Recent reviews by AlienTree

Hard to describe how good this game is. A group of people who play this game come out the other side closer than I thought a single short shared experience could possibly cause. One of the most impressive ending sequences of any game I've seen in recent memory.

What I saw of this game made me think it would be a good way to add supplemental vocabulary while learning Japanese, but if you have the same thought, save yourself the money. Every bit of Japanese vocabulary it offers is katakana loanwords. I don't think I need to pay $15 to practice ホットドッグ, ナイフ, and ベルト - and given that it won't be discounted in the future, it seems even more of a waste. Genuinely shocking that they would make a set up like this where 22 of the first 25 words I opened were all katakana - and one of the 3 examples of an actual Japanese word, 炊飯器, it translated only as "Cooker."

As far as I can tell, much of the recorded Japanese dialogue is not performed by native speakers either. I don't really know how this team has marketed their audio content, but the performances are below what I would consider reasonable quality to learn from.

To add insult to injury, the combination click/wasd/targeted interact system and janky pathfinding mean that while the game is nominally playable on any device, it doesn't feel good to play on any of them.

I'm going to hold off on refunding because I don't mind adding something low quality to my current language learning rotation, if only because I can't see it doing me personally any harm at this point, but I cannot see any way I would recommend this product to anyone for any reason as it currently exists - my existing knowledge of Japanese makes me question that this has anything to offer in any language if its offerings in Japanese are this poor.

theyve done it again

yeah. this one hurts

this is the best monster hunter has ever been

maybe one of the best DLCs ever released for any game. truly an unbelievable accomplishment.

not sure how i've never given factorio the thumbs up before. genuinely the singular master class in immaculate game design. hard to run out of positive things to say about the game, and all of the free 2.0 updates breathe new life the game hardly needed. this will remain one of the games of the century, no matter what happens in the next 76 years.

they've done it again

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edit: unfortunately, every update has removed the things i like and added things i don't. i respect supergiant's need to listen to community feedback to ensure sales, but i'll still mourn what this game could have been.

While Viewfinder is visually and mechanically very impressive, it offers absolutely no substance. The puzzle designs are insultingly simple, hardly offering more than the most surface level introduction to a mechanic, and the writing is frankly bad. The voice actors do a good job of delivering a believable performance, but the script is so vapid, and the overarching narrative so flat and empty, that I would honestly rather the game have no story at all than what it offers. Even with these faults, I would often finish a fun mechanical sandbox, but in less than an hour and a half I've already made it through more than half of the game, and in that half been offered nothing that kept me interested, so I'm instead choosing to request a refund and save myself both the money and time.

This truly feels like a game that suffered from too much direction by programmers. From its overall feeling of a glorified tech demo to its self-congratulatory story elements about the beauty of majestic code, it feels impossible to take this game more seriously than an unnecessary expansion of the promotional footage that spawned it. Real puzzle design and writing could have made this concept into an incredible game, but instead it's landed as one of my biggest disappointments of the year.

For a simple concept, the scenarios and difficulties provide just enough variety to keep Slipways consistently engaging. The 25 year limit for each run is well balanced to give you just enough time to achieve the cooler options the game has available while still restricting you enough to force interesting decisions. For $17, this game feels well worth its asking price, and I expect to continue doing runs for some time to come.