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Recent reviews by marbeltoast

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Showing 1-10 of 23 entries
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
20.8 hrs on record
Never have I felt more in touch with the character I am controlling in a game. We fought his enemies. We cried his tears. We loved his family. We went mad looking for something to change the course of fate. We genuinely felt fear when it all felt so helpless.

This is one of the best indie games ever made. 11/10. Play it right the crab now. You deserve it.
Posted 25 December, 2023.
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4 people found this review helpful
1.6 hrs on record
What frames itself at first as a mere spoopy horror game for youtubers to scream at for clicks gradually reveals that it does, in fact, contain multitudes.

The devs describe this as "stanley parable meets lovecraftian horror with a dash of disco elysium", and I can certainly see where they're coming from, but in my eyes, there's a far more pertinent point of comparison...

Spoilers beyond this point.

For fear to exist, there must be a blend of uncertainty, threat, and hope.
This game is scary, initially. The gore is gruesome enough that you might scream on the first lap through the winding story. Then you die, and then, you come back. And then you don't die... and you go *there*.

Once you come back from *there*, fear is dead. You aren't fighting against the princess, or the narrator, or the voices in your head. You're trying to figure out what's going on. How this works; what it's for. Sure, you'll get drowned, or eaten, or torn limb from limb, but beyond the blood splatters, and the graphic descriptions, there is never a feeling of threat after that first loop.

The truly beautiful thing comes when you finally learn why the narrator is so hell bent on the death of the princess: She *IS* death itself. He is filled with the oldest fear, fear of the unknown. You rise above him on your journey, realising that death is what gives life meaning. Embracing it. Embracing her.

It's a love story, at it's core. Learning to love the finality of it all. The uncertainty. Knowing that endings give life meaning, and choosing to keep it that way and carry forwards. One other game has made me feel that way, and that game is Outer Wilds. To be compared to such a masterwork is no small feat. Well done Black Tabby Games! I eagerly await your next project!
Posted 29 October, 2023.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
47.6 hrs on record (22.2 hrs at review time)
Potionomics is a relaxing if slightly monotonous time. For 20 bucks comes 20 hours of gameplay, where winning is easy and you don't really need to be good at what you're doing.

The music, animation, and character writing is heartwarming. The cast you come to know on the island setting are memorable characters with depth and side stories, and interacting with them is required to unlock new cards for your barter deck.

Bartering itself is fun... at first. The early shoppers go easy enough on you, but the stress damage you accrue is a compounding problem, as each percentage point of stress represents how likely you are to draw *another* stress card, almost all of which will increase stress further while occupying a card slot that could have gone towards upping the price. It's easy to snowball out of control, but at the same time, it's also entirely unnecessary, as at any time, you can just hit the "close sale" button and get what the return currently shown.

Gold is useful for upgrading your shop tools and buying ingredients, be it through the adorable feline smugglers, the heroes who actually use your potions as something more than just a price tag, or the future seeing chaos gremlin who regularly eats, among other things, faeces. Trouble is, bringing your shop up to snuff is only a side mission.

The main mission is to produce three potions for the end of each tenday's competition, and it's so laughably easy that by the end of the game I wondered what the hell even to do since I had all the required potions before spending my first unit of time that tenday. I could buy better shop equipment, but why? I had all the potions I needed. I didn't need more money, or better cards from my friends. I didn't even bother to sell anything all tenday long. I'd won already. All there was to do was wait.

So, yes, it's a recommendation from me, if only for the early game. It's fun, pretty, and cute, but as toothless as the countless nagas my girlfriend Mint slaughtered.
Posted 9 October, 2023.
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2 people found this review helpful
56.4 hrs on record (15.4 hrs at review time)
If you're going to cheat off of somebody else's homework, it might as well be the smart kid.

Sun Haven is Stardew Valley, but:
1. Magic takes centre stage. Your character can be an elf, a demon, an elemental and several other fantasy races. You learn spells that are useful without being game breaking and no matter the path you choose, mana plays an important role.
2. A lot of SV's features that were less well thought through have been revised.
Take cooking: Many food items can increase your max HP, or Mana, or some other stat, but each time you eat a certain food it diminishes that food's returns, which GIVES YOU A REASON TO GO TO THE EFFORT OF MAKING LOTS OF DIFFERENT FOOD ITEMS! FINALLY! It's not just about "find the easiest way to refill HP and energy; ignore everything else"! And it tracks how many of a given item you've eaten in the description so you don't have to remember!
Oh, and energy? Gone. You can work your sad little avatar to death as long as you don't miss bedtime. Which, by the way, you can change the speed the day passes to get more done in a day. It's like the video game version of a subtweet; it's great.
3. Crafting is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nightmare. Oops, thought it was all going to be positive? No, crafting in this game is a hassle and a half, mainly because everything takes like 10 hours (the whole day) to craft. I put some Clovers in a seed maker and the next day, I had 2 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ seeds. It's still going now. It's like trying to download a huge file with really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ wifi; "12 days and 14 hours remaining..." really grinds my gears. It's such that you'll come home from mining and load up the furnace with all your work orders, and it'll be THREE DAYS before it's done. THREEEEE DAAAYYSSS!
4. I spent the first season ignoring the village entirely. I haven't gone fishing AT ALL. I was JUST mining. The mine is open from day one and I wanted the best tools to speed my way through everything else.
So, just a heads up, yeah that doesn't exactly work.
You need to level up each skill to use the associated upgrades for the tools, and while your mining and a bit of your combat will go up, your other stats won't. The game gives you lots of different ways to gain EXP in your stats, from doing fetch quests to eating certain types of jam, so you do have a lot of ways to make progress in whatever areas you've neglected.
I like it! I like being the master of my own destiny in games like this.

So, to summarise, if you liked Stardew Valley, this game is that but with some of the rough edges hewn off, and some new ones added on. It's still in development at time of writing so expect more to come, but if you're looking for a new game to play until it's bright outside, this could well be it!
Posted 21 March, 2023.
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1 person found this review helpful
15.9 hrs on record (6.2 hrs at review time)
Cult of the lamb has one major design flaw that holds it back from being a good game:
The core gameplay loop is only half fun.
The management of your cult compound; talking to followers, sacrificing them, feeding them poop, THAT'S fun. I like that.
The dungeon runs? I could do without.
They are just so... boring.
Every weapon FEELS the same, every room FEELS the same, you BARELY get any kind of randomised upgrades so every RUN feels the same.
Rogue-lites live and die on variety between runs and so when every run feels the same it starts to get old FAST.
Add to that the fact that the maps are so colourful and move around so much (grass swaying in the breeze, fires crackling, etc) that it makes it harder to tell when an enemy is telegraphing an attack, so you get hit quite a lot unless you spam the dodgeroll button like a maniac, but spamming imputs takes you out of the moment and just adds to the blurred, dreary haze that is the dungeon run portion of the game.

All in all, I would prefer if that part of the game, the dungeons, the combat, simply weren't there and we JUST did the base management stuff.

Would not recommend.
Posted 24 August, 2022.
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37 people found this review helpful
2
4.8 hrs on record (3.1 hrs at review time)
I've played it for 3 hours and I am officially bored!

If you never bought the first game, for the love of god buy this ON SALE and play it. It has all the content of the first and more... in a manner of speaking.
Trouble is, this game DOES have some genuinely new content, buuuuut a lot of it is just the old content with slight variations regarding whether or not you have a bucket.
At the default price tag of 20 bucks, that's just not enough "new enough" to be worth buying what is effectively just the old game with a couple new ideas and some reskinned endings from the old version.

I'm glad I got it at a discount, but honestly, I'd have payed less if I'd known how much I was getting.
Posted 27 April, 2022. Last edited 27 April, 2022.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
136.0 hrs on record (5.1 hrs at review time)
What you should know before purchasing:

The good:

This game has a very fun character customisation system where you can slowly and patiently upgrade your team of 4 as you want them, and any choices you make that you later regret can be reversed for a fee at an in game vendor later on.
The difficulty is fair if you follow the obvious forward path, but if you like danger you can often stray into much tougher turf. This is a positive in my book; I like game that give you the power to make your own destiny.
The story is nonexistent. This might sound like a negative point, but honestly, I like it. Some games throw so much freakin' story cutscene crap at you when you just wanna get on with the gameplay. This game is not like that. Straight out of the gate, you're in gameplay town, baby.

The weird: Golly gosh, this RPG suuuuure has a lot of puzzle platforming. You wander about this minecraft ass fantasy world with a two block high jump. It's good from a treasure perspective; you really do feel like you have to work to find good loot in the wilds, but the game could really use some greater camera controls.
It can often be very, VERY hard to tell where you are in relation to the platforms you are traversing. You can tilt the camera slightly to either side (if you're happy holding down a key the entire time, that is), but it's a drop of water in the ocean of slime.

The bad: For god's sake, give us some kind of fast travel system. Call me a spoilt summer child if you must, but trekking back through explored territory is just plain dull. There are a few shortcuts here and there (Protip: You can jump on people's heads and sometimes use them as mobile platforms) but the only fool-proof fast travel options I've found at least in my first 5 hours are the "go to your home checkpoint without healing" which you do with an item, and the "go to the last checkpoint you rested at and heal" which you do by dying.
I don't know why, but I look forward to dying in this game. You lose so little, you get to move back to a safe place without having to walk or do any platforming, and it's one of few surefire ways to get mana for nothing.

If you want to play a reasonably difficulty strategy platformer RPG with no story to speak of, this is your game.
Posted 8 April, 2022.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
1 person found this review funny
534.9 hrs on record (58.4 hrs at review time)
I am on day 4. I have more than half the achievements, so this review is coming from someone who is pretty good at this game.

This game kicks ass. You can fight on horseback. You can do the areas in basically any order. You can get really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lost and end up totally out of your depth.
You will get totally lost. A lot. I still haven't found the map for the lake area, and I'm currently fighting Melania. Or melentia? The lady with the prostestic arm. Yeah, she heals every time she hits you. And she has a phase two. I hope she's an optional boss because ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this lady is a maniac.

Buy this game, y'all.
Posted 28 February, 2022.
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1 person found this review helpful
89.1 hrs on record (6.2 hrs at review time)
Another Daniel Mullens game, another good fun time had with weird gameplay and mystery elements. Dude certainly knows what he likes, I'll give him that.

The first of the 3 main gameplay chapters is by far the hardest. Expect to die multiple times to the creepy eyed log cabin weirdo before beating his gauntlet and progressing to stage 2. From the point onward, the only penalty for failure is having to try that particular fight again, which, you know, it's annoying, but it's not a major setback like getting booted back to square one.

Chapter 3 is where the game started wearing out it's welcome. Mild spoilers for gameplay and not so much story ahead.

In chapter 2, you pick one of four decks. The third chapter starts with you basically playing one specific deck of those 4 verbatim. I happened to pick the exact deck that I was going to be forced to use anyway, so I got very, VERY used to those cards.

Also, mechanically, the final deck archetype you get introduced to, with coloured gems and battery symbols, was just too convoluted. I basically just button mashed through that part without having any idea what was going on. It wasn't chapter one anymore; I didn't have to concentrate to win.

Speaking of button mashing; almost all of the game's primary puzzles are "turn three dials around to find the combination". I solved all of them through brute force because I had no idea what was going on half the time. So yeah, that took a while.

Still though, a great fun time. There was one part right at the very end that had me, as a long time yu-gi-oh fan, laughing my lungs inside-out with glee. Heartily recommended!
Posted 20 October, 2021.
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15 people found this review helpful
14.8 hrs on record
If you want the tl;dr version, DDLC plus is a prime example of how more is most certainly NOT the same as better. The addition of a 100% progress meter has totally torn the venom out of this slow burn horror game's stinger, and like telling the same joke over and over, has made the original telling of the joke feel worse in retrospect.

If you have a little more time on your hands, I'll go point by point. Let's start with the few things I did like.


The side scenes were adequate. Nice little character vignettes that in no way contributed to the horror of the game, but provided a small amount of characterisation for those people enamoured by the characters. I'm not among those people, but I assume they would like it.

I found myself quite bemused by just how much small variation the original game had in character dialogue, depending on who you wrote poems for and in what order. When fast forwarding through the game, it defaults to stopping on text you've not seen yet, so while I was hammering through the poetry minigame over and over while trying to get the random images to appear for my scrapbook, I got all sorts of combinations I otherwise wouldn't have seen. So, even though the text itself was a feature of the old game, I only KNOW about it because of the new release.

Lastly, I quite liked what I believe was a new addition to the first time start screen, strongly clarifying that all of the characters shown were 18 or older. I was never quite as scared with this game as I was while contemplating why they had to specify that, with the clear idea that it might have been because of all the porn people have made about these high schoolers.

Right, that's the praise out of the way, let's get into the mud.

The content warning system is very poor quality. I heard the dev team took inspiration from Ikenfell, a great game that did content warning systems really well? Yeah, maybe take a bit MORE inspiration next time. Maybe have an option to skip flagged content? Maybe provide a clear, unambiguous, hard to miss and very specific description of what exactly is going on, so people can choose with clarity? Suicide, for example, could mean the act OF suicide, or merely a character TALKING about suicide. Two very different things, which one lone word cannot adequately express. If you're going to do it at all, do it right, you know?

The world building around the characters; of the company that made this software in the first place, isn't helping the game's horror appeal. You know the beasts under the bed are scary because you don't understand them, right? Explaining too much kinda dulls the blade a little.

It's pretty buggy. I'm certain I'm not the first who has gone over and over through all the content with a guide and tried to get 100%, but I think for some people it's just not going to happen. If it's still got glitches, don't sell it for money unless you want people to complain about the glitches.

Spoiler time. Once you get all the percentage completion points, a gruelling process that involves starting the game over from scratch again and again and again to randomly re-roll the secret poems in the hope that the game will add them to your scrapbook this time, your prize for all this is a white text on black background garbled text generator that has snippets of some broader story thread or whatever. I don't know the fine details and frankly I don't care anymore. I wasted too much of my own damn time trying to get there only to learn after the fact that it WASN'T EVEN a proper story resolution. No neat little bow tied on the tale, no big answers to justify all that effort, just another thread of a mystery I am rapidly losing patience for. I can only imagine this isn't the last we'll be seeing of this IP, so all I can say is, you'd better get it right next time. This entry was very disappointing.
Posted 4 July, 2021.
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Showing 1-10 of 23 entries