Solas 128

Visually, Solas 128 looked like an interesting puzzle game. Rhythmic beams of light packets flow from map to map, and your goal is to figure out a combination of mirrors and other objects to bounce, combine, and separate the beams from their emitters to their receivers. There are some 150-plus little grid-based screens, each their own puzzle to a degree, but some also combining with adjacent ones to form a larger puzzle.

I played for about an hour, beating maybe a third of the levels. They get harder as the game goes on, but I'd guess the whole game still has several hours of puzzles, which is a nice amount. But what's not so nice is that the puzzles never got enjoyable. At first, there was a lot of freedom, so everything was too easy. Just place the mirrors in the right place and you win. But as the levels went on, there were more and more restrictions, which did make the process of finding the right solution harder, but they didn't make it more satisfying. To a degree, it felt like you could find every possible way to arrange things on the board, and eventually you just won.

It's difficult to make good puzzle games, but that's no excuse, and neither the presentation nor the puzzles themselves were particularly good here. Even as more mechanics are added, the game feels minimalistic. Even as the puzzles get difficult, your toolbox isn't large enough to feel like your solutions are anything of your own. It's 90% just a dry quest to find the board state that the developer intended, and I don't believe that makes for a fun game.

Trials of Fire

Trials of Fire is yet another rougelike deckbuilder, except this time it has both a battlemap and an overworld map, both made of hexes. You start by choosing 3 out of 9 classes, each with their own deck, passive ability, and unique equipment slots. Some cards are common cards shared between characters, others are specific to the class. There's no real story mode in the main game. You're just plopped onto the map and given an arrow which way the main quest lies. On the way you can complete various smaller encounters, upgrading your deck, getting new equipment, upgrading your equipment, and gathering supplies to rest every now and then.

To me, there's nothing really new here. The map is nearly purely cosmetic, and there are no real decisions to be made regarding where to go. Just selecting one out of three options for the next encounter would have been the same and easier. Equipment giving new cards is interesting, but they seem to focus more on quantity than quality, so the average card is often not even good enough that I'd want them all. Equipment also gives extra temporary HP (once per combat) and opportunities to swap out your hand, so it's usually worth it, but still a bit frustrating at times. The characters don't seem to have a lot of synergy with each other, and not even themselves. Sure, the cards they get thematically fit them, but it never felt very exciting playing any of them or progressing my deck. This is by far the biggest problem this game has, and the largest contributor to the "it doesn't feel fun" issue, I believe. There are also some balance problems. Some cards and tactics are crazy strong while others are garbage. This does extend to the classes as a whole, to a degree.

Overall, it's actually a fine game. I played for a few hours, and time flew by faster than I expected, but looking back at all the other roguelike deckbuilders I've played, this just doesn't measure up, and I don't even hold the others in high regard. Some of it comes down to this clearly being made by a smaller team, and some comes down to bad game design. If you're a fiend for roguelike deckbuilders and want to play all of them that are half-decent, then go ahead. But this game is #54 on the list of roguelike deckbuilders right now, so there's no shortage of selection among supposedly better titles. I wouldn't recommend trying it.

YumeCore

Rolling a random game from my backlog and getting something from more than 5 years ago often really shows how I had different standards back then. At least, I can not imagine anything that would possess me to add YumeCore to my backlog today.
This is like the most indie Japanese game I can imagine. Graphics and animations straight out of MS Paint. Absolutely nonsensical storyline. And someone just wanted to make a beat 'em up game.

I don't really know what to say about this. The fighting mechanics are on par with some of the better Flash games I played 15 years ago. The graphics aren't. They're worse, somehow. But you get to beat up some trash enemies, and each stage ends with a boss fight, I think. I didn't really feel like playing past the first stage. Oh, and you can grab a different powerup for each stage, if you want. Maybe there's some message at the end, but I'm not expecting anything worthwhile.

In case this needs to be said, I don't recommend it. I'm surprised at the positive review score for a 3 hour game of this... quality.

Frincess&Cnight

I decided to try a puzzle platformer for a change. It's small, rather unknown, but highly rated by its small audience. It's Frincess&Cnight, and it can be played as either a single player game where you control two characters, or you can give control of the other character to a friend in local co-op.

One player plays the Frog Princess - the Frincess, and the other the Cat Knight - the Cnight. The Frincess can walk on walls and ceilings by grabbing them with her tongue, as well as eating the Cnight and either carrying him or shooting him as a projectile. Meanwhile the Cnight has the ability to jump, use platforms, act as a wall for the Frincess, and smash or push blocks. There are other small differences, but the point is that they have very different movesets. Together, they must navigate the levels and both reach the end without either dying.

There are 55 single-screen levels, and it took us 3 hours to beat. Playing alone might be a bit more difficult, as some levels do expect timing, and could take an extra hour. I found the abilties of both characters, as well as the fact that they were divided at all, to be quite unique. Puzzle platformers often live by having some idea that hasn't been done before, and it definitely succeeded in that regard. As for the level design... The single-screen levels were cute, and didn't require checkpoints, but they're not as impressive as a full map. Also, the first levels were extremely easy, with only a couple levels that took more than 2 minutes in the first 45 levels. After that, the difficulty quickly ramped up, and a couple of the later levels even took us 15-30 minutes, but sometimes for unsatisfying reasons like trial and error. The various mechanics introduced weren't always pushed to their limits, and were rarely combined in a meaningful way.

Overall, while Frincess&Knight is far from a masterpiece, and doesn't have amazing level or puzzle design, it was never bad either, and didn't overstay its welcome. For the low price of 1 euro that it's often sold for these days, I would recommend it if you like puzzle platformers and have a friend to play with. If not, then this isn't really the game to step into the genre from.

Overload

I've played a few six-degrees-of-freedom shooters before, and while I don't remember liking them, I figured it's been a while, so I gave Overload a try. It is the highest rated game of the genre on Steam after all.

Sadly, the attempt didn't last very long. I found little excitement in the game mechanics. Aside from the novelty of moving around in 6DOF zero-gravity, which I'm not even sure is a positive, as it only furthered my disorientation in the already labyrinthine 3D level layout, it was a pretty basic game about moving, dodging, and shooting. Sure, there's different weapons and upgrades, and other small things, but it doesn't really change the game. It seems very much like the "boomer shooter" genre (the naming origins of which I still don't understand), which I have tried plenty of times to know is not for me. The focus is more on speedrunning or getting high scores, as well as repeating the same content over and over to get better. Maybe it's good if you like that genre, but it's one of my least favorites.
I did notice nearly all reviews talking about a game by the name of Descent, which is a game from the 90s made by the same people? I guess the postive review score comes nearly entirely from old fans of that, happy they got a modernized version of something they used to love. Honestly, 20 years ago, I would have loved this game too.

Overall, I don't like Overload. I blame it mostly on disliking the genre, but if you like simple shooters then maybe it's worth a try. Supposedly there's nothing better than this in the 6DOF genre. But yeah, personally, I have no ground on which to recommend it. I just don't get what makes these games interesting.

Mini-Dead

Mini-Dead is a short and simple free boss fight game. You can fight three bosses (and later all three at once), each with its own unique attack pattern. You yourself are pretty unique as well, moving instantaneously to whereever your mouse is, unless you hold it down, in which case you shoot a beam, which is your only source of damage, and upon release, teleport to the location of your mouse. It's purely a game of dodging and then finding time to stand still and attack. Impossible to fail in slow-motion, as you can teleport to any point on the map instantly and with no delay, but as a counterbalance, the game is anything but slow.

Turns out it's supposed to be a sort of advertisement for the developer's other similar, also small, but not free, game. I can't say it won me over, but I didn't manage to get bored in the 15 minutes it took me. Would I recommend it? Probably not. While it's not bad for what it is, it also isn't good, but most importantly, it isn't much anything at all.

Regions of Ruin

I tend to be a little more lenient with free games and games I already find in my library, as they are effectively free. And so I had somehow gotten Regions of Ruin, though I'm quite sure I never bought it. It doesn't have a great review score, but honestly, I'm surprised it got one even that high.

Aside from having relatively much content and not garbage art, everything else I saw in this game looked like someone's solo first commercial video game project. Incredibly clunky movement, the most basic of combat actions, nearly no animations, badly designed UI, unintuitive gameplay... I can't go into depth because I had such a bad time at the start that I quit very shortly after. Let me share my opening minutes.
The tutorial got skipped because an enemy forced me to keep backing off since the game hadn't told me the correct keys for combat yet, and then told me to "dash to skip the tutorial". In an effort to not do that, I pressed space, hoping to either attack or jump over the enemy, but it was of course the key to dash. (Jump existed but was unbound. Or maybe it wasn't, because half the UI wasn't visible due to the text not fitting into its boxes, so settings and/or keybindings seemed unlabelled.) Arrow keys were the ones to attack by the way. After forcibly skipping the tutorial I tried to gather wood with the axe I was given at the start considering I was in a forest and this was a game about building a settlement (among other things), but of course trees can't be cut down for wood and the axe is effectively cosmetic. I proceeded to run into an archer who was out of my reach because I couldn't aim my throwing weapon, and who proceeded to kill me because I wasn't told I could use my shield.

I hope even just a fraction of my frustrations got through from this. I did even give it another try by restarting the game, but even "properly" playing, the game was far from anything fun in neither the combat nor the building aspect. Stay away from this one, it's really bad.

Swallow the Sea

Swallow the Sea is a free 15 minute long game I picked up due to its high review score. In hindsight, this may have been from an influencer playing it, as I found nothing noteworthy here.

It uses the mechanic of "you can eat things smaller than you" and places you in a rather unsettling underwater maze-like area. You have to clear each area, eating smaller things, avoiding larger things. And then there's some semi-cryptic thing at the end.

That's all there is to say. I wouldn't recommend it. It's pretty boring and very short, even among this non-novel genre it is in. I can't say it's even worth the 15 minutes it took.

Forager

I usually don't even give games a try that have been abandoned mid-development or immediately after the release, especially if the abandonment has been this... ugly. But I don't want to get into the drama, and since I saw this was still very highly rated despite it all, I figured I would give Forager a try.

As of right now, Forager is the 25th highest rated "Open World Survival Craft" game on Steam. This says more about how much people love the genre than how good or bad the game is though, since the reviews are pretty decent. However, I still don't get it.
Forager seems to play the same as most all other games in this genre. Collect materials, craft them into better materials and build things, upgrade your tools, maybe explore and fight some, and repeat ad nauseam. I understand the appeal of seeing progression and numbers going up, but I don't see the appeal of doing this via repetitive manual labor.
Admittedly, I didn't stick around Forager for very long since if the start of the game wasn't going to be any interesting, the end definitely wasn't, with it being abandoned and all. Despite minor differences in format, with an initially very limited area, and additional space being unlocked by purchasing new islands, there seemed to be no fundamental difference in the gameplay here from any other game in this genre that I've played.

This review is a bit too short for me, but I really have nothing more to say. I obviously didn't enjoy it since I don't like the genre, but even for fans of the genre, perhaps a more complete and nuanced title would be preferable. Even just in the last year, 4 higher rated open world survival crafting games have been released, and I'm sure more are coming.