Recent reviews by TheWriterAleph

Yes, it's Early Access, but this game needs a LOT more work to even be considered a functioning product. What I can see if the devs' intention is a simple, repetitive game loop of finding survival items and working car parts, in an attempt to cobble together a reliable vehicle. Maybe it's trying to be like Pacific Drive? It has co-op, which is a plus (though, at time of review, no avatar customization). The early game is a slog, with a large open world with almost nothing in it. The driving doesn't feel particularly great. Inventory management is a pain in the ass. Assets are uninspired (and the neon-tinged vaporwave aesthetic dominant in the trailers and headers are largely misleading). And when I played, it was riddled with bugs, including one that just made a physics explosion that killed me, my teammate, and our halfway decent car, after several hours of play, forcing an almost complete restart. Good luck to the devs, but I've refunded and probably won't come back.

This game is a work of art. It's all the weirdness and oddity you could want. At free, it only costs you a couple hours to experience the first episode. Hopefully you'll like the strangeness and choose to support JoelG on his marvelous project.

Gorgeous game, just wish it was a bit longer and wasn't trying so hard to convince you that it's a "real video game" at points. Maybe it was a few years ahead of its time; releasing now as purely an interactive audio/visual piece (a la GRIS or Edith Finch), it would be well accepted.

This game is not for everyone – I'm not even sure it's for me, yet, to be honest. But it is competent and confident in its tone and delivery and the systems mostly work as intended. SoD is for those who liked (*really* liked) the sneaking and investigation in games like Thief and Deus Ex or just want to explore a very open cyberpunk world. I wish there was a little more world-building or emergent storytelling that you could find or stumble across, as the missions themselves leave little room for "surprise" once you've seen all the types. But I'm curious to see what future updates will bring to this game.

A beautiful, resonant tone-poem on the nature of love and loss. Not a challenging game, but not mindless, either. Not that the game has something to say, but it has things it wants you to feel, and will warmly hold your hand from one scene to the next.

Bizarre, fiendish, squeamish, and knows exactly how long to stick around. Plus it's always great to see more non-linear narratives in games.

A short, sweet, touching meditation on nature. The puzzles are just the right difficulty, but the combat could be harder – I never felt in danger from the enemies, even the bosses.

The strongest dissenting opinion about BG3 is that it's TOO similar to Larian's other Big Bad RPG, Original Sin 2, which I played through co-op nearly to completion and thoroughly enjoyed. If you didn't like DOS or DOS2, you probably won't like this approach to D&D 5E. Similarly, if you did like those games but aren't a fan of 5E or the Forgotten Realms setting, you can probably give this game a miss (or check out some Let's-Plays first).

Saying all that, BG3 promises a deep, expansive story that will keep you occupied for dozens of hours for a single playthrough, tons of player/party customization, and lots of options to tackle encounters the way you want. The three difficulty levels also let you tailor your experience to a "this DM hates me" level of your choice, from None to Lots. It is similar, but NOT identical, to a True Tabletop Experience, but is a CRPG worthy of considerable merit, with lots of opportunity for shenanigans. Try co-op; the more players in your party, the better!

This game is fine. It's a Raft-like in space with a train, so it's literally on rails. You make the train go, scoop up resources as you pass them, and shoot everything that gets in your way. There's a "story", but it's almost ancillary at time of review, so don't expect anything amazing.

The thumbs-down review is for the way the devs are treating their users, especially their fans on Steam. This is one of the dev teams who were offered X sum of money to put out their game first on Epic Game Store and remove it temporarily from Steam; at this point, it's exhausting to cluck your tongue at any team who does so, so I won't belabor that point, but there have been Discord messages more-or-less demanding praise for bringing it "back" to Steam. But surrounding that is a kind of... attitude, maybe? A kind of smarminess from their official communications and in the game itself that isn't deserved, in my opinion. Updates are slow in coming, updates remove a lot of older content (the research tree has been revamped at least three times, at this point), and it feels like too much time and effort and being used at "funny" updates or "features". As a single example, there's a random chance every time you reload your gun for an alternate animation to play (such as your gun falling to pieces), but these animations take longer than the normal one and can actually just screw you during a firefight.

The aesthetics and atmosphere are great and if the devs can lean into that more, this game may leave Early Access as something really special. Right now, though, it's not for everyone.

This game is "one of those": an open-world-survival-craft server-based multiplayer game with base building and searching crates for supplies and a bunch of store-bought game assets made by a small dev team (and the corresponding bevy of bugs that may or not be fixed) so it's in early access for god knows how long. You know, a 7-Days-like (this game even includes a "blood moon every 7 days" mechanic, so that influence is blatantly on its sleeve). I've seen so many of these and I'm still convinced if they all worked together on a single game, that one might actually get done. Anyway, in this edition, we also have to deal with an INSANELY grindy progression that also depends on the favor of RNG to find the specific singular material you need to unlock certain branches in your tech tree in an attempt to artificially extend your playtime. If this is the kind of game you already know you like, give it a shot and hope the dev sticks around to make a full game for you.