Hikikomori No Chuunibyou Reviews

Hikikomori No Chuunibyou is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. You might think this is just another copy + paste of the Ninjahtic game the developer cloned several times (why get paid for a game once when you can get paid 3 times?) but it's not... the brawling is different, there's a lot of differences, but then these are ultimately minor and while the game plays slightly better (but not much), it's got more in common with the Ninjahtic games than it has differences. I guess that's the GameMaker Studio platformer template heritage. One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Blaze Epic has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Hikikomori No Chuunibyou has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the tutorial (without dying), trivial to achieve, but less than 10 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 10 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. Hikikomori No Chuunibyou is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

I liked jump boxer so I bought this game. This is much better than jump boxer. The main downside is the backtracking. Everything you do, you do backwards too. Other than that, pretty good game with some nice art and mostly good controls

I wish there was a "neutral" thumb because this game COULD be good if they got rid of every cheap mechanic and polished controls a little bit. Every time you die it feels as if the game is purposely screwing with you. Some would say it just requires "skill," but the controls are sometimes just intolerable. Definitely one of the most frustrating games I have ever played, not asking for a refund just because it was one dollar.

The style and tokyo music dragged me in. Even with the (somehow, someway) difficult controls of wallrun and walljump. The fighting parts are separated from the platformer parts. I liked the level design. getting a key and then going thru the same screens, only backwards. If you go for all achievements this game needs time and dedication. The game demands 100% timing and precision. I can recommend because Flying kicks RULE

A fun little game worth the price you pay. If i had to complain I'd say the later parkour sections are borderline sadistic and that the wall jumping is fairly jank.

This one's just too rough / flawed for me, and I stopped at Act V. That's when I learned that the save system only saves at the beginning of each act (augh!). I don't think I'm going to finish it. A lot of the problems with this game are fixed in the next one, so this one's interesting just to see the evolution.

This [i]might[/i] earn a neutral if the option existed, but even then it'd still tether quite close to a negative. It's not the worst game I've played or everything, but for every thing it does right, it does at least one wrong. The gameplay is a mix of parkour with occasional slight "stealth" elements (read: there's patroling robots which more or less instakill you if they spot you) and brawler sections. For the parkour some of the moves (mostly wallruns) are slightly janky, which make successful completion of a couple of some manuevers unguaranteed (not ragequitting bad, but often enough to add up). These parts actually feels rather well when it's flowing well (though sometimes the timed obstacles prevent a superfluid motion like you can achieve in superior precision platformers). The brawler sections boil down almost entirely to button mashing (the tutorial swears there's combos, but I could never get find anything more complex than the air versions of light and heavy attack). There's a bit of strategizing to be done to make things easier and a couple of the bosses take more conscious actions, but they are all too similar not to feel like they're there for padding after a while. There's a few enemy variants found throughout the game, but their low number paired with all but one of the "arenas" being just a hallway (literally, more often than not) make this a chore. None of this is helped by how padded the game structure is. Every chapter contains at least one "get to key, then backtrack to use it" section, so you'll be crossing almost every screen in two directions (chapters two gets "open worldy", so there's even a few screens that need to be traversed four times). This isn't terrible because at least you don't need to hit switches again, but it rarely gives the rooms any significant new dimension. Oh, I mentioned switches... yeah, some screens contain switches needed to open gates, sometimes positioned so inconveniently that you'll actually need to traverse the screen three times in a row (without dying) before you can advance. There's relief when a particularly frustrating one gets finally completed and you don't have to deal with it anymore (until the return trip), but not in a "I got gud" manner that leads to self-congratulations. The final problem is a relatively minor one, but bears mentioning: there's no proper saving, just chapter select. These chapters can get relatively long, so may you hopefully not have to interrupt a chapter halfway and leave it for later, lest the last thirty minutes having been in vain. I get this is likely engine limitations, but it's annoying nonetheless. The plot is actually cute (and even includes a bit of self-awareness, as expected from a game with this title) and has some mildly funny parts. The protagonist is as loquacious as you might expect from a chuuni, but there's enough charm that even when it does get a bit too much in a couple of spots you can still wonder what comes next. Some of the fetch quests are legitimately funny. I'd quite like a remake which revamped or at least streamlined the gameplay, as sadly the sequel's tone doesn't appear to be as entertaining.

A barely functional platformer that commits so hard to it's main premise of sticking you in the role of an unlikeable autist that it forgets to be fun to play.

Very Nice Game! The achievements are fairly easy, and the gameplay of the game is nothing to shy away from. There are times where you can't get to a certain place in the game due to how difficult it may be to wall run, but as you proceed farther, you'll eventually get the hang of it. There is also Combat in the game, its your standard beat'em up control scheme: Strong attack, Weak Attack, Jump. I'm not entirely sure if you can die in the game (since there is no indication of a health bar or meter), but if you do get stuck in between two enemies, get ready to struggle to your hearts content to break free. For what it's worth being around 1$~2$ I'd say its a game thats worth picking up if you want something short and fun.

Based on the trailer, I thought I would end up enjoying this game quite a bit. I love retro-styled platformers, and the idea of one that incorporated a free-running movements system into a 2D platformer seemed intriguing. Unfortunately, the parkour system is a huge frustration, as it doesn't seem as if the wall running triggers reliably when it should. Pair this with the unnecessary repetition of screens by having to play every one at least twice on each level, and things get annoying quickly. There are also some issues with being able to tell when the character will grab onto a ledge or hang from a bar, which can lead to seemingly random deaths. The game also seems to have an identity problem, as the parkour movement encourages speed and free-flowing platforming (when it works), but then there will be things inserted into the levels that you have to stop and wait for, such as drones to hide from or precise jumps to time between laser beams. Similarly, the combat sections seem to want to replicate a martial arts fight, and while you have various types of attacks, you can simply mash your basic attacks and get through pretty much any fight. The story also makes no sense. I assume that the concept of "chuunibyou" is something that Japanese people or fans of anime and manga would understand, but I had to look it up. Once I did, though, it seemed like a simple enough idea. In the game, though, it seems less clear what is real and what is in the character's delusion. There are also times where there are sentences that just don't make any sense, and the dialogue is often awkward and unnatural (such as the time the characters are discussing the virtues of manga artists and how they should be viewed, which feels very preachy directly toward the player). It was all very bizarre. It's really a shame, too, as it has a lot of potential, and when things work like they're supposed to, it can be really fun. I try to keep in mind that the game was only $2, so I wasn't expecting something as polished as a Shovel Knight or Freedom Planet, but the four hours I spent with the game were four of the most frustrating hours I've spent with a game in recent memory.