Recent reviews by hianhianhian

Psychonauts definitely excels in its art direction, its writing style and its flair for the weird. The comedy is wonderfully written, with a plot that is pretty out there yet juuuust plausible enough. The graphics and visuals still hold up 15 years later, thanks in large part to its solid character and world design. Definitely an experience worth the price of the game.

The gameplay on the other hand, is decently passable with some design grievances, but it's alright for the most part. It does come with some buggy interactions, but it's definitely playable and doesn't really take that much away from the overall experience.

So you're telling me I paid for this game to spend hours building assembly lines and optimising a virtual factory? And I won't even notice the time fly by as it goes from 8pm to 8am in the blink of an eye? I'm sold.

10/10 would get carpal tunnel again clearing biter nests

This game is an ambitious step up from the earlier King's League games, with better art, animations, sounds, writing and a ton of polish. The core gameplay loop has remained the same, with the simple innovation of adding "active abilities" that your units can perform during combat. This little addition adds another interesting layer to the gameplay, adding a tiny piece of Postknight's soul into this game. The moments where you perfectly counter/interrupt an enemy's ability are very satisfying.

As of this review, I completed the Story mode once, so you do get a good chunk of playtime for what you pay for once you consider Classic mode (which I haven't gotten to yet!). I really enjoyed the writing, and I hope to see future DLCs that expand on the story heh. My one problem with Story mode is that it's almost too easy, as you're given the unique/epic units as part of the story, and you can only play the Story on normal difficulty.

Besides that, I feel that healers in this game play an even stronger role than before, perhaps too much. Since trainings now consume the unit's health (energy), you're supposed to budget your training points between training/resting. However, a healer immediately invalidates the need for resting as you can just go into an easy quest and get your party healed up. A few other minor gripes I have with the game:

- Autosaving isn't mentioned explicitly, which can lead to some confusion/worry the first time you play the game and not seeing any options to save the game when quitting.
- A Continue button on the main menu screen for the last played savegame would be nice.
- It's not obvious that keybinds for KB/M exist, having keybind options could also be nice.
- Having a fast mode would be very useful for replayability and time-efficiency (other strategy/management-focused games like XCOM2, Slay the Spire, etc. tend to have a fast mode for skipping through long animations). Seeing how this game has a lot of animations in between combat, having an option to skip these animations would be useful.

The First Tree is all flash without any substance. It tries to say something profound without actually saying anything. The overall narrative is pretty one-dimensional, and doesn't try to make any meaningful connections between the fox and the narrator.

The graphics and visuals are beautiful, yes, but there's so much emptiness in the environments that it's just a lot of the same scenery repeated over and over again. The levels are needlessly big in relation to the movement speed, the controls are clunky, and collecting stars doesn't do anything besides increment a counter. You'd think a pretty game like this would at least place stars where you could see something pretty. Instead, they're placed almost randomly, sometimes they serve to guide the player but most times they're hidden behind rocks, under rocks, on top of rocks, in fact, just a lot of big boring rocks in this game.

Comparing this game to games like Journey, Firewatch and Shelter is a good joke. This game is not worth its price.

Best game evar.