Recent reviews by Rainwad

This game is absurdly good. This is the exact kind of game that makes me remember "oh yeah, my dream job is being a gamedev." The animation, the music, the surreal atmosphere, the writing... All oozing with personality, with charm, with delirious passion! You can really tell that this is the result of 4 years of effort from a team of extremely talented artists. It's utterly addictive just soaking in the atmosphere and poking at every inch for secrets galore.

My only gripe is that, while some of the achievements are pretty cool and serve to highlight secrets you found, others are pretty nothing-burgery (e.g. stare at blood for a while), and one of them is a complete bastard and a half to get, since it's a disorienting platforming challenge that you can only attempt once per save file (unless you get good at Alt-F4ing when you mess up, or just copy your save file), ough.

If you love basically any game focused on the surreal vibes (Hylics, Space Funeral, Yume Nikki, LSD Dream Emulator, etc), get this thingy and experience the vibes now!!! Do it!!!

This is just an insanely good game, start to finish, no questions asked.

When I first heard about it, I was like "oh, Greek mythology, eh whatever, not my thing," but HOOOOO boy, don't judge a book by its cover!!! Everything about this game just FEELS fantastic in a way that's hard to describe. The loop of smashing through the underworld, cobbling together a crazy build, and using your resources after every run to unlock MORE power, and more dialogue with all the super well-written characters... So good.

It does everything in its power to soften the tremendous impact that death normally has in a roguelike, and it makes every death feel all the more encouraging. Sure, your run's over, but now you can dump all the resources you've collected in to unlocking like 3 new permanent upgrades that all have very tangible impacts! And in the meantime, you spruce up the lounge with some cutlery and a fireplace, and maybe you give your dog a comfy bed, because he's a good lad.

Probably the only problems / minor nitpicks I have with it are:
- Some irritating enemies (though none are too bad)
- Dark Thirst can be annoying, sometimes made me feel like I had to pick the same weapons over and over whenever it decided to cling to a specific weapon (looking at you, Adamant Rail!)
- Making progress too fast is a thing - certain NPCs might suddenly talk about things you've done like 5 runs in a row as if they're totally new happenings, lol

But that's basically it!

Hades is just full of so much love and personality and chaos, it might honestly top Dark Souls 1 as my favorite game of all time. Even though I've gotten all the achievements, I could absolutely see myself booting it up again and again to unlock every little bonus item and codex entry possible. Can't wait for the sequel!

This game is just a big vibe-y romp. Was a bit wonky at times, but overall, I loved it!

Got addicted to it while it was in Early Access, fully completed everything it had at the time, then started a new save file for v1.0, and had lots of fun sinking my teeth in to it all over again! I've only gotten one of the endings so far, might update the review after getting the other four.

PROS:
+ Has a lovely, super charming art style, exactly the kind of ancient PlayStation / early computer 3D graphics I have a fondness for. Every area's got really nice, unique vibes, ranging from magical and comfy to horrific and bone-chilling! My favorites were probably Yosei Forest, the Sanguine Sea, and the Forbidden Archives... but honestly, every area in the game has at least one setpiece or general vibe that I totally love.
+ I also like the character + enemy designs! Lotsa variety on display, with loads of fun-lookin polygonal lads and weird creatures. Some people are like "ehhh meh, why is there an anime demon girl, ain't this supposed to be a grimdark fantasy world???" but I say, "hey, neat! anime demon girl! varied character designs! :>"
+ The music!!! It's great! Bolsters the vibes even further! Catchy tracks like "Book Betrayal" and "The Hunter" have been absolutely embedded in my brain since Early Access, and all the various ambient tracks do a lot of heavy lifting to provide a sense of wonder or horror in their respective areas.
+ Neat, simple gameplay loop of exploring weird places and doin' RPG stuff! It definitely doesn't have the deepest systems in the world, but walkin' around, smackin' dudes, finding new weapons and spells, using the abilities at your disposal to take creative paths around the environment, and choosin' what stats to upgrade is just generally fun overall.

SUBJECTIVE:
~ The difficulty... or, lack thereof. The game sort of has a "reverse difficulty curve," where things start out challenging, but manageable, as you figure out the game's systems and get surprised by the wacky tricks various enemies can pull...

But by the time mid-game rolls around, you're practically guaranteed to be an unkillable god compared to everyone else. Like other reviews have said, it's basically like being an FPS protagonist in a game where nearly every enemy is still just a slow RPG goon that slowly strolls towards you. Magic in particular scales LUDICROUSLY well, and if you get Ice Tear as a mage build, congrats, you have officially won the game.

Being able to snowball in to an instant-kill machine that nukes everything can be fun! And, it was fun for a while, since, y'know, the game's mainly about exploration, not combat... It just kinda feels too easy to do so. It's practically inevitable, oof. There is a difficulty slider, though I haven't toyed around with it much, and I've heard that even on max difficulty, magic still utterly annihilates everything, so, lol, oh well.

~ Illusory walls. Gotta love them illusory walls. Sometimes they're pretty well-telegraphed, other times, it is literally an affair of dragging your face across an entire hallway and hoping a question mark pops up. When some integral secrets depend on this... oof.

CONS:
- The story... This is probably the part that disappointed me the most. It's technically not bad, but it took a look at the Dark Souls approach of drip-feeding every crumb of plot, and thought, "huh, that's cool, what if we gave you even LESS plot?"

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of bits of good stuff here! The tragedy of Castle Le Fanu is probably the best subplot in the whole game, with plenty of lorebooks scattered around across multiple areas that allow you to piece together everything, and it all serves as a super cool build-up to the game's first boss! And the simple environmental storytelling in areas like the Temple of Silence is really cool!

The characters start out interesting, buuut they don't really... do a whole lot. Some of them can be encountered at multiple areas, but once you're done with their little bonus vignettes in those areas, it's back to the hub for them, repeating the same dialogue over and over. Until they all show up at the final boss fight for a big showdown, like "hey!!! we're important! remember us?!" - which was actually fun in a goofy anime finale kind of way, but I feel like it didn't have much impact because of how fast you run out of new interactions with all of them...

Aaand the ending is... wonky. At least, the only one I've gotten so far. The final boss (who is only the second boss) is pretty cool, but I've heard they're either a cakewalk if you're a magic build (my experience), or absolute hell if you're a melee build... They also don't have nearly the same build-up that the first boss had, so uh... oof. Once you go in to the room beyond, and wake up the sleepy eepy guy, the story just kinda abruptly ends with some fourth wall breaking mumbo jumbo. "This ain't the real ending, get the others!!!"

It's like... I loved exploring the game to try and piece together the stories of every area, but not every area even wants to piece together its own story. Sometimes it's just like, "that's it?" and it kinda sucks when that happens. If I wanted to be super uncharitable, I might even say it's "pretentious," since it leads you in with all of these cool surreal dark fantasy shenanigans, but ultimately builds up to "woah... bro... what happens to the game, when the game stops being played??? woooahh brooo... are dreams real bro?"

Buuut, eh, ain't that big of a deal.

CONCLUSION:
Even if the story is kind of a wet sneeze of "whatever," and the game balance is really wonky, I definitely don't regret the experience I had with Lunacid! It's really neat! It's clear that it was made with loads of love and passion, poured in to a nice little soup of jankiness and fun vibes, and I'll definitely remember it for a long time. Honestly makes me wanna make a King's Field-like of my own, lol.

If you wanna just soak in some really good dark fantasy atmosphere and some simple RPG gameplay, get this game!!! I dig it.

Pro-tip for anyone stuck on the Pronouns boss fight, if you keep getting inflicted with the "Enraged" status effect when you reach the Neo-Pronouns phase, try hitting the left arrow instead of the right arrow. You could also instead try getting good. Hope this helps! :)

This game is REALLY cool, basically a fighting game that's entirely focused on the tactical side of fighting rather than the extreme, finger-destroying, perfect execution aspects, and it's highly moddable! I even started making a mod, myself, but...

...It IS still a fighting game, which means you're going to inevitably have some matches where you just get helplessly stomped in to the ground by a pro with no recourse besides the Blue Wheel of Copium. Sometimes, watching how hard you get rekt can be fun in its own right, but sometimes it's absolutely blood-boiling to spend 10 minutes watching yourself get stunned over and over and over, lol. I just kinda got tired of that, alas!

Still absolutely worth playing and supporting, even if you're not a fighting game aficianado, it's just a really nice indie gem. Cool unique idea, cool execution, cool developer, cool moddability, heck yeah.

Maybe I'll randomly be in the mood to play it again in the future, or maybe it'll languish in my library for the rest of the eon. Either way, was still a worthwhile and super interesting experience.

Extremely janky in many respects, but wow, this is genuinely one of the best games I've ever played???

The precise balance of RPG, FPS, and stealth gameplay - combined with really good level design and a really engaging (and painfully prescient) story - all comes together in this scrumptious concoction that's utterly addictive! Figuring out your own path through the world, making decisions on the fly, and building your own JC Denton from the ground up over the course of the game... You can really tell a lot of love went in to basically every inch of Deus Ex. They had a precise vision of a nutty, over-the-top game about being a cool secret agent guy who can think of a plan to get out of any tough situation, and they nailed it.

This is one of THE genre-defining immersive sims, and I don't regret a single second spent playing it! Even now, days after I've finished my first playthrough, I'm already thinking stuff like "hmm, what if I built myself around using low-tech weapons and took Combat Strength instead of Microfibal Muscle?" or "ooh, what if I skipped a subdermal augmentation so I could take both Cloak and Radar Transparency, and went with a Rifle build and just sniped everything from afar with a silenced sniper rifle?" lmao

It's extremely rare that a game THIS LONG already makes me want to replay it, hot dang. Sure, sometimes the AI is a bit dumb. Sometimes the voice acting is hilariously awful. Sometimes there's little bits that seem rushed, slapdash, or genuinely designed kinda crappily... And some of the weapon + augmentation balancing is a bit questionable.

But there's seriously nothing else quite like this game.

Really great game! Definitely scratches that Sonic Adventure itch, with a character who honestly controls so much smoother and snappier than Sonic ever has. Took me a bit to get used to, but once I grasped the controls fully, it was all uphill from there.

The level design's mostly pretty great - Protest City was where the game absolutely HOOKED me, with the sheer ridiculous amount of alternate paths and optional secret routes you can access through tactical mobility shenanigans. I spent 30 minutes on that level alone, just having fun dashing across rooftops in weird, esoteric ways to find as many exploration medals as I could!

The art and music are also fantastic! Some character designs are a lil' dumb, but they're still charming in a goofy way, and the vibrant and expressive artstyle is always just a joy to look at. Each level's got a lot of fun details that make the environments really look alive, it's just lovely.

The game's chock full of perfect adrenaline-pumping electronic music, buttrock, and metal to go alongside the blistering pace of the game. Most of the boss fight themes in particular are GODLY, and I haven't been able to get them out of my brain after endlessly replaying each of the themes like 20 times, lmao

I do have some gripes, however...

Easily my biggest gripe is the combat; it feels pretty decent on its own, even if its a bit button-mashy, but the problem is that it feels completely detached from the standard speedy gameplay loop in every way. There isn't a single arena / boss fight in the game that challenges your mobility, outside of a few attacks which force you to dash away - which is a real shame, because a lot of the bosses in Sonic Adventure test your mobility in fun ways! After all, in SA, the movement WAS the combat, instead of being 2 different systems...

The weirdest part is, it KIND OF works??? Since the combat on its own is fun enough, and still feels "fast" in a different way, it almost serves as a kind of "break" from the fast platforming, in a similar way to the various vehicle sections... but I still wish it was integrated better with the movement. There's nothing like Egg Viper or E-101 mkII or Biolizard to be had here, just straight-up DMC-style boss design. I haven't even played DMC, so I guess this is my first real experience with combat of that style??? Huh. Weird to think about.

I also have no idea how to feel about the story. It's very clear that it's supposed to be a big culmination of the events of the two previous games, buuut I haven't played either of them, so OOF. A hefty chunk of the story is also presented in pretty mundane info-dump cutscenes through a television - I was able to stomach them, since I do unironically love a lot of games with text-heavy stories, but it feels a little barebones compared to Sonic Adventure's completely unhinged anime storytelling.

The actual cutscenes with characters interacting with each other are quite fun, but I was definitely left hungry for more - there's way too little! I also have EVEN LESS IDEA how to feel about the ending of the game - that's where the game really cranks up the absurdity, and goes full SA-tier with a heaping dollop of existentialism. Problem is, it just feels really abrupt... I guess that's kind of the point, and it might feel better with the context from previous games... But still, would've felt way more impactful with more cutscenes of character interaction + more reasons to care about the world.

Even though Spark 3's not a perfect game, I still think it was worth every cent. It fills the gaping, Sonic-shaped hole in my heart with a big meaty hamburger, and pulls a hefty amount of new tricks out of its hat that keep things totally interesting and unique. And the fact that ONE GUY was responsible for most of it is just incredible, and totally inspiring for me as a beginner gamedev.

Is it an objectively superior spiritual sequel of Sonic Adventure? Honestly, nah.

But is it fun as hell? Does it succeed at almost everything it tries with flying colors? Does it keep a big goofy grin of utter confidence on its face, even when it fails? Hell yeah.

pretty alright game. having played Sheepo, it was neat to see how this game evolved from that game's simplicity in to something deeper, but i still feel like it's pretty lacking

just a very basic metroidvania, the amount of actual freedom in exploration is kinda low; mostly a linear trek through some decent stages, most of the areas are pretty well-designed tho - was also kinda disappointed by the island-connecting mechanic, which seems really cool on paper, but in practice, it's mostly just used to block access to tiny secret upgrades instead of actual progression. honestly i'd probably give this game a middle thumb if i had the option, it's just a very "fine" game with nothing that stands out a whole lot, but nothing super bad either.

PROS:
+ great art and music! just nice vibes all around
+ gameplay controls nicely in general
+ most enemies are pretty finely-designed
+ some funny writing and alright little characters
+ lots of concepts that are pretty cool on paper, and sometimes pretty cool in execution

CONS:
- kinda bland overall, permeates the whole game; from the upgrade design, to the room design, to the world design, and the ending section of the game + final bosses amplifies all the blandness
- a few enemies SEEM like they have states of invincibility because they do not react to your attacks at all (not even flashing white / red), but they actually do take damage... pretty bad conveyance issue (especially noticeable with that one rat robot boss)
- world was sometimes annoying to navigate, kinda linear, and the island-connecting mechanic felt underutilized + underwhelming
- the teleport arrow is possibly one of the lamest upgrades i've ever seen in any game; there could've been cool stuff if you were able to AIM the arrow, but it's literally only used to teleport past like 4 gates that block progression, or for precisely 1 secret

this is basically the potato chips of metroidvanias. it's a yummy crunchy little thing, but it's not going to give you any fantastical super unique experiences compared to other games of its style... and even though it's a nice comfy romp, i can't say it's left much of an impression on me. i'd be interested to see what kinda game the devs have up their sleeve next, i just hope they get way crazier with it!

man this is just a really cool dang game

there's a lot of other exploration-type games i've played where i get kinda sick of retreading the same ground over and over, but this game just fires on ALL cylinders -- impeccable vibes to soak in + never waiting too long to show you new cool things + consistently rewarding the player for backtracking / exploring. even if backtracking sometimes didn't give me any rewards, just hanging out in these weird cool areas was a treat. the art and sound design are absolutely top notch here

from comfiness to silliness to sadness to extreme terror, this game encompasses a whole lotta different atmospheres, and i thoroughly enjoyed em all!

it's no earth-shattering, 50-button-presses per second advanced technological achievement, but it doesn't need to be! it's a game where, oftentimes, just existing feels rewarding, and man, i dunno if i've ever played another game that can quite replicate that

except the secret forest maze, that gave me a massive headache, but everything else is great lol

Bennett Foddy's Galaga.
it's a decent, sometimes frustrating, but overall fun shmup...

until the final boss. at which point the difficulty SKYROCKETS in to the stratosphere, catapulted up by a thick layer of nonsense that toes the line between "requires perfect execution" and "requires perfect luck." hated literally every phase of that fight.

i am extremely glad i beat the final phase on the first try, because apparently if you fail the (technically optional but basically mandatory) final phase, then your save file is deleted and you start all over

okay. sure. wowee. i could not give less of a crap about the themes of this game because it's just like "wow! death and rebirth and reincarnation sure are concepts! buddhism exists! this is why deleting your save file is profound, because BUDDHISM and REINCARNATION and SUFFERING, am i right guys??? :DDD"

none of the characters are really extraordinary, because dialogue basically never happens - i guess that's not really 100% necessary, since there's plenty of games where the plot is great enough to not need fully fleshed-out characters, but... there's like... zero substance here. "hey what if a big evil robot flesh planet tried taking over the universe? hey! surprise! buddhism! isn't it so deep that you're putting a bunch of effort in to a video game? wow! here, now you can have like, the only four lines of dialogue this character will ever speak!"

ok but all that aside, the REST of the game is pretty well-designed. the art + character + enemy designs are great, each level feels really different, and the different subweapons you can unlock and swap between are cool (especially since they have different effects on each ship!) i also like how the checkpoints + level select + score-based continues system works until the final boss's final phase walks over with a cheeky grin and farts directly in your face, and... yeah. i don't really have a lot to say tbh.

even though i spent the first half of this review bashing the hell out of this game, it's still not BAD, i'm more neutral on it, but the whole ending bit of the game just scraped all the enthusiasm out of my body. urgh. coming from games like Nuclear Throne, Enter the Gungeon, and The Binding of Isaac as my only real "shmup-ish" experience probably didn't help much either...

also Fraxy! Fraxy!!! that game was great, and Ebo's boss showcases from literally over a decade ago were how i started following him and found out about this game. was very sad that this game never really evoked that same sense of "awe" i got from watching his custom Fraxy bosses. alas.

the moral of the story is, someone's gotta remake Fraxy, and this game is okay, but i hate the ending. this may be the most aimless review i have ever made lmao

pretty neat! the transformation mechanic is cool and it's just a cute game overall - sometimes it was funny, sometimes it was kinda meh, but hey, this isn't really a game you play for the Deep Story

i found some of the platforming annoying, and some level design felt a bit janky / unintuitive (in particular, the hungry beast in Deadmall felt like an area hazard that would instakill me if i tried to walk past it, clearly telegraphed by it eating the sign, so i tried going everywhere else before going past it, lol), but there's nothing, like, hair-pullingly frustrating

basically, it hits all the beats a platformer-focused metroidvania should, it's just a small, tightly-focused, fun game where ya jump around, get new abilities after each boss, and do shenanigans