Reviews - LivajO

Nice little bundle of all old mods, not by the best and the most honest creator sadly.

Review done, now for the main part.

My comment about certain thing was getting deleted all the time so here it is in reviews, which author can't delete by himself.

Original comment from Swankest:
Mod Ancient Showdown was removed because its content violated the terms of moddb as well as the terms of this page under which I allow other members to upload mods to this page. In the event that an attempt is made to reupload the mod to moddb in the future, I will be forced to resolve the matter with the server administrators.

My comment which was deleted 10 times:
But uploading the so called "original" versions of Madhouse or Castle Wackersberg without the permission of Sabatu or Cyborg is ok right? Surely it doesn't break any ToU :) (I absolutely love, how you deleted Cyborg as the author of "original" Castle Wackersberg even though he is still the author of the scripts, cause without them, the FC wouldn't even work lmfao). Grow up kid!

Deleted 10x (lets see how far we can go) (ask me for screenshots if you wanna see it)
Loving the censorship.

Removing Ancient Showdown is something that "needs to be removed", but uploading mods without permission of other moders is apparently ok.

Very nice mode, although the lights were sending some suspicious commands so I had to ban them

Literally months of waiting until an actual serious mod came out. Over a year of work gave out really interesting outcome and brought some really creative ideas to the table, although it had several frustrating flaws as well.

Design is a pretty interesting case, the mod is gradually improving from generic "menson" into an entire underground complex. It's not sabatu level but cool to see someone develop on the go, 7/10

Lighting could do some work, many areas lack proper pointlight usage, prime example is the long corridor in the mansion, with black corners despite candles every meter. It would look nice for a loading screen, but walking through it just feels off, 5/10

Puzzles are similar to design, you start from looking for hidden keys to later navigate your way throughout a mineshaft. Gradual improvement the more you progress and I appreciate that, 7/10

Gameplay... Mixed feelings. On one hand it's unique and engaging, on the other frustrating and random. Shadow-like chase in the dream sequence was a great idea, but I can't even count the amount of swears from dying because of the bs "X" from wooden beams constantly making me stuck and glitching on the hatch. After like 20 retries I finally got past it just to die in the next room and restart from the brginning. At that point I have up and despawned the beams in the hps. Other thing is unbalance with lantern oil. It's so little you'd barely have enough to speedrun the mod, and if you (very likely) get stuck on puzzles you're gonna have to do 3/4 of the level in pitch Black environment. With some proper testing this aspect would've been great. I especially enjoyed the cutscenes and background events. Although they look a bit wonky with really simplistic animations, like t-posing corpse getting yeeted through a room, I'm still amazed what you managed to pull off and most important, tried to be original, just too bad it's short 8/10

Atmosphere-wise it was ok, I'm just not a big fan of jumpscares and explicitly showing gore on every corner. Luckily the more subtle aspects (ambients, screen effects) exist as well, 7/10

Story... Definitely better than "escep from spookeh menson" although a bit vague and I don't think I understood it. One butler left, one went missing, you go to sleep, start dreaming, at one point realise it's not a dream anymore and have to leave. What even happened? There were notes about orb and stuff but still idk, maybe because of english as there's a bunch of typos and weird grammar mistakes. Anyway it was interesting, at least compared to nowadays stories, 6/10

For me it wasn't scary, as I said jumpscares and gore simply won't do it, and I know the common scaring techniques in amnesia too well so it takes a bit to surprise me. Casual players might find it scary though, as the mod offers more than just screamers to the face, 5/10

Overall a good mod and well spent 1 year of work. With this amount of time you could expect it to be longer but eh, this is fine too

Review copypasting time

Undoubtedly one of the best looking mods to ever be released, and one of better overall. Really refreshing after all the low effort mods

Absolutely nothing to pick on about design. It's divine, and when combined with the particles it sometimes feels like I was playing Rebirth. All of the locations are unique and full of detail, perfect, 10/10

Similar about lighting, everything done well, there's a lot of play with color and it looks really cool. Maybe I should experiment with them myself, 10/10

Puzzles are ok, nothing too crazy but they're original and interesting, some require observation and interaction with the environment, overall I'm satisfied with them, 7/10

Atmosphere is thick as fook. Music is quiet or doesn't even play and is replaced with ambient sounds which work great. Combined with design the mod is really immersive, 9/10

Wasn't scary for me though. Monsters spawning without any warning is a good touch that at first caught me off guard, but it also backfires to some extent, because even when I'm being chased no music is playing, I just hear calm ambient sounds in the background. I wasn't even sure if I was still being chased, and it wasn't intense, it was calm so I was kinda standing in a doorway and looking if a monster is still following me. Other issue is a lack of safe areas. Sure, there are "safe" areas, meaning ones where there's nothing to kill you, but there's always unsettling events, whispering angels and scary sounds, so you never have a chance to catch a breath and after a while the tension is gone. Doesn't change the fact that atmosphere and good scripting give this mod its several moments, 6/10

The story is... eh, not bad. I don't remember much of the previous entries so I wasn't sure what I was reading for the most part. Maybe I'll correct this part after I've replayed the previous parts, for now I can just say the voice acting is well done, though there's not much compared to MH3 for example

The gameplay doesn't differ much from regular walking and solving puzzles but it does a good job at keeping the player interested. There's a good flow between levels, time for puzzles and for scares, many events, just wish there were some more dynamic parts within. And the mod is just right when it comes to length so I was able to finish it in one long play without getting bored, 8/10

Well, It might be one of the last great mods to ever come out. And despite its several flaws... Eh, I might as well give it a 10 since I don't think there were even 5 high quality mods to come out this year. Soon we will see what about other acts

That's probably the lowest amount of effort put into the mod this year, and there's been many great candidates.

Where to even start with this. This mod is basically escape from bunker with some really minor changes. I don't remember if you made that mod or just stole it but nonetheless the only thing you added is a linear empty corridor near the end. You didn't even bother to remove the old memento from that mod.

From the design's perspective nothing's changed, it's as terrible as it was. Boxlights don't exist, nor do pointlights. A few months have passed and you barely added anything, only thing that's noticeable is rebirth monsters but yeah... really hard to swap them with grunts.

I once again softlocked myself after jumping down the hatch like in escape from bunker. Good idea making the player restart the mod at this point because there's obviously no autosaves. Luckily you can get back to the location in like 15 seconds.

From the gameplay's perspective it only got worse. 90% of items don't have any name, machine room key only has a name because it's defined in base english file. One of the keys is melted into the floor and it's impossible to pick it up without debug mode unless you push it away from decals and aim at a pixel at a precise angle.
Quests other than the bunker memento are blank in the journal.

There's not a single bit of good quality in this mod. It's a copypaste from an old mod with one empty corridor added. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Some individuals are really keen to sacrifice any dignity and release the same garbage just to become "teh moder".

Ah yes, a 2021 standard. Who cares about Amadeus or even still quite new The Atonement, that's what we call a mod with great effort nowadays.

Really awesome design, one map is literally a box with stretched carpet and shelves in the middle, incredible creativity, 2/10

Lights also work perfectly here. I mean, if they don't exist, they can't be bad, right? 1/10

Gameplay is really refreshing, you walk in dark corners, pick up keys and reload the game because you fell into a hole with no way out, 1/10

Puzzles consist 100% of keys, half of them without any description but don't worry, maps are linear so you will never get stuck. some maps only have one door anyway so it's impossible to make a mistake, I like that! 1/10

Story? well... Bunkers in the 18th century, 1/10

Atmosphere is well thought out. For the entire game there is no ambient music so you know when to scream in fear as chase music starts kicking in, 1/10

It's clearly not a beginner work judging by not caring to use english or coming up with a name other than "Daniel", but even if it is, the author didn't even try, no reason to go soft with it. Yep, long gone are days of Amadeus, Gary - Dark Secrets or... well anything, now stuff like that is worth a solid 7/10

Silent Hill: Respite is the perfect embodiment of everything wrong with the modding community. Its development cycle doesn't only show how narcissistic people are in the modding scenery nowadays, but also proves that people who disregard others can never learn or improve, and as a result, stay stuck in the never ending loop of asking help for basic things, while using other people's creations to further put yourself in the spotlight.

This mod had a lot of potential but god... How cringe inducing and disgusting can the mod get?

If it wasn't for outside areas with broken lighting and tons of places to glitch through I could easily give this a high rating. Areas are well designed for the most time, vith some variety as well but outside really hurts eyes, 4/10

Except for outside once again, I have nothing to pick on in terms of lighting, 6/10

My favorite randomly hidden items to open a door, nice. I don't really have much to say about puzzles, nothing is going on here, 2/10

The atmosphere was decent, we have a slow build-up, story that made me interested... at least at the beginning, and rather rare encounters. It's ruined after a while thanks to the story, 7/10

It was quite scary, gotta admit. There was an attempt to try some ambitious scaring techniques but... talking to monsters? 4/10
Yeah, story AKA how to be immature about mature subjects. Let alone one person voice acting every character, the notes made me wanna quit several times. They look like they were written by some teenage incel describing his fantasy, I don't want to go in-depth (get it?) about that. Other than that the basic story with no twists and plain characters, everybody is either pure good or pure evil, 1/10

Puzzles are boring so the gameplay also isn't extremely entertaining. At least exploring delivers some "fun", 3/10

At the end I have to mention some "outside" issues. 2gb mod even though it could be less than quarter of that. You DON'T include vanilla files in your mod, neither do custom files that are never used in the mod. You decided to "ignore" others' tips about that subject so now deal with it. Also grammar. I don't wanna assume but it seems there's one nation that really hates english grammar. This mod could be good if it was free of elementary mistakes that even novice creators don't make

Your name is CorinthianMerchant, a poor plebian who lives in his granny's basement with his imaginary friend. One ordinary night in the year 2021 you release a "custom story" which leads you to the path of degeneracy to find out what happened to all of your brain cells, that just simply went missing the day you were born.

I remember playing a demo of this(or some other cs you were planning to make) in the past. Now I get to play the full version which, still being far from perfect, is definitely a lot better. The overall rating will be higher knowing it's your first try but the score on each aspect will be given as for any normal cs to give you the idea how this could actually look like in your future, much more advanced mods if there will be any

Level design is rather ok, while rooms are usually full of details, corridors are left empty, big areas also have some issues here, but nothing too serious of a problem. Also I suggest using welders. Note that when you place 2 walls near each other there's a noticable line where they are connected. It doesn't look good so using welders to cover it is a fair solution. Also corridors just look better with welders around, 5/10

I don't have much to tell about lighting either, bright areas are bright, dark are dark. Though there are things like windows not giving any light or torches barely lighting anything up, 5/10

Unfortunately the mod falls flat on puzzles. Almost everything is hidden keys or copypaste from TDD, 2/10

At first the mod wasn't scary at all, being instantly and randomly thrown into danger, without any build-up. It gets better later on with unsettling events, and some introduction. Too bad the encounters are so predictable, most of the time it's a monster spawning on item pickup, 3/10

Once again at first the atmosphere was dull. It's only told in the description why you entered the castle and what happened, in the game you immediately wake up in a cell, which pretty much ruins the immersion. Luckily the story holds up and let me immerse myself again, 6/10

So yeah - story. Turned out to be surprisingly good after a weird introduction. It's interesting, tries to add something to the cliche "kidnapped and tortured" scenario but it has some minor flaws, like Mr. Strider and his god-tier knowledge or servants that own the landlord? I think it's the other way. Despite some issues I enjoyed it, 7/10

Gameplay, probably the best part of this mod. You mentioned before that scripting is the biggest problem when creating a cs yet it's probably what turned out to be the best. Scripted events, dynamic music, "cutscene" thingies, various screen effects etc, really well done, 8/10

To be honest I had low expectations based on the previous experience so I'm glad that has changed. Nice lengthy mod with quite interesting story yet having it's worse aspects like puzzles. Hopefully you're gonna improve even more and create some great cs in the future. Right now it's ok, not exactly awesome and polished but definitely better than usual first tries

PS - The grammar could use some work. Not necessarily awful but there are a lot of mistakes. Maybe you should find a proofreader?