A Plague Tale: Innocence

I'm not entirely sure what I expected going into A Plague Tale: Innocence. It was a very popular release, with a fairly high review score for such popularity, so despite being a stealth adventure game, I decided to give it a try.

A lot of people praise it for its great graphics and amazing story, but I could honestly see neither. Sure, for game standards, neither is bad, but from a cinematic standpoint, the animations and models were still noticebaly janky, and I was thoroughly bored with the story.
The game is about being on the run from the inquisition with your little 5-year-old brother in 14th century France. You have to evade guards and rats in usual stealth game ways - throwing things, moving through tall grass, and waiting. This is just my personal gripe with the genre, but especially the waiting I find dreadfully boring. It's not like the rest of the gameplay is any exciting either.

I don't really have much to say about this, except that the story and quality did not nearly meet the level of hype this game seemed to have. Maybe it's still worth it for fans of stealth games, but if you're someone like me who doesn't like the genre and hoped that either the stealth portion would be really good, or that the story would carry it, then that's not the case. Honestly, even for a stealth game, this seems pretty average, so I really don't have any reason to recommend it.

The Planet Crafter

I was dragged into playing The Planet Crafter, which is a very highly rated (optionally) multiplayer open world survival crafting game. It's in the top 10 in that genre on Steam, and in the top 200 overall, so I expected something good.

The game drops you on an inhospitable planet with just sand and rocks and tells you to make it into a lush place filled with life. You do this by collecting rocks, making small buildings and tools out of them, and then building machines that passively add various types of terraformation income. At certain breakpoints, the terraformation levels unlock new things you can build and craft, and also alter the world around you visually. There are also the usual hunger, thirst, and oxygen bars you have to keep an eye on.

Aside from the unique and rather interesting thematic, this seems like a pretty standard survival game. The game focuses on busywork, spending all your time delivering resources from place to place and crafting the next thing you need. As the game progresses, you slowly get methods of automation, starting from resource drills, and eventually reaching automatic crafters, and drones that move resources around. Still, for most of the game, automation is scant, and the focus always stays on manual labor.

While the dynamic environment is interesting, the building aspect seems pretty poorly implemented, with badly aligning buildings, and little variety in the amount of customization, which I believe is often something people look for in these types of game. The other elements are more-or-less standard, and I don't recall any significant innovation nor a high level of quality.

Sadly, I've never enjoyed any games in this genre, as I'm neither a fan of customizing a base nor running back and forth doing mindless collecting and ferrying of resources just to build yet another building so I could repeat the process a hundred times more. If you liked Subnautica, you'll probably like this a little bit less, but if you're looking for another game in the genre, you'll probably enjoy it anyway. Me, not so much, so I won't be giving it a recommendation myself.

FragPunk

I decided to try another fresh multiplayer game while it still had players. Against my better judgement, I picked an arena shooter, FragPunk.

I don't know if Counter-Strike was the first to do it, but it sure feels like the genre of two teams shooting each other while one tries to plant a bomb on a site has been around since then. Valorant was a successful iteration on it, adding characters with unique abilities. FragPunk has that too, but also adds a card system where teams can put points into randomly selected cards every round that either make their team stronger, or the enemy team weaker. It adds a randomness element to the game, and more variety to each round, which is something that at least I feel is sorely needed. Regardless of this, this 5v5 bomb planting thing is the most boring kind of gamemode I've seen in first-person shooters. There are also a number of other game modes, but those do not seem to be in the focus.

Now, clearly I'm not an expert in the genre, so I can't comment on the nuances of weapons, map designs, handling, or whatever. Everything felt fine, and I had no complaints whatsoever. Compared to at least some FPS games, there is a lot of info available on the weapons, and a lot of systems in general, so on paper this looks like a really good iteration in this genre. The glaring problem is of course that I hate this genre, so I can't really form an accurate opinion on it.
Feel free to interpret my thoughts as you will. There will obviously be no personal recommendation, but at least to me, it seemed more fun than Valorant or CS:GO, so maybe you might feel the same way. The better question is if it can retain a critical mass of players to stay alive.

Urtuk: The Desolation

Urtuk: The Desolation is a turn-based tactics game, where you control a party of (up to) 6 characters in a series combats on hex grids.
The strength of Urtuk lies in the depth of the combat system, and in the amount of content built around that combat system. There's about a dozen classes, probably over a hundred different traits (passive abilities), a bunch of different equipment with various modifiers, and a progression system for characters that allows them to not just gain levels and stats, but also unlock new traits by completing certain actions in combat. There are also mutators, which are equippable traits that can be harvested from enemies you beat, and can eventually be absorbed, becoming a part of the character equipping them. Characters falling in battle results in an injury that's difficult to get rid of, and further leads to the character permanently dying. (But you can find a new one.) While there's a random element, it really feels like the way you play shapes your characters' progression.
The combat itself makes excellent use of terrain elevation, obstacles, and a lot of interaction between different units. Taunting, retaliation, support attacks, pushing, evasion, and a lot more. Most movements and actions are very important, as it's difficult to get out of a tough spot once you're in one, so some planning has to go into making sure you don't spiral into losing teammates, thus making further encounters even more difficult.

I would say that Urtuk has the best turn-based tactics combat system out of all the games I can remember. But there is a problem. The combat system is the entire game. The overworld has basically nothing. You can move from place to place, various events spawn, but they're all some form of combat encounter. There's some variety, where not everything is an all-out deathmatch, but that doesn't really change the essence of the combat.
It was really interesting playing these combat encounters back to back for the first couple of hours, but I eventually felt myself feeling a lack of purpose. Yeah, I had some vague quest and storyline to follow, but I didn't really feel like I was making progress aside from just completing yet another battle. There was basically no incentive to pick and choose my battles, and each combat either boiled down to a victory from which my units escaped unscathed and stronger than before, or a debilitating defeat. Mostly the former though, as the AI was a bit lacking in how it approached the battles. After a while, I also discovered some stronger strategies, like putting two tanks in a chokepoint and using four ranged units to obliterate anything that came near. Or abusing the action economy and putting all points into the stat that gives speed and stamina, making up to 6 times as many attacks each turn as the enemies. They did have harder difficulty modes, so perhaps that's not a problem.

Regardless, I can only give this a partial recommendation. If you want to just grind out tactical battle after tactical battle, then maybe there's something here for you. Sadly, probably due to this being made by a very small team, possibly even just a single person, there isn't anything else to do. I loved the combat, but it wasn't exciting enough, or I didn't feel enough progression, or enough reason to go through yet another encounter. Whatever the reason, I become bored as I slowly settled into some strategies that worked out for me, and I never reached the excitement to play just one more battle.

Alicemare

I usually pick games at random, but I noticed I had only one game left from 2016, and that was Alicemare, so I decided to play it. It's old enough that I even wrote about finding it back in 2016. It's by the same developer (Miwashiba) who made LiEat, which was a charming little story-oriented RPGMaker game that I gave a partial recommendation for.

Alicemare is the second out of three releases by Miwashiba, and the least well received one. It still has a reasonable review score, but not that great for a story game. It's about 3 hours long, but I only got about 15% of the way through before I was greeted by an endless black screen that didn't seem to go away between saving and reloading. Now, 30 minutes isn't a lot to replay, but in those 30 minutes, it hooked me a bit less than LiEat did, while otherwise feeling quite similar. It seems the combat aspect is gone (I actually somewhat liked the combat), but the backtracking and checking every interactable object or person after each plot point progression is present and annoying as ever. I ultimately decided it was not worth another 30 minutes of starting all over, hoping it would not hardlock me again. I also decided to go ahead with writing this excuse for a review, because the alternative was to go back to a weekly instead of a twice-weekly review schedule sooner.

So I couldn't tell you much about the game or the story, except that you're a kid who lost his memories and so you're in an orphanage or something, and you end up in a place reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, where you have to go through some "Worlds" related to the other kids in the orphanage. I can't really recommend it, not because it was that bad, but because I literally couldn't play it, so make of that and my previous thoughts what you will.

Epic Battle Fantasy 5

I can't remember anymore, but I believe I have been playing the Epic Battle Fantasy series since the second game came out on Kongregate in 2009. It was an absolutely amazing game at the time among all the free Flash games, and I've been following the series since. EBF 3 and EBF 4 are still on my favorite games of all time list. I'm more than a bit late playing Epic Battle Fantasy 5 in 2025, but better late than never. It's more of the same, but better, currently sitting at the 255th spot in the highest rated games on Steam.

EBF 5 is a turn-based JRPG, though it's not made in Japan, but rather mostly by a single guy in Europe. It has very traditional mechanics, lining up your squad of 5 characters against up to 5 enemies. Only 3 of your characters can be on the field at a time, though switching between them is free, as long as the one on the field hasn't acted. You do all your actions, usually choosing one out of a dozen-or-so abilities per character, and then the enemies do all of theirs. Simple stuff. There are also 10 different elements, physical and magical attack and defense, evasion, accuracy, and over a dozen status effects. Both you and enemies can have resistances or vulnerabilities to any of these, and your equipment can heavily modify how well you can deal certain types of damage, or what you're resistant to. New to the series is a capturing mechanic, where almost every enemy can be captured after beating them low enough and debuffing them enough. All of these enemies can then be used (using a special resource) to use their specific ability instead of a character's own.

EBF has never been too innovative with its mechanics, but what it does incredibly well is quality. This is absolutely a case where it's copying other games, but people like it because it's just better than them. In most JRPGs, there is a very obvious problem of too much complexity, and not enough depth. Very many mechanics, things to learn, stuff to setup, and yet not a lot of it actually matters. Not here. At the most basic level and easier difficulties, you can just grab random characters, throw whatever equipment on them, and just kind of hit the enemy with whatever they're weak against. But turning the difficulty up to Epic, and even more so in the optional challenge areas, it really becomes important to utilize most of the features the game offers. Proper gearing against the enemies you're facing, utilizing buffs, debuffs, specific counterplay according to the enemy AI... I especially want to praise the buff and debuff system, because almost all RPGs get this horribly wrong, where buffing or debuffing is a pointless endeavor that wastes your turn, and maybe even mana, because it's always more effective to just attack instead. Again, not here. You have to choose the right ones, but buffs and debuffs have a really long duration, meaning that for those difficult and long boss fights, they will benefit you hugely.

I could talk on-and-on, because there is so much content in this game. Over 100 hours, if you want to complete all the optional stuff, and not much of that is recycled either. In fact, the amount of content is perhaps the biggest downside about this game. The amount of party members, and thus skills and equipment, has been increasing every installment since the second, and I'm feeling somewhat fatigued and overwhelmed by juggling everyone to perform optimally. This is alleviated by regular fights not requiring perfect play, and everyone getting fully replenished between each battle, but I can't ignore it nontheless. I can not memorize all the skills my characters have, nor all the equipment, especially not as they upgrade and gain new effects throughout the game, and this wastes time as I have to go through them every time I want to make a decision regarding them.

But to summarize this review before it gets too long, Epic Battle Fantasy 5 is an amazing traditional turn-based JRPG. While not very innovative, it manages to beat out similar games by being better in just about every regard, and having several times more content to boot. Different difficulty levels and optional gameplay modifiers allow everyone from casual gamers to people who prefer to approach battles as strategy puzzles to solve to enjoy it. I heavily recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed any turn-based JRPG. This will be earning a spot on my favorite games list, replacing the 3rd and 4th installements, because there's enough content and more that I could replay this multiple times before I wanted to go back.

Brutal Orchestra

Most games copy existing games, shuffle ideas together, or make very small incremental adjustments to established formulas. Games that try to step a bit far into unexplored mechanics territory often don't get it right the first time and suffer because of that. However, I feel Brutal Orchestra does just that, and, judging from the amazing reviews and being in the top 1000 Steam games of all time at the time of writing, succeeds at it.

The rules and mechanics of the game aren't complicated. The game is a turn-based roguelike where you repeatedly choose between one of three paths, leading to various encounters (treasure, a new party member, etc.) or a battle. In battle, you control a party of up to 5 characters, each character has 3 abilities, maybe a passive, and an equippable item. Each of your characters can move and attack, and then the enemy does the same. But it gets deceptively complicated.
See, the board has 5 lanes, so at a full board, each character is facing an opponent. Character health carries over between battles. You can see what your enemies are going to do, and in what order. Most abilities hit only 1-2 tiles, so you could for example go into battle with fewer characters, allowing you to play more evasively. Enemies can also change their positions or trigger passives when attacking or being attacked, and so could you, which is also an axis that has to be kept in mind. Further, all abilities cost pigments of various colors, which is a very central game mechanic. You generate pigments by attacking enemies with the corresponding health bars, or getting hit yourself. If you don't have enough pigments you can't use an ability, but if you have the wrong color pigments, you will hurt yourself when using an ability. If you have too many pigments by the end of the turn, they get deleted, but hurt all your party members.

This isn't actually a lot of information, but there is nothing that is irrelevant in combat. Every single detail and decision matters, and as the game gets harder, you will find that you can't rush things, but have to contemplate each turn if you want to win. And this, in my opinion, is where there might be a divide in player opinion, because it certainly is where my opinion did not match up with the glowing review score. I can appreciate the work that went into making sure that everything the player does has a purpose. But I can not enjoy the agonizingly slow pace of combat. This plays like a puzzle game, where each battle is a puzzle to be solved. Choose the right party members to deal with the enemy composition. Consider the squares they threaten. Make sure you're in position to attack them, but also that you can move out of the way before their attack hits you. Alternatively, perhaps there's some way to heal or block the damage. Choose abilities based on what pigments you can use, and what you need to use to not overflow. Perhaps taking a hit on purpose just to generate pigments that an enemy does not have? And so. much. more. A single turn can take minutes, and a single battle can take over an hour, if you want to be thorough. If you enjoy that kind of gameplay, then this game is probably going to be amazing for you. If not, you will quickly succumb to the frustration that it's taking too long to do anything.

To mention a few other things, there's a good amount of content in the game. Completing just the main "easy" mode will probably take several hours, as you can rush it a bit more if you want, but if you want to see all the characters, items, enemies, then there's definitely a few dozen hours to be put in here. The art is a bit unsettling, but otherwise pretty good, and while I didn't care to read much of it myself, there's supposedly also some lore to be discovered. There is a surprising lack of keyboard support, which might have slightly increased the game's tempo, but it's not really a problem as you spend more time thinking than acting anyways.

In short, Brutal Orchestra is very highly rated turn-based roguelike, where simple mechanics combine to form complicated battles that can be solved like puzzles. I can not personally enjoy games where I can clearly see I could perform better, yet where doing so would take so much of my time as to bore me. Here, I found performing optimally to take far, far too much time. Still, I have to acknowledge the good game design that went into making every action meaningful, as well as the fact that most players do like it. In light of that, this get a partial recommendation from me.

Devil Slayer - Raksasi

I somewhat enjoyed Devil Slayer - Raksasi. It's a top-down action roguelike, which borrows a lot of mechanics from other popular games.
You have to traverse through six floors, each being a series of connected rooms, and ending with a bossfight, much like Binding of Isaac. Each floor also contains a store where you can buy items that give passive bonuses, a different store for upgrading or replacing your weapon, and a treasure room, each requiring a key to access. Keys are also used for various lesser chests found throughout the map.
The floor progression is much like in Dead Cells, allowing you to choose which floor you want to tackle, with each floor having a different enemy type and a different boss. Also from Dead Cells is the item unlock mechanic where you first have to find the blueprint for the item, and then you can work towards unlocking it with souls you gather on each floor. Those souls can alternatively be used to permanently upgrade your character.
And speaking of souls and characters, you quickly unlock all six characters who aren't all that different, but have different passive skills and stats, and also start with and are proficient in a different weapon type. Each weapon type, and even weapons within a type, have a different moveset, with various jabs, swings, guard breaks, blocks, and parries. You also have the very common invincibility dodge that costs stamina, and each character has a skill that costs mana.

A long list of things you can do, and indeed, the game has a reasonable amount of content. While all these mechanics fit together well and are generally not badly implemented, they also aren't very novel. If you've played the games it takes inspiration from, I can't really say you'll get any kind of new experiences here. At the same time, many mechanics are not implemented to a particularly high level of quality either. As examples... I found the skill system very disappointing - mana isn't super common, so you would assume your skill is your ace in the hole, but they're all pretty underwhelming. The sword and shield weapon has a block, but most enemy attacks go through the block, dealing damage and staggering you. If you parry an attack, the enemy gets knocked back, and some weapons don't have enough range to actually retaliate after a successful parry. So it's almost always better to just pick a weapon that just attacks and use the dodge that every character has.
Some of the enemy design is also questionable. Some can perfectly track your movement and execute a long-range attack. Or some enemies who get an "elite" modifier, and thus can't be stunned, which makes them significantly tougher because their base moveset kind of expects you to stun them, else you take damage. Encountering these unbalanced enemies often leads to losing one or multiple of your 6 lives, while many rooms are easy enough that you can just blast through them without much care.

Overall, I'm not quite sure what the biggest problem with the game is, and why I decided to not entirely finish it. I would guess it's just a combination of everything. Many small problems, balance, polish, subpar translation, slightly lacking animations. Like, none of it is bad, but I also can't point to anything that this game really does well, or that makes it stand out. If you want a top-down Binding of Isaac with Souls-like combat and Dead Cells metaprogression, then I think it's fine to give this game a try. I just don't think it's quite good enough to really recommend it.