0xFF

I'm reviewing Steam games in alphabetical order, and you can watch my review here: https://youtu.be/oWWg2x3PywQ Prefer to read? 0xFF is a modern game with stylised retro PS1 era graphics... with ray tracing added. It's a first person exploration and environmental puzzle solving game, where the challenge is to reach a destination by performing a needlessly complex series of steps that involve several instances of backtracking. The game itself is only around an hour long, but any death results in a full reset, so it ended up taking 8 hours to beat as a result. This is less of a game and more of an endurance test - it's not worth your time.

This game has a lot of potential and cool ideas, but ultimately they fall flat in the face of the gameplay loop. Everything about this game is frustrating and janky. Invisible gigaradiation barriers that will shred your suit in 1-hit are spread around POIs and are just frustrating to play around because you don't know what you did wrong when you hit one and die. If you fly the helicopter too straight to the first base, you will die to a gigaradiation blast, but if you deviate by 10 meters you will live, no explanation given. For my clear, I ended up brute forcing the mechanics, and finding glitches so that I could get around poorly designed and not explained mechanics. I have no idea how you can beat this game legit, and don't care to learn how. This game doesn't respect your time, and I don't think its worth yours. At the end of the game, the pay off for putting up with torture is the water turns blue, and you can freely explore the map, which is lame. If you decide to venture on in, I have a clear video on my profile to help.

update: after watching a video of how to "beat" it, I can no longer recommend the game. There isn't even a damn "you win" screen or credits, the game just continues on and its implied that you "won" Idk if i'd actually fully 100% recommend it, but its hard to be the only reviewer and be too critical. The game is good, its similar to Iron Lung in that its a low poly 3d puzzle game, but you have to get the run perfect while discovering more things like in Outer Wilds. The atmosphere is intriguing and the concept unique. Essentially every 30 seconds or so, a radioactive pulse shoots across the sky, obliterating anything in its way as well as taking away 25% of your health unless you're indoors. You need to hop between bases and vehicles to try to get to the source of it. I liked the game enough to try diligently at it for a few hours, but ultimately couldn't beat it and got frustrated with the system. Perhaps the most annoying aspect is there is no way to descend your helicopter, and for a game where the most important thing is getting to the ground and taking cover, having to wait 20 seconds for the helicopter to slowly descend is frustrating. That said, the setting intrigued m…

[h1]0xFF[/h1] Upfront, 0xFF (value 255 in computer terms) is for a niche audience due to the fact that the game uses RTX, this means that it is not compatible with the Steam Deck and if you don't have a Nvidia graphics card, then you will be unable to play this. The developer has been tinkering wiith global illumination for many years and when raytracing became available he just had to use it, creating the game and a world that he himself wanted to make. Originally, the developer Joakim Sandstrom (Swedish), further created this short puzzle adventure (20-45 mins) towards a niche market by making it hardcore. He increased the amount of damage each radiation outburst caused, water was instantly toxic and there was no respawn points or save functions. Therefore when a player died they would automatically have to go back to the start. This is the main cause of the vast majority of negative reviews recieved. Now the developer has completely changed this and catered for a more casual gamer experience also. Though I would like to add that he should implement various modes to the game like easy, normal and hardcore as some puzzles can be solved in more than one way. The main objective o…

With barely any direction to this game I found it very difficult to know what I was supposed to do. When you can what feels randomly die to mass amounts of radiation that I have no way of detecting, I eventually got frustrated of dying and quit playing.