I thought I was getting tired of HOGs, but it turns out I'm just getting tired of Artifex Mundi's HOGs. This game is by MumboJumbo and it's fantastic.

The strongest part of this game is the story. Story is very important for me and boring story is the major reason why I'm getting tired of Artifex Mundi's HOGs. But this game just gives narrative and builds atmosphere really well. I'm pretty immersed in the world and because of that some of the old school jumpscares actually got me to jump out of my chair. Interestingly enough I didn't get annoyed at it cuz it indeed builds atmosphere that made it justified.

What I also love in this game is that HOG's gameplay ties into the story. It's not just a mandatory mechanic that you have to do to find the item to progress the game. In the game the usable items can be hiding in the scene itself, although sometimes it hides too well that I got a bit annoyed that I'm stuck. Thankfully hints are not rare and the game doesn't have achievements so I can freely use them. Sometimes the killer will require you to collect a specific number of items so the scenes themselves become a huge HOG game. The most brilliant part is the ending where you search for all the victims' rings in the killers' base. It just ties in the story so well and as I find more and more rings I actually got some shivers as just thinking about how many lives it represent got me a bit sad and creeped out.

I would definitely recommend this game as it's really rare to find a HOG with actual good story, and I had a great time.

Yes, I played it for the free game and I actually got Moon of Madness on my first try which is nice. I wonder if it considers achievements and stuff when rolling the chance since being the usual myself I got everything I could on the first run.

It's quite an interesting game tho. Going into it I thought it's a horror game since I saw the tag on the store page and was kinda scared. It ended up being more of an atmospheric creepy experience, which I like quite a lot. Basically it's an ARG game where you try to find the password to the next level with the 3 pictures the game provides you(and perhaps audios too? ). Each level reveals an audio log of an astronaut and a picture of files and stuff. The voice acting is pretty nice and the story is cool. So yeah. Overall I like the game and since it's free why not try it out?

I forgot who recommended me this game but I talked about losing motivation to play games and someone said this game is pretty straight forward and nice. They're not wrong and this game is pretty good and I tried hard to like it, but since I'm super bad at pong the game in the end just became a bit too frustrating. And yes, this game is basically pong with monsters. In this game each level has a soul room where you can have a chance to collect souls, and souls basically acts as your restart chance. When you die you can either choose to restart the level or use a soul to continue and get a nice ability. The problem with that is you need 4 souls in order to unlock the final stage, and since I'm bad at the game I ended up having to restart the same levels a lot sometimes, and that's annoying. Further more, in the castle level you can potentially screw yourself over and create an unbeatable area because walls can be broken. I really think that they should respawn walls if you lose a life, or if they want to balance it respawn certain numbers of wall tiles each death. I did like the game at first as it's quick to get into and the mechanic is interesting, so I'd still recommend anyone to try it out since it's pretty innovative.

This is one of the games that I put off on getting achievements but in the end I just decided to call it beaten and done instead of torturing myself, because the core gameplay of this game really isn't great. It's ok for the first 3 runs or so since you can do a run for each character, but after that it just becomes really boring since character movements are generally slow and maps are randomly generated so you have to explore all paths and backtrack. On other games it would be fine but since you'll only be playing a single time but this is a roguelite game so it expects you to play over and over to unlock new things. The concept is very unique tho. I like that there's events that give you traits and events locked behind traits, and in the end your character will have a story depending on what traits it has. It's a shame that there's a limit on how many places you can visit. I would've like a free roam mode where there's no days limit and you can fully explore the land. And the arena although is a decent idea for players to continue playing their previous run heroes, it just isn't enjoyable because of the combat system.

Overall, I would say that I enjoy the game. It's good art and music that's lovely for the first few playthroughs. Beyond that I would not recommend unless you really like the combat system.

At first I loved it because of its interesting mechanic, challenging levels and uninterrupted gameplay flow. But then the levels got harder than I can enjoy because of the randomness of the trucks and it being unforgiving. I especially struggled on 8-10, 9-7 and the boss level. I swear, branches are my nemesis. I always struggle with levels that have branches. I tried putting myself in the front of the truck where I'd duck under the branches but sometimes it works and sometimes I just die randomly? In one case I almost got to the end a random bump on the truck I'm at just sent me flying to my death, which tilted me a lot. The final boss is also a bad design choice because I got to the top instinctively jumped on the green button, but then just sent flying and I was super confused as to what I was supposed to do because I didn't know I'll have to do it a second time. Looked it up on youtube and apparently a lot of people struggled because they didn't even know you should step on the green button because all the mechanics have been teaching them not to touch anything that's not truck. I ended up using this guide because I just don't feel like going up there twice when I'm already struggling going up there the first time.

Overall I did like the game, although it overstayed its welcome.

I have postponed on writing this review for over a month now just because I have so many strong emotions and conflicted opinions about this game that I'm uncertain I can't fully express them through words. I loved the previous game so much that I pre-ordered this game(I very rarely pre-order games), but the direction they went for in this game is just not what I liked in the original. There will be spoilers ahead, so beware.

To establish a memorable videogame franchise you have to have several things. One is unique and constant gameplay that improves and adds new things each game, but didn't remove the old core that made it unique in the first place. Two is distinct and relatable characters that fans can latch onto. Third is great story and setting that players can immerse in. Ori 1 has all three of those. It really looked promising and I just feel like it could be a fantastic franchise. However, in Ori 2 they threw the first 2 away.

The most unique thing about Ori 1 is the self-made save point, and really is something I felt like they could've made into an iconic mechanic throughout the franchise. When I think about Ori 1, I'll think of the intense escape sequences, beautiful visuals and fantastic music but really the save point makes the game so great. It gives player control over where to respawn and if they failed to do that it's all on them. Instead in Ori 2 it's auto-save points where I do not know how far back I'll spawn at. And to make it so it doesn't get frustrating the devs put wayy too many save points so most of the times if I die I don't really care, which sometimes makes me just go wreckless to cheese to the next point. While other times the save points made it so I have to do tedious things before getting to the part where I'll die so it's just annoying. And don't even get me started on the combat. This game is centered around the combat yet it's just not that great. Normal enemies are usually fine, but the bosses are just awful. A lot of them do not have great hitboxes since only part of their body like their head counts(who thought that was a good idea?!), and sometimes your attack doesn't hit their hitbox for some reason yet you still get hurt by their impact damage which is so unfair. Another thing is you can only equip 3 abilities, and since you'll want a basic attack one slot is always taken up by the sword or hammer, and the heal ability is a must have since hitboxes are so bad that only leaves 1 ability option left. That honestly wastes a lot of potential and I barely played around with other abilities as I can't and don't find the need to. It's just unnecessary hassle. And can we talk about the heal ability itself? I'm both glad and dislike that it exist since if it weren't for it I probably wouldn't be able to finish the game. It's such a bandage fix to the bigger problem of unfair hitbox and heavy hitting bosses tho. You just stand still and hold the button for a few second then you convert energy to health, and since energy always respawn there's no strategy there. Honestly I would like them to make it so bosses hit lighter, and also all minions that give you health and energy are like the fish in frog fight where it's 1 hit kill and they spawn more often. That's a much better risk and reward system and more fun to play around than just standing still for a few seconds.

As for the story, I don't know if it's just me, but I find myself not caring about the owl as much as I'd like to. The intro to the game really didn't grasp me as much as the first one, and since we're separated from the owl for the majority of the game and we didn't even play with him for that long before he died I'm just like: "Am I suppose to feel something? But I don't really know the owl and don't really care tho......." I have no idea why it's like that, but my speculation would be that we didn't get to play as the owl in the intro. In the first game, we played Naru both when she discovered Ori, and when she's getting food with Ori. I feel like the act of controlling a character really connects the player to it, as the player has as much time as they want to observe the character and see just how cute he/she is(yes I'm talking about the jiggly belly of Naru <3). We barely get to control Ku in this game. My suggestion would be that perhaps when Ori defeats a boss or get to a certain checkpoint we change to playing Ku, and try to survive as Ku. Perhaps make Ku have some escape sequences so that one, we get to like Ku more and two, when we switch to Ori we get the urgency to go save him. We now know that he's in real danger and that's much better than when we know nothing and can just afford to run around. In the end the favorite character for me is actually the villain. I cried 2 times(start and finish) in Ori 1, and I only cried once in this game, when they revealed the villain's backstory. I just feel so bad for him. And contrary to some people, I actually don't mind the ending. Tho now they'll need to prove to me that Ori 3(if there is one) will be worth playing since pretty much the only thing driving me to buy the game is gone now.

Although there's so much negativity in my review, I still wouldn't say this is a bad game. Visuals are as stunning as ever, soundtracks are still amazing. Maybe the hype just got to me, since I love the first game so much. I'm sure if people go into the game not knowing much about the first game they'll enjoy it quite a lot, but for me this game is a huge disappointment.

Perhaps I've been gradually getting tired of HOG games? I have found that my patience with them are lowering and in turn the scores and enjoyment of the games are lowering as well. It's just that every HOG game seems the same. Boring and cliche story with bad jumpscares and bad voice acting. Gameplay is those usual puzzles with HOG scenes. Normally tho I would be fine since it's a great time waster. But I do not appreciate games that expect you to play it twice to get all achievements while it is a linear story experience. The game has HOGs, and then they have domino games. You can either choose to play HOGs or domino, but not both. And there's achievements for finishing all HOGs and all dominos. That is really annoying. On top of that I accidentally did a HOG in one third in my second playthrough(since you get less dominos goals if you find some objects first) so I had to do a third playthrough. It's just very boring. I honestly thought of just quitting the game. lol But eh, I still did it.

I think this game is about simulating life and your goal is to kill all life? And apparently it's a recreation of a old simulation. Tho I think this game doesn't do a very good job at telling you all that. The how to play button literally calls out wiki. Does the game expect us to read the wiki to know how to play? What's the point of recreating something if you didn't improve on it? In the end I just played on easy and it became sorta tedious to just pause and use single square to clear everything. I feel like I wouldn't enjoy the game even if it has tutorials but eh, I suppose it's kinda fun for a few minutes watching all the particles go on its own for a bit.

Growing up playing what I consider to be real "Mahjong", I've always consider these to merely be go-fish. Don't get me wrong, people do play this in real life. Mainly in night markets where you can earn prices and stuff, but to me this is not real Mahjong, and always raise an eyebrow most westerners say: "Isn't mahjong just this matching game? " So going into this game, I know that I won't like it, and sure enough that's what happened. A major problem with this game tho is we have infinite shuffles. Doesn't that make everything meaningless as you can just keep shuffling until you get the right pair?