Hand of Fate 2

It's been over 5 years since I completed the original Hand of Fate. I left quite the positive review of it, and added it to my favorite games list, albeit at a rather low position, somewhat contrasting the tone in the review. I remember what the game was about, but not the details, nor anything that particularly stood out to me. In hindsight, it feels as if the game was unremarkable. Who's to say if I've simply forgotten, if my preferences have changed, or if the bar I've set for games has gotten higher over the past 5 years. This review is of course about Hand of Fate 2, but I would like to pretend I remember the first game well enough to make comparisons to it. They are, overall, very similar games.

Hand of Fate 2 is mostly a turn-based rougelike. You have your basic stats - health, food, gold. You have some equipment with attack, defense, and passive abilities. And you have a goal in the scenario which you must accomplish. What they changed is that instead of the game being one large scenario with checkpoints, it is now a more loosely connected collection of smaller scenarios without a fixed order. This feels like a slight downgrade.
Most of what happens in the game is based on decks. You step into a new "room" - it's a random card from the deck dictating the encounter. You gain a new equipment - it's random from the equipment deck. You gain a positive or negative effect - same story. You can customize the decks to a degree by adding your own cards in addition to the dealer's cards, which is a very nice idea in theory, but I would criticize the execution. There are a lot of cards, but not a lot of cards you can put in a deck. Making a good deck becomes a secondary or tertiary objective, because you want to prioritize cards which can unlock new cards, or cards which you haven't used yet, and thus have not yet identified, despite having obtained them. In the end, I'm making very few strategical decisions about my deck building, instead being half-forced to pick the cards which unlock new things. And, as another downgrade, I feel like they have reduced the amount of agency the player has over the decks as well.
I can't say I feel I have a lot of choice anyways. I go through all the rooms, I pick the usually obviously correct choices, hope the RNG doesn't fuck me over, and repeat the process until I win or lose. I definitely don't feel the exciment I felt during the first game.

The second half of the game is in fact action-based, being any combat encounter. This continues to be the worst part of the game, and I would be much harsher on it this time around. The combat is actually dead-easy if you have reasonable awareness and reaction times. Your equipment is inconsequential (making the bits about obtaining it matter less). Every encounter is just spamming attack (or shield break, or finishers) until a red or green arrow appears near you indicating to either dodge or block. Press the correct button of the two, and you're fine. Throw in a shield bash or weapon ability if those are ready. There is no strategy to the combat, no thinking.
This time sink is made worse by a tediously long transition from the game board to the battle, as well as some flexing animations at the start of combat from either side. I am adamant in my opinion this time, that they should have never added action combat to Hand of Fate. The card game aspect is far superior.

Speaking of time sinks, the dealer is ever chatty, but with the amount of text in the game, he somewhat wastes my time by forcing me to wait until he's done talking to start reading. Perhaps it's me, or perhaps the overall storytelling quality has gone down, as the dealer does not feel as enchanting as he once did.

Overall, a definite step down from the previous game, even if I factor in that I possibly have some nostalgia for the original Hand of Fate. That said, I still don't think it's a bad game. I think I got about 25% through the campaign. That's half as long as I played the original, but the campaign is now twice as long too. The first hours definitely passed very fast, as I was enjoying myself. The magic faded far faster this time around though.
I'm demoting the original Hand of Fate to a "below the line" recommendation, but I would still recommend you play that, and not this sequel. Despite it being newer, there is little innovation, and what there is, is not better.

Grimm's Hollow

I spent the evening playing through a short free game by the name of Grimm's Hollow. It takes about 3 hours to get all the endings, and it's a cute little RPG / Adventure game. I could tell you more about the gameplay, and how and why it was not balanced, was too easy, or why the real-time / turn-based hybrid system was somewhat frustrating. I won't. It's not important. You'll be playing for 3 hours, only half of that will be combat - you don't need a great system there. What was was good enough.

Grimm's Hollow is about the story. You wake up, you're dead, and you want to find your brother. It touches on things like coming to terms with your own death, the death of others, the afterlife, and other somewhat heavy topics, while also throwing in lighter moments to stop the mood from falling too far down. I don't want to spoil anything of course, so I won't go into details. It's nothing too deep, nothing incredible, but I found the story well-written and charming, and just short enough to keep me entertained throughout.

Overall, Grimm's Hollow is a short yet enjoyable Adventure RPG which I hope would not leave you indifferent. I find the quality comparable to another well-received game, Eternal Senia, and I would recommend both roughly equally. That is, they're good enough to earn a spot on my best games list, but a "below the line" spot, meaning they're not incredible or unparalleled. Still, Grimm's Hollow will only take you a few hours, and I think it's time well spent.

Lost Ember

A short review for a short game.
Lost Ember is an interactive story spanning a few hours. You kind of just run forward, listening to your mote of light companion explain the story for you, and occasionally taking control of other animals to run forward in a different way. There's also a ton of collectibles scattered around, if that's your thing.

I'll get to the point - this "game" isn't for me. The story's kinda basic and not well told, even for a game. The gameplay's nonexistent. The camera feels really weird and uncomfortable, and the graphics aren't as pretty as I would like from a game that's supposedly just about taking in the beautiful scenery. I can find no reason to recommend this to anyone.

Mothergunship

My initial impression of Mothergunship was amazing. I was actually laughing with excitement every time I built a new, stronger gun, and fired it for the first time. Sadly, that fascination died down rather fast.

Mothergunship is a fast-paced FPS. It has randomly generated levels, multi-jumps, weapon knockback propulsion, a ton of enemies, and other FPS things. I didn't find these aspects spectacularly executed, but they weren't terrible either. Perhaps my relative lack of knowledge regarding FPS games is to blame here.
What certainly sets this game apart is the ability to craft your own guns. It's not just your usual "choose 3 parts with different stats" building. You can chain connectors together to make more connections onto which you can place the actual gun and powerup bits, creating truly massive, powerful, and absolutely awesome guns. The imposed spatial limitations only add to the feeling of accomplishment when putting a new gun together.

But there's a problem. You build your awesome gun, you have fun with it, and then the level ends or you die. You effectively lose your gun. You keep the parts if you win and lose them if you die, but you can only bring around 3 parts to the next level. So just as you get to the best version of your gun, it's taken away from you, and you're back to shooting something quite average for a while. It doesn't help that crafting is such a frequent and time consuming occurance as well. I would love to spend more time experiencing this gun I made, not clearing one room and then remaking it because a new shop came around, spending a good half of the time just crafting. Making something awesome is only worth it if you get to use it too.
Further, sure, having guns in both hands is cool, but I feel bad to have to choose between the optimal deicision of making two guns of equal strength rather than making one massive gun instead. Don't put your players in this situation. Let the optimal path be the most fun path as well, if possible.
Going back to the mediocre execution of the combat, I would voice my main problem that there was just too much going on. The rooms were too small, the projectiles and explosions too large, enemies appeared out of thin air, and it all blended into one colorful lightshow, removing most tactical gameplay, and leaving just spamming projectiles towards enemies.

In conclusion, an amazing gun-building system I would love to see in some well-made game, but not here. The combat is too chaotic, and there is not enough time to enjoy the fruits of your labor, neither within the level, or across levels. Give us one gun, larger rooms, larger levels, less frequent crafting, better clarity, and I will probably love your game. But then that would be a completely different game. Mothergunship will not be getting a recommendation from me.

Moonlighter

Moonlighter is an Action RPG/roguelike where you run through dungeons, collect loot, then sell it or use it to upgrade your equipment.
I found the game very simplistic. It takes Binding of Isaac's dungeon formula where each dungeon is a series of screens. Kill everything on the screen and you can move to the next room. There's 5 different weapons with different attack patterns. They have upgrades, but it's basically just increased damage. They also have a charged attack that's almost never worth it. Similarly, armor just gives increased health. More so at the expense of movement speed, if you want. And of course there is also an invincibility dodge roll. I found some weapon types just flat out better than others, and most non-boss enemies trivial unless they swarm you from more than two directions. As far as the combat portion goes, it's very uninspired.

The enemies drop only ingredients and valuables which can have some "curses" determining where you can place them in your limited inventory. This creates a form of an inventory management minigame, but as we know, inventory management is usually a nuisance, unless done incredibly well. And, well, it's not done well here at all. On the topic of managing your inventory, the control scheme is fully optimized for a controller, with just a basic map to keyboard. The default bindings are awkward, there's no mouse support, and no shortcuts for some common actions, causing most inventory management to take too long.
Continuing with tedious things, the other "half" of this game is a shop management game, where you list your dungeon loot up for sale. Problem is, items mostly sell at a fixed price. You don't initially know this price (which makes no sense, because every villager does, but you, the professional shopkeeper, do not), but finding it out is very easy, as the game sorts items by price even if you don't know their price. Really, there is no depth on this side of the game either, and it might just have been more enjoyable if you got to dump your stock to an NPC instead of going through the trouble of running your shop. Heck, enemies just flat out dropping coins could have been a better choice, allowing focus on the marginally better combat side of the game.

Overall, I found nothing new or interesting in this game. The execution is fine, but the implemented ideas are pretty basic and boring. There's tons of better top-down action RPGs/roguelikes out there, and if you're looking for something to scratch the shopkeeping itch, Recettear did it better. (They also did basically everything else better.) But Moonlighter I just can not recommend.

Wandersong

Wandersong seems like a very well-received game. I can't say I can blame people for liking it, but after playing it for a brief while, I am rather confident that there is no big secret or unexpected element that will make your opinion of the game differ from whatever initial feeling you got from looking at the trailers / images. I think the game does a good job at being this colorful musical adventure game, with, I dare say, childlike humor and difficulty.

Wandersong should take about 10 hours to complete. These hours are filled mainly with "puzzle platforming", although neither the puzzles nor platforming are difficult, just thematical. I would guess the main focus of the game is the story, which I found neither deep nor enticing, although I did not finish the game. Aside from basic movement, the game is controlled via a singing mechanic - essentially 8 directional inputs. These are usually used for solving whichever puzzles are needed, either by replicating a pattern, or using the directions as a steering wheel of sorts. Simple stuff, really, and I didn't stop to question the solution to a puzzle even once.

Overall, I don't quite get the scale of the positive reception. Sure, the game's well made, but I'm surprised so many people liked it, considering what I felt were very simple game mechanics and plot. I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of Aquaria, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere near as deep. So, from a personal perspective, I definitely can't recommend Wandersong.

Lost Ark

Amazon sure knows how to advertise a game. They also know how to blow that hard work away by not providing enough server capacity for people to play. First New World, now Lost Ark - the login queues plagued people for the first two weeks. But I'm not here to talk about that. Queues are now a thing of the past, while the game continues forward. Lost Ark exceeded even the previous impressive nigh-one-million New World peak player count by amassing over 1.3 million players a couple days after launch, placing it at the second highest peak player count game on Steam. After nearly a month, it still pulls in daily peaks of over 800K, and has remained the highest average player count game on Steam for the whole duration.
Myself, I played it for a whole 120 hours in the first two weeks, falling off over the next two weeks leading up to this review. I think I got a very good view of the game and experienced every major activity, but in terms of raw progress, I'm not even halfway through.

At first, you may hear Lost Ark being compared to Diablo or Path of Exile, but also being called an MMO. I can't verify the comparison to Diablo, but I found that statement weird at first. After a bit into the game however, I deemed it an apt description, at least according to mainstream definitions. Lost Ark combines the top-down mouse-based-movement action RPG combat with the content and progression systems of mainstream MMOs. I of course loathe that these games, where the only multiplayer aspect is people co-existing in a multiplayer area without any incentive to play together, dare call themselves MMOs, but I can't fault people for using the term, considering how long it's been since there has been any non-indie "real" MMO.
Lost Ark has the usual storyline grind to max level (technically a soft level cap), which then opens up daily dungeons and raids you can do (generally 4 people max, but also usually doable solo), alongside with more spaced out additional storylines unlocked at various points in progress. I would wager that the main appeal of the game, however, is the vast amount of optional collectibles it features. There are hundreds of side-quests offering various little collectibles that can be turned in for minor character improvements. Of course, hundreds of minor improvements stack up to become quite powerful indeed. Aside from the mini questlines, there's over 1000 "mokoko seeds" scattered across the whole world, and a lot of NPCs have a sort of friendship level that can be increased over time. Through these side quests, there is content for well over a thousand hours if you aim to collect and complete everything.

Different things kept me in the game during different times. At first, it was mostly the combat. Throughout the levelling process, you often unlock new skills and upgrade existing ones, offering new playstyles. These skills were well-designed and felt very satisfying to use, but after hitting max level, the playstyle remained the same, never to change again. Worse still, despite the dozen-or-so different classes, there was very little diversity within a class. My Scrapper class played like every other Scrapper class, and there was nothing to make me unique.
That might have been fine, but after the fun of using my flashy and impactful skills wore off, I realized that the enemies posing no threat whatsoever for 99% of the encounters was not a levelling thing. This, dare I say, casual difficulty was here to stay until the end. And so, there was no fun left for me in the combat.
During the later levels and after hitting the level cap, the world opened up, and I started to care about the collectibles. This remained my main focus up to this point, but with a few exceptions, the quests to get these collectibles were as quests are in MMOs - 90% travelling, 5% beating stuff up, 5% clicking and waiting. It was fun to see the numbers go up, achievements roll in, and progress be made, but whenever I looked back at what I was doing, it was beyond mindless busywork. I stopped to ask myself if this was worth my time. Was I actually enjoying this?

As of right now, I have not actually made the decision to quit the game entirely, but rather to take a break. I've played more than enough of it in the past month, and I'm not sure if I could really call this game bad, after how long I played it, after how hours flew past so fast while playing... But I do look back at what I've done, and think of things to praise Lost Ark for, and I'm having trouble. It's like the game felt fun in the moment, but not in hindsight.
Should you play it? I don't think I can recommend it, in the end. It's free, so you're free to give it a try, but be warned that it will take a lot of your time if you decide to give it a serious try. It's just made to be that way. Maybe in another month or few, as people reach the real end of the game, will we see if Lost Ark has any real staying power, or if it really is just a 500 hour grind.

Ring of Pain

Ring of Pain is a fast-paced, simplistic, kind-of-like-a-roguelike game. You have a few stats (HP, attack, defense, and speed, basically), and 15 item slots for passive modifications to those stats as well as various other effects. The gameplay revolves (heh) around choosing whether to interact with the object on the left, or the object on the right (or to bypass them, moving to the next object in the circle). You either exchange blows with a monster, or pick up an item. Repeat ad nauseam.

While the game is quite heavy on RNG, and sometimes unavoidable (at least without inhuman foresight) defeats, my main gripe is with how simple it is. It feels like something I'd play on my phone while engaged in some other activity, not something that requires my full focus. I just felt I had so little agency in what was happening, that any mechanics, balance, or whatever was entirely in the background. Click, click. Left, right. Right, left. Bored, bored. Why am I playing this.

And indeed, why would I be playing this? Or why would you? I couldn't tell you, and so I couldn't recommend it to you. For what it's worth, the game's reviews are mostly fine, so there's a fair chance you'll like it nontheless, but again, you'll be hearing no praise from me.

Othercide

Othercide is a game I would really have loved to like. It's a stylish turn-based tactics game that weaves a lot of difficult decisions into every battle. Permanent sacrifices have to be made often, and if you're not willing to do them yourself, the enemy will force alternatives for you, often to a less desirable outcome.
Let's break it down, from the best bits to the worst bits.

The atmosphere is well Othercide's strongest point. The entire world is grayscale, with shades of red at places. Despite the limited color palette, there is complete clarity in visuals, and I absolutely love the style this creates. It fits well with the dreamlike, or rather, nightmarish, scenes and enemies, as well as the echocing voicelines thrown out every so often. Despite what I feel was a somewhat low amount of resources due to being an indie game, they could not have done a better job in this field.

Secondly, the idea was good. The game is designed not only to be very difficult, but to also force the player into difficult decisions. The unique mechanic is that your units are never able to recover health. This is further enhanced by many units having access to powerful abilities that can be cast in addition to your normal actions that turn, but there's a catch - they consume the caster's life, the resource they will not be getting back. You can try to play it perfectly by never using these abilities, but that decision may well turn on you, if you sustain greater losses otherwise.

Now, finally, where everything falls apart - the execution. By far the largest problem that you will notice again and again is that the game does not give you enough information. In a super-difficult game like this, the player needs to have the tools to make the most of their doomed situation. But the game fails to tell you very important information. How often can enemies act? How many actions can they perform per turn? You're never told they can not attack on the turn they spawn, unless they forego their movement. Further, ability descriptions, formulas, ranges, targetting information, etc. are either not shown or hidden under multiple menus. The UI feels somewhat unresponsive, which makes navigating these menus more time consuming and frustrating. The gameplay is good, but I have to make a choice between playing to the best of my abilities and spending, without exaggeration, 90% of the time on looking up details that a well-designed UI would have at the ready, or just winging my turns, and getting beat over and over.
Worth noting is that your units increase in offensive power very rapidly, allowing a single unit to do more work than 2-3 units combined. Of course, it is nigh impossible to never lose them, but the game undermines its own permadeath mechanic by handing out resurrection tokens every so often, and your dead units persisting through runs. (You also get other passive powerups to make your subsequent runs easier.) So, fail as much as you want, you can always resurrect your most powerful units early on in the next run, and eventually have enough of them that clearing anything becomes easy enough.

Overall, a great idea with a captivating atmosphere. The gameplay and balance are fine, but nothing amazing, but the user experience, namely the information shown, as well as navigating the game and the menus, are terrible, and ruin everything else. I am saddened that they did not put extra polish into these areas of increasing clarity, for this could have been a very good game. As it is now, I can not recommend it. It may feel great for the first hours as you explore what the game has to offer, but it will quickly lapse into tedium and frustration.

Meteorfall: Krumit's Tale

Meteorfall: Krumit's Tale is a deckbuilding game, that I guess could be called a roguelike, sort of. I believe it originates from a mobile game. I would say it's pretty good as a mobile game, but doesn't quite reach the quality standard for a good PC game.

My initial impression was a slight dislike for the overly cartoony artstyle. I would of course not judge a game for that alone, but they did feel the need to make everything jiggle and wobble around making it harder to observe, while wasting a lot of space around the edges (presumably due to the original mobile interface), so that's a slight negative.
I think there were ideas present for a good game, but there just wasn't enough ambition in the project. Building a deck, finding synergies, and adapting around the board the game dealt to you felt like a fun experience, but the lack of content and space rather ruined the experience. The balance of the game was surprisingly good, given how often I felt on the brink of defeat, only to barely recover from the situation and continue onto victory, but I feel they should have increased the board size, as well as the hand size. This would of course make the game easier, due to more choice, and more synergies, but these are almost exclusively the areas where the fun is at, so everything else should compensate for it. Make the enemies stronger, increase the length of a level, add a larger variety of items and enemies. But sadly, these things just weren't present.

As it stands, Krumit's Tale is too restrictive, as you lack much meaningful choice from your hand running out of space, or the board only having enough moves where one is obviously superior. The low amount of levels, as well as item and monster variety means that once you complete the game, you probably have little desire to go for another run. Considering all this, I can't give Krumit's Tale a recommendation.

Copy Kitty

Damn Japanese, making insane games again. I don't actually know the nationality of the indie developers of this game, and it doesn't really matter, but Copy Kitty has so many things happening at the same time it can be very difficult to comprehend, especially with the crazy visual style. It definitely stands out the moment you look at it, but the strangely coherent mess of an artstyle may correctly invoke both the feelings of this being a game by amateurish developers as well as it being something quite unique.

Copy Kitty is a stage-based action platformer with the unique gimmick that you can combine 2-3 different weapons into a new, more powerful weapon. This creates a rather insane number of combinations I'm surprised the developers bothered to implement. This combining is dynamic and ammo-based, so if one weapon runs out of ammo, your weapon downgrades until you pick up some more ammo from slain enemies.
You start the level with a single weapon or none at all, making the start of each stage much more slow and calculated. However, once you gather 3 weapons, destroying enemies ususally becomes a breeze and you just zoom through the level. While I dislike this trivialization, the alternative might be worse. With a lot of enemies on screen, you firing your particle-heavy weapons, and everything being so gosh-darn colorful, it can be nigh impossible to tell what's going on. The enemy placement and level design also doesn't tend to be that well thought through in my opinion, so being able to ingore them to a large degree actually comes out as a positive.
There is also a lot of detail put into less important things, like enemy descriptions, statistics tracking, dialogue, and probably many things I missed. The game truly feels like it has been made with a lot of passion.

Still, I failed to find satisfaction from this game. The combat and levels aren't designed well enough to interest me when I am not powerful, and once I do become powerful, most strategy and reason is thrown out the window, and the game becomes boring because it is mindless. I believe there is emphasis on playing the levels again later to obtain a better score through methods which aren't necessarily aligned with beating the levels in the most optimal way. (Some sort of style bonuses I think. I did not explore this side of the game.) Knowing me, I of course find repeating things under the same conditions boring, so this did not appeal to me at all.

Overall, I can't give it a personal recommendation, as I don't find the game to be up to my quality standards. Still, it might be interesting to fans of score attack action platformers, or for anyone looking to just experience this very unique weapon gimmick I have not seen anywhere else.

Cypher

Cypher is a puzzle game, and it's honestly barely a game. It's an increasingly difficult series of cryptographic messages that it asks you to solve, giving you but a brief introduction for each category, as well as a tangientially helpful hint for each puzzle, if you so desire.
There is really little interactivity in the game, with the only response from the game being either telling you whether your answer is correct, or giving you the hint, if prompted. As such, it really could be presented as a short book instead, with the hints and answers at the back. Setting aside the fact that it would be harder to sell this in book form, it would really suit the game, considering the fact that most of the solving process will not be done inside the game, but with a pencil and paper or the internet.

I believe my main issue with the game is that it doesn't do much to teach you, and to solve a problem you must either mostly know the solution method already, or look it up. I understand that this self-learning process is what the game would want from you, but to be fair, if I had a deeper interest in cryptography, I would have already sought these subjects out, and if I did not, then this game would not tip me over to spend my time to do so.

While I think it is of little contribution to the value of this game, considering you will not be in the game if you intend to play it, I must note my appreciation for the setting of the game. The clean white aesthetic and black text, accompanied by a spacious interior and classical music playing in the background are exactly the kind of environment I would love to solve these in. A wonderful choice, but sadly inconsequential.

Overall, I don't think I could recommend this to anyone except those who are already interested in cryptography. I find the game offers little in terms of generating interest for the subject, nor does it teach you the topic sufficiently.

Mana Spark

Mana Spark is a short rougelike game, probably taking a lot of inspiration from the likes of Binding of Isaac in that you run from room to room, collecting random powerups that alter your character and are generally not just stat upgrades. I am unsure, but I think it might even be something akin to a student project, for which the quality would be excellent. Even compared to regular "good" games, there isn't much to fault this game for. The AI and mechanics work well, the game's quite polished, and there aren't any obvious balance problems. A few bugs, mostly pertaining to physics and AI, but nothing game-breaking.
No, the real problem is that it's short. They just didn't add a lot of content. A few characters, maybe a few dozen items, twenty enemy types, three areas... I wasn't even sure if I was enjoying the game before I realized it's going to be over in just a little while.

Overall, the game's good, but nothing special. It implements the dungeon-crawling action rogulike genre well, but is light on innovative features. Regardless of that though, even if you'll start to like playing it as you collect more items and unlock more options, it will be over soon after. Thus, I don't think I could recommend it.

Eternal Return

I generally steer clear of games that are still in Early Access, but I feel like, in some regard, the prime time to play Eternal Return might have already passed, and there's some chance it won't see the light of release in a playable form at all due to the slowly dwindling playerbase. So, since I played it now, I might as well review it now, rather than never.

Eternal Return would be best classified as a Battle Royale MOBA. The game has a moderate size map with about a dozen "zones", and 18 players per match, as well as the option to play in 18 "teams" of 1, 9 teams of 2, or 6 teams of 3. The zones then start closing down as the game progresses, forcing the players into a tigher area, prompting conflict. I would love for the map to be larger and have more players, but, given the already small playerbase, that could push queue times to unacceptable levels.
Like a MOBA, the game's played from a top-down perspective, and there's a few dozen different characters. They have the usual 3 abilities + ultimate + passive, with also one extra ability determined by their weapon. You have 6 slots to equip gear in, and 10 more to put materials or whatever in. This gear is crafted from materials scattered across the map, with each zone having some specific pool of materials. It functions similarly to collecting loot in a Battle Royale, but there is an important distinction and this is a very important aspect of the game which is a bit difficult to explain.

Each piece of gear does not fit each character. Wrong weapon types are simply unequippable, but many gear items might not fit your character's playstyle. This makes looting other players a somewhat poor method of getting better gear. Also, for most of the game, gear can not be found pre-crafted on the map, making looting less about luck. Winning is less dependent on your skill in combat, but your gear, and thus how fast you can get it. Put all this together, and you realize that the game boils down to a sort of speedrunning. It has some luck, with who you run into, whether you find the resources you need, etc. but mostly it's about optimizing your pathing, optimizing your build, and not wasting any seconds.

It's not secret I don't like speedrunning nor Battle Royales. I don't like the former because I don't want to do the same thing over and over with little-to-no variance, and I dislike the latter mostly because most of the game is spent conflict-free, culminating in an often unfair and out of your control battle, which may diminish the feeling of accomplishment upon victory or worsen the feeling of defeat. Thus I must conclude that this game isn't really up my alley, and I don't enjoy playing it all that much.
But when it comes to objective complaints about the game, I can't really name any aside from the low-ish playerbase, which isn't directly the fault of the game. The characters are different from each other, there's depth and uniqueness to the game mechanics, the balance doesn't seem completely out of whack, I quite like the art and sounds, and I haven't found any bugs. I'm genuinely surprised that this game is losing players instead of gaining them. So, listen, while I don't personally like Eternal Return, I think it's a good game. There's unique dynamics and strategies to be had whether you're playing alone or with friends (though probably steer clear of teams of randoms), and I think the combat is great fun, I just wish there was more of it.
There you have it, recommending an Early Access game. Only if you like the things I described of course. Go play it before it dies, it needs more players.

New World

Oh, MMOs, where should I even begin with them. My favorite game genre, yet one of my least played ones in the last years. I've sunk about 150 hours into New World over the past 2 months, which is the reason for the drought of other posts lately. It's a huge game, and I've not had enough time to experience everything it has to offer, but I feel I'm ready to give my thoughts on it regardless.

New World was off to a massively successful start, becoming one of the most played games in the world for about a week with around a million consecutive players. It was partly due to this that I went to give it a try, as this really seemed to be the best opportunity I was going to have to play an MMO in the nearest years. I don't think I was mistaken, but it wasn't all I had hoped it to be.
New World seems to not be entirely copy-pasted from the standard themepark formula, offering choice on where to go, what to do, and not binding you to the usual quest mill to max level. You're not forced to make the annoying class selection at the start when you have no clue who you want to be playing, and thus saved from having to run through the levelling process again if you want to change who you are. You're really going to have this one character, and commit to this one character, and that's wonderful. Similarly wonderfully, the economy seemed to be doing relatively well. Crafting and resources were well thought out as to not leave any lower ranking resources useless, and encouraging returning to lower level zones at least somewhat, if only to farm the resources there. The market was lively and there was no sign of gold inflation on the horizon. Combat was also a breath of fresh air, feeling quite weighty with staggering and blocking, and only having two hotbars of three skills each - one for each weapon. The design decisions seemed to be done quite well, so I kept playing.

The more I played, the more I started to notice problems crop up. And I don't want to complain about the login queues or the initial supposed plethora of bugs. They didn't worsen my experience, and I believe they were easy enough to avoid. Not that the login queues will be a problem anymore. At this rate, 90% of the players will have left by the end of the year, and that's more than you could chalk up to just the usual post-release decay.
But as I was saying... One of the things I initially loved about the game was that even during the levelling process, the game was never too easy. It was simple to get in over your head and get yourself killed to monsters. While that difficulty theoretically never went away, there was one large oversight. As you explored the open world, the game showered you with quests and things to do. It was great, but those quests had rewards, and being the completionist I am, I wanted to complete all of them. 20 hours into the game, I was far overlevelled for all the content I was going into, and for the rest of my 130 hours, that sweet difficulty that kept me from getting bored was gone.
And yet, why was I doing them? I could skip them, go for the harder, more fun quests and areas. The rewards I was going to get from the higher level quests would overshadow whatever I was getting now anyways. I didn't stop to really ask myself this until I had maxed my level and the game goaded me towards the end-game content. ... I think I didn't want to do whatever the end-game had planned for me. The quests, despite their repetitiveness and simplicity, were more interesting. I got achievements, and got to watch the map and other progress bars slowly become more complete. The end-game was already being streamlined into the most efficient speedrun-like grinds for better equipment or gold on the PvE side, and I didn't have interest in the PvP, it being either dominated by guilds picking their favorites into the organized matches, or whichever side brought more people. Filling up those achievement bars was the most fun I was going to have, and I sat down to think if that was good enough for me.

On the other side, the game wasn't static for 2 months. It was getting updates at a brisk pace, and it had to do something to fix the issues that were cropping up the more people played. But as they fixed one problem, another cropped up, and I am not convinced that they could stop this huge bleeding of players that was happening. While they surely massively exceeded their initial popularity requirements, I'm not sure that it's going to be bringing in enough money soon, and I genuinely worry about Amazon cutting funding from it.
To return to the previously posed question, the content grind was not good enough for me. Not in this state of the game. Not when the future is so uncertain. While New World was a very refereshing MMO experience, and definitely better than most other MMOs I've tried in the past several years, it wasn't unique enough to keep my attention further. I don't regret the time I put into it, but I do wish to refrain from investing any more, until Amazon proves they can stabilize the game while continuing to provide meaningful updates. I will be returning in the future to check up on how it is doing, and perhaps even returning to play if I find things well improved. As for if I would recommend New World? Tough question, but probably so if you like MMOs, especially themeparks, and it is not dead by the time you read this.

Yuppie Psycho

My dislike of horror games grows. When I started playing Yuppie Psycho, I had apparently forgotten that it was a horror game. I just thought it was an... eccentric? adventure game. The pretty pixel art and "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews lured me in, and so I started it up. It's not even that I hate the horror aspect. There's just always been some problem linked to the horror.

The game's about a dozen hours long, and I quit an hour in, so anything beyond my complaints right now will be secondhand experience as per my research before shelving this game for good.
The game just deleted my entire one hour of progress without so much as a warning. And about 15 minutes of it on my first try playing it. See, the game nicely warns you at the start that there is no autosave function. It does not elaborate further. This is fine. Not every game needs autosaves - checkpoints or manual saves are often completely acceptable. The first time, I crashed. Well, I actually crashed about 5 times before I realized it disliked me alt-tabbing or streaming the game, but this was near the start, and wasn't too much of a hinderance.
The seconds time, I was well into the game, and just thought I had had enough for the day. I figured that, surely, the game would at least allow me to save on quitting, and then delete that save on returning. Failing that, I would be reminded that I needed to save my progress before leaving. I've already spoiled that there was no such thing. The game exited without so much as a complaint, wiping an hour of progress. That was just about all I needed to quit. I will not play a game that does not respect my time.

You see, not only does Yuppie Psycho have checkpoints you need to manually save at, it also has a currency (paper) that you need to spend for saving. If you do not have any paper, you can not save. In my hour of playing, which I will admit was mostly the introductory part, I received a grand total of one paper, and this was only through careful checking of everything in the environment. The rest of what I say will be what I read, not what I experienced.
The papers aren't actually that rare in the game, but there's no indication of this. There aren't, however, enough of them to save at every convenient opportunity, and they can also be used as another currency, making it a choice if you want to replay less of the game, or get some other benefit.
This is bullshit, and a complete waste of people's time. I don't care about the excuse of this creating suspense and reinforcing the horror aspect by making you wonder if the journey to the next save point will be manageable. This isn't that kind of game. And most importantly, I lose the ability to play in short bursts, because I need to play for as long as it would naturally take me to want to create another checkpoint.

Most everyone seems to agree that the adventure part of this game is great. The story's good. But the gameplay is a lot more polarizing, and I didn't see a single thorough review of the game not mention the save system. If you're selling me a good story, I want to experience that story in a way that is comfortable for me. "A horror game is supposed to make you uncomfortable." By being scary or unsettling, not by making me do the same stuff all over again for no good reason.
So there. I didn'y play this game. Not because it's not good, but because I don't have time for this nonsense. If you do, I hear the story's great, and you'll probably enjoy it, but I can't personally recommend this horrible design decision.

Omensight

Omensight is a hack-and-slash game, but more than that, it is an investigative story game about finding out why the world has ended. Armed with the power to repeat the last day of the world, and enough combat prowess to make your way into just about anywhere, you will slowly uncover the reason for the calamity and put an end to it.

The game was a tough sell for me at first, as I was put off by the very cartoony artstyle, the non-human cast of characters, but most importantly the subpar gameplay. Movement and attacking felt rather unusual and uncomfortable, caused mostly by the very... custom camera angles. The game took it upon itself to fully control your camera, but I daresay failed at the task. Additionally, combat was a combination of mostly button mashing for attacking, interleaved with reaction-based dodging, as enemies made very swift attacks at you oftentimes from a considerable distance. Perhaps some would enjoy it, but it was too twitchy for me. I got somewhat more used to these issues as I played further, but they never really went away.

I was going to quit after a couple hours of the rather unenjoyable gameplay, but something else had happened. I had gotten invested in the story. I think there were two main things that caused me to really enjoy the story, even as someone who nearly always hates story in games.
The first was that everything was fully voice acted, and at a pretty good quality at that. Every line of dialogue, every single character.
Secondly, I felt a sense of freedom. I'll admit that the game didn't have a branching narrative, and probably required me to go through very concrete plot points to advance, but I was never told where to go or what to do, and I felt the characters and surroundings always reacted to my actions quite naturally. I could present the evidence I had previously found to any of the major characters, and they would act accordingly. I was rewarded for exploration, and even dead ends and wrong decisions, which were the majority of the possible outcomes, played out to their conclusion. I really think what saved the game for me was that they went the extra mile to ensure a proper reaction to any action I could take.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about this game. I did end up giving it at a spot in my best games list, which automatically warrants a recommendation, even if the spot was on the lower end. From a gameplay perspective, don't expect anything innovative or enjoyable, but despite there being plenty of combat and platforming in the game, I would still say the story is the main focus, and the excellent storytelling should carry Omensight to be an enjoyable experience overall. For better or worse, it's on the short side, clocking in at maybe 8-12 hours, depending on how thorough you are, and if you're going for the good ending.
Oh, and don't you dare interrupt Ratika's song.

For The King

I found this indie-looking turn-based RPG called For The King in my Steam library and thought to give it a go. After a failed campaign, I realized it might be better with friends, so I invited two along and did the next two campaigns with them. It was fun, but despite some variety, I really wouldn't go for a third campaign.

The game has about half a dozen campaigns in total. You pick one, pick three characters from a collection of around a dozen classes, which differ by passive abilities and starting stats, and then set out to complete whatever quest this particular campaign asks of you. Most of the game is just running around the map and fighting enemies, earning loot and levels to get stronger, and completing sub-quests until you get to beat the main objective. It takes about 8 hours per successful campaign playthrough if you're alone, and a bit longer if you're coordinating with friends.
The combat is a basic "your turn, choose your action, choose your target", and then you roll a bunch of d100 against your stats to determine the result, with the occasional consumable use thrown in. There's also an unlocks system to get more content - weapons, armor, events - after you've gathered in-game lore currency from campaigns, but it doesn't change the core of the game.

So the main thing I would want to talk about with this game is the illusion of all the choices it gives you. Equipment is not class-locked, but you will be highly inefficient if you use equipment not meant for your class, so it might as well be. Each of your party members gets their own turn on the overworld, so they could move separately, but with how tough enemies are, you almost always want to have a full party for each encounter, removing most of the point from splitting up the party. Similarly, everyone needs very tight cooperation in multiplayer to make things work, but since all actions are sequential, there won't be a better tactic than letting one person decide what everyone does.
At the end of they day, the game just gets repetitive. Once you get down the rhythm of combat, who to focus, how to optimally path around the map, and other small details, you just repeat it ad nauseam.
That said, it was quite fun to figure this stuff out for the first time. The first campaign, it was a mystery what various buildings did, how to approach certain enemies, and the variety in equipment actually seemed to be pretty large. I also found the difficulty to be excellently balanced, as well as the game hurrying you along at a moderate pace to stop you from going the unfun route of farming yourself too strong.

So, what do I think of the game overall? Despite the very low-quality appearance, For The King is quite well-made. It suffers mostly from sticking to a very standard turn-based RPG formula which many people are already familiar with, yet not quite providing enough depth to make it replayable for a longer amount of time without feeling like you're just doing the same thing over and over without much thought. In conclusion, it earns my recommendation and a (low) spot on my best games list, because I had fun for the first campaign or two, and could share the experience with friends.

Nex Machina

Nex Machina is a twin-stick shooter. It's focused on speed, brevity, and action. You're thrust straight into the game, one-shotting enemies keep spawning in in hordes and swarming towards you, you have enough firepower from the get-go to obliterate everything in seconds, as well as being hyper-mobile with a dash. There's some bigger enemies, a few environmental hazards, some power-ups... You finish a level in a few minutes, and it thrusts you immediately into the next, and so on until you lose or beat all the levels in less than an hour.

Now, from the description, you might realize the target audience for this game. You might also realize I'm not part of said target audience. It's a short and difficult game, with the objective being to do better and better each time you play it. You're not expected to beat it and call it a day, you're expected to play the exact same thing over and over again until it's burned into your brain and you can execute it flawlessly. There are very few games of this type that I have enjoyed, but even then I feel like there's been more substance to the game - more I could do. Nex Machina feels very basic, and super intent on memorizing and specific flawless execution, and I'm really against that.
Also, the mouse aiming mode is atrocious, as there is no reticule to point with. This alone was a massive issue for me.

If you're one of the people who likes these kinds of score-attack arcade games, maybe you'll like Nex Machina. I can't well tell what is sought after in these games, and it feels a bit bare for me, but the reviews aren't bad. From a personal perspective though, I can't give it a recommendation.

Underhero

Underhero is basically a story-based platformer, except combat happens when you bump into an enemy and plays out in this weird time-based format, kinda of like a series of quick-events. I think I got about 20% through before dropping it. It wasn't particularly bad, just... boring.

So the game opens up with what is essentially a cutscene of this max-level hero going to slay the big bad, and then dying to a chandelier, with a level 1 minion taking his talking sword, and then setting out on a quest to kill his own boss, or something. I hear it makes more sense as you get further into the game, as well as touching on some concepts of "what is good, what is evil?", but I wouldn't guess it's all too serious or deep. See, Underhero puts a huge emphasis on the story. There's so much dialogue, characters to talk to, and even all of the enemies have something to say. Problem is, the writing is kind of mediocre. It doesn't take itself seriously and makes constant attempts at being funny, but falls flat. Feels kind of like sitting in the audience, listening to an amateur stand-up comedian, and once every five jokes someone in the audience chuckles, but the comedian just keeps going for another 20 hours. This is important, because you will be reading much of this dialogue, whether you want it or not.
The platforming is average. Controls aren't tight, and the level design is slightly sub-par, with no special mechanics so far into the game.
The combat is... unusual. You have a stamina bar that fills over time, and a bunch of actions you can use which consume stamina (plus some that don't, but they aren't as relevant). Now, problem is, the game expects you to dodge the enemy's attacks, but this requries stamina - the same resource used for attacking. So the combat has far too much waiting, as you wait for your stamina to recharge and then don't spend it as you need it to dodge. Luckily they have a shield which could be used to parry at next to no stamina cost if you time it well, alleviating some of the time sink problem, but trivializing regular combat.

In the end, Underhero just feels like it's wasting my time. Between a non-serious story, unfunny jokes, uninnovative platforming, and combat consisting mostly of waiting, there aren't many redeeming qualities to this game. I wouldn't say it is particularly bad in any regard, but that hardly qualifies as a compliment. So, yeah, there's nothing to recommend here.

Tower Hunter: Erza's Trial

Disclaimer up front: I only managed to play Tower Hunter: Erza's Trial for about an hour, and didn't experience even close to all aspects of the game, but oh god has it been a while since I've played such a well-scented piece of garbage. The game looks fine from a pure feature description perspective, as well as in stills or clips of up to three seconds in length, which is all that is displayed on the store page, but actually experiencing it live is a nightmare. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Erza's Trial is an action game. Didn't play long enough to confirm if it was a roguelike too, as it says it is. You pick from one of a few weapons, explore a platform-based dungeon, kill monsters, collect currency, level up your abilities, collect slottable runes which give stat increases, and probably fight a few bosses. I didn't get that far. There were no innovative mechanics as far as I found.

A run-on-the-mill hack-and-slash isn't bad in itself, but man did they do everything as terribly as they could have.
The weapons are advertised as being different and having different combos. None of that really matters. Any weapon, you can just spam the attack, and it's functionally equivalent. The enemies die, stunlocked. If you want to go the extra mile in stunlocking, you get a dash about every second, which resets your combo cooldown, allowing you to literally execute a non-stop barrage of attacks, all while dodging as an added bonus. It's dead easy.
Traversing the levels is trivial, partially thanks to abilities like double and triple jump being unlockable at the start for the same price as a 5% damage increase. Gee, can't imagine which one I'd want... In fact the entire ability store is devoid of thought. It's 90% small numerical increases to every weapon, rune, and ability in the game, for the same price, none changing the gameplay in any way.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention there's abilities. They recharge over time and you can find new ones to switch out, but they're useless - your attacks are more than enough.
And the art is all over the place. Some aspects of the game look gorgeous, while others look like MS Paint drawings I could manage. The enemy animations are jerky, no thanks to their AI, which is the most basic walk-back-and-forth pattern you could think of, but somehow made even worse. And the game's not been translated properly, with Google Translate probably being capable of more.

Okay, this isn't a review anymore, this is a rant. Erza's Trial is on the level of quality I'd expect from a university student's first game, just with a bit more time put into it. I could go on and on about the problems in this game, but you don't need to hear it. I don't recommend this game, and I don't so much as want to touch it with a stick.

Grip: Combat Racing

Grip: Combat Racing is about exactly what it says in the title. It's mostly a racing game, but you can ram other racers, as well as acquire pickups to shoot them, protect yourself, or go faster. Your car also has an incredible amount of speed and downforce, allowing you to drive on any wall or ceiling. That's about the extents of the gameplay. It's a racing game, and it's simple, as they tend to be.
You got a dozen or so different levels, difficulty settings, cars (which differ by the usual stats like speed and acceleration - fundamentally all the same), a free-play mode, and a campaign which tries to create a progressively more difficult experience.

Grip puts a lot of effort into the aeshtetics of the game. It looks great. The lighting, the moving parts of the cars, the levels, as well as the music and sounds, which I felt were very fitting. Sadly, that's about where the quality ends. In terms of gameplay, the wall/ceiling-riding gimmick adds little to the game, the combat isn't all that new nor exciting, and the racing element is pretty average.
My biggest problem is how the game constantly disrupts my flow. I hit a wall because I can't understand where the track is headed, or take a jump at the wrong angle, or hit some weird crevice or bump in the level, which shouldn't be there in the first place. Of note is that there is virtually no aerial control, which is dumb for a game where you often exit a tunnel in the air or take off from one of the hundreds of ramps on the level. Sure, you could attribute these to my personal messups that wouldn't happen if I played better, but I feel there is far too much skill required for a smooth and satisfying experience - most everyone should be able to enjoy it.

Overall, Grip isn't a bad racing game, but it has its flaws, and it's really nothing special. If they put heavy work into making the tracks as well as the car handling (in the air, and in the transitions from one surface to another) better, it could be a solid game, but the current implementation can't earn a recommendation from me.

Death Crown

Death Crown is a very simple Tower Defense RTS. It's played on a hex grid consisting of a grand total of a few dozen hexes. The general goal is to destroy the other team's castle, and for that you can: Build mines to increase your gold production, build spawners to spawn units that you can drag to path to whereever, and build towers that shoot nearby enemy units. There's also some areas on the map which act as powerups if you have control over their area, and some other minor mechanics, but for the most part, that's it.

Listen, I love the game's 1-bit aesthetic, and they did all they could with such a small map and so few mechanics, but at the end of the day, it's just an incredibly simple game. You play it for an hour, you experience it all. If you like it, you spend another couple of hours to complete it. However, it can't really captivate you or provide any sort of deep enjoyment - it was just never ambitious enough.
I can't really recommend anything this short and lacking in features.

Civilization VI

I have apparently already given my brief thoughts on Civilization VI back in 2016, but I figured I would do it again, now that I played a proper match to completion and got to experience the DLC as well. After all, Civilization V was not nearly as good without its DLC. I will be focusing a lot on the changes since Civilization V, as that is the closest game to it.

Civilization VI is a 4X Turn-Based Strategy game, much like its predecessor. You start off with a singular city and no idea of the world, and expand into a sprawling country, battling over your borders, your culture, and your religion, while keeping your technological progress on track, your coffers full, and your public opinion nice and tidy. Each of the listed six elements is a resource, and a victory condition, with the exception of gold, where the victory condition is instead points after a certain amount of time, if you want to enable a time limit.
Religion was added as a new victory condition, which is a welcome change. The culture tree is functionally a clone of the tech tree now, which I suppose is also nice, as it gives more options, despite being unimaginative as a clone. Diplomatic victory has been changed from public voting to collecting "good boy points", which makes it more of a race than a popularity contest, but also means it's now essentially a time victory like Points and Science.

The major change of course is the district system, and I think they went too far with it. Each district and world wonder consumes its own tile. Districts determine which buildings you can build, and wonders have restrictions on where they can be placed. The problem is that the world is crowded, and there isn't nearly enough room for all of these. I think it is a major problem, how you can really mess up your city layout by not planning ahead, or if you take someone else's city. With districts being limited by population as well, you could just get stuck, since there's no way to remove or replace districts. It adds strategic depth, I'm sure, but not enough to justify how damn frustrating it can be, and this really outweights all the small improvements they added.
But to quickly fire off a few positives as counterpoints for those who might care: Strategic resources now actually accumulate into stockpiles. City state influence is no longer decided by who's the richest, but has its own mechanic. You can't just plop a city next to someone's empire and expect it to stay up - the loyalty system ensures that large city clusters will convert owenership of any small or lone cities very near them. Great Persons (except Culture related ones) now have unique abilities instead of just being resource boosts.
Most of the rest of the game is the same though, so you won't have a fundamentally different experience either way.

Overall, I feel like Civilization VI goes multiple steps forward from its predecessor, but also as many steps plus one backward, ending at just a slightly less enjoyable experience, and that's not counting the unsightly cartoony artsyle. It's not a bad game, but I would expect something better after a decade or so. Would I recommend it? I guess if you really like Civ V and just want a slight change in scenery, but not in other cases. Just stick to Civilization V.

PS. For what it's worth, the match I played to completion wasn't actually called by the game. I had won the Culture victory, but the game refused to acknowledge it. Such a major bug has been in the game since launch.

RimWorld

The reason for my prolongened absence from any reviews is because I finally got around to playing RimWorld. As any sandbox game worth its salt, it took a long long time to experience it fully. I could estimate up to 200 hours went into trying it, but at least I can finally feel like I can give an informed opinion on it.

RimWorld is a Sandbox Colony Sim with a randomly generated map, world, and events. You control up to a few dozen characters who make up your colony, harvest resources, build buildings, defend from raids, natural disasters, trade with other colonies, accept quests from them, or be the one raiding them. The end goal is to research and launch a rocket (or acquire one by some other method), and get off the hellhole of a planet you crashed on. The various described events serve to hinder you and reign your colony from prospering too much, as simply farming and weathering the climate is generally not a difficult thing to do.

I can tell right off the bat that RimWorld has taken heavy inspiration from Dwarf Fortress, more so than many other colony sims, and that makes my job easier, as I compare any such game to Dwarf Fortress anyways. From the tile-based building, to a fully generated world with biomes, mountains, rivers, temperature physics, to each entity having relatives, emotions, individual body parts being able to be damaged, to a lot more similarities, RimWorld really wanted to be Dwarf Fortress, but more accessible, I feel. Considering the enormous success on Steam, I would say it succeeded in its own right, but I am not going to be as lenient on it. If it wants to copy Dwarf Fortress, it is going to have to beat it.
Despite having an actual team behind the game, RimWorld is surprisingly lacking in content in comparison. There is less variety in jobs, fewer animal and plant types, fewer items, less combat depth, and most importantly, as a massive shortcoming - no 3rd dimension. Without a way to expand into the skies or delve into the depths, RimWorld is fatally lacking in the sandbox building aspect. The "endgame" of Dwarf Fortress is building crazy structures, which are only limited by one's imagination, but RimWorld lacks this long-term depth. One playthrough of it exposes you to most of what you would care to experience.

To compensate, RimWorld has put in more effort into the random event and quest system, offering the player a supposedly balanced challenge, culminating in escaping the planet. It's an intriguing system, sure, and for a while made me think of actually giving this game a positive recommendation, but as the time went on, it got tedious. See, the AI is well made, never throwing challenges at you that would exterminate your colony. However, you need many people to have the game not progress at a snail's pace, yet as soon as you get enough to feel like the colony really picks up, the AI hits you with a harder challenge. Some colonists may die, many get injured, some permanently. Morale is low for weeks as people mourn, suffer in agony from their wounds, and even throw tantrums, possibly wounding or killing more colonists. The game regresses back to a snail's pace, and just as people are finally recovering from it all, the loop begins anew. Sure, the big challenges are exciting and really make you fight for your life, but they do not outweigh this tedious back-and-forth. Another strength of Dwarf Fortress was really managing hundreds of units, and the scales in which events could unfold then. The same scales are simply never reached in RimWorld, because it sacrifices some player freedom for a forced challenge and an attempt to feed fun down your throat.

Despite the negative tone of this all, I don't think RimWorld is a bad game. Few games can say they've held my interest for over a hundred hours, and RimWorld is one of them. However, I would ultimately still not recommend the game. There is not enough room for many games as time-consuming as this, and in my eyes, the price RimWorld must pay for copying Dwarf Fortress, yet not ambitiously surpassing it, is that it is eclipsed by it. It has not managed to carve out a separate enough identity for itself, and I believe you could just have a superior experience with Dwarf Fortress, and for more hours than nigh anyone would care to play it. Thus, even if you need a UI, go get yourself a copy of Dwarf Fortress when it comes out, probably next year.

Book of Demons

More misconceptions, or excuses, if you prefer to see them this way. Whatever the reason, I have made more poor choices in selecting games. When adding Book of Demons to my to-play-list, I'm quite sure I thought it to be from the same series as Monster's Den: Book of Dread, which was a lovely flash game I played many years ago. Well, it wasn't. The description of the game was close, but sadly misleading.

Book of Demons claims to be a roguelike deckbuilder, or even a hack-and-slash. That's a lie. A roguelike, maybe, but in other regards, it's on the level of a mostly casual mobile game.
The game sets you on a track through many levels of dungeons filled with monsters, equipment, gold, and exp. There's promises of dozens of varied enemies, different elements, many game mechanics, multi-stage bossfights... I don't even dare list them for how disappointing they are, although not technically wrong.
For one, the game has no animations, just sprites bouncing about and essentially particle effects as attack animations. Secondly, there's no "real" combat. There's a slow automatic attack pace, but you actually have to click (and keep clicking) on enemies to hit them. The movement is basically fake too, as you're confined to linear paths, essentially giving you a choice of forward or back. This is extra annoying if you're trying to dodge archers or mages, who can shoot at your from outside your vision distance for some reason.
Among other ridiculous mechanics are that some enemies can just summon more enemies. Sometimes right behind you, blocking your path. If they do, you're screwed, since you can't outplay them - it's purely a numbers test, which you will lose. Your saving grace is that even as the melee class, you have a much larger attack range than any melee enemy, but this also creates a boring environment where waves of enemies crash against you, and you just have to click on them all to die.
Speaking of clicking, there's so many things to click on. Click to break shield. Click to pick up loot. Click to open chests. Click to shorten your poison duration. Who adds the mechanic that you have to pick up gold by hovering your mouse over it to a PC game?
And were you wondering about the deckbuilding promise? It's just that equipment and consumables visually look like cards. That's it. There's no deck to speak of, it's just a lie.

Honestly, I'm upset. Not just because this is a glorified phone clicker game, but because I felt it actually had potential. The production quality doesn't seem low at all, and I can tell effort's been put into it. It seems very deliberately made, yet it misses the mark completely. Obviously, I can't recommend this game. If this was an actual mobile game, this might be a different story, but it's not.

Thumper

Tried out Thumper today. I remember seeing it get praised on multiple game news sites, which might have been the reason I picked it up. As seems to be the trend here recently though, I'm not actually a fan of the base genre it's from - rhythm games. I'll try to give you my thoughts on it as unbiased as I can regardless.

So Thumper is a rhythm game where this beetle-like thing is speeding across a linear track, and you gotta press the right buttons at the right times. Turns, notes, barriers, jumps, or maybe they were something else. You see, Thumper's a bit abstract and has very confusing and overbearing visuals and music. The thematics have been turned up to eleven, but at its heart it's still just about pressing up-down-left-right-space at the right times - nothing complicated. There's, I think, 9 stages, with roughly 20 levels each, and a bossfight (which is just a non-fixed length track) at the end of each, and maybe in the middle or somewhere else too sometimes.

However, from its thematic arises my main issue with it. I can't actually see or hear the audio and/or visual cues for what I'm supposed to do at times. Usually, the visual cues shouldn't be as important, but Thumper doesn't always let you keep pressing buttons, with how large the spacing between actions sometimes is, making you lose the rhythm. This really strikes me as something a rhythm game shouldn't do. Sure, as far as the audiovisuals go, Thumper stands out, but I don't understand why people would let it sacrifice the gameplay for that purpose.

Overall, Thumper looks and feels quite unique, but that's just a facade. It has the same old simple rhythm gameplay underneath, and even that isn't executed all that well. I don't like Thumper and wouldn't recommend it, and I don't think that's even my distaste for rhythm games talking. It just wasn't that good.

Finding Paradise

I don't really play games for the story. I generally think there's no benefit to be had from splitting your attention between telling a good story and creating engaging gameplay. However, perhaps a good game can benefit from pieces of story here and there, to give meaning to whatever you're doing. Similarly, perhaps a good story can benefit from pieces of gameplay - reader interaction - to stop attention from waning, to create pauses for thought, and to maybe slightly deepen your attachment to the story.

I immensely enjoyed Finding Paradise's predecessor, To the Moon, and I thought there was no way they could replicate such a memorable story... but they did. Finding Paradise is every bit as good as To the Moon was, so if you loved that, you can stop reading here and go experience Finding Paradise. It's more of the same fantastic storytelling. However, for others, this review can serve for both games in the series.

The reason I approached this in such a roundabout way, is that I don't have much to say about the To the Moon series. As any good story, telling you any major plotpoints would ruin it, so you'll just have to take my word for it being good. Both stories follow two doctors, who work for a unique company that grants people's dying wishes by rewriting their memories, so they could live the lives they always wanted to, at least for a brief moment before their death. To accomplish that, they must traverse through the person's entire life, experiencing the most imporant pieces of it. The beauty of the To the Moon games is how they manage to show that something as ordinary as a regular person's life can be quite extraordinary.

Both games are about 4-6 hours, so they won't take a large chunk of your time, nor will they waste any of it with irrelevant bits or tangents. I wish they were longer, but honestly, they don't have to be. They say what they need to, don't say what they don't have to, and that's probably for the best. Both To the Moon and Finding Paradise are the best story-based games I've played, and I would recommend them to anyone, regardless of whether they like this genre. Myself, I'll be looking forward to the third installement that might be coming out in the nearest year.

Hell is Other Demons

Glad to see my old favorite Flash game site Kongregate is still supporting game development. Hell is Other Demons is one of their published games on Steam that I just tried out. Sadly, like with many other games they've published on Steam, it wasn't bad, but also didn't quite suit me.

Hell is Other Demons is a bullet hell game, but instead of flying in a spaceship/plane equivalent, you're platforming. I had initially thought this was like a more fleshed out roguelike, but most levels are still tied to roughly one screenful of room to move around in. There's some platforms, environmental hazards, and waves of spawning enemies per level. You get a double jump, an invincibility dash, a pistol (or more like a machine gun) that can only shoot sideways, and a "bomb" that can be charged up through kills. Definitely closer to the design of a bullet hell.
You can also buy some upgrades to your character like more health, faster bullets, etc. as well as new guns and bombs with different attack patterns. Additionally, each level has extra challenges like don't get hit or don't use your bomb, if you want that.

After playing, it became clear to me that this is yet another game oriented toward the perfectionist players who like challenging the same content over and over for slightly better scores. The lack of a map and exploration was kind of dissapointing, and that might've been enough to drop it. However, what really irked me about the combat was that I couldn't shoot up, and couldn't dodge with precision. Bullet hell games are supposed to be about using fine control and good planning to dodge all the enemies and their attacks. Here, I feel more like commanding an unyieldy ragdoll. I've a large hitbox, and the constant assault of gravity and environmental hazards.
Sure, it might be too easy if I just get to stay in a corner and gun everyone down, but then that's the developers' problem to fix, instead of shackling me with unsatisfying restrictions.

Overall, definitely not a game for me. I can appreciate what it was going for, and the execution isn't bad at all, but I simply don't wish to repeat the same content so much, finding ever less interesting ways to kill the enemies to compensate for the restrictions placed upon my actions. Just give me mouse aim for dodges and shooting. As it stands, maybe if you want to try a mediocre platformer bullet hell, but otherwise I can't recommend it.

Furi

Ah, Furi. Another promising game I was looking forward to. Been almost 5 years since its release now too.

Furi is a top-down bullet hell hack and slash. The game is comprised of a series of bossfights - levels, if you will. You've got your melee slash, your ranged gun, charged attacks for both that deal more damage but leave you vulnerable, a parry, and a dodge-dash. Good, if standard, stuff. The boss fights offer a healthy amount of difficulty, but are also somewhat forgiving, giving you a full heal and one of your lives back after each phase, so there's a good chance of beating them on the first try since you essentially get a practice run every phase.

Now, I'll address the elephant first. This game has shoddy keyboard+mouse controls for how high action and precision demanding it is. I don't think it's an inherent problem in the type of game Furi is, I just think the developers didn't care to add it in. Like, give me my mouse cursor at the very least, instead of some reticle on the ground serving as a vague hint. For a PC game, this is unacceptable, and amounts to more than half of my frustration with the game.
The rest leans more toward personal issues. It feels like Furi is more oriented towards the speedrunner and completionist kind. The game's about 6 hours long, I think, but there's a more difficult mode, and extra praise if you do really well in the fights. While a norm for bossfights in all action games, I'm not actually a big fan of the rather rigid series of actions-responses you're supposed to do at times. I think Furi offers a good amount of freedom for a bossfight game, but it's inherently quite reaction-and-memorization based.
And finally, it just seems rough around the edges. The graphics are stylized, but still feel a bit... amateur. Same for the animations. Not bad, but a bit off. It's a minor grievance, and I'm not one to hate on game art, but it bleeds a bit into how responsive the game feels, and how well attacks and whatnot are telegraphed.

Overall, I can't give Furi a personal recommendation. If you're a fan of bossfights, hack and slash, and/or bullet hell, it might very well be up your alley, but I think it's far from perfection in any case. Just make sure you own a controller before playing, because otherwise I can almost guarantee you'll have a greatly suboptimal experience.

Kingdom: New Lands

One of the older games still left on my backlog this time. (Fun fact, there's apparently also a Flash version, not that those are easily accessible anymore as of this year.) I've had my eye on Kingdom: Classic (which kind of acts like a free demo these days) since it came out in 2015. But before I got to play it, Kingdom: New Lands was already out, so I opted for that instead. I seemed to have missed Kingdom: Two Crowns for some reason, which came out in late 2018.
So, I only played New Lands, but from what I read, the core gameplay is basically the same for all of them. Each next installation just adds a bit more content. So keep in mind that what I say probably applies to all of them.

Kingdom is an extremely minimalist strategy game. You play as a ruler, who gallops left and right on their steed, and the only thing they can do aside from this movement is to collect money and choose where to allocate this money. You can hire workers, get them tools to build/hunt/farm, fund farms, defenses, and some other stuff like shrines. After a few days, you'll be sieged by monsters each night. Survive long enough to build a big boat, and you win.

To start from the good bits - I find this minimalistic gameplay quite well executed. It's intuitive, and you can really do quite much with effectively only one interaction button. The art is really nice, and the music is fitting and beautiful.
Now, as for the problems - they mainly come down to pacing, unit AI, and general lack of content. The map is pretty long horizontally, and your movement isn't that fast. You have no overview of what is going on outside of your immediate view, so you're going to have to move around a lot, spending most of the game just getting from one place to another. It's slow, and it's not fun.
Secondly, the AI is really not up to par with a game this hands-off. If I can not micromanage my units, they must be capable of managing themselves. These fools will happily wander outside at night, getting beaten up by monsters and losing all my hard earned money. Builders prioritising important or nearby buildings? More like random things, sometimes even aborting an ongoing project to go elsewhere. And archers just... don't know where to go. They have no idea where to find enemies or animals to hunt. All in all, it makes for a frustrating experience, seeing such incompetence unfold.
Other problems are just the lack of building, unit, and enemy types, as well as sometimes lacking clarity of what some things do.

To conclude, Kingdom isn't a bad game or a bad idea, but it needs better AI, and a faster way to get around. Most of all though, it needs more content. In that regard, I would have almost certainly been better off trying the newest version, and you definitely should skip straight to that if you want to play Kingdom, but I understand it's still not a significant improvement. As such, I would have to give the overall series a "no". There's probably plenty of strategy games out there that would rather suit your fancy. This one doesn't respect your time, and even if you invest in it, you'll never reach satisfying gameplay. A bearable way to pass the time, at best.

Wolf & Rabbit

The thing with RPG Maker adventure games is that they're either going to be really good, or a waste of time. Wolf & Rabbit seems to fall more into the latter category.

There isn't much to say about adventure games in general. As they don't tend to be gameplay-based, the "game" is not a point of discussion. The story, however, obviously can't be talked about without spoiling it, leaving little to say. Wolf & Rabbit is about 2-3 hours long, depending on how stuck you get.
Maybe I'm just dumb, but I feel the game is very non-straightforward, forcing you to backtrack and re-search a lot of places you've been to before, because those places inexplicably gain new items you "did not see before".
The game kills you for stupid reasons, forcing you to go to the last save point and through the dialogue boxes with forced wait time that can't be skipped, being a major annoyance.
And the grand finish is that this game is translated from Chinese by someone who's not exactly an expert in English, making it a painful read most of the time.

In the end, I was probably mostly through the game, but the story didn't grip me enough to even care to see it through to the end. It's supposed to be a horror game, and does have some slightly eerie moments, but nothing truly scary either. The writing isn't very good, even if you don't account for the bad translation, and... what's left, really? The nice art and melodies playing in the background? Not enough for me to give it a recommendation. There's better adventure games out there, horror or not, RPG Maker or otherwise.

Ruiner

Ruiner is an action shooter / hack-and-slash. It's got some story and takes about 6-ish hours to complete. You run around some levels, whack enemies with your melee weapon, or pick up some guns to shoot at them, while using some abilities to help.
Truth be told, I didn't get very far in the game as I was immediately put off by one glaring flaw. The game is in this top-down, almost isometric view, and you control your character with the WASD keys. But... pressing down actually moves you down and slightly to the left. Likewise, all other directional controls are slightly angled. In a game where precision and fast action taking is important, this movement scheme is unacceptable. I can not play a game when the character is not moving where I am telling them to move. This in and of itself is more than enough to not recommend this game, but wait, there's more.

Honestly, the game just feels a bit boring, and has some unnecessary elements. It presents a variety of guns, but with their limited ammo, the mobility of your character, and the damage of your trusty handheld pipe, there's just no reason to not go up to everyone and whack them instead. Likewise, from the selection of abilities, not all are equally useful. The game's too short, repetitive, and running around dodging and whacking people is a snoozefest, so I just really see no reason to recommend it.

Trackmania

Already been quite a while since I first tried the "2020" Trackmania. One of the earlier Trackmania games actually stands as one of the first "real" video games I played (not an indie Flash game or Minesweeper or sth.), so this series has always had a special place in my heart. Not that I'd ever been a particularly active player, but I feel it's at least something I can always return to.

Trackmania is a simple game. It's a racing game, which tend to be simple in and of themselves, but Trackmania eliminates any possible lingering complexity surrounding the driving. Everybody gets the same car, no upgrades, no abilities, no interaction with other people aside from seeing their incorporeal cars race alongside you. You only have your gas, your brakes, and your steering, and this allows you to focus on the important bit - driving.
You see, Trackmania is probably the only speedrunning game I have enjoyed so far, and that's because it makes it so accessible. Completing a level and getting a Bronze time is easy. A Silver might take a few tries. But as you approach a Gold (or the extra hard "Author time"), you really have to start embracing the speedrunning mindset, where a single mistake like bumping a wall or braking at the wrong time ruins the run and warrants an instant restart. On some maps, that's where the difficulty comes from, on others, you also have to watch how you take curves, manage your speed, etc. They're not difficult concepts, but everything has to be executed near perfectly and refined over dozens of runs.
While usually speedrunning would have you go look up tricks from the community, here you can always fetch some replays from the game's servers of people who are just a bit better than you, showing you areas you could improve in. So while it's possible to be stuck for a while as you struggle on the perfect execution, you will never have a problem that you don't know where you can improve.
All that's not to mention any user-created tracks, which often go crazy with jumps, loops, wall-driving, and other shenanigans.

I still have mixed feelings about some new track elements they put into the game. I enjoy the new ground types, which have more variety than older games, like the drift-oriented gravel, or slippery snow. However, I have not yet come to terms with ice tracks, which basically rob you of your steering ability. Nor do I like the track effect which literally robs you of your steering ability until the next checkpoint, and the "reactor boost up/down" effects are unintuitive as well. I think these elements increase the skill floor needed to enjoy the game, and that's not something I wish for this game, even if it's not a problem for the seasoned player.

Overall, while I'm not super excited about Trackmania, I do see myself playing it from time to time, completing a few tracks, seeing my leaderboard ranking increse and medals rack up. I would definitely recommend trying it, since it's the first and only racing and speedrunning game I care about, and I feel it's got to be special to do that. It's also free, so nothing lost if you don't like it.

Risk of Rain 2

Pretending as usual that my 2.5 month absence is not noteworthy - here's a game I first played in a free weekend in Early Access, and only just now deemed ready to review - it's Risk of Rain 2. It is a 3D remake of Risk of Rain, which I also loved. I really didn't have faith that this formula would succeed in three dimensions, but boy am I glad to have been proven wrong.

For those that haven't played either, Risk of Rain is an incremental shooter. You start off with one of a few character classes which you can unlock through achievements, and proceed to kill enemies while collecting equipment to make yourself ever stronger. I would call the game incremental, since the power difference between starting and ending a run is absolutely insane, and the endgame chaos is insanely fun. A single run consists of a few (or as many as you can handle, if you want) stages, each culminating with a boss fight. There is a lot of variety depending on what kind of enemies you encounter and which maps you go through, but most importantly, what kind of items you get. There's just over 100 items of different rarities, with the highest rarity items being impactful enough to actually influence effective strategies, diversifying the runs.
Risk of Rain 2 also added a secondary currency, some item conversion mechanics, hidden maps, more characters, etc., and is, as of about the midpoint of last year, past the content amount of the original, not to mention having more polish and production value in the first place. Because of the success of the game, it doesn't seem like they're done either, and there's more to come.

Personally, what can I say? Risk of Rain is one of the games that instilled me with the belief that we need more incremental mechanics inserted into other game genres. The power levels have to be executed well to prevent either the player or the enemy growing out of control, and need to be more than just numbers going up equally. (Because who cares if you do 1 dmg to a 100 hp opponent, or 1k dmg to a 100k hp opponent.) It's insanely fun if done well, and really creates a sense of progression looking at how far you've come. Risk of Rain executes this incredibly well.
A problem with Risk of Rain 2 being 3D is that it's sometimes hard to see who's shooting at you. But that's not the game's fault, it's inherent in FPS games, and I'd say the added dimension, as well as the ability to see and shoot really far, more than makes up for it. I also feel like multiplayer could do with some improvement, maybe in terms of shared equipment of sorts. There is always some arguing over who gets what or how someone has too much equipment, making it really hard for the players who don't.

Regardless of any negatives, Risk of Rain 2 earns its spot as one of my favorite shooters. It is mostly a copy of the original, but greatly improves and continues to improve on it, and I would absolutely recommend giving it a try. Although maybe you'll have a better time playing alone than with friends, at least at first.

They Are Billions

I remember this next one being quite popular right when it came out, and I, too, liked the premise. There are lots of zombie survival games that make you run around, avoid the zombies, maybe kill some here and there, but They Are Billions actually goes and lets you face the hordes. Literally thousands and tens of thousands of zombies at once, and you take the assault head on. Truly a fantastic idea. There is of course the usual disclaimer that I'm an idiot for yet again playing an RTS when I don't really like the genre, but sometimes you just have to take what you can get.

Looking at the campaign side of things, They Are Billions is composed of a series of levels, each with an objective mainly consisting of killing zombies and staying alive. Often there is also a population requirement and/or a time limit. For what grander purpose, I can not tell, as you need population anyways to get workers for the resource collection buildings (food, wood, stone, iron), soldiers, and well, why not let people take their time playing if they so desire and are not otherwise overrun by the hordes that spawn every so often and charge your base? The gameplay is roughly split between the combat and the colony management aspects, as a lot of effort goes into making sure you have all the necessary production set up to build units and defenses. In the end, probably only 5-10% of your buildings will be military-related.
The campaign also includes a technology tree which allows you to unlock more impressive units and stronger buildings as you progress. And then there's another mission type entirely, where you control a single unit, clearing out smaller levels, without the building mechanics.

Honestly, for the first few missions and hours, I really liked this game. But the more I played, the more I noticed problems started to crop up, both big and small. The game was kind of slow, partially owing that to how it wasn't entirely focused on the best bit - combat, instead forcing you to build up your economy first. Once you got that going, the progression speed was more related to how fast you could build (unless you ran out of uninfected room). They could have reduced the number of houses and food gathering places needed, as well as removed the energy distribution grid idea entirely. Further, building was a mess, as there were many requirements about what could be built where, and which buildings could be built how close to each other. The restrictions were entirely unintuitive, and neither were there any visual indicators where stuff could be built, leading to trial and error, which was also a big time sink if designing an effective base.
All this detracts from the sweet experience of killing buttloads of zombies, but worst of all, and what was the final straw... Once you've finished all the boring setting up and can use your military to finally start more agressively fighting the zombies, your chance of failure starts rapidly increasing. If you make a slip up and get your defenses breached, it's game over, and you have to start from the beginning, doing the tedious setup yet again.
As briefly mentioned, there were some other weird choices made by the developers, such as having odd population and time limits on missions, or the whole concept of "hero missions", which are just a slog through a building, playing pixel hunt with indiscernible pickups that you desperately need to advance your tech tree. Lots of other quality of life things were missing as well, like more sophisticated commands for units, such as formations.

Overall, I believe They Are Billions is a great idea, trying to fulfill the fantasy of slaughtering an insane number of enemies, but numerous questionable design decisions and lack of quality of life functionality are a dealbreaker. I can't force myself to go through the lengthy boring bits again and again, just to get to the good ones, and unless you got a lot of tolerance for repeating non-challenging tasks and a lot of time on your hands, I can't really recommend this RTS to you. As an alternative, maybe try one of the Creeper World games.