Look Mum No Computer

This is a lovingly crafted game, the aesthetic and graphics are excellent, the music is awesome, and the references to electronics and music clearly shows an expertise in those subjects. But the gameplay is just .. not good. It's grindy, uninteresting, lots of backtracking. The core gameplay of shooting enemies is just not satisfying, and having to wait for overheated modules to cool down is not interesting. The story is bad and kinda incoherent, and dialogue feels like filler from the get-go. And so much tell-don't-show to handhold the player. It does not feel like a modern indie game that has learned from progress in the industry. Twin Stick Shooter is not a favorable tag for this game, do *not* in any way expect it to be like Enter the Gungeon or Nuclear Throne. Expect a collect-a-thon where you meet quirky NPC's and clearing the same area 5 times over to grind for parts / because you need to navigate back and forth. But if you're not deep down the rabbit hole of indie games, and want a cute game to kill hours doing repetitive missions, and want to support a very lovely youtube creator, you may still have a lovely time playing it :)

Eins, Zwei, Drei

In many of the previous reviews of Look Mum No Computer (The Game), the twin-stick shooter developed by The Bitfather together with musician, YouTuber and electronics enthusiast Sam Battle, has been praised quite highly, but also with some occasional and justified points of criticism here and there. As you can see, I'm also giving it a thumbs-up, but I can’t honestly say I would fully recommend it without hesitation. It would simply feel wrong to frame it as a great game, because even if it hurts a little to say, it isn’t quite that. I’ve been following Sam on YouTube for many years and most recently had contact with him when I wrote an article about Audiosurf and music games. I also wish him a lot of success at the Eurovision Song Contest and I do think he actually has a decent chance of doing well there. But as much as I love pixel games, as much as a game with synthesizer modules always grabs my attention and as much as I want to support Sam, I had a pretty rough time with this game overall. Well there’s definitely some charm here, and you get some hilarious moments out of playing as Sam and Kosmo while tweaking your sound cannon with different modules, but the downsides are still pretty hard to ignore. Pacing and progression feel sluggish and kind of tedious, you slowly walk back and forth, running into the same enemies and fighting the same battles over and over again. It also feels like the game is deliberately slowing you down or stretching things out, and the short music loop in each level becomes just as repetitive. It’s a bit of a letdown they didn’t put a bit more work into that. By the late game, you’re basically stuck grinding. Magnet floors slow you down even more, oil slicks can send you sliding straight into groups of enemies, battles get more and more chaotic with way too much going on, and missions like escorts mostly just end up being frustrating. For me, I eventually reached the point where I just didn’t feel like finishing the game anymore. Maybe I’ll get back to it at some point, but probably not. That’s not really down to the game alone, even if I wasn’t enjoying it much anymore towards the end. There are just too many other games I’m still really into right now or have been meaning to finally play, plus a few new ones I’m honestly pretty excited about. So I just hope that if you end up playing Look Mum No Computer, you have a good time with it and don’t get too frustrated by the end, so you’re able to actually finish it.

An excellent game, but maybe not for everyone. I found out about this game on launch day, and being a fan of LMNC and his style of music, I was more than happy to buy and play it. I enjoyed it enough to fully perfect the game on 125% difficulty, but I can't say that it's entirely flawless. The sound design of the entire game was great (even just the dialogue sounds were pleasant to me haha), and at the end of each play session I would go to the synthesizer in the museum just to mess around with the different modules. The dynamic soundtrack concept kept me more engaged with the game as I played, but I have to agree with other reviews that some of the sounds can start to feel grating (the flame organ module lmao) and especially early in the game when your power level is low and the sounds aren't as complex. I found the gameplay satisfying and especially once you get far enough in that you're choosing where and when to use different combinations of modules. I could never fully rely on a single loadout to take me through every single mission, and there were times that the game was clearly encouraging me to use specific ones to fit the current mission better. I will admit though that I pretty much never used a few of the modules (the hypno and acid ones), and in some cases there were some that I used early on but found to be so much less effective than the later unlocked ones that I almost fully stopped using them even though I was still upgrading them all (the beam and lightning modules vs. the flame and megadrone modules in particular). I would say the game was challenging for me to complete, but I found out right before the final boss that I had accidentally been making everything harder on myself by manually turning to face each enemy and using the fire button instead of just using the right stick for it all (oops lol). In terms of the feeling of progression, I felt that I had unlocked all 8 of the module slots almost too early on and that I had been given just about all of the most useful modules by the end of world 4, and so the last half of the game felt a bit grind-heavy since I was just upgrading the same set of modules over and over (I had also refrained from buying module upgrades until the end as much as possible). I did try to play the worlds in order though, doing every mission and getting all the collectibles in each one before moving to the next, so perhaps if I had done a bit of each world at a time I would have been going back and grinding previous worlds for resources less (that would have made getting all the collectibles more exhausting, though). The only other thing I could note about the difficulty of the game was the sharp increase at the end, I was expecting a challenge of course but the final boss was quite exhausting even with a max level loadout which I had to go back and grind resources for to even stand a chance at beating. It was super satisfying to complete the game though, and the story was okay for the most part. It's very clear to me that a lot of thought, time, and effort went into the game, even just from the smaller LMNC references and humor with not just the dialogue but even things like the characters you rescue running crazily around the screen before leaving lol. Sadly though, I do think that those who aren't fans of LMNC and especially analog synth music would find more issues with the game than I did, or at least not appreciate it as much. To everyone who was involved with the game, awesome work!

Play this if love LMNC and want to support Sam! If you don't love LMNC, then what the heck is wrong with you?!!!

Heads up, I didn't realize the music would get better as you play! early songs sound really lame, then as you upgrade and acquire more modules it gets back to being more like look mum no computer! Not the greatest of story lines but still good fun.

This game is a twinstick shooter where you use a modular synthesizer to modify your gun. Of course its fun and the gameplay loop is very addictive. The game feels very arcade-y and i mean that in the best way possible. There is plenty here for anyone that likes LMNC, but plenty for anyone that like this style of action game. Soundtrack slaps.

Just started playing on my ally running bazzite. The game design is excellent. The music / synthesis elements are surprisingly in depth and really good. I am going to enjoy this one. Seems easy to pick up and grasp.

I do recommend this game with a major caveat: you gotta be here for the music. Look at this like an LMNC interactive album lol The soundtrack, most sound effects, and music-based mechanics of the game truly slap. It's a highlight. If you dig chiptune, bad puns, anti-consumerism themes, and syncopated beats then you're in the right place. However! The gameplay is lacking in many parts. Component farming is super grindy and doesn't add anything. Enemy health feels randomized (and especially terrible in the last stage) and this is compounded with the addition of an uncommunicated damage upgrade for every boss beaten. There is an astronomical amount of backtracking. The levels are not designed well and after beating any puzzle or boss you have to trot yourself back to whatever entity sent you there. Combat tends to drag after a bit and at its most challenging is just a matter of tanking enough hits while waiting for your damage combo to finally kill the thing(s). It's just a matter of having enough health and grinding to get the better strength weapons, skill is ignored. Another combat aspect that is weak is the lack of any real chemistry between attacks. You should always choose whatever let's you spit out more damage - most crowd control passives are entirely useless. Also, the movement feels clunky and walls tend to grab you. This becomes an especially punishing aspect of the game in levels with a dense amount of obstacles and some amount of altered movement (e.g. slippery floors, launching bumpers, etc.) Overall, I still love Sam and I think his influence here is clear and just barely the saving grace for the game but I sincerely feel like I should have just kept playing with the jam session tool instead of trying to actually beat the game. Great concept, awesome music, and goofy fun writing but the Sh!tfather and Headup A$$ have ruined most of the obvious potential with lackluster development and zero playtesting.

Great game, which reminds one of SNES adventures like Zelda. Also, this game has very good music