Backpack Hero (The concept is great. Where's the game?)

  I liked the idea of the gameplay but it lacks enough content to have the required replayability, since you'll end up with the same items fighting the same bosses nine out of ten times.

Like those items? Good, you'll be seeing them a lot.

 The "city building" that works as progression feels completely out of place and the "cute" design that's so common nowadays was poorly applied.

 A darker theme would suit an inventory management dungeon crawler a lot better, and perhaps a few hunger mechanics to avoid stagnation.

Code Geass (The Anime of the guy that controls people with his funny eye AKA code grass or code gear)

ah, yes. The cliché evil pose that makes no sense at all. What are you doing?

 Ok, plot reminder. Warning, bursts of laughter might leave you out of breath. Around 2010 Britannia conquers all of Europe, China, Russia, the US, and eventually the whole world thanks to a mecha-looking thing call a "Knight-mare", that's a less functional tank but that for plot-convenient reason is immune to almost every weapon. Yes, the UK conquer the world, so get ready for a lot of tea and bad movies.

It's funny how brittania doesn't encompass the actual UK island. It's like the joke goes, the beauty of their women and the taste of their food make brits the best sailors in the world. 

When the last country to fall, Japan turns into "area 11" (what were you expecting from the Brits), they provoke the wrath of Lelouch VI Britannia, another of these allegedly super genius high-schoolers. Of course, he isn't that smart, he's average at best.

"checkmate"

 This is proven by the fact that his whole ploy for revenge can't get started until the magical power of controlling people's will falls into his lap, and honestly, much more practical ways of overthrowing the British empire could have been used once he had it, like giving them an actual palate. They would all have starved to death!

 But instead, he used this overly contrived method of somehow killing all his brothers and sisters, later assassinating his father that has some sort of magical power to hold onto power despite being comically evil and stunningly stupid, to eventually end up as the only successor to the throne, then make himself the most hated figure and ultimately fake his death crossing fingers that his death would somehow trigger a pacifist social revolution instead of causing a power vacuum that sends the world into another war where more tyrants would replace him. Genius, right? 

Feat. attack on titan's Eren

 There are a couple of either illogical or very predictable plot twists, like the one in which the green-haired character puts the gears of the so-called "plan" into motion with the condition of an IOU favor, that surprise, surprise it's "kill me please". I mean, I would get it if it was "Watching you make so many stupid mistakes and trying to pull this absurd plan makes me want to die" or "God! Just cut it out with all this foreplay you have with your "friend" and admit you're gay!", but instead it's this basic whiny story about "Oh, yes I have this magic power that makes everyone love me and I no longer know when they love me for who I am, uhh, uhh" Well, boo-hoo. It's like when the rich complain about all the problems having so much money gives them. The only entertainment the show has it's what Lulu's next screw-up is gonna be. 6/10 (but the quality declines as the seasons go on)  

Shield Hero: the infamous mysogenist, lampshading done wrong and zero creativity.

27/09/23 Shield Hero (first two volumes, isekai japanese light novel)

 What Aneko Yusagi does the best is a fast-paced succession of engaging adventures. Although not particularly original nor well-described, these adventures are packed with action and there's always a funny remark or a small character progression (as in level-up, new skill). What's even more surprising is that despite not having very original quests, The Shield hero is rather unpredictable and that makes me want to invest time on the story... On the other hand-.I have yet to see a single word about world-building except for the "racism against demi-humans" trope, the dialogues are basic to say the least and the characters are one-dimensional and franquely stupid. Some of them are meant to be that way, like Moyatsu or the Trash king (name pending), but Naofumi is so obsessed with money, in a petty, cartoonish way that the thought of leaving the country that falsely accused to the one that has historically revered the Shield Heroes never crossed his mind, or FIlo's every comment about food (a joke that got old before being pronounced), or the blunt suggestions of Raphtalia that doesn't seem to quite catch that Naofumi isn't interested. Regarding the rape accusation, I don't know who's more of a dimwit, Malty for compromising the Hero who's allegedly going to save the world in exchange of.. Some sort of benefit so small that I still don't see, Naofumi for falling into such an obvious trap, or the king/kingdom for believing such poorly thought lies. 6/10

 

7/10/23 Shield Hero vol. 3&4  

Consistent in the inconsistent, Shield Hero continues to excel in action and fast-paced story telling, so fast indeed that sometimes I have to re-read sections in which there's zero transition until they arrive at a certain destination hours or days later, walk in and a certain character starts speaking. Raphtalia has improved somewhat in her character, but the heroes and especially Naofumi remain as airheaded as they always were, something that partly confuses me as if it is intended or not. Naofumi for once appears to be some kind of masochist and when the option of leaving the country to one of the places he's regarded as God, where they would give or do him everything he wants, where he'd be surrounded by a harem of beautiful woman, he answers "Ew!". Yeah better we stay here where they frame you twice, try to kill you at least five times, people either shun you or treat you like trash, I don't blame you who wouldn't miss the thrill of sleeping with one eye open after you've been assaulted by highwaymen twice in a week. The aftermath of the lucky/unlucky events of  fighting three enemies way beyond Naofumi's strength and always surviving (Glass, T-rex and the Pope) leaves me with a sensation that the shield of rage/wrath is in the perilous border of becoming a hulk-like sayajin deus ex machina that levels up whenever is convenient to the plot.

07/10/23-06/11/23 Shield hero 5-13 

Since the longitude of the content to be encompass is so extensive, I took the liberty to assist my memory with what the fans call "arcs", which is titles the main event, or at least the most recognizable element, under which smaller events happen.

   -Cal Mira Island Arc v5-6:

The first half of the story is certainly one of the worst. The heroes ignore each other while grinding low-level uncreative enemies, battles which of course are as thrilling as you would imagine a vacation on the Caribbean look-alike can be. Naofumi continues to be annoying, and pretty much everything is the same until the wave arrives in which the appearance of the otherworldly (human-sized, for you dark souls players) enemies, and this time Naofumi and company stand their ground without relying on some overpowered external force to interfere. Starting from this point on every mention of the other heroes is a constant reminder of how much of an annoyingly useless and boring characters they are, but since the author decided to play the "heroes can't be killed, because the world and stuff" card, we're stuck with them.  

 -Spirit Turtle Arc v6-7

Whoever gave the idea to the author, even if it is himself, that an oversized turtle makes a colorful, interesting, complex, and overall great adversary should be punched in the gut. Several times. And whatever editor, since I read it wasn't like this originally, made it so that said epic battle lasts 600 pages should not only be stripped of his position, he should be stripped naked and covered in tar and feathers. But by far the greatest mistake of it all was this OST (original soundtrack?) character. While it might have been promising a battle against your possessed-self, this is not what happens and again it feels like the enemy got so many buffs that the author just had to rely on the enemy killing himself (plus Fitoria, poster girl for Deus ex).

-Otherworld Arc v 8-9

 The disappointment this arc has supposed to me is even greater than the disappointment Qu Ten Lo Arc has been to others. I can't even begin to express how disconform I am of everything that happened; Naofumi relapses into his money obsessive behaviors, Raphtalia falls behind in character development to complete extinction, time which is instead devoted to dull characters we'll never see again and that could be easily merged with others who we already know, the otherworldly experience we've been promised simply never happens as the characters stay in a place that looks "just like Japan in Edo period", kind of like every single place that doesn't look like western medieval ages, and the "vengeance" they go to exert against Kyo is simply unrewarding given how bad of an antagonist he is. To quote one of my predecessors "A condescending bookworm weakling that we cannot pinpoint any good reason why he became a bad guy other than being an unsuccessful fat dude that played a lot of games". In fact, I started to see that antagonist fall into three categories: staggeringly stupid, as in braindead stupid like all the heroes, Trash king, Trash II (yes, really), Moyatsu II, Jaralis the lion, all the assassins from Qten Lo and its so-called heavely emperor; Stereotypical, needlessly evil nemesis whose evil actions tend to do them more harm than good, the kind that you can picture in black robes doing long monologues and laughing at their own bad jokes (all of which happens with the following) like Bitch the redhead, Kyo (ugh), Makina, the High Priest, Demon Dragon; and then there's the ones that are excessively powerful and either some external force (i.e Fitoria) comes and kill them or they turn out to be good and join the Hero force although there's always some reason they turn out to be weaker (Insert "when you unlock the boss as a playable character" meme) like S'yne, Sadeena, the otherworldly trio, Fitoria, T-rex, Spirit turtle, the Phoenix and the third beast whose battle we don't even see. This is an enormous turn down, when I saw the cover for the 14th volume, I instantly knew that whoever that evil-looking guy was. He'd be the next Kyo. He might as well be called Kyo II judging by the looks! 

Village Rebuilding Arc v10

I don't think I have to tell the fellow reader how disruptively vexing Naofumi's disposition towards romantic relationships is. The dull protagonist trope was born dead, an abortion if you will, and Naofumi takes it to a whole new level. It is my firm belief that he's either gay and still on the closet (like when he is under Moyatsu Lust spell and says "What a hunk, I'd gladly bend over for a man like that") or that the holy weapon perceives his penis as some sort of short weapon like a shiv or a blackjack and thus forbids him from using it. Maybe each time he gets an erection a sharp pain strikes him and that's why he says "I'd rather DIE than intimate with a woman" since in that case intimacy would be akin to torture. More and more inconsistencies pile up on top of his character. Why is he obsessed on looking like a bad guy, if he clearly prefers being loved instead of feared? Why after being betrayed once, and mostly because of his own stupidity and child-like naiveness he decides going to the opposite extreme, building strange conspiracies that undermine everything he does? Why is he so eager to return to Earth if he's yet to say ONE good thing about his past life? Why does he keep whining about how hard a life he has and what difficult choices he had to make being that the sucker lives surrounded by luxury, pigging on food while his unwavering faithful followers kiss the ground he steps on? Why being so "untrustful" as he is he trusts wholeheartedly the queen of Melromac, meaning the ultimate responsible for all the misery he went through that he keeps crying over? Did he suddenly decide that working together for the sake of a world he doesn't even want to be in was more important than all the alleged convictions he keeps blabbing about? 

Fallen Heroes Arc v 11-12

 Maybe the same way he suddenly decides that he should put up with all the other's heroes crap, and even pay their bills. You know, for the world. And Rapthalia, of course. Raphtalia whose character has been diminished to the extent of an old bitter housewife always getting on your back, hassling about something. I can't be completely sure but I think that in all her 20 lines across the past three volumes, 19 were her just yelling "Mr Naofumi!" no elaboration or anything. Risha, the vindicated girl that's gets superpowers whenever is convenient to the plot but that always acts like the submissive girl everyone bullies at school, finally achieves her goal of winning back the Bow hero, the guy that treated her like a handmaid or a lowly thrall for about three months, same guy that confessed to kick her out of the party over some trinket that she didn't even break, but that he felt obligated to frame her because just expelling someone out is rude. How chivalrous of him. I can understand declaring undying love for someone like that, totally realistic. I think that rather than "fallen heroes" this arc should be call "Heroes: recharged" because rather than falling from grace or whatever attached concept fans put in there, it seems that is the same dim-witted gamers, screwing things up like they always do but now the kingdom is "persecuting" them. I mean, the same way the U.N. prosecute war criminals and terrorists, by carefully observing them and removing economic incentives. This all happens because once again Naofumi's lack of determination comes to bite him in the ass and Redhead, the one that was supposed to be publicly executed ten volumes ago and yet here she is, stirs the "heroes" complexes which makes them run amok under the influence of the curse series, something which COULD be interesting if the base characters weren't so bland and plain. Their "Dark" form is just them in a tantrum, sobbing about being weak but still not willing to do something about it.  At the end of the arc they return to normal, but the puaj savor that Lust Moyatsu left on me was the beginning of the end of my interest in Shield hero. It's not an overcompensation for Naofumi, it's obscenely poorly written, so infuriating that such garbage acts as one of the main characters. I remember that at the end of volume three there was a side story about Moyatsu's companions bad-mouthing him while the guy remained oblivious to the matter, which was supposed to make us feel sorry for him (I guess) and then the author explicitly promised that the time would come that Moyatsu would redeem himself. WELL AUTHOR. I'M STILL WAITING. 

Q'ten Lo Arc v13

 But the drop, or rather the downpour that spill the glass was that not content with the display of unoriginality in the past volumes, the author rushes through Siltvelt which leaves it as a cartoonish place where the inhabitants are so, so stupid they comically worship whoever claims to be the "shield hero" completely oblivious to the plots their government have and end in this "Q'ten Lo" which is basically Japan, same as the "other world" that was also Japan, same as the western parts of Shield hero world which also happens to look a whole lot like... Japan. I'm not saying it's not right to be a little uncreative with descriptions and landscapes but try not to do it so obvious, please! The characters in Q-ten Japan (place that has never been mentioned before despite being so "important") are a bunch of cliché, cardboard flat figurines that the reader figures out in few pages like the sister of the whale character that was clearly the sister despite having three "mysterious" appearances and "cliffhangers" as to who it might be. The resolution of the arc is also one of the most disappointing in the book so far, which speaks a lot. It manages to make a battle against some kind of deity (that we never heard of before) so drag out, so dull that I had to make stops just to read through it, and the decisive end decides nothing, it's back to square one. The arcs decrease the scoring by pairs, so to this point Shield Hero is a 0/10, unreadable!

The Rear Window (Suspence movie)

                                         

 I don't know how the movie impacted the theaters in 1960, what I do know is that from 2023 perspective, it starts excessively slow mostly due inconsequential dialogues that are supposed to be a critique of that time's society and that fail to help the viewer know the characters as it should.

 The build-up of the suspence is good, once the problem above is duely adressed, but the conclusion is lack luster specially from nowadays perspective. The murderous neighbor creeps into the photographer's home, shrouded in darkness and malignancy. That's where the credits should had rolled and it would have been impecable, but instead we get few extra scenes that leave Rear Window with a bland happy ending. 

AK-xolotl (Roguelite, now with Axolotls)

If this looks like Gungeon or Nuclear throne, or any of their many derivatives it's because it's literally just that

Lisa: Don't buy it! It's the same grindy, souless action roguelite they've been publishing since 2017, only they now changed the sprites to Axolotls!

Smithers: But it has Axolotls!

Crowd: *Cheers!*

It was "overwhelmingly positive" but they got a couple bad reviews since the multiplayer patch

 The only fun part of Akxolotl is trying new weapons, unfortunatly most of these have to be unlocked, and even more unfortunatly those that you unlock are generally worse than the base ones, gameplay wise.

 While the graphics and sprites are interesting, it's not enough for rhe game to escape avarage, and the unlock/meta progression demands an unreasonable amount of grinding. This is clearly one of those cases where the devs should've invested more in something other than cute sprites

Infectonator Survivors (Getting out of the to-be nuked city onto the next. Maybe go for a country house instead???)

PR: The zombie virus from Infectonator has already destroyed a significant portion of the population, so the goverment decides to bomb all major cities, and the not-so-major ones as well. Now, the game calls it "nuking" but I'm gonna go ahead and suppose that the game goverment, as stupid as goverments are in zombie media, wouldn't really pollute the already apocaliptic world with radiation just for the kicks of it. 

As a group, or rather a ragtag bunch consisting of a so-called scientist, a "policeman" that can't stop repeating "Stay frosty guys", a cheerleader that's suspiciously good with guns and a... construction worker? Fireman? Lumberjack? Something blue-collar like that, you have to fix a car that's thoroughly destroyed and it's apparently the only car in the city in order to get out the city in fifteen days. 
In case you're wondering why not just walk out the city during the fifteen days rather than look around for autoparts that may not even be there, adquiring some from dubious characters and praying RNGsus for the rest, yeah. That's not an option, do these look like walking shoes to you?  
I would like to mention that when you eventually adquire the car, it breaks down after reaching the next city. Why did they choose to go to another city when the goverment is bombing cities? Good question

They changed it to "journalist", but I swear it was cheerleader for like a decade

 
Really good looking, and entertaining for the first couple hours.

 As the gameplay advances and you start seeing the same five maps over and over again, fighting the same zombies, some of which are extremely annoying like the really tanky, speedy one that explodes on death and kills everyone close to it, the fun starts draining really quickly.

 Pair to this, the game is plagued with mechanics that make everything feel like a drag. The characters walk too slowly, the "exploration" maps are too big and you need to cover 80% of it while being sieged by Zeds, if you don't have a specialized character "search" takes thirty seconds and you have to do it dozens of times per map.

 I'd give it a lower score, but I can't shake the feeling that it could be a good game if someone put some work into it. 4/10

A man called Otto (Drama/comedy movie)

God takes it with one hand... And punches you with the other. Or at least that's what poor Otto tells us after failing to suicide at least three times. Honestly, it's hard to say if it's a movie against or pro-suicide, don't let the "comedy" tag fool you, this is a plain drama with just a couple of jokes in between.

 And it's pretty sad and well done too. I didn't cry and the whole act with the neighborhood rounds and the car fetishes aren't my things, but it was mostly enjoyable. 

Finch (post-apocalyptic drama movie)

Decent movie with the somewhat cliché premise of the human-like robot. Like all the stories of the kind, humans are depicted as evil and AI is good for some reason. The drama comes from the hand of the guy that created the robot, whos dying of cancer or something. Nothing memorable, but had a nice time with it. 

Against the Ice (Realistic "madness" horror, nature-survival movie)

A very slow, very predictable movie. The plot twist was anticipated by the very characters, characters that whether because of insufficient script writing or else fail spectacularly at being interesting. The ordinary captain is boringly severe and the young one is stupidly nonchalant. The hallucination woman that they find later feels like a plot hole. They maim dogs in the movie too. I find that the title of the movie is a warning from the filmmakers of their hatred against survival, and their determination to make the worst possible historical drama, costing the greatest amount of money to their producers. 

The Nevers (Drama steampunk TV series)

 

"And when would you say our show will get good?" "Don't make me say the pun" 

 Plot reminder: Some aliens pop out of the blue and started giving away magical powers gods know why, powers that range from floating stuff to casting balls of fire. The democrats say "Cool, I like magic powers" and the republicans are like "And who controls the magic powers?". Well, they don't go by that name in the series.

 In the future, they have these chuuni, cringy-ass names like "planetary defense coalition" and "the FreeLife™ army", because the series goes forward in time at the end of the season, since as it turns out, one of the characters it's actually from the future reincarnated in the past at the good ol' light novel style.

 I often mock those who said that something was lacking a "Je ne sais quoi" but for the first time, I see with my own eyes how difficult is to see exactly why the series doesn't work.

 There are a lot of unnecessary sex scenes, and the "reincarnated from the future" plot twister was awful, the characters are difficult to believe, especially in the eighteen-century scenario in which the series is settled, mostly the whole thing with the orphanage of supergirls seem like a failed "umbrella academy" for adults... But none of these things are enough in themselves to say that the series is boring.

 What I think happens is that the scenes are poorly liked by the others and the stories of the characters rather than having a synergic relationship are more like a parasitic ones, the unnecessary sex scenes pile up leeching the rhythm from the story and the character development is badly driven, at least for the insane amount of characters they introduce us.

 I don't recommend it, it's a pseudo-intellectual waste of time    

How to survive 2 (Pump bad survival zombie games while TWD is still hot)

  Horrible, horrible. Perhaps the developers should do a DLC on how to survive the boredom this game is. I wouldn't be surprised if this had been a facebook game that someone attached a few more gimmicks. The problems? Same as every bad zombie game. 

The "survival" elements don't feel like survival but more of a jam in system to avoid the player from lingering too much in one place, the combat is extremely repetitive, the fetch quest to build the base are a bore, and the base building is purely progression rather than a customized experience, which is wrong. 1/10 

Smile (Imagine "it follows" but it's actually decent)

 

 PR: Some kind of demon that comes out of nowhere, and might or might not be ubiquitous rapidly possess people through trauma or something like that. Some rando kills himself with a smile in front of you and then you got 4-7 days until the same happens to you, unless you kill someone else with a witness. Which doesn't happen in the movie. 

With the same premises of "it follows" and the sanatorium + possession formula the movie is not particularly inventive, but along with the gore, it gets the job done. One hour forty minutes, out of which the first forty minutes are introductory and the last hour is quite entertaining. 4/10

Not that creepy, really. More like weird and funny

Doomsday Hunters (Dr. Acula: Nine years adding problems)

 Recently I asked myself whether I should try to develop my own video game seeing that people apparently run out of ideas, and then while browsing I  saw this game that had a neon sign saying "AFTER 9 YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT, FINALLY OUT!!!". I'm like, wow. Nine years? What a commitment. The game looks fine, roguelike shooter, top down pixel graphics. Lots of showcasing sprites. Lots of that. I give it a go. The story is really silly, but since the game doesn't take it very seriously I'll just ignore "Dr. Dracula: time traveller" thing. But It he real catch is... It's practically unplayable! Nine years of development and what you gotta show for it? Dozens of weapons that run out of bullets so quickly it's impractical to use them, some weapons, relics and items that solve your entire run and a lot of fillers that are garbage, súper expensive meta progress in which a single upgrade can translate to days worth of gameplay, magic that is useless, chests that won't open and unbalanced bosses, classes that don't make sense such as the one benefiting from touching grass in the middle of a fallout wasteland, and the list just goes on and on. What were they doing all these years? Adding problems? 1/10

Sheltered (Pixel art survival game)

Your usual Fallout setting, nukes dropping out of the blue for no reason except that apparently human race is stupid enough to bomb the entire planet. It's in our nature or something like that. Maybe it wasn't asteroids that caused the extinction of Dinosaurs but mankind doing nuclear routine, who knows?

Point is that you've an underground vault and four people to provide with water and food, two adults and two children, for as long as possible. While having "children" in your group might seem as a handicap, in Sheltered age doesn't really matter. Or strength, size, experience, or well... Anything but RNG.

A 1 strength child might knock out cold a full-size bear with an uppercut and a 20 strength adult equipped with a sledgehammer and dozens of battle experiences in his pocket might get his every attack blocked by some barehanded hobo. Who knows? Maybe you get that one piece of common material you need to finally get a necessary upgrade or more probably you'll get twenty more of whatever is it that you have the most.

I was hunting for hours in the lookout for hinges and didn't get nothing, and after getting one they started to come by the bulk. I end up having to build extra storage thrice just to put all those hinges somewhere!

Overall I'd say that the nice art and the whole bleak scenery might give you a couple of runs worth of fun but after that the faults of the game start to become too evident and ruin the experience. For an instance: there are five stats, but none of them matter because the game mechanics are unbalanced to the point I doubt they've been tested.

Battle is discouraged since the rewards are never worth the risks, not of losing the survivors that are easy to recruit and interchange but of losing the items they carry, worth several times more than them, and even if you engage in combat the game practically forces you to end them in your first turn either by killing them with a rifle (the only ranged weapon that hits the target) or by "subduing" them, which means rolling a dice to instantly kill them.

All of this makes forming warriors a waste of time and resources. The trading system is also too random with the values of the items not being related to their practical worth but to some kind of perceived value that'll have you trading 5 cans of food, 6 bags of concrete, 10 bars of iron, 10 plates of steel and a truck full of electronics for some soap, and Charisma barely has any impact on trade.

Intelligence increases the chance of recruiting new survivors but these literally come day in between to knock at your door begging for a place to stay, and lastly Perception also has little impact.

Then there's the problem of common sense. The developers were so focused on having this harsh world that they made the characters in it to be mentally impaired.

Situation: you have a starving colony, people are dying of hunger and there's fresh meat, caught in a trap just next to the vault... But you can't get it because there's no refrigerator.

You got everything to make the damn fridge, but you got no hinge. Can't just build it without a hinge.

Situation: survivors come back from a perilous expedition and the stuff they bring back doesn't fit in the small cardboard box at the center of the room. Do they put it in the giant empty room? No, they toss it outside the base for anyone to grab.

People walk around with gas masks and they don't get radiation sickness, your survivors do. If you don't have any, you can't use one of the hazmat suits your vault is equipped with.

Survivors keep nagging you via radio about if they should explore the places you specifically send them to, and then they ask if they should check the items. No, just leave them, I just wanted to check if the hospital was still there, dumbass!

To cut it short, the game needs a lot of work, but devs moved onto Sheltered 2, which is basically the same game but 2.5D and more bugs. Gee. 4/10

 

Subnautica (Crash in water planet and craft stuff to get out of there game)

 Some dude crashes for no reason on some planet we know nothing about, and without any commentaries or worries of any kind he nonchalantly begins to swim in the apparently endless sea, gathering random bullshit  that might come in handy later, or maybe not.

I've only played for five hours and watched a funny let's play parody, so I might be wrong, but I sincerely don't understand what the guys that call Subnautica a masterpiece have in mind. Sure, the graphics are gorgeous, I'm personally very scared of the open sea, extra if its at night, I'm very fond of the opening scene of Bioshock 2 and this got some of those vibes, but does that mean it is a good game? Not necessarily. Subnautica leaves the players to figure out what to do which would be fine if not for the against common sense mechanics and the sci-fi setting. For instance, the first thing I did was to build a knife and hunt a fish, but it turns out I couldn't even grab it once it died. Instead, I should've grabbed the smaller fish with my HANDS, then processed it in the fabricator for later consumption. Crazy! How is a guy swimming able to pursue and catch small fish? Or what to do next. Logic reason begs to get out of the planet, which needs salvage from the wreck ship you can't access until it explodes or getting to land which is nowhere to be seen and you have no way of moving the shuttle you are staying in. So basically you craft random stuff that unlock some other random stuff waiting for the right RNG combination to trigger  an event that leads you into a very disappointing ending, using one of the cheapest, most cliche sci-fi tropes. 3/10

Legend of Keepers (Feel the rage of having weak minions and a shitty dungeon as a dungeon boss)

Good concept, but gets dull quickly.

 The dungeon bosses have little personality and barely any impact outside the boss fight that assuming you play the cards right never comes to pass, and even so it's quite underwhelming.

 The minions have little variety especially the "rare" ones, (I know, ironic), and once you get to know them there's little interest in playing them since they're pretty static.

 The traps are almost useless, and the "sequenced" dungeon rooms feel uncreative and inefficient, considering that a dungeon is supposed to be maze-like. After twelve hours gameplay or a little less, the game becomes a bore. 

Bleak Sword (When you choose "graphics" instead of "gameplay")

 
 Very aesthetic, very beautiful, nice pixel art with good animations... If only the gameplay was half as good!

 I'll start by saying that it clearly was meant for controller, which artificially increses the already high difficulty of the game by making enemies hard to hit.

 The map is divided in squeres with a little decor, but soon you start to guess why it's call "bleak" sword. There's a tree here, a skull there and the rest pitch black.

 The rewards are also uncrative, and as some of my predecessors pointed out the only relevant stat is attack, so you have to rise you ATTK level from 1 to 10 and call it a day, nothing flashy or game changing like in other action roguelikes. 

Preacher (When you're out of ideas, just bring in the texan preachers)

"God talk to me in my dreams, and he said "Son, you need to pull yourself by the bootstraps and star in the worse comedy that ever existed". I'd put us in the top three, solid." - Dominic Cooper

 The aim at first seems an absurd comedy with tints of religious protest, but as the series advance toward the fourth season, it changes to an epic drama. Not epic because of how "good" it is, simply because we got out of texas.

 The series is much better in the first season than in the last three, as the retard messiah joke and the romantic triangle that the characters have going on gets old fast.

Ah, let's not forget the hundred jokes revolving around this dude.

 The closure is definitively the worst part of the whole, it's very forced and hard to believe. The half-baked finale for every character with three ellipses, one of a few months another of a couple of years, and finally one of thirty years feels like the directives of Preacher were like "Yeah, we don't have anything else to say, we lost our creativity".

 Cassidy, a vampire of over two hundred years that over the three other seasons we see go through all kinds of losses and hardships suddenly decides to suicide because the other two characters died of old age. The daughter Tulip had was Tulip herself with a different haircut, it was all very bland.

Amsterdam (I'm sadden to announce, not a beer movie.)

 The disappointment of the year. Hollywood gathered all the big actors for this movie, you name it. They brought the Godfather, Mr. Robot, the guy from The Pale Eye, and many, many more. With such a casting the movie quality was practically assured, right? 

Well, no. Like Superbands, this movie was a waste of talent. Boring, cliché, predictable, slow, versing over some political hit I don't care about, about how the Nazis or the big companies want to take over America... It was terrible! 

Hannibal (Lecter's back, now more freely adapted)

 The series changes quite a bit after the first season, and the morbid murders and the impressive images of an evergrowing symbolic-artistic direction only strengthen when at the end of this first season the Hannibal Lecter card is displayed adding to the mixture of full-blown cannibalism and the kind of excruciating empathy for a criminal mind of the worst kind that we've seen back in Lolita's days.

 The extent of Hannibal's mind is never fully explained and I would never ask them to, for a mysterious character is at its best. The series culminated in the synergy of the apparent opposite main characters, Hannibal and William Graham, into images of bloody mayhem and madness.

 All of this, even if very much of my liking and exquisitely produced and executed, is not the kind of show one can casually waltz into at the end of labor work; the plot is dark, unnerving, anguishing, and disturbing. I have no doubt that's the reason why it's no longer broadcast.

Censor (The beauty of their women, the taste of their food and the quality of their movies)

Hope you like film grain, glitchy screen and loads of chromatic aberration

 Takes place in 1985 when movies where being heavily censored, under the belief that fictional violence induces real-life violence. Nothing like it is now, now we censor the truly distrubing stuff like shakespear's plays and one in every three online comments.
 The movie is extremely boring, it's badly driven and it feels inconsistent. The mystery of what happened to the MC's sister doesn't take you very far, as it seems plotted by a junior psychology student, with the whole "surrender to the beast" thing which I guess has something sexual to it.

 Some reviewers talked about being groundbreaking for the British horror scene, but I don't think it was. If this was the best Great Britain has to offer, that's the last British movie I ever watch. 

Edit 2025: I've been searching and while I watched very little predominantly british cinema I'd say that, other than a sherlock holmes adaptation to TV series, yeah, mostly bad. From terrible to midly passable. 

 

Empty Shell (Roguelike but darker, as in actually difficult to see what's happening)

 Like many of my predecessors have pointed out, and thank them because I was racking my brains thinking "what was the name of that game? It's so similar to this one!", Empty Shell is the black-and-white version of Teleglitch.

 In all sense of the word, it's like the Empty Shell of Teleglitch since the concept is not new, the enemies are way uglier starting by that hovering hand GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING DOING IN MY GAME!

Warning:this image has been CSI enhanced so you can actually see

 Anyways, the plot is also even worse than Teleglitch that didn't have much of a plot anyway, the developers were like "Yeah, you know. Lab experiment going wrong, happens everyday" with the audacity of making the player read these scattered pieces of paper that, I have to say, have some merit for being so long yet so devoid of content.

 The game is harder than it's supposed to be mostly because there's no enough ammo to go around and melee is completely ineffective, but also because it's really difficult to see where the enemies are since it's all pitch black and glitchy. I have no idea what kind of a person could possible like this garbage! 

Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles (Who'd win, a literal emissary of doom, the shadow deity, or a this annoying mob?)

The dice dungeons became a common thing as of lately so even though it's a new approach to the genre, I wouldn't say that Astrea is particularly daring in that front.

 While it's true that each dice can have multiple abilities this mostly is reduced to damage output in numeral values. Meaning, that whether we call it "Ocean wave" "Shark punch" or "Twilight baleful Tears of Sandy Destiny" in the end is basically casting a die and hoping for a good result, just like any other games that involve dice.

 In that sense approaches such as Dicey Dungeons are more interesting. The story that the game presents is pretty poor, but we forgive them because no Roguelike that I know of has a good story, much less an original one.

 I would say that the final boss fight was a complete bust and that reaching the boss was several times harder than beating it. 6/10 

Black Skylands (Sky pirates game, but you are not the pirate. Boooo)

  The product was a lot shallower than what was promised, I have not felt that customization of the ship or the weapons held any relevance at all, and dying had little to no consequence, perhaps due a poor attempt at a open world that's intended to disguise the absolute linearity of the game, that in spite of railroading the player to follow the quest path that's jumping from one combat to the next still manages to feel slow AF.

 The resource gathering is jammed into what's clearly an action game, which increases this feeling of annoyance. As for combat itself is as repetitive as it gets, since the protagonist takes little damage that can be healed quickly and dying doesn't matter too much anyways.

Dead State "Reanimated" (Hmm, nope, still dead)

  Terrible game if I've seen any. Reanimated only because you can see all the rotting pieces of gameplay falling off the skin and bones that "DoubleBear" calls lore.

 Even ignoring the complete lack of story, poorly scripted, cumbersome dialogues that just get in the way, the clunkiness of the mechanics simply make it impossible to play.

 The invisible fog of war makes it difficult to know if the path is clear of if you got a zed standing behind the corner, the scarcity of bullets but the overabundance of guns is frustrating, and the melee looks like the designers never intended for it to be an option. Combats are dull and never ending, thoroughly a poor title! 

Deadly Days (The fever dream of a CoD black ops fanboy feat. RNGesus)

 Zombies started sprawling all over the place after a burguer factory started distributing contaminated patties. Now, it's not really clear whether the apocalypse was intentional or not because the contaminated patties come out of mixing regular meat with some green bubbling goo stored in giant batches with skull signs on them, so either they are extremely stupid and deserve to die or someone, not very clever either (maybe a CoD black ops fanboy) engineered the zombie outbreak on purpose.

 In further addition to the the "everyone is stupid" theory, the contagion does not occur via saliva, blood or air like it does in other zombie media: The zombie virus (or whatever factor that causes zombification) can only be contracted through the ingestion of contaminated hamburgers, and since the apocalypse gets worse day after day that means people see how the burger consumers mutate into freaky flesh eating monsters and they still look for them and eat them, that's why the apocalypse only stop after you destroy the burger factory.

 Leaving plot inconsistencies aside, the first thing you notice is that the graphics are an eyesore. Don't get me wrong I love pixel graphics, but Deadly Days have very vibrant colors, an annoying zoom and characters with wacky back-and-forth movement. I won't get into it but it's definitely a minus.

Don't feel bad if you don't understand what's happening in this picture, neither do I

 Then there's the gameplay, which consists of going to standardized locations (supermarket, warehouse, etc) gathering resources and repeating. After a few days the "danger level" jumps several numbers. I haven't spotted a pattern but it more or less scales with the days, so day 4 DL jumps from 1 to 6, day 11 is difficulty 14, etc. The game is entertaining for a while but it has a lot to improve:

 ›› Difficulty needs balancing. Is too unpredictable and punishing for players like me who take their time in the game instead of rushing things, additionally the game makes survivors scarce but extremely needed and will knock you off the rails if you lose one, as it could take you several days through which the difficulty level keeps rising. The end mission is practically unwinnable and even using cheats I lost half three out of my five survivors team, and didn't lose because I reactivated the cheats at the last minute. Note that I had all these problems on EASY. (yes I played easy mode with cheats, sue me)

>> Generally too much RNG dependency, making the strategy tag on the game look like a joke. RNG to get food and not starve to death, RNG to get half decent weapons, to get tools, for the maps not to be excessively large, for special zombies not to destroy your party balance, get just the right perk, and so on, and so on... It's impossible to get things right like that.

›› Very little content. Once you've failed the first run you've seen all the locations available to explore, roughly all weapons, practically all the monsters...

>> Meta Progression is both too slow and too repetitive. There are three teams, "scavenge", "warfare" and "research" but out of the two non-exclusive items they're the same thing. Something I'd do is give them some sort of specialty and different optional missions. Instead of warfare being a task to kill a certain amount or type of zombies or research to do a specific map related event, they all get the same dull optional objective of looting every single lootable thing in the map. Shocker.

›› Melee/ranged weapon imbalance. Melee weapons except maybe a very specific ultra rare one coupled with a fully leveled melee perked character are plain bad. They're slow, deal little damage and put the survivor in harm's way, so they should either be balanced or removed.

›› Custom weapons are not custom enough. Coupled with the problem that they're excessively expensive and exclusively ranged, the three available "custom" weapons look very much alike and the upgrades they get are rather generic. While it might be cool to have infinite ammo or life steal on kill, having to pick from a RANDOMLY GENERATED pool of options, none of which synergizes with survivors perks, and not to mention that they're worse than regularly acquired weapons until you dump a huge pile of resources in them... Well. You can guess how I feel about them.

 To Summarize, I feel like I can't give it the thumbs up regardless of how much potential it has until at least  some  of these problems are solved.

Paranoihell (Hoping this isn't a hint about the game being a dream... again.)

Some girl working at "the only bar" has to fight her way out of the hellscape the city has become after meeting a weird fellow for half a second. 

 The more Lud games I play the worst they become. The guy is creating a "Lud universe" so the game is full with references to his other games which not only is quite boasty but in case you do know those games like I do, they all start to look the same. You have the same impractical inventory management, the same hovering invulnerable enemy, the same monster that you can knock out but not kill, the same 2 meter wide keys, and of course the same multiple endings, one worst than the other.. In this case making even more references to those games seems redundant.

 There's not much to say about gameplay except that the weapon durability is kind of silly to begin with and that having "heavy" attacks that only take one more second to launch and deal three times the damage makes normal attacks useless. In general paranoihell would be an avarage game but knowing all of the other Lud games I'll score it lower for lack of originality. 

Synthetik: Legion Rising (The unnamed AI takes over)

 One day, humanity goes too far with AI and it gains consciousness. The humans limit the hardware to 1% of it's capacity (why not use cheaper materials instead?) But the effors are in vain and eventually Skynet *ejem* the unnamed AI takes over every piece of machinery in the world, and with it complete control... Except for one rogue android that'll save all of humankind, for some reason.

 While the game is good, the difficulty curve was too steep for me. So I died every time after the first boss, and back again in squere one. After that I jolt up the difficulty and same result, I lowered it a lot and same result.

Why did I super-juiced the difficulty when I was already struggling at normal? Good question

For some reason the graphics kinda remind me of Bunny Flags 2, a flash game

Reference picture

 As I always mention, I don't like ammunition management especially in a shooter since it means that I don't get to use my weapons because they run out of bullets pretty quickly, but the both the jamming and headshot mechanic were pretty good. Headshots become more difficult as the game progresses and a lot of headless creatures begin to show up. Classes were mediocre since most of it boils down to a key item that defines the entire class, making it quite shallow. 

The Devil Haunts Me (Or does he?)

 So just the day before finding this game I watched Let's Play (John Wolfe) from another game by the same developer, "Search Party". It's almost a copy paste. Same aesthetic, same combat mechanics, same everything except the "survival" addon.

 I have a similar feeling about both the games, the mechanics disrupt the game's flow in both cases and it feels like they'd better be used in other games, not this. To go onto the puntual case: the devil, the one "haunting" you, it's actually desirable all-through the game. You see, the game has this energy mechanic that depletes after doing certain actions like chopping wood or halting water, and once it reaches zero you should go to sleep and part of your resources are used.

 But the devil chases you around shooting fireballs (zero accuracy) that instantly chops trees, meat trees (that's a thing) and also melts ice. So I figure, running around the woods with the devil as my errand boy gets me infinite wood and meat for zero energy, thanks satan! I end up haunting him!

 You're left wondering if this is intended, not a bug or a glitch, and yet it takes away all the gameplay. Makes it pointless. Why waste days and resources when I can have Lucy do the dirty work?

And again with the comparison, both games have TERRIBLE endings. Making a game is not an easy thing. You've got the codes, the sprites, the sounds, then you got to test it, balance it, the early access... And then, you just have to give it an ending, wrap it up... And this guy just can't get it any worst.

 It's the "it was all a dream" again and again, the terrible fade outs, and an obvious lack of narrative skill. 4/10

Deepdive (Simple "get better equipment, dive deeper, repeat")

  It's hard to make a review of a game that's so simple. I would expect this type of content from a browser game rather than a desktop one. The only thing I'll say is that "the secret of the deep" was very dissapointing, again, flash game from online site kind of thing: you prep for half an hour only to see some sneaky bone thing flash by the dimly litted screen half a second before dissapearing again, boom, you've won. That's the secret people. A bony eel. 3/10

Therapy with Dr. Albert Krueger (Today's seasion theme: how not to make a videogame. Or any sort of media, really)

 Albert Krueger is some sort of supernatural entity, or a magician, or a cannibal (it's not very clear), that likes to play therapist for hobby.

The game follows the doki-doki literature club or mascot horror idea of terror in which a seemingly harmless enviroment slowly becomes the place of your nightmare, but in this case is done very poorly.

For an instance, the place never feels safe and given the short amount of playtime the supposed catabatic descent to which this sub-genre aims at ideally isn't plausible, which means that suddenly glitchy jumscares and slightly disturbing  images start to pop out.

 So far we got a dull game, boring gameplay and nothing innovative plotwise.

 Then there's the issue of the multiple endings. There's no accelarete text nor skip so I just watched the other two in Youtube since no way in hell I'm going through all that for couple more poorly writen lines of dialogue, and I suggest not only the developers of this particular game but to every story writer: A good ending always beats multiple boring, unsatisfying ones.

 The bad ending (n°1) in both senses of the word, you die, is the easiest to guess and passes through like a gust of wind, shruggable.

 The other bad ending (n°2) in which you become a "dream eater" has two problems, one that is not an ending is very vague and very open, and the second is that dream eaters haven't been even mentioned in the rest of the game so except the inferences you can make out of the name; it doesn't mean anything to become something you don't even know.

 The good ending that's not good in either sense of the word left me baffled. Absolubtly perplexed. Because it made no sense. To get this ending you have to be rebellious to Krueger and by the end the guy, the same guy that has been hinting to be a cold blooded murderous cannibal mafia leader dystopian dictator, goes like this "Hey you can't look at my high-school drawing that I've conceal in the back of a flashcard, that's not very nice!" "But who is it?" "Yeah... It's my arch-nemesis from HS. No, no. The only thing he did to deserve such title is being second in class while I was the first" "Sounds like he isn't much of an adversary. Tried calling him?" "No, but I should. Yeah, I'm going to give him a call, see how he is". I'm frowning during the entire exchange and then the main character wakes up in front of the computer black screen and "WAS IT ALL A DREAM? GOOD ENDING." That's defenitively the worst ending in history of endings, "Lost" (TV series) kind of bad, rotten to the core, horrible. Imagine having to play the game three or more times for this disappointment. 

Endzone: A World Apart (From being fun, that is.)

 So after playing and liking Rimworld I started exploring this Base-building genre, and a lot of BS like this started to show up. Garbage like "Endzone" are the reason why I've been shunning the genre in a first place.

 The world ended once again because people started nuking each other for some unexplained reason but luckily for mankind a ragtag bunch in a hippie van is here to save us from extintion by building the city of the future. Or the past. Or whatever that thing is.

It's like devs couldn't quite make up their mind about whether they wanted a dystopian city-builder or a medieval one, so they got this in-between thing

 The game starts with an overly detailed, burdensome tuturial dragging you through annoying mechanics such as come-and-go radiation spots, fertility and related nonesense such as people being unable to have offspring unless they reside in a white picket-fenced house for the two of them and a maximum of two children. They'll also grow discontent if they reside in a shelter with other people even thought they outlived the apocalipse with more than 30 people cramped in a van, for at least fifty years but probably more. So much for adaptativity!

 This extremely extensive tutorial that reminds me of a certain VN with 7 prologues, not only tedious but is also a proof that the rest of the game isn't actually a game but a recipy to follow. As long as you stick to the manual and do the things the tutorial taught you, you'll be fine.

 There's never a feeling of adventure or rewarding progression, there's no danger nor world depth, just the recipe. 1/10

Keplerth (Imagine Rimworld but it's RPG and horrible)

 It's my firm belief that this game hopped onto the rimworld cart and bluntly offered a product that aesthetically resembled the former in order to sell, and then fill it up with random stuff they came up with, and I'll explain why.

Keplerth. This is a game generated base BTW, not the type of thing the player gets

Rimworld

Keplerth is a contradiction. As an open world RPG with procedural generation, it should offer a lot of freedom to the player: instead, it's terribly linear and the world is void of anything but the three flora sprites and the couple of monsters that spawn into existence at night.

As a survival base builder, it should offer bonuses to whomever actually builds a base instead of leaving the crafting stations in the open and period, and the search for food should be a little more challenging that killing a couple of monsters a day.

As an action game, roguelike or otherwise, it should offer some kind of battling experience, instead of magnet enemies and kiting around everything with a spear. 

Flooded ("reverse" city building game)

 The plot goes like this: Some people wake up after a regular workday at the mountain mines and they are like "Time for a cup of... What! The rest of the world is underwater! What to do now... Oh I know, let's just move onto that other mountain peak that's slightly higher. That'll keep us safe"

  First thing I want to say, this is not reverse city building. The sales speech  made me think that I'd had this inefficient city and that I'd had to deconstruct it to its minimal aspects, but what the game really is about is level-based city building against the clock. You have around 20 minutes to rush through ages and move to the next level, managing six resources, steel, copper, lead, electricity, citizens and (incredible!) water, the last of which you collect from a well. A well. With the ocean, literally next to mine, the guys are like "yeah, maybe that water's contaminated or something, I'll drill a hole and pump water from an underground river, which will be in no way connected to the mysterious source of water that flooded the entire planet". Even leaving behind logic issues such as the one above or the baffling need to advance through the same eras to unlock the same buildings from twenty minutes ago, the game becomes extremely grindy and dull, repetitive to sickness. 

Voice of Cards (They sell this crap to kids)

 When I saw the PEGI 7 rating at startup, I was concerned. That meant no cursing, no drug use, and more importantly: no cannibalism. But then I thought, 'Hey, not all games need cannibalism to be good,' so I endured the cheesy introduction with cringeworthy anime-style character cards and entered a standard turn-based RPG combat system, complete with a 'gem' mechanic that screamed 'I also created Magic: The Gathering, buy me!' (BTW, horrible game that one).

Should've known, should've known...

However, when the real characters showed up, I reached my limit. The developers sneakily implemented dialogue choices that didn't matter. I don't mean Mass Effect-style changes that alter an ambiguous line into unintended dialogue; I mean that I explicitly chose 'I don't want the crazy woman who hurled a fireball at my pet in my party,' and the game still forced her in.

 Or, I selected 'Don't help the hag to the apothecary, leave that to the duty guard; we've got things to do,' and the game took a ridiculously Disney-esque approach, forcing me to babysit the old woman I barely knew. What's next? 'A good pirate never takes another's property'? 

Tails of Iron (side-scroller action game)

  I was enticed by the nice artwork, reminiscent of Ratropolis, but ended up extremely disappointed.

The story is subpar from the start. The rats are at war with the toads, and the currently dying king had supposedly secured peace in the past, though we're not told how. As his strength wanes, this safety seems to dissipate, leading me to assume he simply strong-armed the toads into a peace treaty that now, with his advanced age and possible senility, they feel emboldened to break. I say senile because it's obvious that peace achieved through force is unsustainable, and throughout his lifetime, King Rat failed to build an army, forge alliances, or consolidate the treaty. Consequently, when the toads arrive with a real army, they effortlessly overrun the palace and kill the king. It's almost poetic justice.

The end result is a narrative that's a mix of standard and nonsensical elements. Initially, the gameplay involves traveling from point A to point B, constantly backtracking. Your first 'quest' is literally an errand from the cook – fetching vegetables from the basement right behind him. I was perplexed until I realized that the cook is another prince, highlighting the questionable royalty dynamics that may have contributed to the toad invasion.

The gameplay is, by far, the worst aspect. Clearly influenced by Dark Souls, it even features an Estus flask equivalent. However, the Souls-like mechanics are poorly implemented. Blocking and dodging aren't intuitive; instead, you must rely on a color-coded system to distinguish between unblockable and undodgeable attacks, which feels random and unrealistic.

Have a Nice Death ("The Grim Reaper goes white collar but gets bored so he jumps back into the field" Action game)

 The first thing that I'd like to point out is that the plot is very confusing:
 If the reaper has to harvest every soul in person, what happens if two or more people die at the same moment, but in different places? When eventually the Reaper gets the obvious idea of delegate, why doesn't he (she?) delegates the paperwork to a paper pusher as every other company does? Or if she's (he?) Is doing that, how come there is so much paperwork coming to the CEO? And why does the Reaper go rampant in his own company, killing all the employees? Is it because they asked for a raise? Do they have stock options? Nothing makes sense.
The game itself is very poorly constructed, all the "rooms" look the same, and there's like three mobs that just spawn all the time but since there's no incentive to kill them you can just run past them, the gameplay feels like a button smasher there are no different ways to approach combat, the whole situation where the Grim Reaper is killing ghosts at "Have a nice Death Inc." Is like a bad joke still waiting for the punchline. 

If this looks like a plataformer but worse because you can't even see the platforms, it's because it is.