Recent reviews by Orthopraxis

Game locks entire system on the loading screen.

Was really excited for this surprise DLC to one of my favorite games ever. Early reviews were positive so I went for it.

Unfortunately, I got what I will guess is 30-50% of the way through, and the back half is very heavily focused on creeping around slowly in very dark areas, with tension being a major component and I am super not into that. Warning for anyone looking to purchase this!

This is a tough call to distill into thumbs up or thumbs down. I'm going with "Yes, reccomended" with some specific caveats that hopefully you are reading.

- Is this game Subnautica in space? Yes. Basically, yes. It doesn't have as much depth (no pun intended), and without the sort of "keep going deeper!" drive of Subnautica, the experience isn't the same, but the fundemental mechanics are there, and are fun. Subnautica is a better more fun game, but this has that same feel, and if you are looking for it, it has it and it very fun for the first 20ish hours.
- The game is trying to be funny, at basically all times. Sometimes it succeeds! Often it doesn't and the humor is a little embarassing.
***Mild spoilers below***
The critical failure of this game IMO, is that after those first 20ish hours the core loop of the game changes dramatically. At a moment when you likely expect to be entering the end-game, or even finishing the game (having at that point unlocked everything) you are apparently only 3/4ths or halfway through the game. A few issues with this:
1) If you are really loving a game, such a thing can be a pleasant surprise. For me, by this point I was ready to be done. "Thanks for the good time Breathedge, lets bring it home!" I said. But nope, Breathedge was not done with me.
2) The core Subnautica elements (scrounge materials, craft upgrades, explore, maybe base building) fall away at this point, and what was a game of exploration in a free-form way turns into flying a ship around (you can no longer exit the ship whenever) from big space object to big space object, docking, and running around inside on foot, finding crafting materials sitting around that need to be made into a widget to progress, usually only after running BACK to the ship to craft it. Up until this point there were a few very limited "Running around inside" sections. At this point, it becomes the whole game.

For me, I was done at that point. All the things that were enjoyable and compelling became tedious. I would have been happy to have the game end right before this point. So for me, Breathedge was a lot of fun for the first 50-80% (I really have no idea how long that section drags on) and then absolutely does not stick the landing. So if you are capable of enjoying the first half of a game and pretending the second doesn't exist, this is worth a shot. I don't regret buying it despite these disappointments.

Tremendous combination of fun gameplay and a fantastic epic story. Really there weren't any elements of this one that I didn't love - even the music and sound design was great.

Game is far far too shallow, I can't imagine I would play it that much even if it was just a mobile game. Good "clickers" have more depth.

This is the whole game:
- Send your 1 dwarf to gather resources. You click to send him, he animates digging/fighting, etc. If his stats are high enough he finishes on his own. If not he might run out of HP, and you should click to bring him home before he hits zero.
- Use the resources he gets back to craft items. This process consists of browsing a list of items, clicking "Craft", waiting 2-5s, and then clicking "Collect".
- Use these items to equip on your miner, or your shopkeepers. Each item has numerical stats in 6 categories (Strength, wisdom, etc.) that boost your shop keeper or miner abilities. Incidentally this makes even equip management tedious as you are constantly needing to compare "Ok this item was 2 str, 3 dex, 1 wisdom, 1 charisma... is that better than this item with 1 str, 2 dex 4 wisdom and 2 charisma?" - etc. ad nauseum.
OR
- Sell these items for gold. You click to pick them up, click to put them on a bench, and click to set a price. If it's too high, nobody buys. Otherwise... they buy and you make gold.
Gold is spent either crafting items (they all require some gold and materials from the caves) or unlocking new shops.
- These shops don't change the game or unlock features, they just have more equipment with bigger numbers.

Thats the whole game. Make gold until you have enough, and you win.

Pros:
- Art is beautiful
- Concept/lore is special - this + the solid artwork tells me someone put a lot of love into this.
- mechanics are creative, I enjoy the way your workers (Pupils) can switch jobs get better. Not the most novel thing in the world, but I've always enjoyed that kind of mechanic!

Cons, and the reason I can't recommend this:
- way too hard. The tutorial ("Campaign") does a nice job of teaching you the mechanics. What it does NOT prepare you for is the way everything will spontaneously fall apart. I don't know whether the "Vagaries" (negative events) come too often, or what, but at this point I'm uninstalling and writing this review after the 4th or 5th aborted attempted to complete even a single run. In all cases I never made it farther than halfway, and in all cases, things went from "going great" to "complete collapse" in an eyeblink.
I can't imagine it's intended to be this hard, given the variety of starting Tribes, but after 5 attempts not even getting halfway, and thus I STILL don't know what you unlock and get to build upon with each completion... I'm just done. They need to reduce the difficulty or offer different difficulty levels or something, because as it stands, the sudden failures occurring during what otherwise feels like a good run is a huge bummer and super demotivating.

You know, I was super aggravated at this game - I've grown tired of the Early Access thing. Games "releasing" years before they are done, coverage that constantly talks about unfinished games, etc.

But I'll be damned if this isn't a fantastic one of these. Solid action, fun progress and mechanics. Reminds me a bit of Dead Cells in the way it feels like it has just so many builds and unlockables. Once again Supergiant has knocked it out of the park.

This isn't very complex. If somehow you are reading this and DON'T already know the core gameplay loop here, it's this:
- you get deliveries from one place, you take them to another. Sometimes with a vehicle, sometimes on foot. Terrain varies from rocky plains to mountains. Flat, hilly, treacherous.
- Sometimes bad people are on the way.
- Sometimes scary ghosts are on the way.
- You are given the means to deal with these.
- While you make your deliveries, you reconnect people living in the boonies, and disconnected bases. You also build helpful infrastructure. Sometimes the infrastructure that other people have built in their games will show up in yours.
- You do this for many hours, play through a 5 hour end game, then watch credits twice.
- It's Kojima crazy for the duration.
If any of that sounded fun? You should probably play this. If it sounded stupid? You should probably not play this. For me, I read all the reviews and what sounded good to me was a game around making deliveries. I can get behind that. I had a blast for about 95 hours making deliveries, and was annoyed for 3 of the final 5 hours, and watching cut scenes for the other 2 hours.
10/10 would buy again.

It's hard to pin down the year, but near as I can tell, I got an NES as a gift from my father when I was 6 or so. Video games have been a hobby, passion, time-waster, distraction, or coping mechanism occupying a critical part of my life ever since then. And in my (at the time of this writing) 32+ years of gaming, I can't say as I have ever had an experience like this one.
It wasn't perfect all the way through.
I did have to look up how to proceed more than zero times which was disappointing and took some of the magic away.
The structure of the game is such that if you don't like how time pressure feels it will make you anxious and maybe encourage you to go fast and miss things at times when going slower and being more thoughtful would benefit you.
....but I have never, ever, had an experience like this one, and I certainly wasn't prepared to confront my own mortality, and my own feelings about entropy as much as I did at the very end of it.
10/10, recommended for everyone.

If you like run based deck builders, this game is awesome. Pro tip - if you find an imbalanced combo, pump the hell out of it. You are MEANT to combine effects to make ridiculous combos in this, and exploiting those combos is often the only way you will see victory.