Geometry Arena

I had somewhat high hopes for Geometry Arena, and I'm not entirely sure if the game met those hopes or not.
Geometry Arena is an incremental minimalist twin-stick shooter confined to a very small arena. You get to choose one of 12 classes, each of which has a surprisingly unique playstyle, from simple classes that just shoot and dodge, to classes that fire giant projectiles that blast through everything, to classes that shoot bouncy lasers in every direction. You also have basic stat upgrades - all the usual damage, fire rate, critical, range, etc. as well as a few dozen difficulty modifiers that give you more rewards. There's also a rune system that allows you to buy and merge randomized runes, allowing for some very rare and powerful, but also expensive, permanent powerups.

The game loop is simple - you go into the arena, beat as many waves as you can, buy temporary upgrades between waves, and then permanent upgrades between runs. In fact, pretty much every single system in this game is quite simple, but I have yet to see a game that allows you quite as much freedom in customization and insane powerups as this. About twenty levels into the run, and you may already have cranked the enemy HP up a millionfold, because you fire 50 projectiles every second that each deal several billion damage and bounce around the level, instantly killing everything that appears. It's a bit of a journey to those ridiculous levels of power though, and so it feels quite exhilarating the first few times you get there.
However, it is understandably very difficult to balance something with so much freedom, and it's no exception here. My steady climb was interrupted by one run, where I got a broken combination of powerups going, put the in-game difficulty to the max, and beat the game for the first time. This allowed me to get pretty much every upgrade for this one class. A couple tries later in endless mode, I got another good run, which now allowed me to pretty much max out every single class. It only took a few hours, but I'd seen all the nearly 200 temporary upgrades, and experienced pretty much all the game had to offer, even finding a power-up combination that granted me effective immortality.

I really had a ton of fun with Geometry Arena. The road to the top may have been short, but I've rarely been this excited at seeing my character become stronger. For this alone, I would recommend the game. But I can't quite put this in my favorite games list, because it's still lacking in content and quality. It needs better balance without compromising the freedom. It needs longer progression without getting repetitive. And while the minimalistic art, world, and enemies were a great fit, it would really benefit from all-around better design. There's a point where the game goes from a skill-based twin-stick shooter, to a weird incremental simulation game. That's not a bad thing, but realistically, I've played better twin-stick shooters, and I've played better incremental games. Still, I would absolutely recommend giving it a try.

Desperados III

I think I picked up Desperados III due to its highly positive review score. It is apparently the third installment in the series, with previous versions being more than 15 years old. They were made by a different developer, and were very poorly received. But it seems their publisher got the team behind Shadow Tactics to make this one. Now, I played Shadow Tactics more than 7 years ago, but as far as I remember, it's basically the same game, and my thoughts on it are mostly the same. Shadow Tactics was multiple times more popular, but I couldn't say myself if it was because it was better.

Repeating a lot of what I said last time, Desperados III is a real-time tactics game with pausing and stealth. All the mechanics seem fairly standard, with cover, cones of sight, noise circles, stealth kills, hiding bodies, creating distractions, traps, etc. If you're spotted, the situation quickly starts to get worse, but it's still possible to get out of it. That said, it's still a stealth game, and attempting to just storm the enemy is not an option. While there aren't really any novel or interesting mechanics here, everything seems very solidly executed, to the point where I don't have any complaints.
You control 5 characters again, and again, I feel this is where the game falls apart for me. It is quite difficult to keep track of what everyone's doing, and all the enemies who threaten my team. Sure, the game lets you pause at any time, but it kind of doesn't want you to. The design seems more oriented towards controlling everyone at the same time, but that creates for a frustrating experience for me, when characters are not doing what I want them to, because I didn't have the time to manage them properly.

I'm well aware these problems are mostly personal, but I'm not really a fan of neither real-time strategy nor stealth action games, and definitely not a mixture of the two. If you liked Shadow Tactics, then this seems to be literally more of the same. As far as I got into it, it seems very solidly made, and good for what it is. I just don't like what it is, and thus, I can't personally recommend it.

Lobotomy Corporation

Oh boy, oh boy, I did not know what I was getting into when I decided to start playing Lobotomy Corporation. This is probably one of the most unique games I have ever played, and despite that, it's not a brief experimental experience at all. It can take around 100 hours to beat the game. Sadly, I did not get that far. The game may be unique and interesting, but that doesn't equate to it also being fun to play.

Lobotomy Corporation is a management game heavily inspired by the SCP Foundation. Unlike many SCP-based games, it doesn't actually use any SCPs, but writes their own "Abnormalities". You act as the manager of the research and containment facility, and I believe this position resonates so much more with the feeling of SCP than any first-person action game.
Each day, a new Abnormality is added, and each day, you have to interact with enough Abnormalities to meet your daily quota. The game generally doesn't run on a timer, leaving you as much time as you want to make decisions. Interacting with Abnormalities both fills your daily quota, but also teaches you about them, leading to a better understanding of how to deal with them in the future. Every abnormality is different, and requires a different approach, and possibly differently skilled Agents interacting with it. Some are nearly harmless regardless of what you do. Some are harmless once you know how to handle them. And especially as the game progresses, many are deadly if you don't know how to deal with them, or quite dangerous even after you know exactly what to do. You can't just not interact with the dangerous ones, because after every certain number of interactions, a Meltdown happens, forcing some random abnormalities to be interacted with, lest something bad happens. This really creates interesting decision-making points quite frequently, especially regarding how to approach new Abnormalities.
There are more aspects of the game, like Abnormalities escaping, training characters, harvesting equipment from the Abnormalities, and specializing your Agents to be able to deal with certain types of Abnormalities. I think the greatest strength of the game lies in how varied each new Abnormality is, and how it forces you to evolve your playstyle as the game progresses. While I would love to detail them, I wouldn't want to rob anyone of the joy of experiencing these unique mechanics themselves for the first time. I will say that they can mess with things like your save file, your time controls, depend on your camera, and more.

Now, for some of the more negative things. I think the weakest point is the lack of polish put into the game. A management game needs to give you tools to do your managing. Yet the UI and the layout makes it quite difficult to actually get a good overview of what's going on in the facility. It can be difficult to select individual characters, check their current health and sanity, or to order them around. It can also be difficult to figure out what areas currently need tending to. Many UI interactions are unclear or unpleasant to perform. This game is all about information, with knowledge being the most powerful thing, and yet it's made unnecessarily difficult to know things that we can know.
There is also a clear problem of repetition, and optimal playstyles not being fun. For example, the first weeks, the Abnormalities are quite simple to handle. There is no inherent limit to how long I can farm my Agents' stats on them, but it's a very slow process. It would be very helpful to have several maxed out agents for use later on, but it's no fun. Later on, restarting days or rewinding to an earlier day becomes a near-mandatory (and expected) thing to do, but I also find this to be poor design. I would rather my mistakes and losses be not so great I couldn't recover from them, and be forced to live through them, than to rewind and do everything again so they never happened.

In other aspects... There isn't a lot of variety in the music and sound effects, and that can get annoying after playing for dozens of hours. The art is amateurish, but visually coherent, and rather charming, so I've no compaints there.
There is also an overarching storyline and mystery that's revealed bit by bit as you complete each day. Each department's head also has their own story as you complete their questline. I didn't really see any of these to their conclusion nor to any satisfying point, but they were interesting enough to read.

Overall, an amazing idea for a game, with a lot of work put into it, and a lot of content, but really held back by the lack of polish. If you're someone who enjoys management games, enjoys SCPs and wants the most authentic experience of what it would be like to deal with them, and enjoys bashing their head against the wall, then this could actually be an amazing game for you. Personally, while I enjoy the lore aspect immensely, I'm lukewarm on management games, and the badly designed interface along with the persistant restarts I had to do killed it for me. I would love to play this exact game if it was made better, and I would still recommend trying it to see if you can handle the listed faults or not. I quit after I was no longer enjoying it, but I have no regrets playing as far as I did. So ultimately, a partial recommendation.

Hello Charlotte

Y'know, sometimes I just don't understand. I'd like to explain why or how I don't understand, but I can't even understand that. I tried playing Hello Charlotte, and I wanted to tell you about it, but I'm not sure I'm qualified. I was prepared for something weird. Something unusual... but not this.

So, mechanically, Hello Charlotte is a RPGMaker trilogy. The second episode is linked and free, and the first episode is available as the second episode's demo, which is already a weird way to distribute a game, but whatever. They're supposed to be short stories with psychological horror themes.
I couldn't get very far, because I felt uneasy reading what seemed to be written by someone who was either mentally ill or 3 years old. This clearly looks like a solo project, but the Steam page is neat and tidy, so whoever made this is probably fine, and maybe this makes it all the more impressive.
I can't really describe what I experienced. You interact with things, and they give you textual responses, but it's nonsense. I've read absurdist fiction, but that was quite normal compared to this. Something about gods, and puppets, and interdimensional beings, and there are colored sqaures in my bedroom that break the fourth wall, but I'm aware of this, and the world doesn't exist, and a cockroach delivered me my capitalist diabetes food, and then I opened a box and everything collapsed into a singularity and I got a bad end.
This doesn't make any sense, and I'm not trying to make it sound confusing. This is actually what I got from playing it. This is all with a small 400x300 pixel box in the middle of my screen that can't be resized and droning music that's kind of starting hurt my head along with all the nonsense that's happening.

The game gave me a bad end, and I got out. I'm happy I did. I do not understand how this has overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam. Like... Yume Nikki is a very logical and simple to understand game compared to this, and even that was too much for me. If you're any semblence of normal, do not try this game. If you want one of the most absurd experiences ever, then this is it. I've never done hallucionegens, but I'd imagine the real world makes more sense after those than this game does without them. A hard "Not recommended" from me.