Recent reviews by Noche

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

This is a diamond in the *very, verrrrrrrrry* rough. It's got a great premise, and could be excellent in the future, but right now it's just too buggy, janky and unbalanced to be worth playing. It's far too easy to team-wipe to even the lowest-threat of creatures, losing all of your footage unless you happen to read a somewhat-buried FAQ that tells you to hit F3 (which none of us did), and many of said creatures feel extremely unbalanced and difficult to deal with despite ostensibly being fairly low risk. Actually progressing feels like it takes more luck than it does skill- especially when buying items is also buggy right now, and you can lose an entire hundred-dollar boom mic to the floor eating it.

Also, there's an "iron maiden" enemy that's just objectively terrible. Despite *requiring* multiplayer to function as intended, it can spawn when all but one player is dead, or in solo play- oh, and if it happens to land on an upward-facing slope, its captcha puzzle becomes completely unsolvable due to clipping into the floor, meaning the game can effectively just decide that you lose with the same enemy in two different situations.

Overall: not recommended in its current state. Wait a while for more updates to release before picking this one up.

Hollow Knight is deep, intense, and powerful in a way I struggle to describe.

It reaches into your heart and pulls on its strings in just the right ways, playing a melody of emotions that I can't quite put into words. It's permeated with a deep, unnameable sadness throughout, and yet, that all consuming melancholy is pierced by moments of love and hope. The bugs you'll meet along your path, all endearing in their own strange little ways, are like spotlights of comfort in a sea of sadness, and you'll love them like they're real; the game plays with that love, quite a lot actually, in ways that hurt, ways that leave you heartbroken, in a way I haven't felt about a game in years. But even then, their fates are often left ambiguous, leaving some room for you to hope, that they're still okay, wherever they are.

Even the circumstances and characters that are meant to be humorous and silly, it's hard not to find something in them outside of the comedy; Zote, for example, is the butt of plenty of jokes and a rude, haughty character with lots of comedy springing from him, but if one looks deeply, it turns out he's a remarkably deep and interesting character, with even he, the comically-inept, loveably-hateable rival, having a story and character which delves deep into that same nameless sadness, and yet, shines with hope.

The gameplay itself is snappy and fun, if punishingly difficult, in a Souls-like manner, but it's a way that encourages you to keep going. Fight through that struggle, and keep pushing forward. You will learn, and it will shape you, until you find yourself achieving feats you never thought you could. The game is very open, and lets you explore it at your own pace, finding new trinkets, interesting secrets, and occasionally more pieces of mournful, melancholy lore, from time to time.

In the end, Hollow Knight is a game about hope, and how it can be found glimmering in even the deepest, most silent, dead worlds. It's deep, intense, and powerful, and it's a game that I'll never forget.

I am going to grab Malina's face and smooch her with reckless abandon. Will she kill me for it? Probably. Will I regret it? Hell no.

There's a damn good reason this game never goes on sale, and it's because it's basically video game drugs. I play this game for weeks at a time non-stop when I'm in the mood for it. Factorio is simple in premise- you're dropped more-or-less empty handed on a randomly generated planet, and you've got to mine resources, craft items, and build your way up to launching a rocket to get out of there, all while squashing bugs along the way (and I mean the kind with exoskeletons, not the kind with broken polygons and whatnot). However, it's so, so much deeper than you'd think from that surface-level skimming of the premise, and it will take your brain and stretch it like silly putty.

The crux of the game is automation, and you will eventually make factories for damn near everything you can craft, and trust me, with some of the crazy-long crafting trees you can get, those factories will probably end up ridiculously massive and spaghetti-like. Optimize however you'd like, build them in whatever way makes sense to you, and automate, advance, accelerate. It's a game with tons of thought put into it and it stimulates the brain in just the right way to keep you playing and playing for hours and hours.

UPDATE: The creator of this game is an AI bro and has put out a Stable Diffusion-based, staggeringly overpriced AI avatar generator to make avatars you can't even use in the game. I can no longer recommend this game on principle. Unless you're cool with supporting the work of an AI bro, or he rescinds this descision, don't play it.

My original review is below.

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I am in a bloody and brutal love-hate relationship with this game. DemonCrawl is Minesweeper as a roguelike, and it's great fun with that idea taken to its extremes in a plethora of different ways. Unfortunately I'm terrible at Minesweeper, and so this game is incredibly infuriating for me to actually play 70% of the time. But, hey- it's infuriating in a way that keeps me coming back. Glutton for punishment, I suppose.

I do recommend this game in the end, as it's tons of fun and is surprisingly accessible for people like me who don't understand Minesweeper at ALL, but do be prepared for the game to kick your ass and hand it to you on a silver platter, even when you're at your most indestructible.

Deep Rock Galactic is one of those games that I don't touch for nearly a year, until I suddenly decide I'm in the mood for it again and then it consumes my every thought for a week straight. It's super addictive, best played co-op but still plenty playable solo. With a wide variety of both mission types and locations to play, fantastic drop-in multiplayer that I wish more games had, and a delightfully cheeky sense of humor, not to mention a surprising amount of content depth that you're left to discover on your own, I've not found a game quite like it. Rock and stone!

(Note: This review is written taking all DLC into account.)

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is a game with near-infinite replay value as you unlock new content with every run, dozens of characters with unique playstyles to play as, thousands of items, and Edmund's signature brand of edginess and dark humor all over it, interlaced with a melancholy and surprisingly powerful story that grows more down to earth the further into it you go. In my experience, Isaac is a great game to play when you just need something to do while listening to background noise, or if you just feel like turning on the console and screwing around with absurd item combinations for a while.

Also, the mods- good lord, the mods. Workshop support requires DLC, but that's a small price to pay for the sheer amount of content and replayability the mods add. I've modded this game so hard that it's straight up stopped working on multiple occasions.

Overall it's a game I highly recommend, especially with all the DLC.

I barely understand this game, but it's entertaining to play with people who actually know what they're doing. Definitely not for morons like me, but if you can get over the sheer learning hurdle, it's probably really fun!

My go-to tool for pixel art, Aseprite is a tool with tons of options and plenty of ways to make the creation of pixel work easier and more interesting. It's got a great brush stabilizer, nice pattern options, a tiler, an outline function, even palette cycling is possible in it. An excellent tool for making animated sprites in particular, given it has built-in frame-by-frame animation support (though, sadly, no tweening). My use time isn't really accurate; I have a tendency to just leave it running in the background until I need it again.