The Magister

I remember Nerdook back from the Flash games era. I think I also remember rather liking his games. But we've come a long way since then, and sadly, the standards have risen. I feel like the quality of his games has not risen alongside those standards. I felt that with his previous games on Steam, and I feel this with The Magister.

The Magister is a rather short (a few hours long) murder mystery themed game that's actually more of a roguelike deckbuilder. In fact, you have two decks - one for combat, and one for talking. I will credit Nerdook for not copying the common formula for this genre. Instead, the two decks and the two game modes operate differently. During talking, you are on a turn limit and you accumulate points. You can spend those points either to make progress or to get more cards to make a stronger deck, just for that "battle". In the actual combat, you have a grid and a turn "timer". Cards have time costs, as does movement, but spending more time only delays when you next get to make your turn.

Honestly, maybe they should have used more common elements from existing games, because not only did I feel confused at times on how to play, I also really didn't enjoy what I was doing. The cards I played, the actions I took, none of them felt satisfying, especially compared to the combos I've come to expect from these kinds of card games. Combine that with the low production values common in an indie game and I had a pretty poor time.
Honestly, the game's not even highly rated on Steam, and even if you do like it, it's quite short. I think this one's a pretty clear failure and not something I could recommend.

Pyre

Ever since Bastion, I've been on a quest to eventually play through all Supergiant Games'... games. Their games have always been quite story-focused and innovative. Innovation means taking a risk, and doing so with every game is quite admirable. I'm glad it finally paid off with Hades, though I have not gotten around to it yet. Instead, today, it's Pyre.

Pyre definitely continues on having a focus on the story, more so than their previous games. The world this time around is some wasteland, where outcast criminals such as yourself have been exiled. Your goal is to participate in the Rites and win your way out of exile. The world and characters are very colorful, literally and figuratively, with a bunch of fantasy-races alongside our familiar humans. While far from fully voiced, the characters speak in a made-up language, which sounds oddly familiar, and adds a very nice touch. You get to, on occasion, talk to the various characters that make up your party. Your decisions, as well as the outcomes of gameplay matches, have consequences to the story. Whether these consequences reach far into the story or drastically alter its course, I was not able to tell. All in all, a lot of effort has been put into the worldbuilding, and I think the result on that front is excellent.
However, it's not all good. Many people coming to expect a game might find themselves spending more time reading, as if they were playing a visual novel. I would personally not object to that either, were the story and the writing excellent, but unlike the worldbuilding, they don't quite reach that level.

As for the gameplay, it's mostly a sort of 3v3 ball game. You control one character at a time, and your goal is to get the ball from the center of the field to to opposition's base. The ball can be run with, passed, and thrown. But while carrying the ball, you're vulnerable to other characters approaching you. If not carrying the ball, you can instead "shoot" at the enemies. There are some tricks for evasion, and different characters have different abilities, not to mention different attributes like speed or the size of their "aura" and attacks, allowing you to create your own team compositions depending on your own idea of a good strategy. The metagame - character level ups - also encourages you to not always pick the same team, even if you like them, offering nice variety.
The problem is mainly that I just don't like the gameplay. It's a kind of sports game, and it's just not something exciting to me. The boards are small, and the actions you can take are not very varied. It almost feels more like an arcade game. I'm also not terribly good at it, and losing doesn't just make you try again but furthers the story anyways, making the gaps between matches rather lengthy, and opportunities to learn to play well scarce.

I'd give it a partial recommendation. I think it's a fine game in theory, not really having much that would be universally considered a flaw, but in order to like it, you'd need to enjoy character interaction driven visual novels. Enjoying the mechanics of the high-action multi-character ball game, with a bit of party management on the side, is also important, but not as important as really caring for the story. If you're not into a lot of reading, I'd almost certainly stay away.

Everhood

I feel like I'm on a roll of rolling highly rated games which just don't appeal to me in the slightest bit. Everhood is the latest such victim. Again, a game I can only assume I added to my wishlist due to its overwhelmingly positive review rating. I can't remember, but I hope I've lowered the frequency at which I do this.

Everhood is a story-heavy rhythm adventure game. It seems there may be other minigames later on, but as far as I got, it was about jumping between 5 lanes to avoid incoming notes. While dodging every note is significantly easier than hitting every note, you're given only about 2-3 consecutive failures before losing the level. Worse still, the notes match the rhythm as the enemy fires them, not as they reach you, so you can't really use your ears for dodging them, bringing into question if this can be called a rhythm game at all.
As for what the story is about, I couldn't tell you. It was all some goofy abstract humor as far as I saw, and taking the happening events at face value seemed pointless. I didn't like it.

I mean the music is nice, I guess, but I will never play a game solely for the music (or the art). I found no fun in the gameplay, and no sense in the story, so I can't find a reason myself to recommend it to you. A lot of people say it reminds them of Undertale, which might also explain why I didn't like it. I can't say I made the connection myself.

Marie's Room

There are some things I look at when selecting a game, especially in terms of things that might hint that it's not going to be a good time. For one, free games tend to get more praise. This is somewhat surprising, as the low barrier of entry should mean more people who aren't as likely to like it will try it, but perhaps the bias from rating something highly because they didn't have to pay for it outweighs it? The other relevant thing here is that story games tend to be rated higher. I also can't quite explain this, but perhaps the group of people that likes games without much or any gameplay don't like leaving negative reviews? Well, games like Marie's Room reinforce these preconceptions in me.

It's a short free game rated at 93%, but it used to be overwhelmingly positive. I beat it in 30 minutes. You explore a room and recall the general life details of yourself (a girl) and your friend (another girl) during your teenage years. I found both the storytelling method as well as the story to be utterly unremarkable. In the rare case you would want to try it, I won't spoil it, but I've heard more interesting stories from real people I know. I mean, sure, in the context of a real story of a friend, it would be a very interesting tale, but in the context of a probably fictuous tale of someone I don't know about, it's garbage. Is that really the best they could come up with? And why do people like it?

I don't get it. It's not revolting, but it's boring. There is not a single memorable or interesting moment in the whole game. Free or not, there's so many better stories out there to read, preferrably not in a walking simulator or even a "game" format at all.

Grime

Grime is yet another Metroidvania Souls-like. That means it's a 2D (in terms of gameplay, not art) side-scrolling platformer with a focus on combat, but also a big interconnected map and backtracking. The usual. In fact, it's so usual that I quickly got bored of it. As I always say, if you're going to make a game in a genre that already has a lot of games, especially one that has a lot of good games, and you're not going to have some truly transformative innovation, then you have to make a really, really good game. Grime is definitely not a bad game, but in my short time with it, I saw very little innovation, and definitely nothing so good that it would keep me playing.

If anything, the biggest innovation I saw was the absorption mechanic. It effectively works as a parry, as you have to time it as the enemy attack is about to connect. This basically just instantly kills the enemy and consumes their essence, letting you collect them and become stronger. It also acts as a health potion once you absorb a few enemies. Of course, as the game goes on and enemies get tougher, you can't just absorb everyone anymore, at least not right away. Personally, not a big fan of parrying, especially as a mandatory game mechanic, so this little half-innovation isn't even a positive for me.

Personally, I wasn't a fan of the aesthetic, music, or anything else I saw either. Again, it's not a bad metroidvania, but with how much selection, and how many stellar options we have to choose from, I find it really hard to recommend it.

Lisa

I opted to let games that have been sitting in my library or wishlist for over 8 years cut in line for what to play next. I hope this won't come to bite me later if I can't keep up with playing through my backlog, but for now, there is only one such game.
For a game with over 10000 overwhelmingly positive reviews, perhaps the 15 minutes I gave Lisa were not enough. But between only picking this up because of its ratings, and literally everything I saw in those first 15 minutes being something I did not like at all, I didn't really think the game was going to do a 180 and become good, even if it did get better.

I understand Lisa is supposed to be a very story heavy game with some RPG elements and a large focus on dark humor. Personally, my initial feeling was that it was very abstract. Scenes just blinked at random intervals and constantly broke the continuity of the story, leaving me confused. The basic animations with little expression didn't help me understand either. I guess I hated the art style in general. Maybe that was part of the point - make the game look ugly, so you'd hate it, because it did feel like I was supposed to feel a resentment towards the game world. I'm not sure that's a great strategy to sell your game, but the reviews say otherwise. The combat system was some weird variation on the traditional turn-based RPG combat, and not only did it look confusing, it also looked unappealing. Any attempts at humor also failed to reach me.

Okay, so, listen. I only played for 15 minutes, so clearly my opinion isn't too relevant, but it was just as bad as it seemed in the screenshots. My personal opinion is that it's garbage, but if you want to follow the review scores like I did when I picked this up, I suppose I can't fault you for that either.

Chaos Zero Nightmare

Time yet again for a relatively timely review, as we'll be looking at another live service game. It's a gacha game by the name of Chaos Zero Nightmare, but it caught my attention due to being a roguelike deckbuilder. Not a novel genre by any means, but I can't say I've seen neither any live service games nor large studios attempt to tackle this genre. It's not large as far as major gacha games go these days, but still large in the grand scheme of gaming.

Instead of the gameplay, let's start with the gacha mechanics. It's basically a one-to-one clone of Genshin or other HoYoVerse games. Standard banners for characters and weapons, and then a rate-up banner for the new character and weapon. They give out a lot of pulls at launch, but generally the free-to-play income seems to settle around getting one 5* a month, which includes one rate-up 5* every other banner (about 6 weeks). Not too generous for a gacha game of its smaller scale, but luckily teams are composed of only 3 characters, and some 4* units are very good, so this shouldn't hamper your progression through the game.

For the gameplay, as mentioned, teams are composed of 3 characters, and each character has their own deck. All the decks are shuffled together, and the characters share most resources like HP, shields, action points, and card draw, but some self-buffs are only for the casting character. The enemies do not share any resources, and can be individually defeated. Most enemy actions also have a timer, ticking down by one each time a card is played. They will act the end of their turn unless the timer reaches zero, in which case they act immediately. It's an interesting mechanic, forcing to spend a little bit more time thinking about the order in which you play the cards, and which enemies you target first.
There are 5 elements in the game. Each character uses a single element, and each enemy is weak to a single element. Using elemental advantage deals 25% more damage, but also reduces the enemy's tenacity bar. Getting the bar to 0 will give an extra action point and increment their timer by 1, which is pretty powerful. This system seems to exist mostly to force team variety and to pull and invest in more characters, but I don't mind. It reduces the mental load of team-building, as you know 2-3 characters of the suitable element are usually best for a given stage. A healer / support might not need to match the element.
Additionally, your characters also receive mental damage, and may experience a mind break if they take too much. This is individual per character, and replaces that character's cards with 0-cost cards with a possible negative effect that you have to go through to recover the character. There is also an out-of-combat gameplay element around this mechanic.
While all this already gives replayability and progression for many hours and would be enough for a regular game, live service can't possibly stop here. There are several progression mechanics for upgrading the characters. One is of course copied from Genshin again, which is the daily farming of equipment with randomized stats. But the other, which you can repeat as often as you want, is the actual deckbuilding part of this game. See, content is divided into two - content where you build your deck, which usually means longer runs, and content where you come in with a pre-built deck, such as most of the daily farming, which is only a few minutes per run. During the longer runs, your characters start with their base deck, but evolve it over the course of the run, upgrading their existing cards, as well as finding ways to remove cards and add new cards which aren't specific to them at all. At the end, you get to save the deck for later use. There is a heavy amount of randomness here as well, so it's almost always possible to get a better run and improve on your decks, if you want to spend the time doing so.

While I can't possibly cover all the features of a gacha game, those are most of them. So, onto the negatives.
I found the story rather uninteresting and lacking plot hooks and events to look forward to, so I don't think that deserves any further mention. You can of course just click through it, but it's a shame nontheless.
The PC client is absolute garbage. Mainly the launcher, but the game itself is also heavily prone to crashing. I had no problems on mobile, and with the fully turn-based nature of this game, it does make for a pretty good mobile game, so if you're looking for a mobile-only game, this isn't a negative.
But by far the biggest problem is that the translation or localization quality is absolutely garbage. For most games, I would not mind, but card games are incredibly dependent on it being very clear what a card does. Even the best card games struggle with this, so you can imagine how bad it is when there are inconsistencies in terminology not just across cards, but even on a single card. I genuinely do not know what about half the cards do by just reading them. Sure, I can try them out in various scenarios and try to figure it out and memorize it for each card, but this is not fun. I feel like so much strategy and planning are stripped from me, and I'm left with just vibes. Again, this is fine if you just want to watch cute anime girls and boys beat the shit out of monsters, and play with your favorite waifus. But that's not the kind of player I am.
On that note, the game is pretty easy. I did not reach the very end, but I did not at any point struggle. Sadly, the game gates you from doing missions you probably aren't prepared for, which is a shame. Forced to do more boring content, never being challenged, even though harder content exists. That's a big negative in my book.

Overall, an intersting idea, but lacking in oh-so-many departments. There is some novelty in the roguelike deckbuilder mechanics, but it's going to feel very familiar if you've already played the genre. There is plenty of content, but this also includes a lot of grinding. Personally, the amount of randomness in the grind is a bit too much for me, and I would prefer more certain avenues of progression. But ultimately, the reason why I already dropped the game is because it is both too easy, and too unstrategic. Card effects are unclear, meaning you're best off just playing this on a more casual level. I can imagine this is completely fine for many players looking for a casual gacha game in some novel genre to them, if they don't usually play indie games. But for me, there's nothing here, and I can't recommend it.

Helltaker

At long last, once a game in the top 20, now the 31st top rated game on Steam, it's Helltaker! Fun fact, I noticed this was going to be my 667th blog post by complete coincidence, so of course I did the only rational thing and kicked the 666th post back by a slot, so that this could be number 666 as it was fated to be.
Did I know this was going to be an incredibly short and simple game that only reached its immense popularity because it was free and had attractive demon girls in it? Of course, but I still had to play it.

Helltaker is mostly a puzzle game. It's composed of 10 short levels. The first ones are rather simple, but a couple of the latter ones are actually very difficult for how small the board it. See, you move on a grid, kicking around skeletons and stone blocks, maybe going over some traps or getting a key on your way to seduce a hot demon girl. You're on a very limited budget of moves, and levels have just about one correct solution. The final level turns to an action game about dodging lasers instead, but that's very easy compared to the puzzles. If you want more content, there's more levels after the end, without the girls, sadly.

Listen, it's not gonna win any awards for being a good puzzle game, but it's honestly decent for what you pay. I definitely don't regret the hour I spent on it. The characters are charming, as brief as your interactions with them are, the music is bopping, and I will admit that if I had to choose any kind of monster girl, it would be a demon girl, so there's that.
Would I recommend it without the sexy demon girls? Probably not. But personally, all things considered, I'll give this a partial recommendation.