Core Keeper

Core Keeper is a newer game I picked up because it got pretty decently popular at launch and in general received good feedback about being like 50% Terraria with a bunch of ideas from other great games mixed in, and because I finally figured out a way for my friends to get to play it.

As mentioned, Core Keeper definitely takes the most inspiration from Terraria, but is top-down instead of side-scrolling. It is a sort of survival crafting game, where you find higher and higher tiers of resources in the world and use them to craft better and better equipment and tools that let you tackle harder and harder challenges. It looks great, the combat is pretty fun, and there's a lot of content with several tiers of bosses and optional minibosses. Progression happens both through getting better gear, as well as leveling up your skills by using them and further specializing through a mini skill tree for each skill. About half the skills are for different combat styles, and the others are for mining, fishing, farming, cooking, etc. It starts off great, and on paper it is great, but the more I play it, the more I find things that annoy me.

I think the first thing that stuck out to me was how little this game cares for the environment and what you've built. To a degree, this is also true in Terraria, with end-game tools prioritizing reckless mining, leaving huge holes everywhere, it's much worse here. Many enemies and your attacks may destroy terrain. While this is immersive in terms of combat and seeing enemies tunneling along, it really sucks when enemies find their way into your base and destroy everything you've built and all your neatly organized chests, and also leaves the world rather ugly elsewhere with there just being progressively fewer and fewer walls to be found anywhere.
Secondly, I think this commits the same sin as many other survival games that want to have decoration options. It lets you find those decorations out in the world instead of letting you craft them. It's fine for rare decorations, but my inventory instantly gets full with all this junk as I explore. If I want to enjoy exploration, I have to delete all of it, leaving me with nothing to decorate my base with. If I bring it all with me, I also have to have tens and tens of chests just for these decorations. Aside from decorations, far too many other items are also found through drops, and in general inventory space and managing where everything goes is not thought through and a terrible experience.
And finally, just in general, Core Keeper tries to do too much. It picks these little mechanics from different games but fails to incorporate them properly into the core gameplay. There is automated mining and conveyor belts, but not enough tools to actually automate doing anything else. Farming works for plants, but there isn't much to do with them, because the other half of the food or potions you can make with them requires too much work from random fish drops or seeking out certain enemies. NPC housing is terribly undercooked, with no indication on how it even works, and you can just chuck them all into a single room with 10 beds in it. And there's many more cases like it.

I just think Core Keeper bit off more than it could chew and released without polishing all of its mechanics and how they influence each other. And I don't think it will ever get around to polishing everything. If you just want another Terraria that's pretty much worse in every single aspect, Core Keeper is still a fine game, because even at being only a fraction of what Terraria is, Terraria is just so good. I'll give it a partial recommendation, because fun can still be had with it, but honestly, I know I'm going to enjoy replaying Terraria for the 6th time more than I enjoyed playing this.

Blood Card 2

If I had to guess why I decided to give Blood Card 2 a try, then it's because I still like the idea of roguelike deckbuilders, and back in early 2021 when this was released, there weren't yet that many good ones. I don't think I'd pick something like this up these days, but I decided to honor my past decision by playing this regardless.

So, you pick a class, you pick a difficulty, and your goal is to work through a number of floors, each with a few columns of enemies. Defeating an enemy causes the column to shift down. At the end of one of the columns is a boss. Beat all enemies to win. Each turn you have energy, you have cards with energy cost, damage, and various effects, and you play them until you're out of energy or cards. Then the enemies attack you, and you lose health. Pretty standard stuff, with the exception that you don't explicitly have health. Instead, enemies steal cards from you and you lose when you run out of cards.
I played two full runs at the first difficulty (which was far too easy, but I couldn't play the harder one until I beat it, and even then I could only do so with the character I beat it with, which was a shame) and both classes had a strong synergy with this card stealing mechanic. One generated cheap cards that allowed him to pad his health pool but not clutter his hand while the other got strong buffs from enemies holding onto specific cards of hers. I would assume the rest of the classes were similarly designed around this mechanic, which I quite enjoyed.

Overall, the game design and balance were surpisingly good, given that this game has a very basic UI, and just about zero animations. I'm not very up-to-date with what this genre in general has to offer, but still, this felt a bit weak to me. If you care about graphics at all, then this definitely isn't a game for you. The gameplay wasn't bad enough to really point out something terrible, but I just didn't get a feeling of excitement while playing it. I think everything was just kind of made to be passable and good enough, and it kind of is. If you're just looking for another roguelike deckbuilder to play, this should have a good amount of content time-wise, but nothing about it really sticks out to me, and I wouldn't generally recommend it.

Record of Lodoss War-Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth-

I played a game today that has a name that's a bit too long to write out. Let's just call it Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth. It's from the Record of Lodoss War franchise, the origins of which I find too interesting to not share. Apparently it started in the 1980s as a series of "replay" novels of D&D games, which are basically just transcripts that have been edited and illustrated to be more appealing to read. So you'd just be reading about how some guys played a D&D campaign. Apparently it became popular enough that the author of these novels started a regular novel series. Several manga, anime, and games were also made based off of it. Most of all of this was before the turn of the century, but every now and then another something gets made. Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth is one such work, focusing on the most popular character - Deedlit.

But enough about the backstory. The game is a rather linear metroidvania with some focus on action platforming. It's quite a basic implementation of the metroidvania genre, with little to set it apart. The 7 hour runtime doesn't leave for too many different abilities to be unlocked. You get better forms of jumping, which also help in combat, but most of the map unlocks through finding keys for locked doors (and the ability to breathe underwater, which was only used to access two areas). There is no stat or skill point allocation. You just get stronger with levels, and also get stronger weapons, which have only slightly different attack patterns and don't really change how you play. The main thing setting it apart is the spirit system, where you can switch between two elements. You are immune to attacks of the same element (and in fact gain energy for ranged attacks and spells from them). But enemies may also be immune to some elements, forcing you to make yourself vulnerable to land an attack. This forces certain fighting patterns, and is easily the best feature they have.

Sadly, it's about the only good non-standard feature they have. There's a whole system about how you gain spirit levels in the element you're not using when fighting, and lose them along with your HP when getting hit. At max spirit level, you passively regenerate HP, and quite quickly, while in that element. Well, it turns out that a super-aggressive playstyle allows you to deplete enemy HP fast enough and gain levels fast enough, that most bosses (and of course regular enemies) can be brute forced by just attacking them until your other spirit is full, switching to it, shooting ranged attacks at them until you're full health, and then going in again. I won multiple fights that I had no right to, because I outhealed getting hit by most hits the boss threw at me.
But perhaps it was necessary, as aside from not getting hit (which was quite difficult for not just many bosses, but also many standard enemies), there were few mechanics for counterplay. Most enemies did not use one of the two elements you could switch into. There were no i-frames, no blocking, no parrying. This made for a very tedious game of just beating each other until one of us ran out health.

Overall, while the game is pretty in terms of art, animation, and music, the gameplay, balance, and enemy design are lacking. Sadly, the latter are the more important parts of a game. At places, it feels unfinished, or some mechanics underutilized, but I would not have wished it to be longer. It didn't overstay its welcome due to being so short, even though it didn't have much interesting to do. The story, while present, was kind of cryptic and luckily not very prominent. Maybe it would have made more sense if I knew anything about the franchise.
I wouldn't say it's really a bad game, but I also wouldn't recommend it unless you're a big fan of metroidvanias, and don't mind that Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth is short and doesn't have anything novel to offer in the genre.

HighFleet

HighFleet is visually a very interesting game. I was immediately drawn in by the very detailed UI, which tries to look like a real-life cockpit or control station, depending on what you're doing at the moment. In fact, the whole art style is great, fitting together well and giving the game a distinct look. It's overwhelming with tens of different knobs and buttons, but almost none are cosmetic - each serves a purpose.
But what is the game about? Well, there's a lot here, as HighFleet is actually kind of composed of multiple games. It tries to offer a pretty comprehensive simulation of all your activities as the commander of a fleet in a war. Navigating on a map, tracking enemy fleets, avoiding being tracked by enemy fleets, a bit of diplomacy, ship building, fleet management, and finally a sort of helicopteresque dogfighting simulator.

Now, what I said may already ring some warning bells, and if it does, you'd be right. The game tries to do a lot, and that doesn't work well. While everything looks good visually, each separate element of the game hasn't gotten enough attention to really make it deep enough to be enjoyable. For better or worse, the systems are complex enough, which fits well with the game's style, but this additional complexity doesn't translate well to extra depth. It doesn't help that the different types of gameplay are not from adjacent genres, but often quite distinct ones.

I sadly failed to enjoy any aspect of the game. None of it was terrible, but there was clearly a focus on presentation, not gameplay. I think I would have loved to see this level of detail focused into a single one of the multiple games offered. There are definitely good and unique ideas here, but ultimately the game tries to be too vast and ends up too shallow, and for that I can't recommend it.