Recent reviews by Squish That Cat

The weird flash game vibe doesn't change that it's as good a "number go up" dopamine loop as any other, and better than many more.

The Club only serves Long Islands.

Seriously, the game is good, but a bit brief. It reminds me of Gods Will Be Watching but whereas that game was intentionally focused around different episode-style mini-games. Red Strings Club feels less balanced. The lathe and social engineering sections are short and not revisited. The bar tending is interesting in that it makes you wonder how things could have gone differently, but I'm not sure the game moves quickly enough for me to replay repeatedly to get all the content. I don't regret buying the game, but I wouldn't give it the screaming 10/10 reviews others have. It feels like the first part, or an abbreviated part, of something that could have been much bigger and more powerful. It's a small game that's competently executed but will leave you wanting. And the "leaving you wanting" part does diminish it somewhat. The philosophy would be more interesting if there was more substance to back it up.

I paid $30 to bug-test a $200,000,000,000 company's game because I am stupid.

It's okay. Endgame is a chore and getting one-shot by common mobs that can hit you from screen-edge is boring. It'll be better when it's out of early access. Play it for free then.

It's F2P Battlefield and F2P Tarkov. So it's worth playing until the next F2P Battlefield comes out and all the players move to that one.

A great "cozy" game with pleasant art but that succumbs to the blind guessing of element-combination games.

A novel idea that struggles in the execution with insufficient demonstration of its applications. Ideally, the game would be easy to learn but hard to master, but it took me about 30 minutes to figure out what I was doing. This game could have great success in the current market of Balatro and AutoChess but needs a way to introduce players to the system a little more prior to dropping them in, especially when failure means returning to the start. The visual novel interludes also interrupt the pacing a bit.

The difficulty leaves a little to be desired (currently a very tight deck is needed to progress) but an excellent and unique concept well-realized with solid art and effects.

An enjoyable idea that deserves a full-feature treatment.

An excellent adventure with plenty of replay. Truly a hidden (green) gem. Plenty of different life paths to explore, although the combat is straightforward to cheese. Still, I prefer an interesting and accessible game to a challenging one, so this is still a wholehearted endorsement.

Whiskey-Four is a decent book, so if you just want to read an action story with some heavy-handed yandere ex-partner drama, it's OK.

However, it's not interactive fiction, despite its presentation. Choices do not matter and the game does not present any identifiable possibilities for failure. Most telling is that the "stats" page is just a biography, and no actual stats are recorded there. Dialog choices are often positioned so that the next page can continue without changes, regardless of what you said. Sometimes it seems like a single sentence is devoted to your actual reply, but even that isn't guaranteed. When the patter does change, it's in a purely fluff way with no bearing on the story. Other elements (keeping track of how many grenades you have, one-line callbacks), if consequential, are inscrutable. There are occasional points where the romance plots might have more continuity, but they're such a tiny fraction of the overall text that they might as well be an afterthought. This is especially noticeable with the ex-partner, who is deliberately positioned in a psycho love-hate status, probably because it means they can react very similarly no matter which choices you pick.

Edit: After reading the discussion board and seeing how many achievements I don't have, it seems like there might be more branches. But the story is so long that it's very hard to detect them organically, so without the game signposting the branches it's impossible to tell. One of the biggest drives to replay a story is to see how your changes would affect the story. But I'm four hours in and not finished, so I'm not going to replay four hours of content just to scan for possible changes, especially when I already had the impression that nothing I did mattered.

All of the achievements being hidden by "???" without even a brief description as a hint eliminates any chance I'd want to replay. Where would I even start looking? Sorry, I didn't enjoy the book enough to pore over it for hours.

The Steam achievements staying as "???" also makes them worthless. Either remove Steam achievements entirely and just use in-game ones, or make the Steam descriptions include the full title, but mark them hidden.