Old World

I bought Old World because it was on a 90% sale, but of course also because it is one of the highest rated turn-based 4X games to have come out in the past few years. Sadly, this says more about the poor state of 4X releases than the quality of the game.

Old World is a Civ-like, if you will. You play as a single nation, expanding upon a hex grid map, starting from but a tiny city. The big difference is that while there is technological progression, the game is more focused on the older times, hence the name, ending before the renaissance era. Most else is the same, with expanding your borders, improving resources, building infrastructure and armies, and waging war. There's a large new system with families and dynasties, and what the relations of different characters are to your current leader. This can shape both internal politics, giving bonuses or disadvantages to production, as well as external politics, influencing trade or war. Your current leader also dies after every couple dozen turns, forcing you to build most relationships up again.
My favorite change from Civilization is that cities now have set locations they can be built on the map, meaning there won't be a city every 4 tiles in every direction. Unit managment was also heavily changed, with a global pool of actions shared across all your units. I can't say I liked this though, because most units could now move triple the tiles if you put more actions on them, shattering the idea of a battlefront. Many of the other systems are very similar though, and I actually wish they had tried to do a bit more innovation, because most changes were positive in my eyes, if not very influential, like randomizing the tech tree a bit, so you wouldn't progress through it the same each game.

But how does it compare? Well, sadly I feel like they took a step forward, but two steps back. I don't hate any of the changes they made inherently. While the people management aspect seemed a bit uncomfortable at first, it's honestly a system like any other, if perhaps suffering a bit more from the following problem - there are too many decisions to be made. I think this can be partially attributed to the UI not being the best it can be, meaning you don't have the information for every decision available as you make said decision, but mainly that the consequences of these decisions aren't that impactful. You can't not make the decisions, but making them arbitrarily also feels really against what a strategy game should be like.
In conclusion, it's a bit too similar to Civilization V or 6, and doesn't, as a whole, offer a better experience, so there's little reason to recommend it.

Tales of Arise

I quite enjoyed Tales of Berseria, so naturally, I thought I'd give the next game in the series, Tales of Arise, a try.
As usual, there's a huge focus on the story with cutscenes and dialogue taking up about 40% of the game time. You can kind of skip a lot, but I would insist that if you're not at least moderately interested in the story, don't even bother with this game. The general idea of the story is nothing new - common people rebelling against a magic-wielding oppressive elite. You're playing as a mysterious man who has conveniently forgotten his entire past, and are mainly joined by one of the elite who for some reason has turned on her own people.
The first two hours of the game had maybe 30 minutes of gameplay, and so after having listened to a movie's worth of dialogue, because the story had failed to grasp me, definitely not to the level of Berseria at least (even though it wasn't amazing there either), I dropped it.

As for the gameplay side, the combat felt maybe a little bit better. It's hard to tell after multiple years. It's an action combat system where you control one character in a party of four, with the other characters controlled by AI. You have the option to choose who you control, and actually have a reasonably extensive AI customization menu. It definitely had more options than I felt like I needed to fiddle with, and that's good. What's not good is that the game still hasn't gotten rid of permanent stat increase items that make the most sense to be piled onto a single character, essentially forcing you to choose a main character you will play with all the time, at least if you want to be efficient. You have the usual attack combos, aerial attacks, magic attacks which use a quickly refilling resource, as well as some other attacks. Honestly, nothing remarkable, even without considering that my standards for action RPGs have gone up in the past few years.
The depth of combat and character customization has definitely gone down. Equipment and attacks are simpler, with fewer stats, and there is less choice to be put into what you wish to use. So, again, a step down from the previous game.

As I already said, I got about 2 hours in before I dropped it. It just seems to be worse in every way compared to Tales of Berseria, and even that I would barely say I enjoyed. The graphics are better, I guess, but they're nothing remarkable either.
If you're a fan of the Tales series and want to play it for the story, which you expect you will like, then I guess it's fine to try. But on a personal level, I can't recommend it.

Avorion

Genuinely, by complete coincidence, it's the second game in a row where I still have some old notes left from 2017 when I was writing them for every game I added to my wishlist. I'm not sure how many more games I have notes on but haven't gotten around to playing, but I can't imagine it to be many. Back then I said Avorion "seems to be some kind of Space Sandbox, but I can't quite grasp the main point of it from just briefly looking at it." I don't think that's a wrong assessment. Avorion is indeed a space sandbox, and as sandbox games often are, the goal is a bit arbitrary, and more what you want to do yourself.

There are a whole bunch of features in the game, and while there's a rudimentary tutorial and an encyclopedia in the game to help you learn (not that anyone reads the latter), it can still be very difficult to get a grasp on things. You're only taught how to build a ship, mine resources, fight a couple of enemies, and then told to go figure out some ancient mystery of how to get to the center of the galaxy which has been blocked off by rifts that prevent hyperspace travel.

A very large part of the game is ship building, with everything you own having to be made block-by-block, module-by-module by yourself. There are a lot of customization options with many decorative blocks, coloring, using different shapes, etc. This was easily the part of the game that caused the most friction for me, because I'm not a creative person in the sense of making things with no functional value. I still attempted to engage with the system by making spaceships that looked like spaceships, even if that took more time. Sadly, that backfired, as smaller blocks were significantly more likely to break off, causing you to lose whatever functionality they had or weapons you had mounted on them. The optimal thing was to just make a flying box, using 1 of each functional block, scaled to however large it needed to be, stacked like a sandwich. Also, cover your engines with armor making them visually impossible to use, but the ship-building engine doesn't check for that.
I really wish that since they put so much focus on making your own ships, that there would be more incentives to vary their designs a bit. Like directional thrusters were great, because if you actually understood how torque worked, you knew exactly where to put them for maximal efficiency. That idea clicking for me was the one enjoyable moment I had in ship-building, everything else was just a forced disappointment.

The rest of the game was this expansive simulation of the galaxy with the hundreds (or thousands if you count all the pirates, probably) of factions inhabiting it. Each faction owns territory, has stations, sends out ships to attack other factions, mine, or whatever. It looks really cool, but you realize after a while that aside from some random times pirates maybe occupy a small area, all the factions are actually static. There's no struggle of power, no expansion, nothing of the sort. But the player can still do all those things.
But let's start small. You start with a single ship and basically have options to go mining, trading, or pirate hunting. Mining is the simplest, but doesn't make a lot of money. I still mined my own resources for my ships though. Trading is better at making money and also safer, but figuring out what to buy and sell where is such a chore. You can equip a module that slightly helps, but actual spreadsheets, noting down the prices everywere, are so much more effective, but boring to make. I understand having built-in functionality to remember the prices of everywhere you've been would make trading too easy and strong because the prices are static, but that's a failure of the economy balancing. Finally, combat. This is the most fun and most profitable thing to do. Killing pirates, which there is no shortage of, gets you lots of money, lots of weapons and modules as loot, and greatly improves relations with the local faction.

Another big part of the game, that I didn't engage too much with, is the automation or RTS part. See, just about everything you can do manually, you can do automatically. If you make a ship, you can give it a captain and have it go mining, trading, or fighting on your behalf. This was not explained at all in the tutorial, but is very important for making money as well as tackling larger opponents. At higher tiers, your ship just won't cut it against a whole fleet, so you need a fleet of your own, which needs more money to make.
But it all gets kind of repetitive. There are 6 tiers of resources, and some story quests that you can do while moving up the tiers, closer to the center of the galaxy, but each tier is mostly the same. Acquire the building knowledge and then upgrade everything you have to that tier. One of the reasons I didn't want to engage with the automation aspect early, was because my stations and things built in the outer rim of the galaxy lost a lot of relevancy when moving to a higher tier, and rebuilding them all would have been bothersome.

I still played several tens of hours of this game, and despite many of its flaws, it's better than any other space sim I've played. It's just that the genre itself is not a very thriving one. I'm really sad to see all the wasted potential of this game. It desperately needs more incentive to do various things, more variety as you progress, and a deeper simulation that makes the world actually dynamic. These are all very hard things to make, but right now it's just too much of a boring sandbox - the sand is static and you can ignore most of the tools in the sandbox in favor of the cookie cutter.
Regardless of all the flaws, I had enough fun for quite many hours, and so I'd be disingenuous not putting this on my favorite games of all time list. It's at a low place on the list, but until we get another big space sim that manages to be better than this, it will probably stay on there, and it will be the space sim I recommend to people.

Hollow Knight

I'm still surprised whenever I finally get around to playing a game that has been sitting in my backlog for so long that I still have short notes from back when I was writing them for every game I added to my backlog before playing it. And indeed, Hollow Knight was one of the older games I still hadn't played, at almost 9 years old. I wrote "Another metroidvania. I like how it looks. As for the gameplay side, seems pretty standard, but well polished?" Having finished it, honestly, that's a pretty spot on assessment.

While each next metroidvania I play seems to tell me that I'm not actually that interested in the genre as I think I am, I still like to think I've played many games from this genre. And Hollow Knight is very, very standard. There is a slightly larger focus on combat than platforming, but if you just think of the most basic metroidvania features - jumping, dashing, double jumping, directional attacks, then this is the core here as well. There's no unique mechanic that sets this apart from other games. You have the ability to "pogo", which is a mini-jump by hitting an enemy or hazard below you with a melee attack, which is used for some platforming. The most special thing it has is an energy system that is used both for casting spells, which are attacks with higher range, as well as healing yourself, possibly even mid-combat if you have the time. You regain this energy by landing melee attacks. All these powers are incrementally unlocked from various parts of the map. You also get passive powerups you get to slot in and out up to your maximum capacity that also increases throughout the game. But this feature list is not a good reason to play this game.

I found the game to have too much traveling for my liking. There is a lot of backtracking, which is expected of a metroidvania, but fast travel options are limited, and most of the regular map traversal is a trivial affair because you generally get enough energy from combat to heal any damage you take. Maybe this is a good thing, because checkpoints are also somewhat far apart, and having to make multiple attempts just to get anywhere over and over again is no better. Still, I would have liked a way to engage less with the trivial content I had already beaten, and more with just the new content. This also ties into the problem I often see, where difficult content, such as boss fights (or most notably in this game, the Colosseum of Fools), require you to go through an easy but lengthy journey (or simple early phases of the fight) to get to them, only to be wiped out immediately at the hard part. I have no problem with trying something difficult and failing 10, 20, maybe even 50 times, but only if you don't force me to do something menial to earn every individual attempt.

There were some other minor problems I had. Such as that there was too much hidden content. The developers were seemingly fine with me not experiencing whole parts of the game just because I overlooked the starting point of these parts. It didn't really make the rest of the game worse, but it just puzzles me why they wouldn't make such major blocks of content (The Grimm Troupe in my case, though I feel I almost missed a couple more) more easily discoverable. This isn't talking about various little secrets or fun interactions that could be found, because hiding those is also a staple of metroidvanias, and makes it more fun when you do discover them.
And, finally the difficulty. I think the overall difficulty of the game was fine. At its hardest during most of the game, it wasn't too hard, and it wasn't too easy. I never got stuck, but I also never went more than a couple hours without really having to put in effort to succeed. But beyond the first ending, the so-to-say "true" or "better" endings require a lot more work. I found the difficulty spike to be quite egergious. I would not have minded slightly more difficult bonus content at the end of the game, but the difficulty spike from the (first) last boss to the first optional boss was crazy. There was no point for me to slowly get better over time. It was either "beat your head against a wall for 10 hours until you get better" or "quit". And I did quit, which is fine because I had beaten the game, but I can still wish I had some intermediately difficult content to do.

Writing this, I went into a lot of things I disliked, and not a lot of things I liked. But there isn't a lot to talk about on the positives of this game. And by that I mean that it didn't do anything remarkable. I was never wowed by Hollow Knight, but I have to admit that the developers took the standard metroidvania formula, and made a really, really solid game out of it. If I had to praise something, it would be the length of the game at 40-60 hours. I was consistently amazed at how there was always yet another region to explore. While I really would have liked to see some new unique and exciting gameplay mechanic that could sell this game, I still have to concede that this is the best metroidvania I have ever played. It took me a long time to get through it because I was never hooked, but I'm amazed I kept wanting to come back for a whole 50 hours, and I really can't think of another metroidvania that would come close to the level of quality, polish, and amount of content that Hollow Knight has.
I can both want something better, and admit that I think it deserves the spot of the highest rated metroidvania on Steam, as well as a slot in the top 50 highest rated games overall. I would without a doubt recommend it to anyone intersted in metroidvanias.

Mindustry

I first played Mindustry some 8 years ago on a phone. It wasn't actually that bad as a mobile game, but it was rather bare-bones. It was clearly part of the first wave of Factorio clones, and as a small indie game didn't really have much to compete with Factorio even when it came to Steam a couple years later as a PC game. But recently, while looking through what the highest rated RTS games are on Steam, this came up in the top 5. At first I thought, "this must be mislabeled - it's not really an RTS game any more than Factorio is", but I took a look at it, and it's clearly gone way more in the direction of an RTS, and had a whole lot more updates over the years, being seemingly in constant, albeit slow, development.

The factory-building elements are still simple - undepletable resources, single-lane conveyors, and only a couple of production steps from raw resources to a finished product. But what is the finished product? Well, raw resources themselves can be used for manual construction or ammo for turrets, but otherwise they usually make units. Or upgrades of units. Lower tier units building into higher tier units is probably the most complicated production step in the game, but even then it's just feeding a bunch of mostly-raw resources to each constructor.

I would say the belt management is a much larger challenge than setting up the right production lines, but I can't say it's as enjoyable. The RTS aspect also enforces a very strict time pressure, meaning you have no time to plan your factories, calculate ratios, or anything of the sort. This is a huge detriment to the factory-building aspect of this game. Similarly, while this game has the most RTS elements of any automation game I've played, it's not actually a good RTS. Perhaps due to compatibility with phones, the unit controls are quite bad. And for whatever reason, the AI is really bad, failing to display any semblance of intelligence beyond beelining their units into your core, even if that means rushing past your defenses and never building up a larger force to attack with. Maybe for that reason, to give the AI a fighting chance, most units in the game can actually ignore your walls and turrets and just go straight over them. It also can't understand the concept of linearly rebuilding its base, and instead rebuilds random blocks that have been destroyed.
While the current system with building units makes it viable as a PvP RTS, I think it would have found more success as an automation tower defense game. Either closer to Factorio, but more combat oriented, or closer to Creeper World, but more automation oriented.

Much like many games before it, Mindustry has tried to combine two different genres of games, but instead of managing to combine them harmoniously to something greater than the sum of their parts, what we're left with are a rather poor factory-builder and a rather poor RTS. On the bright side, it is available for the lovely price of free if you go over to its Itch site. It's also open-source, so that's cool. In fact, here you can see all the places you can get this game. Would I recommend getting it? Not really, but it's not that bad. For something completely free, it's actually decent, so maybe try it if the price is an important factor.

Revolution Idle

Steam should really have tag for incremental games. There's "Idler" or "Clicker", where these games can usually be found under, but as the genre has evolved over the years, developers have realized that neither the clicking nor the waiting aspect are really what players desire, although the latter is usually acceptable to a degree. As it happens every so often, I was looking for another such game to sate my "number go up" urge. I ended up on a somewhat less well rated game, Revolution Idle.

This is a pretty standard incremental game. Buy upgrades that keep increasing in price to make your number go up faster. Then reset them to make them go even higher even faster the next run. This prestige mechanic is then stacked on top of itself, so higher levels of prestige reset the gains from lower levels of prestige, but give even more bonuses. There are also some passive bonuses that never reset, mainly from achievements, but even without considering them, the resets aren't something to fret over too much. Prestiging gives enough of a bonus that getting back to where you were usually takes minutes, if not seconds or milliseconds.

Eventually the numbers start going too fast, so you unlock automation options. The ones that buy the lowest level number-go-up generators are fine, if not entirely optimal, but the automations for the different prestige options make it look like the developer doesn't really understand the mathematics behind his own game. Sure, it's one issue that the conditions are a bit simplistic and thus not entirely optimal, but even with the level of simplicity, they're terribly unoptimal and it slightly hurts to see them doing their job so poorly. Losing a few seconds here and there isn't a big thing, but in incremental games, the gains are also incremental, so the inefficiency is quite insane. But manually managing them is also too much work, so that's one thing that really sucks.
The other thing is that this game seems quite familiar to Antimatter Dimensions. I wouldn't say it's a ripoff, but it does give a very similar feel, except just worse. So, this lack of novelty was also something that kind of put me off.

Overall, I played for about 2 days, which isn't little, but it also isn't a lot for an incremental game. It also goes against Steam's rules, by offering to show you in-game ads for extra progress. If you're somehow entirely out of incremental games to play, Revolution Idle is an okay one to play, but there are definitely better ones out there. If you still want something similar, try Antimatter Dimensions first.

Griftlands

Griftlands is a roguelike deckbuilder that's currently just barely in the top 1000 highest rated games on Steam. You can play with one of three characters, each with slightly different cards and playstyles, but overall still following the same rules. Each character also has a different campaign, completing which is the goal of the game. A campaign is divided into a few days over which you must complete various tasks. The tasks have some variety and are drawn from a random pool of tasks that are appropriate for the current situation, but there are also always tasks that form the main storyline. Still, depending on your decisions, you can shape which characters you encounter, which tasks they give you, and to a degree what kind of ending you get. The roleplay aspect is very strong in this game, as you encounter a ton of characters each run, and none are randomly generated. Each character has a role in the world, and can be encountered in appropriate places. There's a fair bit of overlap, so you couldn't break the game by killing off key characters, but it's still very cool to see how your past decisions can come back to haunt you because you now need to deal with someone you screwed over in the past.
The deckbuilder part of the game is divided into two parts - negotiation and combat. While a sufficient quantity of violence will usually solve all problems, it also carries much greater reprecussions. Going around killing everyone generally doesn't earn you a good reputation and will make your future endeavors more difficult. On the other hand, negotiation doesn't work with everyone, but if successfully executed can often get you out of situations without upsetting anyone. Combat is a more familiar experience. You have action points, you play cards, choose a target, deal damage, maybe defend yourself, or spend tempo building up buffs. Negotiations on the other hand are not a system I've seen before. You still have action points and cards, but now you instead attack your opponents arguments and defend your own. You win by defeating their core argument (or lose by losing your own), but can also choose to spend time attacking thier other arguments instead, which are essentially buffs. Both game modes also have limited-use items that can be in your deck, passive augments that buff you in some way, and of course their own separate deck with cards that can be levelled up. The games modes are completely separated in power, and playing a mode makes you stronger in that mode. So you have to be careful to not focus too hard on only one thing.

There is also meta-progression. Completing a campaign, win or lose, unlocks new cards, and gets you points to buy passive upgrades for that character, and beating a campaign unlocks the next difficulty level of said campaign. It also unlocks a "Brawl Mode", which is kind of like the campaign, but without the story. I don't really understand the point of that, since I thought it was like a survival mode game or something to see how far you can push yourself, but it's still the same format - divided into days with a bigger fight at the end of each day, and choice missions during the day, just without the roleplay elements. I would recommend always playing the campaign, not this mode.
But seeing this meta-progression was also where problems started to arise. See, the game was really fun for the first playthrough, if a bit easy. But okay, you unlock the next difficulty if you beat the campaign. It only takes a few hours. But you also get better at the game. And then you have a choice. Do the same campaign again with a harder difficulty, or play the next one? I can guarantee, now that you know how to play, the next campaign will be even easier, since you start that at the first difficulty level. But if you decide to repeat the same campaign, then not only are you missing out on new content, but now you learn how to build even stronger decks, making the next campaign even more easy and boring when you do decide to go back to it. And sure, a single campaign run is only a few hours, but if you complete all three on the first 3 difficulty levels, you could be 40-50 hours into the game without the game ever having presented a challenge to you.

The game is well made and enjoyable, and despite everything, I still put it on my favorite games of all time list, but rather low on that list. I played for a few dozen hours, and not once in that time did the game really challenge me, and by the end of it, doing the same campaign again had become a bit monotone, as many events started to repeat. Sure, new difficulty levels were noticably more challenging, and I'm sure I could have gotten to difficult content in that time had I put all those hours into a single campaign, but then I wouldn't have experienced two thirds of the game's story. I'm also not sure that this dual-deck approach is the best way to go about things, as it doesn't feel too great to be absolutely crushing enemies in one game mode and then become an incompetent mess in another. Practically though, it was rather low on my list of irritations.
I've yet to play some of the more renowned roguelike deckbuilders, but I can still confidently say that Griftlands deserves its spot up there, and I would recommend it to any fans of the genre.

Touhou Endless Dream

Touhou Endless Dream is yet another Touhou fangame. It's still a bullet hell, but this time it's a twin-stick shooter roguelike. You collect items which give you passive power-ups, which is the main source of increasing your power. There are also two slots for active items, and a few slots for consumables, mostly for healing. There's some shops, meta-progression, and interestingly, the ability to play multiple characters at once by switching between them on the fly. I didn't make it far enough to determine whether there was any benefit to having more than one character though, as stacking your items on one character seems more powerful.

The game is very simple on the art and animation front, with enemies being on the level of art that I myself could make, though characters and backgrounds were slightly better. Animations are mostly just the sprites bobbing about. There's nothing particularly fancy about the gameplay, but there haven't been enough incremental roguelikes for me to be tired of something as basic as this yet. So I was having fun for about an hour, but more and more I noticed that despite setting the language to English, I was getting Chinese text. It wasn't that big of a problem with character dialogue, but after item descriptions turned Chinese, there was a real functional issue. Looking around, it seems the game's English localization was never finished. As much as I'd like to ignore it, it's really quite impossible to understand certain aspects of what I'm doing if I can't read.

I don't see this as a major loss. Even if the game had a good English translation, then the quality was not really high enough for me to be actually interested in the game. Sure, I imagine I would have played at least another couple of hours, but I have my doubts if I would have recommended it regardless. There were definitely some issues with how certain items worked, how much time I had to read, visual clarity (which matters a lot in a bullet hell game), and polish all around. But ultimately, if you can't read Chinese, you can't experience the entire game anyways, so it doesn't matter.

Archvale

Archvale calls itself an RPG bullet hell. It's most certainly a bullet hell, as it has you moving around in a top-down view, dodging large quantities of bullets. You also have the ubiquitous i-frame dodge, and of course a weapon to shoot back at the enemies. I understand wanting to call it an RPG, as you can slightly increase your character power, though most of it is through 3 equipment pieces and a combination of "badges" - passive perks. But really, it's an action game, a twin-stick shooter, just not a roguelike like most are, but one that has pre-made map. You go from room to room, clearing them of enemies, collecting their materials, making new equipment with them, and then doing tougher rooms and finally a boss fight to get one of 7 arch pieces.

I started on the hard difficulty and initially had a lot of fun with the game. For the first couple of hours, I was worried the game was too easy, even on hard mode, but the levels slowly got harder and harder. More enemies, more complex bullet patterns, homing projectiles, summons, etc. And so for the next few hours, I was progressing at a steady pace. Some harder rooms had me do several tries, some had me go investigate another path first to get better gear, but I was always progressing. The game did feel a bit bland, but the action was solid, and I didn't feel like it needed any complex mechanics to be a good game overall. But a few more hours passed and I seemed to be getting stuck on all paths, having to make 10-20 tries just to progress a little. But these difficult victories didn't even get me any extra power, and so I got hopelessly more and more stuck.
"Should have just played on normal", I hear. But no, normal was much like the first hour of hard - trivial up to the very end. Archvale failed in the difficulty curve, ramping it up faster than player power. Bosses and challenge rooms were difficult but methodic - I could learn the patterns. But regular rooms just gave you a bunch of enemies, and depending on the lineup, could be nigh undodgeable, and yet hit too hard to tank.

It's a shame, losing an otherwise nice game to balance problems. There were clearly other reasons that also led to this problem. Melee was complete garbage as being close to enemies was a death sentence, and melee did barely any more damage. Weapon upgrades helped offset the difficulty by allowing you to get stronger by grinding, but they just stopped at one point. Any system that let you grind for more power would have allowed persistant players to at least eventually beat the game. But overall, the game just felt untested towards the end. Higher tier weapons just being flat out worse then lower tier ones. Some rooms being really easy, adjacent rooms being impossible. Later areas not really increasing in difficulty, just doing slightly more damage and being tankier.

Oh well. Archvale started out as one of the more enjoyable twin stick shooters I've played, but the difficulty just rushed past the power of my character. To a degree, compensating with increasing skill is understandable, but this was cleary far, far too much. Unless you were playing in normal mode, in which case you could facetank most levels. I would probably blame the lack of polish put into the second half of the game. Perhaps the developer ran out of steam. In any case, I don't think I can recommend Archvale just for a good first half. For a complete experience, it's not a good game.