Roguebook

I was surprised to find Roguebook in my backlog, given its relatively bad reviews, and that it looked like just another roguelike deckbuilder. Sure, there's an overworld exploration part where you can reveal the map using various types of inks you collect from battles and around the map, which in turn reveals more combat encounters and loot to power up before attempting the floor boss, but ultimately I didn't feel this system provided more depth to the game than just random encounters on a linear path.

The rest of the game is as standard as it seems. You can choose 2 heroes to play with, each of whom has their own pool of cards they are able to collect and use, and you can control their positions in battle via some cards, mostly defense cards, which allow you to strategically block enemy attacks and power up your own. There are also summonable allies, regular attacks, and other, not very remarkable features. Notably lacking is the card upgrade feature, which is more versatile by using gems with different effects that you can socket freely, allowing for very strong combinations, but they are a rather scarce commodity, so most cards will never be upgraded. Also, there is no way to remove cards from your deck, causing your decks to simply grow ever larger. Perhaps this was simply due to my playstyle choices, but I very often found myself having excess energy that I had no way to use, causing me to just play all my cards every single turn. There was still some strategy in the order I played them in, but there was usually a clearly optimal choice.

Overall, even though I haven't played a lot of what are considered the best in the genre, I could tell Roguebook was a very mediocre roguelike deckbuilder. Map exploration and combat were boring, and the game was very lacking in the strategic department. With how many options in the genre there are, I see no reason to recommend it.

Art of Rally

I suppose I completely misunderstood Art of Rally. I contemplated if I should even write a review of it, since I didn't adequately experience it. But, why not?

Art of Rally isn't as much of a racing game as it seems to be a simulator. You can drive around scenic landscapes, various terrains, and control most of the aspects of your car that you would in real life, such as using a clutch and manual transmission. I'm sure this is all real useful and necessary if you want to pull off that authentic drifting, but... I don't know how to drive in the first place. I was really lost trying to drive the cars, failing miserably. It very quickly occurred to me that I was having no fun whatsoever.

I'm sure I'm just really far from the target audience for this game, so I can't be too harsh on it. Even among racing games, I like ones with a bit less realism, and a bit more fun, and as far as I can tell, this gets quite realistic. So, I don't really have much right to speak about a game I don't understand, but I also can't really recommend it, since I found no fun in driving along rather plain roads with unwieldy cars that kept flying off the track.

Gato Roboto

I'm surprised about the nearly overwhelmingly positive rating of Gato Roboto. It's a cute black and white metroidvania about a cat exploring a weird research facility in a robot suit. You essentially have two forms. As a cat, you can climb walls and swim, as well as fit through smaller passages, but as a robot, you can blast through some loose terrain, open doors, and beat enemies, as well as take a few hits from them. Exiting your robot leaves it standing there, forcing you to either come back for it, or to find a save point, usually. Aside from regular enemies, there are also a few boss fights and some rooms with permanent power-ups.

There's nothing wrong with Gato Roboto, but it's just about the most basic metroidvania you could think of. Map exploration is straightforward, enemies are on the easy side, there are no fancy mechanics, just jumping and shooting. I suppose the only non-standard ability is the possibility to have two forms. On top of that, the game's short, only about 4 hours, split into 4 (or 5) areas, with each area taking about 40-60 minutes.

Ultimately, I felt more-or-less sated while playing it, but once I put it down, I didn't feel like I had had fun. Again, there's nothing wrong with the game, and so it never displeased me, but it's just rather unambitious. I suppose if you just want a metroidvania to kill an evening's worth of time, this is a fine pick, but it's a bit too plain for my tastes and so I can't personally recommend it.

Chronicon

I'm back from my break after getting stuck playing some particularly long games, such as Path of Exile 2. While this post is not about that, it is about Chronicon, which is coincidentally quite similar. Evidently it takes a lot of inspiration from Diablo 2, which I never played, so I can't confirm, but I can say it's quite similar in terms of the gameplay loop to Path of Exile, which I've played a lot.
You start the game by choosing one of 5 classes, each of which has 4 subclasses in the form of talent trees that you can spec into that dictate your active abilities and playstyle. A lot of your power, however, comes from equipment, which the enemies drop in droves. Most equipment is useless, but you're always on the lookout for those rare drops that really boost whatever aspect of your build you're trying to maximize. This does create a problem that seems to be present in most similar games - a lot of time is spent looking through drops, even if you filter out lower rarity ones, and that can become tedious. As for the gameplay itself, you just go through different dungeons, blast through hordes of enemies, rinse and repeat.

The game is fine. There are no glaring issues, and it's reasonably fun to play, but I think that's only the case because the game design is great. Sadly, the game design is also completely copied from existing games, and those existing games have a much higher budget and thus surpass it in every other aspect. And that matters, because graphics are not just eye candy, but also offer clarity on what's happening. Same for audio cues. And while there's plenty of hours to grind here, the amount of varied content is not as high as in other games. It's a fine game, but it makes the fatal mistake of trying to compete with big-budget games, and doesn't offer something unique. Because of this, I unfortunately can't recommend Chronicon. Go play Path of Exile, or one of the other top-down ARPGs instead. They should offer more than enough hours of playtime, at a significantly higher quality.