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.

Iris and the Giant (Roguelike? RPG? More like the "let's please the snobbish leftists" genre)

This garbage with a horrible, overly simplistic design that looks ripped right out of one of those pyramid scam ads, you'll be playing the same three cards on the same three monsters until you either die of boredom or defeat the "giant" trying to find out how the so-called "game" justifies that insult of a gameplay 

Like the mobs from the tutorial? Cool, because they're the only mobs