GrooviestPine 最近的评测

It has so many good ideas and yet the *awful* writing combined with the clunky, chintzy RPG Maker framework divebomb it completely. It consistently feels like a game about living in poverty and squalor written by someone who has never actually experienced financial hardship, or dealt with any of the heavy subjects the game tackles, or even so much as researched them--if that's not the case, it just underlines more boldly how poorly written it is. No clue how or why Devolver picked this up.

Probably the most nakedly personal and raw take on depression I've ever seen in a videogame, but also the most toxic and moronic. Were it not for the implied sexual (but loveless) relationship between the protagonist and a fellow co-worker who similarly suffers from an unspecified mental illness, I would have pegged it as a game about a prototypical incel--one who hates himself, but hates everyone around him more, and *especially* the women around him. It all feels gross and self-obsessed and whiny, instead of profound and sad, and that's speaking as someone who's dealt with depression all his adult life. Will O'Neill doesn't so much as entertain the notion that depression can be the result of genetics or a chemical imbalance; it's all because of the choices his protagonist made, or because of the people around him. Evan was supposedly dismissed by a doctor for not having "real problems," but that's...just not how psychologists work (not any ones worth their salt, anyway). For a game trying so hard to be deep, it's awfully shallow.

A bad Zelda-style adventure game, a bad Chrono Trigger ripoff homage, a bad Street Fighter parody, a bad bullet hell shmup, and more...this game truly has everything, and only for $20!

Okay, in all seriousness I played the first Evoland and thought it was a neat idea in search of a game, and found myself wondering how a 4-hour game could feel so thin and tedious. But I was eager to see what Shiro Games would do next, and if they would follow through on the sizable potential of the core idea. The answer with Evoland 2 is...a little yes, a lot no. It's been expanded to a full game, but to what end? The story is barely more memorable than the first one (and the first one hardly even had a story, as best as I can recall), and placed in a framework lifted rather brazenly from Chrono Trigger (as mentioned above). The writing is...iffy, littered with winking referential "jokes" that are only a step or two above "over 9000." The core gameplay is uninspired Zelda-style top-down hack-and-slash. The devs seem to realize this, and so it's padded out with really, REALLY bad minigames. Seriously, I've put about 6 hours into this and have spent at least a third of that being forced to play crappy minigames. Admittedly I haven't finished the game yet so this might change later on, but the game doesn't even really take advantage of the central conceit that drives this whole darn thing. The graphical sophistication changes depending on what era you're in, and that's it. The game barely even comments on it. It can't even muster a feeling of novelty, beyond the non-sequitur genre parody minigames that are as hee-larious as they are fun to play (note: they're not fun to play, and many of them take forEVER to slog through).

In short, it's a game that doesn't respect the player's time--I'd say it's an idea in search of a game again, but not even the idea seems to really be there anymore.

Don't let the seemingly modest presentation and creator Toby Fox's near-constant jokey self-deprecation fool you--Undertale is a hugely ambitious game. "Art games" have had a depressing tendency lately to be humorless, pretentious, and devoid of actual content (looking your way, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture), but Undertale cheerfully dodges the pifalls of the label. It manages to deliver an immensely satisfying gaming experience, even as it sets about deconstructing RPG tropes left and right and openly questioning how and why we play games to begin with.

And as far as content? For not being a terribly long game (an average playthrough will take about 6 hours), it is positively stuffed. It makes note of every single thing you do, which can and will come back to bite you in the ass if you're not careful. And it really, really should not be spoiled--it managed to surprise me as much in its last hour as it did in its first, and then surprised me some more on my second playthrough.

You'll likely hear a lot of comparisons to Earthbound with Undertale, which is somewhat apt--to a fault. It maintains a similar tone, of light humor and whimsy with the unease that something dark and terrible is bubbling just underneath. But as it progresses, it quickly carves out its own strange path and sticks to it. For a game that looks from screenshots to be pieced together out of other games, it's completely original. It's funny, engaging, poignant, occasionally terrifying, and deeply felt.

Oh, and dating the skeleton is totally worth it.