Recent reviews by A bucket of flies

It's a game with a super interesting premise: Every day you dispassionately reveal that the world is far more horrifying than anyone could have guessed. You have a book full of dozens of cryptids and you need to match up the sanitized corporate-ese with panicked descriptions uttered between sobs. So what's not to like?

From beginning to end, you do the exact same thing. You get a call, listen to it, read some descriptions, select the best answer, then wait 10 seconds for the next call. 50 times in a row. That's it, there's nothing else to do. This is the closest a video game has ever made me feel to taking an exam. It's fun for an hour, but not for three.

Here are some things that I think the game is lacking, and ways I think they could be improved in a future game:

1. There are no stakes at all. People are screaming that their children are being eaten by sentient plants and you tell them to "please hold" while you look up some info for 30 minutes. While funny, it would be far more engaging if you were under some pressure to give them an answer quickly to save their lives. I thought the pause button in the UI was going to play a role here, but that button is pointless.

2. There's no interaction. Often people will give you a description that can match more than one cryptid, and you have to make a guess. Sometimes you're right, other times you're wrong. It would be neat if you had the ability to ask some follow-up questions like "what does it sound like?" or "have you been leaving anything out at night?" These would be vague enough to not give the player the answer, and would force the player to engage with with more details of the cryptids. There could even be a question limit to encourage smart choices.

3. There should be more ongoing stories and characters to get attached to. Imo the best call was when I told a man he had a Hobb, and he refused to take preventative measures because he thought it was ridiculous to leave a bowl of cream out at night. He called back later complaining of power outages, and I realized it had metamorphosed into a Boggart, and he had to evacuate immediately. This is a cool moment because it calls back to an earlier action, but this is the only time it happens in the entire game. EDIT: Some commenters pointed out that these two calls are actually from separate people, I was just misremembering. So ignore that praise, I guess.

4. There should be puzzles that require out-of-the-box thinking. There was one caller who had kids who were itchy and having nightmares. For a while I thought it might've just been bedbugs, but the nightmares detail kept calling to me. The only entry that mentioned nightmares was the Dream Weaver, but it didn't cause itching. It caused its victims to dream about being covered in webs. So which one was correct? After lots of thinking I realized: the kids weren't itching, they were clawing at the imaginary webs, trying desperately to remove them! This was an awesome moment because it required me to think about "itching" in a different context, and to really examine what the caller was saying. But after submitting the answer... no. It was just bedbugs. "Nightmares" was just flavor text, I guess. Until the game told me I was wrong, that call was my favorite one in the game because of the creative thinking (I thought) it took.

Again, it's got a great premise, and it could be so much more. I'd probably pay $5 for it as it stands, but not $15.

This game is fantastic! It's a great little deckbuilder with many varied gameplay styles. You get to pick 3 different characters each run, who each have a selection of themed cards. You also get to choose a ship, and each one is quite distinct. It's not as replayable as say, Monster Train, but what it lacks there it more than makes up for with its charm. The characters are fun, the story is intriguing, and there's special dialogue for nearly everything you do, which makes it feel like the characters are right there with you. The callbacks to Sunshine Heavy Industries are appreciated as well! With relatively short runs (30-mins) you won't get too frustrated when you lose.

Never before have I been so hyped for a game and it actually delivers on that promise. As a long time AC fan, this game is a true next-gen version of it. Some of the spectacles that you fight in the first 4 hours alone have filled me with a sense of awe that I haven't felt in years. Can't wait to play more.

This is my favorite ZACHTRONICS game. In my opinion it has the most refined gameplay, the most interesting challenges, and the coolest setting of all the other games. Solving one of the ultra-hard extra puzzles in the top 10% was one of the most satisfying gaming experiences I've had.

EDIT: I came back to replay the game and get all the achievements. I was able to beat the performance of almost every one of my old solutions. I solved one of the puzzles faster than the top 1% of all other players. Feels very good. HACK*MATCH can eat my ass.

I've been playing video games for 22 of my 25 years alive, and this is my favorite one. It's a game for explorers. If you've ever wandered around a forest getting lost in the life around you, or if you ever looked up at the sky longing to know what kinds of stories are being told up there, or if you grew up reading Calvin & Hobbes, or even if you ever resonated with the "Born too late to explore earth, born too early to explore space" meme, this game is for you.

Edit:
It's been 8 months and they've only released 4 main bugfix patches, while Baldur's Gate 3 has released as many patches with additional content in checks notes 1 month. I get that not everyone can be Larian Studios, but it puts into perspective how long it's going to take to get to an actually playable product. There's no reason to play this game over the original, and at the pace they're going, there won't for another 5 years. I can no longer recommend this game.

Original, more optimistic review:
Obviously it's not fully released yet. Obviously there are bugs (though I haven't encountered anything gamebreaking) and obviously performance isn't amazing (though it gets a perfectly playable 30 fps on my 3060 Ti). Obviously it's... an early access game. I love KSP and I have faith in these devs, so I don't mind giving them some money if it helps them finish the game. And in the meantime, I get to build rockets and space stations again :)

An awesome game! Imagine Toribash, but it requires much less effort to pull off cool moves. Matches can sometimes take a long time (upwards of 30 minutes) but there's genuinely a lot of strategy and back-and-forth between good players. No two fights will ever be the same.

I'm giving this game a thumbs-up because it entertained me for over 100 hours (I've also played on mobile). Any game that can do that deserves a positive review. I definitely got my money's worth out of it, and I imagine you would too. It was genuinely fun for a while! With that said, I'm going to be spending this review complaining about the lategame issues with both the mechanics and the UX.

The biggest letdown to me is the arbitrary restrictions during battles. The game promises incredible freedom in making your builds, and at first looking at all the traits got my mind racing. For example, there's one trait that increases damage dealt with each successive attack in the same turn. So naturally I made a team focused around maximizing the number of attacks, believing that I would annihilate everything in my path. But it didn't work. Why? Because creatures can only attack a max of 10 times per turn, and can only receive damage a max of 15 times per turn. There's no justification for this, that's just how it is. Those hours of planning were completely ruined by this one rule tucked away in a menu.

I find my ideas are constantly shut down by these restrictions. Infinite resurrections sounds fun! Oops, creatures can only resurrect 10 times per battle. Oh, what about exponentially increasing stats? Nevermind, there's severe diminishing returns above a certain threshold.

Additionally, for every single strategy you might want to employ, there's at least one creature that directly counters it. Use spells for damage? Well this creature is nigh-immune to spells. Like to improve your stats? This creature prevents all creatures from gaining stats. Debuff your enemies into oblivion? This one is immune to debuffs. The list goes on.

Ordinarily this would be fine, in fact it's desirable for a competetive 1v1 game. But this game isn't like that. Here you face 50+ monsters per level, and on higher difficulties each of them is fused with a random other monster. Thus you can't build your team around an interesting mechanic because you might get annihilated at any moment by a monster that specifically counters you.

This forces you to build your team as generalists. But in a game with thousands of unique traits and synergies... that's just boring.

Additionally, the whole user experience is just a mess. It feels like the UI was plucked from a 90s RPG. I have to work to understand just about everything. To figure out what a spell gem property does before I'm about to buy it, I have to go up 4 menu layers and enter down 4 different menu layers, then go out and back down the first 4 again. The critical limitations of combat are mentioned offhand at the bottom of pages, scattered throughout the codex. Panning through the dozens of pages of monsters is a chore. The menus feel both indistinguishable and inconsistent.

And don't get me started on the combat experience. It's not an issue at first, but as you start to get more traits and more synergies it slows to an absolute crawl. Even while holding the "maximum speed" button down, you're frequently left waiting while hundreds of actions resolve in the background ultimately changing nothing. Once I made a team composition that theoretically worked, but practically it took 30 seconds per turn to trudge through everything that happened. Needless to say I abandoned that build rather quickly.

Siralim Ultimate starts off strong and promising. Even though it's brought down by its dated UI it seems to have so much potential. But then when you reach the endgame it just starts falling on its face more and more, and even as it's limping along it keeps trying to introduce new mechanics that it promises will make the game interesting again. But sadly it doesn't quite make up for the fundamental design issues.

It's a decent game. You'll probably enjoy it for a while. Go play Nova Drift if you want to make lots of different builds that are all fairly viable.

This is an awesome game! It seems simple at first, you dig into the ground and dig up loot. But the sheer number and variety of upgrades is what makes this game replayable. I particularly like the random exciting things you can find in caves. Can't wait to see where the game goes from here!

I was initially wary of this game because it looked like just another "destruction sandbox", But in reality it's so much more than that. The meat of the game involves you getting a list of objectives (to steal or destroy) and planning the fastest route between them. You can carve up the environment almost any way you want to accomplish your goal. I've made chutes for valuables to slide down, melted a wall off of a greenhouse and used it as a bridge over a river, and suspended a safe from a roof to swing it into the back of a semi truck. It's so refreshing to see a game give you such incredible freedom in how you play it. And there's different mission types to keep you from getting bored! Completing every objective took me ~30 hours, yet I still crave more!