Zo Schlemper

Gamemaker's Toolkit did a fantastic video essay on how Silksong doesnt balance Difficulty with Punishment properly

The movie tells you, after an hour, exactly when the plot starts to actually matter. Severely telegraphed the entire time and almost good. If feels like it's trying to hit a bunch of different horror tropes and when it does do those things it actually fun, but it spends way too much time with boring characters and boring writing and it feels like a waste of time given how the contrivances of plot pile up. It isn't a mystery, the suspense is built purely around the idea that they have 13 days to figure it out and the characters suddenly are finally capable on night 13 while also realizing it's the last night. What is this, a cheesy coming of age anime?

It's about as entertaining as listening to strangers describe their own dreams to you for an hour and a half. The main issue is pacing, because the first 60 minutes contained almost no plot or character development. I can understand how this movie may have been effective in the context of UK viewership in the 90s, but as a modern, American viewer in 2025 it just doesn't work.

It's not a horror film or a thriller. It's a drama. As an experimental drama, I'd have given it 3 stars. But as a horror/thriller, this movie is terrible. No explorations of difficult or scary subjects. No jump scares. Nothing that quickens the pulse. Just a plodding series of monologue-ish vignettes.

Ive got to play a bit longer to see how I fully feel, but overall I'm not seeing much "puzzle" in this game. The long-form of the game appears to be almost entirely luck-based, since you can't control which floorplan options you are given at each new door. You can mitigate bad luck by understanding what is required to reach the end and making sure you have a constant supply of keys coins and gems, for example. But my main problem with Rogue-lites and Rogue-likes remains: I dont have any proof that I am not being forced to auto-lose any given run so that my experience properly fits into the arbitrary and genre-iconic "repeatable" gameplay loop. In addition, there has been almost no storyline or plot enrichment after my first two run throughs. The notes that are occasionally included throughout the rooms provide gameplay-relevant hints, but these hints explicitly mention far-future content. In the game, 1 run == 1 day, and these hints are for things like day 16-20, and day 22. Bro, I am on day 2. If you the hints I get on run 1 are for content 15 runs from now, that tells me this game has nothing new to offer between then and now. I have experienced zero world building or plot of substance aside from 1 "cutscene" when I entered a specific floorplan for the first time, and that cutscene just showed some unique camera angles of the static room. What are you people seeing that I am not seeing? Because this game is NOT a puzzle masterpiece so far.

Updating my review from 3 to 5 stars. Game has had loads of improvements since last year so I tried it again. I am thoroughly enjoying my time now. Currently level 60-ish. Have experienced no annoying bugs, the difficulty has been fantastic so far, with an emphasis on forcing you to make good choices instead of just having really fast reflexes. The parry system is very satisfying, and the game encourages you to use all your tools to defeat certain bosses. Highly recommend for anyone who loves souls-like and who wants a fun and challenging time instead of a sweaty/twitchy time.

Eternal strands is almost great. It's very clear what the game is trying to be, but there is just more jank here than I can stomach. it's rather jarring because so many aspects of the game are gorgeously polished, including the UI and environment design, but then the combat honestly feels like a beta version of what they were going for, which sucks, because if all the issues were smoothed out I'd absolutely love this game.

A brilliant experience. Super tight level design, really snappy combat system that rewards execution and even allows for some skill expression once you gain more power ups. Its a carbon copy of shovel knight, but in the same way that the shovel knight dlc makes you play as plague Knight or king knight with a new toolkit. Overall I would greatly recommend this game. The difficulty is medium, and the final boss is focused on fun rather than an impossible wall. I found this game far more compelling than Gravity Circuit.

The games difficulty is from obnoxious design choices rather than offering a difficult game + the proper tools to beat the game. I'm not new to tough platformers: shovel knight and Celeste are two of my faves, and I'm heartily enjoying nine sols even while that game kicks my ass. But this games design choices don't produce that sort of difficulty. You end up clinging to walls when you don't want to but not registering a wall grab when you feel it should've worked, your grappling hook misses or disengages seemingly randomly, you have no dodge and for some reason it's way easier to accidentally touch an enemy and take damage while you are attacking them and are fully in control of the situation. This is exceptionally annoying during boss fights. Boss fights are highly unpleasant requiring something like 30 hits to kill while they only need to hit you around 4 or 5 times. Having no defensive skills means you have to perfect dodge every attack without any sort of block or i-frame dodge. It also uses a really ass design where you have to pay money to fill your special meter after you die with no way to naturally fill it during boss fights, one of my least favorite design choices in games since bloodborne did it with the non-repleneshing potion/silver bullets.

Reviewed on Hero Difficulty. Attempts to bring the Tears of the Kingdom "creative" spirit to 2D, but it does not try any harder than bare minimum. The VAST majority of puzzles are simply "find a way to cross this gap", and the interface for selecting which "echo" to summon is horrible, which further encourages you to use Table, Crate, and Bed combos for nearly everything rather than spend so much time in that stupid horizontal list. On top of that, combat is agonizing. Your summoned monster AI is terrible. You drop down a moblin and it stands there for about 3 seconds before even doing something. Slimes do 1/2 a heart of damage and take FIVE SECONDS to charge up an attack. Nearly all your summons give up on fighting halfway through, or die instantly, or get stuck in corners. Many of your summoned monsters do really low damage, resulting in maybe 5-10+ hits to kill enemies, with most of your echo's time spent standing around doing nothing. I wish I was joking, but its true. Monster echoes should have been more "spell" like, where they do an instant, unique attack/effect and then disappear after some time. The only "cool" thing I've ever done with summons is block a flaming keese barrage using water slimes--because the water slimes dont actually do anything, so they acted like a "wall of water" spell, which is what this game never does. There are a few echoes that are extremely overpowered, resulting in there being no "choice" required besides whether you want to waste your own time or not. Wolfos, Boomerang Moblin lvl1, and Bomb Fish are all super OP. You dont need anything besides those nearly all the time. The story is terrible, taking no hints from all the top zelda games. Instead we get the most basic of premises, reused storybeats from link to the past, and zero unique world building. The only saving grace of this game is the original content that Nintendo has been trying to get rid of: the dungeons. Legend of Zelda Dungeons are still just as fun and exciting and wondrous as they have ever been, especially now that we almost never get to experience them.