Recent reviews by Xaekai

Can't play FLACs, dev promised it 3 years ago. Keybindings not respected. Can't set favorite folders for your own music which makes browsing on Linux a nuisance.

Let's be honest, you're only here for the Cassette, VHS, and retrosun emotes. Buy the game, turn off fullscreen, turn menu music off, and leave it on the menu while you do something else for two hours, and then use the points shop to buy them. It's not actually worth playing.

Somewhere between Daria and World's Greatest Dad is Nicole, a girl with the worst curse ever: Being pretty in highschool. Fifteen endings and all of them suck, just like real life. Except this is easier to laugh about.

After letting the gym teacher perv on me and suing the school for lots of money, I made a boy jump off the school roof to prove his love for me then told him I only date guys who can walk.

9/10 experience. Just needs more of the big booba slut principal.

The one game I keep returning to year after year.

Best game I never played. Paid full price and it was worth every cent. I got as far as pressing the exit button on title screen.

The dev took "Be the change you want to see in the world" to heart.
Stand against stupidity, and support those who do the same.

To preface this; The overwhelmingly positive rating the game has is justified, and it is worth every cent of full retail price. Do not wait for a sale, buy it now. (Especially fellow Linux users. They gave us Tux, give em bux.) -- However, when something is so desperately close to perfection, the more cutting you find its flaws. With this particular game they ascend to being truly egregious. In the beginning I wanted to love the game, but I couldn't. By the end, I wanted to hate the game, but also couldn't.

Also, I don't really know how to make this any more brief; I can't imagine many who need a teal dear would be into it anyway. So advance apologies for the verbosity.

The story is beautiful, and overall it outweighs the gameplay flaws; I look forward to playing the game over again with the next character update due this fall. I will certainly purchase the current soundtrack and art DLCs as well as any gameplay DLCs that come out in the future. My gripe with story is limited one thing, and that's the different manner than the rest in which one character leaves. Yes, it's intentional, and yes I get it. The unfairness of it is part of the feels-gut-punch the story was designed to deliver. However the context to why that happens is not found in the game, but in external supplementary sources. Absolutely infuriating, and I'm not alone in finding that situation so; There is a number of Reddit threads and Steam Community discussions on the matter. Many end up doing a web search pondering if their game bugged, expressly because there is no presented context for it happening, then happen upon these discussions. Finding out "the why" in this manner is a such a disservice to the creators own intent. There is certainly creative methods to deliver the needed context in-game that I can think of, surely the devs could manage something.

No, this negative review is about the tedium. The platforming is great, but overall gameplay have several horrid issues. Despite them, the first three-quarters of the game is an absolute joy. However, because of them, the final stretch becomes a painful slog that rendered me near-bitter by the end. If this were an Early Release title, I'd take these issues to the forums, but it is not. So here we are.

The first thing I can think of that is blatantly missing is a quest from Atul, or Gustav, to fish a tuna. Something where the player is taught in-game to tap the button when the fishing pole is red, instead of reading it online. Minor, but the cuts start.

If any of the ThunderLotus team read this, please take the time to watch the Ars Technica: War Stories episode featuring the Dead Cells devs about cheating controls in favor of the player. Because watering plants in your game is probably why Charon quit in the first place. So player is in a field, plots 1 2 3, and just watered plot 3. Moves to the left but didn't move quite far enough, and ends up watering plot 3 again. Absolute fury. Makes me want to come to your studio with a giant bag of those novelty "big mistakes" erasers and pelt you guys with them until you give me a fakenfix. If the player is equidistant from a watered plot and an unwatered plot, not presuming they wanted to water the unwatered one means you are sucking at your job of delivering the player the action they obviously intended to perform. You understand this right? With how many testers are listed in the end credits, how this has not been resolved leaves me at a loss. My solution ended up being building excess gardens/fields and parking the boat in a rainy spot. Novel idea for industrial production rendered into feeling like just a janky hack for an unresolved controls issue. Given how much of this game is growing food for revenue and feeding spirits, this issue grows into death by a thousand cuts.

You know what's an irritating oversight? Got a huge boat near the end game right? Pass through an event area for a passenger that's moved on, and you have to stop what you are doing to go to the door of their empty house to decline it. You know what would be better? Holding LB to decline the minigame from wherever you are. Yes, I know that character is gone. Yes I'm sad. No, I don't need reminded that they are gone. Death by ten thousand cuts!

A distinct need for a second tier of upgrades is apparent in the station minigames. The sawmill, the blade guide just moves SO slow. An upgrade to make is just a little more responsive? The loom could use an upgrade to widen the perfect diamond just slightly. The foundry upgrade could be to either widen the target heat, or give the player an added furnace control to slow temp drop while temp in the target range to make the game a bit more interactive. Out of these, it's really the sawmill that stands out as especially bad. Still, more cuts.

The mining ore swing sweet spot between fullpower and overload where Stella drops her everlight is just so picky. The time window to hit it right is like just 150ms too small. It almost feels deliberately intended to piss the player off. Well, congrats, you did it. Your reward: This review. This seems like a good oppurtunity to implement a new side quest for Astrid. Go out, just you and her, and she teaches you how to swing the pick a bit better and you get a minor buff: that slightly bigger window between max power and overload. So many cuts.

By the time you get access to the material for the windmill upgrade, you don't really care about additional funds anymore. It just comes too late. You know what would be more useful than double output? Double capacity earlier in the game. What sort of sorry windmill only holds enough grains for eight apple pies worth of flour? I had four of them and it still wasn't enough. Just covered in cuts. Still, it would be nice if there was a way to gain access to a single pine log earlier than when you get the boat fog lights. Smart players could tactically take it to the turtle sisters.

The final straw on my patience is the second Foodarama achievement. When I first encountered the salespitch in Hummingberg I rightfully concluded my current funds were better spent elsewhere. Near endgame I went back to mop stuff I missed. Loaded an old save to get Sealed Lips, and went for Unsubscribe, but time dragged on. Looked it up online and found it takes six weeks before you can get it over with, and I was truly livid. We reached it. Death by a million cuts.

Back to my main save, sailed to that one lady with the parasol, planted Stella bouncing on it, muted game and went to bed. (If you don't know why that's funny, play the game and find out.) Wasn't enough. AFK'd, made food. AFK'd, did some chores. About ten hours of playtime AFK because there is no in-game way to pass weeks quickly. An elegant way to save players from that particular hell would be having Albert mention the service to Stella after she unlocks the Choral Bouquet. (Perhaps that's how Albert gets his food, being at the shipyard all hours.)

All the issues individually are small, but in unison became a great detriment to my enjoyment of the game. The tedium treaded upon the story, and that is tragic. I'm bleeding from all the silica blown across my face, and Darude owes me royalties.

The game is smallest gap possible from perfection. But ultimately that is what leaves me miffed. Get these peas out from under my mattress! So I can move on to pouring another whisky and bathing in the somber afterglow of Lily's emotional carpet bombing.

The game is a collection of levels that are too easy and that are too hard, with almost nothing in between. You will probably end up looking for solutions online. However, the few times you figure out a hard level yourself make the game worth it.

Looks like it would be a beautiful game, but the controller support is completely broken. The thread in discussions complaining about it is one of the most active and hasn't had a developer response despite being started in October of last year. I managed to complete the spaceship part and get to the temple before I gave up because I couldn't aim the gun low enough to kill the spider things.

Also the automatic savepoints are spread way too thin for anyone that's not a teenager slacking on their studies. The rest of us can't afford to play the same segments over and over and over. Time is precious. There is many instances of what would obviously make a good save point that are not.

Update 2023: Remapping works a bit better than when I first played and I was able to get much farther. Probably worth it on a sale.

The best Harvest Moon clone ever made. Which it has more Rune Factory elements though. Like 4 season dungeons instead of just the Mine and Skull Cave.

The game is half skill. The other half is artificial difficulty and luck. There is too many cars for how wide most of the tracks are, so at the higher difficulty levels you have to play over and over driving perfectly each time while hoping the computer screws up and leaves a passage for you to get through.

The physics are much to be desired. Bumping a cars rear bumper sucks 20MPH of your speed into the ether. You can't pit maneuver cars out of your way. There is no drifting. The track edge on some tracks can ridiculously take you from 140MPH to 8MPH instantly.

The game doesn't remember what colors you had each car. You can't reorder the car selector. Given how often you have to retry tracks because of the artificial difficulty, the retry button should be the top item in the pause menu.

The computer controlled cars will literally move in front of you to prevent you passing them, but there is no rear view mirror feature so you can do the same to them.

The biggest travesty about this game is that the rightfully negative reviews of it may dissuade future developers from making a villain-based twin stick shooter action role playing gaming when the problem was entirely the execution and not the concept.

Also the programmers of the Linux port are absolutely tard'd. They hardcoded "\" into the saving. So instead of a savefile named in a folder called in a folder called in my home folder's app data spot , I have a single file called in my home. That is not acceptable.