Recent reviews by WarMom

I was disappointed with the FF12 soundtrack that was released on the same day, so out of curiosity, I wondered 'maybe it's just because it's an older game' (Zodiac Age notwithstanding) and that the releases of modern FFs would have higher quality audio. Nope.

No album art. No metadata. All MP3s, no FLAC. Compared to the uploads on spotify, you're paying a premium for nothing beyond skipping ads. If you're paying, you're better off trying to hunt down the physical CDs so you can have FLAC or WAV.

I was quite surprised to see SE release a backlog of Final Fantasy soundtracks on Steam, today, all at once, at quite high prices. I liked XII a lot, and given that SE have been pretty consistent with uploading their soundtracks to Spotify, I was curious to see what you're actually paying a premium for.

The soundtracks are extensive, but what you get are MP3s, with no metadata at all. Paying double digit prices to get, at best, a local copy of what Spotify offers with no ads. No metadata. No album art. No FLAC.

Only buy on deep discount.

This became the Swarm Survivor Game that I played while I was waiting for updates to the Swarm Survivor Game That I Played While Waiting For Updates To Vampire Survivors.

There's some balance issues - some characters are far more interesting than others, and lasers just aren't strong enough to handily win a round - but it's a great experience, you'll have plenty of runs where different upgrades come together into something powerful. It never really reaches the point of 'the game plays itself' but you'll feel that ramp in strength every time. Definitely recommended.

Builder's Journey exists in the space between 'relaxing puzzle game' and 'ray tracing test to take a jackhammer to your GPU'.

Though its runtime is on the short side at around 3 hours, I see it as more of a choice to not risk overstaying its welcome. Within those 3 hours, new mechanics are introduced on top of a simple base, themes are established, and the game progresses at a brisk pace.

I will say that I enjoyed almost all of the puzzles. Whenever possible, the developers have given you wiggle room instead of demanding one particular specific solution. There is, however, one character / set of mechanics / set of puzzles that I feel did not land. It nudges the player towards brute forcing without learning the mechanics themselves, and while it was a slight dampener on the experience, it didn't stay long enough to sour it.

A wonderful game to try if you want a relaxing puzzler, to use your GPU to heat up your room, or if you just have a fondness for lego.

Despite showing initial promise, I was disappointed with how the game systems are implemented. It's such a shame, because Legends shows so much promise. Even as someone who had a passing relationship with the books when I was younger (1-4 as they were repackaged in the early noughties, where Creature of Havoc was reshuffled to book 4), there's a little thrill to seeing Blacksand and Firetop Mountain on the world map. Seeing how the battle system varies from the original makes it feel so fresh at first.

But then the cracks start to show, very quickly.

The biggest issue that the specifics of how battle is determined - you roll a number of attack dice against enemy defense and vice versa in turns, and then excess damage to defense is applied to health - turns fights into a battle of attrition. You don't 'do' anything, nor do you feel like you are stronger than an opponent. It devolves into just rolling to see who wins the DPS race. I feel like the original battle system had its flaws, but this comes away worse for wear when you only see your HP as a resource to have slowly whittled down, while your skill never protects you the way it did in the originals.

This slip up then cascades into worse problems - if you avoid softlocking yourself, you will still, at the very least, see yourself going through the same repetitive sections of the game, over and over, broken up with a little RNG, getting weaker each time which seals you into the cycle.

I was excited to look at a partly-original 'compilation' gamebook, or an RPG set in the Fighting Fantasy universe, but what I got was a messy halfway house of the two that stumbles so badly in its execution that it undoes the whole endeavour.

A quite literal digitisation of the gamebooks. If you're loooking for a way to experience these books in a digital format with some light modern conveniences (like the digital equivalent of keeping your thumb in the page of the previous section, which you absolutely did growing up, don't lie) then this will be right up your alley.

However, that's all it is, and little more. The faithfulness to the original source material and systems is almost to a fault. Coming to this right after the Deathtrap Dungeon FMV-based adaptation just highlights foibles in the system like how playing a character with a low Skill score rolled at creation is largely just a waste of a half hour. FF Classics exists as a great modern preservation of the gamebooks, but when compared to other attempts to adapt them, their flaws appear sharper.

Recommended if that's exactly what you want, but I feel like this adaptation is much more at home on a phone or tablet as it was originally designed.

Being fond of games with lovingly rendered food and intimate environments, I had to give this one a try the moment I saw it on the Wholesome Direct. What I didn't expect was that a game could pack so many memories and understated emotions into such a short runtime. Absolutely worth trying at its budget price, heavily recommended if you love food and / or loneliness.

Review based on the first main build in early access, and checking out the first raft of big changes.

Fights in Tight Spaces is the slick, stylish cousin of Slay The Spire. For the moment, I've had my fill, with one successful run in 27 hours of play, but I'll absolutely be returning as the game evolves throughout early access.

At its core, the game is a deckbuilding roguelike, similar to Slay The Spire. With some exceptions, cards generally deal damage or add block - so far, so similar - or move. This is the ace up FiTS' sleeve. The game takes place in 3D environments, and you and enemies close gaps, create distance and flank around each other. It's a - literal - extra dimension, creating new ways to play and new solutions to problems. By shifting your position and manipulating enemies, you can trick them into attacking each other while you escape unscathed.

This is what makes FiTS so satisfying to play. There's an occasional thrill in Slay the Spire of racking up your Block to the requisite amount, but FiTS delivers moments like this so regularly. A stylish, perfectly timed slip past an enemy, pushing another into the path of an imminent bullet, and instantly killing a third by kicking them out of the arena is always a thrilling experience. The addition of 3D space as something to maneuver and manipulate makes FiTS an inherently enjoyable game.

There are some issues - events are often dull coinflips rather than interesting decisions to be made, some numbers need to be tweaked as a block-and-counter build (the arguably most boring, least dynamic kind of build which leans the least into the movement play) is the most intuitive for success, and a run is ultimately too long. A successful run of FiTS has you play through five different 'chapters', taking nearly an hour each (or longer for the later chapters); while you can start on any of them, to start on anything other than chapter 1 is to heavily nerf yourself from the get-go.

However, these are all things I have confidence the developer will hammer out over the Early Access period. Even the first big patch changed player upgrades from random chance to player choice, a single change that adds so much depth. There's an incredible base to build on already present and I have no qualms recommending you buy it during early access to experience its addictive, stylish play and support its development.

It's hard to talk about Say No! More like how we talk about most games - boxed, consumer products with features listed in neat bullet points (although the devs took a good stab at it!). Is it, effectively, a game where you just repeat variations of the same action over and over throughout its runtime? Well, yes...but also No?

Say No! More is a cathartic playground, a Standing-Up-For-Yourself simulator that equips you with a toolbox of ways to say no, with non-verbal responses and different tones of voice, to let the player express themselves in a consequence-free environment. It invites you to think of every ludicrous or unreasonable request you've faced in interpersonal relationships, office jobs or when faced with authority, and let out how you really felt.

The fact that it's so freeform and uncomplicated is precisely the point. The developers could have made the different tones of voice into 'elements' that only work against certain enemy types like a rudimentary puzzle game or RPG, and I'm glad they resisted that temptation. It means so much more to be faced with a situation and decide for yourself the ideal No. I laugh when someone tells me to pay their parking ticket because I feel it's a laughable demand and deliver a cold, biting hard 'No' when someone else would pump the aggression to the maximum. It's a short and linear story, but those tiny meaningful variations are yours and nobody can take them from you.

This toolbox is a gift in a story about personal boundaries, office politics, people-pleasing, Bull[-you-know-what] Jobs, collective power and creating a more equitable workplace. If you're into short, experimental, expressive experiences, say 'yes' just one more time and buy it.

After some tweaking and modding to get the game running, it's still, at best, a curio from a time when Tomb Raider set the template for 3D action adventure games, with the jank turned up to 11.

Yes, there's other flaws. It runs at a bizarre 17 frames per second. The music tracks are broken without some patching. Mouse controls don't work. Its ties to the Fighting Fantasy gamebook are, to put it nicely, very, very tenuous. But it's all just fluff complaints next to the fact that it's a game that tried to half-heartedly adapt a popular book into the hottest genre of the late 90s with about as much grace as a flailing bloodbeast.

It's not just a curio. It's a curio best left forgotten.