Diebrary Reviews

This is a pretty good *one of these*. The difficulty curve is pretty chill but sometimes that's what I want. A few of the weapons have a little bit of a weird trajectory in terms of damage... from very weak to, after one upgrade, totally wild. But generally speaking I think it iterates on the VS genre via multiplayer and the "stories" mechanic that carries you through a series of runs with escalating modifiers. It's a pretty good *one of these*!

Diebrary is a fairly easy, but addictive bullet heaven, surprisingly I had the most fun with the starting weapon, the wand. Starting out a match can be a little tough at first, until you've gotten a few levels and upgrades that is. Then it quickly snowballs into a one sided massacre, but boy is it fun anyhow. I never did get to try out the multiplayer, wonder how that is?

This game is well worth buying. You get plenty of entertainment for the price. I already feel that I have gotten my money's worth, and I have way more game to play. I enjoy that the weapons feel very different from each other, and only continue to diversify in game play as you progress your session. I also find that the art style is really charming and leads to a more laid back feeling. The chapters being added after runs keep it challenging even after a successful run, but you also opt into picking them, so it doesn't feel like the game runs you over in difficulty. The best part though: the refund all option for the shop. It's so nice that this game isn't just another grind FOMO dopamine farm like many other games being made today. You don't have to grind everything, and you don't have to worry about being perfectly optimized in your selections.

It's a fun game to just chill and blow stuff up. Increase the game speed to make it harder and do the plot twists to make it even harderer. The dog with the cone of shame is the best.

While not turning the genre on its head, Diebrary provides some amazing depth of builds and weapons if you're a fan of theorycrafting. Via the upgrade variety alone, I believe you'll get your money's worth out of this game. There is a psuedo-multiplayer component that effectively lets you share and progress the same "save game" or story with your friends, stacking up different gameplay modifiers as you progress through each chapter.

Frankly, the game sees little development beyond what what initially made. Sure, it's arguably a complete game, but eventually it loses it's replayability. If you're looking for a game to kill time, I would say this won't last you long. It's not bad for a moment, but hardly great.

This game doesn't set out to redefine the genre. It's biggest selling points are the whimsical design elements and the random modifiers to new games, the "plot twists." It plays well with mouse and WASD and the diversity of character skills and weapon types makes one run feel more different than in Vampire Survivor, the game I have the most experience on to compare to.

I played the game a couple months before full release and It is no where comparable to before, of course it is still the same game and I can see and feel it but it feels easier and less chunky. There are way less bugs and they try to balance overpowered things. The game is online so you can play with your friends(I don't got those) or you can play by yourself with there being a system after beating the map 1 time to get a debuff to try and make your run harder with the wide selection of things to get it makes for almost unlimited play-ability.

First things first, this game is exactly what it is: cheap gum that bursts with flavor for 3 seconds, then tastes like car tire for the remainder of your chewing session. Unlocking Steam achievements was fun, but now the game is actively discouraging me from unlocking the greyed-out 'Special' tab (I've unlocked everything else). -1536x864' as highest resolution for a game released in 2023 is unacceptable. Are you planning to add the standard 1920x1080 HD resolution? -Game has only 1 (one) soundtrack. After listening to it for the 10th time, I decided to continue playing on full mute. Maybe add more soundtracks? -I'm playing single player mode, so why do I have to deal with the 'voting for Plot Twists' multiplayer gimmick? I could have a list of all of the Plot Twists to choose from once 'the bar' is filled, and swap it with another at any time if I don't like it. -Endgame is in dire need of currency conversion. Too many 'Magic Tomes', not enough 'Lost Scrolls' and 'Paper Scraps'. I've noticed an annoying bug: some of the Plot Twists unlocked in one map show their effects on another map. In my case, I unlocked 'Hostage Situation' in forest map, its 'no exp until rescued' effect is also enforced on snow map, which makes it extra difficult for no reason. I could unlock 'Hostage Situation' on snow map and get used to the difficulty, but I can't even see it in the upcoming Plot Twists segment. I've also noticed that Plot Twists that deal you extreme absolutes add artificial difficulty and just make playing a Chapter insufferable: -'Split Personality' should definitely be kept as the very last Plot Twist. I unlocked it for Steam achievement purposes, now I regret doing so, because, together with 'Twice Dead', 'Destructive Tendencies', 'Enraged', and being bugged with 'Hostage Situation' from my forest map, it's made my snow map literally unplayable. -'Twice Dead' should affect only big monsters, not ALL of the monsters. -'Destructive Tendencies' makes the first 5 minutes of a 'chapter' absolute hell, it definitely needs nerfing. Maybe add this rule: 'You're completely healed once you level up' right after 'but enemies no longer drop hearts'. OR make trees destructible so they drop hearts. OR don't let trees block/absorb projectiles. -'Enraged' could make the character invulnerable for a couple seconds or regenerate hearts faster, instead of the ineffective 'increased attack, charge, reload, and cooldown speed for a short duration'. -'Hostage Situation' could be changed to 'no paper scraps until rescued' instead of 'no exp'. OR 'no paper scraps before level 25 until rescued, no exp after level 25 until rescued'. -'Spectral Farmer' needs to reactivate far fewer times, and should plant only SOME of the exp, not ALL of them. -'Spicy Pepper' appears too many times and pushes you in a direction so hard that I often glitch out from one side of the map and end up on the other side. It needs to appear far fewer times and the extremely hard push needs to be nerfed... hard. And most importantly: I've also bought 4/4 'Game Speed' Perk (everything is 100% faster) and unlocked 'Zoomies' (everything is 50% faster), which made me get used to 150% faster gameplay while unlocking Steam achievements and in-game achievements ("bursting with flavor for 3 seconds" part). But now that I'm expected to play with all these extreme Plot Twists, I mitigated the difficulty by refunding 'Game Speed' to 0/4, so now I'm playing with only +50% game speed from 'Zoomies', which feels like a slog ("tastes like car tire" part). I'll change 'not recommended' to 'recommended' once you address my issues by patching the game.

There's something there with each weapon having 3 evolutions that each have unique branching trees for giving something to discover with successive runs, however every other part of the game is lacking. It feels like the devs got so focused on making this system cool and trying to do something different with the story system that they lost all sight of what makes other survivor games good. I'll break down some of my major criticisms: Characters - At no point was I excited about unlocking any of them. I have no favorite, and none of them are exciting to go back to. The decision before a run should be 'what kind of build do I want to do and what character has an interesting way of facilitating that?' Instead in this game it just comes down to picking the only one that is generally useful because it has a dodge roll ability. The rest of them are either incredibly lackluster or even detrimental to make use of their skills. The newest character that switches between sun and moon is just terribly designed. Choose a mode that makes you take double damage or choose a mode that makes you gain less XP? I'd rather choose to not play it. Yes, it has upgrades that lessen the downsides and give slight upsides but they aren't that good, aren't that interesting, and I'd rather spend my level ups on any other weapon/aspect of my character. Which brings me to the next bit.. Leveling Choice - While I like some of the decisions here, chiefly that if one upgrade is going to be an option it always displays the alternative choice it locks you out of if there is one, overall it is a very shallow system. Each weapon has a three row branching tree, so you have an initial upgrade that branches into two choices, and then 3 at the bottom row that branch from the previous 2. Then based on the bottom one you chose, the weapon evolves and gains a 2nd tree of the same size and shape. This amounts to 6 level ups spent on it, and then a bunch of trees that have about 4 or so nodes in them. The problem is the amount of levels you get in a game does not really give you any interesting choice or builds here. You generally get to max out one weapon, maybe get another one decently progressed if it has come up enough, and then just have some generic good stuff with a couple stronger boss abilities. So every run feels equally shallow in choices whilst being easily comparable in power level. You just don't get enough levels, and the game's main feature makes this even worse. Story Book - I saw in another review the developers responded that they only expected people to have a few twists added to their run, and was absolutely baffled. The game is so mind-numbingly easy and boring that I think most players will make the same assumption that adding more twists is the intended (and frankly it is the only way) to increase difficulty. So as the lack of difficulty wears on you, you will continue stacking twists, and the game even encourages this by making the main meta reward based off how many twists you have in the run. The big problem here, though, is that the twists range from completely irrelevant to absolutely awful to play with and damning to your story if you choose one that turns out to be way worse than you anticipated, forcing you to start from scratch. This headline feature just sucks, I don't want to engage with it and seeing as the asynchronous multiplayer is entirely based around it, it is equally pointless. You can skip the twists if you don't like any of the options, but seeing as you can only add them after a run and (as I'm about to discuss) run out of meta progression without grinding twists, skipping the twist amounts to having wasted your time having even done the run. Meta Progression - It kind of just sucks. You fill out 80% of it within a few super easy runs (making the game even easier), and then are locked out of the last few options unless you engage in stacking twists or grinding like crazy. The options are somehow less interesting than Vampire Survivor's basic meta upgrades, with a section that is greyed out with no explanation of if it's just not in the game or there is some hidden thing you need to do to unlock it. One of the options is particularly egregious, which is the option to speed up the game because they clearly must have recognized the base speed is way too slow and dull. Can you please just balance the game around being fun and well paced? It's far too easy to make it so fast you may as well be playing an idle game since there is no way you can actually respond to danger if you somehow come close to losing, and by default it is painfully slow. So you have to scale it yourself to what level you want but none of them feel good because the game is just boring and when you hit the point of wanting it to just go faster so you can get your meta progress and spend less time playing it... why bother playing the game? Gameplay - My final point goes back to just failing to learn from the genre. Survivor games are generally very accessible and can almost all be played with controller and have options to enable auto targeting/aiming or allow you to do manual. There is no controller support and everything has to be manually aimed and clicked. I play intense action games and RTS games like Starcraft, but I don't play these survivor games to have to click like crazy or do bow charge attacks or whatever. These are supposed to be lower effort but still tactical and challenging. This game just isn't any of those. Oh, and before I forget - you might be swayed by seeing the cute pets. Don't be, they're the low effort option but they are visually and mechanically absent. You can get a bunch of buffs to the pets abilities but it's random which pets you get, they have long cooldowns by default, and they are incredibly pointless. There's not much going on visually, they didn't seem very powerful unbuffed (I admittedly never even bothered to do a pet run because they just seem super lame), and frankly I think they're in the game just to sell it as having a 'cute' build. Conclusion - This is the first survivor game I regretted my purchase for, even at $4.99. I loved Project Winter and bought into this because it's the same studio. I won't make that mistake again, this is just painfully unaware of the market and feels like it should be Early Access rather than a full release. I've finished all the content that isn't grinding the twists in less than 5 hours. It isn't done, it isn't fun, and you should look towards the much more promising alternative survivor games coming out in the next couple months. If the developers read this - I understand how some ideas led to many of these problems and appreciate the attempt at many of them. I even think many of my criticisms can be fixed and there is something there to be salvaged. However, this should not have hit release like this. Other survivor games have 10+ hours at EA release, let alone full release. This isn't there and a lot of it feels like it needs a lot more time in the oven with a lot more feedback. I would like to no longer regret buying this at some point. I would also be open to having a discussion about my thoughts on the game, I do have game dev experience.