Kubifaktorium

Falling a bit behind schedule these months. I have multiple longer games in progress at the moment, so I managed to fish out one of the lower rated games on my wishlist for this week - Kubifaktorium.
It's a game that starts out as a colony sim, seemingly taking a lot of inspiration from Dwarf Fortress, but then starts to add pieces of automation in as play progresses, this time taking inspiration from Factorio. While it's well made for a small team, it essentially delivers a heavily watered down amalgamation of the two games without doing anything new.

The game loop is quite simple. You first clear the land of its natural resources and use that to start your little colony. Then you put up farms, pastures, and groves to grow the resources yourself. You need drink, food, and housing for each of your colonists, and if you want to keep them extra happy (and thus productive), specific types of food and decorations / leisure activities around. These extra requirements get more complex as time goes on, but I generally found that trying to satisfy them takes more time than the colonists being more productive saves, so I just ignored that part of the game.
I didn't get too far into the automation part, but essentially you just set up alternate versions of your facilities that work automatically, once you get past the hurdle of making metals and the automation parts manually. It's not really all that different from the first half of the game, because your colonists are already "automatic" if you think about it.

In the end, despite trying to combine two of my possibly favorite games ever, Kubifaktorium made the common mistake of doing multiple things badly, instead of doing a single thing well. It doesn't have even a fraction of the depth that makes Dwarf Fortress so fascinating, nor is the automation nearly as satisfying as in Factorio. There is significantly less content, and further still, I think the two genres don't even mix that well, thus leading to a game that's less than the sum of its parts. Overall, I can't think of any real reason to play this over many other games from either genre. There is no merit to trying to combine them here, and I would thus not recommend this.

Throne and Liberty

Another new MMO, another timely review. It's Throne and Liberty this time around - another Korean MMO, as they seem to be the only ones still actively making MMOs. It's already been out in Korea since the start of the year, but just released in the West.

I won't be dwelling on the various launch difficulties of servers being full and connections being dropped. If anything, they cleared those really fast, basically as soon as the peak hours passed. I already experienced no queues, game-breaking bugs, nor crashes on the second day.
What I will be mentioning... is how this game has hands down the worst new player experience of any big budget MMO I've played, possibly ever. It's a common example of a game trying too hard during the early stages. You're immediately rushed into the action with a full bar of skills that you have no idea what they do. You're immediately fighting some big bosses, and there's a ton of NPCs around, who you, as a character, are supposed to be familiar with, and it's throwing all this story at you while rushing you along, and expecting you to make informed decisions on what kind of combat style you want to use, and...
It's just overbearing. There's nothing wrong with a simple opening, where you're given a basic attack and one ability and you get to kill 5 skeletons to just get a feel for the controls and the gameplay, and then the game slowly opens up as you go along. I really wish more big games did that.

Now, I quit quite early on, as the story was completely uninteresting, somewhat because I felt like I was dropped in the middle of it and nothing made any sense to me, but also because of the overwhelming expectations they set on me, and because the combat felt really weak. There was no "weight" to my attacks, nor the attacks of the enemy. I get to strafe around while my character (*shudder*) automatically attacks the enemy, spamming through my entire number row as it comes off cooldown. Auto-attacking aside, having 10 skills might be fine after you've played the game for 100 hours, but not right at the start.
I didn't get that far myself, but from the reputable opinions of the people I played with, the game remained laughably easy even as the campaign progressed, and the progression systems were really obnoxious and trying to get you to pay way before you even got to end-game.

All in all, Throne and Liberty isn't just a generic Korean MMO, it's a bad one. From combat, to progression systems, to story, everything was below average, and I have absolutely no desire to see if it would improve if I trudged through it. While I hate to wait another year or more for even just a mediocre MMO release, Throne and Liberty is absolutely not worth playing. I'd recommend you pretend it never existed, and keep on waiting for the next thing to launch. The next might not be good either, but at least now I have hope it won't be worse than this.

Geometry Arena

I had somewhat high hopes for Geometry Arena, and I'm not entirely sure if the game met those hopes or not.
Geometry Arena is an incremental minimalist twin-stick shooter confined to a very small arena. You get to choose one of 12 classes, each of which has a surprisingly unique playstyle, from simple classes that just shoot and dodge, to classes that fire giant projectiles that blast through everything, to classes that shoot bouncy lasers in every direction. You also have basic stat upgrades - all the usual damage, fire rate, critical, range, etc. as well as a few dozen difficulty modifiers that give you more rewards. There's also a rune system that allows you to buy and merge randomized runes, allowing for some very rare and powerful, but also expensive, permanent powerups.

The game loop is simple - you go into the arena, beat as many waves as you can, buy temporary upgrades between waves, and then permanent upgrades between runs. In fact, pretty much every single system in this game is quite simple, but I have yet to see a game that allows you quite as much freedom in customization and insane powerups as this. About twenty levels into the run, and you may already have cranked the enemy HP up a millionfold, because you fire 50 projectiles every second that each deal several billion damage and bounce around the level, instantly killing everything that appears. It's a bit of a journey to those ridiculous levels of power though, and so it feels quite exhilarating the first few times you get there.
However, it is understandably very difficult to balance something with so much freedom, and it's no exception here. My steady climb was interrupted by one run, where I got a broken combination of powerups going, put the in-game difficulty to the max, and beat the game for the first time. This allowed me to get pretty much every upgrade for this one class. A couple tries later in endless mode, I got another good run, which now allowed me to pretty much max out every single class. It only took a few hours, but I'd seen all the nearly 200 temporary upgrades, and experienced pretty much all the game had to offer, even finding a power-up combination that granted me effective immortality.

I really had a ton of fun with Geometry Arena. The road to the top may have been short, but I've rarely been this excited at seeing my character become stronger. For this alone, I would recommend the game. But I can't quite put this in my favorite games list, because it's still lacking in content and quality. It needs better balance without compromising the freedom. It needs longer progression without getting repetitive. And while the minimalistic art, world, and enemies were a great fit, it would really benefit from all-around better design. There's a point where the game goes from a skill-based twin-stick shooter, to a weird incremental simulation game. That's not a bad thing, but realistically, I've played better twin-stick shooters, and I've played better incremental games. Still, I would absolutely recommend giving it a try.

Desperados III

I think I picked up Desperados III due to its highly positive review score. It is apparently the third installment in the series, with previous versions being more than 15 years old. They were made by a different developer, and were very poorly received. But it seems their publisher got the team behind Shadow Tactics to make this one. Now, I played Shadow Tactics more than 7 years ago, but as far as I remember, it's basically the same game, and my thoughts on it are mostly the same. Shadow Tactics was multiple times more popular, but I couldn't say myself if it was because it was better.

Repeating a lot of what I said last time, Desperados III is a real-time tactics game with pausing and stealth. All the mechanics seem fairly standard, with cover, cones of sight, noise circles, stealth kills, hiding bodies, creating distractions, traps, etc. If you're spotted, the situation quickly starts to get worse, but it's still possible to get out of it. That said, it's still a stealth game, and attempting to just storm the enemy is not an option. While there aren't really any novel or interesting mechanics here, everything seems very solidly executed, to the point where I don't have any complaints.
You control 5 characters again, and again, I feel this is where the game falls apart for me. It is quite difficult to keep track of what everyone's doing, and all the enemies who threaten my team. Sure, the game lets you pause at any time, but it kind of doesn't want you to. The design seems more oriented towards controlling everyone at the same time, but that creates for a frustrating experience for me, when characters are not doing what I want them to, because I didn't have the time to manage them properly.

I'm well aware these problems are mostly personal, but I'm not really a fan of neither real-time strategy nor stealth action games, and definitely not a mixture of the two. If you liked Shadow Tactics, then this seems to be literally more of the same. As far as I got into it, it seems very solidly made, and good for what it is. I just don't like what it is, and thus, I can't personally recommend it.

Lobotomy Corporation

Oh boy, oh boy, I did not know what I was getting into when I decided to start playing Lobotomy Corporation. This is probably one of the most unique games I have ever played, and despite that, it's not a brief experimental experience at all. It can take around 100 hours to beat the game. Sadly, I did not get that far. The game may be unique and interesting, but that doesn't equate to it also being fun to play.

Lobotomy Corporation is a management game heavily inspired by the SCP Foundation. Unlike many SCP-based games, it doesn't actually use any SCPs, but writes their own "Abnormalities". You act as the manager of the research and containment facility, and I believe this position resonates so much more with the feeling of SCP than any first-person action game.
Each day, a new Abnormality is added, and each day, you have to interact with enough Abnormalities to meet your daily quota. The game generally doesn't run on a timer, leaving you as much time as you want to make decisions. Interacting with Abnormalities both fills your daily quota, but also teaches you about them, leading to a better understanding of how to deal with them in the future. Every abnormality is different, and requires a different approach, and possibly differently skilled Agents interacting with it. Some are nearly harmless regardless of what you do. Some are harmless once you know how to handle them. And especially as the game progresses, many are deadly if you don't know how to deal with them, or quite dangerous even after you know exactly what to do. You can't just not interact with the dangerous ones, because after every certain number of interactions, a Meltdown happens, forcing some random abnormalities to be interacted with, lest something bad happens. This really creates interesting decision-making points quite frequently, especially regarding how to approach new Abnormalities.
There are more aspects of the game, like Abnormalities escaping, training characters, harvesting equipment from the Abnormalities, and specializing your Agents to be able to deal with certain types of Abnormalities. I think the greatest strength of the game lies in how varied each new Abnormality is, and how it forces you to evolve your playstyle as the game progresses. While I would love to detail them, I wouldn't want to rob anyone of the joy of experiencing these unique mechanics themselves for the first time. I will say that they can mess with things like your save file, your time controls, depend on your camera, and more.

Now, for some of the more negative things. I think the weakest point is the lack of polish put into the game. A management game needs to give you tools to do your managing. Yet the UI and the layout makes it quite difficult to actually get a good overview of what's going on in the facility. It can be difficult to select individual characters, check their current health and sanity, or to order them around. It can also be difficult to figure out what areas currently need tending to. Many UI interactions are unclear or unpleasant to perform. This game is all about information, with knowledge being the most powerful thing, and yet it's made unnecessarily difficult to know things that we can know.
There is also a clear problem of repetition, and optimal playstyles not being fun. For example, the first weeks, the Abnormalities are quite simple to handle. There is no inherent limit to how long I can farm my Agents' stats on them, but it's a very slow process. It would be very helpful to have several maxed out agents for use later on, but it's no fun. Later on, restarting days or rewinding to an earlier day becomes a near-mandatory (and expected) thing to do, but I also find this to be poor design. I would rather my mistakes and losses be not so great I couldn't recover from them, and be forced to live through them, than to rewind and do everything again so they never happened.

In other aspects... There isn't a lot of variety in the music and sound effects, and that can get annoying after playing for dozens of hours. The art is amateurish, but visually coherent, and rather charming, so I've no compaints there.
There is also an overarching storyline and mystery that's revealed bit by bit as you complete each day. Each department's head also has their own story as you complete their questline. I didn't really see any of these to their conclusion nor to any satisfying point, but they were interesting enough to read.

Overall, an amazing idea for a game, with a lot of work put into it, and a lot of content, but really held back by the lack of polish. If you're someone who enjoys management games, enjoys SCPs and wants the most authentic experience of what it would be like to deal with them, and enjoys bashing their head against the wall, then this could actually be an amazing game for you. Personally, while I enjoy the lore aspect immensely, I'm lukewarm on management games, and the badly designed interface along with the persistant restarts I had to do killed it for me. I would love to play this exact game if it was made better, and I would still recommend trying it to see if you can handle the listed faults or not. I quit after I was no longer enjoying it, but I have no regrets playing as far as I did. So ultimately, a partial recommendation.

Hello Charlotte

Y'know, sometimes I just don't understand. I'd like to explain why or how I don't understand, but I can't even understand that. I tried playing Hello Charlotte, and I wanted to tell you about it, but I'm not sure I'm qualified. I was prepared for something weird. Something unusual... but not this.

So, mechanically, Hello Charlotte is a RPGMaker trilogy. The second episode is linked and free, and the first episode is available as the second episode's demo, which is already a weird way to distribute a game, but whatever. They're supposed to be short stories with psychological horror themes.
I couldn't get very far, because I felt uneasy reading what seemed to be written by someone who was either mentally ill or 3 years old. This clearly looks like a solo project, but the Steam page is neat and tidy, so whoever made this is probably fine, and maybe this makes it all the more impressive.
I can't really describe what I experienced. You interact with things, and they give you textual responses, but it's nonsense. I've read absurdist fiction, but that was quite normal compared to this. Something about gods, and puppets, and interdimensional beings, and there are colored sqaures in my bedroom that break the fourth wall, but I'm aware of this, and the world doesn't exist, and a cockroach delivered me my capitalist diabetes food, and then I opened a box and everything collapsed into a singularity and I got a bad end.
This doesn't make any sense, and I'm not trying to make it sound confusing. This is actually what I got from playing it. This is all with a small 400x300 pixel box in the middle of my screen that can't be resized and droning music that's kind of starting hurt my head along with all the nonsense that's happening.

The game gave me a bad end, and I got out. I'm happy I did. I do not understand how this has overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam. Like... Yume Nikki is a very logical and simple to understand game compared to this, and even that was too much for me. If you're any semblence of normal, do not try this game. If you want one of the most absurd experiences ever, then this is it. I've never done hallucionegens, but I'd imagine the real world makes more sense after those than this game does without them. A hard "Not recommended" from me.

NieR:Automata

One of the few rare games still left on my backlog that I've previously talked about, while I still listed every new game I added. Perhaps the last one; I'm not keeping count. I finally got around to playing the highly anticipated NieR:Automata.
And as much as I was looking forward to it, and as much as I hate to say it... It's one of the worst things I've ever played.

That may seem like a bit of an exaggeration, but the main reason is that the game is unplayable, quite literally. I hold a firm belief that on PC, your game should have keyboard and mouse support. Steam has the option of marking a game as "controller only" or "controller heavily recommended" for this reason too. Nier here only has "partial controller support", which is a complete lie. You can not play this game with a keyboard and mouse. I even went through the trouble of installing a mod, which made the game playable, but sadly, it was still not enough. I could delve into the long list of actual problems when using KB&M, but just believe me that I'm not exaggerating. It's effectively not supported. For this reason alone, I could confidently recommend not playing this game.

Regardless, I pushed through a few hours of the gameplay (2 of those were spent dying in the tutorial, which, unlike the entire rest of the game, doesn't let you save for some unknown reason, having you do the whole thing again, cutscenes and all.) I feel like a lot of my criticisms from Nier Replicant carried over, which, surprisingly, despite being older, was more enjoyable. Perhaps because it was released on PC later, and they had a marginally better control scheme? The story was of course different, graphics were slightly updated, and the specifics of combat weren't the same, but at the heart of it, I felt like I was playing the same game with a different character, in different levels.
The bullet hell portions were back as a core part of the game. The various ranged magic spells were replaced by the most useful "gatling gun" one, which luckily didn't have to be tapped, but still had to be held for some reason. Not in easy mode, so they clearly though of this, but thought it was "challenging" to dedicate a finger to holding down the shoot button? Insanity. Going into melee still didn't feel worth the risk, but at least I got a ranged addon for my swords real fast. Kind of a waste of the beautiful and varied attack combos, as the game turned into a sort of third-person shooter. Character progression was also still too meaningless. It almost didn't feel like an RPG, but an action-adventure game.
In terms of new complaints I have, outside of boss fights, the world felt even less interesting to explore somehow. The enemies were too easy, while, at the same difficulty, the boss fights were too hard, so there was a clear difficulty mismatch here. And you'd think that maybe the positive reviews were from the main character now being a good-looking female, but then they very deliberately made sure we can't even catch an upskirt peek. Terrible.

Back to a serious tone, I've been kind of looking forward to playing this for 7 years, and I could not have been more disappointed. This manages to be worse than its predecessors in most every way, and even its predecessor was really bad for a JRPG. Even if the PC support was there, I do not understand the high praise this game received. Neither the combat nor the progression is fun in the least. I can't recommend this.

Timespinner

Timespinner is a pretty standard, though rather polished, metroidvania. It has a running time of 6 hours or more, depending on how thorough you want to be with exploration, and features a mechanic to temporarily pause time as the central thing to set it apart.

The game has a surprising amount of mechanics, such as 3 loadouts, allowing to slot 2 orbs (different or identical), an amulet, and a ring each. These define the two basic attacks you alternate through, your special attack that consumes mana, and the passive attack enhancement. Each attack also has its own type, and enemies have various resistances to the types. You can also switch equipment, your familiar, and level not just yourself but the orbs and familiars too.
I initially thought that all this, plus the power to play with time, would make for a lot of depth and interesting gameplay. The sad truth is that the game is far too easy for any of it to matter. You can just pick any attacks you like and roll through the whole game with just those. Worse still, the game rarely requires you to use your time powers save for some platforming, most of which is optional. It's a lot of wasted potential.

Speaking of wasted potential, despite technically being a metroidvania, there is little backtracking. While you can freely switch between the past and the present time, there is barely any need for it. I was able to run through most of the past without returning to the present even once. I also didn't need to return to camp, where the NPCs are. They had quests for me to do, but every time I got back there, the quests would be terribly outdated, concering some area I completed over an hour ago, because I didn't return to collect them in time.

Despite the game having a lot of potential and not meeting it, I wouldn't say it was bad. It's well made, with enjoyable art, music, and most importantly, combat. The story's passable and doesn't force itself on you, which is nice, considering it's not memorable. Overall, I'd have to give it a partial recommendation, because, while I did barely enjoy it, there are definitely multiple games which are similar, but better. Maybe if Timespinner had more length, difficulty, and mechanics that required me to use the systems it has available, it would be significantly better, but sadly, it's not.

Slipways

Slipways advertises itself as a game with all the possibilities of a space-themed grand strategy game, but with a playtime of just 60 minutes. While that statement immediately strikes me as false - you can't shorten a game a hundred-fold while retaining everything about it - I do still believe the end product they've created has merit. I enjoyed it for quite a few hours.

Slipways is definitely not a grand strategy game, and not a 4X game. If because of nothing else, then because there's no combat or conflict in the game, so nothing to exterminate. One might even be hard-pressed to call it a strategy game, because it just has so many features indicative of a puzzle game instead.
Your goal in the game is to set up the biggest trade empire in a span of 300 months. You do this by exploring new planets around your existing ones, choosing a production for each, which indicates the resources it takes in and gives out, and finally connecting everything together with a series of trade routes, or slipways, if you will. The whole thing is a grand puzzle requiring foresight to choose the right production types in order to maximize the amount of resources flowing in and out of each planet and then linking them correctly, because connections can't cross each other. On top of that, you'll need a nice helping of luck when exploring new planets, to make sure you can't just plan an optimal network off the bat.

I had a couple fears regarding some concepts quite early, and the more I played, the more they turned out to be true and bothersome.
For one, the game is too simple. Not to be confused with the game being too easy, which it is not, but the amount of things you can do is rather limited. I did leave out a couple things, like constructions that can be built anywhere, starting with just labs that can take in some resources you have in abundance and produce science for new technologies out of them, but even then, they don't feel like they shape the core game. The same can be said for the campaign mode, which does introduce a different minor mechanic each level, but the core game remains the same. Perhaps only after researching several technologies do some more interesting mechanics begin to emerge, but the game tends to be over by then, if not sooner. After a few runs, I found the novelty running out, and my second fear becoming more and more apparent.
Namely that thinking ahead matters. A lot. Slipways promises quick 1-hour games, but thinking longer gives very clearly improved results, meaning you can either play badly, or you can have you runs last upwards of 3 hours, with very little playing, and a lot of thinking and planning. This is a very unfortunate and sneaky problem games run into, because it might seem like it means the game has depth, but in reality, it frustrates me to have to choose between being a bad player and getting frustrated at not getting to play the game because I'm planning each step.

I think the biggest problem with the game is that it tries to be too simple. I think there can be a market for a 4X game with a shorter run-time and no combat. However, trying to fit into a single hour, Slipways has too little content, too few choices, and too much determinism. I might even have loved to play a multiplayer version of this. Alas, it's no use considering if I might have recommended this game had it had more content, for right now it does not. Still, I think it can be fun for many people for several hours, and if you're particularly fond of solving these types of puzzles, then perhaps even longer. For keeping me entertained for a good chunk of time, I'll give this a partial recommendation.

Slasher's Keep

I've always found something dislikable about first-person dungeon crawlers, be they turn- or action-based. Perhaps it's the confined atmosphere of a dungeon that doesn't, in my mind, mesh well with a first-person view. Today's game, Slasher's Keep, is not an exception.
As already mentioned, Slasher's Keep is a first-person action roguelike dungeon crawler. It's got randomly generated levels, and seems to put a lot of focus on its melee combat system, which expects you to make rather precise parries with your melee weapon against those of the enemies. As for more standard features, there's a few ranged weapons, crafting, randomly generated items, and a bunch of different enemies and traps. Standard stuff for a dungeon crawler.

I have a huge problem with this game that made me drop it after just a few runs. There is a huge focus on skill-based gameplay, where you strike the enemy, and then block their attack or move out of the way. I loved this kind of directional block swordfighting system in a game such as Mount & Blade, but here, all the models are 2D. This makes for a unique visual style, but it also makes it completely impossible to understand where anything is. When I have to parry an enemy, I have to know where my weapon has to be, because blocking based on visuals alone does not work. Similarly, I find it objectionable how a zombie has more range with just his arm than I do with my sword.
I'm afraid I can't go into much detail for the rest of the game, because between failing parries that visually clipped my weapon, getting outranged, and getting stuck on barrels and stairs while being shot at from afar, I quickly lost any interest in playing further.

Perhaps if you can push yourself through these initial frustrations, Slasher's Keep may get better. Maybe you'll eventually memorize the right angles for parrying, and know where you are not allowed to step on stairs to not get stuck. But even then, unless you really like the 2D art style or actually believe that the parry system, as implemented, is a positive for the game, there doesn't seem to be anything unique here. There's a fair amount of action roguelike dungeon crawlers, even though that's quite a specific genre. While I don't personally enjoy them, even I feel I've played ones with just more features and content, so I can't recommend this one.

Towertale

Today's game, Towertale, is a less popular one that probably wouldn't meet my standards for selection these days, but I decided to give a try anyways.
It's a boss rush action game, with 4 different characters. The game is quite simple, with no progression, no map traversal, just boss battle after boss battle. Each of the 4 characters has their own storyline that you can experience as you go through the bosses, and a different moveset, making you approach the same bossfights differently each playthrough.

While this game would be good for a Flash or indie game, I find it a bit basic and lacking for comaprison with "serious" games. The boss and character design is decent, considering each boss has to work with each character, but I found the characters handled poorly. The story and art do their job, but are otherwise sub-par. There might be a bit more merit to this game when you consider it can be played in up to 4-player co-op, but sadly only locally.
Overall, a reasonable indie game, but lacking in content and quality for me to really recommend it.

Cube Escape Collection

Back with another barely-a-review on a game I dropped quite early. It's Cube Escape Collection.
This one seems to be an updated version of a game (or a series of games) from the Flash game era. It definitely looks like something I played, but I can't recall if I've ever played exactly this.

This game is comprised of 9 chapters of various point & click escape room puzzles, with a strong focus on horror elements. This is an unfortunate combination for me, as I'm a fan of neither point & click, nor horror games, and that fact is what made me quit the game quite early.
The reason I picked it up in the first place was because it has stellar reviews, currently sitting in the top 250 of all of Steam's games, and I thought that just maybe it has something extra special. Sadly, I didn't find anything of that nature here. I think a lot of the positive reception comes from nostalgia, but I can also see this being a genuinely good game for fans of both horror and room escape puzzles. I found the puzzles neither too easy nor requiring frequent trains of thought I could never hope to come across, and the horror elements were quite unsettling, with some not-too-distasteful jump scares included.

So, overall, I'd say Cube Escape Collection is a reasonably interesting series of horror-themed room escape puzzles. It's a bit old, but I could find no other objective flaws with it. I can't really give a verdict other than "not recommended" on it, since I don't like any of the genres here, but if you do, you're probably better off believing the review score than me.

Touhou Genso Wanderer Reloaded

I played Touhou Genso Wanderer Reloaded, and I'm not really sure how to talk about it. The main problem is that, despite spending a couple of hours in it, I didn't get very far in the game, so I'm not entirely certain what I'm talking about. I suppose I'll just start at the beginning.

Genso Wanderer Reloaded is a Touhou fangame. It seems to be a turn-based roguelike dungeon crawler with quite a heavy emphasis on story. Now, I can't tell how large of a portion of the game is actually dedicated to the story, because many Asian games like to frontload their story. This could definitely be the case here, as I probably spent over an hour of the first two hours just reading dialogue. I consider this a bad decision (from both the game and myself), since the story really isn't all that worth listening to.
The gameplay, as far as I got, consists of running around dungeon floors, collecting items, leveling yourself and your equipment, and swinging at enemies as they come at you. There's no dedicated combat screen - all the combat happens at the same time as movement would, and you can get swarmed by a bunch of enemies at once. It reminds me a bit of One Way Heroics. Sadly, not only was there no challenge in the combat as far as I got, even when I started beelining for the exit of each level instead of exploring, but I straight up one-shot every enemy that approached me. I'm sure it won't be like that the whole game, but again, it doesn't make for a very convincing opening hour (especially when the other is equally uninteresting dialogue).

The control scheme was one of the most atrocious ones I've seen for keyboard, with no mouse support. Luckily it was rebindable, but that didn't change the menu navigation being annoying. I also found the game quickly showed a lot of confusing systems, and I wasn't quite sure which were important to learn straight away, and which were not. This complexity without depth is, again, common in Asian game design, and something I personally frown upon. I acknowledge I didn't get far enough to give an adequate judgement, but I feel that I shouldn't be forced to go through hours of garbage just to maybe get to something good, so I think my opinion is still valid.

Overall, I feel the high review score might come from it being a Touhou game, which has a strong fanbase, as well as the character art being cute, even more so than usual Touhou art, and from the people who really sunk their teeth into it and put upwards of 60 hours in. Me, I found the game terribly boring during the first couple hours, and I didn't have the faith to continue on. So personally, I can't recommend this at all, unless you wish to gamble on the slim chance that it will get good 20+ hours in.

Papercraft

Rolled Papercraft from my backlog today. It's a Chinese game, and I believe it tried to be a combination of a card-based roguelike, a turn-based tactics game, and an RPG. You have some story, some dialogue options, deck building, and an overworld map (probably multiple, for multiple levels). On the map, you can go fight enemies, entering a small hex-grid combat zone where you can play cards to summon units and cast abilities, and your goal is to beat the enemy hero. Repeat, gain levels, new cards, upgrade existing ones, and beat the final boss. That's the gist of it at least. It's not really an unique idea, but it's also not entirely lifted from some other game, as far as I know.

But, arguably, all of that doesn't matter. I suppose I didn't check the game too well before adding it to my backlog all those years back. It's terribly translated, to the point where it greatly disturbs my enjoyment of the game, and my understanding of what everything does. That alone is enough for me to drop it, but it doesn't help that the game is... kind of bad regardless.
Starting from the art, the individual sprites don't look too bad, but the animations are incredibly basic. There also doesn't seem to be much strategic depth to the game, or balance for that matter. The cards are quite boring, don't have interesting synergies or combos, and using them to fight feels dull.
I didn't experience a lot of it, but I didn't see any benefit to the game having any RPG elements. For most intents, it's just a roguelike deckbuilder with battles happening on a grid. But with many great roguelike deckbuilder games around, I'd be hard pressed to recommend even moderately good ones, let alone this.

So, in short, Papercraft is primarily made unejoyable by a terrible translation, but even if you push through that, you will almost certainly find a rather shallow roguelike deckbuilder with low production value and no unique or redeeming qualities. I wouldn't recommend trying it.

Once Human

I saw a new game keeping a consistent spot in Steam's top 5 most played games, peaking at over 200k players. Surprisingly, the average player numbers were actually increasing during the first two weeks, making me really interested in what this game was. It's called Once Human, and it's a free-to-play survival MMO. While I've never liked the idea of survival games, there have also never been any free ones (that were big enough), and thus nothing with a low enough barrier of entry for me to actually play one. Being free, coupled with boasting to have up to 8000 players per server, and me loving the idea of MMOs, pushed me over the edge to give this game a try.

Once Human is a huge mashup of different ideas from a lot of different games. It has the base of a themepark MMO, survival game elements with base building anywhere in the world and a thirst and hunger system, but also aspects of the recent hit Palworld, with collection of "Deviations", who can automate certain tasks around your base. Throw in third-person shooter gameplay, apocalypse and horror aesthetics, some gacha mechanics for unlocking weapons and armor, and PvP if you're so inclined, and that's Once Human. It doesn't really do anything original, and I'm usually very skeptical of a game focusing on so many avenues of gameplay, but Once Human manages to blend them surprisingly well. Still, considering that I don't like any of the individual pieces the game is made of, it doesn't bode well for my final opinion of the game.

Above all, I feel this game is structured like a themepark MMO. This means that the majority of gameplay is running fetch and kill quests for NPCs, leading you from one region to another. You do this for about 60 hours until you complete everything and near max level, allowing you to gear up with the most powerful equipment and begin the end-game. Here you will either repeat dungeons or open-world events (PvP or PvE), some of which include defending your base from enemies or other players. The goal of all of it being to unlock better equipment or attachments to that equipment, the latter of which has random "rolls", meaning it's near impossible to get anything completely perfect.

I can't tell you how exactly the end-game plays out, as I got burnt out on the rather mundane grind about 30 hours in. I don't think there was a limit to how much you could run dungeons or open-world events, though some rewards did have weekly limits, most notably the currency used for the gacha system. Very surprisingly, there is no pay-to-win in the game at all, and you actually can't buy more currency for more gacha pulls. You do have a battle pass and flat out purchases, but that's all cosmetics, skins, and non-functional house accessories. Huge respect for a game releasing like that, and I hope it stays that way.
The most suspicious aspect was that the game is divided into 6-week-long seasons, after which all progress except the main story and unlocked blueprints (the gacha) is wiped. I don't know how people would feel about re-doing everything, especially since 6 weeks is not enough time for them to really create a fresh experience, so I imagine the game will take a big dip in popularity if they go through with it. It will probably take a big dip regardless, as there doesn't seem to be an enjoyable core loop, and players will start to run out of content in the coming days and weeks.

To conclude, despite a good free-to-play model, I feel I got the worst aspects of an MMO, with the other players running around the world not contributing to my experience, and all the gameplay being running from place to place, with killing a few enemies inbetween. (Not only did the servers not realistically reach near 8000 players, but they were further scattered throughout different instances on the server, making for a low population density.) The survival gameplay was about as run-of-the-mill as it can be, to my knowledge, and there was nothing else amazing about the game either. I suppose it's a decent enough time killer if you just want more of games you've already experienced, but there's nothing here for people not fans of the listed genres. I quit after realizing it's probably not getting any better after reaching end-game, not to mention knowing my progress will get mostly wiped anyways. I probably wouldn't recommend it unless you just need a basic survival MMO in your life to grind the hours away.

Zenless Zone Zero

Time for something relatively timely for once. As Genshin is still one of my favorite action RPGs, and I'm still playing it, I'll of course also try any new games they make. And another such game recently came out - Zenless Zone Zero. While I bounced off their previous game, Star Rail, much due to the combat being slow and boring (to the point where most players were doing most combat on autoplay, which I consider a cardinal sin in video games), then I can tell you in advance then Zenless' combat is anything but.

If you've played either Genshin or Star Rail, then the formula is very much the same for Zenless, and that's a bit of a shame. It felt very similar, being dropped in, getting a lot of story upfront, doing some combat, and knowing I'd have to go through the same treadmill of grinding up my account level to start getting the most out of my character and weapon exp and talent material grinding, and then doing that for a whole lot of time before I was able to comfortably clear all content. So right off the bat, as someone who has already gone through this, it removed some of my enthusiasm. Luckily, they have slightly shortened the grind as well as reduced the amount of characters in a party, and thus the amount of characters you'd need to build up. It's also faster to do all the dailies and spend your energy, so I'd reckon that after the initial grind, keeping up with all the events and content might only take an hour a day, on average.

Maybe I've just been tired of a lot of story-focused games recently, but I feel Zenless had even more story and more talking than their previous games. Especially towards the beginning, I wanted to experience more of the combat, but I kept getting interrupted by very lengthy cutscenes. This could be a positive if you like stories, but I generally don't. Especially since, again, the story failed to provide enough of an initial hook to get me invested. There's bits and pieces of lore and worldbuilding that seem exciting, but nothing really grabbed me. I don't exaggerate when I say that it feels more like a visual novel with bits of action combat at times, instead of the other way around as it should be. This was another huge point of friction for me.

But finally, let's talk about the combat. I think that Zenless has possibly the best action combat I've ever experienced. You control a team of three characters, each with a whole slew of moves that are both the same for all characters, but whose specifics are unique for each character. Every character has a basic attack string, dash attack, dodge counter, special attack, EX special attack, quick assist, defensive assist, assist follow-up, chain attack, and an ultimate. On top of that, each character also has a special mechanic like an alternate timing basic attack string, empowered special attack at certain points of the string, alternate special attack, or something like that. And all of these moves really are used in combat. The combat is incredibly fast-paced and flashy, and departs from the usual fixed rotation-based gameplay, because you have to be ready to react to enemies attacking you or filling up their daze bars, which trigger special, and quite strong, moves, making it advantageous to think on your feet and have multiple scenarios of action at the ready. Oh, and both the animations and the dynamic camera angles make it look so good and satisfying, especially when fighting larger enemies. It's simply amazing.
There's only one big problem. Zenless is a gacha game. And as any gacha game, you can't allow your players to be too good by just being skilled at the game. While playing well does give you an edge, at the end of the day, you're still restricted by your levels, and by the timers on stages, forcing you to hit certain DPS milestones, which no amount of skill will get you to. In addition, I'm quite certain that as the game goes on, all this wonderful skill expression will be wasted on there not being content difficult enough to require it.

So, to sum everything up... Zenless Zone Zero adapts a very similar metaprogression formula as the previous games from the company, making the grind quite unoriginal. I was also not the only one to complain about the excess of story content, meaning you don't get a lot of action, but this can depend on what you're here for. And finally, despite the combat being insanely good, it lacks support around it. Without fights to require you to be skilled, and without there being purpose and meaningful reward to fighting, the raw combat can only keep me entertained for so long. I played for quite a while, but in the end, I didn't find enough enjoyment in playing the game to justify dragging myself through the story and grind, and investing yet another hour of my busy life into it every day.
Looking at overall trends, it does seem that Zenless hit with less overall hype than many big releases, but the falloff graph seems to be about the same. I can't help but wonder if Wuthering Waves releasing 1.5 months earlier with a largely similar combat style caused this. Only Genshin is still hanging strong. Every other gacha's popularity pales in comparison. I think their story, open world, and elemental reaction system are their strongest points, and the reason I'm still playing. I'd recommend Genshin over Zenless, but if you have enough free time left over from the former, then at least according to my tastes, Zenless is the second best gacha game on the market right now.

Pirates Outlaws

It's been 5 years. I'm finally getting around to trying those roguelike deckbuilders that came from the heels of Slay the Spire, such as Pirates Outlaws.

Immediately as I started playing, the UI looked... unpleasant. Everything from the cards to the icons to the text was huge, taking up much more space than it needed, and leading to many elements overlapping or requiring scrollbars. This prompted me to check, and, indeed, this was originally a mobile game, later ported to PC, with luckily all the microtransaction removed. While I wouldn't refuse any kind of game on principle, it was very clear this game was designed for the mobile audience, and little-to-no effort was made to make the port more PC-player friendly. Aside from the UI, I felt this in the gameplay, which was quite heavily simplified compared to games of a similar genre that I've played. Most card effects, enemies, status effects, etc. were very simple, as to be explainable in just a few words. This lead to it being quite obvious which cards to play, and in what order, making for very boring moment-to-moment gameplay.

In terms of other gameplay, Pirates Outlaws didn't seem to have many innovations either. You pick a character that has their own abilities and deck, have some customization options, and then set out. Each turn you choose from a few destinations which lead to an encounter or a shop of sorts, culminating in a bossfight at the end, if you managed to make it that far. You get 5 cards, a few action points, and once you can't play any more cards, the enemies take their actions. Between encounters, you get to build your deck and upgrade your cards. It's all very standard stuff, with nothing really remarkable.
The one thing that did seem impressive was the amount of content. Dozens of characters, nearly a thousand different cards, several scenarios, and more. Sadly, I'm very much one for quality over quantity, so I didn't care much for all these different options.

Overall, a rather lazy PC port from a mobile game looking to capitalize on Slay the Spire's popularity. Despite a large amount of content, Pirates Outlaws is more oriented towards a casual audience and lacks novelty and depth in gameplay, making it become boring rather fast. I wouldn't recommend it over one of the many other roguelike deckbuilders out there.

Noel the Mortal Fate

Again, an older game on my wishlist, added back in 2018. I was surprised to find that it had just 50 reviews back when I added it, and that it had since grown to over 2000 reviews, with the percentage of positive reviews somehow even increasing. I was so hopeful I had something good on my hands. Maybe, to some people, I did, but I couldn't appreciate it.

Noel the Mortal Fate is a story-focused RPGMaker adventure game. As these types of games go, there are some puzzles, some action segments, but the meat of the game is in the story told. The game is presented in a total of 14 chapters, of which I only got through the first one, lasting a tad over 2 hours. It's a story about a stupid girl making a deal with a devil, losing all her limbs in the process, and then embarking on a quest to take revenge on the person who decieved her.

Where do I even begin with my personal impressions... I suppose I never took a good look at the game on a large screen. The full body art of the characters, as well as full-screen stills, while not masterful, are entirely decent, but the small sprites you see in game are really bad. I do not exaggerate when I say that I think I could have done a better job. I wouldn't generally complain about art, but this is very much jarring and hurting my experience.
There also seems to be a bit too much gameplay here. I really couldn't care about the RPG elements, fighting enemies, solving puzzles, etc. There isn't so much it would make me quit, but it is a bit more than I've found in the average story-focused adventure game, and even the average is a bit too much for my liking.
Finally, the story. I could excuse almost anything for a sublime story, but I don't have faith that such a thing can be found here. The main character immediately irked me for how dumb and naive she is. Even after suffering the would-be traumatic loss of her limbs, she does not act like it. Of course, with such a main character, it sets a sort of tone for the rest of the story, even if the other characters are more likable. There are hints of a transition in the attitude of the main character at the end of the first chapter, but as the rest of the story was not without some flaws, and then the art and gameplay problems listed, it had simply managed to lose me.

While I feel bad for not being able to ascertain whether the story gets good enough to justify everything else, I still think it's fair to tell you I don't recommend it. 2 hours is not a short time for something to convince me it has potential, and I wouldn't be one to tell others "trust me, it gets good", and expect them to ignore their initial dislike. Perhaps this story is not just about revenge, but also of personal growth, and as such it was important to start out at such an unlikable state. I suppose I will never find out, and I'm fine with that - there are plenty more stories to read.

Ratropolis

Ratropolis is advertised as a fusion of a roguelite, tower defense, city-building, and deck-building game. I'm not really sure about the roguelite part, but everything else is kind of correct. You have a little rat town, a deck of cards, money slowly ticking in, and enemies pouring in in waves from both sides. You interact with the world through cards, which cost money, usually create buildings, create more money, or spawn units to defend your town. Occasionally you recycle your hand and draw a new one. Add in some events to gain new cards and a few other things, and that's most of the game.

While the idea of this kind of fusion is nice and all, the execution is pretty terrible. The game doesn't look all that great, doesn't have a good variety of cards, and has some pretty serious bugs, like enemies clipping through your defenses sometimes and destroying your whole town while your defenders are busy with the ones who didn't clip through the walls. I don't have a lot more to say about it even. It just needs way more content, way more polish, and more stuff to do. Even with optimal gameplay, I'm kind of just spamming cards and maybe waiting for my redraw cooldown to finish. There isn't a lot of thought to be put into decision making.

So, short review, but yeah, there isn't much to talk about. The city building is weak, the unit diversity is weak, the enemies and combat are weak, the strategy is nonexistant... It's just an overall boring game, and I can't recommend it to anyone.

The Messenger

Among the older games I still had left in my backlog, I tried The Messenger today. It's a retro platformer metroidvania from 2018, with, honestly, a surprising amount of content in it. This short description actually describes the game quite well, as there isn't anything remarkably unique to be found here.

I have to start with the usual disclaimer that while I like metroidvanias, I'm not a fan of platformers, so anything leaning more on the platformer than the action combat side isn't going to sit all too well with me. Such was also the case with The Messenger, and I didn't get too far in the game. While it initially looks like there are quite a lot of enemies in the game and even some boss fights, everything still comes down to your platforming skills. A big feature of the game, at least in the beginning, is that by attacking something mid-air, you refresh your jump. These can be environmental objects, but are often also enemies or projectiles they fire. For that purpose, most enemies respawn after being killed to facilitate the platforming aspect.
You will later also get to experience a sort of grappling hook that propels you forward, as well as portals that lead you to a different version of the same map, and probably a few other things. I didn't get that far, as I got upset at the numerous instant kill traps in the game that set me back quite a bit, and so I quit. I will entirely take the blame for being weak-willed on this, but as mentioned, I'm not big on platformers, so any minor gripe will deter me.

I must, however, praise the amount of hidden and optional content there is in the game, as well as the amount of detail that went into minor aspects. They could have just given upgrades at regular points in the game, but they let us have some choice in what to buy in the store. They could have just respawned us at a checkpoint, but they gave us a little devil who joins us on our journey and eats a portion of our earnings instead. And they could have gone without having every character quip jokes at you, but despite usually being adverse to anything funny, they actually got a few laughs out of me.
On the negative side, I also didn't enjoy the "retro" feel of the game, as the low-resolution graphics weren't amazing, and much of the platforming didn't feel very weighty. Especially the mid-air jump refresh mechanic felt very unsatisfying to execute.

Overall, while I didn't like The Messenger due to my general aversion to platformers and the forced retro aesthetic, which I think hurt not only the graphical quality, but also how the game feels, I can believe this to be a fun platformer for fans of the genre. The main complaint about the part of the game I didn't get to is that it actually turns into a metroidvania, instead of a more-or-less linear platformer. I suppose I can't have an accurate opinion on what I haven't experienced, but having more content isn't bad if you like the game. It's not that long of a game. In any case, I can't give it a personal recommendation, but that doesn't mean you absolutely shouldn't play it.

Still There

Man, what a piece of art Still There is. Unfortunately, I don't say that in an entirely good way, but luckily, not in an entirely bad way either. I went in expecting a somewhat technical game about operating a complex machine with bits of story woven in at intervals. I got... almost that.

Still There is mostly a point & click game, meaning it's more about finding the right things to click, rather than solving a puzzle, and definitely not about getting to know your intricate spaceship controls well. While the controls of the spaceship look complicated, they are like that mostly because there are a lot of them. If they were all properly labelled, the game would become quite a bit easier, but then it also wouldn't take you much time to complete it. Additionally, the same controls aren't used many times, meaning that by the time you might learn them, you won't need them anymore. It's probably for the best, considering the puzzles don't have a lot of substance to them once you know what you're doing. On the other hand, I can't say I had any fun at all with the trial and error of finding things out either.

So the puzzles aren't very fun. Sadly they make up for about 80% of the game. This does include the time spent looking around inside the spaceship, which I must admit is intricately crafted. This is half of why I called the game a piece of art. The spaceship may be illogically complicated and the puzzles may lack actual substance, but they look really good, which is also what made me want to try this game in the first place. That's not a bad thing, but I'm afraid it also doesn't nearly compensate me getting bored of doing them.
The other half of art is the story which is sad and is mostly told in a very slow and abstract manner. Maybe that style would work somewhere else, but I feel that due to the story making up for such a small portion of game time, and the game being short overall, it comes together to less than a 50-page book equivalent. Something that short can't afford to tell itself that slow. In the end, I can't say it made me feel much.

In conclusion, I would most definitely not recommend Still There for the gameplay or puzzles. But there is definitely a charm to the game that is rather rare to find, and that I think might appeal to some people. I don't really resonate with it enough myself to say who those kinds of people are, but maybe if the idea of staying in a lonely, claustrophobic space ship, being affected by emotional trauma, and spending your days doing overly time consuming and convoluted tasks is a vibe that speaks with you, you could give it a try.

Bright Memory

Bright Memory (and it's sequel, Bright Memory: Infinite) got an explosive and very positive reception as soon as they launched. I believe this was the main reason prompting me to try them, as I heard they were mostly solo projects, and so the popularity of the reception was very impressive.

Bright Memory is a first-person shooter where your character also has an assortment of abilities to be used. The game focuses on high action combat and rewards more points for combos, prompting for slightly flashier gameplay. There is a clear focus on graphical fidelity and combat, although there is also a story unfolding. I'm rarely a fan of stories, but even by someone else's standards, the story is not worth experiencing. But what about the rest of the game?

Honestly, I was aware that Bright Memory is a very short game, lasting for about an hour for the first installment, and three for the second one. What I hoped to get for that brief time was impeccable combat, jawdropping visuals, and just maybe, a good-looking main character, since I don't think they made revealing costume packs for her for no reason.
While none of those aspects of the game were bad, they really didn't live up to my expectations. Sure, for a supposedly solo developed game (which I have some doubts about), it looks and plays great, but I've seen both better combat and better visuals from many shooters. So I don't really understand what the huge positive reception was about.

Overall, I don't really see a reason to recommend it. The gameplay is fine, but not amazing, and the whole game is so short that even if you did enjoy it, it would be over very soon. The developer quoting monetary constraints for the second game sounds silly, since the first should have brought in on the order of several million euros. If they ever decide to make a full-length game, I might try it, but I wouldn't try another one of this length.

Minit

I've had Minit in my library for a while, and I finally got around to playing it. It's published by Devolver Digital, who publishes a lot of indie games by various people. Some are games with more tried-and-true mechanics and a significant amount of content, and some are more experimental things, like Minit here.

Minit is a very short game, apparently completed on average in some 2-4 hours. It's also a very simple game, only giving you an interact key in addition to basic movement. The gimmick is that you only have a minute (hence the name of the game) to play, before the game starts all over. Most importantly, you, as the player, retain your memories, so you become better with each run at accomplishing your goal, whatever that is. I guess it's also important that items you find show up at the start on subsequent runs, and a few actions in the world persist, but not most. The game doesn't give you a concrete goal, rather sending you off to find things to do. It does have an end though, and if you are so inclined, you can browse the achievements to find ideas what to strive for.

Despite its short average length and absolutely nonexistant run length, it quickly lost my interest. I would say the idea is new, but I've been aware of Outer Wilds since maybe 2015, and a couple other less-known games that explore this sort of time loop. Especially in the case of Outer Wilds (though I haven't played the release version), it has a longer time loop, and a much more interesting world. The time loop gimmick does not do anything for the game on its own, and Minit's gameplay is boring. The world is barely interesting, the puzzles are basic, and I'm not somehow more captivated by having to restart every minute.

So, I wouldn't recommend Minit. Not only is it too short, it's also too unremarkable. If the idea of restarting the game every minute is, for some reason, very appealing for you, go ahead, but from an adventure / puzzle game standpoint, it's quite shallow and boring.

RollScape

Something possessed me to try out a rather unremarkable game that just launched instead of going for another from my backlog. RollScape seemed like a simple dopamine hit that I could beat under 2 hours and refund. Not that I want to abuse the developer, but because I genuinely don't believe it's a good game or a worthwhile purchase. And I was mostly right.

In RollScape, you roll a six-sided die and move forward that many alternating black and white tiles. Each tile starts out with giving 0 points, but the shop at the side lets you buy upgrades which increase the amount of points you get. You can also upgrade your die to roll bigger numbers, and there's a few special upgrades as well as powerups at milestones in the game. The points give you both, well, points, to buy more upgrades, but also energy, which lets you buy more rolls. As upgrades and energy costs get exponentially more expensive, it's your goal to make good enough decisions (and have an amount of luck) to stay ahead of that exponential curve.

It's a very basic incremental game loop with a failure mechanic. I'm sure most of the effort was spent making the graphics, but even then, this is easily a solo project that maybe took a few months. It does what it needs to, but without even a metaprogression system, there really is nothing to do after beating the game in an hour. There are some extra game modes, but it's basically just more of the same. It's a fine game for an hour, but nothing new, and not worth the price. I wouldn't recommend it.

Plebby Quest

Plebby Quest tries to be a more casual take on the grand strategy genre, probably most inspired by Crusader Kings. I figured that since my main problems with Crusader Kings were its excessive micromanagement and too large a focus on roleplaying, then something like this might be a fun little alternative. How wrong I was.

Plebby Quest definitely does have more of a focus on gameplay, with interpersonal relationships and successions not even being a thing. You simply control a country and fight against other countries. Diplomacy still exists with trade and alliances though. The second biggest difference (after not having to worry about succession) is the heavy focus on individual generals and troops. Both can level up, giving more troops to generals, and increasing the stats of troops and even allowing them to learn new abilities. You also take personal control of all battles, issuing commands to all your troops, giving you more influence over the outcome. Further, the game is not real-time, but instead is played in turns, with each general giving you one action per turn to be spent on combat, gaining resources, research, or something else.

There's more stuff in addition to what's listed above, but there's no point in going into all the little details. It's still much simpler than any grand strategy game, while having a somewhat similar feel. While the simplicity is fine, there are two major problems. One is that there is somehow even more micromanagement. I can not set things up according to some rules. Every turn, I have to tell every general what to do, and if it's not combat that I have to oversee, it's some other little minigame that they decided to insert because they thought just playing the main game wasn't fun enough? I don't know. The minigames were fun the first 10 times, but if I have to do them every turn, they get quite tedious. Secondly, the clicking. Oh god, the clicking. I have no idea who in their right mind decided that everything needed to have, without exaggeration, three times more buttons to click than necessary. I should not need to manually dismiss each source of income every turn. I should not have to listen to some character giving me three lines of dialogue every time I buy a medal for a unit, which I can do three times a turn. In fact, all the dialogue they added is insane. Flavor text and descriptions are fine, but I have to dismiss every single dialogue like a pop-up box.

I can't comment too much on how good the game is outside these problems. It's probably fine - I didn't see any balance issues or anything like that. But the two issues I listed above make the game unplayable. I, again, do not exaggerate, when I say that the turns could probably be around 10 times shorter if pointless clicks and minigames were excluded. After just two hours, I was beyond frustrated. I was angry that I was wasting my time and the game wasn't progressing. Sadly, these issues are far too deep ingrained into the game. It's hopeless, and I can't recommend anyone play this.

Prime Mover

A slightly older programming puzzle game today - Prime Mover. It has clearly taken inspiration from Zachtronics games, most noticeably the leaderboard at the end of each level, showing how well you did compared to others. But what about the gameplay? Is it any good?

Primve Mover is a game about moving numbers from the input(s) to the output(s), transforming them along the way. This all happens on a small grid, with the numbers moving on the board, step-by-step. Aside from basic wires, you're also given a duplicator, an alternator, a deleter, and a piece that sorts by positive/negative/zero. You also have an adder/subtractor, a lock, and very powerfully, a piece that toggles an adjacent piece.
While playing the tutorial for these pieces, I already noticed it was rather dry. The game introduced the pieces very concisely, but it felt more like learning than playing. There were some story bits mixed in, but for god knows what reason, they had decided to write it in non-human letters, so I had no idea what the story was about. Similarly, interacting with the board was really, really annoying. I kept accidentally deleting pieces, or putting down wrong pieces, or wanting to shift the whole puzzle around by a few squares, which was luckily possible, but an absolute nightmare. The "coding" part of the solution should be frictionless, not this.

After the tutorial, I wasn't smoothed into the game. The puzzles immediately jumped in difficulty a whole lot, which was also kind of jarring. I noticed two key problems with the way the puzzles were made. One is that, due to the slow nature of the numbers and the importance of which order they were output, it was important to synchronize different parts of the circuit. The only tool for that was the toggle-and-lock combo, but that required that the two circuit pieces to synchronize be next to each other, which meant running a lot of extra wire. Normally, one could count that as being part of the space constraint, but because this game actually has infinitely nestable subboards, it has infinite space, and near-infinite maneouver room. The developer claims this is a defining feature of the game, but I find this to be a terrible crutch that excused the developer from actually designing his puzzles well. Perhaps if I could save the subboards as components that do more advanced operations that I could re-use later, but no such luck.

Overall, while the puzzles Primve Mover presents are interesting and difficult, the tools for solving them are not. The developer has not managed to make a user-friendly UI, and hasn't managed to make good use of the spatial aspect they designed their game with. Ultimately, I feel the game boils down to writing code with just very basic operators and a lot of boilerplate, which is more tedious than it is fun. Programming puzzle games always have to walk the fine line between feeling like a job and feeling fun, but I think Prime Mover falls significantly more into the "feeling like a job" side, and thus I can not recommend it.

Wuthering Waves

A timely review for once. I hopped onto the Wuthering Waves train at launch, and I've been playing it a good few hours every day since. I wouldn't normally be so eager to try a new game, but you know how it is with gacha / live service games - every day you're not there, you're falling behind on the curve. Being forced to play daily is a sad thing for any game, but the live service model has proven very successful, so it seems here to stay.

If you want to stop reading early, then all you need to know is that Wuthering Waves is literally the same as Genshin Impact. It can in no way be said they just took inspiration from it. They very blatantly copied most aspects of the game, renamed them, and reskinned them. I am honestly appalled. I do not know what they were thinking with this decision. Surely they didn't hope to just flat out beat Genshin, which is still one of the most popular games in the world, and has multiple years worth of extra development time and content. Maybe they thought people just wanted more of Genshin. That seems like the most reasonable explanation. But let me get into more details on the differences.

In case you don't know Genshin, it's an open-world action JRPG where you have a team of characters where only one is on the field at a time. The characters synergize with each other, incentivizing cycling through all of them instead of staying on your strongest one. As for the differences in Wuthering Waves... On the gacha front, it's almost a 1:1 copy. Same for crafting and leveling. Any differences are not worth mentioning. About 90% of the innovations are in the combat department. Everything else is lifted from Genshin. And honestly, I feel they did a good job with the combat - it rivals or maybe even exceeds Genshin's combat, which is quite the achievement, considering I think Genshin's combat is top-notch.
Wuthering Waves reduces the team size to 3, but each character becomes more complicated. Aside from their skill which is only limited by cooldown, and their ultimate, which is limited by cooldown and energy, each character also gets an intro and outro skill which occur when swapping characters, under the condition that the corresponding energy bar is full. Aerial combat is also slightly improved, with some characters having air attacks, and plunge attacks being possible from even just a basic jump height. There's also a larger emphasis on skill, with dodges being rewarded by a special dodge counter, and interrupting certain enemy actions via a sort of parry staggering them. More interestingly, each character gains an enhanced version of one of their existing abilities or attacks which is charged by some special mechanic unique to that character. This really sets each character apart.
If it just added onto Genshin's combat, Wuthering Waves would most certainly have superior combat, but they're missing my favorite mechanic - the elemental reactions. They do have elements, but aside from a rudimentary resistance and status effect system that you almost never think about, they amount to little more than having differently colored numbers. I'm not even sure why they added them.

I personally place a lot of focus on skill expression in combat, but the sad reality is that gacha games aren't really about that. They need to appeal to a wide audience, which includes casual mobile players. Therefore combat is mostly determined by your stats, not your skill. Sure, you can beat a significantly stronger enemy by being skilled, but the game doesn't expect you to, and the fight will just be against a damage sponge that one-shots you with any hit. In areas where it matters, you'll be on a timer, meaning even the best players won't be able to have their skill compensate for the lack of time investment into building their team.
But worse still is that these games often aren't focused on combat in the first place. Most of the content is exploring the world, collecting thousands of collectibles, and doing hundreds of quests. And this is where Wuthering Waves quickly falls behind. Their story just isn't interesting, and the English dub is terribly directed on top of that.

I'd love to tell you more details about everything, but this review is getting far too long. So, to summarize: Wuthering Waves is a carbon copy of Genshin, but with a worse story, less content, and a different-yet-possibly-better combat system. However, because skill expression doesn't matter in a game oriented towards a wide audience, I must mainly judge this game on the non-combat aspects. And based on those aspects, I find little reason to play this over Genshin. Thus, I can't really recommend it. If you want to play Genshin, go play Genshin. If you want something different, then you won't find it here.
If I had to predict, I would say Wuthering Waves is headed the way of Tower of Fantasy. The population will halve each week, until it almost settles at maybe a few percent of the popularity Genshin has. This will still earn them millions every month, so it will be enough to keep things running, but I doubt it will ever grow into something greater.

Monster Sanctuary

I kind of wanted to like Monster Sanctuary. It's a combination of Pokémon and metroidvania. Clearly a lot more effort has been put into the creature collecting and turn-based combat side of things as opposed to the world exploration, but the way the meroidvania aspect is implemented is quite unique. You see, usually you'd find a powerup in some part of the world that allows you to now get to an area you were previously not able to get to. Here, however, the monsters you collect each come with some ability that can be used outside of combat. So now, exploration is gated by having to first find an area where this monster exists, and then collecting them. It's functionally the same, but it fits very nicely into the world.
I would most certainly not recommend this game for its metroidvania aspects. The platforming and level design are both simple, clearly meant to exist as a somewhat novel way to guide the player to go to one area or another. I can't tell if the game might have been better off without it, because it's easy enough to not really cause any frustrations, but also too easy to not provide any joy in interacting with it.

As for the combat, it's both more deep than I expected, but somehow still lacking. Combat is done with a team of 6, 3 of whom are in play at a time. Each monster has its own basic stats, but also an element its weak to, and a whole skill tree with roughly 100 nodes. The skill tree gives you your abilities, upgrades them, and also gives a whole slew of passive bonuses. As you end up getting about half the nodes, this really gives you a whole lot of customization options for your party, from trying to match your monsters to hit the enemies' weaknesses, to having buffers, debuffers, damage dealers, defenders, and healers. There's also a combo system incentivizing to think about which monsters to attack with first, and 4 pieces of equipment you can give each monster. It's a lot, and this can be either a really good thing, or not so good if you're like me.

You see, I can appreciate the depth of the customization, but there is a problem in the effort-to-payoff ratio. I'm spending more time on customizing my party, choosing skills and equipment for my monsters, and picking the optimal turn order, than I am actually fighting. So much effort goes into being optimal, but then the fights don't really feel all that rewarding for it. And this is not the first game I've had this problem in. I think many games fall into the trap of giving the player more knobs to turn, more systems to interact with, while not considering how fun interacting with those systems is. More isn't necessarily better, because I can't just ignore these systems now that they're in the game, and the game has been balanced with them in mind.
I think deep customization fits when you have only one, or maybe a small party of (up to 4) characters you need to customize. It feels really rewarding seeing these characters become something unique to my vision, possibly different from most everyone who played the game, if only by a little bit. But I just don't have the energy to do it over and over again for tens of characters.

So, is Monster Sanctuary a bad game? I wouldn't say so. But I also wouldn't recommend it, unless you have a lot of time, and wish to spend it on customizing your zoo of monsters. It's polished, has a lot of content, looks nice, and the combat is pretty deep. Still, I feel it's not good enough that I'd be willing to spend so much time on preparing my party instead of playing the game. If that aspect feels like something that's right up your alley, you can give it a try, but for others, I would suggest finding something else.

Crusader Kings III

It's been a bit of a rough month for me, which is part of the reason I've released no reviews. I finally got around to playing Crusader Kings III though. Played it with my friends during the recent free weekend, although Crusader Kings has never really been much of a multiplayer game. Fighting against one another is quick to lead to someone being knocked out of the game, and there aren't a lot of opportunities for co-operative play. Sure you could form an alliance, or invite each other to events, or divvy up the land, but you're not really having too much of an impact on each other.

While I was thinking about what to write about, I went back to read my Crusader Kings II review. I realized not much has changed, so you can go read that, and then return. There definitely are some differences, many possibly arising from the 8 years between the release dates of the two games. I would overall say Crusader Kings III is better, because it just refreshes the game. The UI, graphics, and presentation is more modern, and a lot more accessible. One could argue that the additional accessibility makes the game easier, but I've never felt that difficulty through obtusity is a good thing in any way. A lot of it also comes down to personal preference, or a preference for the old game, because it's already familiar. I definitely think some things have gotten worse, while other things have gotten better. They're still making updates 4 years in, so I have faith there's more improvements to be made yet.

Overall, Crusader Kings III is very similar to its predecessor. A bit too much so, if I were to be honest, where I didn't really get a novel experience playing it. Ultimately, I'm okay with this. I think the game has improved, and making the same thing, but better, is a valid direction for a sequel. To that end, I'd recommend Crusader Kings III just as I recommended its prdecessor. In fact, I'm replacing it in my favorite games of all time list, because I don't see a reason to go back to the old game.

Eronoctosis: Put Yourself Together

A short game this time around. I played it on a whim because it was free, co-op, and promised to be at least somewhat of a fun time. It's Eronoctosis.

It's a two-player co-op horror game that's probably inspired by the old games like Slender. You have to collect a bunch of cauldrons, bring them back to a point, and not get caught by enemies that are chasing you all the while. I'm not entirely sure, but I think each next cauldron makes more enemies spawn. You can't really outrun these enemies, but instead have to work together to defeat them. One holds a flashlight that they must shine on the enemy, and the other holds a camera that must focus on the enemy before it can take a photo and destroy the enemy. While it sounds simple, the timings for these are quite tight, meaning splitting up or miscommunicating can quickly cause enemies to catch up to one player and end the run.

It's not very scary, and it is very short. It took 30 minutes to beat it across 4 attempts, so probably less than 10 minutes for a full run. At least, for the free version. The paid version has 3 more maps, and probably more enemy types, but I didn't play it.
That's about all I have to say. It's charming and well made for the low price of free, but I was hoping for something a bit more original. It's not bad, but there are better co-op and horror games out there, even for free, so I can't really recommend this.

Helldivers 2

How unusual for me, playing these highly popular and newly released games so soon after launch. This time it's Helldivers 2, which caught my eye because it reached nearly half a million concurrent players, and because I almost enjoyed the original Helldivers, which came out nearly a decade ago.

Conceptually, it's the same game. You play in a party of (up to) 4 and drop onto a planet to complete a mission, be it killing a bunch of enemies or gathering stuff (while also coincidentally killing a bunch of enemies). The focus is still on the same goofy stuff - accidentally killing teammates, physics bouncing a grenade off some obscure surface back into your face, or crushing a teammate with a drop pod. But not only has Helldivers 2 expanded into the third dimension, they have added a whole lot of production value to the game to the point it feels close to a AAA game now. For the most part, it's all around a better experience.

Now, about the negatives. There are a lot of problems with network errors and crashes, but I don't want to hold it against the game too much, since I believe they'll be fixed - it's only a matter of time. Still, it currently poses a problem where people will randomly disconnect from your mission (or disconnect you from their their mission) and you won't get a new teammate because their system doesn't like assigning new teammates to existing missions. Don't get me wrong, this absolutely ruins the game at the moment were I not playing with friends who can reconnect at any time, but I believe it will be fixed.
The real problem, I'm afraid, is closer to the central design of the game. This is a third-person shooter about killing hordes of aliens. Sure, the missions are nice, but everyone just wants to kill stuff. Problem is, the design is conflicting, where drawing aggro has no benefits, and a lot of negatives. You do not have enough ammo to kill everything the game throws at you, and so you'll be quickly overwhelmed if you try. No, the real strategy is to ignore as much fighting as possible, running around in circles, splitting up, and trying to sneak objectives between dying.

The core gameplay is fun, and the combat feels good, even if it takes a bit of getting used to. Everything in the game feels like it has real, tangible weight to it, and that's odd if you come from games with very snappy movement, but I learned to absolutely love this feeling. There's also not too much content, but I believe that can all be fixed. If the developers decide to change the design to really encourage combat, which is where this game shines, I think it can become something really enjoyable to play, even if you were to grind the same style of content over and over.

At present, play with an established friend group, and don't feel bad about sticking to lower difficulties if you want to actually have fun and kill the enemies. For players who want to be more dedicated or run solo, I'd advise waiting another few months to a year and hope the game's still alive by then. I hope they'll fix the crashes. I hope they'll change the design to incentivize combat. And I hope they will add more content. I would love to play more of it, but as it stands, I can't quite recommend it.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink

Covering a relative recent game for a change, it's Granblue Fantasy: Relink. I'm always on the lookout for new multiplayer games to play, and I saw this having over 100k concurrent players even weeks after release. I pitched it to my friends, got a couple of them to agree, and so we set off.

For a bit of background, Granblue Fantasy itself is a 10-year-old turn-based mobile gacha game. Relink is nothing similar. It's not available on mobile devices. It's fully action-based. And there are no microtransactions. The characters are the same, and it takes some thematic ideas, but the games are completely different. Relink has you controlling a single character in a party of four. There are a total of about 20 characters, with more on the way, and each character has a unique moveset, as well as a choice of 4 abilities out of 8 (usually). Each character also has several different weapons (stat differences only), as well as a pretty lengthy yet linear skill tree and 12 sigil slots for slotting various powerups.

The game is essentially divided into two parts. The first is the ~20 hour singleplayer campaign which tells you the story and runs you through most of the game's content and mechanics. You can already do some missions on the side in multiplayer as you progress through the campaign, but for most people, the majority of the game is after you've finished the campaign. Basically, you play through isolated encounters of harder and harder versions of the game's content, mostly bossfights, as you evolve your characters on the side. This part is entirely multiplayer, with each person controlling a character, and while you can play it solo with bot teammates, the game heavily recommends you play with others (premades or randoms). It plays quite a bit like Monster Hunter, except without the tedious bits of tracking and chasing the monsters, instead focusing on getting straight to the juicy combat. The combat also just feels better than Monster Hunter, at least in my limited experience, perhaps because of the flashier special abilities all characters have. Overall, it was just a real joy to play. The bossfights, which there were dozens of, were some of the best ones I've ever experienced, and that's already reason enough to recommend it.

Now, this is already 40+ hours in, and well past the end of the campaign, but it does eventually start to settle into a bit of a grind, and not the best kind. Despite the very fun bossfights, I feel the difficulty wasn't balanced all too well. For most of the game up to this point, encounters were never a question of "will I win", but rather "will I get the best grade", so running through them felt like a bit of a chore. Eventually, the missions do get more difficult, but then you're left to farm older missions for resources. Sadly, it's generally not the most difficult missions that give the best rewards that you should be playing over and over again, but the easy ones, which doesn't feel so great. I'd love to just do some of the hardest missions I can until I've progressed enough to move on, but that's not how the drops system works.
In the end, it took me about 70 hours to beat the final boss, and while I was nowhere near maxing out even just one character, I didn't feel like continuing to grind out more progress. Due to only being able to use a single character in combat, there was also little reason to heavily invest or even ever play other characters, which I feel was a missed opportunity, considering how well made most of them were.

Despite most of the game being too easy, and the part that wasn't too easy forcing me to play the not-so-enjoyable content over and over, I must say I still really liked Relink. The quality of the gameplay, the animations, the voice acting (I still wish they'd stop with the annoying high-pitced helper NPC trope), and most importantly the epicness of the bossfights was really, really good. I would recommend at least playing through to the final boss, and maybe if you like the grind more than I did, to see how much further you can take your characters. The harder bosses also have new moves, so there's fresh gameplay for 60 hours, and then grind for another couple hundred hours, if you're so inclinced.
For my final verdict, despite its flaws, this goes onto my list of the best action RPGs I've ever played.

NGU Idle

I got the craving to play an incremental / idle game suddenly, so I looked up what the highest rated ones were on Steam. After Cookie Clicker, which I had already completed, the second highest rated one was NGU Idle, so I took it for a spin.

Somewhat anticlimactically, despite my urge to play an idle game, that urge soon vanished. Not that there was anything wrong with NGU Idle. I just realized that the good feeling of seeing a number go up was countered by the feeling of wasting my time just clicking on things. Kinda silly of me to say that - that's the point of idle games after all, but for a "good" long-lasting idle game, you need a lot of mechanics, a lot of features, a lot of buttons to press. And yet, the act of managing all my various bars and numbers is not quite a full-time enough experience to qualify as playing a game. On the other hand, I still have to put in enough effort that I can't just leave the game running and go do something else without the time spent idling being basically meaningless, at least for the first 90+% of the game.
A similar problem of a system being neither here nor there is that the gameplay is not braindead enough to allow me to do it without any thought at all, e.g. while talking to someone or watching a video, but is also not meaningful enough to make me really think and care about what I'm doing. I need to level things up and click certain buttons eventually, but the exact order in which I do stuff isn't terribly important, so there's no excitement of figuring things out.

Overall, this review isn't about NGU Idle but more about idle games as a whole. I think there's definitely room to "fix" these issues I spoke of, and there are definitely more involved "idle" games out there (though I suppose they wouldn't qualify as idle games then), but I also think some people like them as they are. If I had to say a few words about NGU Idle, then it certainly has a plethora of things to do. The quality of those actions doesn't seem that high, and the look and feel of the game isn't polished (there's no audio at all, for example). Other than that, it's a pretty standard idle game. So if you like idle games in general and like quantity over quality, go try it. As for me, I think I'll skip generic idle games for at least a few more years.

Baldur's Gate 3

I've been wanting to play Baldur's Gate 3 ever since it was announced back in 2019. The developers' previous two games, the Divinity: Original Sin series, were my two favorite turn-based RPGs ever, and considering their success, I was hoping their next game would be even better and more polished. Definitely wrong of me to get hyped, but looking back at it now, it sure delivered, right? Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really require me to say anything about it, as it's one of the most popular and highest rated games of all time now, not just among RPGs. I played through it in co-op with a friend. But what did I think about it?

Baldur's Gate 3 is a game that runs in real-time as you move about in the world, but once you switch to combat, everything goes turn-based. It is almost entirely based on the D&D 5e ruleset, and so I dare say has very traditional RPG combat. Thinking about it, I couldn't really highlight any elements of the game that were really unique to it. But then again, with how well everything is executed, it doesn't need to do anything unique to be appreciated.
I do have a problem with how directly it copied the D&D experience. See, D&D is a great tabletop game, because the rules are deep enough to allow for a myriad of different possibilities at the hands of a dungeon master, while being simple enough to be fulfilled by the players and the one running the game. I don't think they're a good fit for a video game though. Despite how many different outcomes and scenarios the developers wrote into this game, a program still doesn't have the creativity of a live person responding to the actions of the player - that is not the strong suit to play for in a video game. Meanwhile, the mechanics of tabletop game are simple due to necessity, not because that's the most interesting option. A video game could do much more by delegating work to a computer, and I feel sticking to closely to the tabletop rules fails to take advantage of that. And I write about this in such detail, because it's by far my biggest problem with the game. I believe that mainly due to this, the gameplay is not fun. It's fun experiencing the story, and finding creative ways to approach the problems it gives you, but I find the combat quite sub-par.

Now, arguably a bigger problem, although one that I don't take as seriously, as it's not deep-rooted and will hopefully be fixed, is how full of bugs the game is. The first act is relatively polished, but acts 2 and especially act 3 is where everything starts to break down. The most jarring problems being quests that are left in broken states, unable to be finished. The worst of that being the main story quest that prevented us from getting to the end of the game. With a bit of cheating through modding we managed to resolve the issue, but I'm quite certain more than 90% of the playerbase could not manage to do so, and would have been forced to start a new game.
Aside from the extra bugs, I found act 3 to be the weakest act overall. This was in part due to the game being far too long in total. When I heard it was a long game, I was expecting 90 hours, not the 150 hours it took us. By act 3, I was already slightly exhausted with the game, and with the quests now just being thrown all over the map with no clear order in which to do them, completing them felt all the more tiresome.

Despite all my negativity, I still liked Baldur's Gate 3. It's just that, as I said, it doesn't really have anything unique to talk about. It's really well made in general (bugs aside), and is the closest thing you could get to a giant, well thought out D&D campaign in a video game. I just feel the focus was too much on the story and the many ways you could go about it. That's not something I care about, and I even believe that the more branches you allow to the story, the less the maximum potential of the story is. Meanwhile the gameplay was quite uninteresting, and even too easy, despite playing on the hardest difficulty (on release, not the new Honor mode). All in all, I would still recommend it to anyone who likes turn-based RPGs, and especially to people who like stories in their RPGs.