Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2

It’s 2017 and the Apocalypse is years ahead of schedule and the gods have disappeared. You, a Deep One, have awoken from the Dreamland and must find the Necronomicon before Nyarlathotep, The Crawling Chaos and his 7 gods does and restore things to how they were or bring in a new age. Alright, so SAT3: TST2 is the third VN in the series and it’s not nearly as cool as I made it sound in the paragraph above. This VN is, at its core, pure insanity and chaos. It’s a Lovecraftian adventure where you fight monsters by answering trivia questions (Brush up on your Shakespeare.) and fly around on a floating ship/city while “fighting” Microsoft paint horror monsters and creatures. One moment you’re in Antarctica making friends with a... yeti girl with pointy teeth (?) and the next you’re challenging Alexander Hamilton to a rap battle and signing the declaration of Independence. (Reminder: It’s 2017.) TL;DR: It’s pure insanity and I would only recommend it if you love fever dreams with a Lovecraftian touch; or if you read the other two VN’s in the series and liked them, which prompts the question, WHY? https://i.imgur.com/nxyEHm9.jpg

It's like a mix of rpg & novel games with many good dialogues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0JVwmYbZjU

This game plays a lot like a choose your own adventure visual novel. It has a lot of various places to explore and a multitude of quests to play through besides the main quest line. The combat in the game is either wordplay based or trivia based (much of it being US history). I really enjoyed my playthrough of the game and will likely replay. Even though I've played thru it once, there still were many side quests I could go back in another playthrough to do and various options to drive the story other ways. The humour in the game was a plus for me too.

This game is funny. I think one of the things that it really has going for it is its sense of humor; be it the snarky wit of the main protagonist, the wacky array of supporting characters, or just the self-aware exposition, this is an objectively funny game. It's a tongue-in-cheek parody game filled with nerdy references, and the game rewards you for recognizing them. Not to mention, the story is quite absorbing -- after playing for awhile it became hard to stop -- despite the fact that the game certainly does not take itself too seriously, it's difficult not to get wrapped up in the world building and story arch. That being said, this game is a whole lot of story, a whole lot of jokes, and a whole lot of amusing exposition. That is to say, it's really, really talky. This isn't inherently a bad thing -- but one of my main criticisms is with the way that the frankly epic amounts of written information was handled. It would have benefitted greatly from voice actors, and considering the 1st game was very nicely voice acted, I found the sudden change jarring (despite the fact that even that was a in-joke about sequels). Voicing the cast would have made me feel less like I was reading an interactive sci-fi/fantasy picture book, and more like I was playing a video game. However, if it was impossible to have gotten voice actors for the sequel for whatever reason, then this game very much needed some other way of breaking up all the talking into easy-to-follow chunks. Just having the character's name there above the dialogue box wasn't enough for a smooth gaming experience. Something such as a logo for each character next to their name, a change in font color for each character, or a musical theme (when applicable) associated with each character to indicate when they are speaking would have been helpful. All in all, this is a funny, absorbing game -- depite what seem like budgetary issues with the voice cast not returning, I would very much recommend this game to anyone who likes an engaging parody story.

Been enjoying it. If your looking for a store driven game that is almost like a novel its a great play. Its funny and pokes fun at alot of Nerd stuff. You will understand once your in :D Pros. Good story, Funny, Intressting toons. Cons. Starts a little slow. Long time till the first health restore point. Litttle Costly but you get alot of game time.

The good: Excellent sense of humor, clever characters, great writing. The game's "battles" are done through arguments and once you figure out the pattern they're not too challenging, and therein lies the fun. You feel so awesome and clever when you figure it out and get through fights flawlessly. There are tons of pop culture references, which are very good at inducing the "oh, I got that!" feeling of superior cultural awareness that a good episode of Mystery Science Theater 2k was so adept at creating. The bad: You will be retreading the same screens over and over as you move from one place to another, "fetch quests" are never very exciting but a menu-based-movement game laden with them introduces some measure of tedium. The ugly: There's a LOT of DLC, though the Black Goat edition fixes this problem, it's approaching Crusader Kings levels here. Unlike CK2 though, the DLC is very reasonably priced and I view many of them more as a way to tip a few bucks to the dev than essential upgrades. The sheer memetic and humor density treads a fine line that some people will no doubt find overly dense, though I personally find it charming. The sort of parodic rapid-fire of jokes where if you don't get or find one funny, another one is right behind, much like parodies like Police Squad (and some people felt Police Squad fell flat for just that reason, too many jokes in too little time) NOTE: there used to be some bugs, but the developer shows an impressive level of dedication to support and polish, supporting the game over a time span that should shame AAA developers that claim product support is "too expensive" over the long term and leave their games unpolished. What I'd pay: I buy every Stegalosaurus game on release, and never regret the money. If you're on the fence discouts are often enough that you can pick it up cheap, and the modular DLC approach with an impressively cheap base game let you try before you really invest, ample DLC means if you find it to your liking you can extend the experience.

So I bought this game following my experience with the first one which I found weird but entertaining. Sadly the followup feels tired and stretched thin. The humor is way less inspired, the use of "Cthulhu Mythos" elements felt irrelevant as art and story status of the beings are way less connected to their original counterparts than in the first one, the dialogue (combat) options felt more random and even more so like game of trivial pursuit than something related to the story or characters (though it was a problem to at some points in the first one). Small nick pick: for some reason (though not surprising after looking at this company's game library) there is an over abundance of Shakespeare references and I mean there are LOTS of them. Those should really have been references to Lovecraft and his circles of associates and friends The combat system is still great and interesting though, but like mentioned before it didn't feel like I was battling anybody through knowledge and logic but just answering trivia questions. There is also a lot of repetition. When you get a random encounter with something you already fought the answers are the same and in the same order and for some reason before fighting the last boss you have to fight all the previous boss and they all have the same answers and in the same order. This was really tiresome and sleep inducing. Let's now talk about the menus: in the first game to move around you had some nice maps to move around, but for this installment they decided to downgrade and go with dialogue menus with sometimes take multiple pages to go through all the options of zone. I think this specific elements represent best the change between the 1rst and 2nd game. For a game build in a visual novel engine there is so many bugs it's uncanny. When I first bought the game I got multiple exceptions that prevented me from starting a new game though this was fixed fast enough. Quest breaking bugs, dead characters joining the party bugs, achievements not unlocking bugs, achievements unlocking without meeting the requirement bugs, etc. etc. Like the first game there some potential here but it's buried underneath all the problems. Stick with the first one if you're into this kind of game.

"Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2" is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. This E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this. On the matter of plot and substance, this has little to none. The favourite subject of all amateur developers, the corpse of HP Lovecraft has once more been exhumed so that a craptastic ripoff of his works could be created, because much as amateur developers typically lack the capability to come up with their own game designs, quality assets etc, they're also usually unable to come up with original plot ideas, and this trashheap is no exception. Why can't amateur developers leave Lovecraft alone??? Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. On the upside, the E-Book does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the E-Book is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-Book absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. All of the achievements have a 2.5% accomplishment rate which implies an incredibly low number of readers... it's mathematically improbable everyone who read this E-book chose all the same Choose Your Own Adventure options to get all the same achievements as everyone else who read it. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered reading this. Ouch. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this E-Book was with readers reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in reader counts for the E-Book. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 3 percent of readers bothered playing the E-Book for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this E-Book to have so many concurrent readers who didn't bother engaging with this E-Book? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this E-Book for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the E-Book just has a couple of readers every week running up the E-Book and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many E-Books like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. So, should you buy this E-Book? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? "Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2" has the far too high price of $11 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $11 asking price for this game could get you games like "Mass Effect Trilogy Pack", "Kingdom Come Deliverance" or "Disco Elysium". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games.