Recent reviews by gimbal

Dave the Diver is an absolutely fantastic game with a huge amount of depth to it.

... actionable pun detected.

I don't think I know of any other game with a more satisfying progression system. It is a game for explorers, it is a game for collectors, it is a game for min-maxers, people who like to swim with the fishes, there's a little bit to like for just about any type of gamer, except those that only want to shoot at things. You can do that in this game as well, but it's the least profitable option available to you. You want fish alive.

So in practice the game loop exists of two sections that are represented as the daytime portion of a day and the night portion of a day; A) obtain resources and fish while diving (and some fish will try to put you on the menu) and B) manage a sushi restaurant. This involves hiring and training staff, serving customers food and drinks, gaining popularity and upgrading the status of your restaurant, prepping a menu, keeping the place clean, do special VIP quests, research new recipes and feed the cat. While all that is happening the game has an event-driven story that unlocks more things to get and do for you at a pretty steady pace. You will get a fish farm, a land farm, do boss fights, make contact with an underwater society, get weapon upgrades, a secondary restaurant, and more.

Screenshots and videos may give you the impression that this is a pretty relaxing game. Not so. It's actually pretty tough requiring you to stay on your flippers (or be eaten by a shark) and manage your expenses well. The game has a huge collection of fish to catch and you'll be tasked to learn which lead to the most profitable dishes that will help you to progress faster. After a paycheck do you upgrade your equipment, or do you hire and/or train your staff? If your oxygen is running low, do you dare going into that dark cave even though there is no guarantee that it is safe in there or there is a way to refill your oxygen or do a quick escape, or do you backtrack to refill your oxygen or go back to the boat for safety? Don't worry though, although the game makes it a little cumbersome to do so, you can save scum should you want to simply restart a section of the day if you screw it up.

10/10 game that feels like you're doing a job that is more fun than your real job.

Played this game a lot back in the day, one of the earlier full polygonal and texture mapped 3D games. This is a pretty faithful port... and that means pixels the size of your fist, geometry that pops and has cracks into the void in it, textures that stretch, warp and glitch, AI that is dumber than a doorstop and default controls that are counter-intuitive.

... switch up and down and you'll probably be a lot happier.

Yeah it's old and they did very little to fix any of it. And I'm fine with that, I wouldn't have it any other way. This is the way Terminal Velocity is supposed to be. Repetitive, weird and against all logic - lots of fun.

Recommended, but only if you're into very old DOS games.

Fields of Mistria is Stardew Valley on steriods. It doesn't even try to hide that it is greatly "inspired" by Stardew, there are simply a lot of mechanics in the game which are directly lifted from it's granddad.

But it does all of it bigger. One of my pet peeves with Stardew is that it has a limited progression system, only a few skills to master. Mistria has absolute tons of things to upgrade and many levels of upgrade at that. Even the town itself has an upgrade system. You will never be thinking "What am I going to do with this day", you have too much to do.

Which is also why... I would wish a day lasted a little longer in this game. It isn't exactly a relaxing experience, if you want to get stuff done you need to run - always. To the mines! Quickly, drop off artifacts at the museum! Oh it is Friday, to the tavern! Etc. etc.

In some cases the game has the same mechanics as Stardew but implements them differently. Fishing for example, is more Zelda. You plop in your bobber next to a fish, wait for it to bite and then just hit the button at the right time. Is it better? ... meh. It's certainly a lot easier. Countering that, you lose a lot more energy to catch a fish so don't expect to immediately torpedo your economy like you can in Stardew if you really commit to fishing.

It also removed unnecessary busy work. You don't need to refill your watering can for example. Plots you have dug up to plant things will not disappear when going to the next season. You can craft your own tools and armor OR you can pay for it; you don't need to farm both resources AND money to get it done, it's one or the other. Things like that. It's a more streamlined experience which helps a little with the fact that a day is very short.

All in all, if you love Stardew Valley, you will love this game. If you love to gather things, you will love this game. If you love to interact with cute anime characters, you will love this game. It has a very addictive gameplay loop indeed.

BUT... it's early access, and still very incomplete. Keep that in mind, if you purchase now it should be with the intent of seeing the game grow overtime. I would say with the March update you will have somewhere around 20-25 hours of gameplay time before you've pretty much emptied the cookie jar. You will still have things to upgrade at that point, but it'll feel like you're doing it without a goal.

I'm giving this a yes but it is a very, very tepid yes. I would say for people who were not immediately attracted by the color palette (EGA), this is going to be a no.

This is a classic adventure game - in the positive and negative way. The graphics are primitive but that means real creativity needed to be put into them to make the visuals tell a story. It's exceptionally well done. The music, what little there is, is serviceable. The characters are straight out of a classic whodunnit movie ... or Scooby-Doo episode. Stylistically there is nothing wrong with this game, I love that part of the game being an 80's child and having grown up with all of the games.

It's Sierra-inspired, so there are deaths. Only a few of them. Some obvious, some kind of dumb. That might be strike one for a lot of people, adventure games with deaths are not everyone's cup of tea. But they're more of an in-joke than a game mechanic really. The game even challenges you to collect all of them.

What grinds my gears is the fact that you can actually miss large chunks of this game. You are invited to explore off the beaten path (as in if the game tells you to go somewhere or do something, you are free to ignore that and go everywhere else first) - but the game doesn't actually have all that many screens in it, "off the beaten path" can often mean going back to a screen you just left. Other characters in the game kind of teleport around to where the script tells them they need to be. A shame that this design choice was made. I do not like to drink tea with a large chance to miss the biscuit, I need them both for full enjoyment.

The game itself isn't all too long - and that can mean only one thing, it has artificial padding like many old games that needed to fit on a single floppy disk (an excuse the Crimson Diamond does not have). Lucasarts games tended to include maze sections for example where you would get royally stuck because every room looked the same. It's not fun... it's just runtime padding, wasting your time in the hopes that you do not realize the game actually effectively only has an hour or two worth of content.

Similarly, puzzles in the Crimson Diamond can be quite obtuse to make it so you're going to be stuck not knowing what to do - and no way to really find out besides a hint book and just randomly trying things. As an example in chapter 3 you need to obtain fingerprints and you need to get one from a cookie (that's no spoiler, the game telegraphs at you that it is a thumbprint cookie)... good luck. It's not moon logic but it is equally insane what you have to do. Perhaps if I was more in touch with my inner child, I might have figured it out myself. But on that particular puzzle... I really needed a walkthrough. What a downer.

I love that this was made, I hope to see more. It hits my nostalgia bone quite hard. But this isn't quite it just yet. I hope to see a second game with the same protagonist, this time with more than 2 hours of content so the puzzles can be slightly more refined.

It is that type of game where on a workday you go to bed at 3AM because you had to do 1 more ro.... 2 more rou.... 3.... 5 more rounds. And then you don't go to sleep, you watch someone else play the game to get even more ideas for creating insane synergies.

A trait I value very highly in games is that they aren't "directed". While it works to make the finished parts of a game such as Dark Souls amazingly good, that's a rare exception because the game director happens to be born to do it. For most games it boils down to putting in artificial ceilings to hit which don't make the game more fun to play, you're just not allowed to be better than other players to keep it "fair" and "balanced". I hate balance in video games, it is not as all things should be.

Might & Magic 6 comes to mind as another example of a game which does not care about ceilings, except for the... ceiling of the world itself. Not a good game at all but if you persist long enough in it you're literally flying through the sky raining huge fireballs and thunderstorms on waves of enemies, killing literally a hundred of them every second. The game allows you to become overpowered and break it and it feels good. Too bad it had to be such a mediocre game, that miraculously managed to get 2 sequels with exactly the same garbage gameplay. I wonder why? Because they are unhinged, it really makes flaws in the game inconsequential.

Balatro is such a game (but then actually good too) because if you persist long enough, you're scoring points every round so high that the value has to be written in scientific notation. It's not a bug, it is intentional that you can literally break the game into individual molecules. And THAT... is why Balatro is the most addictive and most fun game out there. It is dopamine directly beamed into your brain and the off-switch is stuck.

Made by one person of course, because all the best games are.

10/10. Will play for the rest of my life.

Phasmophobia is a fun investigation game where you have to go to a location and figure out what type of ghost is haunting it based on environmental clues, clues that the ghost itself gives you and clues about your own person. It is playable both single player and multi player and is more of the "quick game" variety rather than one you'll play hours on end. Ghosts can give off three pieces of evidence in earlier difficulties; if you identify all three, you've identified the ghost... although it could still be a sneaky ghost known as the Mimic, always keep that in the back of your mind. Besides identifying the ghost itself, you have other optional objectives to complete to increase your ending score and thus payout.

Be wary though because your character has sanity which lowers if you are in the dark or when certain things happen around you. If that sanity drops too far, the ghost will start to hunt you and in that state it can kill you. Although dying is not a great punishment, you have to stay alive to gain enough money and experience to level up and be able to buy more and better equipment. The tricky part is that although most ghosts hunt when your sanity drops to 50%... some have different rules.

The "bad" for me is that the game has a long wind up, it can easily take two dozen hours to understand how to play the game and you will need the help of the internet to learn all the behaviors of the ghosts, it is nigh on impossible to learn all of them just by observing the game. Until that moment the game is fun enough... but not the most fun. On top of that it can start to feel very repetitive especially if you play alone. As such, I can recommend the following to give the game longevity.

Training level: as you learn to play ramp up difficulty until professional level and stay there until you are level 50. Truth be told, there isn't a great deal of difference between the first three difficulty levels, but you'll earn a lot more points on the higher ones so you might as well activate them as they unlock. I would advise against nightmare difficulty for the time being though. At level 50 custom difficulty unlocks and you should go for that instead.

Novice level: using custom difficulty at level 50, setup a game with "nightmare" difficulty presets (which will give you only 2 evidence) but activate all monitors in the game whereas nightmare difficulty by default disables two important ones, giving you more clues as to what ghost it might be to fill in the blank for the missing evidence.

Intermediate level: The same as novice level, but lower evidence given to only 1 so you really have to look for ghost behavior to figure out which ghost it is.

Expert level: using custom difficulty using the "insanity" preset, but reduce evidence to 0 so you have to identify the ghost entirely on its behavior. This is not as impossible as it sounds if you know the behaviors of the different ghosts. A lot of the ghosts actually have a tell which gives them away immediately, you might know it within 15 seconds of entering the house. Also insanity difficulty disables the random cursed item, but I would put it back as cursed items are a lot of fun (and an easy photo).

Master level: the same as expert level, but reduce your starting sanity to 0 meaning you are immediately facing a hostile ghost. At this point you might as well also disable the monitors as you won't be using them. You can also reduce the sanity pills to zero to give yourself even more score. You can give yourself a 2 second reaction time before a ghost hunt begins to give yourself at least some time to identify where the ghost will be coming from before you run or hide which makes it slightly more fair. With zero sanity you have little use for a cursed item but I like to keep it in the game anyway for the easy photo.

The better you get at the game, the less challenge it will give you and the more repetitive it will feel but with these rampups you can really keep giving yourself a challenge because you'll have to go full detective mode in a very hostile environment. I now play exclusively with zero starting sanity and no evidence and my heart is frequently jumping out of my chest, especially when I'm facing a fast ghost. You have to be on your toes at all times as the ghost might hunt right on top of you. I also like this style of play more because you need less equipment for it, which makes playing on larger maps more viable even in single player.

7.5/10, good game, different game. Excellent game to play with your friends, especially if they're easily scared. Far from perfect though.

Version 2.0 of this nervous breakdown simulator is out and since it's now a completely different game, I have to revise the review. The game is still Welcome to the Game-lite with Observation Duty elements added to it, but it is now more Welcome to the Game which fixes a few flaws with the 1.x version of the game. Version 2.0 adds currency, upgrades, a nightmare difficulty with a new killer and strategic choices in the form of multiple entities to report things to which pays out more but at the cost of increasing the time pressure that he game puts on you which given it's very random nature can be a nail biter. This aspect adds much needed variety to playthroughs, they won't feel as samey as they did in the 1.x iteration.

It also adds several mechanics to speed up elements of the game which are by default dreadfully slow, like the elevator and filing reports. And also... adds more loud jump scares to keep you on your toes.

The upgrades are well worth it as they remove the necessity for you to constantly get up from your chair to see if there are killers in your room, you get an audible warning instead. Essentially the early game becomes a little harder as you have more choices and gambles to make, but the late game can be made substantially easier / less error-prone if you play your cards right.

One flaw that made me not recommend the version 1.x iteration of this game remains; you need to play with headphones, or at least a very good sound system which you'll have to put at a high enough volume such that your neighbors are going to call the police every time the game jump scares you. One of the killers, when visiting your room, has a sound cue - a whistle. But it's really soft, so if Unreal Engine 5 is making your fans blow, and it is likely to do so especially when playing on a laptop, you're likely not going to hear it and thus you'll die. But the rest of the game is now so much better and deeper that I no longer consider it a deal breaker.

This is a really good game... if you have nerves of steel, the patience of a saint and the focus of a painter. And noise cancelling headphones.

I recommend this... if you watch someone else play this first before you try it yourself. There is no way you can do the 2 hour refund trick to demo this game, after 2 hours you will have maybe figured out how to plow a field while keeping straight lines. And also because this is not a game. I classify this in the category it's not fun, it's addictive. So make sure you can get addicted to this.

I don't have much with farming but watching other people play I saw that it had some depth to it so I decided to make this my time filler while I take a break from my usuals. After a rough start trying to find my way through the slightly ambiguous UI (it took me way longer to figure out how to sell chickens than is necessary...) and having trouble figuring out what all the machines are for, I started to get the hang of it. The tutorial is dreadful by the way, I learned to play by doing two false starts where I just threw away money buying random machines and learning how to use them before I started the third serious playthrough.

And after 50 hours of play, I... kind of go back on my claim that it has depth. It has some depth, but not as much as I thought it had. To me it feels like an incomplete sim, a beta version for the full release which might just be Farm Sim 24/25. Part of the game feels rather complete. You can plant grains and other goods, harvest them and they form feed for animals, materials for other products in a product chain or you can just sell them on their own. That's fine. Except its extreme busy work because to properly prepare a field you need to plow/cultivate it, fertilize it twice, roll it, optionally remove large stones, lime it and remove weeds. Good god. I would really recommend turning off stones, that is just one grind too many. Thankfully the game is very configurable.

You can let tasks be done by the computer so you can multitask, or you can do multiplayer. A common thing to do is that one does harvesting and the other drives a truck next to it to collect the product so the harvester never has to stop to be emptied. It's just... the AI is dumber than a doorstop. One tree and they will ram themselves right into it and get stuck. They get stuck on corners so you can't trust them to even drive your equipment from A to B successfully. Under-developed to say the least.

But I wanted to do a chicken farm. And... chickens are in my eyes really under-developed too. You buy them (pretty cheap, to be honest), they magically transport themselves to your coop and if you just keep the food storage from going empty, they will on their own grow, multiply and produce eggs which you can sell or put into a production chain. And that's it. That's chickens. If the coop didn't radiate some clucking sounds I would confuse them for being plants. It is almost passive especially if you compare it to growing crops. Oh yeah you have the option of putting roosters in your coop so the chickens multiply faster, but truth be told... you don't need them. Chickens multiple like Gremlins in a swimming pool already.

There is more you can do. You can do forestry which is kind of a cheat way to get money quick, but the game needs that because otherwise you'd be left with only the option of cheating your way into money with mods, or taking out huge loans and have them be a pain in the neck. In the official maps the devs hid collectables all around which are worth a thousand bucks a pop so if you manage to find them (and they are not well-hidden) that's a few free cheap machines right there. You have greenhouses which are largely passive if you provide them with water. If you install mods you can do things like solar panels to make passive money. On the planting side of things you can plant cotton and setup fields of olives and grapes which have their own unique way of prep and harvesting. You can plant root vegetables like potatoes and beets, but they are a massive pain in the neck to harvest. It takes for-e-ver and you need specialized harvesters to do so which are very slow. You can also do grass which is food for animals, or turn it into hay or silage. A lengthy multi-step process requiring several machines and transports.

Long story short. Lots to do... it is kind of fascinating because of the many different machines you get to drive around and use but a pretty shallow experience nonetheless. I am a little disappointed. I have more fun watching other people play it while they edit their videos to skip over the waiting parts than I have playing it myself where there is no skipping.

I mean just watch the Civvie11 review video. This is pretty much the perfect version of this game. If you accept that pixel graphics don't magically become high definition graphics, they just stay pixel graphics but more crisp and in widescreen. But I do feel this version is slightly easier than the original DOS version because far away graphics are clearer due to the much higher screen resolution so you can really easily aim at enemies from far away; in the original DOS version enemies would just become a miasma of pixels that would disappear into the environment and thus hard to see.

The sound options especially are fantastic, you can tune it to whatever your ears want to hear. Which for me is the good old OPL music with the classic sound effects but you also have the option of using the ROTT 2013 soundtrack and renewed sound effects with louder explosions and more squishy gibs.

And you can play it with a controller like a modern FPS game just like the Bethesda Doom remakes! What a joy. It works quite well, except when aiming up rockets will fire below where the cursor is. There is that 2.5D perspective weirdness.

There is only so much you can do with levels built up out of 90 degree walls so this is not to play hours on end like you might do with Doom that has far more possibilities to create twisted levels that keep you engaged. But as a game to kill 15-30 minutes here and there, this is a solid 8/10. It ain't Doom, but Doom ain't this either.

Again I'm missing the "yes, but" option. Playing through Return to Monkey Island was a reasonably enjoyable experience. A short one though, because frankly... this game is pretty easy even on full puzzle difficulty. Most of the puzzle solutions are practically telegraphed to you and the rest just require you to do a 1+1=2 calculation. I was a little stuck on the end game section, for about half an hour.

The graphical style has been a hot debate of course. I personally don't mind it too much, but I find that it prevents the game from having visual gags like it's predecessors. The often comic book styled facial expressions in previous games told a story of their own and... they're pretty much absent in this game. No Looney Tunes rotating of the arm before taking a swing, no picking up a dog and putting it in your pocket.

So to me as a fan of the original trilogy (the fourth one just never wanted to run on any of my machines), I find this half of a Monkey Island game. The music is there, most of the characters are there, the islands are there, half of the voice cast is there. But the brain teasers and the jokes, not so much. But I'm sure people completely new to the games and/or are not battle hardened point & click puzzle solvers will find something to pass the time with here.

But for people who are not familiar with the lore... I see another problem. This game relies pretty heavily on nostalgia. Seeing Herman Toothrot or Otis again was like meeting up with old friends. Seeing the sword fighting being referenced brought back good memories, but to someone who hasn't seen the first game it will be pretty random and not funny.

Yeah. A hard game to recommend. Maybe just don't overthink it. And maybe play the special edition versions of the first two games before Return. Be warned though: those games are NOT easy.