Recent reviews by Orby

A beautifully rendered experience packaged up in a platformer with a handful of boss arenas. The atmosphere and art gives me feelings of Cave Story and Hollow Knight. The game is just long enough to demonstrate it's prowess. I'm not sure if I want a longer version of this game. As it is, the mechanics/movement serve to set the atmosphere and story. Extending the game would potentially require throwing out a lot of what's makes this fantastic on it's own.

Highly recommend the ~hour it will take you to run through the game.

This is my first time playing a MH game so my perspective isn't from a long time fan.

I am going to go through the game to enjoy it with a friend, but I can't recommend it.

Performance is basically broken unless you enable frame generation. I have a 5900X, 64GB of RAM, Samsung 980 Pro, and a 6700XT. Good enough but not top of the line. Cyberpunk is perfectly happy at 1080p with high settings. If you disable frame generation, even with FSR upscaling, the game can't hit 60 FPS when swinging the camera around. FSR upscaling for 1080p is a horrible idea in general. Geometry LOD pop-in is hilarious. With all that said, the graphics don't even look good *for* the horrible framerate. The monsters are interesting in design, but something is just absolutely broken about the rendering pipeline here.

The online play is just insane. Not in a good way. Match making is confusing. Not since System Shock 2 have I had as much trouble trying to figure out how to play with my friends. Link Party vs Private Lobby vs Hunter Friend? What is the point of a Lobby if you can't explore the world together, only randomly drop into monster fights?

I am new to MH games, so I'm not sure if this is a Wilds thing, but solo'ing doesn't seem like the way to go. You want to bring in other players or NPCs to fight. This would be more fun if your friend didn't have to keep dropping out/in to fights.

The instanced natures of fights, the automated traversal to destinations, the quests that either warp you directly to locations, and quests that put you on rails to explicitly look at things going from point a to b. All of these add up to make these feel very hand holdy/theme park ride. There is very little trust given to the player to succeed, while at the same time having a MASSIVELY confusing menu system, broken into multiple locations you need to interact with in the camp to get things done.

I think there is a good game in here, but it's not here now. Fix the performance issues. Correct/improve the graphics (afforded by the corrected performance issues). Overhaul the multiplayer. Trust players to get from point a to b. Overhaul the menu to be less Bethesda/Cthullu inspired nightmare.

I haven't finished the main story. I am not impressed so far. I doubt there is much to be done to fix something so central to the game at this point. The meat of the game really is the combat. Cleaning up everything around that needs to be the focus and until that is done, this is a pass to me.

I highly recommend this game, but only if it'll scratch a specific itch. This is a game of exploration and discovery in the metroidvania style. Puzzles are generally platforming and item based. If you like digging to find secrets, that is the core of this game, where beating the game is almost a step in completing the game.

I do not recommend looking at guides until you have explored the entire map and gotten all of, if not most items. The fun of this game, for me, was leaning the game and finding the secrets on my own, up until a point. Late game I hit a point where I wanted small hints on how to proceed on things I knew I needed to do, but didn't want to scour the entire world for the in-game info to determine how to move forward.


* Hunting for secrets
* Fez
* Metroidvanias
* Cave Story's exploration


Platforming is a critical part of this game, both to puzzle solving and to finding secrets.
The game needs a coyote jump and/or more leniency in the movement controls. Celeste set a really high bar here.

While you can eventually find quicker paths around the map, there are certain areas late game that I found myself having to go back to while hunting for secrets that took a while to navigate. Made worse by fighting the platforming controls.
It would be nice if there were a few more shortcut routes that got opened up for quicker access (even after certain late game items were obtained) to speed up exploration for late game secret searching.

Deciphering certain secrets (without going to a guide) requires note taking outside the game. I see this as the game not respecting my time. Fez made it pretty obvious where there was something to decipher, even if you had to take the deciphering out of the game, Animal Well is harder to solve this problem as figuring out what you are even looking for to decipher is only discovered as you explore and observe. So I don't have a solution here, but as an example, even after I had a piece of late stage data to enter, it still took me ~10 tries to enter it correctly, because I would press a wrong button partway through and have to start over.

Failed to function on a Quest 3 headset over Steam Link. Produces a grey void with black hands. The game doesn't load, while you are able to bring up the briefcase menu it doesn't do anything or allow you to exit.

Requested a refund.

An intense campaign from start to finish with pretty dynamic combat that has a great movement system. The campaign did feel short, which is confirmed by my play time.

On sale, the game is very much worth it for the campaign alone if you enjoy movement FPS games. The macro story is pretty generic sci-fi, but execution, voice acting, and details are excellent.

A proper send up of The Witness. More than worth the price of admission.

Wingspan is a fun boardgame, and unlike some other boardgame to videogame rendentitions, this game is fantastic. It is actually an amazing way to learn the boardgame. Has great multiplayer support. Keeps with beautiful art of the board game, adds in subtle animations and wonderful sounds.
If you like to play relaxing board games with your friends remotely, this is fantastic. We will get on video chat and hang out while playing this game.

The only improvement I would ask on this game is, you can't search your friend list when inviting friends in multiple player, requiring you to scroll around to find the specific friends to invite.

Highly recommended if you enjoy board games.

What should be the final say, isn't. This is ultimately a bunch of separate Halo versions under a shared launcher, which sounds great. Fundamentally this means the team is struggling with technical issues across all these different games. Just finished playing Halo CE on a beefy AMD rig built in 2022. It ran worse than when I first played it on the original Xbox with bear claw controllers. Not sure how Halo CE can consume 56gb of RAM and 12gb of VRAM then crash, but here we are.

I think a better approach to this anthology is to have a unified game engine, then lay in the game mechanics/levels on to each engine. Make it a full remaster, rather than ports of ports of ports of DX9 to Windows 11. I actually worry if the games will get less playable over time. Will certain games stop running in the next edition of Windows ten years from now?

I can't recommend this, unless you *really* need your Halo fix. They are still patching this, but they have also been patching this for a long time. A base of sand is hard to build on.

A fantastic and fun colony sim fighting against time to prevent failure. As you learn you learn a new way to fail and get further until you start thriving.

This game can be overwhelming with the number of system in place from the very beginning of the game.

A short but pleasant puzzler with a cute story. Each zone explore a unique theme on the core mechanic without over staying their welcome.

The game does not have any replay value, so keep that in mind when considering the price. I can recommend this at USD$10 or less, but not as it's full price of $20.