Please finish this game man

I really vacillated between whether to mark this review "Recommended" or "Not Recommended"—maybe more than I have any other game I've ever reviewed.

On one hand, this game is just straight up not fun to play. It is somehow every kind of bad game at once. It is simultaneously too simple and yet incredibly confusing, simultaneously too easy and completely unfair.

On the other hand… this is a fascinating piece of kusoge. It's like a video game made by a space alien that has an encyclopedic knowledge of retro gaming, but no idea why people actually play video games.

This game's genre defies description. It's a level-based sidescroller, so you'd think it's a platformer. But no, you move freely like a shoot-em-up character, and the end of the first level sees you getting an infinite drill power that trivializes most movement. So maybe it's more of an exploration game? It sometimes certainly seems to think it's a Metroidvania, with gestures towards backtracking and item-based progression, and a terrible map screen that you can't scroll or zoom at all. Except if you open the pause menu, you've also had an EXP meter this entire time, and you have stat points to spend. It's still not clear to me what makes you gain experience. So maybe it's an RPG of some kind?

But then you get to the third level in the game, and nope! It's Bomberman now for some reason. Just straight up Bomberman. And if you ever die after reaching a checkpoint, all of your upgrades reset, making retrying the stage harder than beating it on the first attempt!

Oh yeah. Also this game is porn. About every other level, you run into a female character who decides to have sex with your little chibi octopus, who has the power to turn into a human (with an inexplicably golden penis) when sufficiently aroused. It's not even particularly bad porn, it's pretty serviceable stuff if perhaps a bit uninspired. Except the sex is also gamified in the most baffling ways possible! When your character ♥♥♥♥, you get thrown into a little slot machine minigame to see if you impregnated her. Except instead of being random, this slot machine is both skill-based and incredibly difficult, for some reason—think trying to get a specific outcome on Chance Time in one of the N64 Mario Party games.

When you inevitably fail to get any result in this minigame, you might try to re-enter the level and have sex with the female character again. Except this time, you realize that your character's ♥♥♥ is a limited resource. If you fail this minigame, you have to go and find more ♥♥♥ to even get a chance at doing it again. Except you can't even do this until you get to the second sex scene—where the game decides to tutorialize you on these mechanics after it already showed them to you, completely unexplained, just a level earlier!!!

By the end of writing this review, I think I've settled on a verdict of "Not Recommended." After all, if you're buying this game for the normal reasons someone buys an H-game—to have fun or to jerk off—you will not have a very good time. However, I do think this game has some value to people who like to play bad games in order to understand what makes good games work. If that's you, maybe pick it up on sale, I dunno.

This is a real hidden gem. For the low, low price of free, you get a short but sweet top-down shooter inspired by Heat Signature with genuine challenge and gameplay depth, wrapped in a package of beautiful character art, a unique morbidly floral Old West aesthetic. and a sincerely touching lesbian romance storyline.

Oh yeah. And the porn. It's also porn. Very well-animated, lovingly-drawn porn that will definitely especially appeal to furries, monster enjoyers, and people with similar kinks, but that I think most people can find something to like about. If you like, you can choose to turn off NSFW content and play it that way—and I think you legitimately could and should enjoy Deathblossom like that if the sexual content puts you off—but I think the gameplay and H-scenes together make for a really unique experience you're not likely to get anywhere else.

To be frank, this game was a disappointment. Rather than a loving pastiche of Helldivers 2, this game really feels like something that was rushed together to capitalize on a trend, by people who had only a surface appreciation of the source material.

The gameplay is an incredibly tepid adaption of Helldivers 2's core gameplay loop to a top-down twin-stick shooter format. The surface-level elements are there—drop down in a pod, shoot big hordes of bugs, call in reinforcements, airstrikes, and supplies, raise a flag, then wait for the dropship to arrive—but these are just surface trappings, and the game is ultimately missing core features that gave Helldivers its atmosphere. There is no co-op or even computer-controlled allies, leaving every mission feeling lonely; the stratagems "gadgets" don't require button combinations, making dropping them down in the heat of combat unsatisfying and lacking tension; and the missions have no side objectives, meaning almost all of the map is empty, samey, and useless to you.

The writing is not only uninteresting and bland—even by the admittedly lower standards of H-games—it is also riddled with basic typos and grammatical errors that a simple proofreading pass would have caught. The dialogue is almost never funny or even really remarkable, it just serves as a thin pretext for the next nearly-identical mission, and it certainly lacks any of the wit, satirical edge, or atmosphere of the actual Helldivers games.

Both the substandard gameplay and amateurish writing could honestly be excused if the H-scenes were good enough, but they are few and far between, and the ones you do get are nothing special. Only 2 scenes in the entire game are animated, and before a major content update, that number was only 1—the same animation you get every single time you clear a mission. The animation isn't even bad! But you will get very tired of it by the time you beat the game. The rest of the scenes are slideshows wholly disconnected from the gameplay or the main storyline of liberating planets—basically just little vignettes with the most boilerplate porn scenarios you can think of.

The only thing that even somewhat marries the porn aspect of this porn game to its gameplay is that your character portrait loses clothing as they get damaged. This is purely visual and has no bearing on what you're actually doing.

To sum it up, this game fails as a parody of Helldivers, it fails as a pastiche of its mechanics, it fails as a twin-stick shooter on its own merits, and most sadly of all, it fails as porn. There is just no good reason to buy this game unless you have nothing better to spend your money on and are happy to play 3 hours of mind-numbing nothing to get 20 minutes of so-so smut.

This game is genuinely bad. I'm not being cute or coy or sarcastic, it's just legitimately a terrible, bloated roguelike that's horrendously unwelcoming to new players and that locks all of its remotely interesting and fun content behind hours upon hours of tedium and slog.

The controls are bad, and the gameplay is horrifically repetitive. Almost all of your time is spent fighting twitchy, annoying enemies in cramped rooms with a weapon that does pitiful damage. Unless you get a very powerful item combo very early, you will waste 30+ minutes on a joyless, painful run that ultimately dies to some random enemy in the last 2 levels, because the game arbitrarily doubles all damage AND makes enemies harder in the final levels.

Want a level that isn't the exact same routine of Basement, Caves, Depths, Womb? Don't worry, there are other levels! All it takes to unlock them is potentially HUNDREDS of HOURS of grinding!

Also, there are multiple bosses and areas you can ONLY access by getting there quickly enough, so don't you DARE try taking your time to explore and get every advantage you can! Either luck into getting an OP run early, or screw yourself!

I can't even begin to fathom how Isaac got such a large fanbase. Was it better at some point in the past? Because right now, it sucks. If you want a top-down shooter roguelike that's actually fun to play, get Enter the Gungeon instead.

Oopsie, the dev is actually a bigot and gets really mad whenever anyone points that out! Positive review recanted. Sad.

If you had told me a week ago that one of the most heartfelt and powerful queer narratives in all of gaming was a game made by Swery, I would have laughed at you. The idea sounds ridiculous—Swery? The Deadly Premonition guy?

But it's true. I teared up when I finished The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories. The integration of the gameplay with the story elements is masterful, elevating both and putting you into that emotionally raw place of alienation, dysphoria, and self-hatred right there with the main character.

On top of that, it's also a legitimately very fun puzzle-platformer that manages to strike an excellent balance of difficulty and that uses its dismemberment mechanics to their fullest potential, without overstaying its welcome. Besides maybe one or two sections I got stuck on for an extended period of time because it wasn't clear what the game wanted from me, the game manages to stay consistently challenging while never putting up a brick wall of a difficulty spike.

There are parts of the game that are rough around the edges—the voice acting is stilted, some of the animations (particularly those around the neck-breaking puzzles) get repetitive with how slightly too long they are, and a few controls could have been explained better. But honestly, to me, those imperfections just make the game feel that much more human and sincere.

This game fails both as a video game and as porn. Being as cheap as it is, its primary purpose seems to be a Bad Rats-type game you send to friends as a joke, or for the absurd and clearly intentionally overstuffed amount of achievements, meant to be used to spell out words on your Steam profile achievement showcase.

In the gameplay, you click on enemies until they die. In the porn scenes, you assemble a very easy jigsaw puzzle to see a mediocre sex animation. The story is nothing to write home about, either—it's a parody of Resident Evil 3, in the "porn parody" sense of the word, where it's the same story but told worse, and with more penises.

You're just not missing out on anything if you don't play this game. You won't miss the money if you buy it, but you will miss the time you spent playing this mess.