AR-K: The Great Escape
After playing the first 2 episodes I can safely say that this is the best episode so far!!! The developers certainly improved the game quality in both ways: technically and direction-wise. The following points sums up the following:
Pros:
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Gameplay quality much improved from first 2 episodes
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Puzzles more interesting
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Protagonist given more depth in character
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Story development much more natural
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Render quality improved
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This episode is much more bug free than previous 2 episodes
– Real player with 27.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Dark Humor Difficult Games.
It’s great when you come to a game and it’s a lot better than you thought it would be. While I enjoyed ar-k 1 and 2 and I do recommend those games to play first, this for me is a lot better - story, graphics, setting. The writing was very good and if you didn’t want to read everything, you didn’t need to click on that character’s bit of conversation but could come back to it if you wanted. I liked the humour, and it was witty in parts. It is the perfect balance of not just a good story which is vital in an adventure game but also good interactive gameplay.
– Real player with 18.4 hrs in game
AR-K
I received this game as a part of some bundle I bought way back.
I want to like this game. I wish the development team the best. But unfortunately I cannot recommend it, not even for $8 USD.
There are good, or at least decent, things here. There is some humor, including physical humor, that works. The actual voice lines are mostly fine, and what faults there are there in this audio itself are much more likely on the VA director and/or scriptwriters. Barring one jarring segment of lines I noticed in the 2nd episode where something obviously went wrong in recording or compression or something, but the team decided to use it anyway, which… fits with some of my suspicions about how out-of-time/energy/money they were feeling at the time.
– Real player with 16.5 hrs in game
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AR-K may be a study in how to have an okay story, okay graphics and good voice-acting and still come out with a bad game - soo manyy problems.
This title consists of the first two episodes of the game, “Gone with the Sphere” and “The Girl Who Wasn’t There”, and the second feels way better than the first. Still, we see a lot of beginner’s mistakes in the handiwork. Basically every aspect of the game is flawed in some way or another.
Note: Review was rewritten to fit Steam’s transparent character limit.
– Real player with 15.9 hrs in game
Bustories
If I could put a “soft” yes, I would. I got this game in a bundle and loved the graphics. I am a gal who has taken several long bus rides in her life. As well as talked to just about every stranger I meet. That’s why I was surprised that I found this game sort of…boring. It’s cute, I love the concept. The stories are weird, some are interesting. But honestly, at the end of the day I got up and walked away from this game several times. I wish I could save and play it slowly, but I don’t think there is a save option. It’s a game I can only see myself playing once, and I had to struggle to get through it. But yet again, cute. Some of the people are quite interesting. Just wish it was…easier to get through. I think even the simple addition of pressing the space bar and being able to hurry the stories along to your actual reading pace (versus the preset pace) would have made it a little more interesting. Reminded me of Animal Crossing sort of.
– Real player with 2.1 hrs in game
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Good Idea, Bad Execution
If the game was free I could recommend it, but frankly to me it’s not worth any money. I enjoyed the little things like getting to take care of yourself at bus stops like on a real trip and the changing scenery in the background for different locations which I didn’t expect. However the meat of the game, the reason we’re playing it, the strangers, went downhill pretty fast. For starters you can’t click to finish the dialog loading which drives me crazy since it was just slow enough to bother me and I like to use the skipping the whole dialog loading function on some games since everyone reads at different speeds. The characters were so vague and boring. There’s 7~8 strangers and each story is as bland as the next. It’s like the Dev picked 7~8 random stories as different as possible from each other, made an outline of said stories and called it good enough. The game must have been translated, because the dialog had bad grammar mistakes it was sent through google translate. The strangers also have the attention span of a squirrel… they all have A.D.D. and can’t focus or stay on a train of thought without randomly saying something else that somehow relates to another thing. That could be fun if the game wasn’t so lifeless. If you have to get it, then get it on sale, but it won’t be worth it.
– Real player with 1.6 hrs in game
Super Turbo Demon Busters!
Get Dead Shell on Android
Honestly the game itself is pretty addicting, i just don’t see why anyone would buy the version with less content.
Dead shell, fits the “games as a service” model, it got updates and with them more content.
while STD Busters gets 125 levels from whatever version they added on steam.
The only thing extra you might want to check out of curiosity are the two endings, as opposed to the mobile endless mode.
In any case both version work the same, a simplified rogue-lite almost converted to a clicker game.
– Real player with 13.8 hrs in game
Pros:
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A rogue-like inspired by Doom and ALIEN that pokes fun at some of the tropes
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Play through and collect marine, weapon, and demon cards to add variety to your session
Cons:
– Costly upgrade system over the more convenient level promotion from previous game
– You may end up fighting uphill battles by the moment you enter a map
– Poor exframe engineering
”Super Turbo Demon Busters!” may not have the conveniences from its predecessor, but there sure is some entertainment to be had here with no doubt. Because ”Super Turbo Demon Busters!” is a good rogue-like/Doom-satire to lose track of time with when you want to go blasting away demons methodically. So even if you end up fighting cybered up monsters who can tear your medic apart, you will still have a blast while doing so.
– Real player with 9.0 hrs in game
Bolt Riley, A Reggae Adventure
It would be in my best interest to give a glowing review since I want to see this game completed but I need to be honest about the progress made so far. I do realise this game is considered Early Access and I know the budget for this game is pretty small, and you should keep that in mind too (if you end up reading the in-depth review linked below), but ultimately, is it something I would recommend to my friends or the gaming public in its current state? Considering the artwork still needs some touching up, bugs were encountered way too frequently, the UI needs fixing and the first chapter is way too short, probably not. I’m hoping that Adventure Mob will eventually prove me wrong though, as I really want this game to succeed.
– Real player with 1.5 hrs in game
Bolt Riley is a well-intentioned but uniformly misguided proof of concept.
Presumably the developers naively underestimated the effort required to achieve the level of quality best suited to their vision. Instead, they opted to release an embarrassingly short and painfully butchered appetizer.
One should be easily inclined to forgive unrefined details in Early Access but no update in over a year severely burdens the game’s credibility.
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
Grottesco Absurdus
I expected this game to be a bizarre, surreal or funny experience. I play a l lot of games so short games wouldn’t have bothered me, but that wasn’t the issue. It was just not that fun.
Most of the gameplays are just trial and error and most of them involves just clicking stuff at the right timing.
The gameplay itself isn’t that much fun, and it is actually very short while the ride isn’t rich.
The most “mechanical” minigame is one where you click ‘n drag a character to dodge bullets. You need to survive for the score of 100 in order to consider it beaten. One game update claims it has been fixed to be possible, but it was still very difficult and unfun. The problem with it is how random it was, so you were basically depending on luck. You cannot respond fast enough as your character is slow and mildly unresponsive.
– Real player with 2.6 hrs in game
This is a fun little game consisting of weird mini games where you have to discover the rules of each mini game yourself. It took me a bit longer than what I initially thought it should, as all the achievements are missable, therefore I suggest you use a guide to unlock the achievements, as if you look for them yourself it will take quite a while to complete.
I am a big fan of these types of games and I have played all the games from this specific developer and I loved all of the games. I recommend that you guys play this game and if you liked it, then get some of the other games from this developer. Most of the games are short, but definitely worth it.
– Real player with 1.8 hrs in game
The Book of Unwritten Tales 2
A charming, hilarious and fun adventure with the perfect balance of puzzle difficulty. This point and click has my favourite puzzle design because they are not too hard to figure out, but also not too easy. The characters are unique, interesting and lively, and the graphics are gorgeous without putting too much strain on a computer (as a laptop gamer, I especially appreciate this as there is nothing sadder to me than a game I really want to play with specs that my computer can just about manage with lags). As in the first game, Wilbur is an absolute treasure, Ivo is as great a female character as ever and Critter is quirky, sweet and loyal. Nate has grown more likable in this game as well as gained a fair amount of depth and development.
– Real player with 92.3 hrs in game
If you played ‘The Book of Unwritten Tales (1)" you will probably enjoy this sequel. It brings back all the main characters from the first game and introduces a few new ones.
The textures and rigging are a little better than the first and the mechanics and walk paths are a little smoother but I still found that some of the walk paths (especially when you are switching between characters) are a little weird. You don’t have to do any pixel hunting because you can highlight all items that you can interact with so it’s hard to miss something. Some of the puzzles are not very logical to solve but most of them are reasonable.
– Real player with 61.5 hrs in game
The Journey Down: Chapter One
Overall, this is a solid P&C Adventure game, with reasonably logical puzzles once you immerse, and no Guide-Dang-It solutions- it’s possible to work out all the solutions given the information available in the game. That said, there was at least one puzzle that refused several plausible solutions in favor of what seems to me to be a less-plausible (though more amusing) one, and several in which I knew the concept of the solution, but there wasn’t much of an indication about how to actually do that. Plus the traditional complex “solve it because it’s there” puzzle that turns out to massively help your protagonist progress in a somewhat illogical way, but that’s so common in the genre that it might actually be considered a lack if it weren’t present. :-J There is the usual complete refusal by the protagonist to clean up after themselves- I wish more of these games would let us give people their stuff back once it’s not needed any more. Hopefully, there will be uses for the items still in Bwana’s pockets at the end of the chapter, instead of the traditional “lost everything during the cutscene” trope.
– Real player with 6.7 hrs in game
This title really surprised me with how well it was made. I came in having no expectations. I had bought the game as part of a bundle on indiegala, and was only really going to try it out while waiting for another (and much larger in size) game to download, and was frankly blown away right from the start.
You start off in dire straights with your electricity having been shut off because you hadn’t paid your bills for a while. This means you can’t make any money because the pump in your gas station that you own an operate relies on the power to run. However with some cheeky DYI smarts, you’re soon back to normal… If normal means no customers, which… it does.
– Real player with 6.1 hrs in game