Recent reviews by Villith

Snapping is easily the worst part of this game, turning what could have been a tactical card game into a lolrandom bluffing simulator.

Helltaker is a fun little puzzle game that is short, simple, and effective. The charm comes from the animations and after-level scenes with the demon girls. The girls' personalities span through varying anime tropes, and there is a barebones visual novel element to win the girls to your harem or die trying.

The final boss throws the turn-based puzzle segments out and becomes a real-time action game where you dodge damaging elements very similar in gameplay to Undertale. Helltaker is a charming puzzle game with fun humor, groovy music, and cute demon girls.

This is a fantastic -vania game. The sprite work is fluid and vibrant, the sound effects have a satisfying deepness when you hit the enemies, and the level design tempts you with secrets you need to come back to uncover.

The game has tight controls for platforming and melee attacks have a nice reach to them. Your attacks are directional, so you can slash a sword straight up or straight down while jumping giving you a nice threat range with your weapons. Ranged attacks with bows have almost a 180 degree arc, and you are thankfully not rooted into place when you pull out your bow. You may take a step forward to adjust yourself as needed.

The game has a simple magic system. You have a fairy companion that bestows an effect on you. The first one you gain allows you to hover over gaps. Each companion imbues your attacks with a certain element. Enemies have elemental weaknesses you can exploit by switching between your fairies, and you gain resistance to the element as well. There's a bit of Ikaruga-ness to it, but bosses can fill the screen with bullet-hell-style attacks that are difficult to dodge. You can mitigate this by swapping to the proper elemental fairy on the fly to guard against the attack.

The puzzles have been enjoyable so far. They tend to be in their own rooms, so you have time to stop and figure it out without needing to worry about any combat. They mostly involve using the bow to ricochet an arrow along walls to open a door or drop an item, but some make use of the elemental resist properties of your companions.

The map layout is what you would expect from a game in this genre. Long hallways loop back into previous places after acquiring a new item. It conveniently drops you off close to an area that was previously inaccessible that you can now explore. Save and warp points are generous enough to not frustrate, while far enough apart to not feel commonplace.

At the moment, the game is incomplete. You will get a "To be continued screen" when you reach the end.

Catherine is a fantastic game. Vincent is a relatable slacker, while his friends and lovers are each deep characters in their own rights. The puzzle gameplay can be brutally difficult even on normal settings. The actions you take in the bar sections of the game, conversing with customers, and even what you drink affect how the puzzle sections play out in the dream sections of the game. The blend of slice-of-adult-life and weird supernatural puzzling by night is masterful. Everything drips with style, whether it be a character design, menu, loading screen, or the mix of jazzy and classical music in the soundtrack. Atlus can do no wrong.

The relaunch of The Secret World as Secret World Legends fixed up my biggest complaint with the old game, while introducing several new problems that were absent from the original game.

The combat in TSW was dull, but it existed in a world rich with lore and presented in such an interesting manner I played anyway. For awhile, until the boring grindy combat was too much. Thankfully, the combat in SWL has been revamped and streamlined. No longer are you just hitting 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 4 in combat, it takes a bit of inspiration from third person action games. Your mouse now aims the camera, and you need to have a target when you use an ability. There is no autolock on or cycling through targets with the tab key, you point at the enemy you want to hit and fire off your attack. I prefer this, as it adds movement to the combat.

You can only equip a six abilities between your two weapons, similar Guild Wars. These map to Q, 1, 2, E, and both mouse buttons by default. You will have different builds even while using the same weapons depending on fights. Changing the abilities from just being on the number bar to being on the mouse and keyboard helps to spice the combat up from just hitting 1, 2, 3, or 4.

The world is still presented in much the same manner, but quests have been streamlined to prevent you from needing access to multiple zones. When you pick up a quest, about 90% of them will have all the objectives in that same zone. No more needing to globe trot to finish one quest. This makes the hub cities less important, as you will mostly only need to report back once after you finish a zone, rather than multiple times in each zone to increase your faction rank.

Many of the DLC issues have been folded into the main game already. Issues we had to pay for in TSW are unlocked for everyone in SWL. This aids in he flow of the storyline, as you will not have to go back to Egypt at max level to complete Last Train to Cairo, you just run through it as you are leveling normally in Egypt and it seems like a natural progression.

Some new problems creep up in SWL that were not present in TSW, so its not 100% better than its sister game (yes, TSW is still running, you just need to download it through Funcom's site, not through Steam). Crafting was a mess in TSW, and despite watching youtube videos I never understood it. It has been streamlined extremely here in SWL, you take two pieces of gear and fuse one into the other to raise its level. It functions like gacha does in mobile games. Much easier, however it does lend itself to some real grind. A side effect is that story dungeons no longer drop blue gear as they did in the past, they drop slightly better green gear that you upgrade yourself. It lessens the impact of getting cool drops in favor of grinding out trash loot to enhance your main gear.

They server caps have been lowered by an awful lot in this game. Outside of the Agartha travel hub, you will be hard pressed to run into other players in the same instance as yourself. This was done to help reduce lag when many people are gathered in the same place, and to preserve the atmosphere of you being a unique, powerful individual rather than just player #654,132 in zone #3. It does make the game feel a bit lonely, however, and people more used to traditional mmos might even assume the game is empty and dead when they run across only one other player in their zone.

The monetization is also awkward. There is an optional subscription fee to gain patron status, but then there are also lots of things that can only be unlocked via aurum (real money points) or keys bought with aurum. When I pay a subscription fee for a game, I don't want to continue to be nickel and dimed after already handing over 15$.

+ Great writing
+ Interesting storylines
+ Unique modern horror setting similar to World of Darkness
+ Fast combat that encourages movement
+ Streamlined questing
+ Creepy soundtrack
+ Boss mechanics vary, few tank and spank encounters

- Gacha gear grind
- Unimpressive loot drops
- Fewer players per zone might discourage some players
- Unclear monetization

Mysterious. Enigmatic. Sentimental. Innovative. Creepy. Emotional. Excellent.

Best surreal horror game I've played in years, wrapped in a saccharine anime visual novel exterior. It takes an hour or two to get going, but once it does, it won't let you off until the bitter end.

Murder is a "game" that features neither gameplay nor story. The entire thing is over in 22 minutes, and most of that will be watching the character walking, waiting for the elevator, or waiting for a train to arrive.

The prologue (the first ten minutes of the game) involves diving into a damaged robot's brain and setting up the second part, then the credits roll once. The credits are interrupted by waking up again and walking through the same three locations as the prologue. This time, the people are replaced with a glitchy man speaking in Matrix Architect technobabble. The experience ends by doing the exact same thing, diving into the damaged robot's brain and hearing the same lines of dialogue. The end. No closure, no development, just hints that a plot might have happened in ten minutes if the second credits roll had not interfered.

The voice acting is serviceable, the pixel art is very evocative of classic cyberpunk movies, and the ambient music fits the scenes. There are no puzzles, just clicking on an object to walk to it or change scenes. This was a big disappointment, all style and no substance.

Stray Cat Crossing sits at a strange intersection of drama, adventure, and horror. The horror comes from being locked in small areas (typically a single floor of a house) with surrealist characters as your only companions, as well as FMV scenes that interrupt your actions with jumpscares. The characters you encounter are creepy and may antagonize you, but there are very few of them that impede your progress or can send you to the game over screen.

The narrative of Stray Cat Crossing starts out shallow at first. During the first two acts, it seems like the characters are strange for the sake of being strange and no explanations are given for their behaviour. Near the end of the second act is when things start to become deeper, but still very obscured. During the third act, essentially the last half of the game, the loose threads begin to join and form a unified whole. There is a sense of discovery when you find out the significance of a seemingly throwaway task in the earlier part of the game. I was pleased with the way the story came together at the end. It could have been easy to leave everything vague or unanswered in a game as surreal as Stray Cat Crossing, but the developers thankfully brought everything to a conclusion.

Pros:
-the pixel art is wildly original
-the soundtrack swaps between creepy ambience, pastoral guitar plucking, and dissonance as needed
-the full soundtrack is included in the base game!
-story comes to a satisfying conclusion with everything tied up nicely in a big bundle of feels
-different characters have distinct personalities and speech patterns
-about half the puzzles have nothing explaining how to complete them, yet are still intuitive
-the repetition and changing of rooms. Revisiting the same rooms multiple times and seeing how they change as I advanced made an entire level of just three rooms interesting
-I really liked the saving system. Very stylishly done.
-The brevity of the game makes it very easy to finish, and after discovering the secrets at the end, it is worthwhile to play through again to see the foreshadowing.
-Very unique experience. It is not easy to compare with other games

Cons:
-the song "Skin Tight" from the trailer is only as long as it is in the trailer. 0:51 is just not long enough.
-the controls are not quite ideal. Being an RPG Maker game, I had to search non-Stray Cat Crossing forums to find a way to rebind keys to my comfort and play the game fullscreen without stretching.
-the other half of the puzzles are simply trial and error with little logic beind them
-the hedgemaze: this was a really cool, creepy locale with a completely indecipherable puzzle. After wandering aimlessly for 30 minutes, I simply looked online for the answer to progress. I haven't seen any Let's Play videos figure it out themselves either yet, so am sure it was not just my own problem.
-The repetition of scripted events. This was an annoyance in the third chapter. Rather than merely revisiting rooms, you are forced to sit through scripted events as you replay the same scenes over again, learning a little bit more each time. This would have been awesome if some of the connecting events were cut on subsequent visits. Having an usher always come, say the exact same lines as the three times before, and then walk away, come back, and talk some more is irritating when you simply want to walk into the room you are trying to go to.
-Some of the dialogue can fall a little flat. One of the things that grated on me was a certain character that begins every sentance with "..." waits for awhile, then finally says something.
-The FMV jumpscares that interrupt you early in the game do not tie into the plot anymore than to remind you that things are oh-so-spooky here, but largely die off in the second and third chapters

I really wanted to like this game, but I just cannot. The art style really struck a chord with me, and I am a sucker for norse mythology. I still listen to the soundtrack, and absolutely loved the Icelandic voice-overs. If this had been a cartoon, I would have stuck with it for an entire season with no reservations.

As a game, Jotun just does not deliver much in the way of fun. The trailer on Steam is highly deceptive, making it appear as though you will be involved in tense boss battles by using lots of quick edits. The reality is that enemies are few and far between, and the majority of the game is a walking simulator. A very slow walking simulator.

The slow pace is reflected in the combat as well. Thora only has two attacks with her axe, a standard swing, and a slower, heavier swing. Pretty common in many games, but how it changes is just how absolutely slow Thora swings when using the heavy attack. It takes about eight seconds. Eight seconds of standing still, vulnerable, with your hands over your head like an idiot. It is nearly unusable in combat, and only useful to clear obstacles out of your path. This leaves us with only the basic axe swing for the majority of combats. The hit boxes feel a bit suspect at times as well. There were several moments where the animation went through an enemy only to not have it register any damage.

The camera is also a pain. It will zoom in uncomfortably close at times, and other times will zoom out to show a beautiful landscape and leave you a tiny dot on the map, making it somewhat difficult to get around corners or not get stuck on scenery. The camera moves at a slower pace than the character, leading to times where Thora was very nearly walking off the edge of the screen. Having to stop and stand still while the camera meanders into place just so I can prevent from walking into a lightning trap just slows down an already glacial game.

I really wish the developers had made up their mind on whether they wanted to create a puzzle/exploration game or an action game. Had they taken combat out entirely and left the axe only for puzzle solving, I feel it would have been a tighter game and invested the player more into the world. Had they sped up the combat, movement, and camera the game would be quicker, but also more grounded with the idea of Thora as a seasoned warrior. As it is now, Jotun feels like a walking sim with poor controls and frustratingly simple, yet ineffective, combat.