Zombotron

I think the person behind Zombotron did good on the marketing front. I do not personally remember any of his past works, but supposedly he made relatively popular Flash games in the past, and even a Flash game by the same name 7 years prior. Most of the reviews were reminiscing about that, but I can't say I had the same experience.

Zombotron feels like a very run-on-the-mill platformer shooter. You traverse levels, shoot some enemies, fight a few bosses, oh and you have physics to kill enemies with too... Definitely gave Flash game vibes, and I don't say that in a positive way. The characters are big (which means less fits on the screen) and cartoony (which I just don't like, but I guess seeing their joints is objectively bad) and just uninteresting. There's a level up system, but it's just small numerical upgrades and feels enitrely uninpactful. There's different weapons, but they don't really change anything. You still just run, jump, shoot, maybe melee. The game touts all these methods to kill the enemies, but I think they're all pretty boring. The whole game's just... unremarkable.

I don't have a lot to say. Zombotron is the very basics of a platformer shooter with no cool hook, and even then the execution is sub-par. I've definitely played more interesting and more polished platformer shooters (like Seraph or sth.), and still forgotten about them. Zombotron in no way deserves my time nor my recommendation.

Subsurface Circular

While I did read that Subsurface Circular was a text-based game, I still wasn't fully expecting what I got. You know those games where you're tending a bar or some other establishment, and you get customers coming in, telling you about their day and their lives? Subsurface Circular is a bit like that, but instead of a bar, you're sitting in the titular Subsurface Circular - a metro line exclusively for robots, trying to figure out why some robots are going missing, and maybe something more.

Listen, it's a short game, about 2 hours long, and while I'd love to tell you all about it, that would rob you of the experience of playing it yourself. So instead, let me tell you not about the story, but rather my experiences with the story. First off, it's well written. I still don't know how to describe it, but with some stories (it's not a super rare trait) you can just tell it feels nice to read the words, whatever the story actually is. But luckily, the story's also good. I don't think it's amazingly good or original either, just... good. Probably the strongest bit is the presentation, as you have to kind of get the details of things out of the other robots. You're a detective, see, so you gotta ask the right questions. It's... not really possible to fail or fall off course though, I'm afraid, which somewhat lessens the impact of your actions. The game's kind of linear, and that's something I wish could have been improved. That and the length.

So, what are my opinions overall? Eh... I'd play it if it was free. It's short enough to not really waste my time, but I don't feel I got some profound experience either. The story was nice, I'm happy I experienced it, but I will probably forget it in not too long. So I guess it's a partial recommendation. Won't make my list, but I liked it nontheless.

City of Brass

Sometimes I play a game and wonder how I was tricked into believing it's any semblence of good. I just want to get City of Brass out of my head as fast as possible, so I'm not going to go into too much detail. It feels like a student game. You got your standard first-person view, enemies run straight towards you, you slash them with your sword a few times until they die... Environmental hazards blend into the scenery, except for an icon when you hover over them, but then everything has an icon when you hover over it - it's a mess. Treasure chests open to a cardboard cutout of coins, you can accidentally use your whip to grab a potion that instakills you, because of course missing an enemy and hitting a potion next to them means you wanted to grab and chug that... You don't even get anything for killing enemies, or well... doing much anything at all really.

Agh, I didn't play it a lot, but City of Brass really feels like it wasted my time. You just spam your sword, braindead enemies fall down, you run in the direction of the arrow... There's nothing interesting in the slightest about it. Hard pass. Not recommended. Go next.

Katana Zero

Mostly unrelated, but I had a small breakdown trying to figure out how to classify games, particularly action games, after I finished playing this game. Katana Zero is no doubt an action game, but that's so broad... It's a platformer, because you jump from platform to platform, but that's by no means what the game is about... I guess it's a hack and slash, since that is mainly what the game is about, but then I looked at all the other hack and slash games, and how different they, too, are, and I just don't know anymore. To go into more detail, Katana Zero is a level-based side-scrolling hack and slash, with the catch being a bullet time / time rewind mechanic.
It's a fun game by the gameplay alone, as restarting the level is quite rapid, so it can give you very difficult scenarios to overcome. It starts off easy enough, but the difficulty ramps up alongside your skill, giving a very nice feeling of progression as you look back at levels that used to give you trouble, and notice how easy they are compared to what you can handle towards the end. And yet, were it just the gameplay, I wouldn't mark this game as anything too special...

What really lifts Katana Zero above the rest is the story it tells. It could have just been a nice arcade game, where you have the ability to restart the level because it's a video game, but Katana Zero went further, and wrote a whole story, history, psychological aspects - everything around it. I think the story is very memorable indeed, and it's well-integrated with the gameplay where it's actually interfering with how you play the game, not just something you experience between levels. There are also a lot of choices, which appear to have an impact on the rest of the story, but, minor spoiler, mostly do not. Still, I think it's applaudable that it made me care about the decisions I made, and fooled me to believe that the game may have gone significantly differently based on those choices. (There is actually one important choice as well as a hidden boss fight.)
But that's about all I want to say about the story, lest I spoil something larger. Do experience it for yourself.

Overall, between an amazing story, well-executed, although not incredibly unique, gameplay, and an all around solid experience in every other aspect, Katana Zero is one of best games I've played in a while, as well as a contender for the best arcade game I've ever played. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Gloomhaven

I've always been at least moderately suspicious of video games that have been made from board games. Not that I have anything against board games, far from it, but a board game has a set of limitations on it (simple enough rules to be memorized and applied by humans, limited board sizes, no information hidden from all players, etc.) that a video game does not. So I usually leave board games to be played in person, and stick to video games while online. I was, however, willing to make an exception for Gloomhaven, not just because it's the highest rated board game, but because I was asked to. So, having played it, I might as well review it, but keep my overall stance on board games in mind, if you wish.

Gloomhaven is a tactical, deck-based RPG. You choose a class, assemble a party of up to 4 characeters / players, and set off to a scenario, possibly as part of a longer campaign during which you can upgrade your character with new cards, new equipment, and even a slightly more beneficial RNG. Each scenario has you accomplishing some goal, usually killing all enemies. Unlike most RPGs, Gloomhaven places much greater stakes on each action. You are limited by your deck size, and will lose if you run out of cards, placing you on a turn limit. Additionally, you may choose to burn some cards instead of recycling them in order to get a more powerful effect - bringing forward the time of your inevitable demise, but potentially making up for it by clearing enemies or preventing them doing a lot of damage to you.
Enemies usually hit for a lot, and you're expected to know how the AI works and abuse that knowledge to the fullest by manipulating your turn order, unit placement, and whatever else you can to exploit the specifically-dumb AI. This works well in a board game, but I find it makes the game unnecessarily slow online. This is an addition to the already commonly slow pace of board games that stems from generally being played one turn at a time, one player at a time. Further, there is a widespread problem with turn-based PvE games in general, where it's usually more efficient for one person to call the shots and coordinate everything, than everyone making their own decisions. This of course means that unless everyone is on an equal skill level, either the better players have to bottle up their knowledge and stay silent, watching less experienced players make mistakes and bring the party down. Or the less experienced players don't get much autonomy, and thus not much fun out of the game. This is not something inherent to Gloomhaven, but Gloomhaven also isn't exempt from this.

I think that's most of it. Not much specific about Gloomhaven. In fact, I quite like the idea that you're more solving open-ended puzzles than playing an RPG, and I bet Gloomhaven would be quite nice to play in person. But mainly due to the high amount of time spent waiting, I just can't give the game a recommendation over something designed for a computer first and foremost.

Noita

It's rare to see a game with a truly unique concept. I suppose it's usually that innovation is difficult - it's much easier to make something you've already seen. But also that there is risk in innovation - if no one's done it before, there's no telling how fun it might be. I can't say Noita is completely unique, because it heavily reminds me of the various powder toys I liked to play around with a decade or so ago, except Noita has many more elements, many more interactions, an immensely larger world, and the whole thing is gamified into an action roguelike.

I find it an absoute technical feat, creating such a large world where every little block, basically every pixel, is simulated in realtime. I think Noita deserves recognition for this alone. They've further managed to add an exploration element into the game, tasking you with learning how things react, what are the effects of various substances on you and your enemies, and figuring out good combinations of spells and tactics.
I was very excited for the first few hours, being a small floaty wizard in a large cave filled with unknown things. Sure, I died often, but each new run I started off with slightly different spells, found new wands, new things, and the game was constantly fresh. I set fire to things, zapped water and metal with electricity, and a particular highlight was conjuring up enough water to create a shield that slowed incoming projectiles to a standstill before they could hit me. There was a lot to see and a lot to do, but my experiences were somewhat disjointed...

On one hand there was this amazing physics simulator that was asking to be explored. On the other, there were these shooty bad guys trying to get you to die and not explore the former. A particular place of conflict was the permadeath nature of the game combined with it taking a while before you could get to the really fun stuff. I felt my exploration stifled by the nagging "don't do anything too crazy, lest we take these fun tools away from you" feeling. Indeed, after the starting options became familiar, most of my game time was spent just shooting at enemies and flying, maybe sometimes digging, through the levels. I found an interesting interaction every now and then, but they rarely performed better than just "shoot more inert bullets at them".

So, yeah, a shame. I don't even know what they could do to improve these problems. Just removing the physics part would leave us a not-too-unique shooter, which I find to be the main gameplay of this game already. Removing the shooting bits would leave us with not a game, but just a larger version of the powder toys of old. While Noita is a technical feat, the two main components that make it up fail to be used harmoniously together. Apart, they just fail to keep my attention for too long.
But hey, even if I can't personally recommend it, the 95% positive reviews on Steam are not to be laughed at. If what I described feels a bit like what you'd want to experience, you don't have to take my word for the game not being so fun.

GTFO

GTFO had a free weekend recently, so I got together with a few friends, and we gave it a shot. They had just released a new "Rundown" alongside the free weekend, which is a series of missions that is... the whole game, I guess. Seems to happen twice a year to try to keep the game fresh, which is nice. But I'm getting ahead of myself. What's the game like?

Rundown is described as a horror shooter, but there isn't much horror aside from the grotesque enemies, and there's not that much shooting unless you want to run out of ammo and lose the game. Instead, the levels rely on exploring the area, making optimal decisions on where to go, and a little bit of teamwork that includes sneaking past enemies or sneaking up to them and clubbing them in the head while they're taking a nap. A lot of the latter really, and it plays like a game of Red Light, Green Light (AKA Statues), which really makes it quite slow, especially if other players are just on standby in case things go south.
The gunplay isn't bad, but there's nothing noteworthy about it either. Equipment you can find is quite boring (another set of glowsticks no one wants, anyone?), and there isn't a lot of variety in the gameplay, at least as far as the missions I got to. Top that off with having to re-do large parts of the game if you lose and no adjustable difficulty, and you don't really have much of a case to make in favor of this game. For what it's worth, I found the atmosphere quite immersive and well-executed, but that is by no means enough to keep me interested in the game.

So, after the initial feeling of discovery wore off and the gameplay started to fall into more of a rut of just waiting for periods of time (having to repeat a part of the game 5 times didn't help either), I wasn't having any more of it. I can't even imagine what it must be like playing with randoms, where someone running off, getting frustrated, or just being incompetent will simply ruin everything. Overall, play with a group of people you know, for sure, but even then I find the whole thing difficult to recommend.

DungeonTop

DungeonTop is a roguelike deckbuilder. You grab a starter hero, a starter deck, and venture into the dungeon to beat opponents who have little decks of their own. The gameplay isn't completely unique, but I don't know any game that's very similar to DungeonTop either.
Your hero and the enemy hero start in opposite corners of a small 4x6 or so grid and take turns summoning minions next to existing friendly units, moving, attacking, and casting spells. You get a few cards and a few mana to cast these cards, and then dicard and redraw the whole hand the next turn. You get a selection of cards to add at the end of each battle, and occasionally the chance to remove some. If you run out of cards, you just reshuffle and go for another round.

Perhaps some have already realized that this system is a bit basic and perhaps flawed. Because decks are small (<20), the draw speed is massive (initially 5), and there's no penalty for running out of cards, you're going to thin your deck to be fairly small, and consistently execute whatever combo you want. I didn't play for too long so I don't know all the different strategies, but for example I summoned like 5 minions every turn, completely encircling the enemy on my second or third turn, leaving them with no room to play any new cards. I'd then just shuffle my units around and inveitably beat the enemy. The board was not nearly big enough to fit all my units if I didn't kill their hero in the first few turns. I hear other strategies were similarly powerful, and that overall, the game was far far too easy, to the point you would never lose if you had any idea what you were doing. I can vouch that in my couple of hours of playing, every battle was completely one-sided. They had 16 levels of difficulty at the start, but they were sadly disabled until some unknown point, so I couldn't even make it more difficult. After 2 or so hours of the game getting only easier, and reading that it wasn't going to get better, I gave up.

I feel I didn't even get a good feel for the game. The idea felt kind of interesting but it was just mindlessly easy. I could not care less about what my enemy was doing, or what mechanics the game wanted to throw at me. If you can just do the same thing and win, then what's the incentive to try? In any case, it's not as if the game was super interesting behind its lackluster difficulty. I might have had fun if it was properly balanced, but it's not that the balance ruined a masterpiece or anything. Overall, a shame, but nothing of value lost in not being able to recommend DungeonTop.

Swords & Souls: Neverseen

I feel like I've expressed these thoughts before, but... I'm really glad I got to play Flash games growing up, instead of the current state of "free" games that is the mobile game industry. But the quality has gone up in the years as well, so if you want to start charging money, you best step up your games a lot from what they were back in the day.
Apparently Swords & Souls: Neverseen is a sequel to a 7 year old Flash game (which I never played), and it does feel very much like a Flash game, except with more content and quality.

Swords & Souls consists of a three part game loop. First, you train your character through five different minigames, one for each stat. Second, you go fight enemies to collect coins and items. Third, you use the gathered coins to upgrade the town, including the training area, allowing you to progress further. Rotate back around to training, and keep at this cycle.
Upgrading the town isn't really gameplay and offers only minimal choice in deciding what you want to prioritize. Fighting enemies is mostly a stat check. Most encounters are either so easy you don't have to do anything, or so hard there's nothing you can do, with perhaps only one to two encounters each cycle that depend on when you use your skills. So, all that's really left are the minigames, and your enjoyment will depend nigh entirely on whether you like them. Personally, I did not. Even though the minigames change a little as you do them more, they're still very basic games of "press the right direction key at the right time" or "aim and maybe click in the right direction at the right time". They were somewhat fun for the first 5-10 minutes each, but they're very far from what I'd call quality gameplay.

Perhaps my verdict is a bit unpolite, but I feel this game is suitable for children at best, or if you want to do some coordination / reaction time / aiming excercises. It falls deep into the casual game territory for me and has no appealing aspects whatsoever. There is no way I could recommend this.

LiEat

Unlike most publishers whose games I've played before, I never know if I'm getting a good game when playing something from Playism. I think they exclusively publish Japanese indie games, so there's a lot of RPGMaker stuff and JRPGs. I played through one by the name of LiEat today. Seems to be this particular developer's most successful release, despite later releasing two more story games of similar size. (The later releases also did really well for indie games, but just not as massively well as LiEat.) But I'll get around to those some other time. This post is about LiEat.

LiEat is an RPGMaker game about a travelling liar and a little dragon girl (named Efina) who eats lies. The game part isn't really important, despite there being some combat, and I'd go as far as to say it's quite badly made, even for RPGMaker story game standards. The story is told as three smaller stories about the duo solving some mystery or problem in a village, a resort, and a mansion. The maps are small, each story takes an hour or two, and there's about 8 characters in each, 4 of whom repeat. Apart from uncovering the mystery of that particular place, each story also uncovers a piece of information about our main duo. The stories weren't bad. They were enjoyable to read through and didn't drag on due to their short length, but they were also nothing particularly memorable.
I think the main selling point was how darn cute Efina was. Both in the conversation dynamics between the characters, as well as the artstyle (not the pixel art), which looked somewhat amateurish, almost like crayon drawings by children, but all the more fitting for it. Personally, I also found the music to be much to my liking.

Now, as a whole, I don't really know what to say. I definitely liked the story, and found it was 4 hours well spent. But the stories weren't that good, there were some plot holes like Efina's power to make lies manifest being a bit arbitrary and made to suit the plot, and you had to run around far too much, checking every place again and again, as new discoverable items and ways to progress the story plopped up as you found the last. It was a bit of an annoyance. I think I'd give it like a half-recommendation. Play it if you like cute little anime dragon girls with a small side of actual story and mysteries, but steer clear if that doesn't sound like your cup of tea. For me, it just barely won't be making it into my best games list.

Airships: Conquer the Skies

I'm somewhat surprised that Airships has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam. I must admit it's very well made for a small indie game, but it's far from perfectly executed.

Airships is primarily a sandbox for designing steampunk airships and pitting them against other airships. There's also landships and bases which use the same parts but different methods of movement. I spent most of my time in a conquer-the-world style scenario mode, which adds a tech tree for unlocking parts and adds bases to fight over that generate income, thus limiting your ship designs. But you really just care about the ships and the combat, and there's quite a few flaws with that part. Allow me to list off some that come to me, in no particular order:

The research is far too slow, taking tens if not hundreds of hours to finish in its entirety. Getting even a single upgrade takes a while, and sometimes gives only one new block. The research tree does not specifically tell you what each node unlocks.
Combat is neither manual nor automatic enough. You can only give rudimentary commands to your ships, being 80% movement, and 15% who to target. The movement is terrible at understanding whether something is in the way, sometimes ramming into stuff, and sometimes stopping even if it wouldn't ram into anything. There's no navigating around obstacles, chained movement commands, no option to follow a target and keep it at range, no way to target specific systems (weapons, crew, repairs, ammo, etc.) on the enemy...
The battle maps are far too small for the epic scale this game promises, and even almost enables. There is no room to manouver or position your ships most of the time, leading to piles of wreckage blocking the way. If larger maps could be combined with autonomous AI (that works better than current enemy AI, which rams into its own units and gets stuck) and larger budgets for designing ships, we could actually get a lot of entertainment value from watching massive fights - not the case right now.
The battles are about twice too fast at normal speed, and about twice too slow at the next slowest, 1/4 speed.
Aside from research not being transparent, a lot of other systems aren't either. How does armor work? How is accuracy calculated over range? How much damage am I actually doing to the enemy? Or how much are they doing to me, for that matter? If I don't know if my weapons scale better or worse over range than the enemy's, I don't get to make a decision of whether to fight up close or far. This isn't just a strategic problem, it's also unfun to not understand what is going on.
And honestly, there's more problems, most related to not enough polish, not necessarily bad ideas.

Overall, I did play Airships for nearly ten hours, definitely proving it has some appeal. But once you build a few cool ships with the parts you have, there isn't too much incentive to build even more, so that part of the game falls off. The overworld RTS game is very slow and bare-bones, so that was never exciting to start with. And finally, the combat despite offering some awe at larger-than-usual scale fights, and watching the dynamic destruction of both fleets, eers more on the frustrating than the fun side for the reasons listed above.
I'm left wondering what could have caused people to like this game so much. Perhaps there is a shortage of games that let you build your own armaments and then offer a meaningful battleground. I can't help but feel that maybe even Gratuitous Space Battles did it better. In any case, I can't recommend a game I didn't ultimately enjoy, so I can't recommend Airships.

Daemon X Machina

Mecha games always looks so cool from the screenshots. The idea of flying around at high speeds with a lot of firepower sounds cool, but that doesn't necessarily translate to reality. I guess you could say the same about Daemon X Machina, which I just played.

See, the problem with being really strong, and really maneuverable, and really fast is that... Well, there's a lot of problems. Being strong means others are weak, and that makes things easy. Being maneuverable, like a mech, not like a plane, means that you can essentially aim anywhere you want. Combine that with being airborne, and there's often nothing obscuring your view either, making it truly an excercise in clicking on targets as they come close from any direction. And being fast means everything is really damn small because they're so far. So you're going to need some sort of auto-targetting to make sure you can keep living out your power fantasy of eliminating a lot of enemies, lest you feel like a fool, missing all your shots.
These are roughly my problems with this game, which can be summed up in it being too easy and too simple. You go from scenario to scenario, suffering dialogue and story that doesn't seem to be heading anywhere for a while, then fly to targets and hold down your mouse buttons while aiming in their general direction, and then wait for more to arrive until the mission is over and you get to do it all over again.

I could talk about other bits, like how the upgrade and customization system is kind of nice with salvaging equipment from enemies, requiring specific equipment for specific upgrades, and such, but it doesn't matter. It comes down to slightly different damage or defense numbers, or a faster firing gun, but the core gameplay stays the same boring way. They got full English voice acting, but 10 missions in, I still couldn't piece together where the story was going, and they'd already introduced like 20 characters. Speaking of characters, I don't know if the lighting messed up or what, but they had really unsightly streaks of light shades moving across their faces. Ruined that bit too.
I quit after failing a mission because I got tired of the last enemy sitting outside the playable area and decided to fly after it, only to be instantly killed by the map boundary as I ran into it, failing the mission. I wasn't going to re-do one of these missions from the start, so I quit.

I feel like I'm being very harsh on a game that kind of delivered its premise. You fly around and you shoot enemies, even if there's nothing complicated or challenging about it. I'm not sure what better I expected, but as I was actually falling asleep during it, I have no personal reason to give it any sort of recommendation.

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.