Full Bore

I love this game. I just start exploring and solving puzzles and I lose track of time. The world is massive and tightly connected like a Metroid game and the puzzles are really clever, using a wide variety of interesting mechanics. Exploring and solving puzzles are one in the same, since the puzzles are all about how to get from one place to another by pushing or destroying different kinds of blocks, and you can always rewind time to try different solutions. The areas are pretty surreal too. And like any good Metroid-ish game, the map will tell you which rooms still hide treasures, secrets, and doors, so you always know where to look if you're getting stuck. If you like puzzle games like Fez, Escape Goat, Escape from Puppy Death Factory, Toki Tori 2+, etc, try this game. The only thing I don't really care for in this game so far is the writing. It's not particularly interesting, and it has lots of typos. But that's easy to overlook due to the large amount of freedom this game gives you to roam its world with tons of optional treasures to find. I recommend playing this game with a keyboard rather than a gamepad. It's fun to play with a gamepad at first, but the inputs get a little too demanding in the late game and it's much easier to move diagonally using WASD than with a joystick.

i CANNOT express enough how much i adore this game. it may not leave a great first impression, and it may take a while to really click, but once i got into it, i ended up loving this game. i'm not the kind of person who usually enjoys challenging puzzle games, but this game's mechanics and puzzle design kept me hooked through the whole game. the visuals are charming, the music is REALLY good, and while the story certainly isn't the best or most unique, it meshed well with the gameplay, always adding to my enjoyment of the game. if you enjoy puzzle games at all, especially if you're looking for a challenge, i literally can't recommend this game enough. play it now!

The game is unplayable on non-US keyboards due to many controls not being rebindable.

Wait, I haven't reviewed this game already? This is a seriously underrated game. If you're the kind of person who's wary of games with low review counts, don't be put off, this game has top quality puzzles. I actually think it's a fantastic puzzle game and need to start playing it again.

This game....is actually really good. It's a 2014 indie game with less than 200 reviews on Steam, so I wasn't exactly going into it with high hopes, especially I got it from some bundle I got nearly a decade ago and forgot about. But everything works really well! Full Bore is an open-world 2D puzzle game with mechanics that revolve around digging through different kinds of blocks. The gameplay can definitely get a little repetitive, but the puzzles are challenging without being frustrating, the writing is cute, the story is surprisingly engaging, and the OST is a huge banger. The biggest problem is how easy it is to get lost in the huge world, as well as the foreseeable burnout of the similar puzzle structure. That being said, this is absolutely a hidden gem game.

this game rules bigtime, fun puzzles, fun storytelling, i love it very much

amazing puzzles, amazing ost, cute pixel graphic, 10/10

One of the most underrated games on Steam (based on number of reviews, not what they say). Very enjoyable puzzle platformer, with just enough story to keep you interested while not getting in the way of the game play.

This game was from 2014? It seems like it's managed to avoid much attention. That's a pity. At its best, Full Bore is the mining-themed puzzle game that Steamworld Dig toyed around with being but never became. It's frequently satisfying with nice "Aha" moments, and sometimes disappointing with "oh wait, was that it?" moments. Occasional puzzles demand precise timing, and alas those puzzles are the game at its worst; Full Bore has a good control scheme for a square-grid block-pushing puzzle game and a lousy control scheme for a precision platformer. Other sections of the game are a race against the clock and these are also somewhat annoying for the same reason. These bits would put the belief in my mind that I haven't got the correct solution to a puzzle when I do but can't consistently execute it, or conversely that my approach is wrong because there isn't enough time to pull it off even though it is the intended answer. Maybe the devs considered implementing a turn-based mode and couldn't make it work. Maybe I'm old and have the reaction times of a senile tortoise (okay, fair play, there's no "maybe" for that one). In either case I wish the timings were ever so slightly more relaxed. The game has a rewind ability that helps mitigate the frustrating elements, excepting that it's prone to jank - it's serviceable most of the time but if you miss the window in one of those timing puzzles (which you will, a lot) one step backwards almost never takes you to a helpful moment so you have to rewind further and redo other steps of the puzzle. During one puzzle in particular the rewind would constantly give up and only offer to send me back to the beginning of the puzzle. It has the occasional bug - an error message when I first ran it that didn't reappear thereafter, and one time the game hanged so potently during a level transition that I couldn't even open task manager to kill the process. I also managed to lose a small amount of progress a couple of times by exiting the game wrong - Full Bore doesn't appear to have manual saves but also doesn't autosave at mid-level checkpoints as you might expect it to (a couple of the levels are quite large, so be sure not to leave the game halfway through one). The script could have used a proof-reading, some of the spellings are wrong and some words were dropped. From this (and the jank) I assumed the game was from a non-English speaking country but apparently the devs were from the USA. Congratulations on making a game that feels like it could have been made in Eastern Europe. I'm not being sarcastic. I've been very negative but on the whole hog (oh hang on, the devs already though of that joke), I really like Steamworld Pig. I'm being like this because it has a lot of heart, but it demands a willingness from the player to accept its faults.