CRUELTY SQUAD

I must really have liked this game to make it the whole theme of this page haha. Cruelty Squad has probably the most unique visuals I've ever seen in a game taking inspiriation from lsd dream emulator I think. This game feels like an acid trip at all times with all the vibrant colors. The actual setting of the game is somewhere in the future where rich corporations own everything and health advances allow people to be revived at a high price. I like to joke that the creator of cruelty squad made an anti-capitalist game because he lost money on bitcoin (Yes this happened). The game has you working for this hitman business (cruelty squad) and your missions have you assasinate multiple targets or sometimes just one. Throughout your playthrough you can collect organs from people you kill and sell them on a real time stock market with price fluctuation! You can also sell fish or invest in plain stocks. This stock menu can be opened at all times even in the middle of a mission which is just hilarious I feel like an ipad baby whenever I open it.

Probably my favorite feature of this game is it's dynamic difficulty. After the first time you die, the border on your screen changes and the game gets slightly easier. Your difficulty is always shown through your border on screen. After dying 3 times in a row on the second easiest difficulty, the border changes to this fleshy gross one and you're now on the easiest difficulty. You can even eat corpses for one hp. At this point your character is like this flesh mech amalgamation and it's completely free to rebuild you in this state.

This game's movement and gameplay is so fun. There's an upgrade which uses your small intestine as a grappling hook which automatically makes it the coolest upgrade in the game imo. It's really fun to revisit old levels when you have more implants (upgrades) and weapons and just breeze through them in a few seconds.

Overall I give cruelty squad a 9.5/10. This shit is awesome

Roblox: NULLSCAPE

So far I'm about 40 hours? into playing nullscape and my god, this is the most stimulating and fun shit I've ever played. If you like grace you will definitely like this game at least a bit. Nullscape is a roguelike (horror???) game and it takes elements from grace and just goes absolutely wild. Every other round you decide on new enemies/entities and curses for your playthrough. This system alone makes every single run entirely different. You will statistically never have the same run and the same combination of curses throughout a run because of how much variation there is. When you're picking entities and curses, you're basically trying to do damage control, trying to pick the easiest entity to deal with. Sometime's the game with throw you a bone and your selection will be an obvious choice like the bell entity. (does practically nothing and could even be used positively) Other time's you'll be thrown into making hard decisions deciding which entity will be the easiest to deal with.

The basic gameplay loop is: 1. Drop into a procedurally generated random map 2. Collect all the purple presents scattered across the map whilst also avoiding all the entities and hazards (The void, tripmines) 3. After collecting all purple presents, they respawn and become golden, an escape beacon will also open up in the middle of the map 4. Now, you can risk it, going for as much golden presents as possible or play it safe and go in the beacon. 5. After rounds, you then either pick your entity and curse or enter a buy phase to spend golden presents (No idea why they're presents btw)

That's basically the gameplay loop massively simplified because there's a lot more nuance when it comes to different classes, strategizing what to buy, movement, etc. Overall, I love this game so much 9/10

Roblox: Deepwoken

I have about 100 hours on this game across my main and an alt. Deepwoken is a permadeath rogeulite and it's absolutely fucking unforgiveable at times. Playing without a friend feels like being dropped in point nemo as a baby and being expected to get out. Having prior experience in sekiro really helped for getting a feel for the combat, although I had to switch from controller to mouse and keyboard. The lore and storybuilding is insanely good in this game although I never decided to dive into it. There's so many things to like about this game besides the main pvp and pve. It's truly unique seeing so much effort get put into a roblox game but the reason it doesn't get as much attention as it deserves is from the pure difficulty and unforgivingness of the game, which totally makes sense.

The thing this game does the absolute best in my opinion is permadeath. It's a system inspired by the anime/manga "Made in Abyss" where after dying twice, you're sent basically into the equivelant of hell in deepwoken, called "The Deep" which is just so fucking awesome. You have to go to the center main city in order to complete a test and get out of the deep. That's what makes it so good, dying isn't just the end like in pretty much all other roguelikes I've played. But, dying in the deep permanently wipes your character, only allowing you to keep 2 items and giving you points allowing for tiny upgrades for future runs (Why I called it a rogue-lite and not like)

I've been putting off the main gripe I have with the game the whole time. Pvp is always turned on, no matter where you are in the game. You could get jumped at the spawn island if people felt like it, and in this game with permanent character and item loss, it's insanely frustrating to die from pvp especially as someone who would rather just have it off to begin with. It feels like a slap in the face because of the fact that the game could be so good as a pve and co-op centered game, but catering the pvp-driven audience seems to be way more in the dev's interest. There are entire clans dedicated to wiping out fresh-spawns and there seems to be no bounds to the toxicity in game.

Despite all that, 8/10 really fun game, especially with friends. Fun progression and looting.

(This is one of my maxed characters)