Recent reviews by BinarySplit

It's pretty decent - you get what you see in the screenshots. While I'd say it's a tier below super-polished games like Satisfactory, Subnautica, Factorio, etc, I got ~35 hours of enjoyment out of this and am happy with my purchase.

There are some minor flickering glitches on macOS under CrossOver, but nothing game-breaking and that's completely to be expected - roughly 1 in 4 games has an issue under emulation, so I'm happy it was otherwise fully playable. I had no crashes or anything.

It's a hard puzzle game pretending to be a softer puzzle game. I didn't enjoy it, but others apparently did.

The trouble I had - it feels like there are multiple ways to approach understanding the language. All will give you some progress, but there's only one that isn't a dead end. I chose two of the the wrong approaches because the last one just seemed too tedious to be the intended path. The tedious path was the only path that lets you see the real endings. It also feels like there are lots of interactions you can do that might make progress. None of them matter.

I really enjoyed the format up until the point that it forced me to do the tedious work. It's very different. Patient puzzle gamers will likely still appreciate this.

Was fun. Lots of cool places to explore and stuff to shoot. Took me 9 hours to complete.

I still think back to this from time to time. It was so much fun, but just unfinished. Not just "lots of potential" but actually "most of the game is already there".

Base/vehicle building, exploration, questing - all felt really at the start, and are really unique and enjoyable. It just gets progressively less polished and slower-paced until you realize they probably didn't make the rest of the story.

There's a lot to enjoy if you're into this "interactive movie" genre. But, it's like they left it open for a sequel and then didn't make that sequel. It ends with many questions left unanswered, many unresolved or hastily-resolved story threads. I enjoyed playing it, yet am left dissatisfied.

The cinematography, sound & music, voice acting, interactive moments, etc. were all REALLY polished. The characters' writing was pretty decent, but a few had abrupt personality shifts to fit the story. It generally did a good job of keeping me engaged for the first 1 intro + (6 chapters * 3 characters) = 19 storyline segments, but the entire ending had to be crammed into the 20th segment and half of the premise went completely unexplained.

TL;DR: Not worth the price at the moment, but they're making progress. Check the reviews in 6-24 months.

This is a mixed review. There's much fun to be had, but it's still too early. The moment-to-moment gameplay feels a lot like Subnautica, and I feel TLC isn't doing enough to push the genre forward. They've added construction on a boat, and a different story, but you will continue to get frustrated by: never having enough storage or inventory capacity, every interaction requiring you to wait 2-3 seconds for it to complete, annoying gating in the tech tree, not being able to use the fun weapons because their ammo uses nonrenewable resources, etc.

I wouldn't be so negative if it weren't already at Subnautica pricing with a statement saying they're considering raising it as it develops. It's currently less game than Subnautica and on track to match it in a couple years. They should aspire greater and innovate more on gameplay if they want to charge more, especially while the game's buggy like this.

Only play it if you really like Zelda-likes.

If you're here because you heard it's a "metroidbrainia", full of mystery and puzzles and it even has a cool conlang you can decipher... sorry, but you have to get through more than 10 hours of gameplay to start getting a taste of that. It gets REALLY repetitive if you're not vibing with it.

If you like Zelda-likes, you'll probably enjoy this. Seemed well made. Just not my thing.

This was a lot of fun!

It was a risk for me as I didn't enjoy Obra Din, but Daemon Masquerade's story drew me in. The deductions were very well structured, the story pacing was excellent, and it just felt poking through all the bits of paper on your corkboard. I completed it without any hints in 5.5 hours, and it was definitely worth the price.

If you're on the fence, play the demo! It's what convinced me. The third puzzle, with the Awakening Day cards, is most similar to the full game, but you get 6x as much evidence to dig through, all interconnected.

There is so much more gameplay than what's in the screenshots!

At first I thought this was a basic Terraria clone, but Planet Centauri avoids slowing down progression with annoyances (inventory limit, hidden recipes, equipment-dependent progression, linearity) so that the gameplay can take you so much further. You can tackle bosses & dungeons in any order, completely neglect parts of the tech tree, explore or not, etc. There's just a lot to do, all the time. I've played 20 hours now, but it feels like 20 hours of continuous progress.

Some reviews complain about bugs, but I've only seen 1 minor one: sometimes my selected toolbar item randomly swaps with another item in my inventory. No item is lost, it's just momentarily confusing. Has happened ~5 times in 20 hours and has been very easy to recover from. This game is not ruined by bugs as other reviews would imply.

I'm stopping now, not because I want to, but because I need to get back to IRL. It has been a lot of fun and I really wish I could keep playing and see what's next. There's still so much game I've yet to play.

It's hard! But fair. The puzzles need you to find the links between clues scattered throughout the apartment. They were all very different to any I've played so far, requiring different kinds of lateral thinking. I was impatient and used the guide a lot, but always came away realizing I had the information and just hadn't thought hard enough. The difficulty made the puzzles I figured out myself so much more satisfying though.

It's also a uniquely personal game. The books, the pictures, and furniture all feel like objects from the dev's life. It's a nice change from the typical fantastical environments in puzzle games.

Overall, I think patient puzzle gamers would enjoy this a lot. It's quite different from most "Escape Room" games on Steam, but if you've finished any of Myst, Schizm, Quern, etc. I bet you'd love this.