Recent reviews by "Bob" the Space Cadet

Dungeon of the Endless is an interesting mashup of turn-based/real-time tower defense, strategy, and RPG which uses each door you open as a turn, while your heroes and the monsters move about in real-time, with each turn effecting cool-downs, generating resources, and creating waves of monsters. It's a great looking game, and it works best with an Xbox compatible controller (I used an FC30 Pro) but it also worked with touchscreen controls, though it was a lot easier to use the controller.

At first I really didn't like Dungeon of the Endless, but since I liked the design so much I forced myself to give it a go. Once I started picking up the strategies of how to manage exploring and expanding while still protecting my core I really started to get into it and found it quite addictive. However, after playing for about 24 hours and still not being able to beat the game on the most difficult setting offered when you start a new game (that's easy) I was starting to get pretty tired of going over the same ground and not having much to show for it; and I wasn't about to take the difficulty down to very easy because that just feels insulting.

It's hard to decide whether to rate this up or down, but given that I did have a lot of fun playing it for many hours I'd say I definitely got my money's worth... it was just ultimately unsatisfying. If you're willing to put in the hours to get good at this, you might have a really good time, otherwise steer clear.

Karma Incarnation 1 is one third of a cutely psychedelic point and click adventure with light puzzling and some hidden objects. I played it entirely using touch screen controls, though at the start of the game some baffling keyboard/mouse controls were communicated to me without any dialogue. I ignored this and kept touching things intuitively on the screen, which seemed to work just fine.

In the first 40 minutes I met a guru, dosed my eyeballs with a psychotropic substance that let me see spirits and a new world of colour, then I jumped inside some kind of travel monster that took a blind man to eye-land, and then went to a beach rave with a flying saucer.

The only puzzle I found tedious was jumping through holes in a leaf to try to find the correct exit, but otherwise most things went smoothly without requiring trial and error or repetitive searching.

I can't wait to see the other two thirds of the game...

Everything is a nice casual "collect all the things" game, with some deep existential themes delivered through sound recordings of lectures that you can find scattered around the universe which aim to help you consider the nature of reality. You can inhabit the bodies of everything in Everything, even normally inanimate objects, moving to larger or smaller things in an infinite loop. You can recruit things and become a herd of anything. You can make your herd dance to reproduce more of the same thing. You can abandon your herd and become a cigarette.

I was a particle in black space, then I was a horse running in a field. A tree talked to me and then I was a herd of horses running free in a meadow. Then I was a monkey, then a rabbit, then I went down to a puddle and became a bunch of grass, bugs, mushrooms, rocks, and seeds; all growing, crawling, rolling, and dancing. Then I went deeper, became pollen, dust, atoms, and then I fell between the atoms and kept diving until I got back to something resembling a galaxy, then a sun, then a planet, then some giant rocks, then a huge mixed herd of animals, down into another puddle filled with different grass, bugs, mushrooms, rocks, and seeds. Then I retraced my steps back to the start and nothing was as I left it; that, or I was in the wrong place. I’m lost in the Universe and lost in myself. The journey is nice, even though I’m now in a city filled with garbage and traffic and stray dogs. I’m a gun rolling around on the street, wondering how I’m supposed to get home, or what home even means. Pew pew pew!

Edit: Nine hours later I finished the game tutorial.

Everything out of 10. It’s pretty good.

Legend of Kay seems like a good idea, and it gets a lot of good reviews, but that's often the problem with remasters - people get all nostalgic and look past the flaws.

In six hours of gameplay the toughest fight I had was with the camera. It frequently locks into a position where I can't look in the direction of upcoming obstacles or platforms, which results in missing many jumps and getting knocked down by many things.

The story is pretty dull. A martial arts trainee is spoken of in some prophecy and must save the village (along with some neighbouring villages). The game has voice acting, but many of the characters are written in a horrible way that makes the game seem laden with casual racism, rather than the voice actors just having those accents naturally.

I didn't finish Legend of Kay, but I don't feel like punishing myself any further. Six hours was more than enough, and there are much better third person action/adventure games on Steam - Psychonauts, The Last Tinker: City of Colours, and Oceanhorn, for example.

Max: The Curse of the Brotherhood is a pretty slick puzzle platformer. It's well animated with good cut scenes, the graphics look good, and it's very nicely voiced too. The first Max and the Magic Marker game was pretty good, but this is a vast improvement. Instead of drawing items while making sure you have enough ink to do so, all marker actions are context specific and ink management is no longer a concern, which makes the puzzles a lot tighter with a specific solution, but also more enjoyable because you'll always have the right amount of ink to find the correct solution to each puzzle/obstacle.

You don't need to play the first game at all to enjoy the Curse of the Brotherhood, so feel free to skip the first game entirely. The plot of this game doesn't tie in with the first much at all, and closely resembles the 1986 David Bowie film "Labyrinth", in which an older sibling asks the goblin king (in the case of Max, he goes on the internet and asks an old man with a mustache... creepy) to take his/her younger brother away, and when it actually works he/she has to go into a fantasy land to save him.

I played Max on a laptop and tried a number of input methods, the best by far I found to be using an Xinput compatible controller (I used an FC30 Pro, but any Xbox style controller should do the job). Touch screen wasn't usable which was pretty disappointing, and though the mouse trackpad did work, some time-sensitive actions were impossible to carry out using the trackpad. A regular mouse would probably be fine, but the controller has the advantage of the magic marker snapping-to on the nearest interactive object, and continuous direction by holding down the analogue stick, which is important in the later levels where you have to raise yourself up on high platforms quite quickly.

Rust is like meth. It's fun at first, but you'll end up alone, cowering in the bushes outside your own house, cold and naked in the rain, waiting to stab someone with a screwdriver bash someone's head in with a rock, but you just keep wanting more and are powerless to stop yourself.

Tentacult is a perfect example of a great concept executed badly.

At first it's quite fun, even cathartic, watching people scream and run away as you attempt to mutilate their bodies and release the octopus demon from within befriend them, but the numerous problems that build up as you play and make Tentacult seem more like an early access game than a final version. The two worst offenders making this game feel unfinished are grouping/path-finding and the level design.

Grouping/path-finding - everyone seems to be having trouble with this. You can get your little buddies to clump together by pressing space, or on an Xbox controller by double tapping (for some reason?) the A button. Pressing these buttons will only help if your newly converted friends are within a certain limited radius, but if they have gotten themselves wedged somewhere, prepare for some tedious maneuvering or leave them behind.

Level design - it's really unpolished and includes a lot of unclear obstacles. There are invisible walls that block you, and visible walls that you can walk through. Numerous times I have experienced clipping through the ground, and sometimes (what I assume people are mistaking for the ability to jump) being ejected into the air due to obstacles or sometimes for no apparent reason. I could be wrong about that; maybe there is a jump button, but nothing on my keyboard or Xbox controller seemed to do it and since the in game controls only list WASD for movement and nothing else (not even space for clumping), I'm assuming the "jumping" is caused by flaws in the level design.

Some of the later levels can be frustrating so the urge to give up may be great. I struggled through to the end and was rewarded with nothing. The final level was just used to show you the credits, written on the road you walk along, and there was no end cinematic! I assume there was meant to be one because you LITERALLY GO TO THE CINEMA, but no, it just kind of ends and you quit the game feeling disappointed.

Despite it's problems I do like Tentacult; it just has too many issues for me to be able to recommend it to anyone else.

I feel pretty conflicted about whether Insanity's Blade is actually good or not. It has a really classic feel, providing instant nostalgia with the old-school basic gameplay of spamming attacks and basic platforming, accompanied by some really nice arcade music and sound effects; but it's not as enjoyable as it could be, simply because it's lacking a lot of polish.

Where Insanity's Blade doesn't cut it:

- It's glitchy, but nothing game breaking.

- The difficulty curve is really unusual. The second boss fight was pretty much the hardest fight in the game - to the point that I was considering giving up because replaying the cave level was getting so repetitive. After getting past that boss everything was pretty simple; even the final boss took me less tries.

- The gamepad controls are not well thought out. A is melee AND ranged attack, B is jump, X is throw. You can remap the buttons, but if you make attack B, then it also becomes "confirm" in menus, which was even more confusing.

- Melee and ranged attacks are combined. As it is you'll mostly just mash A to progress through levels when you're not having to do some of the platforming. Occasionally throw is worthwhile when an enemy blocks your attacks, but spamming melee/ranged is usually the safer option.

- In story mode you progress through a map, and collectible weapons are hidden (sometimes not very well) within the stages you play through. Despite having a map where you can select the level from, you can't revisit a level you've already completed - so if you miss a weapon, you can't go back for it. Why even bother making me select dots on a map?

- Level design isn't great. The worst level design element is the moving spiky blocks as there is no consistency to how they appear. Sometimes they'll be completely hidden in the ceiling and you'll only know there is one that might be coming down when you see falling particles, but those particles don't line up properly, and if the particles started falling while there were off-screen, they won't appear as you move across under it resulting in being suddenly and unavoidably crushed.

Despite all it's faults I really enjoyed playing Insanity's Blade. I wish there was more polish on Insanity's Blade, but then the glitches, unbalanced difficulty curve, and unfair deaths make it feel even more accurate to the old-school style they were going for.


I played Insanity's Blade on Windows 8.1, using the 8Bitdo FC30 Pro gamepad in xinput mode for additional retro feels.

"As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball; but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"

Meltdown is a pretty basic isometric third-person shoot-em-up, where you shoot a lot of robots that can get a bit samey appearance-wise, and things definitely get a bit grindy gameplay-wise, but it's still pretty fun. One of the things that impressed me the most was the fact that I could play lag free on public servers with a friend connecting from Estonia (and I'm in Australia). You can't talk or issue commands to your teammates within the game, so communication is limited to pointing and twirling.

7 out of 10. Would twirl towards freedom.

Dyscourse is a bit unusual as a "decisions matter" style of adventure game because the unofficial tagline should be "MAKE ALL THE DECISIONS!!!".

You awake from a plane wreck on a remote island and quickly come across a group of survivors. You need to choose "wisely" to help the group survive, but once you complete the game you gain access to a day rewind option which will allow you to attempt pushing the story down different branches until you are literally pushing other survivors down branches just to see if they will fall and die because why not? This really is the main point of the game, and it's fun for a while but I got to a point where I was satisfied that I'd seen everything I wanted to see. According to the achievements list I've only seen 41% of all possible story events, but it just seems like it would be punishing to attempt to unlock every minor event. I'd rather put Dyscourse down while I still feel like it was a refreshingly unique game rather than grind my way through every possible arc just so that I can say I saw it all.

6 out of 10, it wasn't a total plane wreck ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)