Recent reviews by Railyn

Walking into Promise Mascot Agency, I was expecting weirdness. I was expecting a commitment to a specific off-beat vibe. I was expecting some compellingly bizarre characters. What I wasn't expecting was an incredibly genuine story about the power of community and the value of chasing your dreams even when it feels hopeless.

I don't think I'll ever forget Kaso-Machi, and I already can't wait to see what Kaizen Game Works does next.

I'd strongly recommend Paradise Killer to people who can find the appeal in the following:

• Running back and forth across an island city until its layout engraves itself in your mind.
  
• Personally scouring the environment for more information.
  
• Uncovering tantalizing details about the world for which you will never be given full context.
  
• Vibing to city pop as you mull over what you've discovered and where you might look next.
  
• Investing yourself in the motives and personalities of a cast of very strange characters.

If you can appreciate all of these things, you'll find an experience I've never seen the likes of before: a blood-soaked mystery on a sun-drenched island created to resurrect unknowable cosmic beings with the sacrifice of the innocent. You choose when your investigation is complete. You can spend as much or as little time as you choose exploring Paradise. Do you believe the official record? If not, how deep will you dig?

As for me? I uncovered most of this island's secrets. Perhaps all of them, though I wouldn't quite be that arrogant. It's a vacation destination I won't soon forget.

See you in Perfect 25.

More of a neutral-rec than a no, honestly. If I actually was a Hololive fan, I might be able to power through the downsides, but I'm not.

The animation feels pretty unpolished for gameplay purposes. If it were standalone animation, I'd be giving it a thumbs up, but I often had trouble figuring out when moves transitioned into their recovery period, or out of their startup period. Some moves are really clear visually, but it's inconsistent.

The input buffer had me struggling to do invincible reversals, and REALLY didn't like overlapping inputs; one character I tried has a quarter circle back L+M move, and if I didn't input L and M on the exact same frame I got a completely different move. (And I do mean exact same frame; the input display showed me getting the wrong move when I was one frame off.)

These two things probably wouldn't have been dealbreakers for me if I enjoyed the general design choices of the game, but nothing clicked with me enough to get me over them. Maybe you'll feel differently, but if I tried to keep playing it'd just be an exercise in frustration, I think.

This is a game that makes a lot of smart decisions to make an ARPG that's extremely digestible and approachable. The devs did a fantastic job distilling the core systems of the genre into forms that are clearly readable and easy to understand quickly.

If you're interested in getting into ARPGs, you could do worse than Book of Demons.

However, the game is held back pretty significantly by one of its core design decisions--the fact that movement is restricted to straight lines on paths. This means that if a monster's in your way, tough luck. If there's a ground hazard in your way, either wait for it to fade or suck it up and eat the damage. It's bearable for a while, but when the game starts throwing proper hordes of monsters at you, that limited movement becomes more and more of a problem. I tapped out midway through act three because I just didn't want to deal with that anymore.

While I might recommend this as a gateway into the broader subgenre of loot-based ARPGs, I really don't think I'd recommend it to people who are already invested in the genre, save as a curiosity.

This game is incredible. It's lightning-fast, with intense gunfights and some of the most satisfying weapons in any shooter. It's also extremely skill-based, almost to a fault. New players will get completely destroyed until they begin to understand the basics of movement, map knowledge, item control, and weapon usage. It can take tens of hours until you learn the skills to claw your way out of the bottom half of any given lobby, so it's understandable that many players might get scared away, especially since a lot of the remaining playerbase is made up of diehard veterans. The gap can seem insurmountable.

But it isn't. It takes work and time, and maybe you won't see enough fun in the game to work hard enough for long enough that you don't feel horribly outmatched anymore. That's okay. Maybe you'll be frustrated by the long loading times and poor optimization and drop the game because of that. I get that. But even with that wall, even with those technical frustrations, there just isn't another shooter on the market that delivers the kind of high-velocity, skill-intensive action that Quake Champions does.

If you're like me, and you're very sad that Sound Voltex never made it very far outside of Japan, buy this.

I loved this game when it first released.

I'm no coder. Never have been, but I was willing to learn for this game, because what it absolutely excelled at was creating an environment where I wanted to learn. The setting of the game was intriguing, and when I first completed the tutorial and got released into the wider world, I completely fell for the illusion it had set up. Booting up Hackmud on release felt like I was genuinely taking on the role that the game had assigned to me, and I was excited to keep playing that role, even if it meant learning new and difficult skills.

Then, the Discord server started gaining traction.

All of a sudden, 0000 went from bustling and entertaining to completely dead and a waste of time. The way to engage with the community was suddenly moved to a separate program I'd have to tab over to instead of keeping the game fullscreen like I preferred. The illusion was shattered, and I knew that nobody would ever bother to put it back together.

It's a damn shame. I was really looking forward to playing that role I'd started to construct for myself, and now it's never going to happen the way I'd hoped.

Meh.

This game is the ultimate proof that it's not about how many fancy bells and whistles you have, it's about how you use what you've got.

It's got a very straightforward control scheme, but it manages to leverage two buttons into something more challenging than you'd ever expect. It hits a pretty damn perfect balance in difficulty; it's hard without being overwhelming, and the difficulty adjusts to your skill level as you play, though it never goes below a certain point. Of course, it doesn't hurt that when it clicks, the game makes you look and feel like an absolute badass in a way no other game I can remember has done, so that in and of itself is incentive to keep playing and get better.

The game assets are full of stick figures, generic images, bad accents, and royalty-free music, but that simplicity actually works for the game, rather than against it. If assets were more complex, it wouldn't be as easy to keep track of everything once the pace accelerates to lightning speed, and the brief animations help to emphasize the brutality and precision of the characters' movements. The game announcer can get a bit irritating at times, but if it really starts getting on your nerves, there's always an option to turn it off (at the main menu...).

If you absolutely can't stand fast-paced games, this won't change your mind, but otherwise, the low barrier of entry means you have very few reasons not to give One Finger Death Punch a shot.

This game has managed to perfectly capture the feeling of not giving a ♥♥♥♥.