. ♥♥♥♥ the White Palace. ♥♥♥♥ it hard. This is one of the most baffling things I've ever seen in a game. It's annoying, it's more difficult than it has any right to be, the checkpoints are unforgiving, and it was basically designed to be cheesed using the honey charm. It also throws the presentation out the window with all the buzzsaws that look out of place and are annoying to even hear the sound of. It's this game's Water Room, only where as the Water Room was mercifully short, this segment just goes ON AND ON. It's easily the weakest part of the game and even though it's optional, it's the one thing that keeps this game from being a 10/10 for me.

For all of my gripes with that, though, this game was still overwhelmingly a blast for me, and a real reminder of what a great metroidvania feels like. I got through 95% of the game and spent around 38 hours in it according to the in-game timer. And for just $15, that is an absolute steal.

9/10, absolutely worth playing.

Like many others, I'm just going to recommend you go into this game knowing as little as possible. Excellent art, excellent music, and somehow simultaneously containing both the most simple and most complex game mechanics I've seen in a game, and I mean that in the best way. Go and pick this one up.

After playing this game all the way to 100% completion, I have a surprising amount to say about it, and most of it is very good.

ICEY is, at its core, a game meant to be "picked apart," going through the various endings that in turn, pick apart concepts of game design, game development, and even how attached a player should be to the main character. Comparisons to The Stanley Parable are very justified in this regard, but I think there's a few ways that it actually excels beyond Stanley.

The first and most obvious is the action game elements, which are pretty good in their own right. Simple enough to be understood, but can provide a challenge on the harder difficulty if that's what you're looking for.

The second way is that The Stanley Parable, while still a great game, suffers from the law of diminishing returns as the players gets more and more endings; eventually the surrealness wears off and the player won't be inclined to see them all. I wouldn't be shocked to learn that a big majority of players have never seen all the endings. With ICEY, there's a sense of progression since you know you're working towards a "true" ending (which I'll come back to in a minute) that you need to get all the other endings to unlock. And the endings also vary widely in tone, some of them are humorous, some are horrifying, some are a very neat look into the creative process one goes through when making a game.

Unfortunately, this is where my biggest criticism of the game comes in: if you asked me the steps you needed to take to get on the path of getting the true ending, I honestly couldn't tell you. I've looked through numerous Steam guides and none of them seemed to help me unlock what I needed. The last hour or so of me playing was just getting as many endings as I could at random until I found what was evidently the "right" one; it wasn't just a matter of getting 32/34 achievements like the guides I found said.

All that said, I absolutely still recommend ICEY. It's cheap and even comes with the soundtrack for free. That's another thing: the soundtrack is very, very nice and fits the tone of the game very well, though I'm not sure it's something I'll be listening to a lot in my spare time.

There are very few games that can tell a beautiful story without any words. Games such as Journey and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons are some excellent examples, and now we have A Bird Story.

While short, about an hour or so in length, this is a fantastic story with beautiful visuals and music. While it may not have the same impact that To the Moon had on me, it felt as though it was trying to be something different; hence the complete lack of dialogue.

On the whole, this is a quite nice, if short experience, and it is certainly worth your time and the $5 asking price. The soundtrack is absolutely worth it, as well, so I recommend picking up the soundtrack along with it.

There's so much that I could say about this game. The Metroidvania-esque combat is incredible, the gameplay feels satisfying, the characters and even the enemies are surprisingly diverse an creative, and, hell, even the story's great. This is a game that will remain in my head for quite some time.