Recent reviews by Thog of War

It´s the sort of game that a german accountant might want to play on the weekends.

First and foremost, unlike other economy-oriented MMOs, PRUN doesn´t have its in-game currencies value stem from time spent on active menial labour which is definitely something I can hold in high regard in terms of design.

PRUN is definitely a competent market simulation and production chain game that gives you a lot of things to count and optimize. I started playing it cause I wanted an excuse to mess around in excel, and safe to say I got what I wanted. Plus it´s cheaper than EVE if you are the sort of player who enjoys being a one man military industrial complex.

You know how MMOs generally have problems with newer expansions causing the playerbase to move from older parts of the game (cities, dungeons etc) to newer ones, and how eventually there's implementation of means to circumvent grinds for older content like cutting out grind for gear that's no longer best-in-slot? Consider this when looking at the starter edition price tag and realize that what you're buying is the privilege of content the devs know is a slog, with a wall in the way to the content the average MMO player would actually like to run, such as grinding BIS junk with the boys, as that stuff will always be exclusively in the latest expanssion (exception being some niche junk like cosmetics or components).

In other words, the 10 bucks starter edition is basically a demo, and the only way it differes from the actual 30 days trial is the privilege to use social functions. Jesus christ. Practically no point for it to be an MMO besides some dungeons being mandatory for story progression.

If you want VRChat with fidget spinners, this is the game for you. If you want to play an actual MMO, there's plenty of good alternatives, even nowadays.

The game's a convolluted, ankle-deep mess, and I'm saying this as someone who appreciates such a thing.

Gameplay and balance-wise the combat is centered about gimmicks and is simply put one of those games that reward you for breaking it (which is the kind of game I find appealing). Ultimately you need to understand the game and its somewhat arcane systems to make progress as said gimmicks are what's going to be killing you most of the time until you decide to savescum (either legitimately by choice of difficulty or by terminating the game) to properly familiarize yourself with what's killing you and learning exactly at which point you irredeemably ♥♥♥♥♥♥ yourself. Ultimately the games systems are more wide than deep and have way too many extremes that either let you faceroll or completely break a given character, making it a game you can't play without respecting it and understanding it. The difficulty ultimately stems from the game being convolluted so it's really only for people who consider this a good thing.

I've seen a whole lot of praise about CoQs randomly generated stuff like histories, and I assure you that 99% of the time it's going to be gibberish and 1% of the time it's going to be funny gibberish. These history snippets, books, secrets and so on are ultimately just forms of currency and the contents will most likely be overlooked.

Ultimately it's less of an interesting game to beat and more of an interesing lump of systems to toy with. The main selling point here is that the game's a cluster♥♥♥♥ of systems someone could ideally build something on. Then there's also the fact that the community is suffering from some developer-endorsed gatekeeping which makes the game even less approachable (EDIT: Having seen their "onboarding guide", it's a self-proclaimed idological echo-chamber, though this has little bearing on the game's content). As for the story generators, it's pretty much as interesting as a random name or description generator in that as sophisticated as the algorithm is, the system is ultimately inconsequential and noninteractive.

It takes a good while to get into it and I can't promise that you'll find what you want once you're in there.

It was made when terraria became popular, and it stopped being made once the devs realized terraria had content and making content takes time.

I'm generally not a fan of point&clickers but I sure do enjoy a good story and oooh boy does this one exceed expectations; it had great pacing, was properly unpredictable and surprisingly enough had some tense moments (which is really not something I would expect from a point&clicker). There might be a bit too many names in the story to keep track of but you have a nice summary in the hint screen (which really helped me when I completely forgot whose name the character was screaming when searching for them in a forest).

Gameplay-wise there are only two points to bring up and those are:
1)The item and environment interaction puzzles that point&clickers are known for and...
2)The logical puzzles that rely on skills other than keeping track of which items you havent combined yet

For the first category, I can say right away that I have not encountered a single puzzle that I found unreasonable, albeit some more complex solutiuons (such as the one where you hunted the rabbit which admittedly took me a while) needed some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about to figure out what the character is actually trying to accomplish. All in all, I did not have to consult any guides in my playthrough meaning that the least I can say is it's done professionally.

As for the logical puzzles, some were a tiny bit tedious. There were specifically two that I just gave up on. With the least spoilers I can utter, it's the one with the literal skip button which speaks for itself (which I skipped simply because there's nothing to actually figure out in this kind of puzzle), and the one in one of the floaty tower rooms for which I simply looked up a guide because more than half the tedium would be backtracking so you could find a pattern. Even then, what drove me up the wall were the frequent room transitions and not the actual puzzle


All in all, the last time I enjoyed a story as much as this one was when I played another Daedalic title. These guys know what theyre doing. It's good. Get it.

Don't

♥♥♥♥'s desolate

"You need to learn how to survive in the depths of the Ocean."

Mine some ore, get gear.
Mine some new ore, get better gear.
Mine some newer ore, get some even better gear.

Done. Game's over.

Oh, you can also stab fish to get food and make your house slightly bigger.

First of all, I'm a great fan of roguelikes and dungeon crawlers so my preferences in games of said genre will always be the progression and diversity of content that the game might be able to present or generate along with the ability of said content to react with other pieces of content. Even though comparing this little game to great titles such as Rogue, Nethack, Dwarf Fortress is just mean, this game could at least have vaguely followed their footsteps (which - if you catch my drift - it clearly didn't)

The game has cosy visuals, easy-to-understand combat mechanics, easy-to-understand inventory system and a basic stat system, but that's about it.

Let me put it this way: there are people who play games to experience the story, immersion, challenge, content and may prioritize dozens of other aspects. I'm simply a person who enjoys the intricate (and well implemented) systems that games have to offer as well as the challenge curve which rewards learning and mastering said systems. Let's just say that this game lacks this kind of stuff so much that the content BRogue has to offer is colossal in comparison, and BRogue is free.

The only thing in this game that's worth 10€ is the pixel graphics, and even then I'm probably only saying so because I - silly me - got the game first and had a look at the content afterwards.