Kona
An interactive story/adventure that has a touch of puzzles, free roam exploration, and mild survival mechanics. It excells with its story-telling, its atmosphere, and its straight forward mechanics. It’s not for everyone, as it’s a bit short, mildly challenging, and not overly scary or exciting.
This is an interactive story first and foremost. The survival and puzzle elements take a back seat, and are more supplementary to the atmosphere than actual gameplay. The difficulty of the game across the board is mild, something more accessible to non-gamers or low-octane adventurers.
– Real player with 18.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Crowdfunded Open World Games.
Welcome To Kona
This is where adventure takes Carl, our hero, who is entrusted with finding out who and why vandalises the properties of the local industrialist called Hamilton. Not long after the first couple of minutes of driving Carl has an accident and he is knocked out for a short while. As he regains consciousness behind the wheel he notices how the environment suddenly turned to white from green - snow quickly arrived in the form of a blizzard.
Now, reaching the general store will be our initial main objective. We find out more once we are there and we can also refuel our vehicle as the store also acts as a gas station. As we look at our map we can see there are a lot of houses and cabins we can visit so we can immediately get back behind the wheel and start our investigation in a town where residents is what’s very difficult to come by.
– Real player with 16.2 hrs in game
Maia
Been a year that I last wrote something about this game, and considering that the updates for the game come frequently, I think it’s time to update the review as well.
Last year I called it “playable”. This year I can actually call it entertaining. What’s most entertaining, at least for me, is that the colonists are actually very human. Allow me to explain.
In most games, you have people that feel more like worker drones. They will go from place to place, build, mine, craft, sleep, get hurt, go to the medic bay, build, mine, craft… The “people” here feel actually like people. And they don’t want to be treated like worker drones. They get stressed out if all they do is build and work.
– Real player with 101.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Crowdfunded Sci-fi Games.
The inspirations for this game are both obvious and subtle, influencing how it looks, feels and plays, or rather how you think you should be playing it.
It swings from a low pace base builder with an enormously detailed simulation behind every little thing you see and can interact with to a frantic struggle for survival as the dangers of Maia strike the unprepared mercilessly. Prepare to be unprepared and learn by failing.
If you prefer to learn from the mistakes of others - or perhaps boast about your most successful survival or expansion tips and strategies, visit the official wiki and help it grow.
– Real player with 37.0 hrs in game
Last Year
EDIT 5 (+990h): $0.49 USD BUY IT NOW! 100% RECOMMENDED
EDIT 4 (+970h): Right now as I am writing this review there is a 90% discount. ONLY 2 DOLLARS. FOR THIS PRICE IT IS 100% RECOMMENDED TO BUY THIS GAME. There are more people playing and it’s a very good game! (30/10/2020)
EDIT 3 (+963h): Well, MUCH has happened since my last edit (I’m a LY Mod now!) and it’s just that right now the game isn’t getting updates because Elastic Games has run out of money. All the devs are gone and only the owners are left, which are looking for a publisher to continue developing the game and to release it in consoles. In Halloween we will have news if they have found it, apart from an update (not content) of the game. Right now, I do NOT recommend buying the game, maybe it goes Free to Play. (01/10/2020)
– Real player with 1007.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Crowdfunded Team-Based Games.
I’ve held off of leaving a review on this game for a while now because i just felt no need to leave a review if I’m being totally honest, but I’m here to leave to you what this game is and what i think about it.
i picked up this game and played through beta as well as nightmare almost everyday, if you bring in my numbers from beta and nightmare id say i would be close to 2000 hours in total or around. I know this game inside out and i know a lot of the problems.
the first thing i wanna clear up here is a lot of hate about the in store transactions, i just want to say, they had no intention of adding a store at all, it was the community that on dev streams constantly asked for ways to support the game and thus, the store was released.
– Real player with 541.6 hrs in game
Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition
Sunless Skies
**I seduced a woman who’s head was a jeweled skull while there was a spider nestled inside my eyeball. It was
! great fun, but sadly it took
! way too fuckin long to get there.**
Who is this game for?
If you like Britishness, the possibility of a decent story, nice environments or you like mildly spooky games AND you’re either willing to cheat or your time isn’t valuable.
Gameplay
Looking for diamonds in the rough.
– Real player with 249.8 hrs in game
My feelings towards this game are many and complicated. For background, Sunless Sea is one of my favourite games ever…and I can also totally understand why some people might absolutely hate it. Sunless Skies is in many ways an improvement over Sea, and yet, for me at least, it hasn’t quite recaptured the magic of Sea, and I’m not entirely sure I can explain why.
For people who haven’t played Sea, both it and Skies are games about exploring a world that is sometimes bizarre, sometimes charming, and sometimes terrifying. Both games have some of the best writing that I’ve seen in video games, with excellent worldbuilding. And both games are very slow-paced. A lot of time in these games is spent travelling from point A to point B, with only the occasional combat or random event to break up the travel. Depending on the person, this can either be a chill and relaxing experience, or an incredibly tedious one.
– Real player with 118.8 hrs in game
Knock-knock
Don’t look at the Metacritic reviews.
It’s hard to explain this minimalist game, but it definitely has something about it. A very special experience that completely justifies the whole mystery surrounding it. Don’t read anything about this game. Simply get it and play it if you’re into subtle creepy games, if you’re into urban legends, creepypasta - this is a lot like it, but on a superior level of quality and attention. This is my favorite type of horror. The entire game is like a weird lucid dream yet, not where you are in total control. There are visitors.
– Real player with 30.1 hrs in game
Knock Knock is Dark Souls meets The Stanley Parable which plays hide and seek with Amensia: The Dark Descent. According to the game one should play at night in the dark, alone (and most likely with headphones on).
The biggest Steam complaints I found in the reviews was this game was repetitive and frustrating. What RPG game, for example, Dark Souls, is not repetitive and frustrating, and just because Knock Knock has no blood splatter and gut spillage that does not mean one does not die, which happens more often then one is lead to believe. (When one dies, it is done without fanfare.) This of course leads to the entire campaign having to be redone from the beginning which is both frustrating and repetitive just like in Dark Souls (and screaming at the computer scene in utter frustration can occur). Another comparison to be noted between the two is where as the player collects souls in Dark Souls, in Knock Knock the player collects time. Each campaign though not timed until the much later levels is timed based. The player must collect time to reach the dawn of the day either by surviving the night hours by watching the slow moving clock or finding a “clock” which speeds up time (found only by turning on lights and remembering). Running into the monsterous “guests” (some of whom will hunt the player down), let into the house through breaches of the dimensional fabric (which need to be closed or can be walked through) will lose the player time or their life. This whole game is one way, no level can be repeated, only the entire game once an ending is reached.
– Real player with 20.9 hrs in game
Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut
August 22nd 2017: W2 Review by Tandberg_J (steam account name) (tandbergj@gmail.com )
Summary:
“The absolute dream for fans of the classic style of Fallout 1, and Fallout 2, and it’s still a good game even if you are just casually familiar with Bethesda’s Fallout reboots.”
This review is for the Director’s Cut Edition, which in 2017, has been mostly debugged, and is very stable. I play on a PC for the record, and can’t comment on the console ports. But, I’ve played and beat the original PC version as well, before the director’s cut was released, so I’ve seen the game’s development and refinement. (I recommend learning how to edit your save game files, [they are plain text .xml files,] as this allows you to avoid some glitches that might affect your game in purely mundane minor ways, and you can avoid little annoying bugs like not getting credit for a small side quest) Also, you can edit your characters and give them some clothing and aesthetics that are not available in the vanilla game. But this is optional of course. Also there is a huge mod scene for this game, which I can’t really say I’ve tried.
– Real player with 393.8 hrs in game
Did they pull it off?
I don’t quite know what I was expecting when I first backed the Kickstarter. Wasteland was a beloved classic, my first proper PC game, and it showed me just what games were really capable of. Problems with more than one solution, missions that could be failed without forcing a game over, the player’s responsibility to build a balanced team, the combination of descriptive paragraphs with the limited graphics to paint a more vivid picture; the experience blew my fragile little mind at the time. A contemporary title can do many or even all of those things, but whether they can match that feeling - the impression that I’m playing something truly groundbreaking - is a much more loaded question.
– Real player with 165.0 hrs in game