Recent reviews by Ragnar

Psychonauts has good writing and creative ideas paired with tedious and sometimes frustrating gameplay. Psychonauts was fun at first, but a few levels in it stopped being fun and became tedious and repetitive. I finally burned out after finishing the Milkman Conspiracy, apparently its most iconic and memorable level, which felt like a tedious slog to play through.

The Milkman Conspiracy has you search an identical looking neighborhood, going door to door and searching each identical looking car and house for items in order to proceed past the next "gate" to find the next item for the next "gate." I put gate in quotes because it's not actually a gate but a marked off part of the level, and if you accidentally step across the line without the right item equipped you get arrested and have to watch a cutscene before being dumped back at the start of the level. One particular marked off section fills most of the path, and you have to carefully edge around it to avoid accidentally stepping into it, which never stopped being annoying. And passing is not automatic like a key-card where once you have it you can go past the associated gate, you have to go into your inventory and equip the correct item for each gate and keep it equipped the whole time you're in the marked off zone. Sometimes that means equipping one item, walking 10 feet, switching to another item, walking another 10 feet, switching back to the previous item, etc. There are so many gates and items that my inventory filled up and spilled over to a second page and now I had to jump between two inventory pages to juggle equipping the correct item for each marked off area. There's also a puzzle at one point that is so obtuse that I couldn't figure it out and only solved it by accident. And inside each house that you have to search the game switches to the worst camera angles I've ever seen in a video game, with 2-3 terrible camera angles per house which is both disorienting and frustrating to navigate. The level culminates in a boss fight where it tries to make use of a gimmicky new power you get by giving phase 2 of the fight the worst camera angle ever. I hated the level, and couldn't wait to be done with it. There's a bit of good, funny writing right before the boss fight, but it doesn't change the fact that you have to slog through a long, boring, tedious, frustrating level to get to the good part, and the good part is over in a few seconds and then you're thrown into a tedious, frustrating boss fight.

And that's really my problem with Psychonauts - there are good bits of funny writing throughout, but they're surrounded by so much tedious, frustrating gameplay that it hardly feels worth it. I realized that I was playing the game because I felt I should, just to finish it, rather than because I was actually having fun and enjoying it.

Crimson Tactics is a strategy RPG clearly inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics, but sufficiently different that it feels like its own game rather than a copy. It features engaging turn-based, grid-based battles where you field your party of characters against your opponent's, and try to take advantage of positioning and flanking to come out victorious.

The combat is fun, addictive, and challenging - I played on the Auto difficulty that's supposed to self-adjust, and it kept me on my toes. There's a multitude of classes to try out with different skills that you can learn and combine. Characters combine Actions (class specific) with Magic (most classes can learn at least some magic), and different weapons have different ways of attacking. Positioning on the battlefield is important as certain skills have different ranges, and characters take more damage from the sides and the most from behind. When characters fall in battle, you have three turns to revive them (which is easier said than done, when you're still being pressed by the enemy) before they disappear off the battlefield. There is a perma-death, of sorts - main story characters can't die for good, while other characters will permanently die after the third time that they die (disappear off the battlefield). The graphics and music are good, and the story is of a grim-dark political feud as rival factions battle for power. There's party management, equipment

On the negative side, the game could definitely use some Quality of Life additions, which I hope will be patched in, and the writing is done in an archaic, olde tyme style that I don't love. The mounts are cool, but somewhat clunky to use in practice. But if you can overlook the writing style and some (hopefully temporarily) missing QoL features, you'll find a really fun strategy RPG to sink into.

This is a VN that is poorly written. I played through one of the two stories here, and I don't know that I can bring myself to play through the other. I know this is free, but it's just not worth your time.

This VN falls victim to telling instead of showing - in that you're told that people become close and start caring about each other instead. But that's not how gamers work. You can't just tell me that my character has grown close to and cares about a character and expect me to feel the same. If anything, it leaves me feeling disconnected from the character I'm supposed to be playing as.

The writing sometimes makes no sense - more than once I read something and though, "WTF?" I thought maybe there was something lost in translation, but there's the (mediocre) English voice acting, so I'm not sure that this is a Japanese to English translation error.

The characters are unbelievable - the person yelling at you one moment is suddenly nice the next. The dialog is sometimes awkward. There's way too much time spent inside your character's head telling you (again telling rather than showing) how your character feels. The relationship progression / romance is unbelievable.

The art is okay, but at one point the text describes stuff that is not at all reflected in the background art meant to go along with the scene, which again just serves to pull you out of the story.

I hate to be negative about something free, but this just isn't worth your time. There are much better free VNs you could play instead.

A delightful metroidvania focused around digging, collecting gems, finding power-ups and secrets, and exploring. Charming characters and story, great graphics, and really fun exploration gameplay.

If you've played Steamworld Dig, this is more of the same but better in every way - more interesting levels, more upgrades, more interesting upgrades, and more convenient to play with frequently spaced fast-travel points.

The game is challenging enough to be entertaining for an adult, but easy enough (particularly on Easy) to be playable by a child. There's some potentially tricky platforming and combat sections that can be made simpler by finding upgrades. There's one section that's creepy and somewhat scary which may be too scary for young children, but while the game directs you there and expects you to complete it, it's actually an optional section and you can skip it (with some clever platforming) and beat the game without going through it.

I love the aesthetic of the game, I just wish that the game was made to be playable by humans rather than super-human robots.

The game starts out fine, with reasonable challenges and tracks. And then it escalates and escalates. When the devs say the game will be "mercilessly pushing the limits of your reaction time and short-term memory to avoid obstacles and dead-ends. Seriously, this game is wicked," they're not kidding. I'm no stranger to games requiring fast reactions - I've beaten Thumper - and yet I found Neon Drive to become impossible on even the easiest difficulty level (particularly in the segments where you have to fly through traffic heading at you).

Where Thumper let you rely on the music and muscle memory to help you through, Neon Drive doesn't. The inputs required do not match the beat, and the game keeps changing the patterns. Where Thumper builds more complicated patterns on top of previous ones, combining or lengthening simpler challenges into longer ones, Neon Drive purposefully changes the patterns, sometimes to force you to learn something completely new and other times to trip you up by deceiving you into thinking it's the same pattern as before. Where Thumper lets you learn by doing, Neon Drive makes you learn by trial and error and sheer memorization. And while Thumper had appropriately spaced checkpoints - and the upcoming Neodash with similar instant-fail mechanics has short levels under a minute or so - the Neon Drive levels feel really long for how much you have to get through without messing up to complete them.

As such, despite how much I wanted to like Neon Drive, it very quickly descended into impossible, frustrating, and maddening on even the easiest difficulty level. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're looking for a really difficult, punishing game.

Dev quickly admitted that the revocation was a mistake, and restored all the keys. I commend them for handling this well.

Neighbours is a short and repetitive puzzle game about sneaking around and setting traps.

The game starts out very simple and rather boring. There's a trial and error component to it of clicking on anything and everything to see what will work, and getting caught will reset the level which makes it very repetitive. It is thankfully pretty easy, provided you take your time and are careful, but getting caught at the end of a level because you clicked to hide under the bed but the game decided you clicked to walk around the bed instead and having to repeat everything is infuriating. The game starts getting good towards the end, but then it shortly ends.

It may have been good in its time, but now it just feels dated, repetitive, and boring. I don't think it's worth your time.

If you do play it, enable the Trap Camera setting in the options, so that you don't miss the traps being set off as that's the best part of the game.

Deeply unlikable protagonist and seriously annoying android team up to make a really trying kinetic (aka, linear) visual novel.

The protagonist is deeply unlikable - he's dour, curt, depressing, and unlikable throughout. The only other character, an android, is seriously annoying - naive, repetitive, and surprisingly dumb. I don't know how I"m supposed to care about either character when they're so unlikable or annoying.

Beyond that, the writing is poor - it's fan fiction level, and not very good fan fiction at that. Lines like, "I had to remind myself that she wasn't human," sound completely preposterous and out of place when every other line she utters is something like, "I have scanned my databases..." or "My programming..." Really? You have to remind yourself that she's not human? The constant stream of robotic speech and blatantly in-human behaviour isn't enough? She won't go two seconds without reminding you that she's an android, and yet somehow you forgot that right after she spun in a circle and inexplicably collapsed in a puddle? There's countless equally head-scratching lines, and some that actually made me cringe.

I've seen this VN recommended often, and the reviews here on Steam certainly sing its praises, but this VN was a real trial to slog through. I had to take frequent brakes from the unlikable characters and poor writing, and really force myself to get through this VN. I honestly don't understand why it has the following and praise that it does.

If you have access to a public library, just go there and get a decent sci-fi novel instead. Don't waste your time on this.

I think the dev did a really good job of putting an unusual spin on an RPG maker game to turn it into an ARPG. It's obviously a passion project, and the dev should be proud of seeing it through to completion. Making it available for free is very generous. I particularly liked the soundtrack. It's a great accomplishment, and the dev should feel proud.

That said, I don't recommend it because I don't think it's worth the time. If you don't have anything to play, sure, play through it - it's fine. But if you have a backlog, I'd go through that first.

The writing is full of typos and grammatical errors - and while I can overlook a little, having them appear in almost every single conversation becomes distracting.

The inventory system is cumbersome - as an example, upgrading an item requires having to go into a sub-menu, un-equiping the item, backing out to the main menu, going into a different sub-menu, scrolling to find the item, upgrading the item, backing out again, going into the first sub-menu, and finally equipping the item again. Same for having to combine pages into a book and getting kicked out of the menus, such that you have to go back in to actually read the book.

The combat, while initially novel, quickly grows stale and boring in everything besides boss fights - and even most of the lesser boss fights are just spamming one button over and over. Levels likewise become really repetitive.

And the story is... acceptable? The writing was needlessly repetitious, re-stating the same thing over and over, and I found the characters to be very flat. The ending was the best part, if predictably melodramatic, but getting to the ending was kind of a chore. It is also sometimes unintentionally amusing, such as: "Sis curse resistance is surprisingly low. Her curse resistance is lower than normal."

Gris is wonderful.

I mean that literally, Gris is full of wonder. Gris is the ideal indie game, it is artistic, simple, clever, beautiful, and the sort of game I wouldn't expect a major publisher to fund. But I am so glad a publisher took a chance on it, and even more glad I got to play it.

Gris is a beautiful, whimsical, wonderful 2D platformer. As I said before, it is simple, but also clever, and I've had a few "aha!" moments even just a couple hours in.

It is designed to be frustration free, and I think they nailed it. It's not frustrating, you'll never die, those are things you don't have to worry about. That doesn't mean it's necessarily easy, as there are some tricky platforming bits, but they're not frustrating. To give an example, there's a section where you have to navigate a storm and seek shelter between wind gusts. In other games, failing to reach shelter in time would result in you having to restart the level (I'm looking at you, Inside). In Gris, it just sets you back, but not all the way to the beginning, just a very small loss of progress. The level is still designed such that you'll need to master being able to avoid the storm to finish it, but it's never frustrating.

If you're at all interested in a gorgeous, beautiful, wonderful 2D platformer that's full of charm and beautiful music and delight, I can't recommend Gris highly enough.