Nexus 最近的评测

I see dog, I pet dog.

Really enjoyed the first, but had a lot of difficulty enjoying this one. It felt shallow and really lacking in depth. The new characters are complete stereotypes which could be fine, but we're delving into their backstories and supposed to empathize and like them when even at the end they're still basically cardboard cutouts. Their stories are bland, saw the "twists" coming, and just interrupted the gameplay too much in a way the original didn't.

Improvements on the original:
- The AI is massively improved. There are variable difficulties which, your mileage may vary, but while they can be pretty smart there are obvious loopholes to exploit.
- Better indication of objectives especially clean percentage (although something for that last 5% would have been so much more useful).
- Vision system is fantastic much more realistic and gives you a few moments before you're fully spotted.
- You can manually save (in specific places) thank ♥♥♥♥.

Cons and issues:
- Some areas with blood had so much clutter that layered over top making it hard to see whether I had fully cleaned it due to the isometric camera and poor placement. God help you if you're 99% you might as well restart the whole level because you are not finding it... unless the graphics bug out and the small dot suddenly becomes a large smear. Wish I knew how to trigger that on purpose, but it would happen completely randomly.
- Artistic style makes me want to claw my eyes out, everything is so blurred half the time and it just makes it plain ugly to look at. Definite backstep from the clean, crisp style of the original. I get they wanted to use a different style for story reasons but this ain't it.
- Each character has their own playstyle, which is great! But you didn't get to choose because of how they wanted to tell the story. Story should not get in the way of playing a good game and it did here for me.
- Lack of ways to deal with enemies in meaningful ways. You could hide, you could run, you can even knock them over! But I wouldn't say it was improved upon. The change in AI means they stay extra alert for quite a long, boring time before sound distractions work again if they've previously been alerted. I would have liked to see some variety like, smokescreens, use an animal to distract. Just something more :/

Overall: I can't recommend it over the original. The improvements just do not outweigh the frustrating parts. It felt like every step forward was followed up by a step back and like it lost itself in becoming kind of a generic stealth game rather than something special. Massive QOL improvements didn't change the game itself and honestly the last mission in the DLC tilted me so hard from thinking anything positive at all.

DLC thoughts:
- It's clearly not playtested fully. Numerous bugs and issues with clipping NPCs and some sight through wall issues. Lost a couple body parts on the train because they fell through the ground but when I left and came back they were there again.
- Completely disregards its own style. The entire game you play in a smooth-plan-your-actions-carefully style and suddenly you have an unskippable pixel perfect timed challenge... at least for keyboard users. I tried easily a dozen times on the slide and couldn't do it, but as soon as I switched to controller it was one and done. That's ridiculous.
- The timed badges may be optional but if you're a completionist it's terrible. You will barely make it after a number of tries, it is definitely designed to cut it far too close and is immensely frustrating.
- The dinosaurs were pretty well done though I did not like the methods to "deal" with them as I found it a bit finicky maneuvering things on keyboard.

It's cute, but very short. Voice acting, character designs are pretty well done, but there's no substance. Despite being called Duck Detective, and being the main character, the game gives you nearly nothing about him and you get 1 case to solve, that's it. Would make a cute short kids game, but that doesn't seem to be the target audience given the deduction logic has some major stretches tl;dr not worth the full price.

They did a lot of framework it just needs more content than it currently has, 10 or so deduction puzzles and 5 rooms. Pretty standard gameplay, find an item or dialogue, receive a clue word to use to make a deduction. ad-lib your way to solve the specific puzzle. You can solve the puzzle without finding all clue words as long as you've found the right ones.

I felt a number of the puzzles were a bit of a stretch. Non-spoiler: Some of the dialogue is not repeated so although you can meta-game the answer (no consequence for guessing!) it's not ever explicitly stated. I'd be fine with that given it's a deductive reasoning type of game, but it really didn't vibe well when 99% of a puzzle is straightforward with 1 dangling piece that's a complete guess (and you can actually just brute force it) which happened three times for me because the sole clue seemed to be the proximity of a character to an object regarding the action taking place.

For the spoiler: Kidnapping vs murder, zero context other than Sophie is gone. The bus as the place she's been placed. There's literally nowhere else I guess? I guessed that because the character I thought responsible was standing in that area. That's a hard stretch imo. The blackmail subplot, the puzzle that starts it pretty blank. So it's also a stretch because why would it even factor in? I thought that puzzle would be about the accomplices at first. Also severely disappointed I couldn't hand out consequences to the blackmailer. That's a crime too.

Overall, I liked the concept as I love this genre and I'm happy to see where this developer goes, but I can't really recommend it for most unless it's either more fleshed out or on sale.

Plenty of others have compared this to a more popular game and it's completely true. As a direct comparison, they took the aesthetic and missed the larger point of what made that game good entirely. Unironically the parody version The Looker was a better copy of the spirit of The Witness.

On it's own merits, this isn't even a good puzzle game. It's possible to brute force every single puzzle for one. For second, there were multiple instances where the game taught you how to solve a certain type of puzzle and then seemingly threw those rules out the window for the sake of being "hard" (looking at the puzzle from the side instead of the front with no hint to do so in some cases). I'm sure there's some logic behind it, but even after brute forcing a solution sometimes I was just left confused. Thirdly, some puzzles *must* be failed in order to figure out the answer (section with buttons that are only colored when you press them). A good puzzle game should be able to have consistent rules that can be solved without what is essentially meta-gaming or trial and error.

You do sometimes have to use the environment to solve your puzzle, but it's so uninspired as it's literally just - did you see the specific set of 4 things we needed you to look at. And in some cases the "difficulty" of that is because there's so much clutter that you're not sure which of them they want you to count (pillars) or what hints at the order you pick (flower vases). When it's not cluttered, it's completely empty. Puzzle areas are pretty much entirely separate from each other with open field between, nothing linking them. There are 6 scattered puzzles outside these zones, but even they are just tucked into random spots on the map with no lead in to where they are.

Controls were a bit jank for me, I'd be walking, stop pressing forward and momentum carried forward another step. I'm still not sure why they allowed swim and jump other than it being easier than putting bridges and paths up as it didn't really add anything and allowed for some exploits. For example, you can get onto the final area by jumping and since it's a maze you can just completely defeat the purpose of it being a maze. For being able to swim, I would've liked to see *some* use of the ocean. Instead it's just... empty. It doesn't even look good out there and there's invisible walls eventually.

I wish I could leave a neutral review as I can't recommend it at its regular price ($8), but it's hardly the worst game I've ever played. Overall, it's short, puzzles are pretty easy overall, and it's possibly worth picking up during a sale if you enjoy the genre and are starved of content.

Honestly everything I ever wanted from a collecting-battling-monsters game. Better than ARK.

A very promising start. Really captures the middle ground between aesthetics and that feeling of exploring and surviving in a new world. I have yet to find anything that really feels like a chore to do. I'm only 40 hours in but there's been nothing where I've felt "aw I have to do that?!" Really excited to see where they go from here and the roadmap is promising.

Edit: As of June 2021, we've still got no updates from the promised roadmap. Even the bugfixes have been garbage, servers are still an issue and moderation tools are pretty much nonexistent. Devs haven't said much except that there will not be horses. For some reason, the devs think they're clever and getting one-up on people asking for updates by telling us about buying an office horse. Which was honestly incredibly insulting to someone who's just been patiently waiting for something. I mean we paid for an Early Access that had a roadmap specifically mentioning that we'd have 4 MAJOR content patches by 2021 end of year what did they expect us to ask them about when we hear literally nothing for 4+ months? There's been a lot of excuses about new dev onboarding (6 months is not realistic unless you are literally training them brand new on coding), but quite frankly even the hotfixes we saw those first few weeks were lackluster and fixed barely anything. People were having corrupted saves, network connection issues, all kinds of spaghetti code nightmares that looking back were barely patched together. It's a really bad sign when there's been about 3 updates TOTAL over 5 months (no content, only bug fixes) with maybe 5-10 actual changes implemented. They aren't THAT small of a team.

My 8 player friend group dropped this back in late March/early April for lack of content. Running through everything was not very hard for a group used to playing survival sandbox games and to be honest the structure building needs a lot of work. Horizontal structures are still not contributing to loadbearing when attached to vertical structures (T-shape), which is basic building of a cabin 101. And there just aren't enough blocks to build with. We built a cool village but there's barely anything to put in it!

Aside from petty gripes, honestly it just got boring really fast due to lack of content. Mistlands is still unfinished. Workshop support is nonexistent and apparently always will be which is beyond disappointing and a terrible decision honestly since that's what made every single sandbox game have better longevity (Minecraft, Rust, and so on).

I could go on, but Tl;dr, Pretty obvious devs took the money and ran. They'll string it along for the next few years when they start running low on cash. Also, I hope their horse kicks them and they get gangrene because that "news" was stupid.

This is a pretty short game. I'm honestly a bit insulted that the dev thinks having two free weeks and then instituting a paid version is the way to go. It's your first game so: If it's good enough to be paid for, do that from the start. If it's not good enough, don't make it paid later. It just looks like a ploy to be the next viral short game and then profit when you do that.

Fo the consumers: There's honestly just not enough content to justify anything more than $1-3. YTers stay clear, even goofy, crazy reactions aren't going to make this the next Emily is Away (This is maybe a quarter as long if you're good at puzzles and about 1/5th of the emotion).

Most of the puzzles can be solved by either reading (and using the tool you're given that highlights clues) or just interacting with every item until something unlocks. However this presents its own difficulty as the text is so hard to read you'll have trouble telling the difference between I, L, and 1. As most have pointed out, one major puzzle (the first) requires that you view a specific image which the dev has that is so artifacted/zoomed out with this terrible font that many have gotten frustrated just trying to start the game.

There are also a few puzzles that do require external searches such as the GB puzzle where you need to know their phone number (or you can check the dev posted guide!). Or the one puzzle that is second to last in the game, which requires that you click something at a specific real time (get a morse code guide). The controls in this were also frustrating. Such slow scrolling on the documents.

It's also a little concerning that the Dev put a full game guide on the puzzles on day 1. This pretty much indicates that this is supposed to be more about the story being told (because if the Dev cared about the challenge, why have a guide, why not interact in Discussions to hint and engage rather than just straight up give answers?), which I'd guess is their real life story about high school. It wasn't particularly gripping or compelling of a story. If you're in high school right now maybe it's more relevant, but it really just feels stale and bland, like reading a news report about high school life rather than someone's actual feelings about their experience. At the end if you're still confused about what the "mystery" is, the very last journal entry will explain exactly what "moral" you should take away from it (also explains the game name).

TL;DR Dev makes a game in which the character with his name outs himself as a completely normal kid who made a handful of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ life choices that disappoints his loved ones.