Chopping Block: June 23rd 2025

Icarus This is an odd game in my opinion; a survival game with a deep research tree, variety of environments and maps, and gorgeous visuals. Icarus dispatches the player down on a hostile alien world for short term expeditions to collect resources and fulfill short missions.

the game is designed to be played cooperatively and if you don't the game likes to make you suffer. While completing the tech tree pushes progression along every expedition is closer to a start from scratch situation. Unlike survival games with persistence environments and solid continual progression like Green Hell or Subnautica, Icarus doesn't have a compelling story and quickly felt like I was going through the steps of the early game over and over again.

The building mechanics was finicky and that was the biggest problem since you need to build over and over again. The overall the premise was too silly for me to really latch onto. The player is dropped into the world without basic tools or materials for no apparent reason or any real explanation. I found myself going through the same repetitive steps at the ten hour mark that I had been doing in hour one and that worn out its welcome by hour five. This game surely has a niche and based on reviews and the steam store page the game is chugging along with large DLC packs and ongoing development that sees no signs of slowing down as of 2025.

Killer Frequency at first blush looked like a clever story driven puzzle game with an art style reminiscent of Firewatch and
Pacific Drive. In all fairness Killer Frequency did deliver all of these things unfortunately the pace at which it achieves that is glacially slow. Every section is dialog heavy and takes so long, they are un-skippable which is a double edged sword. On the one hand the dialog is critical to the puzzle solving so the player has to digest it. On the other hand it draws out the story and dilutes the actual gameplay. The dialog itself was snappily written and well voice acted so if the drawn out dialog had been the only issue I might have muddled through to the end.

I even had a notion of what to base the article on; readable and collectible lore items. Ultimately it was the puzzles that did Killer Frequency in for me. The games puzzles were of the reference type which does nothing for me personally. I don't really know what specifically about these type puzzles, but I've always felt that puzzles the rely on additive knowledge bases to be off-putting. I had the same issue when I encountered them in games like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Like a trivia game that requires you to absorb information up front. It's fine if you have information already.

I think the game would have been snappier and have a better overall flow if the developers had made the player the radio producer rather than the host. This would have freed up the player to explorer the radio station and collect information and investigate puzzles while the radio host moves the story forward. This would make it easier to experience the un-skippable story and to give the game a sense of urgency.

MADNESS: Project Nexus Project Nexus is was a strange 3D isometric shooter with liberal elements from the Run & Gun and Beat'Em Up genres combined with the absurdist comedy and over the top action of the classic Newgrounds.com series "Madness". This crossed my radar entirely by accident. I was a fan of the Flash videos of Krinkles growing up even playing the early Flash game series of the same vein; Madness Combat.

Unfortunately the charming art style of the Flash era; too me, did not translate into 3D and to me a least the models and art style of Project Nexus where simple off putting. I found myself fighting the controls, struggling more and more with the visuals, and not really following the story. The game was missing essential polish to graphics, camera movement, core mechanics, user interfaces, and some of the tutorials that hamstrung my first few hours. That combined with my personal disappointment with the 3D conversion led me to abandon the game less than half way through the 6 hour campaign.

The game does capture certain essential aspects of its source material and really embraces its namesake of madness as the game progresses. There is a plethora of Easter eggs, a massive array of weapons that the player can chew their way through in rapid succession, enemies are inventive and varied, and the game has a soundtrack that has no business going as hard as it does.