Recent reviews by Vulpi

Living proof of how stupid people are when it comes to group mentality.

I've found that in games that tapped into your nostalgia, the entire game wanted you to remember how good it felt to be in the past again. It wanted to remind you of how fun a game felt when you played it, like Shovel Knight wanted to remind you how great platformers were in the NES days without the fake difficulty that went with it. This was Mighty Number 9's attempted idea as well. Emily is Away Too tries to do the very same, but it does something else.

It makes you remember the not-so-great moments of your past. It makes you remember that within all those happy memories, there's painful, heart-breaking memories you desperately try not to think about.

Emily is Away Too is basically an AOL Instant Messenger simulator in which you have the option to interact with two girls. What happens to them depends on the choices you make throughout the story. Maybe you become close friends and feel you can share anything with them. Maybe you'll start a relationship with one of them. Maybe you end up just destroying your friendship all together with one wrong choice.

It's a very realistic game, painfully realistic really. I haven't seen anything so utterly real and something that hits so many personal feelings on a deep and harrowing level. I would reccomend this game to anyone who wants to remember the early Internet days and everything that it ensued. You really will feel like you're back in the early 2000's. The game really does go the extra mile to make sure you're back in the past again. It's a touch to games I don't see that often.

Bad Dream: Coma is a point and click adventure game with macabre elements to it. You find yourself in a dream in which you sustain life-threatening injuries, such as getting the top of your head chopped clean off, but you won't ever die. You'll just keep living with part of your brain missing and stumble about the world with severely impaired function and what remains of your brain dripping out of your sliced skull quite frequently. Obviously, you want to find a way to stop that.

In order to find a way to bring back the ability for anybody to die, you have to go through many chapters of the game and interact with the environment. You can pick up items that are found throughout the chapters and then use these items to advance through the chapters, such as unlocking doors with keys or making enemies go away by feeding them slabs of meat. For the most part, the game does a pretty good job at that part. Most of the puzzles do make sense and there is a feeling of accomplishment and ephiphany when you make a connection. There are a few ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ puzzles in my opinion with how you need to "draw" in a new part of the level with a pen at one point when the concept was never shown before or even hinted at, as well as times where I everything was so vague that I had to click on everything with all of my items to get a reaction, but they didn't sour the entire experience. It just halted progression for a good twenty minutes until I finally found a solution.

In all, I'd recommend the game to anyone who doesn't mind some minor body horror and slight gore. It has great replayability thanks to different ways you can solve puzzles, even if it's going to take you a while to figure out how to get all those endings.

OneShot is a short, puzzle-adventure game that doesn't take more than 4 hours to complete. In the game, you guide a cat-like boy named Niko through a dying world with the hopes of restoring its sun. However, as you guide the boy through the dying world, it quickly becomes apparent that the game is aware that you, the player, exist.

It's a fun little game that will do things to you, the player, that you won't be expecting. I'd compare it to Pony Island and Undertale into how it messes with you, though I won't delve further into details for spoilers. However, my main gripe with this game is that it seems to crash a lot on my computer. My computer drive crashes between location transitions for some reason, which quickly became irritating to me since every time the game crashed, I lost quite a good chunk of my progress and had to start all over again. I'm not sure if this is just a problem with my computer, and it didn't happen all the time, but it's noteworthy enough in my opinion to mention.

I would reccomend this game to anyone who enjoys puzzle adventure games and who enjoy self-aware video games, however only when it's on sale. I feel the 10 dollar price tag is a bit steep for a 4 hour game.

I wouldn't call this a game so much as I would call it a memoir that you can personally experience with the help of a computer. But for the sake of the review, I'll call it a game.

I honestly don't know how to review this game. It runs fairly like any game should, though I often felt a bit lost at various times since the game was vague about what I needed to do or where I needed to go. The graphics are decent despite everyone being a faceless being and the voice acting is right on point. But those things aren't really what the game's main draw is.

The game does an excellent job of allowing you to experience the family's grief when their son is diagnosed with cancer and their struggles with it. It's not "hollywoodized" and melodramatic, instead being very much how people do react in situations like these in real life. Sometimes you don't always cry when someone you love is discovered to be terminally ill, but instead convince yourself that you can fight the disease and win in the end. Or, perhaps you don't feel anything at all and the grief hits you many days later when you can actually process what you've been told. It's different for everyone.

I'll admit that I didn't cry at any point throughout this game, despite what everyone else says. I knew how much pain the characters were in and how upset they were, as the game developers did an excellent job with showing their grief, but I never felt overwhelming pain myself. I don't know if it's because I'm emotionally dead at times or because I'm a nurse and it's my job to keep professional distance from heartbreaking situations like this with my patients, but that's just how I felt.

But despite my apparent semi-apathy, I'd still reccomend this game. It's a short experience, clocking in at about 2 hours depending on how much time you take to explore the environment. It's a wonderful experience and it does provide a good sense of closure to all those who might have perished because of unfortunate reasons.

And maybe in that time, you can feel what I couldn't and cry the tears that wouldn't come for me.

Short review for this because it's a short and simple game.

Basically, this entire game is just answering questions that the game throws at you, answering if it's True or False. There's a Campaign mode, which lets you go through a large series of questions at once, and then there's Quick Play, which gives you 10 random questions from the Campaign mode. There's also other modes, but you need the DLC for that.

It would be a fun little game to play and learn interesting facts with for 30 minutes or so... if it weren't for one glaring problem.

Not all of the questions are correct.

There are many times where I got fed the wrong information from the game by telling me that something isn't right when it actually is or vice versa, which makes me paranoid as to what's true and what's false.

The game's free to play, but I don't reccomend it unless you're an achievement hunter. Just get 12 particular questions correct, and you'll get an easy 100% completion, no DLC needed. For the rest of you, look elsewhere for trivial knowledge.

Many Roguelikes seem to be RNG-heavy. In other words, your success with the game and if you'll make it to the end heavily depends on if the game lets you have all of the tools you need. Whether it's certain items that need to spawn on the floor or certain abilities you see, these greatly influence the game and are what ultimately determine what leads you to victory more than your skills ever will.

Enter the Gungeon looks like just one of those games. With its adorable and ridiculous characters that you see on the first floor that are literally bullets with guns, you'll think that you'll get a quick victory. Combine this with the equally absurd guns that you can find throughout the Gungeon, such as a gun that literally shoots out the word "Bullet" at enemies, you'll think that this game will be a cake-walk so long as you can manipulate the RNG. Your character even feels very powerful the second you begin the game with their starting weapons and you don't really feel weak at all in the beginning. Then also, you've had years and years of practice with Binding of Isaac, which this game shares similar level design with! How difficult could this game be when you've gotten all the achievements for Binding of Isaac or even Nuclear Throne by this point?

To put it bluntly, your skills in past Roguelikes mean nothing in this game.

Enter the Gungeon is a bullet hell that wants to claim you the second you descend into the chambers. It does not care what kind of guns you have or how much health you've somehow obtained. It doesn't care about what abilities your character has. It doesn't even care that you're a master at other Roguelike games. It just wants to make it so that you'll never get to the bottom and retrieve your prize.

You have four ways to avoid death. The first way is to simply avoid the attacks by moving around as you would with any other game. The second way is the dodge roll, a new and nifty mechanic that allows you to have invulnerability from bullets during the first half of your roll. When implented right, it allows you to avoid damage from waves and waves of oncoming bullets that would otherwise obliterate you on the spot. You can also take cover behind objects, or flip up tables that are in any rooms and have them take hits for you while you reload your ammo. And finally, there are Blanks, items that you can collect throughout the floors that when used, dispel any bullets being shot on the floor and save you from an entire storm of bullets you feel you couldn't deal with.

These mechanics are what make the game what it is. Not the absurd guns, not the ethereal atmosphere of the game, not the rather small amount of characters. This game is a test of reflexes and quick thinking. How quickly you can make the choice to either fire a blank, dodge roll, or simply move out of the way of an oncoming bullet in a split second is what this game is all about.

For those wishing to test their mettle and don't want RNG getting in their way, I would very well reccomend this to anyone. Even if you never do reach the bottom, you will always feel like you're having a wonderful time with the ethereal music playing in the background as you go about destroying everything.

You know that game you saw at the arcade that had all of those flashy lights and drew you in the second you saw it? Remember how you then went up to it and put your quarter into it, and then before you even knew it, you got a game over screen? And then instead of walking away, you put another quarter in the game to give it figure out what even happened, only for you to just barely grasp the gameplay before you died again? And then you dumped your entire wallet into the game and by the end of it all, the longest you lasted was 10 minutes?

Nuclear Throne is that arcade game.

It proclaims itself to be a roguelike, similar to Binding of Isaac. In fact, a lot of people make comparisons between the two games, saying that they're similar. To that I say, there's actually not very in much in common. While they are both roguelikes and you need to get to go through a number of levels to reach the "end", as well as having the same movement scheme with the WASD keys, and having a variety of characters to play as, those are the only similarities they have.

One of the ways Nuclear Throne makes itself very different from Binding of Isaac is by making your primary means of attack with guns and melee weapons like wrenches and sledgehammers. You use your curser to aim, and then you click whenever you want to hit/fire from your gun. And as with real life guns, you need to reload and get more ammo after you've shot them all into your enemies' corpses. The ammo is relatively easy to find, whether it's in chests or from drops after you kill enemies, but it's still a good idea to not unload all of your bullets at once, because some enemy will pop up when you need your bullets the most, and you WILL die.

Another thing about Nuclear Throne is that each level has no doors. It's one solid room of different environments depending on where you are, meaning that your enemies will find out eventually if you don't hide behind some walls. In order to progress to the next level you have to kill everyone on the current level, but levels are so small in general, it should take you not even 5 minutes to make a corpse out of everyone.

And finally, this game has a very arcade-like feel to it. A single run can be done in 15 minutes, but just like all of those arcade games you might have tried to play, you will die. You will die A LOT. Enemies hit with a lot of power in this game, and if you're not quick, you'll get hit rather easily and blow up within 3 seconds. Othertimes you'll get bombarded with ten enemies on the screen at once while you're also surrounded by tons of explosives. Or even worse, you'll kill an enemy, and it'll explode, catching you in the blast and killing you that way. The point is, you will shot full of holes all the time. Success is not easily come by in this game.

And yet despite this, this game is extremely addicting. The very short amount of time it takes you to get to the Nuclear Throne, along with the fast-paced action, makes it very easy to get sucked in for hours and hours. That mentality of "just one more try..." will consume you. Maybe you won't get drawn into it as much as the Binding of Isaac games due to less content, but the addiction factor is still there.

With that said, I can only reccomend this game to those who aren't afraid of a challenge. You will die a lot, as I have reiterated many times in this review. You will die because of stupid decisions, because you didn't move fast enough, or because the game decides it hates you and has hordes of rats storm you from both ends of a narrow hallway and sink their fangs into you. This game does not care about you winning. I'm pretty sure some of the Steam achievements make this apparent with how one of them requires you to sit upon the throne with a certain character when they're seconds away from death.

But if you don't mind that (and are perhaps a masochist), then by all means buy the game. Just don't go expecting this to be Binding of Isaac, because you'll be in for quite a surprise then.

This game has been hailed as disturbing by the community, but after playing it myself, I don't feel that the game actually demonstrated it effectively. It tries to, but it doesn't because it doesn't give the two most important things that all disturbing forms of entertainment need in order to work; tension and connection.

What I'm trying to say is that you already know how the game is going to end with the guy killing himself since it's spoiled right at the very first scene, not to mention the Steam page's description. Now this could have been a foregone conclusion story which can work quite fine so long as it explored the thought process and feelings surrounding suicide. But this game doesn't do that.

This game instead just shows you random things that you do in a mundane setting before the guy offs himself. There was simply not an adequete amount of build-up. There are some hints throughout the game that could have given a richer story and a look into why the guy was suicidal, such as the obsession of the same painting that was all over the house that was redone in various fashions, but the game never went into detail about them. It was all just there, watching you and serving as background. Therefore, I have literally no idea why the guy was suicidal and had a man in a cage that he ended up killing as well. There's the implication that the guy in the cage was the original artist of the painting, but still, why was the main character obsessed with that painting? What was so great about it to him?

I know almost nothing about the character except that he lives alone, has weird online chats with anonymous women, and is obsessed with that painting. And because of that, I can't really feel attached to him. I know that suicides are tragedies, but I don't really feel this game painted the suicide as one. It just felt like a mundane event with how vague everything was. I almost felt like a ghost wandering about aimlessly in this random person's last day of life, seeing and observing, but not feeling.

Despite this game being free and taking roughly 16 minutes to play, I still don't feel that this game has enough going for it to spend your time on it. Go elsewhere if you want something that pulls at your heartstrings and unnerves you.

Pony Island is not a game so much as it is an experience. It's a game about ponies, and yet at the exact same time, it's not. It's a bit difficult to describe the game without spoiling anything, but here's the main gist of what you should know about the game.

Pony Island is a puzzle game that revolves around the gimmick of trying to "break" the game. You are playing an arcade game devised by Satan himself and he is doing everything in his power to mess with you and give you a horrible time. Therefore, your goal is to beat the devil at his own game and break his game before the game can break you and steal your soul. It's a game of two cheaters combating against one another and seeing who comes out on top. And though you'll think your tactics are great and you'll be accomplishing much, you'll be very surprised to what lengths Satan will go to in order to break you.

It's a short play, clocking in a little under 3 hours for me, but I felt it was well worth the 5 dollars. So if you have a little extra cash on you and want to have an interesting and potentially unnerving time, give Pony Island a try.