stikir

I remember the developer of stikir. They also made Indecision, which was a similarly insane game. And I don't mean insanely good or anything like that, I mean completely absurd.
It's a short game, taking about an hour, and there isn't any amazing gameplay nor a real story, but it's an experience to play. It kind of defies description, being just this surreal and abstract thing, but still very much having elements of games in it.

Yeah, I don't know what to say about it. I think it's worth experiencing. It's short and relays its ideas in a rather rapid fashion so nothing overstays its welcome. If anything, things happen a bit too fast, but that just adds to the intentionally confusing atmosphere. I wouldn't say it's a "good" game, but, yeah, worth experiencing.

The World is Your Weapon

I hope the developers had as much fun making The World is Your Weapon as I had playing it for the first hour.
It's a simple game, but quite unlike anything I've played before. I started out my adventure facing a group of slimes, with no weapon to fight them with. The game instructed me to find a weapon from the surroundings, and there was a shovel conveniently placed 2 tiles away from me. A bit unorthodox, but a solid weapon against a slime. But I had seen the screenshots - I knew. I skipped the shovel and picked up a nearby pot and smacked a slime with it. A powerful weapon! It killed the slime in a single hit, but sadly also broke. I proceeded to uproot the nearby tree and smack with that instead. Then some flowers, blades of grass, and finally a good whack with the shovel.

What I described is the essence of the game, as it's a bit of a collection game. Pick up something, hit an enemy, learn its strength, repeat. Despite the absurdity of picking up a whole tree, it's the least of this game's weirdness. As I arrived at the village, I went into a house, and picked up someones bed, wardrobe, window, floorboards, and finally, for good measure, exited the house and took the whole thing. Without exaggeration, if you can see it, you can almost certainly pick it up. That includes the road, a lake, even a villager after you've "accidentally" hit them with an AoE attack and got them slightly injured.
You can also upgrade any of your weapons (including the "live" ones), or list them for sale in your shop. Don't worry, it's not slavery, probably. The whole game is absurd and beautiful in its absurdity, and plays into it so well with its aesthetics and narrative.

The problem is that there isn't much depth to it. Once you take picking everything up to its logical extreme and experience the pinnacle of absurdity, you can either attempt the garguantuan task of collecting everything, or just stick to a few hard-hitting weapons which can be maintained and upgraded forever. There isn't much of a difficulty curve, and combat isn't any exciting - you whack, they whack, maybe some special effects happen, repeat until one's dead.
It's fun for an hour, but then you're like "cool", and drop it because you've pretty much experienced everything. So, I don't know. I think it's worth experiencing for a little while, but not playing to completion. I wish they had added some ramp-up to what you can pick up, because the high of picking up increasingly ridiculous objects could have lasted for a little while after each next step of ridiculousness. Meanwhile I picked up a house in the first 20 minutes of the game, and that was about the pinnacle of me being surprised.

Spiritfarer

Am I getting jaded? When was the last time I really enjoyed a new game? I don't know anymore. Even when playing yet another game with an "overwhelmingly positive" review score of 95% and over 27 thousand reviews, I just... find it boring. Sure, I'll reason that I got bored of Spiritfarer because it's a casual story-oriented management game full of tedious busywork, but it's just been so long since I've found something new I've truly enjoyed. Oh well, on with the review.

Spiritfarer is a game about caring for spirits as you see them off into the afterlife. There's a lot of management aspects of building various buildings on your boat for the well-being of the spirits you're accomodating, such as lodgings and food. You will spend a lot of time sailing from place to place, harvesting or gathering the resources there, then using those to build, craft, grow, cook, or otherwise make new things, and then giving those things to the spirits to keep them happy. Many activites run on a timer, meaning you have to juggle them, queuing each up, and then collecting or dealing with them once they're ready. There's also some platforming.

I think a lot of praise goes into the not-strictly-gameplay aspect of Spiritfarer. I didn't get too far with the story, so I don't know what to make of it, but I understand it's trying to tell you some sad tales of the spirits you're ferrying, and it's actually not a very large portion of the game in comparison to all the running about you have to do in the management aspect.
I can say that the game looks very nice and is beautifully animated, even if all the characters being anthropomorphized animals isn't really my cup of tea. The music's nice too. I think the game overall puts a lot more focus on things looking appealing rather than being fun. It'll take the extra time to make you look at the animations, even if it's an activity you've done a hundred times before, or in general make things take just a bit longer than I was comfortable with.

While this may be an improper comparison, considering I've never played Stardew Valley, I imagine it to be kind of like what this game is. It's not difficult, you can't really fail. It allows you to sink dozens of hours into it, throwing a lot of busywork at you, and tries to keep things fresh by introducing something new every now and then, even if it's just a new item or location instead of a brand new mechanic. Clearly there is a large audience for this, and I can by no means say that I think Spiritfarer is not well made, but regardless of the length or how much there is to do, I just do not enjoy these kinds of repetitive tasks, running back-and-forth, and waiting on various timers to complete. So, if you know you like these kinds of manual farming / gathering / management games with a tinge of story, I'd have to guess Spiritfarer might suit you, but I can't give it a personal recommendation.

Breakneck

On a roll with old games. Breakneck was the third least recent game I had added to my Wishlist. It was also the 9th worst rated. Went about as well as you'd expect.

Breakneck is a racing game, where you're endlessly driving at high speeds through a world with various obstacles in it. You can turn left, you can turn right, there's some powerups, driving near walls gives you boost energy to accelerate faster, bumping into a wall slows you down, while crashing into a wall ends the run. The run also ends if you've been going too slow for too long.

It's a very basic game, but that's not the problem. The problem is that I've played this before. It was called Race the Sun, and it's almost the exact same, except, despite the simpler graphics, Race the Sun is more visually appealing, and has more content and polish overall. Now, I enjoyed Race the Sun for a while when I played it almost 10 years ago, but it got boring somewhat fast. Sure, there's elgenace in simplicity, and mastering some simple task can feel really rewarding, but I'm no speedrunner - doing the same thing over and over generally exhausts itself for me.

So, I don't really have much to say about Breakneck. If the idea of a kind of endless runner racing game seems appealing to you, and you're not against something slightly older, go try Race the Sun instead. Stay away from Breakneck - it's similar enough to basically be a ripoff, and I don't like that.

Transistor

Oh wow, I didn't even realize I had games this old still to play. I played Bastion less than a year after it came out and kind of enjoyed it, so I've been meaning to play Supergiant's other games since then. Being me, I wanted to play them in order, so I'd been putting off good ones like Hades until I finished the previous ones. Well, 9 years after release, I finally got around to Transistor.

Much like I liked Bastion on release, perhaps I would have also liked Transistor on release, but games have gotten better in the past decade. Transistor's atmosphere is great, much like it's predecessor's. The mostly silent protagonist, a narrator with lots of voice lines for both important events and things as trivial as admiring bits of scenery or kicking a ball around, the slow and beautiful soundtrack, a futuristic city to traverse... It all sets the mood so well, and it's excellently put together. As much as I love the atmosphere, I have to mostly judge Transistor for its gameplay.
As you traverse the city, fights occasionally occur, limiting you to an arena with a variety of enemies, as well as some obstructing terrain. You're given an arsenal of abilities, which can each be slotted either as an active, a modifier to another active, or a passive, allowing for extensive customization to your playstyle. You can use these active abilities either in real-time, each having a cast time, or switch to a planning mode, allowing you to plan out the next several seconds of movement and abilities and then execute them while the enemies are almost frozen in time, at the cost of then being locked out of all abilities for a comparable amount of time. Of course, you will maximize your potential by combining these two - acting in real-time when possible, and freezing time to escape complicated situations.
I believe therein lies the biggest fault of Transistor, as I won't tire of repeating that mixing different types of gameplay rarely works out well. Personally more of a fan of turn-based combat, I found it especially frustrating, having to wait for my abilities to come back online whenever I did plan things out. Switching between the two gameplay modes was also not a smooth experience, as I have trouble rapidly adapting between fast and slow modes of thinking, and maybe that's common. And finally, the planning mode shows a prediction of what will happen when you execute your turn, but it's just... wrong. It fails to properly consider the environment, and fails to understand that things do not stand perfectly still during the time freeze of the execution step, causing many abilities to miss.

Overall, Transistor has a very appealing atmosphere and quite unique gameplay. Sadly, I believe the action and turn-based modes of combat mix together quite poorly, and there are some fundamental flaws in using the planning mode at all. If you're willing to overlook the not-so-great gameplay, it could still be an enjoyable experience, but I only managed to get about 50-75% through the game. I would have to lean towards not recommending it, at least not in the current year.

Parkasaurus

I'd consider myself a fan of building/management/simulation games, but perhaps because of that same reason, I'm rather critical of them. Regardless, I decided to try out a relatively highly rated theme park builder game by the name of Parkasaurus.

Looking at this game, and then looking at some similar games after, I drew the conclusion that perhaps the popularity of these types of games is due to their capability to appeal to many audiences. I'm definitely a challenge-focused person, but I can see how well these games can appeal to the casual player looking for artistic expression. There is not one correct solution, a lot of room to make things look pretty, or do them in some unique way... Of course the more liberty is given to the player (color palette swaps not included), the less the game has to be challenging, lest people be punished for pursuing these liberties.

To word this in a less roundabout manner: Parkasaurus is a casual game and I found it boring as hell. I have no interest in making a pretty park or admiring colorful dinosaurs. It's incredibly easy and features a lot of busywork. As I said, I can see the appeal for people who want to use this as artistic expression, but for anyone looking for any kind of challenge or interesting gameplay - stay away.

Nauticrawl

Nauticrawl is an interesting idea. I was lured in by the promise of having to figure out an alien machine, and navigating a world only visible through some sensors. This emanated the kind of discovery and learning that I hoped would be most enjoyable.

The initial impressions were fairly good as well. Sure, my first run ended with the battery dying before I had managed to start the engine, because I was fiddling with all the buttons and levers, but I had gained some insight from doing so. My second run went better, as I actually got the machine moving, even though I didn't know what everything did. It did end not too long after, as I ran out of fuel looking around my surroundings.
Every run had to be started from the beginning, which had so far not been a big deal, since my newfound knowledge very quickly let me skip the fumbling about I had done the previous runs. But on the third try, I already got reasonably far. Less because of my inexperience piloting the machine, and more due to lack of knowledge of the systems of the world outside, that run, too, ended in failure. That was the first time I felt that I did not really want to replay everything up to this point, because it was no longer difficult, but just a chore to demonstrate my mastery.

Embark on that fourth run I did, and due to my familiarity with the systems this time around, I started to notice flaws in them. A bit of background information first. Nauticrawl is mostly turn-based. Without spoiling too much, resources are only consumed when you perform some action. However, some things do occur in realtime, and a patient and wise operator will abuse them. Example: Your monitors may deplete energy, but are not necessary to perform any "turn" actions. You may conserve energy by turning them on, getting the required information, then turning them off to perform your action. As you can imagine, this is tedious. Another example: It is more efficient to inject fuel slowly. This has no other effect than making you wait longer, possibly as long as 5 seconds, to move again. Final example: For some bizarre reason, enemies act in real time, at least until their actions would begin to influence you. You have an infinite amount of time until something attacks you once they have planned to do so. So, uncloaked, all enemies will eventually gather around you and obliterate you if you don't cloak. If you're already cloaked, you can sit and wait for everyone to get away from you so you could uncloak and move without using energy. This waiting can take an incredible amount of time, but you'd be playing suboptimally if you didn't wait.
But even besides all that nonsense, the difficult-to-control machine very quickly stops being interesting as you figure it out, and starts being a nuisance to operate. I've already proved I can work this thing, yet I have to do it over and over and over again.

So, no. Nauticrawl is most definitely not something I'd recommend. While it has a great premise, it makes some very questionable design decisions and does not respect your time. The initial sense of discovery fades to tedium as you realize the machine is not difficult to operate because it's alien to you - it's difficult to operate because it's terribly designed. There's a story unfolding as you explore the world, which I was mildly interested in, but that was far from enough to keep me going. Gameplay, beyond basic operation that would be trivial with a good control scheme, was basically nonexistent as well, not leaving anything interesting to do if you knew how to pilot the machine.

Echo

I think I'll remember Echo for some time. It was a very unique experience. I have mixed feelings about it, and I don't even quite know where to start describing it. Perhaps a retelling of my own experiences would be best. Echo is definitely an experience, and I'm afraid that detailing the gameplay will spoil some of that experience, but I can not really talk about the game otherwise. I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum.

Echo starts off with a lengthy opening. Immediately, I notice that the quality of voice acting is amazing. There are only two people talking, but I very much feel inclined to listen to what they're saying, to the point that it doesn't bother me that I am simply walking for the first 30-60 minutes of the game. It also helps that the planet I am going to is like something out of a sci-fi dream. Snow, countless blocks, crumbling stairways and narrow paths leading downward, eventually into an endless building filled with winding pathways, halls of gold and splendor stretching to infinity... all eerily dark and empty, leading deeper and deeper still. Words do not do the sights justice. I'm fed bits and pieces of the story, of my past, and why I'm here. There's a feeling of some grander narrative, but information is vague, and our two narrators are unreliable. It's all very much just style at this point, and I worry if this will be a game, or just a gorgeous walking simulator. But honestly, I would not mind the latter for once if this keeps up.

The introduction also serves as a tutorial to the game, demonstrating the energy system. You use energy to break your fall on long drops, fire your gun, scan the area. You also have limited sprinting ability, opening and closing doors, vaulting over low walls, shouting, and some other things you can do. These tools will all come in handy when the game gradually introduces its enemy. These tools will also be your downfall, as your enemy is yourself. The game plays out in rather long levels, populated by clones of yourself. You can kill them, lock them behind doors, outrun them. It's all too easy, until the lights go out, come back on, and the cycle begins anew. Every cycle, everyone is revived, and they will learn all you did in the past cycle. Closing a door behind you will no longer work, they will sprint after you, they'll even shoot at you.

Echo is advertised as a stealth sci-fi adventure. I'd agree with the latter two, but stealth it is perhaps not. Sure, the enemies won't attack you if they don't detect you, but there are too many of them to sneak past them all. More than likely, you'll want to play it as an action puzzle instead. Analyze the level, figure out ways to deal with the enemies in some area using only a limited set of your moves, then use a different set of moves to escape them once they are revived the next cycle. It's great in theory, but I must say, I'm not quite so quick on my feet. Things won't go exactly as planned, so any deeper strategy will not work. I have a feeling this might have worked better as a turn-based strategy game, but that would have lost so much of the atmosphere. Speaking of which, Echo isn't a horror game, but the long empty corridors, eerie lighting, blackouts, and of course the many clones staring and chasing you create for a very anxiety-inducing atmosphere.

I've rambled a bit too long. I didn't ultimately like the game due to the gameplay. The story also dried up somewhat, as it kept up its rather vague tone, giving me few concrete details. Still, between that and the gameplay, I would have stuck around for the story, as well as the environments, which were sadly seeing fewer new elements over time than at the start. As novel as the gameplay was, I did not feel much of an expression of skill playing it. I did not have the time to properly think things through, and I did not have the in-game resources to shoot or outmaneuver the enemies. Sure, I got through with a combination of the two, but it just didn't feel like an accomplishment. It didn't feel fun, and worse still, it felt a bit repetitive.
I don't know whether to recommend it to any degree. I would, without hesitation, tell you to go experience the marvelous environments and atmosphere they crafted. But the gameplay isn't actually enjoyable, and the entire whole kind of falls off. I think they did a good job, just... not good enough to really recommend it.

Elephantasy

Hmm, Elephantasy was a moderately pleasant experience. It advertises itself as a 2D puzzle platformer, but I do feel it's more of a metroidvania, with how interconnected the levels are, how many sort-of-secret areas there are, and how much backtracking there is. It kind of reminded me of VVVVVV. Elephantasy doesn't seem quite as polished, nor are the puzzles as innovative or interesting, but it similarly has a very simple yet coherent aesthetic, and a large map composed of smaller rooms, each named.

The story is that you fell down, and you're now trying to get back up. To the sky, that is, not your feet. There's a wizard who will help you by loaning you his items in exchange for gathering gems for him from across the world. He offers you four items. Seeds - to make vines grow to be climbed upon. A ring - to make you stronger, and able to lift objects. A snorkel - to make you breathe underwater, somehow. And boots - to make you run so fast you can cross gaps, to compensate for your inability to jump as an elephant.
Each item can be returned to loan out a new one, and so you must use each of them to explore a different part of the world. Eventually, you'll gather enough gems to be allowed to loan two items at a time, allowing you to reach even further corners of the world. Eventually, three items, eventually four, and then maybe you'll get to go back.

Okay, I have to admit, I didn't get too far, so I don't know the details of how the end plays out. We're promised different endings, and possibly more items than the four the wizard initially lets us choose from. While I loved the level design and the art, the game felt a bit too simple to be enjoyable. Aside from figuring out where to go next, there wasn't any challenge. Grab an item, explore all the nooks and crannies of the area(s) you can reach with that item, then get another one. There wasn't much of a sense of "puzzling", just exploring. What didn't help was the somewhat slow pace of the game (note to potential players: set your game speed to max in the settings), combined with a lot of time spent backtracking, and then small frustrations from the character being very rigid to control. I would definitely attribute the last to a lack of polish on the character controller.

Overall, charming, not too long, very well designed map, but not enough of a challenge to be interesting. I would definitely say that this game is neither a puzzle nor a platformer. You might well enjoy it if you like exploration, or like collecting things. Me, I'm not that big on those two aspects, so I can only partially recommend Elephantasy. I think it's mostly well made and unique, but just doesn't tick the boxes for me.

Bridge Constructor Portal

I think Bridge Constructor Portal stood out to me because of its higher ratings than the other Bridge Constructor games. I had generally avoided them, because they reminded me too much of those casual games where you draw a series of lines to have a ball or something roll to the finish. Sure, instead of a ball, it's a sort of powered vehicle, and instead of lines, it has to be a structurally sound construction, but once you grasp the techinques of bridge construction, the game really does devolve into nothing more than drawing lines from start to finish. There's also portals this time, and other elements from Portal, like turrets and lasers, but they're all just fancy ways to connect or block off different parts of the map, changing from where to where you have to draw the lines. It's really not that difficult.
What can be difficult is getting the lines just right, so that your forklifts fly at just the right angle, but that's basically all trial and error instead of a science. This is one of the worse forms of difficulty.

The game would take maybe 12 hours to complete + 6 hours for the extra levels in the DLC. It's a total of 60 + 30 levels. I tried doing some alternate solutions to some levels, but the game really doesn't seem to like you doing that. No innovation, just take the path from start to finish that we had thought out for you. It's just boring.

Yeah, so, once you learn how to build a bridge, Bridge Constructor kind of loses its appeal. You did it. You constructed a bridge. Feel free to do it a few dozen more times in different shapes, but it's the same thing. Despite the fresh coat of paint, it's the same old boring casual game. So, that's a "no" from me.

Devil May Cry 5

I give AAA games a try once, and I'm immediately reminded why I shouldn't. Or rather, it's this specific type of AAA games, I'm not quite sure what the subgenre here is. I'm sure there's thousands of fans of the series, hence the high rating, but I played Devil May Cry 5 rather briefly, and I absolutely hated it.

I would think I rather enjoy action games. Hack and slash is really cool. I like doing fancy moves, building combos. I figured, "hey, DMC5 is a really highly rated game like that, surely it's gotta be good." How ridiculous of me.
For one, it's a console game. The PC experience is yet again a complete afterthought. The control scheme just doesn't work well on a keyboard, and I feel myself pushing ridiculous key combinations to get the character to do what I want to, and even then some actions just aren't possible because they would have probably been too hard to map to a controller.
Secondly, it's a "story game". Now hey, those cutscenes were pretty good, and I feel like if you just took all the gameplay out, you could make a pretty cool action movie. But I'm not here to watch a movie. The level segments are so brief between being interrupted by yet another cutscene that it feels more like a movie with gameplay spliced in, than the other way around.
And even if I could ignore those two major problems, I failed to really see anything special in the gameplay. Melee attacks, ranged attacks, special attacks, combos... Kind of basic stuff. Sure, it didn't seem bad either, but I feel there's way better hack and slash combat out there.

Well, good to check up on AAA games every now and then and remember that, yup, they're still mostly not for me. But hey, with how popular DMC is, you'll probably already have played it if you liked it, and don't need my opinion. If you, however, don't have an opinion on this game and feel like your tastes align with mine, I can confidently tell you to stay away from it - I don't recommend it.

Apple Slash

Well this has simply been one of the worse things I've played in a while. Apple Slash should take about 30 minutes. I think I got close to the end, but couldn't even make it through that.
It has very basic pixel art with a black, white, and red color scheme, and even more basic combat, letting you swing your massive sword without any cooldown in front of you, killing most things instantly. You get ranged attacks about halfway through, allowing you to kill things instantly even at a distance. There aren't any puzzles to speak of, so the "gameplay" is just navigating through the map while spamming attack.
There's some, humor, I think? At least I think it wants to be humorous, as you meet some characters along the way, and they have silly names, and say and do silly things, but it's really not entertaining. I think there's a story? I don't know what it is, even though I didn't skip any dialogue.

Eh, I think someone just wanted to make a game, and so they made this small thing. There's barely anything in here, but for what I assume is a solo project, it's okay work. It's polished and cohesive, even if what it is isn't any good. Good on the developer. I do not understand the positive reviews, however, and I most definitely don't recommend playing this.

One Step From Eden

Got around to finally playing a game I had actually anticipated - One Step From Eden. I seemed to have either forgotten, or perhaps I never took a careful look in the first place, but I was somewhat surprised to learn that this was, in fact, not a turn-based game. Well, action games are fine. Surely, this won't ruin my enjoyment?

One Step From Eden is an action roguelike deckbuilder that takes place on a 8x4 grid, of which the left half is yours, and the right half belongs to your enemy. You can move freely on your side, and cast your attack (generally for free), or either of two spells. Casting a spell costs some mana, which quickly refills, and discards the spell to draw a new one from your remaining deck. Once the deck is empty, it is reshuffled. Most spells hit one or multiple tiles in front of you, and can have a variety of effects besides damage.
The enemy side has one or multiple enemies who will similarly cast their spells at you, and if you kill them all, you get to move to the next level. There's a bit of a choice in levels, but every few levels there is a boss fight, and between most levels you get to adjust your deck, usually by getting a new spell, or some passive ability (artifact).

There is a whole load of variety and replayability. Far more than I could describe here, and far more than I got to experience. Nearly a dozen different characters, and probably a few hundred spells, plus artifacts, spell modifiers, and a bunch of synergies between them all. The pixel art is pretty nice, the characters look cool, and there's more references as flavor text to every possible medium than I would know, which were enjoyable to recognize. I think there is a lot of love put into this game, and it's executed to a very high degree of polish. The combination of genres is unique (though I did see literally everyone mention it's just like Megaman Battle Network, which I know nothing about), and I don't have any objective complaints about it in general.

Despite my positive attitude towards it and my initial excitement during the first hour of playing it, it soon sank in that this was not a game I could play. I loved thinking about all the interactions between the cards, optimal ways to play, and building a deck, but the game runs at an incredibly high speed. Every second, or even more often, I am expected to re-learn what spells I currently have available, what they do (because in proper deckbuilding roguelike fashion, effects often change over the course of the battle), where I am supposed to move to dodge the enemy, where I am supposed to move to hit the enemy, and maybe more. This makes for an incredibly high skill ceiling and no doubt rewards players who have sunk a lot of hours in the game, but I can not process this information. Playing at a slower pace will just make me get hit more and deal less damage, so the only real solution is to just spam my abilities without thinking what they do or if they hit. Sure, the game is somewhat balanced around this, where AoE spells are quite weak, and pin-point spells can be incredibly strong, but I feel this just robbed all of the thought from the game. I can't execute my synergies or do cool things, because I must act faster, not smarter.

I am very sad about this resolution. This looks like a very nice game, and I think a lot of people, who are not me, can actually well enjoy One Step From Eden. It's not even all that difficult, as I got probably around halfway through on my second run. So if you either don't care as much as I do about executing your deck to its fullest, or are someone who can think and recall information faster and is willing to invest more time into memorizing what every spell and enemy does, this will probably be a really good game. I think once you go play it, you will understand very swiftly if the combination of action and strategy works for you. So, while I can't personally recommend it, I still have faith that it's a good game, and that a lot of people could get plenty of enjoyment out of it.

Honkai: Star Rail

Oh, we got a big one today! Two and half years ago or so I started Genshin Impact and wrote a review of that, stating I had had a lot of fun with it, but wasn't sure how long I'd keep playing. Well, it's now one of my most played games of all time, and I have played it every single day since then. So, when the developers of Genshin were releasing a new game, how could I refuse playing it right away? Honkai: Star Rail, has taken a lot of elements from Genshin, but has the big difference of being turn-based. I'm going to be drawing a lot of parallels to Genshin in this review.
Where to even begin. Star Rail is an RPG, so naturally I'll talk about both the story as well as the gameplay. It's also a gacha game, so I'll also describe the monetization and grind elements.

Let's start with the gameplay. Unlike Genshin, Star Rail is played in a number of small maps, with less of a focus on exploration (no swimming, climbing, or even jumping). There's still chests and casual puzzles in the environment, but to a lesser degree than in Genshin. You run around these instances as normal, but upon encountering an enemy, the game shifts to a turn-based battle mode.
I am moderately disappointed in how unimaginative the turn-based system is. Sure, Genshin didn't have anything never-before-seen, but Star Rail just uses the most standard "your lineup vs their lineup, whack each other in turns" system used in most turn-based RPGs out there. At least there's a turn tracker, and every character has a variable speed. Your entire team of 4 shares a pool of skill points. A weak basic attack gives 1 point, while a skill costs 1 point. Each character also has energy, accumulated by attacking and getting hit, and once full, allows them to cast their ultimate. The ultimate system is unique because you're allowed to cast ultimates in real-time, outside the normal turn order, but with how fast turns sometimes go past (there is only a split second between gaining energy from your or an enemy's action, and the next turn), it can be easy to miss the right moment. I think it's a huge mistake to put real-time elements in any turn-based system, and this is no exception. I have often been frustrated at losing a battle because I missed the 0.2s window for casting my ult.
The 7 Elements from Genshin are also present (though some have changed), but instead of reactions, each enemy has 2-3 weaknesses, and attacking with the right Element does 25% more damage, as well as depletes their toughness bar, which, upon breaking, slightly delays their turn and deals a large burst of damage. I think the lack of elemental reactions is a big loss in terms of team building variety and simply matching your team to the enemies' weaknesses is boring. It kind of just amounts to a 25-50% increase in damage. Aside from the 7 Elements, there also 7 Paths, which don't "do" anything, but describe what type the character is. (DPS, healer, buffer, tank, etc.)

Not to diverge into a strategy guide, but given the rules above, certain team compositions are somewhat mandated. Unlike Genshin, where there's a distinction between on- and off-fielders, Star Rail gives every character their time in the limelight, and provides no invulnerability dodge button, which means every character must be defended or healed, and every character's output matters. While good for fans of the characters, I believe this, too, hurts the team variance in the game. See, the skill point system basically means that you will ideally delegate two characters to be dummies and only generate skill points with basic attacks, and fire off the occasional ultimate, while the other two are actually the meat of the team. You will need 1 healer (of which there are 2 at the moment). This healer uses up one skill user slot, leaving you with just a single slot for another skill user. Putting a buffer / debuffer there is pointless, as your dummy basic attackers deal no damage, so the only option is to use a DPS there. This leaves a massive pool of characters with no role in any team, because they need to use their skill to function. To the developers' credit, they have put roughly 6 characters in the game, who can be useful with just special basic attacks and/or ultimates, or whose skills don't consume any or almost any points. But out of 23 characters, you're currently limited to 1 of 2 healers, 2 of 6 dummies, and can only pick 1 of the remaining 15 cool characters, some of whom aren't even DPS characters. This is a massive flaw in terms of team building, but something future patches can fix.

To segue into the topic of story, I believe the emphasis was not on combat for Star Rail. Two more examples of this. Every character's ultimate has a long, unskippable animation. Genshin was somewhat limited by its action combat still running, but Star Rail takes their sweet time, and because of how often ultimates can be cast, almost half the combat can be spent watching the animations. Due to this, everyone I know plays at 2x speed, which sadly makes the animations look a bit goofily sped up, and reduces variety in voice lines. The game should have been built for a faster pace. Worst of all, Star Rail has auto-battle as an option. I adamantly believe that no game should ever give you an option to not play it. Auto-battle screams "the gameplay is bad, and we know it", and I'm afraid that this is the ultimate truth for Star Rail. To any gameplay-oriented readers, this can be the end of this already long review, but I want to keep writing.

Now, the story. If we exclude games which are basically only story, Genshin has one of my favorite stories in games. Its lore being the best part, while the moment-to-moment storytelling / writing being a bit weak. Star Rail has massively stepped up the writing quality, to the point where dialogue is usually genuinely fun to listen to. Losing a Paimon-like character is clearly the biggest contributor, giving the main character more agenda, as well as giving more time to the various side characters. The story so far has a much more comedic tone, especially when it comes to the various ways you can interact with the environment. Many NPCs or environmental items also have new dialogue as you repeatedly talk to them, and there's overall more dialogue options in conversations, really allowing you to drill into the story as deep as you want to. For fans of story, there is so much more reading, and significantly higher quality everything. There is also more focus put into the characters, which clearly shows from how long we have to look at them in combat.
I have but one nagging issue with the story, which is ultimately a very important one for me, personally. There is no long-term hook. Sure, the general long-term premise is the same as Genshin - we go from place to place, learning about the place and solving its problems, but Genshin gave us a promise at the start. "Gather the 7 Elements", "We will be reunited at this journey's end", "Then you will understand". Genshin holds a promise that the story will not just spin endlessly until the game stops being profitable, and gives us something to look forward to. Star Rail has nothing pressing. No reason to want to move forward, except for if you love the writing itself. I find Star Rail's overarching lore a bit weaker overall, and that matters to me a lot, while I think most would consider Star Rail's story superior. Up to you, I guess.

Finally, the gacha and the grinds. If you're already familiar with Genshin, there is next to nothing new here. Exact same rules for gacha, though they do give their first Standard 5* at 40 pulls, and a Standard 5* of your choice at 300 pulls. Same as Genshin, there's enough currency to go around to make the teams you want even as free-to-play, so I've no complaints here. Weapons are now called Light Cones, lack a secondary stat, and are now restricted by Path instead, meaning only 1/7 instead of 1/5 weapons fit your character, and they're a bit more boring. Aside from the Basic, Skill, and Ult, every character now also has a levelable Passive, which is a cool addition, and instead of an Ascension stat, there are various stat increase nodes you can pick up as you level. Artifact grind has gotten even worse, as there's now 6 artifacts instead of 5, meaning ideally no off-piece, and there's more possible substats, making it even harder to get that perfect artifact.
For end-game, not that I got there yet, there's the Spiral Abyss equivalent dungeon, where defeating the enemies in a low amount of turns matters. There is also a really cool dungeon mode, which gives you a new buff from a large selection after every combat, along with upgrades to those buffs, and possible small events. These roguelike elements make it by far the most enjoyable content in the game so far, as you actually want to go for another run, just to see what build you can put together from the buffs this time. I fear that it, too, will become boring over time, as player strength eclipses any semblance of challenge, but maybe that's just my pessimism.

I put a good 50+ hours into Star Rail over a week, and I really enjoyed it. Reading it back to myself, my review may come across as overly critical, but I think Star Rail is still a pretty good game, compared to other games out there. It's just that, there are too many similarities to Genshin, and with the pace of updates, I don't have the time for another Genshin. I don't enjoy Star Rail as much, as explained by the faults above, and I believe it to be a lot more oriented toward the casual crowd, which gives me less hope about its future. Between the two, I would choose Genshin without a doubt, but if you have time to play both, care more about story than gameplay, want something that you can actually play on mobile, or simply want something that's like Genshin, but not Genshin, Star Rail can still be a game worth playing. So, a partial recommendation from me, but I will not be continuing my journey in Star Rail.
To also make a prediction for the future, because this matters in live-service games, I think Star Rail will settle to maybe 1/2 to 1/4 the popularity of Genshin. Still, considering how Genshin makes on a magnitude of 10x more money than it costs, I don't think Star Rail players will have to worry about it being abandoned for a long time, as it will be able to earn its share.

Tenderfoot Tactics

Tenderfoot Tactics is a turn-based tactical RPG. You run around the overworld with your party of 6, and fight other, generally larger, parties, which in essence are comprised of the same units as yours. There's about a dozen different classes, each with about five different abilities with multiple levels. There's also an equipment system, but it's just two stat items (you only have two stats overall - health and damage/healing power) - nothing fancy. There's some mysterious quest you have to solve, but it's not really much of a gameplay element, other than forcing you to move around, and thus triggering more battles.

I actually played Tenderfoot Tactics for a relatively long time compared to its simplicity - about 5 hours. It seemed really interesting at first. For one, the art and the music are... memorable. The terrain is constantly shifting around visually, meaning you can kind of understand where obstacles are, or if you're going uphill or downhill, but any details are lost. It's hard to explain. Similarly, the music is a bit like someone's just banging pieces of metal together in a rhythmic fashion. It's all quite unpleasant, and I'd prefer if they made this stuff a bit more normal, even if it sacrifices the "artisticness" of it.
No, but, what really kept me in at first was the combat. I think Tenderfoot Tactics has a really good combat system. The terrain is tile-based, and each tile has a height, vegetation density, growth rate, water level and fire level. You can manipulate each of these variables, and in fact most attacks or abilities do. Having a high ground advantage can mean your ranged attacks do more damage, and the enemies have a harder time reaching you. Similarly, it is difficult to move through water or dense vegetation, and fire actively burns and spreads. Despite this already being a lot more than most turn-based combat games offer, I really wish they would have done more, because the rest of the combat was so bland. Trees and cliffs don't block line of sight, meaning there's no cover. Fire can kind of be shrugged off. There was more potential here in general, if they really wanted to distinguish their game with this deep elemental terrain manipulation gameplay.

I guess a big reason I got bored was the lack of content. While each class was pretty interesting in itself, the different classes didn't feel too different, and had too much horizontal progression. Sometimes I didn't even want to upgrade because I felt my character might get weaker. The battles started to play out the same, and the story wasn't existent enough to make me care about its resolution. I think there were also some balance problems, with some classes or abilities just being better, which further hurt diverse parties and trying out new things.

Overall, I like that Tenderfoot Tactics did something a bit new, but there wasn't enough content around this cool mechanic, nor was the content polished enough. After going through 15-30 battles, you will probably feel you've seen what the game has to offer, and get bored. I sure did. So, I think it might be worth just trying out for the experience, but not really. I wouldn't recommend actually getting into it.

Taur

Taur looked like an excellent game from the store page. Effective graphics, combat on a large scale with a lot of units, huge weaponry, multiple skill trees, trading, recruitment... So why were the reviews borderline bad?

Well, everything described is in the game, but... I think the best I could explain is that it just doesn't feel very rewarding to play. The game is advertised as a strategy and tower defense, and I'd say that's already a bit far from the truth. You literally are / have a giant tower that you must defend, which is a "tower defense" in a literal sense, but not as a game. There aren't any real-time strategy elements in the game, as your only action during gameplay is to fire this giant cannon. I'm sure there's some strategy involved in making the right decisions outside of combat - choosing the right upgrade paths, making sure your units don't die, picking the best missions - but they're not very complicated decisions, nor do they feel that impactful to the game. Most decisions are pretty good, so as long as you pick something, your war machine is getting stronger, and you just let it do its job, and fill the menial task of firing the cannon.
I say menial, because despite the cool lasers, energy shields, projectiles and explosions, the combat lacks the polish to really feel good. I'm firing a giant laser or huge mortar shells at enemies, but it doesn't feel like I am. It's a bit difficult to describe, because it's not that it doesn't have a numerical effect, it's just that the visual feedback is lacking.

I don't really have any big negatives to point out, but I think you'd understand why I say this game doesn't feel rewarding to play if you tried it. It feels lacking the mayhem you'd expect from such a scale, and it's definitely lacking in actual gameplay. Shooting the big turret feels the same in your first battle as your last, and I don't feel I'm executing any strategy as I upgrade my defences through the levels. With all that in mind, I can't recommend Taur.

The Supper

A short one for a change. The Supper took me about 20 minutes to complete, and it was an... interesting experience. It's a rather morbid point-and-click story. It wasn't the most interesting story one could tell in 20 minutes, and, of course, being 20 minutes kind of disqualifies it from having enough substance to have a deep enough narrative to really be good in the first place, but it was still an enjoyable 20 minutes.

It's free, so if you're looking to kill half an hour and feel like a short, slightly uneasy, tale would be your cup of tea, then you can give it a try. But don't expect too much.

Slime Rancher

If Slime Rancher isn't the cutest thing I've played in a long while, I don't know what is. Problem is, that's about the only thing it has going for it.

Slime Rancher is a mix between an adventure game and a farming simulator. The game essentially plays in two parts. First you go around the map, finding new slime types, and new types of food. Then you bring them back to your farm, combine the slimes into bigger, better, slimes, and plant their favorite foods to grow more locally. You feed the slimes to get valuable slime poop, which you sell to buy upgrades to your farm and your equipment. You progress by exploring the world and solving little puzzles, like feeding big slimes a bunch of some specific food to get a key to unlock a new area.

While there are a few hazards regarding leaving your slimes unfed, or accidentally combining more than two types of slimes, the game really isn't any difficult. It's more of a relaxation game, looking at all the adorable little slimes. Progress is extremely slow, mostly gated by the speed of waiting for food to grow, or how fast you can traverse back and forth through the map, again, and again, and again. See, your farm can't hold a lot of things, so you need to venture out to gather more from the nature, which is a lot larger. But you also have very limited storage space, meaning you can't collect a lot during one trip. Combine this with the game being rather repetitive, because new slimes, while maybe requiring new food or a new enclosure, don't require any fundamentally different approach to what you've already been doing, and I just felt I had seen everything after a couple of hours, and the rest was just a grind to unlock the rest of the slime skins.

All that said, while I don't like or recommend Slime Rancher personally, I think it's a pretty good casual game. It's easy, it's simple, it's nice to look at, and there's a lot to do as long as you don't abstract these activities away as a single repetitive thing. I can somewhat see the reason for this being one of the highest rated games on Steam, but, yeah, totally not a game for people such as myself.

Islanders

I believe there is a category of media, games included, that receive high ratings not because they're really good, but because there's little to dislike about them. This is probably yet another of the many flaws of rating systems. As a player, you don't want to find a game you don't dislike, you want a game that you really like. And there is no reason that a game with middling reviews couldn't be fantastic for you, personally. A system that could identify something like this is of course signifcantly more complicated and would need to at least take into account the overall preferences of every person rating things. I don't think it's particularly viable, and there's easier improvements most places could make to their rating systems.

Apologies for the long and not-so-relevent intro to my Islanders review. It's just that I don't have much to say about it. As you may have guessed, Islanders is a very highly rated game. It took me but an hour to basically see all the content though, and even then, it wasn't all that interesting.

In Islanders, you're given a series of buildings to place on generated islands. These buildings have certain placement limitations, and give (or deduct) points depending on buildings (or some natural objects) near them. Eventually an island gets full enough that you have a hard time getting enough points for the next milestone, and you move on to the next island where you repeat the same process all over.
The game isn't particularly difficult. There isn't a large variety of buildings, maybe a couple dozen, and building placement strategy is rather shallow. Two of the major flaws I noticed were that you were eventually better off just hovering over various areas to see which gives the most points, or trying to see if a building fit into some crevice that would give a lot of points. There will quickly be too many buildings where reasoning about a good location is too slow, and just randomly scanning the area, letting the computer tell you what's good and what's bad, is the efficient solution. Secondly, that buildings only care about buildings that exist around them when they are first built, meaning you can, for example, replace all the trees near a sawmill with buildings, and you still get to keep your points. This feels really wrong, because placing two farms near a windmill is not the same as placing a windmill near two farms, even though the end result looks to be the same.

Overall, I'm probably the wrong demographic. This is no strategy game, it's a casual "puzzle" game with somewhat aesthetically pleasing buildings and islands. It's one of those "relaxation" games which I just don't understand. If you want to make little island cities like in the screenshots, maybe you'll like it. Otherwise, I have no reason to recommend it.

Infinitode 2

I haven't played a lot of tower defense games in the recent years. They don't seem to be very popular games to make, contrasting with the Flash game era, where a new one was popular quite often. That said, Infinitode 2 is probably the best tower defense game I've played, as far as pure tower defense games go.

To address a possible initial concern, Infinitode 2 is free, and also available on mobile. It sustains itself off of microtransactions. Basically pay-to-progress-faster. There are no paywalls, but because the progression possibilities are nearly infinite, paying does give you an edge. But I wouldn't care about that one bit. There is of course no PvP in the game, and only your leaderboard ranking is at stake. Especially on PC, I didn't feel any incentive to pay a cent.

Now, Infinitode isn't super innovative, but it does have a good amount of depth. Various enemies walk along a predetermined path. You place your turrets outside that path. Enemies have different properties and are resistant or vulnerable to different towers, promoting tower diversity. You'll also want to diverisfy your towers on account of which enemies take which path, dissonances like ice and fire not working well together, or just general placement ideas like spreading out your freeze towers to cover, but not overlap, the entire area, or placing venom towers near the start, to ensure maximum poison duration.
The levels start off simple, but later on, figuring out the optimal tower placement (or just a kind-of-good placement) is like a puzzle that needs to be solved. Problem is, it's work you should ideally do before starting the level, and not something you would need to re-do in the future, unless you noticed an ineffiency in your placement. But because the game has a lot of vertical progression in the form of an extensive upgrade tree, you will want to re-visit levels again and again to get a better score, and farm more materials. Upon re-visiting, however, you will have to remember how you wanted to place your towers, which I found to be an incredibly tedious task from the second time onward.

Overall, despite putting over 40 hours into it, I find it somewhat hard to recommend. The long playtime comes from the grindiness of it, and while unlocking each new turret did give new interesting options, as did new levels provide new challenges, it didn't feel rewarding. Again, because of the highly vertical upgrade progression, the difficulty in levels (most of which are infinite, as far as I know) had to raise rapidly as the waves went on. The early waves were trivial, meaning you could get through them pretty much no matter what you did. Then there were a few waves which were matched to your current progress, where your success depended on how well you had designed your defenses. And then you got overwhelmed, regardless of what you did. My actual skill had a marginal effect, and my performance was mostly dependent on how much time I had invested into playing.
Still, I had a decent amount of fun for about 30 of those hours, and since the game's free, I'd totally recommend giving it a try until you get bored.