New World

Oh, MMOs, where should I even begin with them. My favorite game genre, yet one of my least played ones in the last years. I've sunk about 150 hours into New World over the past 2 months, which is the reason for the drought of other posts lately. It's a huge game, and I've not had enough time to experience everything it has to offer, but I feel I'm ready to give my thoughts on it regardless.

New World was off to a massively successful start, becoming one of the most played games in the world for about a week with around a million consecutive players. It was partly due to this that I went to give it a try, as this really seemed to be the best opportunity I was going to have to play an MMO in the nearest years. I don't think I was mistaken, but it wasn't all I had hoped it to be.
New World seems to not be entirely copy-pasted from the standard themepark formula, offering choice on where to go, what to do, and not binding you to the usual quest mill to max level. You're not forced to make the annoying class selection at the start when you have no clue who you want to be playing, and thus saved from having to run through the levelling process again if you want to change who you are. You're really going to have this one character, and commit to this one character, and that's wonderful. Similarly wonderfully, the economy seemed to be doing relatively well. Crafting and resources were well thought out as to not leave any lower ranking resources useless, and encouraging returning to lower level zones at least somewhat, if only to farm the resources there. The market was lively and there was no sign of gold inflation on the horizon. Combat was also a breath of fresh air, feeling quite weighty with staggering and blocking, and only having two hotbars of three skills each - one for each weapon. The design decisions seemed to be done quite well, so I kept playing.

The more I played, the more I started to notice problems crop up. And I don't want to complain about the login queues or the initial supposed plethora of bugs. They didn't worsen my experience, and I believe they were easy enough to avoid. Not that the login queues will be a problem anymore. At this rate, 90% of the players will have left by the end of the year, and that's more than you could chalk up to just the usual post-release decay.
But as I was saying... One of the things I initially loved about the game was that even during the levelling process, the game was never too easy. It was simple to get in over your head and get yourself killed to monsters. While that difficulty theoretically never went away, there was one large oversight. As you explored the open world, the game showered you with quests and things to do. It was great, but those quests had rewards, and being the completionist I am, I wanted to complete all of them. 20 hours into the game, I was far overlevelled for all the content I was going into, and for the rest of my 130 hours, that sweet difficulty that kept me from getting bored was gone.
And yet, why was I doing them? I could skip them, go for the harder, more fun quests and areas. The rewards I was going to get from the higher level quests would overshadow whatever I was getting now anyways. I didn't stop to really ask myself this until I had maxed my level and the game goaded me towards the end-game content. ... I think I didn't want to do whatever the end-game had planned for me. The quests, despite their repetitiveness and simplicity, were more interesting. I got achievements, and got to watch the map and other progress bars slowly become more complete. The end-game was already being streamlined into the most efficient speedrun-like grinds for better equipment or gold on the PvE side, and I didn't have interest in the PvP, it being either dominated by guilds picking their favorites into the organized matches, or whichever side brought more people. Filling up those achievement bars was the most fun I was going to have, and I sat down to think if that was good enough for me.

On the other side, the game wasn't static for 2 months. It was getting updates at a brisk pace, and it had to do something to fix the issues that were cropping up the more people played. But as they fixed one problem, another cropped up, and I am not convinced that they could stop this huge bleeding of players that was happening. While they surely massively exceeded their initial popularity requirements, I'm not sure that it's going to be bringing in enough money soon, and I genuinely worry about Amazon cutting funding from it.
To return to the previously posed question, the content grind was not good enough for me. Not in this state of the game. Not when the future is so uncertain. While New World was a very refereshing MMO experience, and definitely better than most other MMOs I've tried in the past several years, it wasn't unique enough to keep my attention further. I don't regret the time I put into it, but I do wish to refrain from investing any more, until Amazon proves they can stabilize the game while continuing to provide meaningful updates. I will be returning in the future to check up on how it is doing, and perhaps even returning to play if I find things well improved. As for if I would recommend New World? Tough question, but probably so if you like MMOs, especially themeparks, and it is not dead by the time you read this.

Yuppie Psycho

My dislike of horror games grows. When I started playing Yuppie Psycho, I had apparently forgotten that it was a horror game. I just thought it was an... eccentric? adventure game. The pretty pixel art and "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews lured me in, and so I started it up. It's not even that I hate the horror aspect. There's just always been some problem linked to the horror.

The game's about a dozen hours long, and I quit an hour in, so anything beyond my complaints right now will be secondhand experience as per my research before shelving this game for good.
The game just deleted my entire one hour of progress without so much as a warning. And about 15 minutes of it on my first try playing it. See, the game nicely warns you at the start that there is no autosave function. It does not elaborate further. This is fine. Not every game needs autosaves - checkpoints or manual saves are often completely acceptable. The first time, I crashed. Well, I actually crashed about 5 times before I realized it disliked me alt-tabbing or streaming the game, but this was near the start, and wasn't too much of a hinderance.
The seconds time, I was well into the game, and just thought I had had enough for the day. I figured that, surely, the game would at least allow me to save on quitting, and then delete that save on returning. Failing that, I would be reminded that I needed to save my progress before leaving. I've already spoiled that there was no such thing. The game exited without so much as a complaint, wiping an hour of progress. That was just about all I needed to quit. I will not play a game that does not respect my time.

You see, not only does Yuppie Psycho have checkpoints you need to manually save at, it also has a currency (paper) that you need to spend for saving. If you do not have any paper, you can not save. In my hour of playing, which I will admit was mostly the introductory part, I received a grand total of one paper, and this was only through careful checking of everything in the environment. The rest of what I say will be what I read, not what I experienced.
The papers aren't actually that rare in the game, but there's no indication of this. There aren't, however, enough of them to save at every convenient opportunity, and they can also be used as another currency, making it a choice if you want to replay less of the game, or get some other benefit.
This is bullshit, and a complete waste of people's time. I don't care about the excuse of this creating suspense and reinforcing the horror aspect by making you wonder if the journey to the next save point will be manageable. This isn't that kind of game. And most importantly, I lose the ability to play in short bursts, because I need to play for as long as it would naturally take me to want to create another checkpoint.

Most everyone seems to agree that the adventure part of this game is great. The story's good. But the gameplay is a lot more polarizing, and I didn't see a single thorough review of the game not mention the save system. If you're selling me a good story, I want to experience that story in a way that is comfortable for me. "A horror game is supposed to make you uncomfortable." By being scary or unsettling, not by making me do the same stuff all over again for no good reason.
So there. I didn'y play this game. Not because it's not good, but because I don't have time for this nonsense. If you do, I hear the story's great, and you'll probably enjoy it, but I can't personally recommend this horrible design decision.

Omensight

Omensight is a hack-and-slash game, but more than that, it is an investigative story game about finding out why the world has ended. Armed with the power to repeat the last day of the world, and enough combat prowess to make your way into just about anywhere, you will slowly uncover the reason for the calamity and put an end to it.

The game was a tough sell for me at first, as I was put off by the very cartoony artstyle, the non-human cast of characters, but most importantly the subpar gameplay. Movement and attacking felt rather unusual and uncomfortable, caused mostly by the very... custom camera angles. The game took it upon itself to fully control your camera, but I daresay failed at the task. Additionally, combat was a combination of mostly button mashing for attacking, interleaved with reaction-based dodging, as enemies made very swift attacks at you oftentimes from a considerable distance. Perhaps some would enjoy it, but it was too twitchy for me. I got somewhat more used to these issues as I played further, but they never really went away.

I was going to quit after a couple hours of the rather unenjoyable gameplay, but something else had happened. I had gotten invested in the story. I think there were two main things that caused me to really enjoy the story, even as someone who nearly always hates story in games.
The first was that everything was fully voice acted, and at a pretty good quality at that. Every line of dialogue, every single character.
Secondly, I felt a sense of freedom. I'll admit that the game didn't have a branching narrative, and probably required me to go through very concrete plot points to advance, but I was never told where to go or what to do, and I felt the characters and surroundings always reacted to my actions quite naturally. I could present the evidence I had previously found to any of the major characters, and they would act accordingly. I was rewarded for exploration, and even dead ends and wrong decisions, which were the majority of the possible outcomes, played out to their conclusion. I really think what saved the game for me was that they went the extra mile to ensure a proper reaction to any action I could take.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about this game. I did end up giving it at a spot in my best games list, which automatically warrants a recommendation, even if the spot was on the lower end. From a gameplay perspective, don't expect anything innovative or enjoyable, but despite there being plenty of combat and platforming in the game, I would still say the story is the main focus, and the excellent storytelling should carry Omensight to be an enjoyable experience overall. For better or worse, it's on the short side, clocking in at maybe 8-12 hours, depending on how thorough you are, and if you're going for the good ending.
Oh, and don't you dare interrupt Ratika's song.

For The King

I found this indie-looking turn-based RPG called For The King in my Steam library and thought to give it a go. After a failed campaign, I realized it might be better with friends, so I invited two along and did the next two campaigns with them. It was fun, but despite some variety, I really wouldn't go for a third campaign.

The game has about half a dozen campaigns in total. You pick one, pick three characters from a collection of around a dozen classes, which differ by passive abilities and starting stats, and then set out to complete whatever quest this particular campaign asks of you. Most of the game is just running around the map and fighting enemies, earning loot and levels to get stronger, and completing sub-quests until you get to beat the main objective. It takes about 8 hours per successful campaign playthrough if you're alone, and a bit longer if you're coordinating with friends.
The combat is a basic "your turn, choose your action, choose your target", and then you roll a bunch of d100 against your stats to determine the result, with the occasional consumable use thrown in. There's also an unlocks system to get more content - weapons, armor, events - after you've gathered in-game lore currency from campaigns, but it doesn't change the core of the game.

So the main thing I would want to talk about with this game is the illusion of all the choices it gives you. Equipment is not class-locked, but you will be highly inefficient if you use equipment not meant for your class, so it might as well be. Each of your party members gets their own turn on the overworld, so they could move separately, but with how tough enemies are, you almost always want to have a full party for each encounter, removing most of the point from splitting up the party. Similarly, everyone needs very tight cooperation in multiplayer to make things work, but since all actions are sequential, there won't be a better tactic than letting one person decide what everyone does.
At the end of they day, the game just gets repetitive. Once you get down the rhythm of combat, who to focus, how to optimally path around the map, and other small details, you just repeat it ad nauseam.
That said, it was quite fun to figure this stuff out for the first time. The first campaign, it was a mystery what various buildings did, how to approach certain enemies, and the variety in equipment actually seemed to be pretty large. I also found the difficulty to be excellently balanced, as well as the game hurrying you along at a moderate pace to stop you from going the unfun route of farming yourself too strong.

So, what do I think of the game overall? Despite the very low-quality appearance, For The King is quite well-made. It suffers mostly from sticking to a very standard turn-based RPG formula which many people are already familiar with, yet not quite providing enough depth to make it replayable for a longer amount of time without feeling like you're just doing the same thing over and over without much thought. In conclusion, it earns my recommendation and a (low) spot on my best games list, because I had fun for the first campaign or two, and could share the experience with friends.

Nex Machina

Nex Machina is a twin-stick shooter. It's focused on speed, brevity, and action. You're thrust straight into the game, one-shotting enemies keep spawning in in hordes and swarming towards you, you have enough firepower from the get-go to obliterate everything in seconds, as well as being hyper-mobile with a dash. There's some bigger enemies, a few environmental hazards, some power-ups... You finish a level in a few minutes, and it thrusts you immediately into the next, and so on until you lose or beat all the levels in less than an hour.

Now, from the description, you might realize the target audience for this game. You might also realize I'm not part of said target audience. It's a short and difficult game, with the objective being to do better and better each time you play it. You're not expected to beat it and call it a day, you're expected to play the exact same thing over and over again until it's burned into your brain and you can execute it flawlessly. There are very few games of this type that I have enjoyed, but even then I feel like there's been more substance to the game - more I could do. Nex Machina feels very basic, and super intent on memorizing and specific flawless execution, and I'm really against that.
Also, the mouse aiming mode is atrocious, as there is no reticule to point with. This alone was a massive issue for me.

If you're one of the people who likes these kinds of score-attack arcade games, maybe you'll like Nex Machina. I can't well tell what is sought after in these games, and it feels a bit bare for me, but the reviews aren't bad. From a personal perspective though, I can't give it a recommendation.

Underhero

Underhero is basically a story-based platformer, except combat happens when you bump into an enemy and plays out in this weird time-based format, kinda of like a series of quick-events. I think I got about 20% through before dropping it. It wasn't particularly bad, just... boring.

So the game opens up with what is essentially a cutscene of this max-level hero going to slay the big bad, and then dying to a chandelier, with a level 1 minion taking his talking sword, and then setting out on a quest to kill his own boss, or something. I hear it makes more sense as you get further into the game, as well as touching on some concepts of "what is good, what is evil?", but I wouldn't guess it's all too serious or deep. See, Underhero puts a huge emphasis on the story. There's so much dialogue, characters to talk to, and even all of the enemies have something to say. Problem is, the writing is kind of mediocre. It doesn't take itself seriously and makes constant attempts at being funny, but falls flat. Feels kind of like sitting in the audience, listening to an amateur stand-up comedian, and once every five jokes someone in the audience chuckles, but the comedian just keeps going for another 20 hours. This is important, because you will be reading much of this dialogue, whether you want it or not.
The platforming is average. Controls aren't tight, and the level design is slightly sub-par, with no special mechanics so far into the game.
The combat is... unusual. You have a stamina bar that fills over time, and a bunch of actions you can use which consume stamina (plus some that don't, but they aren't as relevant). Now, problem is, the game expects you to dodge the enemy's attacks, but this requries stamina - the same resource used for attacking. So the combat has far too much waiting, as you wait for your stamina to recharge and then don't spend it as you need it to dodge. Luckily they have a shield which could be used to parry at next to no stamina cost if you time it well, alleviating some of the time sink problem, but trivializing regular combat.

In the end, Underhero just feels like it's wasting my time. Between a non-serious story, unfunny jokes, uninnovative platforming, and combat consisting mostly of waiting, there aren't many redeeming qualities to this game. I wouldn't say it is particularly bad in any regard, but that hardly qualifies as a compliment. So, yeah, there's nothing to recommend here.

Tower Hunter: Erza's Trial

Disclaimer up front: I only managed to play Tower Hunter: Erza's Trial for about an hour, and didn't experience even close to all aspects of the game, but oh god has it been a while since I've played such a well-scented piece of garbage. The game looks fine from a pure feature description perspective, as well as in stills or clips of up to three seconds in length, which is all that is displayed on the store page, but actually experiencing it live is a nightmare. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Erza's Trial is an action game. Didn't play long enough to confirm if it was a roguelike too, as it says it is. You pick from one of a few weapons, explore a platform-based dungeon, kill monsters, collect currency, level up your abilities, collect slottable runes which give stat increases, and probably fight a few bosses. I didn't get that far. There were no innovative mechanics as far as I found.

A run-on-the-mill hack-and-slash isn't bad in itself, but man did they do everything as terribly as they could have.
The weapons are advertised as being different and having different combos. None of that really matters. Any weapon, you can just spam the attack, and it's functionally equivalent. The enemies die, stunlocked. If you want to go the extra mile in stunlocking, you get a dash about every second, which resets your combo cooldown, allowing you to literally execute a non-stop barrage of attacks, all while dodging as an added bonus. It's dead easy.
Traversing the levels is trivial, partially thanks to abilities like double and triple jump being unlockable at the start for the same price as a 5% damage increase. Gee, can't imagine which one I'd want... In fact the entire ability store is devoid of thought. It's 90% small numerical increases to every weapon, rune, and ability in the game, for the same price, none changing the gameplay in any way.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention there's abilities. They recharge over time and you can find new ones to switch out, but they're useless - your attacks are more than enough.
And the art is all over the place. Some aspects of the game look gorgeous, while others look like MS Paint drawings I could manage. The enemy animations are jerky, no thanks to their AI, which is the most basic walk-back-and-forth pattern you could think of, but somehow made even worse. And the game's not been translated properly, with Google Translate probably being capable of more.

Okay, this isn't a review anymore, this is a rant. Erza's Trial is on the level of quality I'd expect from a university student's first game, just with a bit more time put into it. I could go on and on about the problems in this game, but you don't need to hear it. I don't recommend this game, and I don't so much as want to touch it with a stick.

Grip: Combat Racing

Grip: Combat Racing is about exactly what it says in the title. It's mostly a racing game, but you can ram other racers, as well as acquire pickups to shoot them, protect yourself, or go faster. Your car also has an incredible amount of speed and downforce, allowing you to drive on any wall or ceiling. That's about the extents of the gameplay. It's a racing game, and it's simple, as they tend to be.
You got a dozen or so different levels, difficulty settings, cars (which differ by the usual stats like speed and acceleration - fundamentally all the same), a free-play mode, and a campaign which tries to create a progressively more difficult experience.

Grip puts a lot of effort into the aeshtetics of the game. It looks great. The lighting, the moving parts of the cars, the levels, as well as the music and sounds, which I felt were very fitting. Sadly, that's about where the quality ends. In terms of gameplay, the wall/ceiling-riding gimmick adds little to the game, the combat isn't all that new nor exciting, and the racing element is pretty average.
My biggest problem is how the game constantly disrupts my flow. I hit a wall because I can't understand where the track is headed, or take a jump at the wrong angle, or hit some weird crevice or bump in the level, which shouldn't be there in the first place. Of note is that there is virtually no aerial control, which is dumb for a game where you often exit a tunnel in the air or take off from one of the hundreds of ramps on the level. Sure, you could attribute these to my personal messups that wouldn't happen if I played better, but I feel there is far too much skill required for a smooth and satisfying experience - most everyone should be able to enjoy it.

Overall, Grip isn't a bad racing game, but it has its flaws, and it's really nothing special. If they put heavy work into making the tracks as well as the car handling (in the air, and in the transitions from one surface to another) better, it could be a solid game, but the current implementation can't earn a recommendation from me.

Death Crown

Death Crown is a very simple Tower Defense RTS. It's played on a hex grid consisting of a grand total of a few dozen hexes. The general goal is to destroy the other team's castle, and for that you can: Build mines to increase your gold production, build spawners to spawn units that you can drag to path to whereever, and build towers that shoot nearby enemy units. There's also some areas on the map which act as powerups if you have control over their area, and some other minor mechanics, but for the most part, that's it.

Listen, I love the game's 1-bit aesthetic, and they did all they could with such a small map and so few mechanics, but at the end of the day, it's just an incredibly simple game. You play it for an hour, you experience it all. If you like it, you spend another couple of hours to complete it. However, it can't really captivate you or provide any sort of deep enjoyment - it was just never ambitious enough.
I can't really recommend anything this short and lacking in features.

Civilization VI

I have apparently already given my brief thoughts on Civilization VI back in 2016, but I figured I would do it again, now that I played a proper match to completion and got to experience the DLC as well. After all, Civilization V was not nearly as good without its DLC. I will be focusing a lot on the changes since Civilization V, as that is the closest game to it.

Civilization VI is a 4X Turn-Based Strategy game, much like its predecessor. You start off with a singular city and no idea of the world, and expand into a sprawling country, battling over your borders, your culture, and your religion, while keeping your technological progress on track, your coffers full, and your public opinion nice and tidy. Each of the listed six elements is a resource, and a victory condition, with the exception of gold, where the victory condition is instead points after a certain amount of time, if you want to enable a time limit.
Religion was added as a new victory condition, which is a welcome change. The culture tree is functionally a clone of the tech tree now, which I suppose is also nice, as it gives more options, despite being unimaginative as a clone. Diplomatic victory has been changed from public voting to collecting "good boy points", which makes it more of a race than a popularity contest, but also means it's now essentially a time victory like Points and Science.

The major change of course is the district system, and I think they went too far with it. Each district and world wonder consumes its own tile. Districts determine which buildings you can build, and wonders have restrictions on where they can be placed. The problem is that the world is crowded, and there isn't nearly enough room for all of these. I think it is a major problem, how you can really mess up your city layout by not planning ahead, or if you take someone else's city. With districts being limited by population as well, you could just get stuck, since there's no way to remove or replace districts. It adds strategic depth, I'm sure, but not enough to justify how damn frustrating it can be, and this really outweights all the small improvements they added.
But to quickly fire off a few positives as counterpoints for those who might care: Strategic resources now actually accumulate into stockpiles. City state influence is no longer decided by who's the richest, but has its own mechanic. You can't just plop a city next to someone's empire and expect it to stay up - the loyalty system ensures that large city clusters will convert owenership of any small or lone cities very near them. Great Persons (except Culture related ones) now have unique abilities instead of just being resource boosts.
Most of the rest of the game is the same though, so you won't have a fundamentally different experience either way.

Overall, I feel like Civilization VI goes multiple steps forward from its predecessor, but also as many steps plus one backward, ending at just a slightly less enjoyable experience, and that's not counting the unsightly cartoony artsyle. It's not a bad game, but I would expect something better after a decade or so. Would I recommend it? I guess if you really like Civ V and just want a slight change in scenery, but not in other cases. Just stick to Civilization V.

PS. For what it's worth, the match I played to completion wasn't actually called by the game. I had won the Culture victory, but the game refused to acknowledge it. Such a major bug has been in the game since launch.

RimWorld

The reason for my prolongened absence from any reviews is because I finally got around to playing RimWorld. As any sandbox game worth its salt, it took a long long time to experience it fully. I could estimate up to 200 hours went into trying it, but at least I can finally feel like I can give an informed opinion on it.

RimWorld is a Sandbox Colony Sim with a randomly generated map, world, and events. You control up to a few dozen characters who make up your colony, harvest resources, build buildings, defend from raids, natural disasters, trade with other colonies, accept quests from them, or be the one raiding them. The end goal is to research and launch a rocket (or acquire one by some other method), and get off the hellhole of a planet you crashed on. The various described events serve to hinder you and reign your colony from prospering too much, as simply farming and weathering the climate is generally not a difficult thing to do.

I can tell right off the bat that RimWorld has taken heavy inspiration from Dwarf Fortress, more so than many other colony sims, and that makes my job easier, as I compare any such game to Dwarf Fortress anyways. From the tile-based building, to a fully generated world with biomes, mountains, rivers, temperature physics, to each entity having relatives, emotions, individual body parts being able to be damaged, to a lot more similarities, RimWorld really wanted to be Dwarf Fortress, but more accessible, I feel. Considering the enormous success on Steam, I would say it succeeded in its own right, but I am not going to be as lenient on it. If it wants to copy Dwarf Fortress, it is going to have to beat it.
Despite having an actual team behind the game, RimWorld is surprisingly lacking in content in comparison. There is less variety in jobs, fewer animal and plant types, fewer items, less combat depth, and most importantly, as a massive shortcoming - no 3rd dimension. Without a way to expand into the skies or delve into the depths, RimWorld is fatally lacking in the sandbox building aspect. The "endgame" of Dwarf Fortress is building crazy structures, which are only limited by one's imagination, but RimWorld lacks this long-term depth. One playthrough of it exposes you to most of what you would care to experience.

To compensate, RimWorld has put in more effort into the random event and quest system, offering the player a supposedly balanced challenge, culminating in escaping the planet. It's an intriguing system, sure, and for a while made me think of actually giving this game a positive recommendation, but as the time went on, it got tedious. See, the AI is well made, never throwing challenges at you that would exterminate your colony. However, you need many people to have the game not progress at a snail's pace, yet as soon as you get enough to feel like the colony really picks up, the AI hits you with a harder challenge. Some colonists may die, many get injured, some permanently. Morale is low for weeks as people mourn, suffer in agony from their wounds, and even throw tantrums, possibly wounding or killing more colonists. The game regresses back to a snail's pace, and just as people are finally recovering from it all, the loop begins anew. Sure, the big challenges are exciting and really make you fight for your life, but they do not outweigh this tedious back-and-forth. Another strength of Dwarf Fortress was really managing hundreds of units, and the scales in which events could unfold then. The same scales are simply never reached in RimWorld, because it sacrifices some player freedom for a forced challenge and an attempt to feed fun down your throat.

Despite the negative tone of this all, I don't think RimWorld is a bad game. Few games can say they've held my interest for over a hundred hours, and RimWorld is one of them. However, I would ultimately still not recommend the game. There is not enough room for many games as time-consuming as this, and in my eyes, the price RimWorld must pay for copying Dwarf Fortress, yet not ambitiously surpassing it, is that it is eclipsed by it. It has not managed to carve out a separate enough identity for itself, and I believe you could just have a superior experience with Dwarf Fortress, and for more hours than nigh anyone would care to play it. Thus, even if you need a UI, go get yourself a copy of Dwarf Fortress when it comes out, probably next year.

Book of Demons

More misconceptions, or excuses, if you prefer to see them this way. Whatever the reason, I have made more poor choices in selecting games. When adding Book of Demons to my to-play-list, I'm quite sure I thought it to be from the same series as Monster's Den: Book of Dread, which was a lovely flash game I played many years ago. Well, it wasn't. The description of the game was close, but sadly misleading.

Book of Demons claims to be a roguelike deckbuilder, or even a hack-and-slash. That's a lie. A roguelike, maybe, but in other regards, it's on the level of a mostly casual mobile game.
The game sets you on a track through many levels of dungeons filled with monsters, equipment, gold, and exp. There's promises of dozens of varied enemies, different elements, many game mechanics, multi-stage bossfights... I don't even dare list them for how disappointing they are, although not technically wrong.
For one, the game has no animations, just sprites bouncing about and essentially particle effects as attack animations. Secondly, there's no "real" combat. There's a slow automatic attack pace, but you actually have to click (and keep clicking) on enemies to hit them. The movement is basically fake too, as you're confined to linear paths, essentially giving you a choice of forward or back. This is extra annoying if you're trying to dodge archers or mages, who can shoot at your from outside your vision distance for some reason.
Among other ridiculous mechanics are that some enemies can just summon more enemies. Sometimes right behind you, blocking your path. If they do, you're screwed, since you can't outplay them - it's purely a numbers test, which you will lose. Your saving grace is that even as the melee class, you have a much larger attack range than any melee enemy, but this also creates a boring environment where waves of enemies crash against you, and you just have to click on them all to die.
Speaking of clicking, there's so many things to click on. Click to break shield. Click to pick up loot. Click to open chests. Click to shorten your poison duration. Who adds the mechanic that you have to pick up gold by hovering your mouse over it to a PC game?
And were you wondering about the deckbuilding promise? It's just that equipment and consumables visually look like cards. That's it. There's no deck to speak of, it's just a lie.

Honestly, I'm upset. Not just because this is a glorified phone clicker game, but because I felt it actually had potential. The production quality doesn't seem low at all, and I can tell effort's been put into it. It seems very deliberately made, yet it misses the mark completely. Obviously, I can't recommend this game. If this was an actual mobile game, this might be a different story, but it's not.

Thumper

Tried out Thumper today. I remember seeing it get praised on multiple game news sites, which might have been the reason I picked it up. As seems to be the trend here recently though, I'm not actually a fan of the base genre it's from - rhythm games. I'll try to give you my thoughts on it as unbiased as I can regardless.

So Thumper is a rhythm game where this beetle-like thing is speeding across a linear track, and you gotta press the right buttons at the right times. Turns, notes, barriers, jumps, or maybe they were something else. You see, Thumper's a bit abstract and has very confusing and overbearing visuals and music. The thematics have been turned up to eleven, but at its heart it's still just about pressing up-down-left-right-space at the right times - nothing complicated. There's, I think, 9 stages, with roughly 20 levels each, and a bossfight (which is just a non-fixed length track) at the end of each, and maybe in the middle or somewhere else too sometimes.

However, from its thematic arises my main issue with it. I can't actually see or hear the audio and/or visual cues for what I'm supposed to do at times. Usually, the visual cues shouldn't be as important, but Thumper doesn't always let you keep pressing buttons, with how large the spacing between actions sometimes is, making you lose the rhythm. This really strikes me as something a rhythm game shouldn't do. Sure, as far as the audiovisuals go, Thumper stands out, but I don't understand why people would let it sacrifice the gameplay for that purpose.

Overall, Thumper looks and feels quite unique, but that's just a facade. It has the same old simple rhythm gameplay underneath, and even that isn't executed all that well. I don't like Thumper and wouldn't recommend it, and I don't think that's even my distaste for rhythm games talking. It just wasn't that good.

Finding Paradise

I don't really play games for the story. I generally think there's no benefit to be had from splitting your attention between telling a good story and creating engaging gameplay. However, perhaps a good game can benefit from pieces of story here and there, to give meaning to whatever you're doing. Similarly, perhaps a good story can benefit from pieces of gameplay - reader interaction - to stop attention from waning, to create pauses for thought, and to maybe slightly deepen your attachment to the story.

I immensely enjoyed Finding Paradise's predecessor, To the Moon, and I thought there was no way they could replicate such a memorable story... but they did. Finding Paradise is every bit as good as To the Moon was, so if you loved that, you can stop reading here and go experience Finding Paradise. It's more of the same fantastic storytelling. However, for others, this review can serve for both games in the series.

The reason I approached this in such a roundabout way, is that I don't have much to say about the To the Moon series. As any good story, telling you any major plotpoints would ruin it, so you'll just have to take my word for it being good. Both stories follow two doctors, who work for a unique company that grants people's dying wishes by rewriting their memories, so they could live the lives they always wanted to, at least for a brief moment before their death. To accomplish that, they must traverse through the person's entire life, experiencing the most imporant pieces of it. The beauty of the To the Moon games is how they manage to show that something as ordinary as a regular person's life can be quite extraordinary.

Both games are about 4-6 hours, so they won't take a large chunk of your time, nor will they waste any of it with irrelevant bits or tangents. I wish they were longer, but honestly, they don't have to be. They say what they need to, don't say what they don't have to, and that's probably for the best. Both To the Moon and Finding Paradise are the best story-based games I've played, and I would recommend them to anyone, regardless of whether they like this genre. Myself, I'll be looking forward to the third installement that might be coming out in the nearest year.

Hell is Other Demons

Glad to see my old favorite Flash game site Kongregate is still supporting game development. Hell is Other Demons is one of their published games on Steam that I just tried out. Sadly, like with many other games they've published on Steam, it wasn't bad, but also didn't quite suit me.

Hell is Other Demons is a bullet hell game, but instead of flying in a spaceship/plane equivalent, you're platforming. I had initially thought this was like a more fleshed out roguelike, but most levels are still tied to roughly one screenful of room to move around in. There's some platforms, environmental hazards, and waves of spawning enemies per level. You get a double jump, an invincibility dash, a pistol (or more like a machine gun) that can only shoot sideways, and a "bomb" that can be charged up through kills. Definitely closer to the design of a bullet hell.
You can also buy some upgrades to your character like more health, faster bullets, etc. as well as new guns and bombs with different attack patterns. Additionally, each level has extra challenges like don't get hit or don't use your bomb, if you want that.

After playing, it became clear to me that this is yet another game oriented toward the perfectionist players who like challenging the same content over and over for slightly better scores. The lack of a map and exploration was kind of dissapointing, and that might've been enough to drop it. However, what really irked me about the combat was that I couldn't shoot up, and couldn't dodge with precision. Bullet hell games are supposed to be about using fine control and good planning to dodge all the enemies and their attacks. Here, I feel more like commanding an unyieldy ragdoll. I've a large hitbox, and the constant assault of gravity and environmental hazards.
Sure, it might be too easy if I just get to stay in a corner and gun everyone down, but then that's the developers' problem to fix, instead of shackling me with unsatisfying restrictions.

Overall, definitely not a game for me. I can appreciate what it was going for, and the execution isn't bad at all, but I simply don't wish to repeat the same content so much, finding ever less interesting ways to kill the enemies to compensate for the restrictions placed upon my actions. Just give me mouse aim for dodges and shooting. As it stands, maybe if you want to try a mediocre platformer bullet hell, but otherwise I can't recommend it.

Furi

Ah, Furi. Another promising game I was looking forward to. Been almost 5 years since its release now too.

Furi is a top-down bullet hell hack and slash. The game is comprised of a series of bossfights - levels, if you will. You've got your melee slash, your ranged gun, charged attacks for both that deal more damage but leave you vulnerable, a parry, and a dodge-dash. Good, if standard, stuff. The boss fights offer a healthy amount of difficulty, but are also somewhat forgiving, giving you a full heal and one of your lives back after each phase, so there's a good chance of beating them on the first try since you essentially get a practice run every phase.

Now, I'll address the elephant first. This game has shoddy keyboard+mouse controls for how high action and precision demanding it is. I don't think it's an inherent problem in the type of game Furi is, I just think the developers didn't care to add it in. Like, give me my mouse cursor at the very least, instead of some reticle on the ground serving as a vague hint. For a PC game, this is unacceptable, and amounts to more than half of my frustration with the game.
The rest leans more toward personal issues. It feels like Furi is more oriented towards the speedrunner and completionist kind. The game's about 6 hours long, I think, but there's a more difficult mode, and extra praise if you do really well in the fights. While a norm for bossfights in all action games, I'm not actually a big fan of the rather rigid series of actions-responses you're supposed to do at times. I think Furi offers a good amount of freedom for a bossfight game, but it's inherently quite reaction-and-memorization based.
And finally, it just seems rough around the edges. The graphics are stylized, but still feel a bit... amateur. Same for the animations. Not bad, but a bit off. It's a minor grievance, and I'm not one to hate on game art, but it bleeds a bit into how responsive the game feels, and how well attacks and whatnot are telegraphed.

Overall, I can't give Furi a personal recommendation. If you're a fan of bossfights, hack and slash, and/or bullet hell, it might very well be up your alley, but I think it's far from perfection in any case. Just make sure you own a controller before playing, because otherwise I can almost guarantee you'll have a greatly suboptimal experience.

Kingdom: New Lands

One of the older games still left on my backlog this time. (Fun fact, there's apparently also a Flash version, not that those are easily accessible anymore as of this year.) I've had my eye on Kingdom: Classic (which kind of acts like a free demo these days) since it came out in 2015. But before I got to play it, Kingdom: New Lands was already out, so I opted for that instead. I seemed to have missed Kingdom: Two Crowns for some reason, which came out in late 2018.
So, I only played New Lands, but from what I read, the core gameplay is basically the same for all of them. Each next installation just adds a bit more content. So keep in mind that what I say probably applies to all of them.

Kingdom is an extremely minimalist strategy game. You play as a ruler, who gallops left and right on their steed, and the only thing they can do aside from this movement is to collect money and choose where to allocate this money. You can hire workers, get them tools to build/hunt/farm, fund farms, defenses, and some other stuff like shrines. After a few days, you'll be sieged by monsters each night. Survive long enough to build a big boat, and you win.

To start from the good bits - I find this minimalistic gameplay quite well executed. It's intuitive, and you can really do quite much with effectively only one interaction button. The art is really nice, and the music is fitting and beautiful.
Now, as for the problems - they mainly come down to pacing, unit AI, and general lack of content. The map is pretty long horizontally, and your movement isn't that fast. You have no overview of what is going on outside of your immediate view, so you're going to have to move around a lot, spending most of the game just getting from one place to another. It's slow, and it's not fun.
Secondly, the AI is really not up to par with a game this hands-off. If I can not micromanage my units, they must be capable of managing themselves. These fools will happily wander outside at night, getting beaten up by monsters and losing all my hard earned money. Builders prioritising important or nearby buildings? More like random things, sometimes even aborting an ongoing project to go elsewhere. And archers just... don't know where to go. They have no idea where to find enemies or animals to hunt. All in all, it makes for a frustrating experience, seeing such incompetence unfold.
Other problems are just the lack of building, unit, and enemy types, as well as sometimes lacking clarity of what some things do.

To conclude, Kingdom isn't a bad game or a bad idea, but it needs better AI, and a faster way to get around. Most of all though, it needs more content. In that regard, I would have almost certainly been better off trying the newest version, and you definitely should skip straight to that if you want to play Kingdom, but I understand it's still not a significant improvement. As such, I would have to give the overall series a "no". There's probably plenty of strategy games out there that would rather suit your fancy. This one doesn't respect your time, and even if you invest in it, you'll never reach satisfying gameplay. A bearable way to pass the time, at best.

Wolf & Rabbit

The thing with RPG Maker adventure games is that they're either going to be really good, or a waste of time. Wolf & Rabbit seems to fall more into the latter category.

There isn't much to say about adventure games in general. As they don't tend to be gameplay-based, the "game" is not a point of discussion. The story, however, obviously can't be talked about without spoiling it, leaving little to say. Wolf & Rabbit is about 2-3 hours long, depending on how stuck you get.
Maybe I'm just dumb, but I feel the game is very non-straightforward, forcing you to backtrack and re-search a lot of places you've been to before, because those places inexplicably gain new items you "did not see before".
The game kills you for stupid reasons, forcing you to go to the last save point and through the dialogue boxes with forced wait time that can't be skipped, being a major annoyance.
And the grand finish is that this game is translated from Chinese by someone who's not exactly an expert in English, making it a painful read most of the time.

In the end, I was probably mostly through the game, but the story didn't grip me enough to even care to see it through to the end. It's supposed to be a horror game, and does have some slightly eerie moments, but nothing truly scary either. The writing isn't very good, even if you don't account for the bad translation, and... what's left, really? The nice art and melodies playing in the background? Not enough for me to give it a recommendation. There's better adventure games out there, horror or not, RPG Maker or otherwise.

Ruiner

Ruiner is an action shooter / hack-and-slash. It's got some story and takes about 6-ish hours to complete. You run around some levels, whack enemies with your melee weapon, or pick up some guns to shoot at them, while using some abilities to help.
Truth be told, I didn't get very far in the game as I was immediately put off by one glaring flaw. The game is in this top-down, almost isometric view, and you control your character with the WASD keys. But... pressing down actually moves you down and slightly to the left. Likewise, all other directional controls are slightly angled. In a game where precision and fast action taking is important, this movement scheme is unacceptable. I can not play a game when the character is not moving where I am telling them to move. This in and of itself is more than enough to not recommend this game, but wait, there's more.

Honestly, the game just feels a bit boring, and has some unnecessary elements. It presents a variety of guns, but with their limited ammo, the mobility of your character, and the damage of your trusty handheld pipe, there's just no reason to not go up to everyone and whack them instead. Likewise, from the selection of abilities, not all are equally useful. The game's too short, repetitive, and running around dodging and whacking people is a snoozefest, so I just really see no reason to recommend it.

Trackmania

Already been quite a while since I first tried the "2020" Trackmania. One of the earlier Trackmania games actually stands as one of the first "real" video games I played (not an indie Flash game or Minesweeper or sth.), so this series has always had a special place in my heart. Not that I'd ever been a particularly active player, but I feel it's at least something I can always return to.

Trackmania is a simple game. It's a racing game, which tend to be simple in and of themselves, but Trackmania eliminates any possible lingering complexity surrounding the driving. Everybody gets the same car, no upgrades, no abilities, no interaction with other people aside from seeing their incorporeal cars race alongside you. You only have your gas, your brakes, and your steering, and this allows you to focus on the important bit - driving.
You see, Trackmania is probably the only speedrunning game I have enjoyed so far, and that's because it makes it so accessible. Completing a level and getting a Bronze time is easy. A Silver might take a few tries. But as you approach a Gold (or the extra hard "Author time"), you really have to start embracing the speedrunning mindset, where a single mistake like bumping a wall or braking at the wrong time ruins the run and warrants an instant restart. On some maps, that's where the difficulty comes from, on others, you also have to watch how you take curves, manage your speed, etc. They're not difficult concepts, but everything has to be executed near perfectly and refined over dozens of runs.
While usually speedrunning would have you go look up tricks from the community, here you can always fetch some replays from the game's servers of people who are just a bit better than you, showing you areas you could improve in. So while it's possible to be stuck for a while as you struggle on the perfect execution, you will never have a problem that you don't know where you can improve.
All that's not to mention any user-created tracks, which often go crazy with jumps, loops, wall-driving, and other shenanigans.

I still have mixed feelings about some new track elements they put into the game. I enjoy the new ground types, which have more variety than older games, like the drift-oriented gravel, or slippery snow. However, I have not yet come to terms with ice tracks, which basically rob you of your steering ability. Nor do I like the track effect which literally robs you of your steering ability until the next checkpoint, and the "reactor boost up/down" effects are unintuitive as well. I think these elements increase the skill floor needed to enjoy the game, and that's not something I wish for this game, even if it's not a problem for the seasoned player.

Overall, while I'm not super excited about Trackmania, I do see myself playing it from time to time, completing a few tracks, seeing my leaderboard ranking increse and medals rack up. I would definitely recommend trying it, since it's the first and only racing and speedrunning game I care about, and I feel it's got to be special to do that. It's also free, so nothing lost if you don't like it.

Risk of Rain 2

Pretending as usual that my 2.5 month absence is not noteworthy - here's a game I first played in a free weekend in Early Access, and only just now deemed ready to review - it's Risk of Rain 2. It is a 3D remake of Risk of Rain, which I also loved. I really didn't have faith that this formula would succeed in three dimensions, but boy am I glad to have been proven wrong.

For those that haven't played either, Risk of Rain is an incremental shooter. You start off with one of a few character classes which you can unlock through achievements, and proceed to kill enemies while collecting equipment to make yourself ever stronger. I would call the game incremental, since the power difference between starting and ending a run is absolutely insane, and the endgame chaos is insanely fun. A single run consists of a few (or as many as you can handle, if you want) stages, each culminating with a boss fight. There is a lot of variety depending on what kind of enemies you encounter and which maps you go through, but most importantly, what kind of items you get. There's just over 100 items of different rarities, with the highest rarity items being impactful enough to actually influence effective strategies, diversifying the runs.
Risk of Rain 2 also added a secondary currency, some item conversion mechanics, hidden maps, more characters, etc., and is, as of about the midpoint of last year, past the content amount of the original, not to mention having more polish and production value in the first place. Because of the success of the game, it doesn't seem like they're done either, and there's more to come.

Personally, what can I say? Risk of Rain is one of the games that instilled me with the belief that we need more incremental mechanics inserted into other game genres. The power levels have to be executed well to prevent either the player or the enemy growing out of control, and need to be more than just numbers going up equally. (Because who cares if you do 1 dmg to a 100 hp opponent, or 1k dmg to a 100k hp opponent.) It's insanely fun if done well, and really creates a sense of progression looking at how far you've come. Risk of Rain executes this incredibly well.
A problem with Risk of Rain 2 being 3D is that it's sometimes hard to see who's shooting at you. But that's not the game's fault, it's inherent in FPS games, and I'd say the added dimension, as well as the ability to see and shoot really far, more than makes up for it. I also feel like multiplayer could do with some improvement, maybe in terms of shared equipment of sorts. There is always some arguing over who gets what or how someone has too much equipment, making it really hard for the players who don't.

Regardless of any negatives, Risk of Rain 2 earns its spot as one of my favorite shooters. It is mostly a copy of the original, but greatly improves and continues to improve on it, and I would absolutely recommend giving it a try. Although maybe you'll have a better time playing alone than with friends, at least at first.