...it’s a lot of fun to craft a deck to meet the challenges and stories of the road. Meeting the characters along the caravan’s route and learning their stories is a joy that drives mechanical experimentation. It’s refreshing to create harmony and boost meaning-laden signal over noise.
Like many powerful, unique titles, Sunless Skies leaves the player with the desire for more, not because it’s lacking but because it appeals to the mania to solve every mystery, plumb every depth.
Back in the Groove can be completed in a single evening; subsequent playthroughs extend the experience, but feel like a pancake-eating contest where the prize is more pancakes.
It’s the sort of game that will gain a cult following. These super-fans will appreciate its millennial dread, imperfect friends supporting one another through crises both personal and apocalyptic, and a quirky style that draws on gamer culture, weird horror, and low-poly goofs without getting bogged down in uncritical nostalgia.
Ultimately, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is a touching personal story wrapped in good jokes and functional graphics.