Recent reviews by ★ N3rd ★

This is my favorite game ever made. I have spent 500+ hours on the PS4 version, combined with the playtime you see on this review for the PC version, and it's for good reason.

- Damn good story. The cast in this, whether it's the Japanese or English voiceover, really brings these characters to life to such an extent that it feels like dialogue between the characters doesn't feel like you're talking to a character, and instead feels like normal conversation with a group of friends.

- Some of the most fun gameplay I've seen out of this entire series, with the addition of the Thieves Den, Showtime attacks, and stamps and flowers in Mementos only adding to the replayability that the game offers as it is.

- The best OST I've ever heard. Shoji Meguro and Lyn Inaizumi knocked it out of the park.

If you want to give Persona games a try, please consider playing this one, regardless of which platform you happen to have. You won't regret it.

The best rhythm game I've ever played, as it's challenged me to become better and better every time I play it.

(The play time is not accurate; I've played since Dec 2021 on the Quest 2 version, so it's more like ~100-200 hours)

I know what you're probably thinking with this being a mascot horror game: It's something along the lines of "This game blows" or "This is a FNAF clone that isn't very good".

I see you, and I hear you, so I want to make a case for this game. Given that this game has an episodic format (3 chapters as of July 2024), with each subsequent chapter being a DLC, I will break this review down chapter-by-chapter, with an /10 rating for each.

Chapter 1:
I came across this game very shortly after Chapter 2 first came out back in May 2022, right when it became free to play vs. its initial 10 dollar price tag. I played it, and thought it was pretty good. The highlight for me is the vent chase sequence at the end, as it's a very tense section that caps off a lot of atmospheric world building, as I'm sure is evident by how viral this particular section got.

Overall, it's a short and sweet introductory chapter for what was to come. Kinda lacking in the scare department, but it's a fun time.
(Score: 7/10)

Chapter 2:
I jumped into this game immediately after finishing Chapter 1, and it beat Chapter 1 by a country mile. While this chapter came at a time where Mob Entertainment was still trying to figure out what kind of horror they wanted to shoot for with the Poppy series, it was a very good attempt. The voice acting for all of the toy monsters was amazing, especially the voice acting for Mommy Long Legs, and is a large part of why I enjoyed this chapter as much as I did. The minigames were fun and had some cool concepts behind them, with some frustration during the Whack a Wuggy minigame in particular. The ending speech with Poppy is a good sendoff to the game, and a great lead-in to Chapter 3.
(Score: 8/10)

Chapter 3:
Where do I start?

Chapter 3 is Mob Entertainment at their finest. They basically took notes from any criticism they received from the previous 2 chapters, iterated on that tenfold, and put out a banger of a game.

While the puzzle design was mildly frustrating in some parts, it made sense with some exploration and keeping an eye on the environment, and it made really good use of the different powerups for the grabpack. The atmosphere and ambience is incredibly well done, to the extent that I'd say it's some of my favorite in the horror genre. The highlights for me include the introductory tram ride going into the Playcare, the nightmare section at the start of Home Sweet Home, and the weeping angel chase in the School.

While it may be a bit complex for those that are just jumping into Poppy, I would highly recommend Chapter 3 by itself.
(Score: 10/10)

Overall, I would highly recommend anyone reading this review pick up this game. While it may have a bit of a reputation as a mascot horror game, it's a game and series that means a lot to me and so many others, so I seriously recommend giving this game and its subsequent chapters a try.

This game is the best representation of Backrooms, alongside the Kane Pixels series, that I've ever seen. It encapsulates that "liminal space" feeling of being alone in an empty space perfectly.

I decided to play this after seeing a Games Done Quick speedrun of this and nearly crying just from seeing a tiny tidbit of the ending cutscene. If just watching a small portion of the cutscene elicited an emotional reaction out of me, you can guess how the rest of the game went for me.

To be honest, I was a little intimidated at first. After initially getting in the rocket and blasting off (the rest of which I won't spoil for obvious reasons), I was kinda worried that it would take a long time to explore everything and eventually get to the ending.

What I found over the course of 16 hours though is that the game, true to its word with how the developers designed it, has you naturally curious, and that natural curiosity is what leads you to your goal. Finding a small thing in a random planet soon leads to a rabbit hole of searching for things that act as leads to other things. Explaining further than that is spoiler territory, but you get the idea. The game also has a sense of urgency going on, and with some sections towards the end being very tough and precarious, it really has you on the edge of your seat and tensed up.

As well, the soundtrack is beautiful and really aids in getting the player settled in the atmosphere. I come from a region in the US where country music is a favored type of music and is ingrained in my identity, so the folk-country music in this really hit home for me.

10/10 from me, and easily one of top 5 games ever made.

Put simply, this game is a must-have if you are at all interested in puzzle games. I picked this game up in February 2020 back when it was an Epic Store exclusive after seeing a speedrun of it at a recent Games Done Quick event, and I fell in love with it after my first playthrough. I will explain why by dividing it up into a few factors:

1. The Environments
The big "pull" of this game is that the environments loop infinitely, and have structures resembling those within paintings by the artist MC Escher. Exploring these environments and wrapping your head around them is a feeling of wonder that I think hardly any puzzle games after this one will be able to replicate. In particular, there's one location leading up to the second god cube that instilled a sense of grandness that pretty much stuck with me for the rest of the game, and the ending cutscene of the game was a very good way to finish off the main story.

2. The Learning Curve/The Mechanics
Of course, the other big "pull" of this game is that you flip gravity to solve puzzles. Something I think people playing this for the first time might struggle with or feel daunted by is keeping track of which gravity state you're in in combination with where you are in the game world, as some of the levels can be massive and very complex. While that is the case, the game is very good about herding you to where you need to go to either solve a puzzle or find a component to solving a puzzle, despite not giving explicit instructions. In particular, the fact that the levels are designed around the player falling infinitely allows you to get a vantage point to find whatever you need to more easily. Because of this, while I did get stuck plenty of times (my first playthrough on the Epic Store version took 12 hours in total), I never felt like it was the game's fault or that the puzzles were "too hard", and persevered to get to the end.

I am a speedrunner of this game that has spent nearly 200 hours on it between the Steam release and the Epic Store release, and has a put a fair amount of research into the development that went into it, and after all that time, all I can really say is this:

Buy. This. Game.

You won't regret it one bit.

Probably my favorite game of the whole series. Voice acting added a lot to the game as it gave more depth to the characters. Each night has you doing tasks instead of what 1-4 did with sitting still and surviving, and each task is different from the last,so no task will be repeated. A point of advice from me for people playing this game is that night 4 is extremely tough. To be frank,it is the hardest night I've ever done in a FNAF game,right up there with 20/20/20/20 mode in FNAF 1. My advice is to be patient at doing night 4,and you will pull through and beat it :). A small complaint I have is about the ingame cursor. A lot of times when I let my mouse sit still, the ingame cursor would move by itself(which may or may not be because of the kind of mouse I use). This isn't a huge deal, but can be very annoying on things that require precision, like night 4 and the keypad task on night 5. I easily found a solution,but I think it might need a patch. Regardless of my night 4 troubles, I enjoyed the game a ton, and I hope Scott makes more of these types of FNAF games. 10/10 from me :)

I can say that this is the only horror game I've played by far that scared me so damn much that I quit it for a few days

10/10 would be scared s***less by the scythe guy(speciman 12)again

"Tomorrow's another day"
I actually don't have a lot to say about the game this time around except that IT'S. SO. GOOD.
A lot of what Scott did with this game improved upon what all the other 3 attempted and then some

The music,especially the menu music, is absolutely chilling and still gives me goosebumps just listening to it on Youtube

The gameplay was I feel the absolute best one out of the four because while it is the very familiar style of avoiding the animatronic characters,this time around you really have to listen for whether the animatronics are at the door or not,and that adds on to the scare factor and difficulty/challenge of the game ten-fold

The story was imo again the best one because it reveals the background of that one infamous bite and really immerses you in the lore with the death minigame-style"cutscenes"after each night

Besides the actual content of the game,the teasers on scottgames.com teasing this one very much surprised and somewhat confused me every single time they came out,in fact imo that's one of the best ways to spread news about the game or a video game in general instead of just spurting out huge chunks of information like most other video games do,because especially for the theorists like 8-BitGaming,Dawko,and Razzbowski,it gets people thinking and creating complex and interesting theories,adding on to the already high interest I had in mysteriosity of the game ten-fold

12/10 from me

"You know,you were my first test subject. You will always have a deep place inside my gears! Farewell my human test subject!"-Nigel

I pretty much first knew this game existed when Znernicus did a speedrun at #AGDQ2015,and I decided to try it because it looked kinda fun
Aperture Tag is a mod for Portal 2,where instead of giving you a portal gun,you instead get a paint gun with the red and blue gels.
The red/blue gels in the game play a HUGE role in solving the puzzles,and in some cases require you to bounce off the blue gel or run on the red gel for a good amount of time to get enough momentum.
The puzzles imo were pretty cleverly done(albeit it being very broken with the shortcuts you can take x) )

Overall I liked how it was done with Nigel essentially being a Wheatley II,the portal gun being replaced with a paint gun,which made the puzzles interesting,and the music(there's even a Metal version of Still Alive during the credits ^^)

8/10 from me