Recent reviews by Akhlys

I feel kinda sad having to downvote this one. But while I wish the devs the best, I kinda feel I have to. I want the reviews of my h-games reflect their quality as well and steam has a huge issue with people leaving "haha boobs" reviews on such games, making it very hard to find the good ones.

I heard it was better than bonetown. Not in my experience. I enjoyed bonetown, but I did not enjoy this one.
It's not open world, the missions are very boring, the weapons feel like they have absolutely no punch (several shotgun shots to the face and the dudes are still not dead, it's an eternal whack-a-mole) and often it feels like you're hit by invisible enemies because apparently some elf archers can shoot across the whole map with pinnpoint precision or something, the h-scenes are exactly the same as in bonetown except your character is a space marine midget, and in the real game there are just orks (that differ oly in clothing) and elves (that differ in clothing and color), all other girls are not in the story but just in an extra menu and just copypasted from bonetown. The humor is very childish but not in a good way ("I'm part of her cabinet" - "I don't care about her furniture", haw haw) and it runs about as stable as a ♥♥♥♥♥ after a night of "anal on the house". It doesn't even shut down cleanly, you have to kill the process in task manager.

It's.. just not fun.

Also sidenote, why the hell would they name it bonecraft, have starcraft space marines and not let me have kerriganussy? I know, I know, warcraft, but. Infected. Kerrigan. Queen ♥♥♥♥♥ of the universe. would've been so great

Note that this is not a puzzle game, it's a Visual Novel.
There are of course the connect-3-puzzles, but they're rather few and far between. Nicely descigned tho, most prn connect-3 forget to do something special when you connect 4 or more, for some reason. It's not rocket science, but still. Alas this game does it correctly.
Still. VN, not puzzle.

The story is... rather ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I dunno if it is because of some shaky translations, because it bombards you with words you, as a westerner, never heard of (for half the time I thought lukomorye was the name of some dude, not the name of some mythological russian region) or because it uses some words in an uncommon matter but I found it very hard to follow the story.
I mean, the general gist is no issue, just the details.

Anyway, it has some nice animation, nice art, and is a nice little game. It's rather short tho. Disregard my playtime, I forgot it was running in the background when I went to bed.

it has plenty content, but it's really repetative and grindy
Also.. I never had an RPGMaker game that hardly runs for 20 mins without crashing. How do you even manage to do that? You can say plenty about rpgmaker games but usually they're at least stable

Also way too much text. It puts VNs to shame. By the end of it I basically just leaned on the skip-dialoge-button and it stil took like 20 seconds to get through some of them. Ain't nobody got time for that

This game is nice but a bit boring (well it's a walking sim)
But that's not the reason I recommend not paying for this.

This game was made by Alec Holowka. He is no longer with us. False rape accusations by Zoe Quinn (some of you veterans may know this name) drove him to suicide. After he was bullied off this mortal coil, the game company went to his sister, Eileen Mary Holowka. Who was buddy buddy with Zoe. But it doesn't end there. Eileen used the plenty of money she got from her brothers game to create "Baby Ghosts", a "social impact investment firm", and "Weird Ghosts", an "impact fund". Besides other things, they provided part of the funding for Sweet Baby. She funds the very same type of people that drove her brother to suicide.
Let me repeat, by buying this game, you do not support the one who made it but, by proxy, the kind of people that made him kill himself. You piss on the creators grave.

Play this game. Don't buy this game. I bought this long before learning this, sadly.

Nice remake that nets you about 30 hours. Seems pretty faithful.

Just.. put story difficulty on the lowest level. I don't know how many waypoints you're gonna get, but on normal difficulty you spend half the game not knowing wtf to do.

Also get some mods from the nexus (take care they were updated to 1.2) - particularly for more inventory space, more cargo lift space and less weapon size.
I'd also get the one that sensaround recharges energy. Having slowly regenerating energy was pretty nice. Even the second fastest version of it with one energy every second would still mean a full recharge being 4 minutes, so it's not like you'd be too overpowered.

Nice little game. At times, you really have to brute force the deductions tho, or at least I had.

it's just a ~2h game tho

I dunno, the balancing just doesn't seem to be for me.
In advanced mode, the normal enemies are nice, getting hit hurts plenty, mana is scarce, etc. But the bosses are sum ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, especially because you spend 80% of your time with no mana and just waiting and evading until you can do anything any more, and if you miss one evade, well, there goes a quarter of your health bar at least.
But in Standard mode, the bosses are rather too easy (I beat the final boss in the first try with 80% health left) and the normal enemies are way too easy and your mana refills so fast you can pretty much shotgun (fire) or sniper (electricity, one shot kill for most enemies) all the time, you will hardly run out, and even if you eff up the enemies do so little damage it doesn't really matter, your health will be full again at the end from their health drops. And, well, you get refilling health.

A difficulty where the bosses are somewhere between standard and advanced and the normal enemies are advanced would probably have been the best for me.

Then again, I'm not the type that enjoys seeing the same boss intro 20 times.

Also, the levels are very samey. It's castle dungeon, castle dungeon but with fire, or outside with muted colors. would it have been so bad to throw in some colors beside red and grey and maybe some brownish green?

The story is also.. Bad. You have to go to the throne, you have to go to the throne, hey I gotta get my hat, you have to go to the throne. Hell even after you reached the throne.. it's, again, you have to go to the throne, just this time in the spirit world. That's all there is,unless you read the description of all the items you pick up, and those are also just worldbuilding and not story.

This is more of a neutral (case #287973 where I wish steam would let me)

The game all in all is nice. Handling feels a bit clunky at times, but that's probably because Bea (the dog) is so wide as opposed to your normal platformer protagonists.
The senses were a nice idea, with an awful execution. So you have one sense that points you to important items and secrets. Which means you probably always use it. If only it had a toggle for always-on. Hell, have all senses always on, but muted (hard to see), that would be the best IMHO

At least one puzzle is buggy, and it feels like by design. Minor spoiler: You carry around fruits that have different sizes of NPC groups following them. You gotta distribute 4 groups to 3 buttons to get the correct weight on each. So far so good. Annoying puzzle because the dudes don't end up right next to the fruit so you have to finagle around to get them all on the button, but nothing to bad. But as soon as you have enough dudes on a button, it locks in place. If you then move the fruit (NPCs)to a different button, that first button doesn't reset - but still counts as wrong for the end solution. So you feel like you have the perfect weight on each button but nothing happens.

And what the hell kind of story telling is that?
Tutorial -> on a planet, in a fancy space suit, task to restore 8o8by's parts (who the hell is bobby?) -> use bobby to hack and stuff for the whole level -> "2 hours earlier" -> what happened after the tutorial, how you meet bobby, how you got the fancy space suit, complete with tutorial mesages on how to hack, the thing you have been doing for the whole of the last level.
It's like they mixed up the order of the first two levels, then thought "ah screw it, slap a '2 hours earlier' in between them"
Yes, flashbacks exist and they can be a nice storytelling tool, but it really doesn't feel like one. When tasked to restore 8o88y's parts you think bobby was the boy of the tutorial and think you gotta find space shuttle parts or something. Not small glowing rectangles. And later, you already hacked aplenty, you had to use it to finish the previous level, so why a tutorial again? Even in the gallery the two levels are switched.
Hell, even if it was a flashback, that's not a place for one.

Also, a pet peeve. Who pronounces Bea as "bee"? Is Beatrice now bee-trice?

Nice short puzzle game. The wallwalking will make your head hurt :)

Just gotta say, would be nice if it let you manually save and had a "restart from checkpoint" instead of "restart level". Two times I was stuck on the environment. The first time I somehow got out again, the second time, on a guard rail in the library, I did not and had to reset. Thankfully, going back to the main menu and then loading the game (instead of "restart level") put me pretty much exactly where I was, but I tried for a long time to unstuck because who knows when the last checkpoint was.

not bad all in all
But it feels very proof-of-concept-y, which it probably is.
Buying stuff (ingame) you have to guess at what it does (only told after purchase) is something I always disliked.
I wish there were more room types besides "empty", "enemy gauntlet" and boss. The last level/ship having like 5 waves each room was annoying
Also, dunno if it's a bug or not, but my first playthrough the ships weapon did 1 damage in the second level, where enemy ships already have multiple phases. Took forever to defeat a ship. On my second playthrough, the ships gun did 3 damage.

having different team member do different things by default (not only after upgrades) would be welcome. One gredanier (slower, more damage), one sniper that autotargets enemies not on screen and so on.
Also, a way to heal without the glove pickup.