Return.

I probably wouldn't give such a game a try these days, but since it was already in my backlog, I had to play it, and since I already played it, I have to talk about it. It's Return., and it's a free 30 minute platformer about returning an antropomorhic axolotl to life, or something.
It's really basic, with just movement and a tiny little hop you can repeat 3 times. Why they opted for 3 hops instead of a single larger jump, I'm unsure. It was quite unintuitive how to get enough air time at the start, but apparently I just had to mash jump really fast. The game looks like it could have some clever little secret with the progress bar stopping at 2/3 of the way to the finish, but apparently that's just a bug. There's no secrets. You just finish the game, and that's it.

There isn't really anything here to talk about. It's a free game that lasts half an hour. Less if you're good at it. Not that it's particularly challenging. There's no secrets, no branching, no particular story, and no reason to replay it. There's nothing bad about the game per se, but the platforming is just underwhelming enough that it's not even worth checking out, not even for free.

Quantum Protocol

Quantum Protocol is a PvE card game where you choose one of a few existing decks, and then expand that deck over the duration of a level by acquiring new cards as you defeat enemies. It's quite unique in terms of gameplay, and features multiple novel mechanics.
For starters, the game is asymmetrical. While both you and your enemy have a 5x2 board, your enemy's cards come in waves, each appearing after the last one is defeated. Each enemy card has a timer, indicating how many turns are left until it does an action. Meanwhile, you usually play cards from your hand, move cards around on the board, and choose which ones to activate. Each of these actions normally costs a turn, bringing you closer to the enemy's attacks. Each card can only be activated once, except after 5 turns, you can spend a turn to draw a card and refresh your board, allowing you to activate each card again. The actual loop generally relies on clearing your board often and building it up again, as you can choose to activate all your cards (even already activated ones) in a single row in just 1 turn if you discard them after. Many cards then return discarded cards back to your deck.

There are a lot more mechanics, definitely more than I care to list, but I feel that's the gist of it. While novel, these mechanics aren't necessarily good. I can't quite pinpoint my frustrations, which I suppose goes to show that they weren't that severe, but I never felt like there was a pleasant flow to the battle, despite the game advertising "it's always your turn". The general favorable emotion I get from deckbuilders is building a sort of machine that spirals to become better and better. Meanwhile here, I felt I was throwing a lot of trash onto the board, and instead of building up momentum, I was losing it the more the board got full. Sure, cleaning it up and starting fresh is a central game mechanic, but it's the opposite feeling from what I wanted. Add to that that your decks only last for the duration of a level, despite it possibly being half an hour long, and I really didn't feel I was getting anywhere in the game, short- nor long-term.
Oh, and if you were wondering about the visual novel aspect of the game, don't bother. There is a story, but it's very shallow, and only exists to provide context to the gameplay. That's fine, but don't expect to find a good read here.

Overall, Qunatum Protocol might be a fine game for you if you're a fan of card games, thinking, and prefer novelty to tried-and-true gameplay. The levels can be quite long, you can lose and have to reset to the beginning of the level, and you will probably be spending a lot of time reading and thinking, not playing. These aren't necessarily bad things though, just not something I enjoyed. As such, no recommendation from me, but I don't want to discourage you from trying, if the description seemed interesting.

Yume Nikki

It's been well over a decade since I first saw Yume Nikki. It was a Let's Play from a YouTuber I used to watch. I don't think they ever finished it or even got close, but the game definitely seemed intersting from what I could remember, so when I saw it appear on Steam at the start of 2018 for free, I added it to my library. 6 years laters, I finally got around to playing it.

Uhmmm... I don't have a lot to say about it. The game is incredibly cryptic and gives no hints on how to progress. Though I did not intially know this, your goal is to gather all the "effects", which are like little accessories for your character that grant you powers to do things and get to places you couldn't before. I found 4 out of the 24, and found a use for none of them. I spent about an hour wandering around aimlessly in creepy, desolate worlds, listening to the unsettling, and somewhat irritating, background music. There's 12 worlds, I think? They kind of connect to other worlds too and feature sort of unique scenery. None of this tells you anything though. What do you do in the worlds? What's the goal? Where do I go next? Is this a dead end because there's nothing here, or is it a dead end because I don't have the right effect equipped? You'll never know, and the game won't so much as hint to it.

Listen, after an hour, I was emotionally tired. I had kind of given up after 30 minutes, which doesn't sound like a lot, but if you asked me to recount what I saw in that hour, I couldn't tell you. The game is so devoid of any meaning, and it doesn't make it easy to explore it either, with the worlds being large, the field of view being small, the things you want to find being hidden, your walking pace being a crawl, and the music eating away at your sanity. It's definitely an experience, but it's not an experience I would recommend having.

Neoverse

Neoverse is yet another Roguelike deckbuilding game. I really should get around to Slay the Spire in order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the genre, but until then, you're getting comparison-free reviews. For what it's worth, my judgement of Neoverse mostly did not come down to how good it was in its genre.
Neoverse has a selection of 3 characters, each with their own decks and playstyles. You start with a few cards in your starter deck and proceed through a series of fights. The default mode has a total of 24 encounters, and up to 4 enemies per encounter. You are given 5 cards, each with some effect, but most importantly, a mana cost. Many deckbuilders give you a limited number of cards per turn, making card draw very valuable, but here you are instead trying to optimize your mana usage, because you always draw a new card upon spending one, unless you mill your entire deck in a single turn. Each encounter gives you a mission that can be completed even after the encounter, with a reward upon completing it. You may choose a tougher encounter for a better mission, more gold, skill points, and better cards at the end of the encounter. Gold can be spent on 1-time consumables, new cards, and skill points. Skill points can be spent on passive upgrades to your character.
There's even more to it, but I can't explain everything, and the point is that there are plenty of mechanics to make for an interesting game. The cards are made well enough to have good synergies that aren't entirely trivial to achieve, and do reward thinking and good planning. There are also different game modes which shift around difficulties and make some changes into how you power up, but the core game is the same.

Based on just the above description, you might think the game is great, but there are a lot of problems. As far as gameplay is concerned, it's too easy. It's simple to get the deck you want, so there isn't a lot of randomness to the game, which also limits replayability. On top of that, the amount of content is still somewhat limited.
Beyond gameplay, the game just lacks polish. The translation is poor and limits understanding of certain game mechanics. Some tooltips are missing, leaving you guessing what some effects do. The graphics may seem like they have high fidelity, but as I understand, most of the game is made with pre-existing assets. This explains the visual dissonance and the clunky animations. There's also plenty of weird bugs, like scrolling a menu too fast makes the music temporarily stop. It's just shoddy work, and I think a big draw of the game for many people who did decide to buy it were the hot anime girls in revealing outfits.

Overall, I had my fun for the first run or two, despite everything. It's an entirely playable game, but I know how popular the rougelike deckbuilder scene is these days, and I'm certain there are many better games than this. I think it's more fair to see Neoverse as a rushed, yet oddly solid, attempt at a quick cash grab from the popularity of the genre, instead of something well-made. I would rather advise to stay away and find something else.

MO:Astray

I picked up MO:Astray because of its positive reviews, because it seemed there had been a lot of effort put into crafting the levels, with the pixel art being both beautiful and quite varied, and the environments looking like they were telling some interesting story. Also because I recognized the publisher as having published some of my favorite mobile games. Even though those were rhythm games, and I don't play many mobile games in general. While those assumptions were correct, there were some caveats. But first, let me explain the game.

MO:Astray is an action and puzzle platformer, with a strong emphasis on the story. You play as a little blob who can jump in any direction, stick onto any surface, and latch onto the heads of enemies to control them and read their thoughts. The thought reading is just for the purpose of storytelling, and is the main method of explaining the lore, allowing you to skip it if you so desire. You will also get some other abilities later on, such as briefly stopping in mid-air and doing another omnidirectional jump from there. I would say that there is a lot of inspiration taken from Ori, both in terms of how some of the story is told, as well as much of the platforming. The biggest difference would be that this is not a metroidvania, and there's no real combat to speak of. Personally, I actually prefer this pure focus on platforming and puzzles, and I would say MO:Astray can definitely stand up to Ori, even if they feel very similar.

I'm a big fan of storytelling in games that is not in your face and not forcing you to pay attention to it. I think the story, or perhaps rather the lore, of MO:Astray can be quite interesting to follow along and discover, but wasn't quite enough to grip me. For people who care more about storytelling though, it's probably worth experiencing. Similarly, the art and many of the backgrounds are very beautifully drawn, even if I feel the animations could be a bit better.
Finally, the platforming, my only complaint is the focus on mobile screens and controllers. I think it would have taken but an hour or two of development time to add a better control scheme for the mouse, but as it stands, you're forced to drag your mouse every time you wish to make a jump, whereas a single click while showing the cursor would have been much more natural. Other than that, the platforming was quite fluid and had a reasonable amount of skill expression without being frustrating for someone like me, who's only average at this.

Ultimately, would I recommend MO:Astray? Kind of. If you are a fan of either Ori game, or enjoy other non-combat-focused platformers, then MO:Astray is definitely one of the better ones. The problem for me is that I've never enjoyed those kinds of games, and I know that's just a personal problem. So therefore, I would have to give this a partial recommendation, because while I can appreciate and recognize this as being a good game, I still didn't quite like it myself.

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension

Today's game is one of the higher rated ones on my backlog - There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension. Opening it up, it immediately seemed familiar to me, which must have been because it was originally a free browser game back in 2015. It has increased from its previous 30 minute length to a much more reasonable 6 hour length, and it seems a lot more polished as well, at least as far as I can remember.
There Is No Game is a point-and-click adventure about how there is supposedly no game for you to be playing. It focuses on humor and having you solve casual puzzles by thinking outside the box. It's divided into multiple chapters, each having a different style.

While there are plenty of games that still break the fourth wall, I don't feel it has ever become a common thing in video games, so the concept is usually novel enough for me. However, this kind of fourth wall breaking is only interesting by itself the first time you see it, and I already expect there to be either a solid story or solid gameplay accompanying it. The puzzles presented weren't particularly difficult (time consuming, perhaps, due to having to click around, finding what the game wanted you to click, as is standard in point-and-click games), and the humor of the game didn't even manage to get a chuckle out of me. So between an unenjoyable story and unenjoyable gameplay, I didn't have much reason to finish it.

As usual, I can't outright dismiss the positive reception this game has. If it looks like something you might enjoy, then statistically it's quite likely you will enjoy it. On the other hand, because I did not like it, I can not personally recommend it.

Oh My God, Look at This Knight

A shorter one today - Oh My God, Look at This Knight is a 10-15 minute free adventure game I added to my library some years back.
I was expecting there to be a little bit more to it, but no, what you see on the screenshots is 80% of the game. There isn't even enough to write a review off of. It's slightly humorous, I suppose, but it doesn't subvert expectations enough to actually be funny. There isn't really any gameplay to speak of. You just walk around and click the attack button to whack things, and move out of the way of enemies' attacks. "Help" a few people, do a bossfight, and that's the game.

Usually, I find these short games to be worth the nonexistant time it takes to complete them, but not this one. There isn't really anything remarkable here, and the joke they make is far from novel. I suppose it's just highly rated because there isn't much to hate about it, but I wouldn't recommend you play it, even for the low price of free.

Creeper World 4

I was surprised when I found I hadn't written a review of Creeper World 3, but then I realized its release date was nearly 10 years ago. Turns out Creeper World 4 is not that different of a game, despite visually becoming 3D. Since the Creeper World series is something I've played since the Flash game era when I was still a child, I figured I'd cover the previous game in the series as well.

Creeper World is a mix between a tower defense game and an RTS. You must build towers and harvest resources to protect your base, but your enemy does not do the same. They, the "creeper", are a giant mass of viscous liquid that destroys anything it comes in contact with. It slowly creeps forward from its spawning points, and you have to build a defensive battlefront to halt its advance. After managing to do so, you must then slowly push back the creeper by having your defenses clear a small area in front of them, then building new defenses there. Each map is this tug-of-war between you and the creeper, usually ending when you have managed to push it all the way back. There are several different towers, types of resources, other buildings, and ways for the creeper to spread. Terrain is also an important part, with high ground generally being better to defend, but also harder to attack, as the creeper flows from high to low areas.

I think Creeper World is a very unique game, and I love the feeling of fighting against this giant mass that is bigger than yourself. It feels like keeping an ocean at bay. It's quite exciting for the first 10 or so minutes of each map, as you figure out how much area you can grab for yourself before the creeper reaches your outer buildings and you frantically try to allocate resources to get all the various types of defenses operational and strong enough to withstand the approaching flood. However, after some intial setbacks of maybe losing a few buildings if you were too greedy, or running out of resources if you weren't greedy enough, you arrive at a stable base that can keep the creeper at bay forever. Unless you do something really stupid, it becomes impossible to lose the game, and the remaining time, possibly even as long as an hour, you're just fighting a battle you know you've already won. This is by far the biggest weakness of Creeper World, but honestly, most strategy games suffer from it. At some point, you will just tip over the balance point and become stronger than your opponent, and from there on out, it's just a task of wiping them out. For the player's sake, hope that you can win soon after, but sadly, that's not usually the case with this game. I don't like RTS games, and I'm lukewarm on tower defense games, but despite that, Creeper World is still something that I've enjoyed. Perhaps I don't mind the tedious latter 75% of each map, because it feels satisfying to assert my superiority over the enemy that gave me trouble for the first quarter of the level.

Creeper World has always been a 3D game in some sense, as the creeper is a liquid and flows in accordance to the terrain, which has a different height at different points of the map. So, despite visually extending to the third dimension in Creeper World 4, the game still played the exact same. It looked quite nice, seeing the waves of creeper in 3D, and I found no downsides to the added dimension, but I also found very few benefits. I started off playing in 3D mode, but the erratic terrain elevation made it confusing where things really were, so after a few maps, I just switched to the top-down view, which was exactly like the old 2D mode, only switching back occasionally to admire the view.
Creeper World 3 was the best release in the series, and in terms of features, 4 didn't change a lot. In fact, I'd argue that despite improving the balance of the game in some aspects, it was made worse in others, to the point where I actually enjoyed it substantially less than its predecessor. I did still enjoy it, much like I enjoyed the first game in the series, but after over a hundred hours of playing them all, the new ones really need to innovate in order to keep me engaged for a similar length of time, and Creeper World 4 did not manage to do that.

Would I still recommend Creeper World 4? Yeah, sure. Although, if you have played Creeper World 3, don't really expect anything new or better. If you haven't played Creeper World 3, then maybe that would be the better starting point. The series is definitely starting to show its age, with not having many improvements for over a decade, but I think it's still good as long as there aren't any other games of this type. I do think it's a bit of a niche game, and it's hard to guess if you'd like it because it's so unique, but I know I like it, and if your interests generally align with mine, then perhaps you will too.

Fae Tactics

Another turn-based tactics game today, this time with a better concept, but not as good of an execution. It's Fae Tactics.

I was initially very hopeful for this, considering the large amount of mechanics this game had implemented. It had a good introduction to them as well, usually introducing a new mechanic one battle, then giving one to practice it, then introducing the next one.
You control up to 6 units on a small map. Each unit has 10+ stats, and then several passive abilities as well as an element. You have melee units, ranged units, terrain has varying height, and units have stats for how much higher than themselves can they move and attack. There's benefits for attacking from above, from behind, against enemies of an element weak to yours, combo attacks, and more. Every unit also has an assist or wait ability they can use instead of attacking that turn, those usually being an allied buff and a self-buff, respectively. Combined with leveling, equippable items, customizable team compositions, and probably many more things I forgot, Fae Tactics is actually quite a deep game.

However, the problems start to arise as you actually get into the game. I think the overall largest problem is the sub-par AI. For one, the enemies are very passive until you actually get close to them. They clump up into small groups (or alone, if no one is nearby) and start buffing each other forever while you have your fight at the other end of the map. This trivializes many encounters, because as long as you survive the first group of enemies near your spawn, you can take all the time you want to apply all allied and self buffs, wait for your spells to be off-cooldown, and heal all your units to full. This wouldn't even necessarily be a problem, as the game can be difficult despite allowing you these times of respite, but it takes very many turns to reach an optimal state if you only have a single unit handing out good buffs and/or many injured units to heal. I could just forego this tedious phase and rush onwards, but a good developer knows that the optimal way to play must also be the most fun way to play. At the very least, these two things should be strongly correlated.
The AI troubles don't end here, because the developers have failed at yet another common design aspect - they gave you allied units that aren't under your control, must not die, but are also bad at keeping themselves alive. They do often force you to adapt a more aggressive playstyle to keep up with them, but that still feels bad because of the reasons mentioned above.
Other minor complaints include character level-ups feeling unsatisfying, as they are just stat bonuses, the effects of multiple stats being unexplained, as well as the game lacking a manual to look up mechanics after they were first introduced. Sometimes the party composition decision feels kind of fake, as you just pick the same team, or as many units as you can that are effective against the element the enemy has the most of. Finally, I would also like to mention that while the pixel art looked good, the entire game had a terribly low resolution, making most areas of the screen very blurry and somewhat unpleasant to look at. The entire UI looked more like it was designed for a mobile game, which this game might actually have been good as.

Overall, Fae Tactics has interesting ideas, many systems, and potential to be a good high-depth game. This potential, however, does not translate into reality mainly due to a poorly implemented AI, but also other, less serious problems. I wouldn't go as far as to say Fae Tactics is a bad game, and it could definitely be fun if you're specifically looking for another turn-based tactics game to play. If you're not a huge fan of most games of this specific genre though, and only somewhat like strategy games, then there are probably many better picks out there than this. So, personally, I can't recommend it.

Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX

Only after starting to play this, did I realize that Luminous Avenger iX belongs to a pretty sizable series of Gunvolt games, which I assume play at least somewhat similarly. Perhaps the existance of this series is also part of the reason for its rather positive review score. At least, I did notice a lot of people referencing the other games in the reviews section. Not me though, as I haven't played any other Gunvolt games, and after this one, I probably don't want to either.

Luminous Avenger iX is an action platformer where you clear a bunch of levels, beating up small enemies on your way to the bossfight at the end of each level. Your character has the usual jump and ranged attack, but also a long dash and one of a variety of special attacks. Dashing into an enemy locks onto them, enhanching your attacks and forcing them to target that enemy. Aside from manually dodging the enemy, the game also has a rather unique system where you automatically evade an enemy's attack as long as you have a special resource, which can be reloaded basically at any point, rendering you near-invulnerable.
The game isn't very lengthy, nor is it difficult if you play it safe. It is a score attack game, meaning you're rewarded for disposing of enemies quickly, and swiftly maneuvering through the level. You're probably expected to play through each stage multiple times, gunning for a high score.

As usual, my first and biggest problem was that this game was clearly made for consoles, not PC. The default keybindings were terrible, and even after rebinding them, the character felt awkward and imprecise to control on a keyboard. I think mouse support could have made a massive difference. This is a pretty big problem in a fast-paced action game that rewards precision.
The other problem was that the game just felt kind of bland. There was some level up system, but it didn't have much of an impact. The enemies weren't anything special, mostly just fodder, and the few unique mechanics the game had didn't really set apart the gameplay, at least not in a positive direction.

Overall, I don't see anything noteworthy in Luminous Avenger iX. It played like an average, perhaps even sub-par action platformer without much polish. I can't speak for how it compares to other titles in the series, but even without considering my dislike for score attack games, I can't find any reason to recommend it, especially not on PC.

Wargroove

Let's just jump right into this Wargroove review.
Wargroove is a turn-based strategy, or more precisely, a turn-based tactics game. You play on relatively small maps, conquering buildings to either produce income, or produce units using your previously produced income. While there exist over a dozen playable commanders with different abilities, all players (AI included) otherwise play by the same rules and have the same units. Instead of playing to your race / faction's strengths, more emphasis is put on outplaying your opponent by careful positioning, and choosing the right units for the right battles. See, each unit has units they're strong against, and units they're weak against, as well as a specific circumstance which lets them deal a critical hit. Additionally, while enemies attack back, all damage is multiplied by the attacking unit's health, so being the first to strike is a huge advantage. The first person to defeat the other team's commander (or a stationary building deep on their side of the map) wins.

Sounds simple enough, and it is. Wargroove initially gave me a very positive impression, because it's quite polished, the art looks very nice, and there's even partial voice acting. But the more I played, the more I realized the problem that lies in that relative simplicity. Wargroove is too simple to be a full-fledged 4X game - the maps are too small, the mechanics are too simple, the games are too quick. However it also feels quite heavy and slow for a turn-based tactics game, while lacking a fine tactical element.
My experience is mostly limited to the campaign and co-op campaign, though I do know it also has arcade mode and PvP. For the campaigns, it is quite easy to beat the levels in a slow, methodical, 4X fashion. However, this is kind of boring due to being slow and monotone, and the game itself incentivizes to play more aggressively by giving a suggested turn count for beating the level. Trying to achieve that, however, falls on the other half of being boring. It requires you to really consider the enemy unit composition, think turns in advance, plan stuff out. This makes you spend too much time thinking, not playing, especially considering both armies easily go into double digits of units, unlike most other tactics games, which just have you controlling a smaller, more powerful squad.

There's also other issues like your commander being the most powerful unit that also automatically regenerates, so you want to keep them on the front line to hit those turn goals. However, with how fragile units are in general, it is far from impossible for your commander to get killed in a single turn, instantly ending the level. Loading a save you've played past also incurs a score penalty, which forces you to start over for a good score. On multiple occasions, I got very close to quitting after an accidental commander death on the last few turns. In the end, I stopped playing for the other reasons listed above.

So, in conclusion, Wargroove is a well-produced turn-based tactics game that is a bit too close to a 4X game. Most battles play out in a similar fashion, and there is a tradeoff between the game being too easy or you thinking for too long. It's most definitely not a bad game, but I would guess most players would rather play something with a deeper combat and management system, or something with fewer units to consider. If you really want a tactics game like what I described, then sure, try Wargroove. Otherwise I wouldn't recommend it, as there are almost certainly many better games of this genre.

Minoria

Today's game is Minoria. I was quite excited to play this, as it was from the developers of what could qualify as my favorite Metroidvania, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight. For some reason, Minoria was significantly less popular, and also rated lower, but not so much that I'd consider the review scores to be bad.

Minoria is similarly a Metroidvania, with a similar story of some religion-related females going to rid a place of evil. It has a similar length of about 6 hours, and features combat consisting of running, jumping, dodge rolling, melee attacking, and then using various consumables that refresh at save points. The consumables can heal, serve as ranged attacks, melee charged attacks, and more. While most of the game is spent running through the interconnected rooms and beating up little enemies, there are also quite a few boss fights.
What's interesting is that Minoria has very "high-stakes" gameplay. Many enemies will kill you in 2-3 hits, but you're similarly granted very strong basic attacks, and since your dodge roll has no cooldown, you're almost invulnerable while using it. I feel this was not such a good idea, because it would cause the game to either be trivial if you knew how to avoid an enemy's attacks, or lethal, losing you a reasonable amount of progress, if you did not. I rarely found a moment where I felt appropriately challenged.

Maybe I'm comparing Minoria to Momodora too much in my head, but they are by the same developer and have very many similarities. However, I can't help but notice that Minoria seems worse in pretty much every way. Momodora has a gorgeous 2D pixel art art style, whereas Minoria uses 3D with flat shading. This type of shading is very difficult to pull off well, and Minoria certainly doesn't accomplish that. Regardless of that, the 3D, the animations, the feel of combat and platforming - it just ain't that good. The music and sound effects also feel like they're down a notch.
There are also some really questionable design decisions, like limiting the amount of charged attacks you can do per save point, when they already have the limitation of taking longer to execute. Or the map design, which felt really poor. Backtracking is understandable, but there were around 20 locked doors before I had found even a single key. At least put some areas behind other areas, or diversify the methods of progression, rather than having me try my newlyfound key across the entire map.

Overall, Minoria's not entirely terrible, but I'd still have a really hard time classifying it as a "good" Metroidvania. Especially if you've come from playing Momodora, and expect an experience on a similar level of quality, you are going to be sorely disappointed. Minoria is a downgrade in every aspect from a minor difference in music, to a large difference in how enjoyable the combat and level traversal is, to a massive difference in the art and animations. In general, I wouldn't recommend it, but if you're really itching for another Metroidvania to play, then there are a lot of worse options out there.

Open World Game: the Open World Game

Open World Game: the Open World Game is one of the open world games of all time. It has elements that the best open world games have, like skill trees, skins, encounters, a minimap, a fishing minigame, exp, levels, a seamless world, achievements, hidden areas, a story, and more. You will have an experience playing this game, and it is completely free.

Now, while none of the previous points are false, it might be important to highlight that this game is satirical, and pokes fun of open world games. Completing everything takes about an hour, and the production value is the literal minimum that wouldn't be physically painful to experience. I think the screenshots on the store page explain it well.
There is of course no "real" game here, you just run through the entire map, and input a short sequence of the same movement keys to complete each "encounter". Each encounter also has a corresponding short text entry, and those contain many references, if you care to read them.

Funnily enough, this game is about as enjoyable as some AAA open world games, because it has the same level of difficulty, and the same tedious grind. Except this one is over before the grind can really wear you down. I think that says more about AAA games, or at least my opinion of them, than it does about this game. Of course, I couldn't really recommend you play this, but maybe if you want to feel an internal conflict of whether you actually enjoy these kinds of video games, or if you're just pre-programmed to complete to-do lists and make progress bars go up. At least this takes up only an hour of your life, unlike some games I've been playing for over a thousand hours by now.

Touhou Kikamu ~ Elegant Impermanence of Sakura

In an actual coincidence, I played another Touhou fangame - Touhou Kikamu. This one is a traditional bullet hell, and very much like the mainline Touhou games. In fact, it's so much like the mainline Touhou games, that I could mostly copy-paste my review from there. But fine, I'll repeat myself.

Touhou Kikamu is a bog standard bullet hell game, without even the one unique mechanic regular Touhou games have, to my knowledge. You shoot bullets, you avoid getting hit by bullets, but if you do get hit, you can use a bomb to save your life and clear the screen. Shoot basic enemies for a little while, then complete a boss fight, then do it again in the next stage. There was actually some unique system dubbed "dyeing", which I'm glad they spelled correctly considering the rest of the translation was bad enough that I could not figure out how this system worked. Genuinely, I can't explain it to you because I never found out.

But yeah, everything else was just really standard, and I have the same issues of auto-fire not being on, even though there's no downside to firing. No correct color-coding of your bullets vs enemy bullets or pickups. No mouse control. No enemy indicators at the bottom of the screen. The entire game was very short too, but of course you're expected to play it over and over again, chasing a higher score and completing on higher difficulties.

In conclusion, I can't recommend it. It did nothing well, and it did many things below my expectations. I don't really see much reason to play this over many other bullet hell games, and perhaps this has been my wake-up call to judge Touhou games harsher, despite their positive reviews.

Tempest of the Heavens and Earth

Played another Touhou fangame today. A sidescrolling action one this time. Rather unpopular, but reasonably highly rated, it's Tempest of the Heavens and Earth. I initially thought this was a 2018 game, as the Steam store would suggest, which would already make it somewhat old, but no, it actually came out in 2013. That fact is a bit more apparent when you realize upon launching the game that the resolution is upscaled from 480p or something like that and looks blurry as all hell.

Let's be a bit more specific about what kind of game this is. The gameplay is divided into stages, which themselves are divided into areas with a bunch of weaker enemies and some platforming, and end in a grandiose bossfight. You control a character with a double jump, an invulnerability dash, a melee attack, and a couple of meters to fuel your other attacks. There is an automatically refilling meter that fuels your sword attacks and dashes, and then a meter that fills as you hit any attacks which don't use that meter. The latter meter can be used to either fire ranged attacks, or perform ultra-powerful special attacks. You also have 3 different attack sets which swap out your ranged and special attacks. You can choose those attacks from a selection of over a dozen of both, and there are also combo attacks which can be done using certain combinations of movement and attack keys. Overall, the game puts a lot of emphasis on combat expression and incentivizes to actually switch your playstyle every so often.
Also, apparently important is a technique where if you sword attack an enemy whose attack you dodged through, you change the weather and thus gain extra powers. I specifically mention this, because if you think you want to go play it after reading this, know that the game explains itself really, really badly, and you may not ever figure this out yourself, but you do need to know this to progress.

On that note, the game is rather obtuse in general. I find the controls to be awkward, and I often fumbled my actions, pressing the wrong buttons. This is especially annoying if it causes you to fall off the map, instantly killing you. There is no indication which attacks are in your currently selected attack set - you just have to memorize what attacks you put under "woe", "ire", and whatever the third set's name was. Also, you have health, but no health bar. I think it automatically regenerates, but I have no way to confirm this.
This is all a shame, because I find the combat of the game to be excellent in theory. I absolutely love how expressive you can be with your attacks, and how you can totally play in different styles. The combat's fast, responsive, flashy, and when I wasn't messing up my buttons, it felt exhilarating. It's also a more score-oriented game, incentivizing replaying it while not being a particularly long game, but I can't say it has much replayability, unless you yourself decide to switch up your playstyle.

Overall, considering the many shortcomings I listed, I couldn't bring myself to complete it. I think I got a bit less than halfway through, but the little frustrations piled up and overpowered my enjoyment of the combat. If you think can overlook the issues I listed and would like a high-action score attack game, then Tempest of the Heavens and Earth might suit you. Personally though, I can't recommend it. Maybe it was better 10 years ago when it first came out.

Manifold Garden

I had higher hopes for Manifold Garden. The trailer video for it was beautiful, and even playing it, the surreal geometry stretching to infinity was stunning. Still, I value games for their gameplay. Perhaps their story, to some extent, but the visuals are not all that important in the end. Manifold Garden is a puzzle game first and foremost, and I think it isn't quite that great at it.

The main themes of the game are gravity shifting (choosing which of the 6 sides is "down"), and circular dimensions (if you go far enough in a direction, you are back where you started, generally achieved by falling and landing on the roof or crossing a small gap), with a pinch of other non-Euclidean geometry. Using this gravity manipulation, you must cleverly place cubes, which retain their gravity direction in spite of you, and solve various puzzles with them. There's also some other elements, moreso towards the later half of the game, but the essence remains the same.

While not trivial, I didn't feel the puzzles were all that difficult, nor were they particularly exciting. After experiencing each mechanic once, and saying "cool" out loud, that was kind of it. I feel like I generally spent more time solving the puzzles than thinking about their solutions, which isn't a good outlook for a puzzle game. The infinite spaces were cool to look at, but then a lot of the game was also set indoors. I'd say that defeated the point, but there wasn't much point to the infinity anyways aside from visuals, and occasionally acting like a portal from the floor to the ceiling / wall.

Overall, a fancy looking puzzle game, which is only a few hours long, and even at that short length feels a bit padded out. I could maybe recommend it as a polished introductory puzzle game, but it just didn't feel fun, interesting, or challenging to play. So I can't recommend it on a personal level.

Immortal Planet

Another one of the oldest games I still have on my list. Added back in 2017, it's Immortal Planet.
I'm surprised by its relatively positive reception, because I couldn't stick with it for long.

Immortal Planet advertises itself as a Souls-like, and I can believe that. You run, you dash (dodge roll), attack, block (or parry), and a lot of focus in combat is on stamina, which every action takes. I don't think this combat style is bad or overdone, but Immortal Planet just implements it really badly. Perhaps part of it is that it suggests I play with a gamepad, which I didn't, but some basic movement is just plain out broken, like dash following your cursor unless you're sprinting without changing direction? It's a very core part of the game, so it being broken might just be a case of a low quality standard. Another example of this is that despite it being an action game with tight dodging and blocking mechanics, the animations just... don't exist. Enemy goes from "standby" frame to "readied attack" frame, to "you're already hit" frame. It's not possible to dodge or block by reaction, not because the attacks are too fast, but because there's no indication when they're coming. (The "readied attack" frame is too long to go off of that alone.) Not only does this make the gameplay unnecessarily difficult, but it also looks really bad. On that note, it also sounds bad, mostly in terms of the music.

A short review for a game I only played for a short while, but I hope you can understand why. Right from the beginning of the game, I found bugs relating to the core combat, which, even if it was functioning properly, felt really bad. I just found no joy in playing, and there's plenty of Souls-like games out there, so I didn't feel like sticking around to give it a longer chance, and I couldn't recommend it to you either.

Stationflow

Not a very popular game this time around, but something from a genre I thought I might personally enjoy. Stationflow has you building a metro station network, with many entrances, many train lines, a whole bunch of people, and a whole bunch of needs that those people want satisfied, which aren't limited to getting to their station or exit.

After doing the brief tutorial, I thought the game looked rather simple, so I set the difficulty settings to "very hard". Despite that, it never really got difficult. While there is some thinking involved in terms of efficient planning, it is mostly just a simple case of building paths that connect all points of interest and then adding items and rooms at various intervals to satisfy the miscellanious needs your passangers may have. Most of the difficulty comes from people not just needing these items to exist, but needing to find them. For that, you have to manually put up signs literally everywhere that point to every possible thing a passanger could desire. I do not exaggarate when I say this game is more settings up signs than everything else combined. And honestly, while not completely braindead and predetermined, there isn't a lot of thought to put into how you should label these signs. 95% of the time, just make sure every sign lists everything in that direction if it's closer than the same thing in some other direction that is visible from that point.

I think that mostly explains why I didn't find the game very fun. While it's cool to see the station expand and all the people mill about in an efficient manner, I rarely feel like I designed (or could design) the station particularly well. Just have to make sure I didn't forget anything from a sign, and that I have enough of everything that the passangers want. Not enough of something? Add another. Someone got lost? Must have forgot something from a sign. It's a simple back-and-forth where if a passanger is angry at something, you don't have to think, but just satisfy what they were angry about.
Another thing is that, the game quickly got to hundreds of passangers being in the station at once. That was nice to look at but I wondered, "Huh, how have they handled large crowds?" It's usually in the early thousands that games start to have trouble without advanced programming techniques. Well, turns out they haven't. As you reach 1000-2000 people, you'll "lose", not because you played badly, but because the game stops running at a reasonable speed.

So, in addition to not being a difficult or complicated game, you can't even enjoy Stationflow if you just want to look at crowds going through the station you've designed. At least not for long. I wouldn't recommend this game anyways, but anything that breaks down just as it starts to get to the best parts is clearly something I can't advocate for. There's a lot of building and management games out there, so I'm sure you can find something better, even if you want a peaceful game that doesn't have combat.

Melty Blood: Type Lumina

Melty Blood had a free weekend on Steam a while ago, during which I thought I'd give it a try. I'm not generally a fan of traditional fighting games, but it won't hurt to try one every once in a while. Truthfully, I am well aware of the fact that fighting game enthusiasts, like is the case for many PvP games, spend a lot of time perfecting their craft. Unlike for the many games that I play that can be completed, I am quite certain I can not give an adequate overview of the nuances of Melty Blood, how it differs from other fighting games, or how well it's made in comparison. Though I did play it for almost 8 hours straight, which is longer than like 90% of the games I write about, that is not enough. So, this will be more of a brief overview, and my thoughts on fighting games in general, instead of a useful review of Melty Blood.

I can at least mention that Melty Blood: Type Lumina is a newer iteration of the original Melty Blood fighting game, and they feature characters from the Tsukihime visual novel (and some from the Fate series). As far as I can tell, the source material is of no detriment to the quality of the game. The gameplay feels pretty solid, the art is great, and it wasn't too hard to pick up even for a mechanically-challenged player like me.
Being bad at fighting games is the same reason I'm not a fan of them, and it's not technically unique to fighting games. It's not that I can't play action games at all, but I'm slow at anything that's not a binary reaction, and I can not for the life of me input button combinations in the heat of battle. Not for a lack of practice, mind you. I have played probably hundreds of hours of action games total that require these skills to some degree, and it's consistently something I fail at. I've just accepted it at this point. Of course, this is what traditional fighting games are all about. Split-second reactions, instantly choosing the correct counter-move to some action the opponent did, and often inputting a pre-learned sequence of keypresses at very precise timings to perform some move or combo. I can handle something like Brawlhalla, which is a Smash-like, but all of these things I call traditional fighting games, where the characters are 2D sprites that take up most of the screen, have correct body proportions, and can only double jump or do a single air dash, have featured some input system that requires either pressing multiple buttons at a time, or doing a motion with the joystick, which of course corresponds to a tight chain of button presses. Honestly, Melty Blood is actually light on these features, but still features the quarter-circle and whatever a 623 or 421 is called, and I can't do those.
This massive arsenal of moves, and expectance to know frame timings and stay up to date on which combos can be done in which situations is just too much for me, especially given that even if I learn them, I still can't execute them in a real fight. And nothing frustrates me more than knowing what I am supposed to do, but failing to do it. I can execute the keypresses in my head, but not with my hands.

I'm rambling, and there's no good conclusion to this. I can't in good faith blame fighting games for my own incompetence. I had previously held a belief that the button combinations are needlessly complicated, and that may still be the case, especially in other fighting games with half-circles and whatnot that's more than 4 keys. However, I tried playing for a while, having created macro keys for both quarter circles and the other combiation I mentioned, and I still failed to do them in battle. Of course, reducing the input complexity would also reduce the depth of the game, and I can see what that is undesired.
Regardless of all that, I think fighting games should still strive to be more accessible and easier to play, perhaps shifting complexity to other areas of gameplay. Backing this up is that even the most popular fighting games are quite niche in comparison to most other PvP games. Even most of the worst players still playing are significantly good at the game, and so going to a matchmade game will guarantee getting your ass kicked for hours on end until you either improve or quit the game. I'm afraid most people quit, myself included, and can you fault them? Few other game genres test the mental resolve of new players like this.

So, yeah, I don't know. Melty Blood was kind of fun. Wouldn't play it again though. Art is very cool. The girls are cute. Neco-Arc is life. I will instantly quit the next game that asks me to input a quarter circle.

GoNNER

What a throwback. Gonner was one of the first games I wrote about on this blog, back when I was still writing about not just every game I played, but every game I found (that I thought had potential) on Steam. Well, due to Steam's more-than-liberal policy of what to allow on itself, that didn't last long. But at least I have a look-back at what I thought about Gonner all the way back then.

"A procedurally generated platformer. It's got plenty of action, and from the looks of it, it's quite hectic. So, looks interesting, hopefully not too repetitive."
That's all I wrote, and I wasn't wrong. Gonner isn't a particularly complicated game. Run, jump, shoot, maybe get a new gun sometime. Levels are short, and you're rewarded for going through them quickly, racking up a kill combo. But, damn, it's kind of unfun to play, even if I liked speedrun-like action games.

Despite different guns, what's the deal with only being able to shoot forwards. Most enemies fly or scale walls, so combining waiting for them to get down, so they don't hit you on the head and make you lose (hitting them on the head damages them, not you, at least), with the fast pace of the game kind of isn't fun. Also you have multiple lives, but you lose "pieces" of yourself if you get hit once, not just a life, and have to pick them back up to continue shooting. Finally, everything else aside, it is quite repetitive. You're just chasing higher-and-higher scores and some arbitrary end level, but the road there is mostly the same.
Oh, and the artstyle is a bit too wobbly for something that should be a high-speed precision-based game. It really doesn't define the hitboxes very well.

Overall, old game, some people said it was better before some large update they made, but I doubt I would have enjoyed it either way. The levels are too short, your actions are too limited (please let me aim if you're giving me a ranged weapon), and it's kind of just the same thing over and over again. Wouldn't recommend.

Subnautica

I initially passed over Subnautica, ignoring it, as I had never been a fan on the "open world survival craft" genre. Some of my friends commented on how this was one of their favorite games ever, so considering that, and its ever increasing popularity, as well as it being regarded as possibly the best game in the genre, I finally caved and gave it a try.

Subnautica is a game where you survive a spaceship crashing into a large, watery world. Having only your escape pod with its built-in item fabricator, you must scavenge the ocean for resources and craft ever better equipment, tools, and eventually even build new bases and submarines. There is a lot of very hostile stuff in the ocean though, especially the further you go. Add to that hunger, thirst, and most importantly, limited oxygen reserves, and there's plenty to impede your progress.

While I haven't played a whole lot of survival games, Subnautica didn't strike me as something particularly unique. It's quite well made, seems to have a sizable amount of content, and does take place underwater, which is at least scenically unique. I don't have anything objectively bad to say about it, but I think it just further cemented that I don't like the genre.
Most all the game is not exploration, but mindless busywork. Grab more resources, craft new things, don't forget to forage for food and drink, evade wildlife. It's not challenging, but it takes time, annoyingly much so when you can't find a resource you're looking for. The limited inventory space, while realistic, forces you to throw away resources you would need in the future. I don't consider myself a hoarder, but the inventory management was so annoying. And even when I did get to explore, it wasn't very exciting. Finding a new resource or species didn't feel satisfying or an accomplishment. It just kind of happened. It was maybe fun for the first hour, but for the next few that I managed to bear, it was just a boring grind.

I'll readily admit that I'm not the best person to review a survival game, and that Subnautica probably is good if you're already a fan of the genre. But if you are, then you've probably already played it. If you're not, then I really don't see anything special here that might tide you over. So, on a personal level, I can't recommend this.

Overdungeon

Oh man, what a game Overdungeon was. Apparently abandoned in development for about three years, and only just recently picked back up. I am not sure if it's actually a mobile game, but it feels like one, and has an auto-play button, so it might as well be. And I could've sworn the character I happened to play had the same character model as those dozens of hentai shooter clones on Steam. At the same time, for about 10 minutes, I was having so much fun, I was laughing like a maniac. Then the game ended.

Despite being out of Early Access, Overdungeon feels very much unfinished. There are 4 characters, basically no unlockable content, only 3 floors, each having less than ten encounters (battles / rest points / stores / etc.) It is also unbalanced, as I beat the game easily on my first try on the hardest difficulty. But, I have yet to mention what it actually is.
So, Overdungeon is off the heels of the Roguelike Deckbuilder craze, which I still haven't explored much. You choose a character, get some starter cards, get to upgrade those cards, get some passives, get rid of some cards, and try to build the strongest synergy in your deck possible. Standard stuff. Where Overdungeon differs, is that you're on a sharp time limit of a few seconds per card, and there is always a battle happening between your summons and the enemy's on the battlefield located between you two. A lot of cards can place buildings on the field or summon units, which will autonomously do their thing.

While there isn't much content to the game, there do seem to be a lot of synergies. Animals created on the field can trigger traps, which can summon more animals. Cards that gain power every time they're played. And what won my game, was a passive item that removed the effect from cards that made them not be shuffled back into the deck, allowing me to play a card that played all the cards from my hand, and then clone that card's upgraded version that played all the cards from my hand twice. Add in some card draw cards, and I ended up playing more than 20 cards on some turns, instead of the default 2. Fun, but just briefly, as it was far too strong.

Honestly, the production quality, and, well, almost everything, about Overdungeon isn't great. I love the absolute mayhem that was happening on screen in the later stages, and I caught a glimpse of some bosses actually being fairly strong, so I think there's potential in balancing the late game by just making both parties ridiculously overpowered. Sadly, I don't have faith after all this time (and because it's a mobile game), that they will fix all the problems with the game and also add a good chunk of content. It was fun for the hour or so that I played it, but I have no desire to replay it, and I couldn't give it a serious recommendation.

Disc Room

Another game from Devolver Digital, who's known for publishing at least okay quality indie games. The review scores for this are pretty good, but it's not a well-known game. It's Disc Room.

Disc Room is an interesting take on the bullet hell genre. Instead of enemies that fire bullets who you have to kill, the enemies essentially are the bullets, and you can't kill them, but have to survive for as long as possible. Most rooms have a goal of surviving for some 10 or 20 seconds, but they may also have a variation on that, such as the timer only going up while in a zone. There are also other goals, like dying to different discs, which there are almost as many of as there are different rooms. Completing goals unlocks new rooms, progressing the game. You will also unlock new skills (invulnerability frames, bullet time, etc.) as the game progresses, only one of which can be used at a time.
The rooms are quite short, depending of course on how well you can play, but the overall game time should be around 3-4 hours. After that, you can go for completing all goals, dying to all discs, or just going for a high score in each room. The difficulty also ramps up quite fast, so maybe you'll complete the first half of the rooms in an hour, and then spend three in the other half.

I like this bullet hell variation, and I think Disc Room was well executed in terms of the vision it had. I didn't notice any instances of the game being broken, or missing the mark on some of its mechanics or anything. However, I do think the vision wasn't quite as good as it could have been. While reasonably difficult, simply running around and dodging isn't the most fun gameplay. It's kind of repetitive, despite the large number of different discs, but at the end of the day it just boils down to not overlapping your player box with the enemy boxes. It's also kind of short, even if you did want to enjoy it for more than a couple of hours. And finally, many rooms have a greater or lesser degree of randomness in them, which can get really annoying in an otherwise heavily skill-based game.

So, overall, good execution, subpar idea, and too short. I wouldn't recommend it to most people, but if you're big on bullet hell games and/or chasing high scores in short bursts of gameplay, then maybe you'll find it fun while it lasts. Although to my knowledge, the randomness in this game may very heavily clash with the usual strategy of learning attack patterns in bullet hell games, so consider that.

Void Bastards

My initial impressions of Void Bastards were pretty positive. The graphics were stylized, some of the story was told through animated comic panels, the narrator was slightly humorous, and exploring unknown spaceships was somewhat exciting, as I didn't really know what I was going to find.
To elaborate, Void Bastards is an FPS roguelike about exploring and looting randomly generated spaceships. It reminded me a bit of Heat Signature if it was first person, didn't have time stop, and just had fewer features overall. See, I'm already getting into some pain points here, as Void Bastards very quickly fell off. Around the second or third spaceship, I kind of developed a general route I would take through the ship. Helm first, as that highlights the loot, and then just loot all the stuff that wasn't near enemies and kill a minimal amount as that only wastes weapons and health.
There are also some decisions on which ship to board next, based on what kind of items you're looking for, but at least as far as I got, that boiled down to just going for ships which unlock a new item, and don't lock me out of my overall goal. I'd say the worst was that there weren't any interesting decisions to make. Each weapon was mostly suitable for each level, so you'd just go with whatever you had ammo for. There were no major differences in strategy between ships, and rather obvious best picks for which ships to explore next. To top it all off, death was very inconsequential, as you kept all the items and upgrades you had, and only got new character traits and a fresh batch of ammo, food, fuel, and other consumables.

Despite the criticism, I wouldn't actually say Void Bastards is a bad game. It's well made, it's witty, and the gameplay is okay, but it's not good enough to carry the nonexistent meta progression. There's just far too little strategy, decision making, and personal improvement throughout the game. If you think you'll really like the core gameplay loop of looting randomly generated ships, evading some enemies, killing others, and you don't care about the lack of variety, then maybe you can enjoy it. Otherwise, I just can't recommend it.

Amid Evil

I really gotta stop even trying these retro FPS games. I don't like them, and I won't play long enough nor know enough about them to give a good review on them. But rules are rules - I played Amid Evil, now I gotta talk about it.

As I said, it's a retro FPS, even though it starts you off with a big melee axe. The graphics are low-poly, the textures are pixelated, and in my honest opinion, it not only looks like shit, it's very unapproachable, because it's difficult to make out the important parts of the game like where the enemies are. But hey, that's just the aesthetic they were going for. Can you blame them? I sure can.
The movement's the same, floaty jumping, running backwards as fast as forwards, and just generally hopping backwards to fight many enemies, just like Devil Dagger or what other popular retro FPS games there are. As I said, I'm not really knoweldgeable, sorry.
You have pickups for health and mana, which serves as your ranged ammunition, and then soul points which can make you hit really really hard for a while once you cap them.
There's different levels, different difficulty settings, and you're being timed, because as usual with these types of games, time matters. I've never been big on neither speedrunning nor timed challenges, so that's another pain point for me, personally.

Well, that's my really brief review of Amid Evil. It doesn't really say much about the game, now that I look back at it. To tell you of things that are not my personal experiences, but that may be more useful: The whole game takes about 10 hours to complete. It's one of the higher rated retro FPS games out there, and is by the same publisher that made Ultrakill and Dusk, which are supposedly a lot better. (I don't know why I didn't try those instead, but I won't anymore.) It's clear I didn't like it, but don't let that stop you. If you enjoyed the two previously mentioned games, Amid Evil's probably more of the same.

The Beginner's Guide

Well, that was a philosophical journey and a half. And a damn old one too, from late 2015. The Beginner's Guide was a far shorter experience than I had anticipated, at only 1.5 hours. To make matters worse for reviewing it, it almost entirely consists of spoilers. But I will do my best to skirt around the spoilers, and give an idea of what the game is about anyways.

The Beginner's Guide is a walking simulator, narrated by its creator. It features a bit over a dozen chapters, each of which is a tiny video game made in the Source Engine, and not particularly polished. You slowly go through them, listen to narrator, and maybe form some thoughts about it all at the end.
That's about as much as I can tell you, because really, there isn't much substance to these little games. I can tell you that despite the eerie atmosphere, there will not be any jumpscares - this is not a horror game. I can also say that I felt I saw through the game rather early, but then again, maybe the game wasn't expecting to fool anyone or everyone, and either way, it probably didn't matter.
Despite the little games being very non-stimulating, I felt the narrator kept me going through it, and it never lingered too long on any bit. Unlike other small, I dare say, experimental, games I've played - I think that while the content of the mini-games was significant, it wasn't important that it was what it was. It was more of a chosen example, to illustrate the ideas The Beginner's Guide was trying to convey.

This is already going in the direction of a philosophical dissection, which I really don't care to do, nor do I think I should do. While the narrative is about video game development, it can easily be interpreted to be about any kind of art. It is most certainly not a game for everyone, and I think that if you have pursued or wish to pursue any artistic field, you will understand the story a bit better. Whether you'll like it or not, regardless of the previous condition, I can not say. I can only say that it failed to really reach me. As much as I found open questions in this game, I felt I had answers for all of them, for myself. So, because I didn't personally enjoy it, and because I think the target audience is a bit niche in any case, I wouldn't recommend it.

Vaporum

One of the older games still left on my list - from late 2017 - it's Vaporum.

I'm going to be upfront - I did not give this game a fair try. It's basically Legend of Grimrock, which came out 5 years earlier, but worse. And Legend of Grimrock itself is a throwback to old RPGs, which I haven't played, but can only assume couldn't afford proper collision detection or such due to the technology of the time, and thus defaulted to having all combat and movement be on a grid. The entire game is exploring this pre-built dungeon (meaning little-to-no replayability). There's traps, there's small puzzles, and there'a a bunch of enemies. The enemies, once close enough, take an action every some unit of time, either moving closer to you, or attacking you. Mind you, despite the game being set on a grid, and enemies acting almost as on fixed ticks, the game is actually action-based. You (or your party, if we're talking about Grimrock) are generally faster than everything else, allowing you to abuse the tick rate and outmanoeuver the enemies, dodging their attacks by timing, while getting your own in.
There are of course also the usual RPG elements, such as collecting consumables, new items and weapons, levelling up, different skills, etc.

Now, while I only played Vaporum for about an hour, I have closer to a dozen hours in Grimrock, which is why I felt confident in abandoning the game so soon. I just dislike almost everything unique about it. The combat and movement systems of times past, used again here, weren't like that by design, but by necessity, I'm quite sure. It feels terrible, and that's not only because I think combining turn-based and action gameplay is a bad idea. I would much rather go on a one-on-one whacking contest with each enemy than do the tedious dance of maybe having to do three movements in quick succession, not fucking any up, before I could land a hit on an enemy without retaliation. It makes the combat drag on so, but is necessary to not run out of health and resources.
Also the puzzles are kind of lame, and finding little hidden buttons on walls isn't enjoyable in my experience. Vaporum especially didn't give me the impression that the dungeon was designed very well, and the production quality of everything from graphics to voice acting was a bit below the bar I'd like.

All-in-all, definitely not a game for me. For the most part, gameplay of the past should be kept in the past, and mixing genres doesn't end well, and I don't think Vaproum is an exception. Combine that with the not-great overall quality, and I have no reason to recommend it. Perhaps if you really liked Grimrock and are looking for more games exactly like that, because I don't think there's many of them around.

Unreal Life

You never really know what something's going to be like until you actually experience it. Unreal Life didn't seem like anything particularly special from its store page, but managed to strangely hook me in the first hour of playing it. It hooked me for the wrong reasons, but as I kept playing, I discovered other reasons to keep playing further, and despite a somewhat rough journey, I saw it through to the end.

Unreal Life is a story adventure game, which is to say it has no real gameplay to speak of. It's kind of like a point-and-click game. You pick up items and interact with the environment and the characters in it, but it doesn't really place much emphasis on making the puzzles actually difficult to solve or the way forward difficult to guess. I can't say I'm a big fan of busywork in the middle of my stories, but perhaps this quiet time helps some people process events that have already transpired, or helps grow closer to the characters, by spending more time with them. Of course, if this was written as a visual novel instead, I wouldn't be writing about it here, so my complaint is a bit paradoxical, but I do think some puzzle segments involved a bit more walking back-and-forth than most would be comfortable with.
Of note is a somewhat unique mechanic of being able to see the last prominent memory of inanimate objects. This was the mentioned initial hook for me, but I soon discovered that it's not really utilized much from the puzzle perspective.

It's not really important, but while I think the art and music were good, they had much more spirit than actual quality. Especially the art - some of the sprites were or had pieces that were nigh unrecognizable. Still, the overall composition and feel of all the visuals were fantastic and made up for the lack of quality.

Enough about the gameplay. You shouldn't come for that. You should come for the story. Unreal Life is a mystery about a girl waking up with memory loss in a strange world. There's a sentient traffic light, and animals can talk. Inanimate objects have memories, and doors can teleport. You know only you need to find a woman by the name of Sakura. Things don't make a lot of sense, and you're troubled by headaches as your memories slowly return, revealing bits and pieces of the mystery. Still, the inhabitants of this mostly empty world alleviate and help to come to terms with the traumatic things you remember and do their best to make you feel cozy despite the looming unease and dread.
I remember hearing from someone, many years back, that only young children and fully-grown adults can appreciate fairytales. Being in neither age group at the time, I couldn't ever see myself enjoying a fairytale again in the future. I still wouldn't say the statement is entirely true, but I think Unreal Life is something that a child could enjoy, while also being something that I enjoyed. Sometimes the story was just so simple and childish, yet I couldn't help but smile. I wish I could tell you more details about the story, instead of my emotions, but as with all stories, especially mysteries, that would spoil it.
I will say that the ending was a bit dissatisfactory, with a slightly forced conclusion, but I decided that it wasn't important. Much like the story tells you - it's not about the destination, it's about the journey. I felt a lot of happiness through it all, and a less than perfect ending wasn't going to take that away from me. But... perhaps you notice the few missing achievements after you complete the game, even after really going through every interaction. I would have no idea how to unlock them, but luckily, watching a 30 minute walkthrough showed me something very interesting... For better or worse, this game has a very hidden supposedly "true" ending. It's brief, but if you choose to acknowledge it, it changes everything. My feelings on the "truth" are conflicted, because on one hand, accepting it resolves my grievances with the regular ending, but at the same time throws away so much else I loved about the story. I know I'm being cryptic, but that's all I can say without spoiling anything. In any case, it's a very unique detail to add to a story.

To sum up the long ramble, Unreal Life is a wonderful story. It has its shortcoming in its execution, but I loved that it could make me appreciate some moments of childlike wonder, while telling a touching and serious story in the background. I would absolutely recommend it to fans of story-only games. I would also like to see these developers make more stories, hopefully smoothing out some of the rough edges next time.

UnderMine

UnderMine is an action roguelike where you dungeon crawl through a bunch of floors, each of which has a bunch of rooms. Most rooms have you defeating a bunch of enemies before you may leave, but some other rooms have a store, or a passive powerup (artifact), or some other event. You also get one slot for a potion, which is your one-time consumable, and some of the gold gathered during a run carries over to buy upgrades between runs. You have a melee and a ranged attack (but can't melee attack until your ranged attack has returned to you like a boomerang), and can dodge in the form of a jump which can also cross gaps.
There's also some other stuff, but that's most of it. If you've played anything like Binding of Isaac, UnderMine will feel very familiar.

Now, my problem is that UnderMine is a bit too familiar for how unimpressive it is. It's not a bad game. There's a good amount of content and upgrades and replayability, but it's pretty bland and not executed well enough to stand out. I've said it time and again, but if your game doesn't innovate, then it needs to be really, really good.
To just list some grievances: The jump feels very floaty, and it can be difficult to see where you're going to land. It doesn't let you reposition well, but gives you a very lengthy invulnerability period. The ranged attack feels a bit too strong compared to how small and risky a melee attack is. Potions, which are kind of underwhelming in terms of combat strength anyways, have you stand still for multiple seconds to activate them - often not feasible in combat. Every time anything drops gold, you have to play some dumb minigame where a bunch of slimes appear out of the walls to steal it and you have to get to it first or beat them off.

Overall, I don't have anything interesting to say about UnderMine. If you're a fan of action roguelikes in the vein of Binding of Isaac, and you just want a new one to play, UnderMine might well be worth your time. It's a solid game, but for me who's only a slight fan of the genre, it is neither unique nor of superb quality, so I don't really have a reason to recommend it over the many other games like it.

Supraland

I do not understand the positive reception of Supraland at all.
It's a game centered around exploration, solving puzzles, and collecting things, with some combat thrown in. I don't really know how to further elaborate on the gameplay, since it's not particularly remarkable. The exploration happens in an open world. Puzzles are largely physics-based, and collectibles are mostly coins, but also some power-ups. The combat is poorly done, with few enemy types, and weapons that are too powerful for the task. For example, the beginner sword just had no attack cooldown, allowing for effectively infinite damage.

It's not just the aesthetic, but I feel the game is designed more for children. The narrative, the world being a literal child's playground, the art style, the really simple and poorly written dialogue. I also found the art assets and visual design of the game to be rather basic. Add to that the fact that I'm not big on games centered around just running around and collecting things, and I just don't have anything positive to say about the game.
I mean, it's not that terrible, but I do feel the review score is too high even if I don't just consider my personal preferences. Regardless, whether this game is actually bad or I'm not just the right person to review it, I can in no way recommend playing Supraland.

stikir

I remember the developer of stikir. They also made Indecision, which was a similarly insane game. And I don't mean insanely good or anything like that, I mean completely absurd.
It's a short game, taking about an hour, and there isn't any amazing gameplay nor a real story, but it's an experience to play. It kind of defies description, being just this surreal and abstract thing, but still very much having elements of games in it.

Yeah, I don't know what to say about it. I think it's worth experiencing. It's short and relays its ideas in a rather rapid fashion so nothing overstays its welcome. If anything, things happen a bit too fast, but that just adds to the intentionally confusing atmosphere. I wouldn't say it's a "good" game, but, yeah, worth experiencing.

The World is Your Weapon

I hope the developers had as much fun making The World is Your Weapon as I had playing it for the first hour.
It's a simple game, but quite unlike anything I've played before. I started out my adventure facing a group of slimes, with no weapon to fight them with. The game instructed me to find a weapon from the surroundings, and there was a shovel conveniently placed 2 tiles away from me. A bit unorthodox, but a solid weapon against a slime. But I had seen the screenshots - I knew. I skipped the shovel and picked up a nearby pot and smacked a slime with it. A powerful weapon! It killed the slime in a single hit, but sadly also broke. I proceeded to uproot the nearby tree and smack with that instead. Then some flowers, blades of grass, and finally a good whack with the shovel.

What I described is the essence of the game, as it's a bit of a collection game. Pick up something, hit an enemy, learn its strength, repeat. Despite the absurdity of picking up a whole tree, it's the least of this game's weirdness. As I arrived at the village, I went into a house, and picked up someones bed, wardrobe, window, floorboards, and finally, for good measure, exited the house and took the whole thing. Without exaggeration, if you can see it, you can almost certainly pick it up. That includes the road, a lake, even a villager after you've "accidentally" hit them with an AoE attack and got them slightly injured.
You can also upgrade any of your weapons (including the "live" ones), or list them for sale in your shop. Don't worry, it's not slavery, probably. The whole game is absurd and beautiful in its absurdity, and plays into it so well with its aesthetics and narrative.

The problem is that there isn't much depth to it. Once you take picking everything up to its logical extreme and experience the pinnacle of absurdity, you can either attempt the garguantuan task of collecting everything, or just stick to a few hard-hitting weapons which can be maintained and upgraded forever. There isn't much of a difficulty curve, and combat isn't any exciting - you whack, they whack, maybe some special effects happen, repeat until one's dead.
It's fun for an hour, but then you're like "cool", and drop it because you've pretty much experienced everything. So, I don't know. I think it's worth experiencing for a little while, but not playing to completion. I wish they had added some ramp-up to what you can pick up, because the high of picking up increasingly ridiculous objects could have lasted for a little while after each next step of ridiculousness. Meanwhile I picked up a house in the first 20 minutes of the game, and that was about the pinnacle of me being surprised.

Spiritfarer

Am I getting jaded? When was the last time I really enjoyed a new game? I don't know anymore. Even when playing yet another game with an "overwhelmingly positive" review score of 95% and over 27 thousand reviews, I just... find it boring. Sure, I'll reason that I got bored of Spiritfarer because it's a casual story-oriented management game full of tedious busywork, but it's just been so long since I've found something new I've truly enjoyed. Oh well, on with the review.

Spiritfarer is a game about caring for spirits as you see them off into the afterlife. There's a lot of management aspects of building various buildings on your boat for the well-being of the spirits you're accomodating, such as lodgings and food. You will spend a lot of time sailing from place to place, harvesting or gathering the resources there, then using those to build, craft, grow, cook, or otherwise make new things, and then giving those things to the spirits to keep them happy. Many activites run on a timer, meaning you have to juggle them, queuing each up, and then collecting or dealing with them once they're ready. There's also some platforming.

I think a lot of praise goes into the not-strictly-gameplay aspect of Spiritfarer. I didn't get too far with the story, so I don't know what to make of it, but I understand it's trying to tell you some sad tales of the spirits you're ferrying, and it's actually not a very large portion of the game in comparison to all the running about you have to do in the management aspect.
I can say that the game looks very nice and is beautifully animated, even if all the characters being anthropomorphized animals isn't really my cup of tea. The music's nice too. I think the game overall puts a lot more focus on things looking appealing rather than being fun. It'll take the extra time to make you look at the animations, even if it's an activity you've done a hundred times before, or in general make things take just a bit longer than I was comfortable with.

While this may be an improper comparison, considering I've never played Stardew Valley, I imagine it to be kind of like what this game is. It's not difficult, you can't really fail. It allows you to sink dozens of hours into it, throwing a lot of busywork at you, and tries to keep things fresh by introducing something new every now and then, even if it's just a new item or location instead of a brand new mechanic. Clearly there is a large audience for this, and I can by no means say that I think Spiritfarer is not well made, but regardless of the length or how much there is to do, I just do not enjoy these kinds of repetitive tasks, running back-and-forth, and waiting on various timers to complete. So, if you know you like these kinds of manual farming / gathering / management games with a tinge of story, I'd have to guess Spiritfarer might suit you, but I can't give it a personal recommendation.

Breakneck

On a roll with old games. Breakneck was the third least recent game I had added to my Wishlist. It was also the 9th worst rated. Went about as well as you'd expect.

Breakneck is a racing game, where you're endlessly driving at high speeds through a world with various obstacles in it. You can turn left, you can turn right, there's some powerups, driving near walls gives you boost energy to accelerate faster, bumping into a wall slows you down, while crashing into a wall ends the run. The run also ends if you've been going too slow for too long.

It's a very basic game, but that's not the problem. The problem is that I've played this before. It was called Race the Sun, and it's almost the exact same, except, despite the simpler graphics, Race the Sun is more visually appealing, and has more content and polish overall. Now, I enjoyed Race the Sun for a while when I played it almost 10 years ago, but it got boring somewhat fast. Sure, there's elgenace in simplicity, and mastering some simple task can feel really rewarding, but I'm no speedrunner - doing the same thing over and over generally exhausts itself for me.

So, I don't really have much to say about Breakneck. If the idea of a kind of endless runner racing game seems appealing to you, and you're not against something slightly older, go try Race the Sun instead. Stay away from Breakneck - it's similar enough to basically be a ripoff, and I don't like that.

Transistor

Oh wow, I didn't even realize I had games this old still to play. I played Bastion less than a year after it came out and kind of enjoyed it, so I've been meaning to play Supergiant's other games since then. Being me, I wanted to play them in order, so I'd been putting off good ones like Hades until I finished the previous ones. Well, 9 years after release, I finally got around to Transistor.

Much like I liked Bastion on release, perhaps I would have also liked Transistor on release, but games have gotten better in the past decade. Transistor's atmosphere is great, much like it's predecessor's. The mostly silent protagonist, a narrator with lots of voice lines for both important events and things as trivial as admiring bits of scenery or kicking a ball around, the slow and beautiful soundtrack, a futuristic city to traverse... It all sets the mood so well, and it's excellently put together. As much as I love the atmosphere, I have to mostly judge Transistor for its gameplay.
As you traverse the city, fights occasionally occur, limiting you to an arena with a variety of enemies, as well as some obstructing terrain. You're given an arsenal of abilities, which can each be slotted either as an active, a modifier to another active, or a passive, allowing for extensive customization to your playstyle. You can use these active abilities either in real-time, each having a cast time, or switch to a planning mode, allowing you to plan out the next several seconds of movement and abilities and then execute them while the enemies are almost frozen in time, at the cost of then being locked out of all abilities for a comparable amount of time. Of course, you will maximize your potential by combining these two - acting in real-time when possible, and freezing time to escape complicated situations.
I believe therein lies the biggest fault of Transistor, as I won't tire of repeating that mixing different types of gameplay rarely works out well. Personally more of a fan of turn-based combat, I found it especially frustrating, having to wait for my abilities to come back online whenever I did plan things out. Switching between the two gameplay modes was also not a smooth experience, as I have trouble rapidly adapting between fast and slow modes of thinking, and maybe that's common. And finally, the planning mode shows a prediction of what will happen when you execute your turn, but it's just... wrong. It fails to properly consider the environment, and fails to understand that things do not stand perfectly still during the time freeze of the execution step, causing many abilities to miss.

Overall, Transistor has a very appealing atmosphere and quite unique gameplay. Sadly, I believe the action and turn-based modes of combat mix together quite poorly, and there are some fundamental flaws in using the planning mode at all. If you're willing to overlook the not-so-great gameplay, it could still be an enjoyable experience, but I only managed to get about 50-75% through the game. I would have to lean towards not recommending it, at least not in the current year.

Parkasaurus

I'd consider myself a fan of building/management/simulation games, but perhaps because of that same reason, I'm rather critical of them. Regardless, I decided to try out a relatively highly rated theme park builder game by the name of Parkasaurus.

Looking at this game, and then looking at some similar games after, I drew the conclusion that perhaps the popularity of these types of games is due to their capability to appeal to many audiences. I'm definitely a challenge-focused person, but I can see how well these games can appeal to the casual player looking for artistic expression. There is not one correct solution, a lot of room to make things look pretty, or do them in some unique way... Of course the more liberty is given to the player (color palette swaps not included), the less the game has to be challenging, lest people be punished for pursuing these liberties.

To word this in a less roundabout manner: Parkasaurus is a casual game and I found it boring as hell. I have no interest in making a pretty park or admiring colorful dinosaurs. It's incredibly easy and features a lot of busywork. As I said, I can see the appeal for people who want to use this as artistic expression, but for anyone looking for any kind of challenge or interesting gameplay - stay away.

Nauticrawl

Nauticrawl is an interesting idea. I was lured in by the promise of having to figure out an alien machine, and navigating a world only visible through some sensors. This emanated the kind of discovery and learning that I hoped would be most enjoyable.

The initial impressions were fairly good as well. Sure, my first run ended with the battery dying before I had managed to start the engine, because I was fiddling with all the buttons and levers, but I had gained some insight from doing so. My second run went better, as I actually got the machine moving, even though I didn't know what everything did. It did end not too long after, as I ran out of fuel looking around my surroundings.
Every run had to be started from the beginning, which had so far not been a big deal, since my newfound knowledge very quickly let me skip the fumbling about I had done the previous runs. But on the third try, I already got reasonably far. Less because of my inexperience piloting the machine, and more due to lack of knowledge of the systems of the world outside, that run, too, ended in failure. That was the first time I felt that I did not really want to replay everything up to this point, because it was no longer difficult, but just a chore to demonstrate my mastery.

Embark on that fourth run I did, and due to my familiarity with the systems this time around, I started to notice flaws in them. A bit of background information first. Nauticrawl is mostly turn-based. Without spoiling too much, resources are only consumed when you perform some action. However, some things do occur in realtime, and a patient and wise operator will abuse them. Example: Your monitors may deplete energy, but are not necessary to perform any "turn" actions. You may conserve energy by turning them on, getting the required information, then turning them off to perform your action. As you can imagine, this is tedious. Another example: It is more efficient to inject fuel slowly. This has no other effect than making you wait longer, possibly as long as 5 seconds, to move again. Final example: For some bizarre reason, enemies act in real time, at least until their actions would begin to influence you. You have an infinite amount of time until something attacks you once they have planned to do so. So, uncloaked, all enemies will eventually gather around you and obliterate you if you don't cloak. If you're already cloaked, you can sit and wait for everyone to get away from you so you could uncloak and move without using energy. This waiting can take an incredible amount of time, but you'd be playing suboptimally if you didn't wait.
But even besides all that nonsense, the difficult-to-control machine very quickly stops being interesting as you figure it out, and starts being a nuisance to operate. I've already proved I can work this thing, yet I have to do it over and over and over again.

So, no. Nauticrawl is most definitely not something I'd recommend. While it has a great premise, it makes some very questionable design decisions and does not respect your time. The initial sense of discovery fades to tedium as you realize the machine is not difficult to operate because it's alien to you - it's difficult to operate because it's terribly designed. There's a story unfolding as you explore the world, which I was mildly interested in, but that was far from enough to keep me going. Gameplay, beyond basic operation that would be trivial with a good control scheme, was basically nonexistent as well, not leaving anything interesting to do if you knew how to pilot the machine.

Echo

I think I'll remember Echo for some time. It was a very unique experience. I have mixed feelings about it, and I don't even quite know where to start describing it. Perhaps a retelling of my own experiences would be best. Echo is definitely an experience, and I'm afraid that detailing the gameplay will spoil some of that experience, but I can not really talk about the game otherwise. I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum.

Echo starts off with a lengthy opening. Immediately, I notice that the quality of voice acting is amazing. There are only two people talking, but I very much feel inclined to listen to what they're saying, to the point that it doesn't bother me that I am simply walking for the first 30-60 minutes of the game. It also helps that the planet I am going to is like something out of a sci-fi dream. Snow, countless blocks, crumbling stairways and narrow paths leading downward, eventually into an endless building filled with winding pathways, halls of gold and splendor stretching to infinity... all eerily dark and empty, leading deeper and deeper still. Words do not do the sights justice. I'm fed bits and pieces of the story, of my past, and why I'm here. There's a feeling of some grander narrative, but information is vague, and our two narrators are unreliable. It's all very much just style at this point, and I worry if this will be a game, or just a gorgeous walking simulator. But honestly, I would not mind the latter for once if this keeps up.

The introduction also serves as a tutorial to the game, demonstrating the energy system. You use energy to break your fall on long drops, fire your gun, scan the area. You also have limited sprinting ability, opening and closing doors, vaulting over low walls, shouting, and some other things you can do. These tools will all come in handy when the game gradually introduces its enemy. These tools will also be your downfall, as your enemy is yourself. The game plays out in rather long levels, populated by clones of yourself. You can kill them, lock them behind doors, outrun them. It's all too easy, until the lights go out, come back on, and the cycle begins anew. Every cycle, everyone is revived, and they will learn all you did in the past cycle. Closing a door behind you will no longer work, they will sprint after you, they'll even shoot at you.

Echo is advertised as a stealth sci-fi adventure. I'd agree with the latter two, but stealth it is perhaps not. Sure, the enemies won't attack you if they don't detect you, but there are too many of them to sneak past them all. More than likely, you'll want to play it as an action puzzle instead. Analyze the level, figure out ways to deal with the enemies in some area using only a limited set of your moves, then use a different set of moves to escape them once they are revived the next cycle. It's great in theory, but I must say, I'm not quite so quick on my feet. Things won't go exactly as planned, so any deeper strategy will not work. I have a feeling this might have worked better as a turn-based strategy game, but that would have lost so much of the atmosphere. Speaking of which, Echo isn't a horror game, but the long empty corridors, eerie lighting, blackouts, and of course the many clones staring and chasing you create for a very anxiety-inducing atmosphere.

I've rambled a bit too long. I didn't ultimately like the game due to the gameplay. The story also dried up somewhat, as it kept up its rather vague tone, giving me few concrete details. Still, between that and the gameplay, I would have stuck around for the story, as well as the environments, which were sadly seeing fewer new elements over time than at the start. As novel as the gameplay was, I did not feel much of an expression of skill playing it. I did not have the time to properly think things through, and I did not have the in-game resources to shoot or outmaneuver the enemies. Sure, I got through with a combination of the two, but it just didn't feel like an accomplishment. It didn't feel fun, and worse still, it felt a bit repetitive.
I don't know whether to recommend it to any degree. I would, without hesitation, tell you to go experience the marvelous environments and atmosphere they crafted. But the gameplay isn't actually enjoyable, and the entire whole kind of falls off. I think they did a good job, just... not good enough to really recommend it.