Legends of IdleOn

Legends of IdleOn cut in line in my game queue, because I simply couldn't resist an MMO that had been out for about 2 years, and still had thousands of concurrent players on Steam alone. "Surely, this must be a good game if so many people are still playing it," I thought to myself. I don't usually play Early Access games, but I figured I'd rather not be any more late to the party than I already was. After about 20 hours, my opinions on it are mixed.

As the name states, IdleOn is an idle game. It's not an incremental game though, like many idle games are. The progression ramps up much like in a regular RPG. Despite that, there is quite a lot to actively do. The main activity in the game is combat. You go to a field, monsters spawn, you kill them. There's little benefit to giving any active input - it's fully automatic. But in a similar vein, you can do other activities like mining, logging, smithing. At least 3 more activites unlock soon, but there's like a dozen overall, with more being added. There's also bosses, dungeons, challenges, and most importantly, a boatload of collectibles. So many collectibles... Foods which give permanent upgrades, cards which are like 1 in 10000 drops from monsters, statues, stamps, achievements, and each stacks and gives diminishing stacking bonuses, and this is just World 1. There are currently 4 Worlds, but World 5 is supposedly coming soon. I can not even begin to list all there is to do in this game - it's truly massive, and I'm not sure if it's a solo project, or has a very small team size. In any case, amazing dedication from the devs.

I was hooked and fascinated by all the possibilities for a full two days. Yet, the more I played, the more some ugly details started to rear their heads. Oddly enough, the complexity that I feared was not going to translate to depth wasn't a problem. The multitude of things to do all seemed relevant to the game as a whole.
The first problem was that the game started to slow down. First area - kill 20 monsters to advance. Second area - 50 monsters. Soon it was 500, then 2000, and I was still in World 1. All the items I could craft wanted more and more resources. Each next level became more and more of a grind. Soon enough, not only could I not play when I wanted, as progress was blocked by more AFK farming, but I also felt I had to log on at specific times to make sure this AFK farming was going smoothly. I felt the game dictated not only when I could play, but when I should play. It of course didn't help that the gameplay wasn't particularly exciting - just the satisfaction of watching numbers go up, bars fill, and various collection tabs populate.
Secondly, forced alternate accounts. The game has a class system, with each class having slightly different abilities, but also specializing in different forms of gathering. You get your third alt pretty early, and can have up to 6 so far. They all collectively contribute to your account, each simultaneously collecting resources, but very annoyingly still have to go through all the quests and progression hurdles themselves. (At least your main accounts can supply them with gear and resources.) The grind was already bad enough for one character, I don't want to do it all over again 5 more times. In addition, most infinitely (or near-infnitely) stacking buffs are shared between all characters, but some are not. It really frustrates me that I would probably be best off sending all of these to my main, meaning my alts will forever be weaker. It's not fair to want my alts to do all the same challenges, but without many progression items that my main has.
And lastly, to not much of a surprise, there is the monetization. IdleOn's free, so of course it has microtransactions. And ho boy is it pay-to-win. Sure, no purchase is mandatory, but hey, isn't that grind getting a bit too long for you liking? Wouldn't you like to be able to AFK more without worrying your resources are going to waste? Spend less time walking from place to place, or play more minigames or dungeons or challenges which are actually kind of fun to play? There's all that and much more, and you will have to pay up again, and again, and again. There's no nice option of 20€ or even 60€ for all the major conveniences. Buying even just the limited-quantity powerups like various inventory expansions or extra daily boosts will cost horrendous amounts of money. And I'm willing to bet this ties into the game grinding to a slog, meaning you'll want to fork over another 10€ at regular intervals just to keep the pace of progression at an entertaining level.

You know, I really liked IdleOn for a little while. There's a lot of idle games out there, but the sheer amount of content in this rivals and probably even exceeds most collection-based RPGs created by large companies, let alone indie idle games. It's so satisfying collecting things, finding those rare drops, and completing actually difficult achievements too. Of course, I know this is an idle game - it's in the name - but there's too much idling. I'd love the same content if there was even a mildly fun active element instead of the idling, if it wasn't repeated across multiple characters, and if the game had a more sensible monetization (though I fear the latter might be necessary to enable the developer to do this full-time). Sadly, as is, the few major problems ruin my fun, and I can't recommend it unless you know that these kinds of time-gated games that force you to log on every so often are what you're craving.

Super Fancy Pants Adventure

I'm always happy to see a game on Steam from a developer whose game(s) I used to enjoy back in the Flash gaming era. I'm glad they're still making games, and I'd always go and give their game a try, even though I know that my standards were lower back then, those were entirely free games, and I might not end up liking the games I have fond memories of. It's fine, because even if I don't like the new ones, nothing can take away the past joy I felt, and I think having a perspective on how things have changed is nice.

So what I played today was Super Fancy Pants Adventure. The Flash versions back in, gosh, 2006, and another at 2011 were probably some of the best platformers among free Flash games. While some platformers are snappy and have very tight controls, Fancy Pants feels the opposite - it's hard to hit anything specific, but the movement has a flow to it that feels very... satisfying, organic, fast...
It's a very simple game - you run, you jump, you roll/slide. There's some goofy version of physics that somehow makes sense, like how running up slopes makes you jump higher, the usual walljumping, but also running on the ceiling by the power of spirals. (I guess that's how it would work for a very fast moving vehicle with wheels...) There's enemies, most of which can be knocked out of the way by jumping on them or sliding into them, but some also require you to attack them (a new mechanic in this game, and I'm not sure how I feel about it). There's a collectible currency that restores health and can be used for combat upgrades, and then special challenge rooms that unlock new pants colors or hats.
It's quite a silly and lighthearted game, and lasts for about 4 hours - not longer than the Flash version - which was a bit of a bummer.

Overall, it's probably about the same as I remember it. Running around feels very satisfying if you get the momentum going and hit your targets, but if you miss something, it can be somewhat tedious to get back to it, since you lost the momentum. I feel the mandatory pen sword combat is a bit of an unnecessary addition, but the added freeform surfing along certain walls feels very nice. Does it live up to my current standards though? No, not really. Definitely very good for a free game back in 2006/2011, but not enough to really entertain someone who's not a platformer enthusiast these days.

Burning Daylight

I might be a bit harsh on this one...
Burning Daylight is a free walking simulator from 2019. I don't remember anymore why I decided to give it a try. Perhaps it had an unusually high review count shortly after launch, even for a free game. I noticed it had barely gained any new reviews since, so I guess the popularity didn't really carry on into the future. It's an hour long, features basically no gameplay, and lacks a lot of polish, from mismatching visual elements to invisible walls to physics glitching you out of the map forcing you to restart the game.
I finished it, but... I don't even quite know what it's about. It's some kind of abstract-ish sci-fi horror thing. Minimal voices or text, just... running through the scenery in a linear fashion.

Okay, I'mma be real. I generally hate walking simulators. If the gameplay is so devoid of anything to do that you just have to move in linear fashion, you might as well make a movie in a game engine. At least give me reason to pause, some forced conversations or something. This abstract feelings-and-emotions stuff and not explaining anything does not click with me one bit. I have no idea what Burning Daylight tried to tell me, and I didn't even enjoy it aesthetically, nor did I feel like it had some actual deep meaning behind it.
I'm just glad it only wasted an hour of my time. You won't be hearing anything close to a recommendation from me.

Rehtona

I gave this cute little puzzle game by the name of Rehtona a try. I'd say it about met my expectations.

Rehtona is a semi-casual puzzle game where you have a few dozen levels, each consisting of a single-screen grid of blocks (roughly up to 20x10) with various attributes. Your goal is to get to the key, get to the right side of the level, get to the puzzle piece, and then get back to the left side. Optionally, you can also try to gather all the crystals along the way. The right side of the level switches the world to an alternate version, where blocks have different effects. You can push some blocks around, and create blocks that become solid in the alternate version. There's lasers that can be blocked, and buttons to turn things on and off, and a few more gadgets, but that's most of the mechanics of the game. There are actually about a dozen different kinds of blocks, most having a different effect between the world versions, but I need not list them all.

It's a simple game, with neither a lot of levels, nor a lot of mechanics. Regardless, the puzzles are reasonably well made, and can be quite difficult. Ultimately, I'd have to say I didn't like it. Not because it's bad, but because it's unremarkable. It's a pretty run on the mill puzzle game, and I feel like I've played plenty similar ones in the past. Not the exact same mechanics, but with the same feeling. Rehtona was too forgettable, and that's why I couldn't recommend it, unless you're a big fan of puzzle games.

Lucah: Born of a Dream

Lucah: Born of a Dream is a 2D hack-and-slash game, and I don't quite know what to think of it.

In some aspects, Lucah is a rather ordinary game. You have your usual hack-and-slash mechanics: stamina, dodging, light, heavy, and charged attacks, a ranged attack that recharges with melee attacks, some stat level-ups... I'd even say the customization is closer to what you might find in a larger RPG, not that of an action game lasting only several hours. You can switch between two forms, each being customizable to have the types of attacks you want. Different patterns, ranges, speeds, damage... You can also equip modifications, which allocate points from a limited pool, and give things like being able to take an additional hit at the end, or being able to regenerate health if counterattacking shortly after getting hit.
What I listed wasn't even all of it, but there definitely also weren't too many mechanics. From a theoretical perspective, Lucah did an excellent job at making the combat interesting and nuanced, as well as moderately customizable to your liking. Run in, break the enemy's guard, and swiftly destroy them with a few powerful attacks? Or perhaps you'd rather stay afar, pelting the enemy with light and ranged attacks, making it easier to dodge theirs? There were many options, and I loved that.
Lucah also has one of the more unique visual styles I've seen in a game. Everything is like scribbles. Rough lines, no gradients, pixelated, shaky, unclear forms. Combined with the flashy and jerky visual effects, it gives off a visceral feeling. I think you could call it edgy? From an aesthetic perspective I love it. Even though it does kind of resemble the scribbles of a child, it's clearly made by someone with at least a moderate understanding of art because the overall composition still works.
On the artistic note, the story is also definitely unclear like the art. I couldn't understand it well, or almost at all, but I did sort of feel it. I hear you have to complete the game multiple times to experience and understand it all, which I did not. Luckily, combat was at the forefront, and I never felt slowed down by any narrative.

However, from a more practical perspective, things didn't hold up nearly as well.
The game doesn't seem entirely well balanced. Some enemies are tough, some are easy. Personally I found longer-ranged weapons better because they made it easy to avoid enemies, though it did make many enemies tanky and tedious to kill.
The keybindings aren't quite to my liking, but are also not rebindable. Holding a directional key, movement still stops when crossing maps. There's a mouse cursor, but I can't seem to really click on anything or aim with it? There's forced auto-aim roughly depending on towards what I'm walking, but it turns off at moderate distances, and can't account for enemies moving. There are a lot of these problems, and I find that having a comfortable and effortless experience making the game do what you want is very important in an action game, and lacking this is the largest reason I quit Lucah.
The second largest reason was that, despite loving the artstyle, it made things so unclear. Where is the enemy's hitbox? Where is mine? How far do their attacks reach? In pursuit of style, the game had sacrificed playability, and I really hate to see that in any game.

So, overall, my feelings are mixed. I loved the ideas put here, but as I was playing it, I felt frustrated. They keys were in annoying places. Important menus took too long to reach. I had to just hope auto-aim was on my side, and the enemy's hit didn't reach me sometimes, because I couldn't tell. The game had the potential to be good, but it fell far short of realizing it. As it stands, there are better hack-and-slash games to play, even if they aren't as imaginative. Perhaps a partial recommendation? Try it out for an hour or two, and you should have a good idea if the flaws can be outweighed for you.

Anodyne 2: Return to Dust

What was going through my head when I decided I wanted to try playing Anodyne 2? I had already tried it's predecessor, Anodyne, many years ago, and I don't even remember what it was about, but I remember I didn't like it. So why did I think Anodyne 2 was going to be better? The slightly higher reviews? Being more modern? Beats me. This was not the type of game I'd enjoy.

I don't quite know what Anodyne is about. It doesn't help that I didn't play for too long, but it's definitely more of a story game. There's two parts to the gameplay. One's like a 3D platformer, and from there you can go into smaller worlds to complete them as 2D casual puzzle games.
There's a lot of text, not too much gameplay, and the theme of the story and the visuals is definitely more art-y than game-y. I think the stories try to tell me some tales I might care about, but writing is abstract and the tone is often so ridiculous I can't take any of it seriously. Sadly, it's not the funny type of ridiculous to me either, it just doesn't feel good.

It's no news I'm critical towards story-focused games, especially if they act as some from of interpretative art. I don't have much to say. The game just isn't fun, and neither is the story. It's not for me, and I can't even being to explain why people would like it, and thus I can't recommend it.

Dead Cells

Time for a game off my "anticipated" list of games for a change. It's the incredibly popular and well-received action roguelike Dead Cells. But does it stand up to all the hype I've been hearing about it?

Dead Cells offers a high-action platformer through a series of randomly generated levels. Each level has a different thematic in terms of its level design and the enemies featured within, and some end in a boss fight. You can find a plethora of weapons and skills, of which you can carry two of each. Between each level, you have the opportunity to permanently unlock more options, as well as unlock general buffs like more money, more potions, or an inventory slot for an extra weapon. Completing certain areas in levels (including completing the whole game for the first time) unlocks permanent powers that allow you to access new levels and content, creating a replayability loop.

Starting from first impressions, it's quite fascinating how fast-paced they managed to make the game, yet how responsive and non-button-mashy it still is. Fast animations and animation cancelling into dodges is to thank for this, and it feels really nice. The first dozen hours are enjoyable, as you're constantly finding new weapons, new upgrades, reaching new milestones, unlocking new content. Most weapons play quite differently, especially so if they're from the different classes (sword / bow / shield), and each area's thematic makes you approach traversing it at least a little bit differently.
But roughly around the time when you first beat the game, things have started to significantly slow down. You're quite familiar with the enemies and levels, unlocking a new weapon or skill isn't that impactful, since you might not find it in-game, and unlocking a whole new level becomes a rare occasion. You also start to understand what the game "values". You want to efficiently grind for the permanent currency (cells). Enemies are quite lethal, so you really shouldn't be getting hit. On a personal level, these things don't necessarily align with how I would like to play the game. The most efficient way to get more cells might not be the most fun. Not getting hit steers me too much towards certain weapons and skills, as well as encouraging cheese tactics like dropping a turret which does 10x less damage than me, and staying out of harms way. Some of these might not be problems for you, but they were for me.
After running through the game a couple more times, I felt I was basically just doing the same thing over and over again, with next to no progress. I know there were still mechanics to unlock, and I'd heard that completing the game a few more times would unlock something, but I had no clue when or where the next unlock, that wasn't just a new weapon or skill I didn't care about, was going to be. It didn't help that despite using different weapons, I didn't feel I had a lot of room for choice. I attempted the same tactic I deemed most efficient, and whether I lucked out with items, such as getting a legendary item or not, determined if I was going to complete the run or not.

All that said, I still enjoyed Dead Cells. The action combat was very well executed, and there was enough randomness to keep things fresh for at least 20 hours. It's not as long or replayable as many other roguelikes, and I expected a bit more given it's stellar reputation, but the quality is still definitely top notch. I give Dead Cells a recommendation, and a low spot in my favorite roguelikes category.

Deep Rock Galactic

The following three paragraphs were written back in March 2019.

Deep Rock Galactic just enjoyed a free weekend, prompting me to play it before it got out of Early Access. If I had to explain it in terms of other games, then it's very much like Left 4 Dead, but with dwarves and mining instead. It's a 1-4 player PvE co-op game where the goal is to complete various missions. The missions make you run and dig around the map, gather various minerals or other things in the cave to complete the objective, fight various critters that try to stop you, and possibly gather some more for health, ammo call-ins, and tiny upgrades to your character outside the mission. There's 4 quite distinct classes, and lots of little silly things to do besides doing what you're supposed to. In terms of the "co-op" atmosphere, it reminds me more of Magicka, in that it's rather lighthearted, and there's lots of yelling at each other to (not) do things.

However, despite having lots of missions, they feel rather similar and repetitive because of their similarity. As explained, the loop is the same each time - explore, gather, fight, repeat - and it's just not quite entertaining enough after the first 5-10 times. The character and weapon upgrades also don't provide much variety, being just stat increases.
This is kind of exactly the reason why I would rather not try games in Early Access. I liked the game, it was really fun for a while, and I even feel like it could be enjoyable for a longer amount of time, had they perhaps more time to tweak things. In other words, the core gameplay is nice, but what's built around it, less so.

I'm going to be optimistic about things, and put this game back to sit on the list until it's out of Early Access and I can give it another shot. I would say I wouldn't give my verdict on this, but literally, as I could not yet recommend this, I am not recommending it. I just figured I'd write my thoughts on it now instead of later, since there's still a good chance that "later" won't come for whatever reason. And if it doesn't, you can probably assume that what's written here is still mostly accurate.

The rest of the paragraphs are my new thoughts.

Coming back 2 years later due to yet another free weekend, I don't feel Deep Rock Galactic has changed all that much. The core gameplay is the same. They've added a few new mission types, weapons, and smaller things to do, but the loop is still the same, and it's still not interesting to do over and over.
I would also mention this time around that I was bugged by the fact that it was somewhat difficult to understand what was going on at times. Enemies hitting you from angles you can't recognize, hitting through terrain or objects, and personally, a weird lack of depth perception regarding how far the ground is. Maybe that last one's just me. Also, the gunplay wasn't particularly exciting.

Overall, I wouldn't call it a bad game by far. It's quite novel with its fully destructible terrain, but perhaps doesn't do enough with that possibility, or doesn't give enough opportunities for different classes to really fill a role no one else can. (I guess you couldn't play with less than 4 people otherwise.) Still, I don't understand the stellar reviews the game has gotten and would not personally recommend it, since it gets repetitive in just a few hours, and isn't super fun before that either.

Rush Rover

Rush Rover is a very basic twin-stick shooter. There is a randomly generated map, a dozen or so enemy types, slots for a primary and secondary weapon, dash, ability, a passive, and more, depending on the upgrades you get. You can also upgrade the slots themselves, and each slot has multiple different things to put in them. If you manage to find and aquire them, that is. Other that that, just move around the map, clear room after room, shoot the enemies, and don't get hit yourself.

This game has the barest of bones of what makes an acceptable twin-stick shooter. I have no complaints about the execution of any of the systems. Everything worked just fine, played smoothly, was well-polished... But as I've said on occasion before, it was all just terribly unambitious. There is not a single remarkable feature I would like to call out. Nothing to separate it from the other twin-stick shooters out there. And mind you, there are plenty of very well received games of this exact genre that do everything just as well as Rush Rover does, and then some.

What definitely did not help was the short length of the game, as well as the lack of difficulty. I put the game on hard mode for my first try, and I beat it on that first try without even a moment where things got tough. Most rooms, I did not get hit, and completed it within the bonus time limit. I'd like to think I'm actually rather poor at all kinds of shooter games, so I think most people will find this game far too easy. After completing the whole thing in a bit more than an hour, I didn't feel like going for another run, even if I'd get to experience new weapons or whatever. I'm happy to leave this entirely forgettable game behind, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone either.

Iwate Mountain Dance

What a fun little-known game I have found. Iwate Mountain Dance would actually slip through my radar these days, with all the compromises I've had to make to at least somewhat cope with the insane amount of games being released daily. Which is sad, because I think this game deserves a bit more recognition. Just a bit though.

Iwate Mountain Dance is an action platformer bullet hell boss rush. That jumble of phrases actually delivers a very complete overview of everything the game offers. There's no levels, no upgrades, just a bunch of bosses, each with a unique gameplay mechanic, unique bullet patterns, and you with a double jump, a mid-air any-direction dash, and 3 lives to take each boss down.
Each boss has several stages, with a slightly different twist on the main mechanic on each stage. Some bosses are more difficult, some have more stages, and I think some are optional. However, the game's so short (a few hours, depending on how good you are), you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't beat all the bosses despite liking the game.

I have not played any official Touhou games, but this very much gave off Touhou vibes. (I checked, and the developer's only other game on Steam is a Touhou fangame, so I guess I was right?) I'm not sure what makes it so. It's not just the bullet hell gameplay. Maybe it's the overall art and music theming? Maybe it's that a separate track has been made for each stage of each boss, which is a crazy amount of music.
In any case, I feel a lot of care has gone into this game, but sadly the execution could be better. The gameplay doesn't feel precise enough for a bullet hell. Probably because a keyboard only lets you move at max speed or no speed. They could have just made the character follow the mouse on the horizontal axis. The game's a bit too short to really get into it. And while I feel the art and music are thoughtfully made, they aren't of a particularly high quality.

I'd give the whole thing a partial recommendation. I think they did well to focus on just making boss fights and nothing else around it. As a result, the gameplay feels well-balanced, and there's no distracting elements that I might dislike. The fights are fun despite the sometimes frustrating controls. I just wish it was of a higher quality and longer length overall, then I could give it a real recommendation.

Heat Signature

Heat Signature is a stealth roguelike from the maker of Gunpoint, which is a game I kind of enjoyed. With Heat Signature receiving even more positive reviews, I hoped it would be an even more positive experience.

In Heat Signature, you play as a randomly generated character (possibly with random modifiers like "won't kill anyone", or "can't use melee weapons") who has to board spaceships and clear them out / sneak through them to accomplish their objective there, and then get out. The objective can be something like an assassination, kidnapping, theft, or an all out massacre of the crew. The spaceships are randomly generated grids of rooms and corridors filled with various guards, turrets, and airlocks with keys carried by some of the guards. You can pause the game at any moment to think and carry out actions that will execute as you un-pause. You can even teleport any dropped item on the ship to you.

Generally, I found the gameplay loop to be rather monotonous. Clear out everything on your path to the objective, then either walk back or blast the nearest window open and recover yourself with your pod. Sometimes, things are a bit tougher, like armored enemies needing an armor-piercing weapon, shielded enemies requiring you to be at least somewhat stealthy, and turrets making you wait a little while. But after you get your character geared up with rechargable equipment to deal with armor and electronics (this includes shields), missions become a breeze of just running through the enemies, and no longer force you to use the game's more elaborate tools, like swappers, temporary teleporters, traps, etc. When I do eventually die after gathering good equipment, it's usually due to some sort of glitch, like my pod noclipping through the enemy spaceship and instantly exploding. Not a particularly heroic end, but it did help keep the game fun a little while longer, as I worked on getting new characters online.

Overall, I have to appreciate that Heat Signature tries something that's at least somewhat new. However, I failed to find the gameplay loop to be particularly fun. There were new things for the first couple of hours, but after that, your character just gets too powerful, and adding more enemies to the spaceship doesn't make it significantly more difficult. I found fewer and fewer reasons to approach problems with creativity that the game permitted, and found it easier to play it like a sort of run-and-gun game. So, I don't know. Maybe if you want to ignore the optimal solutions to problems and find it fun to just mess around, you might find the game fun for more than a few hours, but I didn't. So, it's kind of a unique game, but can I recommend it? Not really.

The Red Strings Club

Oh boy! Not all that often I get to expierence something like The Red Strings Club. It's a story about... taking down a corporate conspiracy, I guess, as the store page says. But it's a lot more about getting you, the player, to think about things. To get you to philosophize or contemplate, I'd say. It's a short experience, about 4 hours for a single playthrough, but you can re-play it. I say "experience", since there isn't much gameplay. A few minigames that I honestly could have done without, and the rest is mostly just dialogue options and a bit of point-and-click. More like a visual novel. But I want to step back from the story for a bit and tell you about the other great things in this game.

I think that even moreso than what you're reading, the strongest aspect of The Red Strings Club is the atmosphere it manages to create. The pixel art is pretty good, fitting, and the music sets the mood excellently. There isn't really a lot to say about it, but I just want to assure you that as a whole, the aesthetic side of it is masterfully executed.
The little bits of gameplay - pottery, mixing drinks... They were somewhat finnicky and poorly executed, where doing them was more of a chore than a fun experience. They were also a bit too long to serve as just a break from the dialogue. They should have stuck with deductive minigames, like the phone one at the end, not "skill-based" ones. But aside from making me a bit more hesitant to replay the whole thing because I don't want to do these minigames again, they didn't really take much of my time.

So, the meat of it all - the story. I can't tell you any details of course, but it's all this sort of detective game. Remember people you've met or heard about. Remember things that have happened. Connect the dots and read between the lines to choose the right dialogue options and get the information out of people that you want. While I don't think you can really fail completely, you can fail to gather all the information, making latter parts more difficult, or just depriving you of narrative you would have liked to read. I did not replay it, maybe in the future, but your actions can have a real impact on what people do, what people say, and who you meet, so there is reason to play the game more than once.
Aside from goal-oriented bits of dialogue where you aim to uncover the truth and learn new things, the game also offers you dialogue which does not really affect the game. Dialogue to make you reflect on the events happening in the story, and to make you form your opinion on it. Except, in this department, things felt a bit off. On one hand, I did definitely start to ponder certain questions, and the game did not answer them for me. But on a contrasting and conflicting note, I felt the game tried to push certain viewpoints on me. I don't view either as particularly bad ways to tell a story. The former is less likely to conflict with anyone's personal ideas on the subject, if they exist, while the latter makes for an easier reading experience, and works for people who don't like open-ended stories or thoughts. But combining the two... I felt at times like the game wanted me to come to my own conclusions about what I think of it all, and then rammed into them by saying what the author thinks, and followed the story according to their views. Having multiple endings would have been perfect for this kind of game. To really show the positives and negatives of both outcomes. Sadly, we did not get this opportunity.

Overall, despite this conflict in storytelling and having only one outcome to a struggle where I felt both sides had their reasons to be right and wrong, I enjoyed my time with The Red Strings Club. It shall take a place, even if not a high one, at my favorite adventure games list, and I would definitely recommend it to others who enjoy stories. I have to admit that the game does carry a tone and a message regarding social politics, culture, and such, and I can imagine there might be people who don't like that, but it's not forefront in the story, and most should be able to enjoy it regardless. I sure did.

Biomass

Biomass is a 2D side-view metroidvania that could be called a soulslike. I don't know, maybe it is that, maybe it doesn't quite reach that mark. They have a lot of familiar systems - parrying, dodge rolls, collecting your biomass (this game's equivalent of souls) from where you died, no map, complex-ish map layout, somewhat cryptic story / lore... The whole thing. It's just... kind of really poorly made.

The game definitely feels amateurish, and while I don't want to mock new or small developers, I need to be honest.
The pixel art stills on the store page look pretty great, and the backgrounds in the game aren't half-bad either, but the characters and enemies just don't look any good. Faceless, mostly featureless characters, unappealing animations... it's very typical of unskilled artists.
The same could be said about the gameplay. While all the theoretical gameplay element boxes are ticked, it just doesn't feel good. Attacks aren't weighty or well telegraphed. Dodging and parrying feels off or doesn't work. Sometimes I'm hit by something, and I can't tell what it is. Sometimes I'm expected to make jumps or the sort where I can't see if I'd make it, and I just die because I guessed wrong. It doesn't help that I can only recover biomass from when I died to an enemy, not when I fell, because they didn't consider the small details, like remembering the last reasonable place I touched the ground. It's just countless small things like that which make the game bad, and they're everywhere.
Not gonna lie, I didn't get very far in the game. As much as I experienced it, the story seemed interesting, but not enough to trudge through everything else for it.

Overall, I feel like Biomass has a good, if not very original, idea behind it, but suffers from poor execution. If the same game was made by more capable people, I might well enjoy it. I suppose that's better than a bad idea with a good execution, but regardless of that - I can't recommend Biomass. It just doesn't feel good to play.

Omega Strikers

Covering a recent game for a change. Never know how long these online multiplayer games stay afloat, and they rarely get more popular after launch. Omega Strikers, too, has already started slightly dipping in popularity after a week, though it's holding remarkably strong. You can always check how many players are playing, at least on Steam (it's also available on mobile), and you probably should, for reasons I'll talk about shortly.

Omega Strikers is a 3v3 PvP... football? action game. It has heroes, or "strikers" with 3 unique abilities each, much like a moba, and a common "strike" ability, which always just kicks the ball, or, well, hoverdisk, towards where you're aiming. Kick the disk into the enemy goal and you win the round, easy as. Win 5 rounds and you win the game, which takes about 5 minutes.
There's more nuances to the game of course, with abilities being able to knock and stun enemy players, even knock them off the field for a little while, powerups that increase your level and speed for a short while, some different maps with mild passive differences and obstacles placed around the map, and a lot more... but none of that is too important. And I think it's important that these little additions are not important and are not able to elevate the game beyond just being about who's more skilled at shooting the ball to your own players and not letting enemies snatch it from you. The map is small, 95% of the abilities boil down to creating a short- or slightly-longer-term area which knocks the ball and enemies away from it and possibly moves you, and the games get pretty repetitive pretty fast.

I don't have any complaints about the quality of Omega Strikers, honestly. I think it's well made. I also think it isn't ambitious enough, and doesn't give enough to do in the game. There is no sense of progression within a match, no sub-goals to accomplish, and no variety in how the game plays out. There aren't really any counters as far as I could tell, no matchup-specific differences in play, or at least nothing that would come close to being as important as raw skill. Maybe there's some comparisons to make to fighting games, which also don't have any intermediate goals in a match and are very much about player skill instead of meta knowledge about the game. But I'm not big on fighting games, so I can't say much about this.
On the topic of raw skill, I want to make a quick note about matchmaking. Matchmaking is difficult, I understand. It's difficult to tell how good a player is. It's difficult to tell how much advantage a pre-made group gives. It's difficult to make balanced matches. But matchmaking seems to be a strong issue for players not in a pre-made group of 3. Matchmaking is all the more important in games where the outcome is more dependent on skill, less on variance of other factors. It's also more difficult with more players in one team, and more difficult with fewer players ready to pick from at any given time. What I'm saying is that Omega Strikers could start to have serious problems with its match quality if player numbers keep falling, which could lead into a downward spiral. Just... something to keep an eye out for.

Overall, I'd say Omega Strikers is an above average PvP game. It's certainly gained a larger-than-average playerbase, and has decent player retention (though the long-term outlook is unclear). Based on just that, if the game's still alive and kicking by the time you find it, it looks even mildly interesting to you, and you have 2 trustworthy allies to accompany you, give it a try. It's free and I certainly enjoyed it for a bit. The novelty wore off too quickly for me though, and the game became something of a grind with not too many exciting or new moments. So, based on that, I can't really recommend it. I think there's still plenty of deeper PvP games out there.

Loyalty and Blood: Viktor Origins

I can't believe the standards I had... Perhaps I just thought I had more time back then...
Viktor Origins is a simple side-scrolling platformer shooter. It's composed of a bunch of levels taking a few minutes each. The game's base difficulty is fairly low, but each level also comes with its own challenges and time limit that you may optionally abide by for extra rewards. Rewards which you can use to buy, craft, and upgrade your gear with. There's also a phase mechanic that allows you to dash a medium distance, going through walls and everything else. That's about all there is to the game.

To be blunt, there's really nothing special here. Before any gameplay it starts off with more story than it has any right to, since the quality of the writing isn't that good. The art isn't bad, but it feels weird. There's this medieval vibe, yet you're wielding modern or futuristic weapons. Also you play as some elf-looking creature who's super hunched over. Maybe it's because of the gun. And when it comes to the gameplay, it's just point, shoot... very bland. I would have hoped that maybe the challenges are at least imaginative, but it's usually just a timer, kill X, where X is something you'd kill anyways, and maybe some limit on your weapon choice.

There isn't much to elaborate on here. Nothing's offensively bad, but nothing's any good either. And again, mediocrity and doing some old thing that has been done a lot before is not going to make your little indie game stand out. I can't recommend Viktor Origins - it's too poorly made for having such an unimaginative concept.

Dragon Marked For Death

I have nothing against games made for consoles first. Yet all too often, they arrive on PC as something akin to an afterthought. I believe it's called a "bad port". In the case of Dragon Marked For Death, my attempts to play were stopped in their tracks by the game not wanting to support me playing on a keyboard. Sure, there were bindings, but they seemed arbitrary, and would have required 4 hands to access them all. None of the in-game prompts referred to the keyboard even as I was playing on it, nor did I have any way to check or change the bindings after I had started the game. So I struggled onward, tapping random buttons, hoping they would be what I need, until I wanted to rebind them, but realized I would need to forego my mission progress to do so. I figured that was enough of that.

Not much of a review of the game. I do sometimes consider if I should even make these, but as I was presently running low on my review backlog, I figured why not. I didn't play for long, but in what little I did experience, there doesn't seem to be anything super special about the game. It's a side-scrolling platforming action RPG. Movement and combat felt neither bad nor super good, perhaps a bit above average. It seems to be focused on co-op, but I did not reach the bit where I could get into a multiplayer game. Not to mention you'd need to find people to play with on your own.

So, yeah, hard pass if you're a keyboard player. If not, I don't know, it might be decent, but there's probably better options.

Streets of Rogue

It's not every week or even month I get to play a game with "overwhelmingly positive" reviews, nor one of the few games I already wrote about back when I was still mentioning every game I was adding to my backlog. March 2017... how long ago it was that I found Streets of Rogue. Despite the review score, this never really seemed like my kind of game. But looks can be deceiving, and I've been wrong before...

Streets of Rogue describes itself as an action roguelike, but also an immersive sim. An interesting combination for sure, as those are on the opposite sides of the "seriousness" spectrum. Yet, I'd say it's kind of true. It's a rather lighthearted and goofy game. It makes many bad jokes, the missions are often nonsensical, like inflitrating someone's house to turn the lights off, or killing a bunch of people for a banana. Sure, it's just flavor, but this non-serious tone doesn't sit too well with me.
The game has some-dozen floors with a few missions on each. You're offered a lot of different ways to accomplish the missions. Stealth, trickery, violence... There's a lot of different classes, each with a wildly different playstyle, and besides completing the missions, you can scavenge around the level for money, items, and anything else that would help you on that floor or the ones to come. Sprinkle in co-op, random generation, status effects, level-ups, and a lot more, and you have a massive amount of theoretical variety in how the game plays.

Ultimately, the problem for me is that I don't care about this variety. Maybe I find an approach that works, and then I just use that over and over. I find little incentive to improvise some more creative solution or go out of my way to do something different. If you would consider fooling around in these small sandbox-like worlds to be fun, then I think you can get a lot more value out of this game. But if you're like me, and just want to complete the goals the game gives you, it might not be that interesting, as the variety does not actually mean that the game has any depth or is any good at keeping things interesting long-term. So no recommendation from me.

Monster Hunter: World

Y'know, I don't understand things sometimes. Various kinds of things. Things like, why are certain games massively popular. In the case of Monster Hunter: World, why was it one of the more popular games in the world for a whole two years or so after launch. I mean, even now, 4 years after release, it's got a very respectable player count. But I can try to make my guesses...

What are the first things I'd notice about the game? Well, it's developed by Capcom. So it's a AAA game, which would definitely contribute to its popularity. But also, it's a Japanese game. Normally that would mean that you could attribute some of the popularity to the anime artstyle being popular, but that's not the case here, as Monster Hunter has a much more realistic style, despite the oversized monsters and weapons. On a personal level, Japanese AAA developer = red flag. With a couple of exceptions, games from large developers from Japan (and Korea, although that's mostly "MMOs") tend to have many similar traits, and most of them are not so good. Continuing with remarks about artstyle, I would say that that's usually the strongest point of games from that region. Be it anime or not, I think some of the best looking games have come from Japan (but actually maybe mostly Korea). Sadly, Monster Hunter's characters look absolutely fucking abysmal. I think some of the facial expression are meme levels of terrible, and the overall visual fidelity just doesn't strike me as high at all for a 2018 AAA game. Okay, but, I've never been one to let the art dictate my feelings for a game, so what else is there?

Of definite note is that Monster Hunter is a franchise. Most definitely many people who picked it up already liked the series, so that increases both popularity and the positivity of the reception. I have not played any of the previous games, so that bias doesn't apply to me.
The last reason that might explain the popularity is that it's a multiplayer game. Your friends have a party of 2 or 3 together, and they need to fill out their group, so they try to persuade you to play. Multiplayer always increases the popularity, and from what I heard a couple of years back, friends inviting them was definitely a big reason people were playing. What strikes me as odd though, is that this game has vertical progression, meaning more experienced players couldn't really play together with newer ones. Cooperation is not necessary either, and I definitely wouldn't want someone with hundreds of hours of experience stepping into my game and trivializing my combat, so unless both I and my friends would play only with each other and never alone, I don't see how the multiplayer aspect could be sustained. Maybe I'm just missing something.

Okay, but I've rambled long enough about things that aren't important. Torn, what's game like?
Well, as I said, it's a big Japanese game, and that means it has lots of complexity, and (probably) not enough depth. I can vouch for the complexity bit, as the game did not ease me into its mechanics at all. The tutorials were largely unhelpful, and there were so many things to do from the get-go that I was completely overwhelmed. This time, I didn't put in the tens of hours needed to understand and assess all the systems, but from my previous experiences with system overloaded games just like this, they were not all necessary. Sure, each system, stat, option, whatever, does something, but unlike well designed systems, they were not all useful to care about. The real knowledge is knowing what's good, what's bad, and which is the 10% of the game's features that you should care about and invest into. And I don't know about you, but I consider that piss-poor game design.

Finally, the combat, which I thought would be the bread and butter of a game about fighting giant monsters... Is one of the worse ones I've experienced in an action RPG. Perhaps a more subjective problem was that it was slow. Even the fastest weapons took a good second or two to finish their attack animation, and you generally couldn't animation-cancel either. Sure, you could argue that this is a design choice that encourages committing to your attacks instead of just spamming them and then pressing dodge when the enemy is about to attack you. It's prediction-based, not reaction-based, you say. It's valid if you feel that way. But I don't. And I think that with the way games have been going, most people would agree that they prefer reaction-based too. It just feels bad to see an attack coming, or an enemy moving out of the way, and you being locked into an animation that you don't want to be in.
But what I found completely unexcusable was how you could not change your attack direction mid-combo. It just felt so miserable doing my attack string, the enemy moving out of the way, and my character not being able to turn their body unless I got my weapon into a neutral position first. The combat just felt so unsatisfying. Let me attack, or let me dodge/block. Don't make me do this song and dance where I attack, reset, then I get to attack again, then I gotta manually sheathe my weapon to pick something up, and ugh, it was the furthest thing from fluid.

Long post, let me conclude fast. Monster Hunter: World feels like a pretty standard, if perhaps sub-par action JRPG. While the idea of the game just being about killing large monsters instead of mostly trash mobs like most games is somewhat interesting, I found no gameplay aspect or game system actually worthy of praise. Despite the many flaws I listed, the baseline was well enough made (even on combat) that none of the systems were bad either, but a whole load of mediocrity does not add up to a good experience. I can somewhat understand the popularity, but I would not recommend it regardless.

Tower of Fantasy

I love making comparisons. Especially if we're talking games which have taken heavy inspiration from something else. It's important to see how a game holds up in comparison to something you could be playing instead. In the case of Tower of Fantasy, it's often called a Genshin clone, and I can definitely see where the comparison is coming from. That said, there are still significant differences in the two, and not just in terms of quality or thematic.

Most importantly, Tower of Fantasy is advertised as an MMO. It's of course one of those "modern MMOs", where the world is shared, but not cooperative nor competitive. "Raid" and "Dungeon" equivalents are instanced content, accessible via a random matchmaking system (because the party finder is full of people who will not let you in because all parties are public by default, including those who've gone AFK or whatever), and there are world bosses, but you won't join them by stumbling upon a fight while running around. No, you will very delibarately join them by observing the spam in global chat, and then teleporting to a party leader. It's not technically instanced content, but it might as well be.
So, if you're looking for an MMO, you won't find it here, although if you just want cooperative (or, heavens forbid, competitive) gameplay, then Tower of Fantasy does basically require you to interact with other players.
I'll just briefly mention, that yes, PvP exists, and there are leaderboards for PvE content, and yes, this part of the game is pay-to-win. The rewards aren't massive, and this content isn't necessary, but if you're competitive, and hate losing to someone just because they paid money, this might be a big red flag for you.

The combat is similarly action-based. Your "party" consists of three weapons, not characters, each having a different attack pattern, skill, and a discharge ability, which triggers if your energy is full and you switch to that weapon. The similarities to Genshin's combat are definitely noticeable, but Tower of Fantasy puts more emphasis on regular attacks, with almost every character (weapon) having a different move set, as well as the existance of aerial attacks, dodge attacks, and some more.
The combat is just as fluid, and might even look flashier than Genshin's, but it's missing the important detail of elemental reactions. There are also very few opportunities for buffing yourself with one weapon, then switching to another. This severely limits your desire to switch between weapons, or make optimal combinations of them, rather than just picking the 3 best ones, and maybe even having one as a stat stick you don't use. As combat is a central part of these games, I think this makes it all a lot more boring.

Genshin's artifact system is split into two systems here. There are matrices which equip to weapons in groups of 4 and have 2, 3, and 4-piece set effects. These have fixed stats, so two of the same matrix are identical. And then there is equipment, which only has rarity and a random combination of stats, so once you get an optimal SSR equipment, you're set.
You also have relics, which are kind of like reusable items that can deal damage or apply some CC or stuff like that. I found that system clumsy and forgot to use it in combat, though it does also have things like a hoverboard and a jetpack / glider, because of course we need the same climbing and gliding mechanics.
Note how I said your party consists of 3 weapons, not characters. The game definitely advertises its anime girls to you, but you really only get their weapon, as well as their skin you can put on. So if you were hoping to switch between multiple lovely characters, then that visual pleasure is deprived from you. You can, however, create your own perfect girl (or boy), and play as them, so maybe it's not all bad.
Oh, and on the topic of visual pleasure, I find the graphics and animations a significant step down from Genshin's level of quality.

And finally, what about the gacha / progression mechanics? Well, it's still story + exploration + dailies + weeklies, but Tower of Fantasy is a bit more generous with how much it gives you. They have deliberately tweaked their numbers to appear as if everything is just a little more cost-efficient than in Genshin. A pull is 150, not 160. A subscription gives you 100 a day, not 90. Pity is 80, not 90, and base probability is 0.75%, not 0.6%. (Although there is no soft pity, so the reality isn't as nice as they make it seem.) Etc... Sadly, there is not a 1-to-1 correlation between ToF's SSRs, and Genshin's 5*s. Each extra SSR duplicate you get gives you a massive boost, and it feels much more necessary to max out your SSRs, in comparison to Genshin, where's the benefits of duplicates are lesser.
I also found it a lot more annoying to do all your daily stuff. ToF wants more of your attention for a relatively lesser payoff. It also keeps pestering you to buy their battle pass, buy your limited first-time-buy packs, and even event gacha systems where you only get a taste of it, and then have to either spend premium currency or just not participate. It just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

It's been a long post, but then again, it's a large game, and I put over 50 hours into it already. I went to play it due to a momentary content dip in Genshin (which I'm sure they planned their release around), but from the combat, to the story, to the visuals... It just feels too much like Genshin, while clearly being inferior. As of the time of writing, Sumeru just came out in Genshin, so I didn't have anything left keeping me playing Tower of Fantasy. If you're reading this further in the future, I'm rather certain there is even less of a reason to play it over Genshin. It took a week for Genshin's popularity to peak, and it stabilized at 1/3 of the peak after a month. (This is an insanely high number to go stable at, to clarify.) Meanwhile, Tower of Fantasy has been dropping in popularity since launch, losing half in the first week, and another half in the second. Who knows where it will end up, but I don't see it having much longevity. My prediction is that it will be effectively dead in a matter of months. Regardless, I wouldn't recommend it.

Zombotron

I think the person behind Zombotron did good on the marketing front. I do not personally remember any of his past works, but supposedly he made relatively popular Flash games in the past, and even a Flash game by the same name 7 years prior. Most of the reviews were reminiscing about that, but I can't say I had the same experience.

Zombotron feels like a very run-on-the-mill platformer shooter. You traverse levels, shoot some enemies, fight a few bosses, oh and you have physics to kill enemies with too... Definitely gave Flash game vibes, and I don't say that in a positive way. The characters are big (which means less fits on the screen) and cartoony (which I just don't like, but I guess seeing their joints is objectively bad) and just uninteresting. There's a level up system, but it's just small numerical upgrades and feels enitrely uninpactful. There's different weapons, but they don't really change anything. You still just run, jump, shoot, maybe melee. The game touts all these methods to kill the enemies, but I think they're all pretty boring. The whole game's just... unremarkable.

I don't have a lot to say. Zombotron is the very basics of a platformer shooter with no cool hook, and even then the execution is sub-par. I've definitely played more interesting and more polished platformer shooters (like Seraph or sth.), and still forgotten about them. Zombotron in no way deserves my time nor my recommendation.

Subsurface Circular

While I did read that Subsurface Circular was a text-based game, I still wasn't fully expecting what I got. You know those games where you're tending a bar or some other establishment, and you get customers coming in, telling you about their day and their lives? Subsurface Circular is a bit like that, but instead of a bar, you're sitting in the titular Subsurface Circular - a metro line exclusively for robots, trying to figure out why some robots are going missing, and maybe something more.

Listen, it's a short game, about 2 hours long, and while I'd love to tell you all about it, that would rob you of the experience of playing it yourself. So instead, let me tell you not about the story, but rather my experiences with the story. First off, it's well written. I still don't know how to describe it, but with some stories (it's not a super rare trait) you can just tell it feels nice to read the words, whatever the story actually is. But luckily, the story's also good. I don't think it's amazingly good or original either, just... good. Probably the strongest bit is the presentation, as you have to kind of get the details of things out of the other robots. You're a detective, see, so you gotta ask the right questions. It's... not really possible to fail or fall off course though, I'm afraid, which somewhat lessens the impact of your actions. The game's kind of linear, and that's something I wish could have been improved. That and the length.

So, what are my opinions overall? Eh... I'd play it if it was free. It's short enough to not really waste my time, but I don't feel I got some profound experience either. The story was nice, I'm happy I experienced it, but I will probably forget it in not too long. So I guess it's a partial recommendation. Won't make my list, but I liked it nontheless.

City of Brass

Sometimes I play a game and wonder how I was tricked into believing it's any semblence of good. I just want to get City of Brass out of my head as fast as possible, so I'm not going to go into too much detail. It feels like a student game. You got your standard first-person view, enemies run straight towards you, you slash them with your sword a few times until they die... Environmental hazards blend into the scenery, except for an icon when you hover over them, but then everything has an icon when you hover over it - it's a mess. Treasure chests open to a cardboard cutout of coins, you can accidentally use your whip to grab a potion that instakills you, because of course missing an enemy and hitting a potion next to them means you wanted to grab and chug that... You don't even get anything for killing enemies, or well... doing much anything at all really.

Agh, I didn't play it a lot, but City of Brass really feels like it wasted my time. You just spam your sword, braindead enemies fall down, you run in the direction of the arrow... There's nothing interesting in the slightest about it. Hard pass. Not recommended. Go next.

Katana Zero

Mostly unrelated, but I had a small breakdown trying to figure out how to classify games, particularly action games, after I finished playing this game. Katana Zero is no doubt an action game, but that's so broad... It's a platformer, because you jump from platform to platform, but that's by no means what the game is about... I guess it's a hack and slash, since that is mainly what the game is about, but then I looked at all the other hack and slash games, and how different they, too, are, and I just don't know anymore. To go into more detail, Katana Zero is a level-based side-scrolling hack and slash, with the catch being a bullet time / time rewind mechanic.
It's a fun game by the gameplay alone, as restarting the level is quite rapid, so it can give you very difficult scenarios to overcome. It starts off easy enough, but the difficulty ramps up alongside your skill, giving a very nice feeling of progression as you look back at levels that used to give you trouble, and notice how easy they are compared to what you can handle towards the end. And yet, were it just the gameplay, I wouldn't mark this game as anything too special...

What really lifts Katana Zero above the rest is the story it tells. It could have just been a nice arcade game, where you have the ability to restart the level because it's a video game, but Katana Zero went further, and wrote a whole story, history, psychological aspects - everything around it. I think the story is very memorable indeed, and it's well-integrated with the gameplay where it's actually interfering with how you play the game, not just something you experience between levels. There are also a lot of choices, which appear to have an impact on the rest of the story, but, minor spoiler, mostly do not. Still, I think it's applaudable that it made me care about the decisions I made, and fooled me to believe that the game may have gone significantly differently based on those choices. (There is actually one important choice as well as a hidden boss fight.)
But that's about all I want to say about the story, lest I spoil something larger. Do experience it for yourself.

Overall, between an amazing story, well-executed, although not incredibly unique, gameplay, and an all around solid experience in every other aspect, Katana Zero is one of best games I've played in a while, as well as a contender for the best arcade game I've ever played. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Gloomhaven

I've always been at least moderately suspicious of video games that have been made from board games. Not that I have anything against board games, far from it, but a board game has a set of limitations on it (simple enough rules to be memorized and applied by humans, limited board sizes, no information hidden from all players, etc.) that a video game does not. So I usually leave board games to be played in person, and stick to video games while online. I was, however, willing to make an exception for Gloomhaven, not just because it's the highest rated board game, but because I was asked to. So, having played it, I might as well review it, but keep my overall stance on board games in mind, if you wish.

Gloomhaven is a tactical, deck-based RPG. You choose a class, assemble a party of up to 4 characeters / players, and set off to a scenario, possibly as part of a longer campaign during which you can upgrade your character with new cards, new equipment, and even a slightly more beneficial RNG. Each scenario has you accomplishing some goal, usually killing all enemies. Unlike most RPGs, Gloomhaven places much greater stakes on each action. You are limited by your deck size, and will lose if you run out of cards, placing you on a turn limit. Additionally, you may choose to burn some cards instead of recycling them in order to get a more powerful effect - bringing forward the time of your inevitable demise, but potentially making up for it by clearing enemies or preventing them doing a lot of damage to you.
Enemies usually hit for a lot, and you're expected to know how the AI works and abuse that knowledge to the fullest by manipulating your turn order, unit placement, and whatever else you can to exploit the specifically-dumb AI. This works well in a board game, but I find it makes the game unnecessarily slow online. This is an addition to the already commonly slow pace of board games that stems from generally being played one turn at a time, one player at a time. Further, there is a widespread problem with turn-based PvE games in general, where it's usually more efficient for one person to call the shots and coordinate everything, than everyone making their own decisions. This of course means that unless everyone is on an equal skill level, either the better players have to bottle up their knowledge and stay silent, watching less experienced players make mistakes and bring the party down. Or the less experienced players don't get much autonomy, and thus not much fun out of the game. This is not something inherent to Gloomhaven, but Gloomhaven also isn't exempt from this.

I think that's most of it. Not much specific about Gloomhaven. In fact, I quite like the idea that you're more solving open-ended puzzles than playing an RPG, and I bet Gloomhaven would be quite nice to play in person. But mainly due to the high amount of time spent waiting, I just can't give the game a recommendation over something designed for a computer first and foremost.

Noita

It's rare to see a game with a truly unique concept. I suppose it's usually that innovation is difficult - it's much easier to make something you've already seen. But also that there is risk in innovation - if no one's done it before, there's no telling how fun it might be. I can't say Noita is completely unique, because it heavily reminds me of the various powder toys I liked to play around with a decade or so ago, except Noita has many more elements, many more interactions, an immensely larger world, and the whole thing is gamified into an action roguelike.

I find it an absoute technical feat, creating such a large world where every little block, basically every pixel, is simulated in realtime. I think Noita deserves recognition for this alone. They've further managed to add an exploration element into the game, tasking you with learning how things react, what are the effects of various substances on you and your enemies, and figuring out good combinations of spells and tactics.
I was very excited for the first few hours, being a small floaty wizard in a large cave filled with unknown things. Sure, I died often, but each new run I started off with slightly different spells, found new wands, new things, and the game was constantly fresh. I set fire to things, zapped water and metal with electricity, and a particular highlight was conjuring up enough water to create a shield that slowed incoming projectiles to a standstill before they could hit me. There was a lot to see and a lot to do, but my experiences were somewhat disjointed...

On one hand there was this amazing physics simulator that was asking to be explored. On the other, there were these shooty bad guys trying to get you to die and not explore the former. A particular place of conflict was the permadeath nature of the game combined with it taking a while before you could get to the really fun stuff. I felt my exploration stifled by the nagging "don't do anything too crazy, lest we take these fun tools away from you" feeling. Indeed, after the starting options became familiar, most of my game time was spent just shooting at enemies and flying, maybe sometimes digging, through the levels. I found an interesting interaction every now and then, but they rarely performed better than just "shoot more inert bullets at them".

So, yeah, a shame. I don't even know what they could do to improve these problems. Just removing the physics part would leave us a not-too-unique shooter, which I find to be the main gameplay of this game already. Removing the shooting bits would leave us with not a game, but just a larger version of the powder toys of old. While Noita is a technical feat, the two main components that make it up fail to be used harmoniously together. Apart, they just fail to keep my attention for too long.
But hey, even if I can't personally recommend it, the 95% positive reviews on Steam are not to be laughed at. If what I described feels a bit like what you'd want to experience, you don't have to take my word for the game not being so fun.

GTFO

GTFO had a free weekend recently, so I got together with a few friends, and we gave it a shot. They had just released a new "Rundown" alongside the free weekend, which is a series of missions that is... the whole game, I guess. Seems to happen twice a year to try to keep the game fresh, which is nice. But I'm getting ahead of myself. What's the game like?

Rundown is described as a horror shooter, but there isn't much horror aside from the grotesque enemies, and there's not that much shooting unless you want to run out of ammo and lose the game. Instead, the levels rely on exploring the area, making optimal decisions on where to go, and a little bit of teamwork that includes sneaking past enemies or sneaking up to them and clubbing them in the head while they're taking a nap. A lot of the latter really, and it plays like a game of Red Light, Green Light (AKA Statues), which really makes it quite slow, especially if other players are just on standby in case things go south.
The gunplay isn't bad, but there's nothing noteworthy about it either. Equipment you can find is quite boring (another set of glowsticks no one wants, anyone?), and there isn't a lot of variety in the gameplay, at least as far as the missions I got to. Top that off with having to re-do large parts of the game if you lose and no adjustable difficulty, and you don't really have much of a case to make in favor of this game. For what it's worth, I found the atmosphere quite immersive and well-executed, but that is by no means enough to keep me interested in the game.

So, after the initial feeling of discovery wore off and the gameplay started to fall into more of a rut of just waiting for periods of time (having to repeat a part of the game 5 times didn't help either), I wasn't having any more of it. I can't even imagine what it must be like playing with randoms, where someone running off, getting frustrated, or just being incompetent will simply ruin everything. Overall, play with a group of people you know, for sure, but even then I find the whole thing difficult to recommend.

DungeonTop

DungeonTop is a roguelike deckbuilder. You grab a starter hero, a starter deck, and venture into the dungeon to beat opponents who have little decks of their own. The gameplay isn't completely unique, but I don't know any game that's very similar to DungeonTop either.
Your hero and the enemy hero start in opposite corners of a small 4x6 or so grid and take turns summoning minions next to existing friendly units, moving, attacking, and casting spells. You get a few cards and a few mana to cast these cards, and then dicard and redraw the whole hand the next turn. You get a selection of cards to add at the end of each battle, and occasionally the chance to remove some. If you run out of cards, you just reshuffle and go for another round.

Perhaps some have already realized that this system is a bit basic and perhaps flawed. Because decks are small (<20), the draw speed is massive (initially 5), and there's no penalty for running out of cards, you're going to thin your deck to be fairly small, and consistently execute whatever combo you want. I didn't play for too long so I don't know all the different strategies, but for example I summoned like 5 minions every turn, completely encircling the enemy on my second or third turn, leaving them with no room to play any new cards. I'd then just shuffle my units around and inveitably beat the enemy. The board was not nearly big enough to fit all my units if I didn't kill their hero in the first few turns. I hear other strategies were similarly powerful, and that overall, the game was far far too easy, to the point you would never lose if you had any idea what you were doing. I can vouch that in my couple of hours of playing, every battle was completely one-sided. They had 16 levels of difficulty at the start, but they were sadly disabled until some unknown point, so I couldn't even make it more difficult. After 2 or so hours of the game getting only easier, and reading that it wasn't going to get better, I gave up.

I feel I didn't even get a good feel for the game. The idea felt kind of interesting but it was just mindlessly easy. I could not care less about what my enemy was doing, or what mechanics the game wanted to throw at me. If you can just do the same thing and win, then what's the incentive to try? In any case, it's not as if the game was super interesting behind its lackluster difficulty. I might have had fun if it was properly balanced, but it's not that the balance ruined a masterpiece or anything. Overall, a shame, but nothing of value lost in not being able to recommend DungeonTop.

Swords & Souls: Neverseen

I feel like I've expressed these thoughts before, but... I'm really glad I got to play Flash games growing up, instead of the current state of "free" games that is the mobile game industry. But the quality has gone up in the years as well, so if you want to start charging money, you best step up your games a lot from what they were back in the day.
Apparently Swords & Souls: Neverseen is a sequel to a 7 year old Flash game (which I never played), and it does feel very much like a Flash game, except with more content and quality.

Swords & Souls consists of a three part game loop. First, you train your character through five different minigames, one for each stat. Second, you go fight enemies to collect coins and items. Third, you use the gathered coins to upgrade the town, including the training area, allowing you to progress further. Rotate back around to training, and keep at this cycle.
Upgrading the town isn't really gameplay and offers only minimal choice in deciding what you want to prioritize. Fighting enemies is mostly a stat check. Most encounters are either so easy you don't have to do anything, or so hard there's nothing you can do, with perhaps only one to two encounters each cycle that depend on when you use your skills. So, all that's really left are the minigames, and your enjoyment will depend nigh entirely on whether you like them. Personally, I did not. Even though the minigames change a little as you do them more, they're still very basic games of "press the right direction key at the right time" or "aim and maybe click in the right direction at the right time". They were somewhat fun for the first 5-10 minutes each, but they're very far from what I'd call quality gameplay.

Perhaps my verdict is a bit unpolite, but I feel this game is suitable for children at best, or if you want to do some coordination / reaction time / aiming excercises. It falls deep into the casual game territory for me and has no appealing aspects whatsoever. There is no way I could recommend this.

LiEat

Unlike most publishers whose games I've played before, I never know if I'm getting a good game when playing something from Playism. I think they exclusively publish Japanese indie games, so there's a lot of RPGMaker stuff and JRPGs. I played through one by the name of LiEat today. Seems to be this particular developer's most successful release, despite later releasing two more story games of similar size. (The later releases also did really well for indie games, but just not as massively well as LiEat.) But I'll get around to those some other time. This post is about LiEat.

LiEat is an RPGMaker game about a travelling liar and a little dragon girl (named Efina) who eats lies. The game part isn't really important, despite there being some combat, and I'd go as far as to say it's quite badly made, even for RPGMaker story game standards. The story is told as three smaller stories about the duo solving some mystery or problem in a village, a resort, and a mansion. The maps are small, each story takes an hour or two, and there's about 8 characters in each, 4 of whom repeat. Apart from uncovering the mystery of that particular place, each story also uncovers a piece of information about our main duo. The stories weren't bad. They were enjoyable to read through and didn't drag on due to their short length, but they were also nothing particularly memorable.
I think the main selling point was how darn cute Efina was. Both in the conversation dynamics between the characters, as well as the artstyle (not the pixel art), which looked somewhat amateurish, almost like crayon drawings by children, but all the more fitting for it. Personally, I also found the music to be much to my liking.

Now, as a whole, I don't really know what to say. I definitely liked the story, and found it was 4 hours well spent. But the stories weren't that good, there were some plot holes like Efina's power to make lies manifest being a bit arbitrary and made to suit the plot, and you had to run around far too much, checking every place again and again, as new discoverable items and ways to progress the story plopped up as you found the last. It was a bit of an annoyance. I think I'd give it like a half-recommendation. Play it if you like cute little anime dragon girls with a small side of actual story and mysteries, but steer clear if that doesn't sound like your cup of tea. For me, it just barely won't be making it into my best games list.

Airships: Conquer the Skies

I'm somewhat surprised that Airships has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam. I must admit it's very well made for a small indie game, but it's far from perfectly executed.

Airships is primarily a sandbox for designing steampunk airships and pitting them against other airships. There's also landships and bases which use the same parts but different methods of movement. I spent most of my time in a conquer-the-world style scenario mode, which adds a tech tree for unlocking parts and adds bases to fight over that generate income, thus limiting your ship designs. But you really just care about the ships and the combat, and there's quite a few flaws with that part. Allow me to list off some that come to me, in no particular order:

The research is far too slow, taking tens if not hundreds of hours to finish in its entirety. Getting even a single upgrade takes a while, and sometimes gives only one new block. The research tree does not specifically tell you what each node unlocks.
Combat is neither manual nor automatic enough. You can only give rudimentary commands to your ships, being 80% movement, and 15% who to target. The movement is terrible at understanding whether something is in the way, sometimes ramming into stuff, and sometimes stopping even if it wouldn't ram into anything. There's no navigating around obstacles, chained movement commands, no option to follow a target and keep it at range, no way to target specific systems (weapons, crew, repairs, ammo, etc.) on the enemy...
The battle maps are far too small for the epic scale this game promises, and even almost enables. There is no room to manouver or position your ships most of the time, leading to piles of wreckage blocking the way. If larger maps could be combined with autonomous AI (that works better than current enemy AI, which rams into its own units and gets stuck) and larger budgets for designing ships, we could actually get a lot of entertainment value from watching massive fights - not the case right now.
The battles are about twice too fast at normal speed, and about twice too slow at the next slowest, 1/4 speed.
Aside from research not being transparent, a lot of other systems aren't either. How does armor work? How is accuracy calculated over range? How much damage am I actually doing to the enemy? Or how much are they doing to me, for that matter? If I don't know if my weapons scale better or worse over range than the enemy's, I don't get to make a decision of whether to fight up close or far. This isn't just a strategic problem, it's also unfun to not understand what is going on.
And honestly, there's more problems, most related to not enough polish, not necessarily bad ideas.

Overall, I did play Airships for nearly ten hours, definitely proving it has some appeal. But once you build a few cool ships with the parts you have, there isn't too much incentive to build even more, so that part of the game falls off. The overworld RTS game is very slow and bare-bones, so that was never exciting to start with. And finally, the combat despite offering some awe at larger-than-usual scale fights, and watching the dynamic destruction of both fleets, eers more on the frustrating than the fun side for the reasons listed above.
I'm left wondering what could have caused people to like this game so much. Perhaps there is a shortage of games that let you build your own armaments and then offer a meaningful battleground. I can't help but feel that maybe even Gratuitous Space Battles did it better. In any case, I can't recommend a game I didn't ultimately enjoy, so I can't recommend Airships.

Daemon X Machina

Mecha games always looks so cool from the screenshots. The idea of flying around at high speeds with a lot of firepower sounds cool, but that doesn't necessarily translate to reality. I guess you could say the same about Daemon X Machina, which I just played.

See, the problem with being really strong, and really maneuverable, and really fast is that... Well, there's a lot of problems. Being strong means others are weak, and that makes things easy. Being maneuverable, like a mech, not like a plane, means that you can essentially aim anywhere you want. Combine that with being airborne, and there's often nothing obscuring your view either, making it truly an excercise in clicking on targets as they come close from any direction. And being fast means everything is really damn small because they're so far. So you're going to need some sort of auto-targetting to make sure you can keep living out your power fantasy of eliminating a lot of enemies, lest you feel like a fool, missing all your shots.
These are roughly my problems with this game, which can be summed up in it being too easy and too simple. You go from scenario to scenario, suffering dialogue and story that doesn't seem to be heading anywhere for a while, then fly to targets and hold down your mouse buttons while aiming in their general direction, and then wait for more to arrive until the mission is over and you get to do it all over again.

I could talk about other bits, like how the upgrade and customization system is kind of nice with salvaging equipment from enemies, requiring specific equipment for specific upgrades, and such, but it doesn't matter. It comes down to slightly different damage or defense numbers, or a faster firing gun, but the core gameplay stays the same boring way. They got full English voice acting, but 10 missions in, I still couldn't piece together where the story was going, and they'd already introduced like 20 characters. Speaking of characters, I don't know if the lighting messed up or what, but they had really unsightly streaks of light shades moving across their faces. Ruined that bit too.
I quit after failing a mission because I got tired of the last enemy sitting outside the playable area and decided to fly after it, only to be instantly killed by the map boundary as I ran into it, failing the mission. I wasn't going to re-do one of these missions from the start, so I quit.

I feel like I'm being very harsh on a game that kind of delivered its premise. You fly around and you shoot enemies, even if there's nothing complicated or challenging about it. I'm not sure what better I expected, but as I was actually falling asleep during it, I have no personal reason to give it any sort of recommendation.

Hand of Fate 2

It's been over 5 years since I completed the original Hand of Fate. I left quite the positive review of it, and added it to my favorite games list, albeit at a rather low position, somewhat contrasting the tone in the review. I remember what the game was about, but not the details, nor anything that particularly stood out to me. In hindsight, it feels as if the game was unremarkable. Who's to say if I've simply forgotten, if my preferences have changed, or if the bar I've set for games has gotten higher over the past 5 years. This review is of course about Hand of Fate 2, but I would like to pretend I remember the first game well enough to make comparisons to it. They are, overall, very similar games.

Hand of Fate 2 is mostly a turn-based rougelike. You have your basic stats - health, food, gold. You have some equipment with attack, defense, and passive abilities. And you have a goal in the scenario which you must accomplish. What they changed is that instead of the game being one large scenario with checkpoints, it is now a more loosely connected collection of smaller scenarios without a fixed order. This feels like a slight downgrade.
Most of what happens in the game is based on decks. You step into a new "room" - it's a random card from the deck dictating the encounter. You gain a new equipment - it's random from the equipment deck. You gain a positive or negative effect - same story. You can customize the decks to a degree by adding your own cards in addition to the dealer's cards, which is a very nice idea in theory, but I would criticize the execution. There are a lot of cards, but not a lot of cards you can put in a deck. Making a good deck becomes a secondary or tertiary objective, because you want to prioritize cards which can unlock new cards, or cards which you haven't used yet, and thus have not yet identified, despite having obtained them. In the end, I'm making very few strategical decisions about my deck building, instead being half-forced to pick the cards which unlock new things. And, as another downgrade, I feel like they have reduced the amount of agency the player has over the decks as well.
I can't say I feel I have a lot of choice anyways. I go through all the rooms, I pick the usually obviously correct choices, hope the RNG doesn't fuck me over, and repeat the process until I win or lose. I definitely don't feel the exciment I felt during the first game.

The second half of the game is in fact action-based, being any combat encounter. This continues to be the worst part of the game, and I would be much harsher on it this time around. The combat is actually dead-easy if you have reasonable awareness and reaction times. Your equipment is inconsequential (making the bits about obtaining it matter less). Every encounter is just spamming attack (or shield break, or finishers) until a red or green arrow appears near you indicating to either dodge or block. Press the correct button of the two, and you're fine. Throw in a shield bash or weapon ability if those are ready. There is no strategy to the combat, no thinking.
This time sink is made worse by a tediously long transition from the game board to the battle, as well as some flexing animations at the start of combat from either side. I am adamant in my opinion this time, that they should have never added action combat to Hand of Fate. The card game aspect is far superior.

Speaking of time sinks, the dealer is ever chatty, but with the amount of text in the game, he somewhat wastes my time by forcing me to wait until he's done talking to start reading. Perhaps it's me, or perhaps the overall storytelling quality has gone down, as the dealer does not feel as enchanting as he once did.

Overall, a definite step down from the previous game, even if I factor in that I possibly have some nostalgia for the original Hand of Fate. That said, I still don't think it's a bad game. I think I got about 25% through the campaign. That's half as long as I played the original, but the campaign is now twice as long too. The first hours definitely passed very fast, as I was enjoying myself. The magic faded far faster this time around though.
I'm demoting the original Hand of Fate to a "below the line" recommendation, but I would still recommend you play that, and not this sequel. Despite it being newer, there is little innovation, and what there is, is not better.

Grimm's Hollow

I spent the evening playing through a short free game by the name of Grimm's Hollow. It takes about 3 hours to get all the endings, and it's a cute little RPG / Adventure game. I could tell you more about the gameplay, and how and why it was not balanced, was too easy, or why the real-time / turn-based hybrid system was somewhat frustrating. I won't. It's not important. You'll be playing for 3 hours, only half of that will be combat - you don't need a great system there. What was was good enough.

Grimm's Hollow is about the story. You wake up, you're dead, and you want to find your brother. It touches on things like coming to terms with your own death, the death of others, the afterlife, and other somewhat heavy topics, while also throwing in lighter moments to stop the mood from falling too far down. I don't want to spoil anything of course, so I won't go into details. It's nothing too deep, nothing incredible, but I found the story well-written and charming, and just short enough to keep me entertained throughout.

Overall, Grimm's Hollow is a short yet enjoyable Adventure RPG which I hope would not leave you indifferent. I find the quality comparable to another well-received game, Eternal Senia, and I would recommend both roughly equally. That is, they're good enough to earn a spot on my best games list, but a "below the line" spot, meaning they're not incredible or unparalleled. Still, Grimm's Hollow will only take you a few hours, and I think it's time well spent.

Lost Ember

A short review for a short game.
Lost Ember is an interactive story spanning a few hours. You kind of just run forward, listening to your mote of light companion explain the story for you, and occasionally taking control of other animals to run forward in a different way. There's also a ton of collectibles scattered around, if that's your thing.

I'll get to the point - this "game" isn't for me. The story's kinda basic and not well told, even for a game. The gameplay's nonexistent. The camera feels really weird and uncomfortable, and the graphics aren't as pretty as I would like from a game that's supposedly just about taking in the beautiful scenery. I can find no reason to recommend this to anyone.

Mothergunship

My initial impression of Mothergunship was amazing. I was actually laughing with excitement every time I built a new, stronger gun, and fired it for the first time. Sadly, that fascination died down rather fast.

Mothergunship is a fast-paced FPS. It has randomly generated levels, multi-jumps, weapon knockback propulsion, a ton of enemies, and other FPS things. I didn't find these aspects spectacularly executed, but they weren't terrible either. Perhaps my relative lack of knowledge regarding FPS games is to blame here.
What certainly sets this game apart is the ability to craft your own guns. It's not just your usual "choose 3 parts with different stats" building. You can chain connectors together to make more connections onto which you can place the actual gun and powerup bits, creating truly massive, powerful, and absolutely awesome guns. The imposed spatial limitations only add to the feeling of accomplishment when putting a new gun together.

But there's a problem. You build your awesome gun, you have fun with it, and then the level ends or you die. You effectively lose your gun. You keep the parts if you win and lose them if you die, but you can only bring around 3 parts to the next level. So just as you get to the best version of your gun, it's taken away from you, and you're back to shooting something quite average for a while. It doesn't help that crafting is such a frequent and time consuming occurance as well. I would love to spend more time experiencing this gun I made, not clearing one room and then remaking it because a new shop came around, spending a good half of the time just crafting. Making something awesome is only worth it if you get to use it too.
Further, sure, having guns in both hands is cool, but I feel bad to have to choose between the optimal deicision of making two guns of equal strength rather than making one massive gun instead. Don't put your players in this situation. Let the optimal path be the most fun path as well, if possible.
Going back to the mediocre execution of the combat, I would voice my main problem that there was just too much going on. The rooms were too small, the projectiles and explosions too large, enemies appeared out of thin air, and it all blended into one colorful lightshow, removing most tactical gameplay, and leaving just spamming projectiles towards enemies.

In conclusion, an amazing gun-building system I would love to see in some well-made game, but not here. The combat is too chaotic, and there is not enough time to enjoy the fruits of your labor, neither within the level, or across levels. Give us one gun, larger rooms, larger levels, less frequent crafting, better clarity, and I will probably love your game. But then that would be a completely different game. Mothergunship will not be getting a recommendation from me.

Moonlighter

Moonlighter is an Action RPG/roguelike where you run through dungeons, collect loot, then sell it or use it to upgrade your equipment.
I found the game very simplistic. It takes Binding of Isaac's dungeon formula where each dungeon is a series of screens. Kill everything on the screen and you can move to the next room. There's 5 different weapons with different attack patterns. They have upgrades, but it's basically just increased damage. They also have a charged attack that's almost never worth it. Similarly, armor just gives increased health. More so at the expense of movement speed, if you want. And of course there is also an invincibility dodge roll. I found some weapon types just flat out better than others, and most non-boss enemies trivial unless they swarm you from more than two directions. As far as the combat portion goes, it's very uninspired.

The enemies drop only ingredients and valuables which can have some "curses" determining where you can place them in your limited inventory. This creates a form of an inventory management minigame, but as we know, inventory management is usually a nuisance, unless done incredibly well. And, well, it's not done well here at all. On the topic of managing your inventory, the control scheme is fully optimized for a controller, with just a basic map to keyboard. The default bindings are awkward, there's no mouse support, and no shortcuts for some common actions, causing most inventory management to take too long.
Continuing with tedious things, the other "half" of this game is a shop management game, where you list your dungeon loot up for sale. Problem is, items mostly sell at a fixed price. You don't initially know this price (which makes no sense, because every villager does, but you, the professional shopkeeper, do not), but finding it out is very easy, as the game sorts items by price even if you don't know their price. Really, there is no depth on this side of the game either, and it might just have been more enjoyable if you got to dump your stock to an NPC instead of going through the trouble of running your shop. Heck, enemies just flat out dropping coins could have been a better choice, allowing focus on the marginally better combat side of the game.

Overall, I found nothing new or interesting in this game. The execution is fine, but the implemented ideas are pretty basic and boring. There's tons of better top-down action RPGs/roguelikes out there, and if you're looking for something to scratch the shopkeeping itch, Recettear did it better. (They also did basically everything else better.) But Moonlighter I just can not recommend.