Recent reviews by eldee

Let me start off by saying that generally speaking I love walking simulators. Gone Home, Firewatch, Edith Finch, Ethan Carter, etc... all fantastic games. Somehow I just never got around to playing Dear Esther, so i figured it was time for me to go back and play the one that started it all.

This game has not aged well, mechanically speaking. Imagine an audio book where you have to hold down W to progress the story, but it only comes a sentence or two every 5 minutes. That's Dear Esther, insofar as I can tell with the limited amount of time I was willing to invest into it.

15 minutes of playtime, 85% of that was loading screens jesus christ. The rest of the time was crashing and reloading. Tons of other bugs and issues- Kept getting a warning about my installed RAM not being at min-spec, I have 16 gigs of ram.

really wanted to like this game, but man is it poorly designed. I get that they wanted to do the overworld thing and tease future abilities by blocking progress, but they do it ALL THE DAMN TIME. Literally every stop on the map when you start the game with the exception of the village is a progress blocker, so you go in- turn around and leave. With no explanation.

There might be a really solid game behind the first 30 minutes- but I don't even care enough to find out anymore.

This is a great game, and I'm going to recommend it because I want to support studio pixel.


BUT. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. It is 2016. Why am I downloading Joy2Key so I can use a 360 controller properly? This is ridiculous- and if this game was made by any other studio I'd thumbs-down it on principle.

NEXT GAME: CONFIGURABLE GAMEPAD PLEASE. THANK YOU.

This game is essentially a love letter to the 8bit era. Tons of references and call-outs to oldschool games and even 80's pop culture if you have a keen eye (in the room where you find the ares gauntlet there's a giant painting of vigo the carpathian on the wall).

There's an area that's clearly inspired by the clocktower in Castlevania, and you fight a mini-boss that borders on infringement-territory with taito's bubble bobble.

All of this is to say that Castle in the Darkness clearly knows its audience and isn't afraid to play fan service. It has pretty solid platforming, lots of criss-crossing and back-tracking, RPG mechanics like inns and shops, and everything else you'd expect from a game that's trying to harness the power of the 80's.

So yes- thumbs up, buy this game and enjoy it if these are the types of things that you enjoy. However, there are some negative things to point out.

First, this game is pretty rough around the edges. Gamepad support is barely there, and menus are never fully navigable using only a gamepad (you always end up having to go back to the keyboard for something) which means you likely won't be enjoying this game from your couch in big picture mode.

Second, the resolution options for this game are abhorrent. It starts up in windowed mode- a TINY window, which almost makes sense given that it's a pixel-game. You are provided with a handful of scale-factors to choose from, which also makes sense given that you want to keep square pixels for an authentic experience. What does not make sense is the fact that everything is scaled bilinearly, which means everything gets blurry as ♥♥♥♥! Why didn't they provide an option for nearest neighbor scaling to keep the pixel art nice and sharp? The developers of this game need to go play Shovel Knight and see how a retro game can be developed for modern hardware and still keep its authenticity.

Aside from those two major issues, everything else I've encountered is fairly minor.

Lots of potential, but so far they're kinda blowing it. Early access review, so take it with a grain of salt- but long story short, I don't have much hope for the long term success of this game.

The devs claim it's not a pay-to-win game, but that's not actually true. In Holodrive, you earn an in-game currency called "bits" that you can use to purchase additional items to customize your bot. You earn bits by playing the game, getting XP and leveling up. You can also earn bits by doing daily missions, things like that. You use the bits to buy item blind-packs called holopacks, and in each one is an item that you can equip on your bot. I know what you're saying- "oh no, in game currency!". Hang on- that's not the real problem.. in-game currency by itself does not make a game pay-to-win.

Part of the problem is that some of these items skew the balance of the game in a PROFOUND way. IE) there's a rocket launcher that fires through walls, rapid fire machine gun that ricochets off of everything, flamethrower that does an obscene amount of damage over time, etc. Oh, and by the way most of these upgraded weapons do a LOT more damage than their non-powered counterparts. That said, that by itself isn't the root of the problem. Players need to be rewarded for their hard work, right? Giving super experienced players uberpowerful weapons is kind of lame if you're trying to sustain a community of new players, but fundamentally I get it.

The real problem is that you can buy bits using real money. Yes, microtransactions. Everybody's favorite feature. This means that you can spend a wad of cash to essentially buy the items you want- and dominate everyone else with overpowered weapons. THAT is why Holodrive is pay-to-win by even the most forgiving definition. If these items were 100% cosmetic I would have no problem with microtransactions- but they're not.

With that out of the way lets talk about the problems with the actual game:

First, they drop you in without explaining ANYTHING. The tutorial tells you things you should already know if you have a steam acount and a pulse. "Hey, heres how you shoot. Here's WASD movement. Here's how you tie your shoes". I hate tutorials like this because somebody spent real time working on it, and it's a joke- nobody has ever jumped into a platformer and said "Hrm i wonder how you jump?". Instead, tell us about the teleporters! I had over an hour of in-game time before I knew WTF they were or how they worked- i just kept getting randomly teleported to other places and had no clue why. Or how about explain wtf the powerups are or when/why they might be useful? Experimentation is great, but when I'm getting analy penetrated by a guy with glowing armor and a rocket launcher that phases through solid walls it's kinda hard, yeah? The "Collector" game mode has great potential but so many people don't know how to play it because the only time you ever see instructions are on a loading screen, and even then they're super vague. What are the red walls? Sometimes they turn green and you can go through? Under what conditions do they turn green? Is it a timer? did somebody press a button? Information like this is ridiculously easy to communicate to the player, so it's frustrating to run into issues like this.

The UI is a complete mess- finding things on the main menu is a challenge, as the sections of the menu sometimes don't make any sense. For example- the area where you equip items you've unlocked is called "album". I could think of 100 different words that would better describe that section of the menu- here's an easy one "ITEMS", or "INVENTORY".
The in-game HUD isn't much better. You get helpful arrows showing the direction of other players on the screen if they're within range, but information that is immediately useful (such as which powerup you're carrying) is pushed to the margins of the screen, forcing you to take your eyes off the action.

I played most of my time using mouse and keyboard, but also tried out gamepad so I could do a thorough review- gamepad support is barely there. I mean, you can use a gamepad and the game will work- but good luck figuring out which buttons to press, because all of the on-screen instructions will remain keyboard commands. Cycling weapons on the gamepad is a nightmare.. using bumpers to cycle through weapons? C'mon, it's 2016- use a weapon wheel.. infinitely faster and actually possible to utilize muscle memory rather than tap-tap-tapping while you stare at the tiny icons under your character hoping you picked the right one.

I've got other gripes with this game, but I'm going to stop here because I'm ready to be done with this game in every sense of the word.

Really wanted to like this.. but there are some fundamental design flaws that really prevent me from playing it anymore. It's virtually impossible to determine areas where you're able to drop down to lower areas, so you'll spend a lot of time frustrated in an area where there's no apparent way to proceed, only to accidentally press down and drop through the floor.

Other irritations- the game doesn't really tell you what type of materials you can dig into.. dirt, okay. stone- apparently?? I spent way too much time stuck in one area only to find that I could dig through solid rock. Apparently not metal though, or thin beams. I just doesn't make any sense and the game doesn't help you understand whats going on (either through color coding, highlighting, or even a frickin tutorial).

The last major flaw is the ham fisted time-rewind mechanic that seems to exist solely to correct other design flaws (the fact that you can get stuck in the first place). It's not like Braid where it's crucial to solving puzzles, it's just there as an "undo button" which is pretty lame.

As a side note and unrelated to my overall experience of the game (because I turned it off), the music was god awful. sounded like a couple of kids 'jamming' in the garage. Just.. awful.

Anyway, if it's on sale and you're curious go for it.. otherwise save your money.

it's aiight as long as you have reasonable expectations and catch it on sale.

buggy piece of garbage. it looked fun, but crashed constantly- would only run in 1024x768 in windowed mode (and that's after I deleted a config file just to get the game to run in the first place), and then it's stuck in "demo mode". Found a thread from 2011 where somebody ran into the same situation and the solution was to shut down steam and delete one of *steams* files (not the game's files). I backed the file up and tried it, didn't work. This game has been out long enough for crap like this to be completely inexcusable. If you see this on sale like I did, save yourself the headache, or at the very least try it within the refund period to make sure it works!! I didn't realize there was only a 14 day window for refunds, so here I am on the 18th day finally getting a chance to play it and now I'm stuck with it.

Easily one of the best games ever made.