kdamica

The graphics are amazing, and the controls are pretty tight, but poor level design prevents this from being a great game. Far too often, small mistakes force you to repeat long, boring stretches of platforming, making for a tedious experience. The boss fights are also fairly uninspired, and since you die in one hit, you'll be playing them over and over again. I don't mind difficult platforming (I've put far too many hours into Super Meat Boy), but this game just feels like a chore. I tried to force myself to keep playing, just to see the beautiful environments, but I soon gave up.

Fester Mudd is a solid adventure game. Most of the puzzles make sense and the humor is great. The game loses points because it is very short, about 2-3 hours of gameplay. Hopefully they will release more episodes, because right now the game feels like a long demo.

Awesome, awesome setting, story and characters. One of the most interesting and engrossing adventure games I've played. I really hope there is a sequel one day!

A great adventure game all around. Took me about 6 hours to beat. The puzzles are mostly logical, and the game has in-game hints that help you out when you get stuck (I used them 3 or 4 times). Great art, voice acting, and story. There's nothing groundbreaking in terms of gameplay; it's just a fun little point n click.

Guacamelee is a well-made game that gets boring quickly. Despite gaining new abilities frequently, combat feels repetitive. Mandatory dialog is frequent and sometimes funny, but also got old quick. I bought the game because I love metroidvanias, but it feels more like a fighting game. There is a lot to like here, but it just didn't hold together for me.

Spelunky has great controls, excellent procedural design, and plenty of variety. You will die over and over again, but you will be laughing. The game doesn't have a huge amount of replay value despite how fun it is for a while. Later levels like the Temple and the Mothership are so difficult that I was drained of any desire to keep reaching them after a few times. Overall, though, well worth playing.

I get it: Back in the good old days, games were hard and it took skill and dedication to beat, while today's gaming landscape of save points and auto-regenerate baby players toward the end of the game. And today, there are many excellent games that hark back to the difficulty of early gaming, such as Super Meat Boy, Spelunky, Teleglitch, and Rogue Legacy. Volgarr the Viking, however, revives some of the most frustrating game elements of the time. First, a lack of checkpoints mixed with long levels means that players have to replay the parts of the levels that they've already mastered again and again before reaching the really difficult parts. Better games tend to avoid this repetitiveness with shorter levels or random elements. Second, Volgarr's jumps cannot be controlled mid-air. Some people might not mind this, but I found it frustrating, especially when there are nearly blind jumps onto small platforms (I'm looking at you, third level). Finally, and this one is minor, but there is no way to attack upward. The game design loves to have enemies jump on top of you, and when they do, there is no way to defend. Even Rastan had upward attacking! Ultimately, I would have played this game for a lot longer than I did if only my first complaint were addressed. If you loved Ghosts n' Goblins, Karnov, or any other of the old-school platformers that no one ever beat, you'll probably like this one, but I just don't feel like playing the same mostly-boring levels over and over.

Fez has some problems, but it is worth playing. The music and atmosphere are great, and many of the puzzles are a lot of fun to solve. But ultimately, it's the puzzle design that left me with the feeling that the game comes up short. While the beginning of the game has a lot of great puzzles, the later game is filled with challenges that are either frustrating or downright impenetrable. I solved some of them without really knowing why, while others required a lot of tedium. Then there are those that require you to crack codes. Since they all had basically the same solution once you cracked the codes (or looked them up online), this came off to me as a total cop-out. In short, Fez is well worth your time, but trying to solve the later puzzles requires so much drudgery that you'll put the game down before you ever get to all of them.

Dust is not a bad game. The art is high quality and everything is well-polished. However, it's also not a particularly good or interesting game. The combat and enemies are repetitive, and the story and character archetypes are almost identical to those found in so many RPGs (Quiet, noble protagonist, cutesy sidekick, sage-like mentor, flirty female characters who embarrass protagonist, etc.). This is a game that executes its limited vision very well, but there was really nothing here to hold my interest. Uninstalled after a couple of hours of play.