Recent reviews by Explodingness

A decent game that Paradox has "Paradox'd" unfortunately. DLCs are more expensive than the actual game and it automatically installs a launcher when the game is run. Decent deckbuilder at first but became a bit of chore to play with all of the small incremental options you had to modify the deck. Tried to go back and give it another chance but was immediately advertised to buy expensive DLC and had the launcher install in the background without consent or even asking for a location. After uninstalling this malware I'll spend my time somewhere else.

Has some good ideas locked behind poor controls and overly punishing difficulty curve.

A beautiful masterpiece.

I love rogue-like games, and "difficult" games and this game came recommended... but it doesn't live up to the hype. I really want to like this game, but I can't. At this point I would be mad if I had paid more than the $3 sale price.

- Terrible controls... and it's a bullet hell... you can't have a bullet hell when the controls are this bad. Jumping feels completely unresponsive. Short hop? Long hop? Distances and heights seem random and disconnected from input. Various core abilities are added as multi-button series of inputs instead of... using any of the other unmapped buttons? I don't understand how that was a good idea. Tried with a keyboard, XB1 controller and PS4 controller... no difference.

- Poor pacing. If there is any sort of difficulty curve, it seems non-existant or there is zero room filtering. One run you'll get 3 rooms in a row with a single melee enemy, next run the same rooms give you a 6+ enemy bullet hell with no chance of coming out unscathed. There are exceptionally difficult sections of platforming with zero build up. No chance to understand mechanics before they are thrown at you. Hallmark platformers introduce elements/mechanics slowly, one at at time over the course of a level. Not in this game, three rooms in you are forced to masterfully pull off rapid series of moves with lethal consequences. The calling card of this genre is the procedural generation but there needs to be a level of filtering that clearly isn't in this game. You can't just claim "PGC" and skip the "game design". It is just lazy.

- Gameplay loop is a grind. It is Not engaging to see your health go up by 1/4 of a single hit when you dump all your money into it. The cost of upgrades immediately rockets up and seems to do so randomly. The same upgrade you looked at one round and try to save up for will be higher the next loop with zero explanation. If the cost is somehow tied to you upgrading other options, you know, trying to see more of the available game, then it feels like you are inherently punished for upgrading... which is the core loop of the game. Also, your ability to get upgrades is lost between rounds so it requires a sucessful run to even come close to unlocking another, mildly worthless upgrade.

- Poor enemy design. There is no counterplay or predicitivity to walking into a room to immediately get hit by a spawned enemy... Oh and that's 1/3 of your unrefillable health pool. Some enemy projectiles pass through walls, others don't. Some projectiles are shown coming from off-screen, others aren't. Sometimes specific enemy types are agressive and charge the moment you walk into a room, sometimes the same enemy is passive and hangs back, other times they try to move and get stuck on/in a wall right where you need to jump to. The hit boxes for the main character and enemies are flawed and deceptively larger than the player sprite.

- Aesthetic. Some people will enjoy the half childish, half over the top humor(?) in the game. I found it annoying and mocking. Your character runs across the screen, sword raised into the air in a charge... but the character has literally done nothing so far. Just acting like a hot shot when they will, in all likelyhood, die in the next minute or so. The family "traits" are gimmicky. Like great, this round everything is black and white, or NPC text is straight up illegible, or the whole screen is upsidedown... why? Maybe some think the gimmicks are fun but when you get over the humor in the first 45minues of playtme you just want to be able to have a decent run... not waste your time because you randomly got a terrible roll on characters. There is no attachment. May as well just suicide till you roll decent characters.



TLDR: Seriously, just go play Dead Cells, this is an utter waste of time comparatively.

This game isn't for everyone. If you want to explore a world seemingly inspired by a fractal, this is it. It's without a doubt the most atmospheric exploration game I've ever played. No other game has taken my breathe away in quite the same way as when you creep out of a twisting cave and enter a vast cathedral of.... something. It's weird, and quirky and interesting at the same time. The few puzzles it has aren't hard but help make the world you explore a bit more interactive. This game feels at times more like an experiment than a game but I finished it full of curiosity. The 3d platforming isn't bad, and is limited to certain areas.

If you decide to play through this, explore the desert, I won't say more but the easter egg/ just another strange bit of this game is incredibly charming.

Good aethetic and art. The gritty, Lovecraftian world is spot on with the art/theming/sound
Decent rouge-like elements

If only the actual game design team wasn't so lazy....

Would be more fun if the game wasn't so punishing. The enemy blatently cheats and random new mechanics are added without any indication to the player. It goes further than increased difficulty = enemies are health sponges, to difficulty = enemies are health sponges, cheat and have random new abilites you can't prepare for. You don't get beaten by anything clever, eventually it's just a stat roll. Regardless if you use the available mechanics or not.

Meta-game "village/town/base" is exceptionally grindy. It's no better than an artsy flash game. Don't expect anything to be worthwhile until you drop 8+ hours into a campaign. A campaign isn't short and takes hours of play time to get to any interesting mechanics. The game wants to be a rouge-like dungeon crawler but then decided halfway that it wanted to have more play time. "OK, let's just lock half the game behind lots of RNG loot and increase the difficulty ramp so the player has to either grind low-level dungeons for little loot or bash their head against the wall with characters unfit for harder dungeons"

Dungeons additionally become artificially more difficult by just making you backtrack and waste supplies, but you can't prepare for it because RNG dungeons mean some will have enormous amounts of backtracking and some will have next to none.

Utterly terrible UI. Feels like a flash game. Menus get glitchy if you hop between them too much.

I jumped on this game because it seemed to get a lot of praise, but even looking for the specific things many people praise the game for, they all fall flat compared to it's understated flaws. It's less about a waste of money (it's not much of a gamble to try indie games for cheap) and more about a huge waste of time.

I normally recommend games like this because I like what they are trying to do for gaming as a whole but unfortunately this really didn't live up to what it could have been. This game feels like a great attempt at a game built to tell a story but doesn't quite follow through. The story is interesting, and very dark. This clashes with the almost cartoon/Fable art style. I’m pretty sure this was intended (as it’s pretty obvious) but the clash straight up didn’t add anything to the story and the two just feel out of sync. Character development is lacking, so the emotional impact Brothers tries to convey isn't as deep rooted as it could be. I really wanted to care about the characters but their personalities were only given one or two insightful moments throughout the entire game. Only so much can be conveyed through actions which gets me to my last point. The made up language aspect was interesting but I think took away from the story. A really great narrative or script would have made this game far more impactful. It would have given the characters a bit more depth and could have made the adventure seem more urgent and dire.

On a brighter note, the game mechanics took a bit of getting used to but in the end really added to the idea of making the brothers work together. The puzzles weren't hard but they were fairly entertaining. Lastly, the music was absolutely fantastic. I would get the game just for the soundtrack honestly.

To sum up, In many cases the game mechanics helped the themes and aspects of the story, but at the same time more things took away from it. If a bit more time was put into character development I think the game would have been awesome.

This game inspired almost the exact same fascinated adventure feeling that Ocarina of Time gave me as a kid. There are just so many things this game did right, can't wait for the second one.

Fun and unique game. The bar for first person puzzle games has been set insanely high by Portal and Portal 2 and this game is right up there.

Touche "To The Moon", Touche