Recent reviews by Hekatonkheires

When everything goes well you kill all the enemies before they even detect you and are blindfiring at your doglegged torpedoes. When things do not go to plan you immediately spawn under an Udaloy-class destroyer and die within minutes while dropping decoys and knuckling.

ASW aircraft are absolutely absurd, they seem to know where you are all the time even avoiding sonobuoys, magnetic detectors and generally being silent.

I think it teaches good life lessons, like don't turn your radar or active sonar on unless you want to die. They can see you from twice the range you can see them.

Yeah, it's pretty good. The writing is very funny. I was expecting Zan to be killed or otherwise disabled at some point to remove his completely overpowered ability...but that just never happened, so you can just keep resetting turns. So it's more of a puzzle game than an SRPG.

-I also had no idea why the ending was some sort of moral choice, she's far too dangerous to be left alive. And it literally makes zero sense for the character whose sole motivation is killing her to save her. Felt like everyone was taking crazy pills at the end, why are we even considering saving her when the entire point of the operation was killing her? She's going to kill everyone in a second if she's allowed to get up.

Jen, you can't solve all your problems by throwing people out of windows. Maybe you're just not doing it hard enough?

In any game that has a grappling hook the grappling hook is usually the best part, so it's not really a surprise that a game centred around it is excellent.

Pixel art generally looks great.

Writing is generally good, there are a few bits where the translation is pretty bad. It's also a lot funnier than I was expecting.

I think it slightly overstays its welcome after the final boss, you're just rerunning through compressed versions of levels you have already beaten before the ending.

We are owls that never cry and tigers that don't leave footprints.

It's great. I don't really have anything bad to say about it. The Cryptmaster is very charismatic and has an absolutely ridiculous number of voice lines recorded to respond to whatever you type.

Maybe there could have been prompts for skills where enemy has X letters in their name, I never used them.

I don't know how it was when it was first released, now it's a pretty good metroidvania. The Endless and Galaxy Mage Amulvaro fights are great. I was extremely annoyed by it because I had no slots in my inventory to pick up a critical final boss item and it disappeared when I rested to scrap an item to pick it up. Have at least three empty slots in your inventory (I don't even know why there's a limited inventory in the first place) before beating the final boss. (Otherwise your save file is apparently ♥♥♥♥♥♥.)

Soundtrack is excellent.

I don't think it's a good adventure game. The game gives you zero feedback, e.g: you can't examine items in your inventory to figure out what they even are or might be used for, you must be standing in the exact correct spot to examine environment objects or nothing happens. The brooch didn't do anything when I used it before I needed to to progress. I've seen screenshots where other people have used it before then, I'm not sure if this is a bug.

There are doorways that lead to death pits, you can't even examine them to see that there's anything wrong. Hope you saved before entering. Invisible death pits in the centre of several rooms. Rats kill you by touching you, I'm not sure why. They don't even seem to be eldritch rats or anything. I don't know what's with the spiders, their sprites look like something from an 8-bit game. It was bugging me trying to think what they looked like, I figured it out - the crab-type Space Invaders. Long pauses at the end of voice lines, and the voice lines often run on past the displayed dialogue so if you skip ahead it skips the following dialogue boxes for that line and fast forwards the entire conversation.

A few moon logic puzzles, particularly the feather one and what I don't think is even a puzzle - walk around a random room for a minute until a secret door opens in the wall. There's absolutely no indication to do this. Hope you know which chemicals and order to use them in for the process for developing photographs, that's actually a puzzle. You only have about a 1/3500 chance of guessing it, so you'd better look it up.


I got stuck in unwinnable states twice, once by using the book before getting the key for it, the game would not allow me to use the book again, had to reload and get the key first before looking at it. Second time was if Bishop walks off the screen without giving you a key, you are stuck in an unwinnable state with no idea that anything is actually wrong unless you look it up. I'm unclear as to what was supposed to be happening at the end of the Hambleton house. The protagonist started running but I had no idea what he was running from. Apparently there's supposed to be a fire? I didn't see anything. Maybe it's some kind of emulation error.

The voice actors' attempts at eldritch gibbering are pretty amusing. I also liked that the cat runs around inside your inventory window. It occasionally looks quite nice, the cemetery at night particularly stood out to me. Other times it's some sort of digitized photograph background, it works sometimes, but I'm not really a fan of the effect overall.

I'm pretty disappointed with it since I had heard positive things about it before. Excavation of Hob's Barrow is more like what I thought this game would be.

It's much more playable than the original with mouselook. Terri Brosius absolutely kills it with her voice acting.

I tried to conserve ammo, do not do this. You will have more than enough for every encounter if you just spray enemies with bullets. Or just use the laser rapier since it's completely overpowered.

-Maybe they could have recorded the sound tracks with a decent soundfont as a default, the one in the game is terrible. I replaced it with another soundfont and it sounded much better.

I prefer a quiet station, thank you.

It still looks pretty impressive. Gameplay is pretty mindless, sort of like Arkham countering but you're locked into the shield animation and can't dodge if an enemy does an unblockable attack at the same time. Historical accuracy is non-existent. The absolute nadir is when the Iceni tribe invade Rome (!?!?) with war elephants (!?!?!?!?!?!).

It's fairly spooky. You end up with more reputation than you can ever sell by the end. Once you start setting bear traps and know how to use a shovel or axe the terror factor reduces considerably. I like what it's trying to do, but only chompers are actually dangerous, and are totally manageable once you know which angles to run to and the timing of their attacks.

-The dodge seems pretty useless, I would give it iframes and/or the ability to dodge in directions other than backwards.

+Excellent writing.
+It's free.
+I'm very intrigued as to how the story will progress.
-I think there's something wrong with drawing, the game isn't fullscreen and if you draw too far past the bottom of the window onto the taskbar it doesn't seem to register correctly. (Running on Linux.)