Timelie

I think I was drawn to Timelie by the overwhelmingly positive reviews as well as the promise of time manipulation, which can be quite a fun mechanic if done well. "With such positive reviews, it probably is," I thought.
I was wrong.

Timelie is essentially a turn-based puzzle game. You have a bunch of levels you have to run through while avoiding enemies who you can't fight against. They're faster than you, but you can both see their cone of vision, as well as the future, so you can plot a path through the levels that avoids them. There's some other mechanics involved with opening and closing doors, repairing broken floors, and also controlling another character at the same time, but none of that really changes the essence of the game.

The problem is, it's boring. The puzzles are simple, somewhat slow to complete as you have to observe the movement of the enemies before doing anything, and the time manipulation aspect doesn't really do anything. If you think about it, it's essentially just the common ability to create checkpoints (saves) in a level and load to them at will. It seems there's only one type of enemy, the levels are quite small, and the game only takes a few hours.

Overall, not much to say. I don't understand the review score. Timelie is a very basic and rather easy puzzle game with neither a high production value nor a lot of content. I found it boring, and I wouldn't recommend it.

Jet Lancer

Jet Lancer is a 2D dogfighter. You pilot a hypermobile fighter jet that retains inertia after turning, allowing for flashy maneuvers such as facing and firing in a different direction than you are flying. The game is stage-based, and depending on the stage, you mostly fight similar enemy jets and ground-based threats, but sometimes also larger bosses with unique designs. You have a basic attack and two special attacks which you can swap between 5 variants, and then 18 modules that you mix and match for other passive bonuses. Each stage also gives you a score and grade based on your speed, combo counter, etc.

The gameplay isn't bad, but I immediately recognized the 2014 game Luftrausers in this. The gameplay and a lot of the general visuals are almost a one-to-one copy. Sadly for Jet Lancer, aside from the boss fights, which I didn't enjoy more than the regular levels, and the level-based gameplay in general, which I definitely didn't enjoy more than the continuous, rogue-like gameplay of Luftrausers, there isn't a lot different here. It's been a while, but I remember enjoying the handling of the plane better in Luftrausers, and the different weapon and engine combinations were definitely more imaginative and fun there. I think the only thing going for Jet Lancer is that it has somewhat more content, but that doesn't really matter to me when that content is inferior.

Overall, I feel Jet Lancer is too much of a copy without even being a better copy of what it was inspired by. I see little reason to play it over Luftrausers, unless you just want a different game for more content that is kind of similar. Personally, the gameplay is a bit too basic in either case for me to really recommend either, but at least I enjoyed Luftrausers enough to complete it. It was a fun enough arcade-like experience. So if you feel you want to try something like that, first play Luftrausers, and if you finish that and want more, feel free to give Jet Lancer a try.

Octopath Traveler

Octopath Traveler looked like a fun enough JRPG with charming pixel art visuals and a decent amount of relatively good reviews on Steam.
It plays like a pretty traditional JRPG, with standard turn-based combat - your team of 4 going against the enemy team, each character taking their action in turn. Unfortunately, the combat is too standard, too basic. There are only two things separating it from being the most basic "I hit you, then you hit me" style combat, and those are that enemies have hidden weaknesses to certain damage types, forcing you to first find those weaknesses by trying different attacks, and then having characters with those types of attacks break the enemies while others pummel them with their best attacks. See, hitting an enemy some amount of times with something they're weak against makes them skip 1-2 turns and take significantly more damage from all sources for the duration. This is the main point of combat. The other unique, but not as interesting, aspect is a boost system, where every turn you don't use a boosted attack, you get 1 point, and can use up to 3 to empower an attack. As the game gives you 8 characters, you can also swap some out depending on the enemies you face, to have access to more suitable skills, but you'll understand in a moment why that's not relevant.

Now, the combat, while basic, isn't that bad. It's fun enough. The problem is that you can't pick your fights. As you run around on the map, you will run into an encounter every few seconds. It's a ridiculous amount of fights, and you earn enough experience from them that it becomes nearly irrelevant what you do. You'll win anyways, the question is only if you'll waste an extra few turns or not.
I would love to tell you more about the rest of the game, but in the 11 hours that I played, I'm not sure if even 2 hours were spent on the story, which is supposed to be the strong suit of this game. The story seemed fine, but it barely had time to pick up, as you're expected to do the stories of all 8 characters at the same time, so I can't really judge the game on this, when all I'm doing in practice is just one pointless fight after another. The bossfights took more skill and thinking, but you only got one every few hours.

So, after a final three hour session, I was finally fed up with the boring loop of going through a pointless combat enocounter, only to get the chance to explore the map for 8 more seconds. The combat just isn't fun enough to make for a standalone game, but that's what it's trying to do. The story might be good enough to warrant going through it, but unless you're willing to spend at least 6 hours of grinding meaningless fights for every 1 hour of story content (and I'm probably being very generous with the ratio here), you won't have the chance to do so. The art, music, and especially the voice acting, even though only the most important parts were fully voiced, are great, but that's not enough to get a recommendation from me.

PS. If you still want to give it a try, then here are the answers to some questions I had:
Does it matter who I start with? Not really, you can and are expected to play through everyone's story.
Can I choose to not play through everyone's story? Kind of. The stories don't interact with each other, but you can't reach the true end without beating them all. Also the balancing will be off, but it's already off even if you play the intended way, so whatever. I also looked up 8 well-written opinion pieces on which stories were the best, and concluded that Olberic's story is by far the most beloved, followed by Primrose, Alfyn, Therion, H'aanit, Cyrus, Tressa, and Ophilia, in that order.

Satisfactory

Factorio's one of my favorite games, so naturally I was waiting for the release of Satisfactory, and jumped straight to playing it as it released. Nearly two months and a hundred hours later, I have finally finished it. It currently sits as the 44th highest rated game on Steam, and I can vouch for it being pretty damn good.

But what is Satisfactory, you ask? It's one of the many automation games that appeared after Factorio's relative success. In fact, it's the only one that actually managed to beat it in popularity so far. It works much the same - set up harvesters for resources, pipes and belts to transport them to crafting machines to make more complicated products, which you then further send to be crafted into even more complicated products, and so on. These products can be used to build more machines to produce even more things even faster, or serve to fill the game's goal to supply the AI with products it asks of you.
It's a fun loop, where you start with a small factory, just producing a few things at a slow rate, and before you know it, you've expanded to thousands of machines across the whole map, with thousands more transport belts zigzagging everywhere, and you barely remembering where everything is and how it all works.

The big improvement, and what probably makes Satisfactory this popular, is that it's 3D and in first person. I think a lot of people find this more approachable, and the game itself also shares many similarities with the survival game genre that has been popular. Compared to Factorio, there is less emphasis on scale and practicality, and more on exploration and aesthetics. Exploring the map gets you alternate recipies by which to make items, and there's enough non-functional building blocks and coloring tools in the game to make all your factories look like works of art, instead of the messes that I love to make.
Unfortunately for it, I will judge it by its gameplay. Aside from the alternate recipes, it doesn't really innovate on the automation genre whatsoever. The 3rd dimension sadly does not provide additional depth to the game, and in fact only reduces the amount of fun you have, because you no longer have to figure out logistics. The first person view makes it very difficult to get an overview of your factory, as placing even a single machine generally covers your entire view. There are no circuit networks or advanced logic options anywhere, which makes certain things, such as proper belt balancing or trains that carry more than one resource, impractical. Worst of all, there are no blueprints (they do exist, but can not be created from existing parts of your factory, and are tiny enough to be practically useless), which means you will have to build everything from scratch every single time.

Overall, while I did have a lot of fun playing it, as a change of pace from the thousand-plus hours I've put into Factorio, unless you care more about base building than automation, I see zero reason to recommend this over Factorio. There's less content, less quality of life, less depth, and basically no reason to go for another run or continue playing after the end of the game, as the map's always the same, and there's nothing to produce after you've completed the game. I suppose it would be a bit hypocritical of me to say I don't recommend this game, since I did have fun for it for almost 100 hours, and everyone else also really loves the game, but I don't think that would have been the case, were I not a fanatical fan of the genre. So, I don't know. I guess I'd recommend it. But try Factorio first, if you haven't.

Mandagon

Mandagon is a short and free game that has been hanging around in my library for nearly a decade now. I was drawn to it due to its thousands of "overwhelmingly" positive reviews. It's a very straightforward platformer where you collect a few items from around the map and deposit them into other places around the map. Aside from moving and jumping, there are some elevators and other objects that assist with movement around the map. The whole thing takes about an hour to complete.

I'll be brief (partly because there isn't much content in the game to begin with), I don't get it. The game looks and sounds nice, but the platforming is just about the most basic it can be to still be called a platformer. There's some cryptic story hidden around the map about death, I think, but it's not very clear.
This was boring to play, boring to read, and even though it was just an hour, I would rather have not spent that time here. I don't understand the review score, and I can't recommend it.