Recent reviews by aunt slurp

Incredibly buggy co-op. Don't even try it IMO. We had two separate times where we finished an hour+ long mission and then had it disconnect us and delete the progress. Absurdly bad experience.

Eurojank Dishonored.

Voice acting and plot is genuinely comically bad. So bad I was having a good time. Mechanically it's a bit rough around the edges but once you get some of the more fun powers it kind of turns into a blast of trying to crack the level to ghost through it. Being able to teleport around on a quick cooldown is *really* fun (hence the Dishonored comparison). The biggest problem is that there are some *really* unfun sections interspersed throughout and annoyingly focused in the early game. Once I got to Geoforge it was pretty much smooth sailing.

Overrated. The people comparing it to Outer Wilds are out of their minds. It's a solid puzzle game with some platforming. This would be a recommend if it was $10/15. Wait for a sale.

I was really looking forward to dipping into this game. A 3D Harvest Moon with some basic RPG elements? Count me in. But sadly I bounced off because of the insistence on grinding and glacial pace.

Booting it up the first time I was struck by how cursed the character creator was. All of the face choices for a male character looked *off*. I mean, I was able to create Coach Steve from Big Mouth very easily with the limited set of preset options. Cursed. Next you get to choose the voice for your character and those ranged from immediately off-putting to just not very good. I ended up choosing the option that leaves your character silent. A wise decision. These were the first indicators that there is a fair amount about this game that reflects its origins from a smaller team.

But after embarking into the world I was pleasantly happy to see the visual splendor of it all. It's a vibrant world with a pastiche of the pastoral and the post apocalyptic. These hints of exploring ruins and discovering the past hooked me along with the sprinkling of experience and progress bars for everything you do. Chopping trees, mining rocks, picking things off the ground and talking to people all moved little meters up. Either enabling my character to grow in their skill tree or progress in relationships with characters. Sadly this feature of meters moving up ends up being the downfall of the game.

You spend your time, as with most of these Harvest Moon-alikes, by gathering materials, crafting things, and fulfilling quests by turning items in. The problem is in My Time At Portia most of the crafting involves waiting for a station to finish automatically crafting an item. This goes for prerequisite materials as well. That means I have to wait for my copper to turn into copper bars and then those copper bars to turn into copper plates and so on. I played for 4.5 hours and in that time I only finished one main quest. And that took me probably 2 of the hours just to craft a bridge with simple components.

The top negative review on Steam mentions that the game can be fixed by playing with mods. That's a pretty damning indictment. And honestly even with mods what's on display here is just a worse Stardew Valley. Between the clunky, barebones mechanics that feel like Recettear but bigger (and by proxy, emptier) and the rough voice acting (the big bear guy literally sounds like his VO was recorded in Ventrilo replete with redlining audio) I just don't think this game, charming as it is, is worth anyone's time unless they are *really* into these farming sims.

$3 is a pretty good deal but actually it's pretty bad when you consider I also had to pay $70 for the game just to gain access to this Portcrystal. 7/10

The Secret of Onomichi was the friends we made along the way.

Like someone designed a soviet city while having a stroke. Entirely weird and subversive. Also it has a sick motorcycle.

2023-07-15
Preemptively putting in my review now because this is just one of those games I don't think I can make myself continue playing to finish. On paper I thought I'd like it. You go in a little loop and you passively auto-battle stuff and you pick up gear and modify the map to increase the difficulty of the battles, getting stronger, fighting stronger stuff, on and on till you fight the boss. Except it's SO SLOW. And it's SO BORING. The amount of agency you have feels extraneous. Sure I can put a card here or there but who cares. I get tons of loot but most of it is dubiously better or worse. There aren't builds that I can see. Items and cards seem to not have any cool synergy so most of the actions you're taking barely matter. And then the loops themselves take like 30 minutes (apparently because I haven't finished one). And then you have persistence for the town to upgrade things but after getting pretty far in 3 loops I only had enough for one building. Woof what a slog.

It feels like Vampire Survivors is the antithesis to this. It's idle but not as idle because you're constantly controlling your character to position them to do optimal damage. Each item you pick up matters and they synergize with each other so you're always planning what to do next. So while loops similarly take 30 minutes you're engaged the entire time. Loop Hero on the other hand seems to miss all the lessons from other roguelike games of the sort like Slay the Spire and Binding of Isaac and the end result is something that's just...boring.

Damn I really wanted to like this but like a lot of other reviews mention the game does kind of pigeon-hole you into its stealthy mode of play. And sadly I just found that pretty tedious. I tried just sneaking past all the content but then you end up in a situation where all the enemies are much higher level than you.

Definitely some promise. I liked the *idea* of the world and having your sneaky little band hunting for scrap and ekeing out a life while engaging in XCOM-like battles. But ultimately I just wasn't having that much fun.

Been playing this game since 2014 and while I think this was a solid end, it could have been better. Shadowbringers resonated way more with me than this.

Pros:
- Great new locations
- Ties the story together nicely
- Wonderful fan service in returning characters
- Dungeons and trials are as always an absolute joy to play

Cons:
- Huge swathes of the MSQ are filler that could be cut. Why am I, the hero of the damned universe, doing fetch quests still? Why did it feel like 80% of the quests could have been cut or just turned into a visual novel and it would have been a better game?
- Story takes 10s of hours to really get going. I was falling asleep doing fetch quests and with the endless expositional setup of the plot
- Perhaps it's because Emet-Selch left massive shoes to fill but I found the final villains to be hilariously dumb. Why is the final baddy a bird who *feels* things? Are you kidding me? Like the universe is really going to end because a birdgirl got nihilistic and emo?
- I found the ending in general to be kind of underwhelming. Characters getting sacrificed and then immediately brought back? That's just lazy.