Pտka 最近的评测

In the meme, from Gamerdad's perspective video games can quickly become a complex array of inputs and outputs interacting with the player. Rulesets, sounds, music & graphics all combining into an overwhelmingly confusing cacophony of stimuli, designed to delight the player and bewilder the uninformed.

While Gamerdad is shown to be invested & caring, others might not. A player becomes immersed into a zone only to have it ruined by an outside observer, perhaps a parent or partner who just didn't get it, delivering a harangue, more lengthy and boring than even this review, about how muchly you are wasting time or money or whatever.


A video game developer's job is to convince potential players why they should play their game over others. A successful video game should be able to convey its appeal, the mechanics and the basic gameplay loops almost immediately, while continuing to introduce new ideas and extrinsic motivations for the player to suddenly grasp and be excited for.

Extrinsic motivations are external motivators provided by others to encourage people to better perform tasks. These can come in the form of both rewards and punishments. So you don't care about getting the achievements but you really REALLY want that high score, or all the collectables. Or you don't care about beating a level as fast as possible but understand that when the timer ticks down to zero you are punished by having to lose a life and restart.

Playing Wilmot's Warehouse you quickly realise it is not a video game. The developer has failed to provide extrinsic motivation to complete it. The initial intrinsic (internal) motivation might be there. You might be mildly autistic (totally not me) with a driving need for organising cute pixel art into personal sets of nitpicking glorious organisation hoping this will fulfil you.

It will not.

Hollow Ponds studio has failed to realise Wilmot's Warehouse into a video game. There are now a great plethora of fantastic indie titles available. Such numbers indicate a need for independent game studios to stand out from the crowd.


The beginning is great! The concept of arranging minimalist pixel art around a warehouse is introduced in a tidy tutorial, inviting the player to sort four stock items into two sets labelled 'winter' and 'hats', before throwing a comical curveball by introducing a fifth stock item, a winter hat! Highlighting an intended equivocal interpretation of set theory.

Of course there are no wrong answers here and upon completing the tutorial Wilmot spawns inside a larger warehouse, free of labels. You are given your first stock items to sort as you see fit and a timer begins counting down. The immediate goal presents a challenge to form your own dynamic organisation method and understand it. Once the timer stops, a canopy springs open to reveal your colleagues, each demanding different quantities of items. Upon completion you are rewarded stars used to purchase upgrades.

New stock items arrive establishing the gameplay loop along with the narrative. Your boss, CJ, rewards you with motivational posters that knowingly condescend you, played for laughs, seemingly attempting to say something deeper about the absurdity of playing a video game about warehouse organisation, or perhaps just a jibe at corporate workplace attitudes in general. However failing to meet your colleagues demands will reveal a damning poster from CJ, thus garnering a reasonable assumption that these posters will continue and can be used to measure your failrate towards an eventual game over.


Wilmot's Warehouse performs all this well, the only bug I encountered was a softlock requiring a simple reload to fix. A lack of rebindable keys is completely unforgivable in modern video games and the replayability is a purely tedious achievement hunt, more about repeating new games instead of actually completing another run. There is no new game+ nor alternative endings.

And that's the gameplay loop for the next 8 hours. Mechanically, Wilmot's Warehouse offers little expansion beyond the initial tutorial, simply tasking you with fresh sets of four new items to organise every loop. The rewarded stars can only be used to purchase upgrades, such as more warehouse space, or abilities to carry more items at once and rotate them.

While these upgrades play into the Sokoban nature and the Tetroid, snakey way Wilmot manoeuvres around the increasingly busy warehouse, the upgrades feel more like overcoming arbitrary limitations set by the devs with no other purpose than making the task of gaining more stars easier which can be used for further upgrades to be rewarded with more stars for the purpose of... yeah.


Narratively the game says nothing deep about warehouse employment, the most exciting tidbit to be found in CJ's motivational posters is a dubious King's Quest reference. Despite teasing potential, these posters paired with the game mechanics offer only a sense of an opportunity neglected. Never striving to forge neither the commentary nor complexity that other workplace games successfully managed, despite a strong initial first impression.

Nor is Wilmot's Warehouse a warehouse simulator akin to a workplace sim. One can speculate whether it is a purposeful design choice of Hollow Ponds to embrace the monotony, repetition and lack of accountability to be found within the workplace. If so, then they have done this at the complete expense of creating vibrant, engaging mechanics with a growing narrative.

I recognise that there is a zone one can enter performing real life work, a state of zen and flow that comes with successfully performing the job, one I also recognised at times while playing WW. My realisation that this game came so close, with so much potential to further explore, only served to confound my growing disappointment. I can think of dozens of directions the devs could have taken far more interesting then the zero options explored.


Where Wilmot's Warehouse completely fails is precisely when players soon realise that it's going nowhere. Have you ever tried to not play a game? I don't mean press the exit button, rather, just let the game play out without you interacting with it at all. Wilmot's Warehouse will just continue regardless. More stock arrives, colleagues demand goods to be delivered, timers click down. You won't gain stars but you don't lose either. No game over screen. Not even any more damning warnings from CJ telling you off, just the purposefully condescending motivational posters, a mere pretense of reward, that unlock anyway as you reach predefined amounts of different stock within the warehouse. Y'know, for laughs.

The boxes continue to stack up with no purpose other than to get in the way. There is little cathartic release where you can finally empty out masses of winter hats. All this will happen until you reach 200 items of stock, then the endgame credits roll. No failstate, no real winstate either, whether you chose to interact or not. Nail meets coffin.

And finally, for once, that outside observer watching me 'play' Wilmot's Warehouse will be correct. I have wasted my time or money or whatever.

If you have played and enjoyed Cosmic Express or Train Valley then you might also enjoy this. Personally I struggle to decide which of these 3 games is the worse and my opinion on any given day might differ from tomorrows. Today it is Railbound.

If you like you can check Railbound's Steam achievements from the storepage to tell a story of how quickly this game turns from playable to not. Only 5% have completed the game. Most players give up around World 4, which is where the 'What if... aha!' moments stop and the tedious trial and error begins.

The soundtrack is splendid!

EDIT 6 months later: It seems there is now a bug with the recent Steam store update, whereby clicking on the achievements page fails to show the percentage of achievements completed. Thus I will clarify those numbers for you right here, right now.

42% of Steam players have completed the base levels of world 4.
25% of Steam players have completed the base levels of world 6.

There are 12 levels. It's worth noting that there are bonus levels in each world, however progress is locked behind completing all of the base levels. There has been an update to Railbound adding workshop support however I have little interest in trying it personally.

The photosensitivity warning came AFTER fuzzing and stylistically glitching between three company logo splash screens which were obvs far more important than someone having a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ seizure or two.

The mouse acceleration made me feel drunk and was obvious from the main menu. I couldn't rebind movement keys to my preferred TFGH. The motion blur was the first thing I noticed when loading a new game, quickly followed by laglaglaglaglaglaglag.

I'm sure the devs are working on a fix or two, but I installed this demo to attempt to enter a speedrunning competition, under the assumption that the game was playable. Not to test it.

So, Metal Eden ran like crap from the opening splash screen and for the entire 5mins on my averagely competent system and I promptly gave up before even getting to shoot something, and was delighted to reclaim my stolen SSD space.

Review 2 year later after 1 hour playtime. Currently on sale.

I got to the boss puzzle thing at the end of the first level. Cue unskippable cutscene, then bug, reload, cutscene replays, bugged out again. Then crash. Uninstalled.

Review at 95 hours. Currently on sale.

You've never played a game like this before & never will again.

It's not at all like The Witness, No Man's Sky or... anything else. If anything it is a whimsical version of what Myst attempted 30 years ago.

There are no quest markers or immediate objectives. Please dive in unprepared & blind with controller in hand.

Thanks, Pün̤ka

Review after 107 hours. Currently dirt cheap on sale. £0.85! Demo included.

Poor ingame progression.

Simply put, whatever you build early game becomes redundant once you unlock better tools.

Making simple adjustments, such as moving everything left a bit, is an unlockable that comes way too late.

Early on a text pop up announces that "THIS IS NOT AN IDLER" without actually arguing as to why it is not. There is zero jeopardy & once you have modified your factory to meet the next goal you can happily AFK with a few swift hand shandys if you like.

Would play it more if there was either a reason to not idle or a purer sandbox mode.

Some positive notes: The music is chill, you can play it in a browser which I thought was cool (altho probably will lag eventually), is moddable & the premise is excellent enough for me to still be interested in the upcoming sequel.


Thanks, Pün̤ka

Review after 3309.5 hours. Currently on sale.


Single player.
Mouse/controller only.
Workshop support.
Customisable gameplay options.
Ingame tutorial with no wiki needed.
No demo.
No MTX.
Sequel announced.
Involves a lot of maths.


Addictive, difficult and RNG heavy. I consider Slay the Spire to be terribly balanced with an especially brutal start. Many losses after 5 minutes of gameplay. Many losses after 90mins simply down to rotten luck.

You pick a character with their own pool of cards & navigate 50 rounds (or y'know, 5 then dead). A round could be a text event with various outcomes, a shop, or a fight against a semi-random pool of enemies, including bosses and mini-bosses. After a fight you are given a choice of 3 cards to add to your deck. From there you mostly make do with whatever you are offered & press onwards.

There is no one size fits all. Enemies will have unique game mechanics that never show up again ingame that you must be prepared for. That said, at the hardest difficulty you generally aim for the few best combos.

There are 20 difficulty levels that you can unlock as you progress & I advise you play until you are no longer enjoying losing so often, then pick a lower difficulty that you can chill with. The moment it becomes a trial & error festival of playing the randomness to your advantage is when the game becomes tedious.

The art style is not my cuppa however the music is fantastic. Apparently the IOS version is buggy making PC the best way to play. Some bugs I however encountered on PC are weirdly long loading times when starting the game & music disappearing when save scumming. Otherwise it runs smoothly as expected.

Is generally difficult to nail down this games appeal & I hope the sequel has a demo so that perhaps more people will give STS the blast it deserves. While popular & (over) rated none of my friends seem to have tried it.

Yeah. A good game that I enjoy :)


Thanks, Pün̤ka

Install free version.
Free version is awful.
Uninstall.
Cannot remove from my Steam library.
Have to reinstall to then remove from Steam library.
Reinstalling...
Leave negative review because I am bitter about this experience.
Remove from library.
Uninstall.
Still lacks Vtube avater.
Draws a stickman in MS Paint.
Profit.

Cool soundtrack!

I spawn on this tiny island. Everywhere is war-torn. There is danger everywhere and one wrong step could seal my fate. It's hard but I tell myself "I have a chance". 98%. I like those odds. I fail. I can try again but every time I do I fail. Again. And again. It's like my fate is a pre-determined path I can never escape from. I want to die but can't kill myself. I try to live. But die anyway.

But my friends somehow manage to save me and drag me home. I call them my friends but when I wake from my unconciousness I find that they've removed my limbs and attached me to a machine. I am now literally part of the machine. All my humanity sapped. Forever to be looked down upon by society. Barely alive and built only to survive. An alien in an alien world.

But enough about my daily life...