Recent reviews by a incredible graphic

my distant ancestors- all farmers, i'm sure- would be pleased to know that, centuries later, i have gleefully taken to scythe-harvesting wide swaths of fake wheat in a field in order to bake fake bread

easy enough. if anyone needs their knee replaced, hit me up! i can play this again beforehand as a refresher

Book trapped inside of a slot machine. Prepare to read the same page of that book over, and over, and over.

I can't get enough of HOLE.

TrickShot Simulator puts you in the shoes of a formless ghost trapped within a house where physics don't work properly and two identical throws can have drastically different results. Some would call this an unfinished product - Others would call it a simulator. Can you, without any context as to where your body is or what kind of throw you're doing, make a "Trick Shot"? No? That's fine, actually.

interesting core concept. art's nice. i like that there's exactly one good song playing forever, just like ballblazer!

balatro's gameplay relies on a combination of open-endedness and random chance so heavily that it does not function cohesively. the game frequently trips itself up on its own random chance, to the player's detriment. there are a lot of cards, a lot of bonuses, ways to strengthen yourself. there are tons of really cool synergies between cards that can create absolutely wonderful, bananas builds. ultimately, none of them mean anything.

in random chance games like this, it is nice to make it to the point of actual loss on a run. in a more swords-and-spells'y roguelike, maybe you get obliterated by a dragon you thought you had the upper hand against. maybe you enter a maze of spike pits and you're out of levitation potions. whoops! you died, and you learned from it. you'll be a little more prepared for that kind of problem when you try again. you are able to better understand how to progress past the hurdle that has stopped you by failing at each turn against your current problem, and there is always that small glimmer of hope that maybe you've got something up your sleeve that will help you pull through in a pinch.

your run ends in balatro rounds before you get to play the match that would cause you to lose. and in roguelikes, usually that's not bad - if it happens when you least expect it, like with a dragon barbecuing your entire body. what separates balatro's end sequence from any other roguelike is how early into the loss it points out that you've lost, and then it expects you to spend some amount of time meeting, grappling with and experiencing that loss when there is no point to doing so as your loss has already been clearly telegraphed.

balatro allows for an adoption and building of a unique play style per run in a freeform fashion, imploring the player to "bend" the rules of the game for a win. it then shuts your build down at the start of each ante by showing you an upcoming boss blind that is designed to stop you. the boss blind always comes with some gimmick that disables a mechanic of the player's build, but the drawback is that a very small handful of boss blinds can wholly shut down a run, regardless of which ante that blind is encountered on, and even if you encounter that blind on five or six different runs with an entirely different build composed of wildly different mechanics than the last.

you will not have enough time to sensibly change your build - the moment that you are made aware of the boss blind, you only get two chances to divert course, whether through the shop or through skip tags. there are ways to change the boss blind, of course - I think two or three? but it's RNG on top of the existing RNG to find the items that will change the boss blind's gimmick, and some of the items will ask you to carry them around as part of your build when you could be using that space for practically anything else.

in a swords-and-spells'y roguelike, if you looked at your map and you were two rooms away from a boss, you'd march into its room. you'd go see what it was! what's it do? can you kill it? is there gold? now, imagine if everything on your HUD not only told you what the boss was, but its powers, and that the room had no gold in it, and the boss' powers would kill you in one shot upon entering the room - and it was all correct! what would you do? restart, probably? quit? but you probably wouldn't go into the boss' room.

in balatro, you're frequently two rooms away from meeting something that you can't defeat and the game is happy to tell you exactly how you're going to die if you beat the small and big blinds of this particular fatal ante. so you quit! you start over. it is the logical response - you will not beat the boss blind, your build is the setup that the upcoming blind counters, and you cannot improvisationally change your build within two turns in a way that will not count as an extreme deficit towards your ongoing setup. the only other option is to continue playing the doomed match for no reason other than to see the actual point of loss.

oh well. were you doing bad? that's fine, here's your sign to start over. were you doing good? okay, well, i don't know why you spent all of your time doing good, because here comes balatro, the game that hates being played. games are a time-waster, yes, but balatro insists upon telling you very abruptly that it's done playing with you, and that you have wasted all of your time in playing with it. when you ask if you've gained anything from the experience, it shrugs at you! you paid for the ride, you got the ride, it says. you can put warframes or bullets or johnny fiveaces on your playing cards now. it waves a hand dismissively. get out of my face.

i really do like that there's one song playing forever.

absolutely phenomenal. i wish that the workers were a little more susceptible to me and my various boys yelling at 'em, seeing as we're all heavily armored and armed, but i suppose that's what my fists are for

i like blade & sorcery and i like the modded-in firearm options available for it! i was hoping to find something that was like blade & sorcery but more geared around the guns - and not H3VR. this is not it. i'm not really sure what this is.

from the moment i launched hard bullet, my character would not stop jumping. i determined that putting your thumb anywhere near the touchpad of the index controller would make you jump AND automatically trigger slow-mo at the same time. so you have to have your hand in an unnatural position while playing. whatever. i'll jump. this would not deter me.

i finally got the controls menu open. surprise! it's just a diagram of what the controls are with no in-game way to change it. yes, i know you can modify it all through steamvr. reliance on third-party programs that might not be in place when your game is still around is silly. but that's not my problem as a consumer so it didn't deter me. you can turn off the slow-mo with your jumping, but you can't turn off the jumping. sure. whatever. i will continue to jump through your game at normal speeds.

i drifted aerially about the main menu warehouse, my arms slowly floating about to track where my real-world hands travelled. items slowly moved towards my telekinetic hands. the strange, cottony slowness of the movement made me feel like i was in a dream. this would not deter me either.

i made it into a "patrol" in the fluorescently-lit City Made Out Of Alleyways and bunny-hopped towards an enemy. he stood stock-still and fired every bullet in his possession around the outline of my bouncing body.

i closed in on that poor sap like a homicidal pogo stick.

i think my hand may have gently tapped him, or perhaps my elbow after i had enabled "Enable Elbow for Martial" in the settings since i'm a big fan of Martial. there was no tactile response, but my assailant kind of fell on the ground noiselessly like a wet blanket. the shaders on his body made him look like he'd bathed in grease or sweat before coming to die to my hand gently brushing against his hippocampus. maybe the sweat was because i'd reached into his mind and plucked a lobe free as a donkey would pluck a fig free from the tree that bore it and the human body isn't meant to experience that kind of dissection while alive.

picking up the lobotomized man's pistol, i blasted his friend who just sort of yelled distantly and continued to fire at me without flinching as spheres of blood blossomed forth from the strange, vacant zone where his heart should have been. four more of the exact same guy joined him to shout and fire at me. they all looked the same. i was up against the angry sailor quintuplets, all firing M1911s at me on some kind of neon staircase. back in 2000, had i been witnessing this on my CRT monitor or on the front of a video card's box, i would've been wowed.

i jumped over and over atop my one kill's body while his friends shot at me but i could not activate the menu to close the game because i was an unstoppable jumping force, so i just took the headset off. if those guys had moved out of my ineffective pistol's range and into my brain-scrambling elbow's attack radius, they'd have been done for.

i can't really think of an FPS i would have called "the worst FPS i've ever played", and i've played a lot of them. i played daikatana when it came out.

this is THE worst FPS i've ever played

when I was playing the phenomenal "Clone Drone in the Danger Zone" i thought to myself "this would probably translate really well to a VR environment"

i was wholly unprepared for exactly how well it would translate. this is like one of my top 3 VR games now