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.