Senaste recensioner av vuh

Great story but the gameplay is complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Classic slaughterhouse fun and great typing experience!

The store page blurb is a great summary. In my words, "A saccharine yet charming story commenting on the human response to hope and despair, taking the form of an easy puzzle game." This will appeal more to people interested in sentimental storytelling and 2010's-indie-developer aesthetics, moreso than to avid puzzle game fanatics. A laid-back experience perfect for cozy, upcoming fall and winter days. The phrase "baby's first Outer Wilds" captures my perception of this game.

Three things I liked:
1) Puzzle mechanics were unique and easy to learn (good sign-posting/discoverability).
2) Challenges and mechanics build progressively.
3) Pleasant story and art style.

Three possible improvements:
1) Puzzles were not difficult - I finished the main game in <6 hours and only had to restart two of the puzzles (this might be subjective based on one's experience with puzzles).
2) Short game - 6 hours of main content and a handful of bonus puzzles upon completion felt short, especially since I did not find the puzzles particularly challenging.
3) More story development - It was difficult to gauge progress from the story beats. I had to be told "Oh you're going to the final area next, then your journey will be over." The story felt more like a string of isolated concepts than a tale progressed by my actions.

Came for the game, stayed for the marketing trailers.

The only thing with more holes than my doctoral thesis!

This is a puzzle game disguised as a walking simulator. I found it to be innovative, memorable, and enjoyable in both gameplay and story. I found the space flight mechanics to be intuitive and engrossing; VERY fun. I personally had trouble with the puzzle elements (I don't think real good), but I figured it out all by myself and each solution was very rewarding and felt well designed and well earned. Excellent story/writing.

I haven't completed the DLC but I recommend it so far. It stands on its own and is a completely new but fondly familiar experience.

I will always have fond memories of this game.

This is a puzzle game in which you serve as a border customs inspector checking the paperwork of people entering the country. During your timed daily shift, you must follow the given instructions to process the paperwork correctly (passport not expired, no forgeries, etc.) to allow or deny entrance. The time is short and you only make money for your family with correctly processed entries, so the ever-increasing complexity of the entrance requirements builds tension inside the booth as international politics builds tension outside of it. Political intrigue, personal desires, and the choice to follow the letter of the law for the sake of your family and country - or to look the other way for the good of potential entrants and perhaps the country as a whole, make for an engaging drama that unfolds like the pages of a fresh, crisp passport seeking that green ENTRY GRANTED stamp.

Glory to Arstotzka.

TL;DR - A vicarious rogue-like: your characters die but you live on. Emphasis on random chance, challenging gameplay, and the inevitable death of characters. The inevitable loss feels balanced by the game mechanics to a good extent. Assemble a team of fresh adventurers to explore the ruined areas around your family's decrepit estate, coming across hideous monsters and powerful fiends connected in someway to your family's gruesome, cursed past. Each successful raid brings loot to rebuild your estate and experience (and trauma) to your seasoned adventurers, who gradually improve in stats (and become burdened with physical and mental ailments concomitantly!). Your efforts culminate in building and equipping raiding parties powerful enough to withstand the final campaign into the heart of your family's estate and history - or so I've been told :)

Gameplay:

- Missions: Go on small dungeon raids using a party of 1-4 adventurers you recruit from a random roster. Round-based party combat between your 1-4 adventurers (always take 4 ppl lol) and rooms of 1-4 enemies. Different character fighting styles and skills mesh well together for effective combos and prolonged survival - but the same is true for enemies! Each procedurally-generated dungeon raid has an objective (usually 'explore 90% of rooms on map' or 'find/kill final boss') and the dungeon is laid out as a set of linear corridors between rooms, with each corridor having 4-5 event spaces (empty, treasure, trap, blockade, etc.). You purchase supplies beforehand (torches, food, medicine, shovels, etc.) and must think carefully about which challenges your party might face. Raids may be abandoned at any time, but the raiding party suffers demoralization and you fail to accomplish the map objectives. The raids have difficulty levels as you attempt them, scaling from 0 to another single-digit number over time (I forget the scale... 0-9 maybe?), so there is some element of time pressure.

- Characters: Party members are one of about a dozen classes with different flavors of combat techniques; characters are randomized with different starting attacks unlocked, and you get a few new recruits to choose from before every mission, to trade out or replace dead or dismissed units. The game emphasizes that characters have a high chance of dying (death is permanent), and an aspect of the game is constant unit turnover. During raids, characters take health damage but also mental trauma which severely compromises their performance during raids and remains with them until healed between rounds. Characters also succumb to permanent diseases and infections, or gain personality quirks that alter their stats (can be good/bad). Altogether, characters are randomized, vulnerable to death, and will eventually gather enough negative status conditions to warrant their retirement and replacement. However, characters gain levels via experience from completing raids, and levels significantly improve stats and abilities. As the game continues, the new recruits also increase in level, so CHARACTERS ARE MEANT TO BE NON-PERMANENT; YOU ARE THE ONLY CHARACTER THAT MATTERS, remaining afloat atop a steady wave of wet-ears-turned-champions that may lead you to victory.

- Difficulty: The game is designed to be difficult and unforgiving, hence permanent character death and ever-increasing dungeon levels. I guess it's likely you can be soft-locked if the dungeons become over-leveled and all your good characters die, but I haven't played long enough to witness that or perceive the curtains slowly closing on either side of me. Because the game is quick to emphasize the intended element of difficulty in its design, I am more relaxed when playing and feel like I accept misfortune and consequences for my actions more readily than I do in other games.

IN SUMMARY: Life is miserable and it doesn't last forever. May as well use your few living days to fully learn the miserable secrets that scar your family name!

Overall: Fun puzzle game with chemistry theme! Basically, you program two circuit boards to reassemble atoms into molecules, as a story of space industry and sci-fi intrigue unfolds. Flavor text provides some aspects of chemical knowledge, like the structure and applications of common molecules (water, sodium nitrate, sulfuric acid, benzene) and the periodic table.

Gameplay: Conceptually, you construct two independent circuits (red and blue) by programming them with a sequence of tasks to make/break bonds, move atoms/molecular fragments/molecules, and recombine them to form new feedstock chemicals. If your process completes a set number of cycles without creating errors (atoms colliding, pipelines clogging, or incorrect final products), you complete the level. Each level occurs in one 'reactor' (circuit board), but at a certain point you must chain multiple reactors to complete more complicated tasks (a broader 'strategy' level, rather than a 'tactics' level). The difficulty seems to scale at a reasonable pace as new concepts are added.

Story: It's secondary to the unique puzzle concept but provides nice flavor for the progression of the gameplay elements.

I gave up on this game in my (impatient) youth, but 10 years later a calmer me has enjoyed sitting for hours and experimenting with the programming puzzle elements. It's given me a new appreciation for process development, engineering, circuitry, and programming logic! Great mental exercise!

Yes, I too was alive in 2010.