Recent reviews by bitflip

I really liked Balatro... at first.

The game is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a poker rogue-lite based around collecting jokers with various interacting effects and enhancing your deck through adding, removing, altering and upgrading cards. The game really hooks you with this from the get go. Building your suite of jokers is fun, and managing your money and deck to create the highest combos you can can be satisfying, especially with some of the weirder Joker combos. The UI, sounds, and art direction ramps it up from fun to surprisingly addictive. Animations are snappy, sounds are crisp and fun, and the UI is informative yet minimal in a positive way.

This combo of snappy presentation and quick resource management and synergy building really hooked me when I started playing, but as my playtime grew and I climbed up the difficulty levels, the ugly side of Balatro began to show itself. Because the game is based around poker, you're heavily at the mercy of RNG from the very start. The earliest blinds when you have nothing are just... playing poker, fishing around for high scoring hands, just discarding and praying. With a 52 cards (or 40 with abandoned deck), there isn't any real control you can exert from the get go, and the control you do get is limited to what jokers and enhancements you have. Because jokers, vouchers, card upgrades, consumables, etc. are all located in the shop, the shop is the only meaningful avenue to take consistent action in Balatro. But there's more RNG there too. You don't control what shows up in the shop. It could be crap jokers or early double tarot cards when you want any jokers at all, or it could be game-changing or game-winning OP jokers. With only 2 slots for purchasable jokers and consumables in the shop at the start, you only get a few opportunities to get your deck up and running, and to get money to take advantage of those opportunities, you need to beat blinds or skip blinds in a way that gets you that money... which means, early on, lucking into good draws and good blind skip opportunities. This early game misery only gets worse as the difficulty increases, limiting your opportunities to make money and making it harder to survive if you get bad jokers early on.

Even with the early game woes aside, the game is just so RNG heavy that meaningful skill expression barely exists. All that matters is getting good jokers and guaranteeing powerful hands through deck alteration.You're at the mercy of what shows up in the shop, which you can only take advantage of with money, which you get good amounts of from winning blinds in a the fewest hands, which you can only get from the mercy of your deck drawing good for you. Or you can skip blinds when the skip gives you money, but that's also luck. The difficulty system in this game only makes this worse in an unfun way, gradually cutting away resources. One out of three blinds gives no innate money, faster scaling point requirements, less discards, less hand size, etc...

But let's say you love Balatro and you power through. How do you consistently beat these increasingly harsh odds? What do you value and what do you do? Well, since all you can really meaningfully do is shop at the store, you look for three things: chip generators, mult (multiplier for the chip value) generators, and mult multipliers. You look for these three things every single run, and as the stakes rise, you increasingly look for early scaling versions of all of these. What this means is that most runs turn into some variation of the same things: beat or skip the early blinds with good value (by drawing well or lucking into good blind skip rewards), manage your money until you can luck into some scaling in the shop and/or luck into some mult multers in the shop, and just make sure you don't run into a boss blind effect that can kill your run. How do you do that? Well there's a boss reroll voucher. How does it show up? In the shop... at random...

My final few hours of Balatro consisted of two things. One: getting really fun and powerful wacky combos that got obliterated by a boss blind debuff because it either killed my strategy or I (uncontrollably) drew poorly, and I never saw the boss reroll voucher. Two: winning because I lucked into godly jokers that fulfilled the above criteria or my wacky combo never got hard countered. I watched some YouTube videos of people playing the highest difficulty of this game and noticed that they tended to pick the same jokers pretty often, and that often the only skill they expressed was judging odds to draw a hand from your remaining deck, managing money, and recognizing good jokers. That's it. That's all you really get to do in this game. And I don't even think I consider two of those real skill as much as just things to consider.

For me to really recommend Balatro as something more than a Vampire Survivors-esque dopamine factory, it needs to change in a major way. There needs to be more for you to meaningfully do in a run besides fish for good jokers and count your dollars, and the higher difficulties need to meaningfully spice up the formula instead of primarily just making your runs worse. As of right now, I can't recommend it unless you're content with a flashy, well-produced, and addictive but ultimately shallow experience.

This is a great game. As advertised, the game is hostile. Nothing is planned, but (almost) everything works. The game loads levels and usable items in at random, and it's your job to get the fruit and get the heck out. It's totally possible to end up with items that make getting to the end impossible or nearly impossible, and therein lies the hostility. The game does not care if you get a win.

On the flip side, it doesn't care how you win. Platforming is generous (most inclines can be scaled by spam-jumping), and the suite of usable items are very creative. A lot of thought clearly went into how they interact with the world and with each other, and this makes every level secretly contain multiple versions of itself. A level played with boxes, balls, and frogs is inherently different than the same level played with spears, the camera, and pomegranates.

I expected to get bored after finishing the available levels in the game, but this amazing formula kept me going for several more hours, laughing at absurd solutions, cursing at complete failure, and feeling pride in pulling off crazy wins. The game even has Workshop support (available thru a beta at the time of writing) for custom levels if you want more.

If you're remotely interested, buy this and play it. It's quick, it's fun, it's silly, it's cerebral, it's so unique. Addictively simple and addictively complex. Very worth the price.

Noita is one of the best games I've ever played.

At its core, Noita is a roguelite with "falling sand" style physics simulation. You randomly acquire spells and put them together in wands with random stats while managing your health, gold, and inventory space to accumulate strength. The wand building is deep and satisfying in a way beyond most other games I've ever played. Spells have not just different damage, speed, and elemental effects but also statistical alterations and complex hidden interactions, and these interactions lead to depth of play that never seems to stop growing. If that sounds overwhelming, don't worry, as it simply gives you power from knowledge and many different ways to achieve your goals. You can make an all-powerful death wand with 26 spells if you want, or you can use just 5-7 pieces for a different effect (sometimes just as powerful as the 26-er depending on your pieces!)

The world of Noita is beautiful and brutal. The simulated world means that every grain of sand, drop of mystical potion, puff of gas, and pixel of metal is a potential obstacle or potential resource. Awareness is key, as every biome has something that can turn what feels like an untouchable "won run" into instant death, and that doesn't just mean the enemies. Locales and their inhabitants are strange, often hostile, and present a wide variety of both threats and boons. Don't be discouraged if you get vaporized early on, as every bit of knowledge brings you power as you learn to exploit the world while avoiding death. The soundtrack provides the perfect atmosphere for this environment. Sometimes psychedelic, sometimes haunting, sometimes frenetic and energetic, always appropriate to every threat and safe place and amazing to listen to.

It's hard to talk more about Noita without ruining the experience, so all I'll say is that the game offers much more than it appears, more than enough to justify the 300+ hours I've spent on it at the time of writing this review, more than enough to justify the first sentence in this review. The game captures witchcraft and mysticism in a way that no other game I've ever played has by not only giving you the fruits of the arcane art but also the journey to obtaining those fruits. Every bit of the game makes you feel like a witch, from the highs to the lows, from the triumphs to the terrors, from the power to the helplessness, from the euphoria of knowledge to the obfuscation of mysteries seemingly beyond your comprehension.

It's incredible. Buy it!

Legend of stone walls and atrocious combat.

Not really sure why this game is so beloved. It's a story-driven RPG maker game with no combat, which isn't a problem. I like these games when well-executed. This one is not well-executed. The two main characters are very annoying and often crack jokes or make weird comments that take away from the emotionality of the story. Even ignoring that, the story feels like it forces its twists and key emotional moments through really contrived plot elements. Spoilers contain more details but obviously spoil the whole game. The mother using beta blockers to remove the main character's memories of his dead brother is absolutely bizarre and nonsensical, and his wife's refusal to talk about his memory loss and how he forgot their first meeting directly is equally as baffling and frustrating. She spends much of the game trying to indirectly remind him and getting upset when it doesn't land. The game seems to want to use her autism as a reason for why she doesn't ever bring it up directly but it doesn't make any sense for her demonstrated level of social function and just comes off as kinda insulting, painting her as childish and sometimes rude. A tearjerker game with emotional dissonance in many places and poor setups for poor twists.

Not recommended.

Brutal Orchestra is an amazing game that I am sad I didn't hear about or play sooner. The game possesses exquisite turn-based combat that builds on top of the genre's staple mechanics with a resource management system. Every enemy has an HP color and bleeds "pigment" of that color when attacked, and all allies require specific quantities of certain colors of pigment to perform their abilities. This coupled with limited inventory space for pigment (and a team-wide penalty for having more pigment than you can store) makes every encounter a thoughtful one, where you're always thinking about who attacks first, who they attack, where they move and when, etc. The game provides the player with a ton of information in combat, including enemy passives, their possible moves, and a timeline of enemy attack and movement sequences, and this ensures that every encounter you run into is open for you to solve and survive. Most of the fights in this game are wildly creative and really ask you to use everything at your disposal to take on their weird twists and interactions. Combat is satisfying, rewarding, and provides a wide variety of puzzles to solve every fight, and the roguelike elements in the form of random items and randomized encounters expand that variety even more.

Beyond the gameplay, the art, writing, and music are all phenomenal. The visuals are a haunting and often comical mishmash of surrealist, supernatural decay combined with elements taken from the Garden of Earthly Delights, a real life artwork by Hieronymus Bosch, and the writing similarly covers the whole spectrum from absurd and funny to haunting and scary. The core story is not very well explained or expansive but it is emotionally rich and I was satisfied by its conclusion. The music is absolutely incredible and memorable, bizarre and thematic. Every music piece is married to a specific enemy or enemy encounter and hearing a song from the soundtrack instantly reminds me of the enemy to whom it belongs.

The game isn't flawless. There could stand to be more enemy variety, but I've heard a future content update will address this so I won't say more. Additionally, early game can be a bit slow and does some disservice to the meat of the game. You start out with two very strong and uncomplex characters to ease you into the game, and while that is nice to prevent new players from getting steamrolled, it also makes the early game the least engaging part from a player party standpoint. This wouldn't be so bad if new party members were a quick guarantee, but RNG can be a cruel mistress and deny you new items or party members. I unlocked one new party member outside the starting pair before a big drought. I completed several unlock requirements pretty early but it took me several runs to actually obtain those new party members, as they never simply showed up for many runs. This is just my experience and other people have had the opposite experience, unlocking people and items and then getting them rather quickly. Just note this could happen, and that I think it is worth pushing through if you have a similar situation. The game is amazing and these little flaws aren't worth skipping IMO.

Big recommended. Please give this a shot if you like turn-based games and/or turn-based roguelites.

There are two kinds of puzzle games. There are those that try really hard to challenge you, and there are ones that are more about a satisfying search for clues and for the intended sequence forward. This is the latter, and that's not a bad thing. The Room excels at being a comfort puzzler, letting you play with many beautiful and intricate puzzle boxes with a light sprinkling of plot.

The hint system lets you tune the comfort even more, letting you turn hints on on off and also drip feeding hints that scale from vague to direct over time. This is nice even if you're like me and don't enjoy hints in puzzle games; the vague hints basically act as gentle little reminders for places on the box you may have seen a long time ago and forgotten about since then.

My only real complaint is that there are some puzzles that can be easily brute forced without even trying. Combination locks with 3 entries with 3 options each that can be brute forced in under a minute on accident. I opened two different combination puzzles without knowing the code on accident during my play time and deliberately brute forced another in no time. But it's hard to really be disappointed in that when the game is not trying to be that intense about its puzzles.

Overall recommended. Short and beautiful and fun.

Good but short point and click mystery. Good music, good art, good voice acting, and has fun with itself, often referencing other classic point and clicks in a fun way without oversaturating the game with them. Has a couple really good puzzles, including one that I adored for how little it directly prompted the player. No highlighting that this is the next thing to solve, just a pile of information, a dead end, and a hunch. Very satisfying. The only "bad" thing to say about the game is that it's very short. The length is not a totally bad thing. It means that there's no unnecessary filler, and it has a brisk pace that's all go and no downtime, remaining engaging throughout. However, that does mean that the main character doesn't get as fleshed out as he could have been, and his emotional journey and the player's attachment to him never gets developed to the extent it could have been. Overall, recommended.

This game is good but I cannot trust these devs anymore. A short list of their huge failures:

-Botched their modding implementation and then effectively abandoned it in multiple ways. Their modding dev left and they haven't hired a new one, and they chose to hand moderate mods with an arbitrary and convoluted category system but then gave up on doing that and let mod approval requests pile up for weeks at a time. They finally decided to delegate it to five (originally) community members, who essentially ended up with total control of the modding approvals because the devs had minimal to no involvement after that. I would know, I used to be one of those mod approvers.

-Their season implementation has been very rushed and unplanned feeling and communication and roadmaps have dissolved into secrecy and sparseness. They really like to pretend they're still really open in communicating but they're way more guarded about the dev process or any plans they may or may not have. Almost a total 180 from how they were when I first started playing.

-Their discord mods often act in bizarre in unethical ways. They have one of the biggest discord communities ever and yet GSG drug their feet for a long time hiring new mods to help with the load and times where no mods were awake or home. All of these mods do huge work for GSG and GSG doesn't pay them or anything to my knowledge. Despite my sympathy for their post, some of them act really unethically. I've seen one specific mod mute or ban people for no explanation, or mute people for pinging him in a conversation. One time, a trans woman was being mistreated in chat. She called for a moderator who unhelpfully just said "no politics", which understandably she said was unhelpful and she left the discord. One of the moderators on the discord FOUND HER ON TWITTER and POSTED HER TWEET COMPLAINING ABT THE INCIDENT in a private chat of "regulars" of the discord so he could complain about her. When someone reached out to her, he got mad at them when he was the one who basically invited possible gossip and harassment on her. Another incident was when a harmless Discord troll who made jokes about being the best DRG player ever got banned from the Discord, some moderator pursued him to an unaffiliated Discord and tried to get him banned there too.

-When confronted with real issues, the community manager and Discord moderators drop the ball hard. The DRG Modding Discord used to be filled with a lot of blatant misogyny, homophobia/transphobia, and racism. I remember the meme channel was absolutely foul and I once read a user talking about how they wanted a death squad called "The Dreadnoughts" to kill all BLM protestors in the streets extrajudicially. A moderator for the modding discord saw this and basically joked around with them and didn't do anything. When all this stuff got pointed out, all GSG did was say stop or we stop endorsing your server. They swept it all under the rug and no one got punished. The person who called for people to be executed was even made a moderator for the modding Discord server later! The moderator that did nothing and joked around with the person who wanted to kill people in the streets is a beta tester and regular on the main discord.

-A culmination of all this is how they handled Unified UI. A central mod a lot of DRG mods rely on is Mod Hub. Earlier this year, Mod Hub received some updates that made it unstable, and the mod author removed previous versions of the mod to prevent people from using them. In frustration with this and the Mod Hub dev's behavior, two modders developed a Mod Hub alternative called Unified UI. Mod Hub's author accused them of stealing code and had the mod taken down and had GSG "investigate". What were the results? Who knows. The investigation took months and nothing ever got said. Unified UI is still gone and one of the devs of Unified UI was straight up banned from adding new mods or commenting on anything on mod.io, forcing him to say his goodbyes in the edits to his mod descriptions. No messages were sent to the accused parties and nothing was made public to anybody in any meaningful way. Around the same time I became aware of this, another user that the Mod Hub dev doesn't like had his privileges on mod.io wordlessly removed. I wasn't active in the community anymore but still had my approver privileges and tried to give him his privileges back. Shortly after, I had my approver powers stripped, also wordlessly. Word on the street is many people who talked about this situation in a way unfavorable to the Mod Hub dev have lost their privs or been banned without reason from the modding discord.
The kicker? The Mod Hub dev is a mod approver and an admin on the modding discord, one on record saying homophobia is fine among other things, one who was admin during its foul and racist era.

I loved this game. One of the best games ever made. But I expect people to act professionally and ethically in these situations, and GSG and the people they empower and support don't do so in many situations. I don't expect the world moved, but I do expect some effort to be put into creating a healthy community, protecting the vulnerable, and acting in good faith. But it seems that all the effort that will go into the community that made them is sweeping things under the rug, diverting and dodging responsibilities, and twiddling thumbs until Rogue Core drops.

It's good!