Recent reviews by chewfeather

It plays very well into its big gimmick, and it packs its environments with enough varied content to be satisfying. It has room for improvement (inventory management is missing a couple of big and obvious conveniences; overall difficulty is probably a little too low because of a few trivializing abilities and *very* stupid enemy behavior; ending IMO didn't quite live up to the quality of some other parts of the game) but overall it exceeded my expectations.

It's a little bit unpolished in places (animations sometimes a little lacking; no progress indication for some one-off objectives; etc.) and it could stand to do a little more to accentuate the differences between its character classes (i.e. the characters are very different in theory, but their gimmicks are mechanically easy enough to use that you end up not having to think about the differences *that* much) but on the whole it succeeds in doing what it feels like it sets out to do. It feels satisfying when a build comes together just right; it feels challenging but doable when the build pieces don't show up; the various optional objectives feel appropriate. All in all, this game delivers the experience that its trailer leads players to expect.

In Exit the Gungeon, the developers transform Enter the Gungeon from a top-down shooter into a platforming shooter, while retaining unchanged gun behaviors, item behaviors, and enemy behaviors wherever possible. They greatly simplify various resource-management mechanics in order to accomplish a streamlined, twitchy, almost claustrophobic short-run game-style, and they update boss attack-patterns to account for the player's increased level of aerial maneuverability. Mechanically, all these things are accomplished very well; the game feels fair and satisfying, albeit a little too easy once higher-value items have been unlocked.

Unfortunately, rather than experiencing what this game had to offer and then putting it down, or continuing until I was satisfied by the hours spent in refining my strategies and reactions in pursuit of Master Rounds and optional-boss wins, I made the poor decision to attain all of the achievements.

Unfortunately, that ill-advised pursuit brings out three glaring flaws.
1) Sheer grind. In order to obtain the achievements for purchasing all costumes and hats, even after the player has accomplished all available skill-based challenges and fulfilled all (secret, not-even-hinted) unlock conditions, it will still be necessary to play *dozens* of additional full runs through the whole game just to stack up enough Hegemony Credits to make these purely-cosmetic purchases. Why make an achievement to do this? How is gameplay enhanced by taking the game a player has already beaten a dozen times and encouraging them to beat it three dozen times more for something that won't change the gameplay experience at all? An achievement tied to making a small number of these purchases, to signpost the existence of these cosmetics and encourage their use, would be understandable; this pointless grind is not.
2) Monotony. As suits the game's streamlined style, there's not a lot of variation in how the five levels on any given route play out; one will soon have seen all the possible room configurations, and experienced most of the meaningful item-synergies. The game *almost* embraces one way of providing different objectives, in that many NPCs have a special quest which must be activated by repeatedly exhausting their dialogue (another fact which is easily missed and not hinted anywhere); unfortunately, every such character gives you the exact same quest, to go obtain an item from the same place in the same way, just with different dialogue and visuals surrounding their request. (Well, not quite always *exactly* the same; one character wants TWO items rather than one, so you have to go to the same place and get an item in the same way... twice. Ok...) Between these phoned-in quests and the eventually trivial difficulty of the overall game, the already dull grind for resources was made worse by the lack of anything new or interesting to experience while doing it.
3) Lack of agency. I expected the hat-and-costume achievements to be the last ones unlocked; I was wrong. That distinction goes to the achievement to play a specific minigame 10 times. Sounds like no problem. However, that minigame is the province of one NPC, out of a dozen of NPCs that can appear in the Gungeon, and of which generally only a couple will randomly appear in the course of a given run. This means that if you need a *specific* NPC to appear, you are probably going to be playing about *six entire runs* just to see them *once*, and that's if your luck is no worse than average. To add one last insult to this injury, when talking to this NPC to find out how much their minigame will cost this time, selecting one dialogue option with insufficient funds unexpectedly locks you out of playing the minigame on that run, even after returning with sufficient funds. This fun discovery was made when I only needed one additional play to finish the objective, obliging several more hours of "gameplay" before the NPC could be found again. Once more: What positive gameplay experience is this achievement meant to either encourage or highlight? Why put this in when the player can't even influence whether this NPC is going to appear? Why require a number of plays so high that one can finish every other achievement in the time it takes to encounter the NPC that many times? It's just thoughtless.

So, it is to this negative experience that this negative review is dedicated. Despite the game's strengths, achievements are going to be important to some players; when a game contains poorly-designed achievements that lead to an unpleasant gameplay experience, it must be expected that some negative reviews will reflect this experience.

Within the category of card-game-combat roguelites, out of the dozen or so I've played, this is probably my favorite one. What it lacks in many-run replayability, it makes up for in mechanics and appropriately impactful decisions.

First, the good. While revolving around the same core battle mechanics as most card-battler roguelites (i.e. on your turn, you play cards from your hand using finite per-turn and per-battle resources, balancing offensive and defensive and utility actions according to the displayed next-move-intents of your opponents), Banners of Ruin has enough mechanics not usually seen within the genre to make it feel distinct from its competitors (e.g. positional mechanics in combat, controlling a squad of characters with separate resource-pools and distinct passives and cards). A large pool of available cards and passives and a very limited ability to thin the deck makes it difficult to pursue exactly the same strategy every time, forcing the player to consider new additions in light of the current situation rather than always reaching for exactly the same solutions.

The game does have a few weaknesses. Unlocking the 'true' final battle requires fulfilling the same somewhat-tedious sidequest every run; it would be better if this sidequest's requirements could vary somewhat from run to run. Likewise, the final battle has unique mechanics that feel appropriately dramatic and challenging when first encountered, but those mechanics make certain cards useless, so in future runs one just never takes or strategizes around those cards again; it would be better if the boss didn't just invalidate the same category of cards every run. Overall, for reasons like these, I feel the lack of variation in the overall shape of the campaign limits the replayability value.

For the most part, the level of polish feels pretty high, making some bugs or design issues more surprising. Map-events display a 'countdown' of how long they will stay on the board, but sometimes this countdown ticks down multiple times after visiting just one other location without apparent reason. Enemy intent-icons are usually reliable about expressing what the enemy action can do, but they are inconsistent about reporting important information such as whether the attack can inflict bleed. The player has a 'stash' of up to two not-currently-equipped items, but storing any weapon or shield in this stash causes that item to be included in the deck as a dead card that no squadmember can play, an outcome both unexpected and much too disadvantageous to ever knowingly choose. Having DLC content installed injects irrelevant material into the main game; two different events in the base campaign gave a reward only applicable to the DLC character who has never appeared at all in the campaign.

Nevertheless, even with these shortcomings, I found this game superior to many of its competitors, and can only wish more games provided as much to experience and strategize about over the course of the first few runs.

"Curse of the Moon 2 brings classic 2D action and a dark, 8-bit aesthetic together with modern playability."

It seems "modern playability" means something very different depending on who's saying it. I don't expect a game with "modern playability" to struggle to recognize a standard wired XBox One controller, to lack the ability to rebind simple functions like the pause button, or to inconsistently interpret the jump+attack input as a pause input. Clumsy controls may be a time-honored source of difficulty in the Castlevania-like genre, but I don't expect a game with "modern playability" to get all its lategame difficulty from clumsy controls and inscrutable patterns either.

Playing levels wasn't fun and beating levels wasn't satisfying. I don't have anything positive to say about it.

On the simple side, but reasonably satisfying for it. Combat largely rewards mastery of fundamentals: spacing, timing, and identifying windows of opportunity to go on the attack vs. when it is necessary to be defending and repositioning instead. Items and abilities are impactful and swingy, but continued success still comes down to fundamentals. Reasonably generous amounts of hitstun and the ability to negate projectiles with melee attacks means that there are multiple valid tactics to deal with most situations, and the aggressive choice is accordingly higher risk and higher reward.

My only criticism is that it'd be nicer to expose a few more numbers; it's somewhat unsatisfying to select a third or fourth stack of an item without any insight as to how much it's actually going to improve the ability it offers, given an unknown amount of diminishing returns per item stack. That's a small nitpick; on the whole, the game certainly exceeded my expectations relative to its appearance.

Good job.

It's got a reasonable amount of content and lots of interacting subsystems in it, they all work fine without significant bugs, it's stable over long runtimes...

It's just all. So. Boring.

I can't recall the last game I saw that incentivized so many hours of the most menial possible in-game tasks, or that had such a long and repetitive campaign of wandering through every world-region and dungeon spamming right-click to kill everything with the exact same spell.

Want to do some weapon or armor crafting? Hope you enjoy holding down leftclick to mine ore for literal hours. Even if you've got an autoclicker to do it for you, have fun running it dozens of times at different places in the game world to cover the different types and sizes of ore, with a high failure rate until you've ground your mining skill up to an acceptable level. Then enjoy the interminable banality of the one-button crafting minigames, where you first smelt your thousands of ore into thousands of ingots, then turn those thousands of ingots into hundreds of copies of low-level items to attain a skill level where you can finally craft something useful. And don't forget the joy of doing the same single-button-minigame grind for every separate type of crafting there is: cooking, weaving, you name it, each with a list of recipes to idly craft thousands of times to reach the useful upper echelons of the system. Fun.

Sounds tedious? Why not play the card-game minigame instead. Maybe you've played an RPG before where there's a card-game you can play with various NPCs, improving your collection by winning cards from them and trying to collect unique cards. This game has one! For what it is, it's even decently designed, with a few interesting card selection choices to make, and enough strategical consideration that you're not just slamming your cards down wherever. So far, so good.
But now suppose you take it into your head to do the card-game questline, which begins in the first town and spans the entire gameworld, or perhaps to chase the achievement for having 'all shiny cards'. Well, now you need to play cards against every single NPC in the game world save for a very few who don't play cards. And if you're chasing those shiny cards, every single opponent has one or more unique cards that can only be received from them... and you may have to play five or ten games against that opponent before they even choose to use their shiny card... and then you have to play the round in such a way that you not only win the round overall, but have control of that card at the end of the round.
Literally hundreds of times. There are NPCs that won't play with you unless you have obtained more than a hundred such unique cards; play with such NPCs is compulsory for the wider card-game questline. And, while it's a fine little diversion from other gameplay, the complexity of the card game is more like a Triple Triad than a Gwent; it's a cute minigame but it absolutely doesn't stand on its own. So much like the crafting system, they've taken a fine initial idea, then made it SO tedious and repetitive that one loses all enthusiasm for it. I got maybe three quarters of the way through these collect-a-thon objectives before my questioning of my life-decisions reached a level too critical to continue.

Unfortunately, the core explore-and-fight gameplay is much like one of these minigames writ large. You can equip all sorts of armaments, raise your relevant skill levels with all of them, assemble a band of captured monsters with differing stats and natures to support you, put together a hotbar of abilities, warm up your dodge-rolling finger, and go to many locales facing dozens of distinct enemy types which attack with projectiles or AOEs of varying shapes and elements... but it's not actually beneficial to *engage* with any of those features of the system. You pick a multi-target damaging spell with a good projectile pattern, you level it up, and you proceed through every region and dungeon from beginning to end just spamming your chosen spell and occasionally reapplying buffs, ignoring all the projectiles and attacks coming your way because you're just going to regen-tank them anyway so there's no need to dodge. Chose an ice spell but now you're fighting enemies and bosses made of ice? Doesn't matter, they take all the ice damage and die anyway, so you don't even need to vary your element until perhaps the very end when you find a piece of gear that synergizes too well with particular elements to turn down. And that's the game! Right down to the dramatic final encounter, where you stand in place suspensefully spamming your default attacks and damaging spell for several minutes while a scary sprite rolls around and ineffectively tickles your healthbar. Riveting.

There's clearly a lot of work that went into this game. A lot of sprites; a lot of world; a lot of levers that open a lot of doors, and a lot of NPCs all eagerly ready to send you on their own flavor of fetch-or-craft-or-both quest. But at every turn, rather than differentiating these subsystems from each other with some sort of strategic or mechanical challenge, rewarding you for insight or forethought or mechanical skill, it just gates things behind endless repetition. If it had taken these systems and refined them just a little farther-- make combat interactive rather than rote and spammy; do something interesting with the 5 crafting types rather than giving them all the same dull one-button minigame requiring nigh-endless repetition; back off on the sheer tedium of needing to track down every single new npc to play multiple games of cards with them in order to do card-game objectives; etc.-- it might be kind of impressive, but as it is it feels like there's a cargo-cult attempt to imitate successful systems from other games without understanding what actually makes them engaging or fun.

It's a large and reasonably well put together project but the gameplay just isn't there.

There's the core of a very good game in here but once one gets deeper into the game's content a succession of poor decisions turn it tedious and irritating instead of enjoyable. Individually, or in a game that worked differently, they wouldn't be problems, but here they very quickly culminate in a tiresome and unrewarding experience.

This review was too long for Steam so it has been shortened, and as a result some points are less thoroughly illustrated.

In order to understand the issues, it is necessary to understand some underlying facts about the game.
- The combat system primarily revolves around fights against multiple enemies at a time. The enemies have clear indications when they are winding up for an attack; different attacks come out after different delays following an indication.
- The combat system is designed around the idea that the player should be aiming to avoid all the damage through a combination of positioning, interruptions, dodges, and parries, depending on loadout and playstyle. Taking any non-ailment damage puts the player into a brief hit-stun in which no action is possible, so any additional attacks which occur during that window cannot be avoided.
- The game is one of attrition. Once one has cleared the initial difficulties, healing is limited to small incremental sources with random availability; until one finds such robust source/s of healing, taking even one hit per room can be too much damage to mitigate through incidental means.

With those facts known, the problems of the game can be understood more clearly.

Problem #1: A run's viability depends on too many random elements, some of which can be seen at the start of a run and some of which cannot. Once a player rises to a skill level that they find challenging, a viable run requires: a) weapon drops of acceptable type and good quality, b) a floor layout that doesn't make too many desired rooms mutually exclusive, c) random relic-drops which provide damage-synergies with the specific weapon types, elements, or playstyle that the player has selected items for, and d) sources of healing and ideally sources of corruption-mitigation of sufficient strength to keep up with whatever few hits a player does take, subject again to random drops. Once a player has *some* amount of all of the above, a run can begin to feel viable and fun as long as the player plays continuously at their peak, but until the player has managed to assemble these elements, the run is a punishing grind with many opportunities for small errors and very little opportunity to recover from them; without the above items, enemies are tediously tanky even when not being healed, and any error can result in a crushing loss of health (e.g. easily 20%+ in the first room) that cannot be readily replenished. The end result is that, apart from the occasional lucky run, one spends the vast majority of one's time feeling underpowered and chasing necessary items which may or may not even materialize at all, to repeated irritation and disappointment when something goes wrong. Repeated runs feeling continually punished and never rewarded is a boring experience that leaves very little interest in beginning yet another run whose ability to be fun at all is subject to the separate rolls of so many unpredictable dice. Many roguelikes suffer from the issue where the run feels boring and slow until you get at least one good piece of gear, but the fact that in this game you need several unrelated pieces of luck just to turn on at all makes it difficult to feel any enthusiasm for returning to this title.

Problem #2: Disincentives to switch up one's playstyle. The tedium of attempting the same thing over and over can be broken up by the novelty of going about it in a different way. Unfortunately, the game largely provides no benefit to doing so. Once you determine what weapons provide a combination of acceptable damage output and acceptable safety of attack pattern, you will always prefer those weapons; finding a great weapon of a non-preferred type is useless if your use of that weapon type opens you up to too many enemy attacks. Similarly, even if you find a good weapon of another preferred type, once you have already started sinking resources into upgrading a single weapon in a run, it is generally too late to switch because of the loss of the upgraded DPS, which is desperately needed to quickly whittle groups of enemies down to a more manageable, less-unpredictable crowd size. By the time you start finding relics which give strong bonuses to a given element or equipment type, chances are you are already locked into your current equipment for the above reasons. All of the factors which could provide a reason to assess different available options and switch one's build for an improvement are rendered less viable by these design choices.

Problem #3: Tedious level design forces the player to make tradeoffs between benefit and sheer boredom. Once a player knows the room layouts, situations arise where a given area contains nothing but a pittance of free gold, but the rote navigation of that area to pick up the small-but-desirable amount of gold will take 30 seconds of doing nothing interesting. If the player is already stuck in the boredom-loop of trudging through the dungeon trying to assemble a minimally viable loadout yet again, sprinkling in areas of no challenge and almost-negligible reward just drags out the boredom longer. Similarly, the light/darkness mechanic is interesting in theory, but in practice it just introduces more slowness and clunkiness to the navigation of the dungeon, as well as the occasional nigh-unreactable damage source in fights where establishing a light source was not feasible.

Problem #4: Stinginess of meta-run progress. There are a few things on which certain currencies may be spent between runs in order to make the runs easier. A few of them, in the beginning of the game, are significant; once one has those significant few, the remainder are quite marginal, and give no numerical bonuses while in the game, only an increased chance to start with or find the gear-pieces that one is looking for. But even those small conveniences (e.g. at the beginning of a run, choose from 4 randomly-generated starting sets of low-level equipment rather than 3) are nonsensically priced; it can take a week of successfully clearing one-attempt-per-day modes whose ONLY reward is the upgrade currency JUST to buy one incremental upgrade.

Problem #5: Poor visual clarity. If a game is going to punish the player so harshly for taking a hit, the game should ensure that threats are at least telegraphed reliably. Unfortunately, this game's visuals frequently make it difficult to even see what's going on: attacks with flashy elemental weapons frequently obscure the enemies being hit by them so much that one can't tell whether the enemy is in hitstun or winding up an attack unless one focuses so closely on that enemy that it becomes different to respond to threats from the periphery. Similarly, the game just doesn't bother to make visual distinctions between things like AoE attacks that can be dodged and ones that ignore dodge-invulnerability. The harsher the punishments a game inflicts for errors, the more 'fair' the game must be in adjudication of those errors; in this case, the game frequently elects to obscure the very information that a player needs in order to overcome its combat through skillful responses.

Visually and thematically there's a lot to like about this game but the sheer number of easily-fixable issues contributing to a tedious, joyless play-experience at higher difficulties cannot be overlooked.

Starts off well, but falls off in every way the farther one gets into it. By the end, the game abandons all attempt at either resolving the plots it set up or having anything to say about the topics it suggests it wants to explore. Some of the gameplay is good, and here and there there are some fantastic visuals and pleasing takes on classic pieces of music, but the platforming suffers too much from its own flaws to even begin redeeming the narrative issues, and the narrative issues are too severe to look past.

First, the good. Early on, the writing is engaging and clever: characters are portrayed with some nuance, and situations are unexpected and interesting. All throughout, the visuals are very good, from the high-effort and varied spritework to the various visual effects and manipulations that are applied both during gameplay and cutscene segments. Similarly, the audio features numerous chiptune-styled variations on classical musical pieces, generally deployed to positive effect. The platforming abilities and the challenges that require them are novel and interesting enough. Finally, there are many little high-effort details and bits of content in surprising places; for instance, the game contains several lightly-changed re-implementations of common arcade games, just because. As a mostly gameplay-oriented video game player, I was nevertheless interested enough in the storytelling to be curious where they would go with it.

Next, the mixed. The gameplay itself is mostly good, but has a few significant flaws. The controls are good and responsive enough for a standard platformer, but they are nowhere near polished enough for a precision platformer, and the farther one gets, the more that's what the game decides it wants to be (the sort of precision platformer that keeps a cheeky tally of your total death-count on its pause screen, no less). Questionable interpretations of inputs near platform corners, arbitrary retention or cancellation of momentum e.g. when moving between surfaces of different orientations, finnicky short-hop inputs, visually inconsistent hurtboxes, and admittedly rare actual buggy behavior all detract from the experience. Having any of the above repeatedly send you back to the beginning of a room that takes a minute to navigate is bad enough; this issue is compounded by the level design. Eventually, the game takes on a metroidvania-like quality, featuring a sprawling zone which includes both required objectives and many intersecting side-areas to explore. Unfortunately, going anywhere other than straight to the next objective typically punishes rather than rewards the player: only at the end of a path, after overcoming many platforming challenges, will the player be faced with an obstacle for which they do not yet possess the requisite traversal ability, making the whole path an attractive nuisance with no reachable reward. Then, to add insult to injury, the player must backtrack the whole way, repeating the tedious challenges they faced on the way there, without any sort of shortcut or fast-travel opened in light of their having completed those challenges already. Because there is so reliably no reward for exploring until the player possesses every traversal ability, and what rewards there are are quantitative rather than qualitative, the player is better off in every way just going straight to the primary objective every time, and only exploring at all after unlocking everything. This completely defeats the point of explorable nonlinear area design; at that point, just make it linear until all the abilities are available and save everyone the wasted time.

Finally, the real reason for the poor review: somewhere around two thirds or three quarters of the way through the game, the writing falls abruptly off a cliff and never returns. Characters start acting against any reasonable motivations, events become increasingly contrived in order to bring about what should be high-emotional-impact scenes that fall flat because of how implausible the circumstances behind them are, antagonists lurch wildly between competency and incompetency as plot-contrivance demands, and causes become unhitched from effects. After spending most of the early game foreshadowing and setting up to explore certain questions of personhood, the game sidesteps those questions entirely by making the relevant characters' behavior too incomprehensible and miserable to engage with at all, before quietly writing them out of the story altogether; similarly, where in the beginning of the game even the concept of death was a delicately-explored trauma, by the end of the game, characters just blithely move on no matter what happens to whom, removing the last scraps of relatability from the story. The beginning of the game had me interested and engaged with the narrative that was unfolding, but by the end of the game, watching cutscenes focused entirely on uninteresting but author-favored characters while the game refuses to grapple with or even acknowledge the absence of more-significant ones, there really is just nothing positive to say.

It is unpleasant to leave such a negative review just because there really are so many little meritorious and enjoyable and clearly high-effort pieces of work that went into this game, but when every individual aspect of the game culminated in a separate disappointment there's really no avoiding a negative conclusion. In the end there is nobody to whom I would recommend this game as a whole.

Significantly superior to expectations, especially in light of free price point. Has a number of interlocking systems with more nuance than I expected regarding how to optimally use them. My only criticism is the opacity of some of the systems; e.g. it would be nice if the item-crafting interface would give a preview of the item's expected stats rather than requiring you to craft the item at various levels to figure out how the item would scale with level increases, especially because understanding those growth-curves is crucial to devising a viable strategy. Making the player write down and figure out these growth characteristics themself feels like it just adds tedium.

As a side note, while it is at heart a clicker/idler game, there is a wasd-and-mouse topdown endless-dungeon minigame in it which, while *technically* optional, constitutes a significant source of important resources. If you enjoy roguelite experiences that reset you to floor 1 upon death, it's a fun addition with some clever and novel and nuanced mechanics and strategy to it. But if you don't like your advancement gated by your proficiency at that kind of game, that could be a significant negative.