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.