Islanders

I believe there is a category of media, games included, that receive high ratings not because they're really good, but because there's little to dislike about them. This is probably yet another of the many flaws of rating systems. As a player, you don't want to find a game you don't dislike, you want a game that you really like. And there is no reason that a game with middling reviews couldn't be fantastic for you, personally. A system that could identify something like this is of course signifcantly more complicated and would need to at least take into account the overall preferences of every person rating things. I don't think it's particularly viable, and there's easier improvements most places could make to their rating systems.

Apologies for the long and not-so-relevent intro to my Islanders review. It's just that I don't have much to say about it. As you may have guessed, Islanders is a very highly rated game. It took me but an hour to basically see all the content though, and even then, it wasn't all that interesting.

In Islanders, you're given a series of buildings to place on generated islands. These buildings have certain placement limitations, and give (or deduct) points depending on buildings (or some natural objects) near them. Eventually an island gets full enough that you have a hard time getting enough points for the next milestone, and you move on to the next island where you repeat the same process all over.
The game isn't particularly difficult. There isn't a large variety of buildings, maybe a couple dozen, and building placement strategy is rather shallow. Two of the major flaws I noticed were that you were eventually better off just hovering over various areas to see which gives the most points, or trying to see if a building fit into some crevice that would give a lot of points. There will quickly be too many buildings where reasoning about a good location is too slow, and just randomly scanning the area, letting the computer tell you what's good and what's bad, is the efficient solution. Secondly, that buildings only care about buildings that exist around them when they are first built, meaning you can, for example, replace all the trees near a sawmill with buildings, and you still get to keep your points. This feels really wrong, because placing two farms near a windmill is not the same as placing a windmill near two farms, even though the end result looks to be the same.

Overall, I'm probably the wrong demographic. This is no strategy game, it's a casual "puzzle" game with somewhat aesthetically pleasing buildings and islands. It's one of those "relaxation" games which I just don't understand. If you want to make little island cities like in the screenshots, maybe you'll like it. Otherwise, I have no reason to recommend it.

Infinitode 2

I haven't played a lot of tower defense games in the recent years. They don't seem to be very popular games to make, contrasting with the Flash game era, where a new one was popular quite often. That said, Infinitode 2 is probably the best tower defense game I've played, as far as pure tower defense games go.

To address a possible initial concern, Infinitode 2 is free, and also available on mobile. It sustains itself off of microtransactions. Basically pay-to-progress-faster. There are no paywalls, but because the progression possibilities are nearly infinite, paying does give you an edge. But I wouldn't care about that one bit. There is of course no PvP in the game, and only your leaderboard ranking is at stake. Especially on PC, I didn't feel any incentive to pay a cent.

Now, Infinitode isn't super innovative, but it does have a good amount of depth. Various enemies walk along a predetermined path. You place your turrets outside that path. Enemies have different properties and are resistant or vulnerable to different towers, promoting tower diversity. You'll also want to diverisfy your towers on account of which enemies take which path, dissonances like ice and fire not working well together, or just general placement ideas like spreading out your freeze towers to cover, but not overlap, the entire area, or placing venom towers near the start, to ensure maximum poison duration.
The levels start off simple, but later on, figuring out the optimal tower placement (or just a kind-of-good placement) is like a puzzle that needs to be solved. Problem is, it's work you should ideally do before starting the level, and not something you would need to re-do in the future, unless you noticed an ineffiency in your placement. But because the game has a lot of vertical progression in the form of an extensive upgrade tree, you will want to re-visit levels again and again to get a better score, and farm more materials. Upon re-visiting, however, you will have to remember how you wanted to place your towers, which I found to be an incredibly tedious task from the second time onward.

Overall, despite putting over 40 hours into it, I find it somewhat hard to recommend. The long playtime comes from the grindiness of it, and while unlocking each new turret did give new interesting options, as did new levels provide new challenges, it didn't feel rewarding. Again, because of the highly vertical upgrade progression, the difficulty in levels (most of which are infinite, as far as I know) had to raise rapidly as the waves went on. The early waves were trivial, meaning you could get through them pretty much no matter what you did. Then there were a few waves which were matched to your current progress, where your success depended on how well you had designed your defenses. And then you got overwhelmed, regardless of what you did. My actual skill had a marginal effect, and my performance was mostly dependent on how much time I had invested into playing.
Still, I had a decent amount of fun for about 30 of those hours, and since the game's free, I'd totally recommend giving it a try until you get bored.

NieR Replicant

I've been playing NieR Replicant recently. The "square root of 1.5" version, to be precise. Where do I even begin with this.
I won't try to deny that I have a bias towards some games sometimes. I have really been looking forward to playing NieR:Automata, so much so that I decided I had to play the predecessor, Replicant, first. Under usual circumstances, I would have quit an hour in at most, but I kept going for 10 - roughly a quarter of the entire game's length. So let me tell you of my experiences.

First and foremost, the most unforgivable problem Replicant has is that it is not optimized for keyboard and mouse play. Even at max in-game sensitvity, it plays as if designed for a 5000 dpi mouse. I was nigh physically unable to turn around until I reconfigured my mouse to 4x the dpi. If you do not have a "gaming" mouse, you will not be able to use it to play this game. Even then, it took me some time fiddling with the settings to make sure the camera wasn't turning as if the operator was highly intoxicated and on the verge of falling over. I never did get lock on to work for anything more than a single target, as moving even just one pixel (which is inevtiable on 5k dpi) will switch your lock on target, easily multiple times a second.

Okay, fine, I should've quit there. But I wanted to experience NieR so bad I was willing to play with a subset of camera functions and a very wobbly camera. Was the game any good despite these faults? Not in the gameplay department.
It's an action RPG where you're either beating up multiple smaller monsters or a big boss. It also has some bullet hell mechanics, where some enemies, and all bosses, shoot bullets at you. You can attack back with your sword, or use magic to attack from a moderate-to-long distance. The idea's fine and good, but the game is terribly unbalanced. I can't speak from the perspective of someone who is very good at the game, but personally, the risk of getting into melee range was never worth it. My melee attacks barely did more damage than my spells, and they left me locked in the animations, unable to dodge. Whereas spells could be charged as I ran and dodged, and fired in a fairly short timeframe. But even among spells, which had some interesting options, the best was the most boring "shoot a singular bullet" one. You could hold it for auto-fire, but worse still, clicking it as fast as you could would do even more damage. So fights would devolve into my right hand navigating the battlefield, controlling the unwieldy camera, and my left hand controrting to unreasonable formations as I struggled to use all directional movement keys while also alternating fingers as one got tired from spamming the magic button.
Outside combat, there were plenty of fetch and delivery quests, which felt kind of like a waste of time, but not a lot of character progression. You had levels and different weapons, but as far as I saw they all had the same moveset, and levels did not give you any allocatable points. So aside from unlocking new spells (which I had no reason to use), I never felt like my character got anything new.

Was everything in this game so bad? Not entirely. To list off the last of the negatives, I really didn't like the art / models for the game. Even for a 2010 game (the new version is 2021, but I don't know if they upgraded the graphics any), the world looks so devoid of buildings or creatures. It looks washed-out, empty, devoid of life. Maybe there's some analogy there for the story of the game, but regardless, it was not a treat for the eyes.
A slight step up is the story. I did go on to read the entire plot after quitting to make sure I was well informed for when I decide to play Automata. The idea behind the story is quite interesting (no spoilers here of course), but I don't feel like the narrative they built on top of that background was nearly as exciting. Further still, the moment-to-moment story told in the game is generally quite boring, and a lot of it is filler to pad out the game. It's all very tragic, sad, serious, philosophical, even the filler, but it's just not interesting enough for me to care. If you, like me, care about the overarching lore across the games, then allow me to fill you in. The relations to Drakengard are basically nonexistant. There are a lot of shared characters with Automata, but by my best guess, knowing the characters and events of Replicant will at most be a joy to understand the references in Automata, but will not affect your comprehension of the story.
Finally, regarding all things audible. I loved the voice acting (and, well, the script) for the main character's floating book, Grimoire Weiss. I don't normally care much about the work done by voice actors, but hearing Weiss speak was always something to look forward to. I'd say about the same for the other imporant character, Kainé. And then, the music. Simply beautiful. I do question the decision to bust out emotional vocal tracks even during mundane activities, but my god was the music impactful to listen to. I can only imagine what they may have composed for scenes later on that were probably meant to be way more emotional.

So, to sum it up... It's kind of shit. My ears would disagree, but I have to look at things objectively, and from every other perspective, NieR Replicant was either unremarkable our outright terrible. Not playable on keyboard and mouse, unbalanced, boring, full of filler... Maybe if I had time to spend on the slow pace of the story, and actually put the game on auto-battle mode which was available on easy... Well, it says something that such an option is even available. I have less criticism for the more art-y parts of Replicant, but I can't recommend it as a game.

Melvor Idle

Idle games can sometimes be very comfortable to play. They don't take a lot of your time, and even without actively interacting with the game, as long as you check back every now and then and do some actions, you get a little bit of the happy brain chemicals because your numbers have gone up. I guess I was in such a state where I felt like playing an idle game, because when I saw Melvor Idle being talked about on some site, I went and gave it a try.

Melvor Idle literally takes RuneScape and turns it into an idle game. Sure, RuneScape already kind of is an idle game, so it's honestly a very familiar experience, but Melvor cuts out the tedious bits like your inventory getting full, or having to walk from place to place. It, sadly, also removes every aspect of multiplayer, and has no animations or audio whatsoever, making staring at it quite boring.
For those who don't know what RuneScape is, I'd describe Melvor as such: You have a couple dozen skills, mainly non-combat ones such as mining, smithing, woodcutting, firemaking, farming, crafting, etc., and a few combat skills. Engaging in any of the skills gives you exp in that skill and some resources, which will probably be useful in leveling some other skill, or useful in combat to defeat stronger monsters or dungeons for drops. Exp gives you new levels, which unlocks new activities in that skill. The goal is to eventually reach max level in all skills (a gargantuan task, for sure), find all rare drops, and maybe even get max mastery in all activites of all skills (which would take an insane amount of time).

There is definitely no shortage of content in Melvor, and you will not complete it any time soon. As with all idle games, the early game starts off strong, with something new unlocking every few minutes or every hour, keeping things fresh. However, after maybe a week of "playing", the game slows down to enough of a crawl that it can take a full day or longer to gain enough levels to unlock anything new. Combine that with the gameplay just being checking in on your exp bars and making sure you have enough prerequisite resources for your activities, and you're really not engaging with the game at all. For me, I soon realized that the main thing keeping me checking in each day was the sunk cost, and that prompted me to stop playing.

I don't play a lot of idle / incremental games these days, but I used to play pretty much all the big and small ones a few years ago, even multiple at the same time. I think the eventual inevitable waiting bit reveals that they don't generally have a lot of content to keep you engaged, and that has stopped me from genuinely recommending any of them. However, Melvor is probably one of the best, if not the best idle game I've played. Sure, it's piggybacking off of RuneScape's successful formula, but that's mostly irrelevant. I still can't overall recommend Melvor, but if you're someone who likes idle games, then you should definitely give Melvor a try.

Superliminal

I think I first saw Superliminal many years ago as someone showcasing cool tech in a YouTube video. They announced it was going to be a game, and I'd been looking forward to it since. It was such a cool-looking demo after all.

Superliminal is something between a puzzle game and a walking simulator. Your goal is to find the exit in a series of levels, but that exit may not be present or not possible to reach at first glance. The main trick is playing with perspective. Once you pick up an object, it is fixed to your camera, so the 2D representation of it stays the same size. However, depending on where you move it, the object can increase or decrease in size. So if you look at it just the right way, a small die may well be big enough to fill the gaping hole between you and the exit. There are a few other perspective and visual tricks as well, but I won't spoil what they are, as some are not widely re-used through the game. This perspective-based reality manipulation is something that can only exist in a video game, and I think that is the main reason Superliminal feels so amazing at first.

However, I feel the game fell a bit flat in terms of execution. It almost still feels like a tech demo that was shoehorned into a game. There was a narrative placed in, and the environments were made to mean something, and the whole thing ends in a flourish and tries to leave some inspiring message. I don't know, it just didn't hit me that hard. The novel mechanics quickly become tiresome, and the main challenge becomes looking around the enviornment for something interactable. It often feels less like a puzzle and more guessing what the developer wanted you to do.
For better or worse, the game was only a few hours long. It wasn't too long, so the mechanics didn't actually start to bore me, but then again, it wasn't long enough to make me feel like I properly got to play the game. I do feel like there was potential for a more full-fledged puzzle game instead of just showcasing each trick a few times and then calling it a day, but that didn't seem to happen.

Overall, I'd say I enjoyed the game, but rather barely. I would definitely encourage anyone to try it, because it really is a unique experience that you won't find anywhere else, but be warned that it won't last very long, nor will you probably want to it to last any longer. I'm just barely giving Superliminal a spot in my favorite puzzle games list. If you're looking for something similar but more fleshed out, I think Antichamber is worth a try. Honestly, I've mostly forgotten it since it's been so long, but that has so far been the top reality-bending game.