//SNOWFLAKE TATTOO//

I'm playing Steam games in alphabetical order, and you can watch my review here: https://youtu.be/99SE7rF_lfs

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//SNOWFLAKE TATTOO// is a prequel to //N.P.P.D RUSH//- The Milk Of Ultraviolet, that somehow manages to make a game with a similar premise but worse execution in almost every aspect.
Firstly: AVOID THIS GAME IF YOU HAVE EPILEPSY.
The screen is filled with unnecessary clutter, the font is hard to read and flashes constantly, and barely anything is explained to you. Now, this could be intentional, to make the player feel lost and confusion, much like the character in game. The problem is, it's not fun to be lost and confused.
You roam around a mostly empty map, waiting for collectables to spawn at random, and then access a shop to restore health and ammo. FYI Dev, I think you forgot to give "Metal" a purpose. You can collect it, but never spend it.
Also, I think you forgot about the whole "Search for and save your sister" plot, because that doesn't even get a reference at the end of the game.
Even if this game was free, I would struggle to recommend it, but at $5.49CAD it's a complete rip off.

Terrible "retro" pixel art style maze game, very boring and doesn't even feel good to play.

Best thing if you are looking for a headache.

I honestly don't know wtf is going on most of the time. It's like some sort of shooter game in wich if you shoot you're no longer able to go to that area anymore because it spreads fire in the entire room and it never dissapears. It doesn't helps when you have to just wander around waiting for some "dollsteaks" things to spawn meaning if you shoot very often you reduce the area of the map you can explore in order to find them. sometimes those dollsteaks never spawns wasting a lot health until you finally see them.

If you don't shoot it starts to stack a supid ammount of enemies that will shoot at you anyways. There are also some sort of flying stuff that you're supposed to shot down to collect stuff sometimes, sometimes they don't drop shit and it wasted your limited ammo + burnt the entire place.

Then there is some sort of bonus stage? where i don't know if yo have to dodge the dollsteaks this time or touch them, there is no counter or anything letting me know if it beneficts or perjudices me, tried collecting all of them but didn't show any difference from the time i dodged them all.

Then there is a shop that once you there they just let you know you can't buy shit anyways, so no way to recover health you lost from the stupid ammount of enemies or the damage from your own weapon.

I tried to like this but it was really

DEUS EX MACHINA - ZX SPECTRUM knocked on the door & wants to be intimate........

going Yes this evening.

F

4/10

I have like 6 minutes in this game and that's enough. This game is either:

A: Completely stupid and makes no sense.

or

B: Makes perfect sense and was designed for people whose IQ is infinitely higher than mine.

Either way I'll tell you right off the bat I knew I was going to hate this game, and EVEN if it has the potential to be something amazing, and even if it tells a fantastic story (hypothetically, as I'll never know) It's all ruined for me by the art. It literally hurts my eyes to look at it. It looks worse than a clumsy UI that was drawn in Microsoft Paint, and I just can't handle it. I'm sorry Rail Slave Games, I'm sorry. :(

I don't know whether to recommend this or not. It's definitely a very boogie and inaccessible sort of game. And not particularly good. But it has this...minimalist white on black aesthetic with small accents of oscillating colours, giving it a sense of beauty and wonder., whilst backed by a unique and mildy trippy soundtrack.

You travel as a duo---one very human, and one a messed up mishmash of a mutilated, restructured body attached to an extremely quick motorcyle. The latter character named Ultra-Violet lights up your way, casting off these interesting light patterns influenced by the surrounding environment that gives each position a unique shape, one of which you're tasked to find each level after completing your other objectives before your heat runs out.

It an definitely be tedious because it's a quest to get certain items and resources each level, but they randomly appear instead of you having to work for them, which---depending on what you can get out of the game---a minor to major downfall.

An opaque game that's hard to understand, not just because it doesn't really go to any real efforts to explain anything to the player, but also because it isn't entirely clear how much there is to understand in the first place. Maybe there's a great meaning hidden inside! Maybe it's obtuse for its own sake, a bunch of empty symbols and arbitrarily assembled word salad. I can't play it for very long, but I've had a lot of fun thinking about it and how it's built all the same.

Roam around a ship while your health slowly depletes, waiting for enough collectibles to randomly appear so you can unlock the next area, then trying to find the entrance to said area before your heat meter drains and you die.

It's not fun.

You have seen nothing and you want to see everything. You have seen everything but you have seen nothing. Your confused mind doesn't know what it's looking for, because what it's looking for confuses it.

Get lost in this hard to master and very addictive trip while listening to its tech-noir atmospheric soundtrack. It's a pixellated ghett-ro game, not very graphically detailed, you'll need to use your imagination to get fully immersed in its twisted cyberpunk plot that pushes the boundaries of morality.

Giving the character the opportunity to behave in many different ways (save the dolls/sell them to the abstraction/craft supplies out of them/leave them alone) without predifining which one is "right" or "wrong" is a great feature, many big games could be a lot better if they didn't design character progression with a single one way route that you have to follow to reach the "end game".

End game... what *is* the end game? Is the end game the start of the game? Or is the start of the game the end game? Don't bother thinking about it, because the final conclusion would be madness, the end of everything for the start of nothing.

In //SNOWFLAKE TATTOO// RailSlaveGames lets the players think for themselves, make their own judgements and act accordingly. It's up to them to decide to be a hero, a villain or something in between.

It's like a sequel to N.P.P.D. Rush, and a sequel to that time you might have been sexually assaulted but aren't sure.

Another release by Rail Slave Games, Snowflake Tattoo furthers the weirdness of the developer's games. You are a human/bike/robot going around a slave ship to find 10 "dollsteak" while defeating or avoiding the robot/people things with your sentient plasma gun. Once you have that all, you can sell them to this "inter-dimensional trading post," and repeat until you find your sister lost in the slave trade. Overall, the game is pretty good, but you need to be able to dedicate yourself to finding the bits and pieces of the story if you want to understand the game.

If you didn't know already, any game made by Rail Slave is gonna be weird. And you need to be ready for that if you're buying one of the games. The graphics are trippy, the stories are strange and confusing, and that's not for everyone, which is okay, but you need to know that beforehand, or else you're in for a bad time.

The graphics are alright. The game is pixelated, which doesn't display too much detail, but that's alright because the whole design looks nice enough. The music is good, fitting the game well, and many other people enjoy it a lot, so nothing to complain about there. The gameplay is fun enough, with a need to keep moving while finding the dollsteak that appears throughout the map while avoiding or fighting your enemies, which also appear throughout the map.

The story is a main part of the game, which you might not be able to pick up. The story really can only be found in the many thoughts and ramblings of your protagonist that appear on the bottom part of the screen. Of course, Rail Slave Games can't just lay out the story for you, that would make too much sense.

In the end, you need to be prepared to play something different, although this game has much more playability than the games before. If you like spending a bit of time uncovering the secrets and story of a strange game, then dig in. If you're looking for another run-of-the-mill indie game, then turn around and don't come back, this is not for you.

Similar to everything else by Rail Slave Games, it's a love-letter to 80s-era arcade style gaming with minimal explanation, and plenty of environmental/alternate storytelling. You're going to be figuring out the controls and purpose on your own, but if that as game appeals to you, can't really find anyone else doing this out there. I'm basically always on board for this team between the C64 atmosphere, the excellent sound design, and weird cyberpunk optimisery.

Might be the best game Rail Slave has made

Railslave games returns to a gameplay akin to NPPD but with a few changes:

- Graphics are worse with an overbearing UI

- Shooting is done by mouse button (for a story reasons a sniper is assisting you) and feels atrocious both in terms of accuracy and firepower

- To advance to the next stage you need to collect 10 dollsteak (e.g. frozen women) and then find the exact spot on the map that matches a shape in your UI once you stop and zoom out. Also there's a time limit to finding this shape.

NPPD was never a good game but weird curiosity, and Snowflake Tattoo is still in that same crazy territory but far more frustrating. The game also likes to barf out dialogue into your cluttered UI constantly and the whole thing is an exercise in tedium. The music is appropriately ambient and "cold" but otherwise there's nothing of value to be found here.

(UPDATE : I HAVE MANAGED TO SAVE **32** FROSTBITTEN BEAUTIES BY GAME-END! IF YOU CAN DO BETTER, POST IN GAME DISCUSSIONS UNDER HIGH SCORE TABLE.)

Snowflake Tattoo is a tough-as-nails neoretro in which you simultaneously pilot two lost souls: a part-human, part-motorbike cyborg whose luminescence cuts through the frosty dark, and a floating mercenary with a sentient plasma rifle who has cast herself into an ever-deepening spiral of casual evil in the name of sisterly love. Though Snowflake isn't as much an adventure as an arcade experience in the vein of white-knuckle classics like Berzerk and Venture (albeit far more pulastingly organic), the framing narrative will resonate powerfully with any player who ever loved the synaesthetic dream voyages of Philip K. D:ck. This story, addressed briefly in the intro and then in snatches of rainbow text during gameplay, intrigued me to the point of distraction when I began; it actually took me nearly half an hour to stop dreaming and start playing this weird, well-designed game in earnest.

The primary gamescape is an orbital freezer-ship: an expanse of shadowed corridors, monstrous snowflakes and bloodthirsty security bots, all limned in the prismatic frizzle that is glitch punk. You control Ultra Violet, the glowing CyBike, with WASD, as she picks up cryogenically frozen women (dollsteak) and organic goop (salvage) that can be used at the inter-level store. Unfortunately, Ultra Violet has absolutely no weapons, so when the cold shadows slide away from her light to reveal a roving turret, things can get nasty. That's where the mercenary comes in! She will remain hovering in the lofty foreground for as long for as Ultra Violet is moving, and while she's there, you can control the crosshairs of her sentient plasma rifle with the mouse. With this curious weapon, you can lay down strings and wads of writhing fireballs -- and since the intelligent plasma may shift but never disappears, you can also lay traps for foes that aggressively pursue Ultra Violet. Watch out, though! The live fire can also dole out serious hurt to the pacifistic motorgirl if she rolls into it.

Once you have nabbed 10 dollsteaks, a dimensional portal opens to the Abstraction (a realm of inhuman beings who want the frozen girls for unwholesomely vague reasons), the temperature of the ship drops even lower, and you begin to bleed heat; if you lose it all, you die -- and as our old pal Ocelot might say, there are no continues, my friend! During this panicked cool-down, the enemies stop and the shadows flash madly as you urge Ultra Violet to that spot where the shadows fall into geometric correspondence with the Abstraction's polygon. Once you have been safely teleported to the Abstraction, you may sell your girls, use your salvage to upgrade health or luck (chance of finding life-kits in the salvage) or craft ammo. You also may keep your girls . . . and risk losing them all in a punishing minigame as the Abstraction seeks (and more than likely manages) to steal them from the mercenary in her dreams! Then it's back to snowy hell, where searcher and slayer must collect more of that precious, precious meat.

This is a difficult game, doubly so for HD-texture kids and others not at home in our hallowed blocky halls of Retro. To make it to the end requires sharp reflexes tempered with caution, as wild plasma-slinging will do you no good against the robo-infested darkness. Actually, If you can even reach the end-game screen, you are most definitely a serious old-school gamer. And if you can make it there with more than ten frosty babes in your pocket? YOU ARE THE LAST STARFIGHTER.

Like Rail Slave's other games, Snowflake Tattoo is short -- but it makes up for that brevity with a high level of retro challenge, uncompromising glitch punk aesthetics and a shotgun blast of gonzo creativity straight to the face. The crystalline beauty of the electronica that hovers in its aural spaces is also worthy of mention. And a final point of interest: this game ties into the story of the criminally underrated micro-epic NPPD RUSH: The Milk of Ultraviolet. Snowflake is a prequel, actually, so you can infer some very interesting things about the nature of the duo's relationship in NPPD.

So, will you like Snowflake? Do you like outre science-fantasy? Ancient coin-ops? Glowing spectral sentient boardgame RPGs you can't find in meatspace? Well then, yes, yes you will!

The game is like Ocarine of Time with guns.

Target Audience: None

Summary:
Well, now we know the effects of hardcore drug use over a period of time.

The only thing that's redeemable about this game is a barely OK soundtrack, and that's really stretching it. The game teaches you nothing about what to do, is confusing, has a UI that will give you a headache, and really makes me wonder about the quality control (the lack of it) for the Steam platform.

Video Review: http://youtu.be/NSogLpg48-E

Lists:
Positives:

• Um.........the soundtrack?
  

• Doesn't teach you anything and expects you to figure it out. That can work for some games, not this one.
  
• The UI will give you a headache.
  
• Quality Control issues.
  
• Gameplay is boring, not fun, and frankly is hard to classify as gameplay.
  
[*] Seriously, the game makes me want to throw up trying to play it.

The game makes no sense. It explains practically nothing, except to collect red dolls or something, and the text there is is hard to read and gives you all this story that you frankly have no reason to care about in one long paragraph. The whole thing is very confusing, and all that you do in ride around collecting coloured objects until some guy who keeps appearing on the screen tells you to leave before you freeze to death, and then you freeze to death because the game never explained how to leave.

It feels like the dev was trying to make a "Whoh maaaaan, the game is like, abstract maaaaaan, you gotta experiment and see what works maaaaaaan" kind of game. Sometimes, I like that kind of stuff, but this just isn't fun. This is coming from a guy who loved Kane and Lynch 2, and WAKE.

Usually my reviews are very long and detailed, but since the game just got released I wanted to get this message out quick. Maybe there's more to this game, and I might delete this review if I ever see it, but as it is, it just seems like a confusing mess to me.

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