Recent reviews by Frown

it might be a little unintuitive that card shark isn't a card game; but then, it might also be terribly obvious.

card shark is a game about cheating people out of their money. specifically, it's a game about taking the french aristocracy for suckers whilst trying to avoid becoming a victim yourself of the schemes and violence around you. the cards are just the tool by which you do this, the game being played with them never committing to a consistent ruleset; high value cards are good? having a lot of a suit is good? knowing someone's high card allows you to beat them? it's all a bit abstract. you win or lose solely by your ability to glean and signal information you're not supposed to have, to palm cards, to do a good bad job shuffling.

the game's more of a visual novel about deception than it is a scoundrels-cheating-across-the-country simulator; there's the odd occasion where you can show up to a game without plot, and make some decisions of your own about what con you run in a given hand, but for the most part you chase a handful of plot threads as the tricks you have to pull step up in complexity and start intermingling. the sleights are well researched, and in practice (at least on the middle difficulty; can't speak as to the other two) strike a decent balance between giving you enough guidance in the heat of the moment to keep you moving forward without holding your hand so much as to cheapen your success. some of them are definitely more stressful than others to perform under scrutiny. top sifting...ugh...

as of time of writing (it's 4 am, so technically it's not release day any more :v) the controls are a little temperamental even on pad like it recommends, and i've had a few situations where clicking on something to interact while walking around doesn't do its thing and sometimes results in a soft lock, but it's never been anything quitting back to the title screen hasn't fixed, and apparently a debug command to force restart a scene was left in whilst lingering bugs get pinned down.

a number of people had mixed opinions about the twist, so while it's a bit of a spoiler it bears mentioning; the game is split into three acts, and only the first one is significantly horror-themed. there's an overarching plot about a hapless youtuber who's come down with a case of creepypasta protagonist, but the game never really tries to return to that spooky aura once you break out of the cabin. i didn't mind this, personally; the three acts having such different moods kept it feeling fresh, but there's plenty of people who were here for slasher movie slay the spire who were turned off by the pivot.

i know a few people who "aren't really into card games" but quite liked inscryption, but as someone who *is*, i was definitely in position to appreciate all the ways in which inscryption is a love letter to the genre. for a game that can easily be less than ten hours if you move quick, i was also surprised at how robust it was mechanically. "balanced" might not be the right word, since there are some notable ways in each slice of the game to absolutely shatter it over your knee (serving as a release valve for people who aren't good at the genre to smash through on progression, a depiction of flashy combo decks, and a nod to dramatic signature ace cards in fiction; you can't tell me ouroboros doesn't make you want to put on a pharaoh voice), but act 2 in particular can be tackled in a variety of ways that really make it feel complete as a genre piece that simply sticking to the run-based deckbuilder model wouldn't have reached. the dialogue is well paced: funny, but not so clownish that it becomes cloying, which is a problem i had with pony island; chatty, but still aware of when to avoid overstaying its welcome. despite two of the characters definitely being the focus, i didn't come away feeling like the others had been underexplored. inscryption isn't the kind of game you come back to over and over again like the genre that inspired it, but instead it's a clever little capsule.

very short, very simple; i cleared it all in under an hour. probably the most important thing to note that isn't immediately apparent is that the inputs are random- there are no charts to memorize, it's all rhythm and reaction speed. whether this is a good or bad thing will vary between players. while i appreciate story mode's progression structure, i felt that its "plot" was uninteresting and stood at odds with the calm nature of the game, and that it ultimately would have been better off without it. however, it's not so intrusive that one needs to spend much effort to ignore it.

mechanically, it presents fifteen tracks in five sets of three. each set after the first has a "stage hazard"- all but one are different means to change or hide the visual indication of the next input. (the exception is "double ball", where you have an input on every beat, rather than every *other* beat.) the update added a sixth stage type and four additional tracks to free play, bringing the game's total song count to 19. it also supports uploading songs of your own (in .ogg format alone), as well as an option to play against human opponents locally in free play.

it's a small toy of a game, but at its price point, a small toy is fine. i didn't quite find it "meditative" like was suggested - it's too easy to reach flow state, but not easy enough to lean back and relax - but i enjoyed the time i spent with it. if you're more of a fan of the musical genre than i am, i could plausibly see this being a good way to interact with songs more actively than just putting them on while you do something else.

*Don't* just sell all your gems. They do stuff.

Short, and on the easy side, but remarkably satisfying. The time stop mechanic is allowed to be as powerful as it seems like it ought to be, with just enough weak spots to avoid undermining the thrill of utilizing it. Perhaps it could wear out its welcome in a longer game, but at a streamlined 4-5 hours to clear (maybe less if you're particularly skilled, more if you're taking your time) it isn't an issue. It presents a pretty complete genre experience during that time, leaning closer to the SotN model of metroidvanias; the important abilities to find are mostly not weapons, you have stats that steadily rise, and of course the visual and audio style makes its inspiration plain. Blessedly, the amount of required backtracking is minimal; most of the runtime is spent moving forward into the map, rather than running around the edges you've already seen. The only thing I found myself wishing for is one last fight tough enough to really demand mastery of the tools on offer, something to properly kick my ass , though it sounds like there's a little more content scheduled to be added to the game...so that's something to look forward to.

This made me appreciate the amount of subtle craftsmanship that went into Stardew Valley. There are things to like about Graveyard, and I certainly wanted to find Stardew But You're A Necromancer appealing, but after eleven hours I couldn't once shake the feeling that this game was resisting being played. The looseness of the pacing mechanic, the unintuitiveness of several of the core mechanics combined with the incompleteness of the explanations, and the long travel time between points of interest (even with the teleport charm that serves as fast travel, you still have to walk back) made me feel like I was on the wrong end of the necromancer-zombie relationship.