Goddess of Victory: Nikke

I considered making this an April Fool's joke, describing Goddess of Victory: Nikke as an action shooter you can play on your phone with one hand, how the characters have great designs with thighs thicker than their waists and breasts bigger than their heads, and how you can experience great storytelling, like having a threesome with a couple of bunny girls. And it's not that any of the above is untrue. I did initially pick this game up as something casual I could play while sitting on the can, because clearly a game that sells itself on fanservice and gameplay consisting of looking at five pairs of jiggling asscheeks can't have any depth or difficulty to it, right? Well, for better or worse, I've been playing this for a year now, and I now take it competitively enough that I can rarely bring myself to play it on a phone anymore.

But let's get serious. What kind of game is Nikke? Sure, it's a gacha game, but that only describes the monetization system, not the gameplay. More on that later. If you look at the gameplay, then at a surface level, you could say it's a third-person shooter. You control a team of five characters (Nikkes) crouching behind cover, and aim at waves of enemies, occasionally taking cover to dodge incoming attacks. Some stages are instead boss stages, but they function mostly the same, with perhaps a few slightly more complex mechanics.
But this isn't really what the game is about. You see, each character has a role to play in a party, and has several passive and one active ability. The real game is assembling these parties, depending on the different restrictions, advantages, and disadvantages various game modes and stages have. There are over 120 characters in the game (so far), and I quite actively use about 40 of them. And it's not just about choosing which characters go together, as each character has several different ways to upgrade them, but the pace of aquiring materials for these upgrades is not as fast as the pace of new characters coming out. New characters who may or may not replace one of the 40 I'm currently using and building up. This forces me to also make decisions on which characters I can expect will stick around in the meta for longer, and which will be replaced soon, distributing my resources accordingly.
There is still skill involved in the shooting part of the game, knowing which enemies to target, where the weak spots on bosses are, and when to activate your active abilities, which is why I rarely play on a phone anymore. A lot of the combat is actually difficult, which is rare to see in a mobile game, but very welcome. The difficulty is largely artificial, gated by stats, which is gated by materials, which is gated by play time, but there is still a very meaningful difference in how far someone can get based on their skill. And so opinions may vary, but I do consider Nikke to be more of an idle/incremental management than a shooter game.

Of course, a lot of people are put off by gacha, so I think it's fair to discuss how progression works in this game, and how monetization ties into it. As most gacha games, progress is gated behind daily income, carefully controlled by the developers. You're expected to log in daily if you want to maximize your progression. At first, progression is fast, and you can spend several hours playing every day, but that slows down the further in you get, eventually reaching 0.5 to 1 hours average per day. Mind you, you still get well over a hundred hours of gameplay on the first month, which itself should be enough if you don't care to continue at a slower pace. For me, half an hour is a great amount of time to avoid burnout while still offering variety and something to look forward to each day.
Progression happens by aquiring new characters for gems that you get from many places in the game, and then by building those characters. There's a different game mode for each type of progression your character can have. Campaign has one-time battles and permanent progression in two different difficulty modes that you have to "push" to earn passive income to increase character levels. Simulation Room gives skill level up materials. Interception gives equipment materials. And Union and Solo Raid each give another different type of equipment material. It took me about six months to max out how many rewards I get each day from Solo Raid, nine months for the Simulation Room and to beat the normal mode of Campaign. It will probably take another few months to max out Interception rewards, over a year more to finish the hard mode of Campaign, and for some rewards of Union and Solo Raid, you're ranked against other players, so you'll never get to the top. As time goes on, more and more is added, so it will take even longer if you start playing now. That is to say, you'll feel like you're progressing towards new heights for a very long time, whether or not that is something you like.

While technically almost all of these materials are purchasable for real money, everything except gems is very expensive for how little you get. A 6 euro subscription gets you a bit more than a week's worth of gems each month, and each progression material alone is roughly five times as expensive. A new character you want comes out about every 2-3 weeks, which is enough time to earn the gems to get that character for free because the odds are extremely generous. Duplicates give a very minor boost to power and are not necessary at all. So, for dedicated players, buying gems doesn't help much, and buying other materials will require several hundreds invested each year to see a noticable difference. What I want to say is, you don't need to pay, as long as you play, because very few people are willing to pay enough to beat you by paying more. They mostly beat you by having played longer. I genuinely believe that most of their revenue (excluding the top 0.1% of spenders) comes from selling skins.
All of this isn't too important anyways, as most of the game is PvE. The PvP mode is not very popular, as it matches you with people who started at the same time, leaving you forever out of the top ranks if you ever decide to take a break from the game. The only rewards there for ranking well are gems anyways. So if you're a casual player and don't care about getting every character that comes out, you can ignore PvP, skip dailies as you see fit, and just progress at your own pace. If you're competitive and actually care about your performance, you'll get enough to perform well just by playing every day and planning well.

Oh, and a quick shoutout to the story, music, and art. The characters are lovely animated 2D sprites with insane levels of detail. It feels like they're 4k resolution, with individual stocking threads being rendered at high enough zoom levels, and like a hundred moving parts and small details or texts on the characters' clothes and bodies. I know that's the main initial draw of the game, but it's an absolute pleasure to look at.
The music is easily in the top 3 among game OSTs I've heard, with hundreds, if not over a thousand different tracks. New campaign chapters get their own album. Each boss gets their own music. Each area gets their own music. Each menu gets their own music. It's crazy.
And while the story isn't that stellar, it's consistently enjoyable, and definitely good as far as stories in videos games go. What I like the most though is that it's concise. Other gacha games should take note. Very little filler. No bloated dialogue. No annoying companion overexplaining everything you've just experienced.

This review turned out longer than I would have liked, but if any recent game deserves it, it's this. It is by far my most played game over the past year, and I see myself playing it for at least a year more. I would highly recommend it for fans of idle games who want a bit less idling, and a bit more gameplay, management, and just overall thinking. Alternatively, you can come for the voluptous waifus, I won't judge. Paying is entirely optional as the game has very generous gacha rates. And everything that is not gameplay is well done too. It can be daunting to get into live service games after they've been accumulating content for 2.5 years, but I don't think anyone's too late to join yet. I'm sure the barrier to entry will increase as time goes on, and the playerbase will decrease, as is the norm with live service games, but Nikke is one of the few games that has been slowly increasing in popularity after launch, so I remain hopeful for at least a couple more years.

A Plague Tale: Innocence

I'm not entirely sure what I expected going into A Plague Tale: Innocence. It was a very popular release, with a fairly high review score for such popularity, so despite being a stealth adventure game, I decided to give it a try.

A lot of people praise it for its great graphics and amazing story, but I could honestly see neither. Sure, for game standards, neither is bad, but from a cinematic standpoint, the animations and models were still noticebaly janky, and I was thoroughly bored with the story.
The game is about being on the run from the inquisition with your little 5-year-old brother in 14th century France. You have to evade guards and rats in usual stealth game ways - throwing things, moving through tall grass, and waiting. This is just my personal gripe with the genre, but especially the waiting I find dreadfully boring. It's not like the rest of the gameplay is any exciting either.

I don't really have much to say about this, except that the story and quality did not nearly meet the level of hype this game seemed to have. Maybe it's still worth it for fans of stealth games, but if you're someone like me who doesn't like the genre and hoped that either the stealth portion would be really good, or that the story would carry it, then that's not the case. Honestly, even for a stealth game, this seems pretty average, so I really don't have any reason to recommend it.

The Planet Crafter

I was dragged into playing The Planet Crafter, which is a very highly rated (optionally) multiplayer open world survival crafting game. It's in the top 10 in that genre on Steam, and in the top 200 overall, so I expected something good.

The game drops you on an inhospitable planet with just sand and rocks and tells you to make it into a lush place filled with life. You do this by collecting rocks, making small buildings and tools out of them, and then building machines that passively add various types of terraformation income. At certain breakpoints, the terraformation levels unlock new things you can build and craft, and also alter the world around you visually. There are also the usual hunger, thirst, and oxygen bars you have to keep an eye on.

Aside from the unique and rather interesting thematic, this seems like a pretty standard survival game. The game focuses on busywork, spending all your time delivering resources from place to place and crafting the next thing you need. As the game progresses, you slowly get methods of automation, starting from resource drills, and eventually reaching automatic crafters, and drones that move resources around. Still, for most of the game, automation is scant, and the focus always stays on manual labor.

While the dynamic environment is interesting, the building aspect seems pretty poorly implemented, with badly aligning buildings, and little variety in the amount of customization, which I believe is often something people look for in these types of game. The other elements are more-or-less standard, and I don't recall any significant innovation nor a high level of quality.

Sadly, I've never enjoyed any games in this genre, as I'm neither a fan of customizing a base nor running back and forth doing mindless collecting and ferrying of resources just to build yet another building so I could repeat the process a hundred times more. If you liked Subnautica, you'll probably like this a little bit less, but if you're looking for another game in the genre, you'll probably enjoy it anyway. Me, not so much, so I won't be giving it a recommendation myself.

FragPunk

I decided to try another fresh multiplayer game while it still had players. Against my better judgement, I picked an arena shooter, FragPunk.

I don't know if Counter-Strike was the first to do it, but it sure feels like the genre of two teams shooting each other while one tries to plant a bomb on a site has been around since then. Valorant was a successful iteration on it, adding characters with unique abilities. FragPunk has that too, but also adds a card system where teams can put points into randomly selected cards every round that either make their team stronger, or the enemy team weaker. It adds a randomness element to the game, and more variety to each round, which is something that at least I feel is sorely needed. Regardless of this, this 5v5 bomb planting thing is the most boring kind of gamemode I've seen in first-person shooters. There are also a number of other game modes, but those do not seem to be in the focus.

Now, clearly I'm not an expert in the genre, so I can't comment on the nuances of weapons, map designs, handling, or whatever. Everything felt fine, and I had no complaints whatsoever. Compared to at least some FPS games, there is a lot of info available on the weapons, and a lot of systems in general, so on paper this looks like a really good iteration in this genre. The glaring problem is of course that I hate this genre, so I can't really form an accurate opinion on it.
Feel free to interpret my thoughts as you will. There will obviously be no personal recommendation, but at least to me, it seemed more fun than Valorant or CS:GO, so maybe you might feel the same way. The better question is if it can retain a critical mass of players to stay alive.

Urtuk: The Desolation

Urtuk: The Desolation is a turn-based tactics game, where you control a party of (up to) 6 characters in a series combats on hex grids.
The strength of Urtuk lies in the depth of the combat system, and in the amount of content built around that combat system. There's about a dozen classes, probably over a hundred different traits (passive abilities), a bunch of different equipment with various modifiers, and a progression system for characters that allows them to not just gain levels and stats, but also unlock new traits by completing certain actions in combat. There are also mutators, which are equippable traits that can be harvested from enemies you beat, and can eventually be absorbed, becoming a part of the character equipping them. Characters falling in battle results in an injury that's difficult to get rid of, and further leads to the character permanently dying. (But you can find a new one.) While there's a random element, it really feels like the way you play shapes your characters' progression.
The combat itself makes excellent use of terrain elevation, obstacles, and a lot of interaction between different units. Taunting, retaliation, support attacks, pushing, evasion, and a lot more. Most movements and actions are very important, as it's difficult to get out of a tough spot once you're in one, so some planning has to go into making sure you don't spiral into losing teammates, thus making further encounters even more difficult.

I would say that Urtuk has the best turn-based tactics combat system out of all the games I can remember. But there is a problem. The combat system is the entire game. The overworld has basically nothing. You can move from place to place, various events spawn, but they're all some form of combat encounter. There's some variety, where not everything is an all-out deathmatch, but that doesn't really change the essence of the combat.
It was really interesting playing these combat encounters back to back for the first couple of hours, but I eventually felt myself feeling a lack of purpose. Yeah, I had some vague quest and storyline to follow, but I didn't really feel like I was making progress aside from just completing yet another battle. There was basically no incentive to pick and choose my battles, and each combat either boiled down to a victory from which my units escaped unscathed and stronger than before, or a debilitating defeat. Mostly the former though, as the AI was a bit lacking in how it approached the battles. After a while, I also discovered some stronger strategies, like putting two tanks in a chokepoint and using four ranged units to obliterate anything that came near. Or abusing the action economy and putting all points into the stat that gives speed and stamina, making up to 6 times as many attacks each turn as the enemies. They did have harder difficulty modes, so perhaps that's not a problem.

Regardless, I can only give this a partial recommendation. If you want to just grind out tactical battle after tactical battle, then maybe there's something here for you. Sadly, probably due to this being made by a very small team, possibly even just a single person, there isn't anything else to do. I loved the combat, but it wasn't exciting enough, or I didn't feel enough progression, or enough reason to go through yet another encounter. Whatever the reason, I become bored as I slowly settled into some strategies that worked out for me, and I never reached the excitement to play just one more battle.

Alicemare

I usually pick games at random, but I noticed I had only one game left from 2016, and that was Alicemare, so I decided to play it. It's old enough that I even wrote about finding it back in 2016. It's by the same developer (Miwashiba) who made LiEat, which was a charming little story-oriented RPGMaker game that I gave a partial recommendation for.

Alicemare is the second out of three releases by Miwashiba, and the least well received one. It still has a reasonable review score, but not that great for a story game. It's about 3 hours long, but I only got about 15% of the way through before I was greeted by an endless black screen that didn't seem to go away between saving and reloading. Now, 30 minutes isn't a lot to replay, but in those 30 minutes, it hooked me a bit less than LiEat did, while otherwise feeling quite similar. It seems the combat aspect is gone (I actually somewhat liked the combat), but the backtracking and checking every interactable object or person after each plot point progression is present and annoying as ever. I ultimately decided it was not worth another 30 minutes of starting all over, hoping it would not hardlock me again. I also decided to go ahead with writing this excuse for a review, because the alternative was to go back to a weekly instead of a twice-weekly review schedule sooner.

So I couldn't tell you much about the game or the story, except that you're a kid who lost his memories and so you're in an orphanage or something, and you end up in a place reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, where you have to go through some "Worlds" related to the other kids in the orphanage. I can't really recommend it, not because it was that bad, but because I literally couldn't play it, so make of that and my previous thoughts what you will.

Epic Battle Fantasy 5

I can't remember anymore, but I believe I have been playing the Epic Battle Fantasy series since the second game came out on Kongregate in 2009. It was an absolutely amazing game at the time among all the free Flash games, and I've been following the series since. EBF 3 and EBF 4 are still on my favorite games of all time list. I'm more than a bit late playing Epic Battle Fantasy 5 in 2025, but better late than never. It's more of the same, but better, currently sitting at the 255th spot in the highest rated games on Steam.

EBF 5 is a turn-based JRPG, though it's not made in Japan, but rather mostly by a single guy in Europe. It has very traditional mechanics, lining up your squad of 5 characters against up to 5 enemies. Only 3 of your characters can be on the field at a time, though switching between them is free, as long as the one on the field hasn't acted. You do all your actions, usually choosing one out of a dozen-or-so abilities per character, and then the enemies do all of theirs. Simple stuff. There are also 10 different elements, physical and magical attack and defense, evasion, accuracy, and over a dozen status effects. Both you and enemies can have resistances or vulnerabilities to any of these, and your equipment can heavily modify how well you can deal certain types of damage, or what you're resistant to. New to the series is a capturing mechanic, where almost every enemy can be captured after beating them low enough and debuffing them enough. All of these enemies can then be used (using a special resource) to use their specific ability instead of a character's own.

EBF has never been too innovative with its mechanics, but what it does incredibly well is quality. This is absolutely a case where it's copying other games, but people like it because it's just better than them. In most JRPGs, there is a very obvious problem of too much complexity, and not enough depth. Very many mechanics, things to learn, stuff to setup, and yet not a lot of it actually matters. Not here. At the most basic level and easier difficulties, you can just grab random characters, throw whatever equipment on them, and just kind of hit the enemy with whatever they're weak against. But turning the difficulty up to Epic, and even more so in the optional challenge areas, it really becomes important to utilize most of the features the game offers. Proper gearing against the enemies you're facing, utilizing buffs, debuffs, specific counterplay according to the enemy AI... I especially want to praise the buff and debuff system, because almost all RPGs get this horribly wrong, where buffing or debuffing is a pointless endeavor that wastes your turn, and maybe even mana, because it's always more effective to just attack instead. Again, not here. You have to choose the right ones, but buffs and debuffs have a really long duration, meaning that for those difficult and long boss fights, they will benefit you hugely.

I could talk on-and-on, because there is so much content in this game. Over 100 hours, if you want to complete all the optional stuff, and not much of that is recycled either. In fact, the amount of content is perhaps the biggest downside about this game. The amount of party members, and thus skills and equipment, has been increasing every installment since the second, and I'm feeling somewhat fatigued and overwhelmed by juggling everyone to perform optimally. This is alleviated by regular fights not requiring perfect play, and everyone getting fully replenished between each battle, but I can't ignore it nontheless. I can not memorize all the skills my characters have, nor all the equipment, especially not as they upgrade and gain new effects throughout the game, and this wastes time as I have to go through them every time I want to make a decision regarding them.

But to summarize this review before it gets too long, Epic Battle Fantasy 5 is an amazing traditional turn-based JRPG. While not very innovative, it manages to beat out similar games by being better in just about every regard, and having several times more content to boot. Different difficulty levels and optional gameplay modifiers allow everyone from casual gamers to people who prefer to approach battles as strategy puzzles to solve to enjoy it. I heavily recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed any turn-based JRPG. This will be earning a spot on my favorite games list, replacing the 3rd and 4th installements, because there's enough content and more that I could replay this multiple times before I wanted to go back.

Brutal Orchestra

Most games copy existing games, shuffle ideas together, or make very small incremental adjustments to established formulas. Games that try to step a bit far into unexplored mechanics territory often don't get it right the first time and suffer because of that. However, I feel Brutal Orchestra does just that, and, judging from the amazing reviews and being in the top 1000 Steam games of all time at the time of writing, succeeds at it.

The rules and mechanics of the game aren't complicated. The game is a turn-based roguelike where you repeatedly choose between one of three paths, leading to various encounters (treasure, a new party member, etc.) or a battle. In battle, you control a party of up to 5 characters, each character has 3 abilities, maybe a passive, and an equippable item. Each of your characters can move and attack, and then the enemy does the same. But it gets deceptively complicated.
See, the board has 5 lanes, so at a full board, each character is facing an opponent. Character health carries over between battles. You can see what your enemies are going to do, and in what order. Most abilities hit only 1-2 tiles, so you could for example go into battle with fewer characters, allowing you to play more evasively. Enemies can also change their positions or trigger passives when attacking or being attacked, and so could you, which is also an axis that has to be kept in mind. Further, all abilities cost pigments of various colors, which is a very central game mechanic. You generate pigments by attacking enemies with the corresponding health bars, or getting hit yourself. If you don't have enough pigments you can't use an ability, but if you have the wrong color pigments, you will hurt yourself when using an ability. If you have too many pigments by the end of the turn, they get deleted, but hurt all your party members.

This isn't actually a lot of information, but there is nothing that is irrelevant in combat. Every single detail and decision matters, and as the game gets harder, you will find that you can't rush things, but have to contemplate each turn if you want to win. And this, in my opinion, is where there might be a divide in player opinion, because it certainly is where my opinion did not match up with the glowing review score. I can appreciate the work that went into making sure that everything the player does has a purpose. But I can not enjoy the agonizingly slow pace of combat. This plays like a puzzle game, where each battle is a puzzle to be solved. Choose the right party members to deal with the enemy composition. Consider the squares they threaten. Make sure you're in position to attack them, but also that you can move out of the way before their attack hits you. Alternatively, perhaps there's some way to heal or block the damage. Choose abilities based on what pigments you can use, and what you need to use to not overflow. Perhaps taking a hit on purpose just to generate pigments that an enemy does not have? And so. much. more. A single turn can take minutes, and a single battle can take over an hour, if you want to be thorough. If you enjoy that kind of gameplay, then this game is probably going to be amazing for you. If not, you will quickly succumb to the frustration that it's taking too long to do anything.

To mention a few other things, there's a good amount of content in the game. Completing just the main "easy" mode will probably take several hours, as you can rush it a bit more if you want, but if you want to see all the characters, items, enemies, then there's definitely a few dozen hours to be put in here. The art is a bit unsettling, but otherwise pretty good, and while I didn't care to read much of it myself, there's supposedly also some lore to be discovered. There is a surprising lack of keyboard support, which might have slightly increased the game's tempo, but it's not really a problem as you spend more time thinking than acting anyways.

In short, Brutal Orchestra is very highly rated turn-based roguelike, where simple mechanics combine to form complicated battles that can be solved like puzzles. I can not personally enjoy games where I can clearly see I could perform better, yet where doing so would take so much of my time as to bore me. Here, I found performing optimally to take far, far too much time. Still, I have to acknowledge the good game design that went into making every action meaningful, as well as the fact that most players do like it. In light of that, this get a partial recommendation from me.

Devil Slayer - Raksasi

I somewhat enjoyed Devil Slayer - Raksasi. It's a top-down action roguelike, which borrows a lot of mechanics from other popular games.
You have to traverse through six floors, each being a series of connected rooms, and ending with a bossfight, much like Binding of Isaac. Each floor also contains a store where you can buy items that give passive bonuses, a different store for upgrading or replacing your weapon, and a treasure room, each requiring a key to access. Keys are also used for various lesser chests found throughout the map.
The floor progression is much like in Dead Cells, allowing you to choose which floor you want to tackle, with each floor having a different enemy type and a different boss. Also from Dead Cells is the item unlock mechanic where you first have to find the blueprint for the item, and then you can work towards unlocking it with souls you gather on each floor. Those souls can alternatively be used to permanently upgrade your character.
And speaking of souls and characters, you quickly unlock all six characters who aren't all that different, but have different passive skills and stats, and also start with and are proficient in a different weapon type. Each weapon type, and even weapons within a type, have a different moveset, with various jabs, swings, guard breaks, blocks, and parries. You also have the very common invincibility dodge that costs stamina, and each character has a skill that costs mana.

A long list of things you can do, and indeed, the game has a reasonable amount of content. While all these mechanics fit together well and are generally not badly implemented, they also aren't very novel. If you've played the games it takes inspiration from, I can't really say you'll get any kind of new experiences here. At the same time, many mechanics are not implemented to a particularly high level of quality either. As examples... I found the skill system very disappointing - mana isn't super common, so you would assume your skill is your ace in the hole, but they're all pretty underwhelming. The sword and shield weapon has a block, but most enemy attacks go through the block, dealing damage and staggering you. If you parry an attack, the enemy gets knocked back, and some weapons don't have enough range to actually retaliate after a successful parry. So it's almost always better to just pick a weapon that just attacks and use the dodge that every character has.
Some of the enemy design is also questionable. Some can perfectly track your movement and execute a long-range attack. Or some enemies who get an "elite" modifier, and thus can't be stunned, which makes them significantly tougher because their base moveset kind of expects you to stun them, else you take damage. Encountering these unbalanced enemies often leads to losing one or multiple of your 6 lives, while many rooms are easy enough that you can just blast through them without much care.

Overall, I'm not quite sure what the biggest problem with the game is, and why I decided to not entirely finish it. I would guess it's just a combination of everything. Many small problems, balance, polish, subpar translation, slightly lacking animations. Like, none of it is bad, but I also can't point to anything that this game really does well, or that makes it stand out. If you want a top-down Binding of Isaac with Souls-like combat and Dead Cells metaprogression, then I think it's fine to give this game a try. I just don't think it's quite good enough to really recommend it.

Roguebook

I was surprised to find Roguebook in my backlog, given its relatively bad reviews, and that it looked like just another roguelike deckbuilder. Sure, there's an overworld exploration part where you can reveal the map using various types of inks you collect from battles and around the map, which in turn reveals more combat encounters and loot to power up before attempting the floor boss, but ultimately I didn't feel this system provided more depth to the game than just random encounters on a linear path.

The rest of the game is as standard as it seems. You can choose 2 heroes to play with, each of whom has their own pool of cards they are able to collect and use, and you can control their positions in battle via some cards, mostly defense cards, which allow you to strategically block enemy attacks and power up your own. There are also summonable allies, regular attacks, and other, not very remarkable features. Notably lacking is the card upgrade feature, which is more versatile by using gems with different effects that you can socket freely, allowing for very strong combinations, but they are a rather scarce commodity, so most cards will never be upgraded. Also, there is no way to remove cards from your deck, causing your decks to simply grow ever larger. Perhaps this was simply due to my playstyle choices, but I very often found myself having excess energy that I had no way to use, causing me to just play all my cards every single turn. There was still some strategy in the order I played them in, but there was usually a clearly optimal choice.

Overall, even though I haven't played a lot of what are considered the best in the genre, I could tell Roguebook was a very mediocre roguelike deckbuilder. Map exploration and combat were boring, and the game was very lacking in the strategic department. With how many options in the genre there are, I see no reason to recommend it.

Art of Rally

I suppose I completely misunderstood Art of Rally. I contemplated if I should even write a review of it, since I didn't adequately experience it. But, why not?

Art of Rally isn't as much of a racing game as it seems to be a simulator. You can drive around scenic landscapes, various terrains, and control most of the aspects of your car that you would in real life, such as using a clutch and manual transmission. I'm sure this is all real useful and necessary if you want to pull off that authentic drifting, but... I don't know how to drive in the first place. I was really lost trying to drive the cars, failing miserably. It very quickly occurred to me that I was having no fun whatsoever.

I'm sure I'm just really far from the target audience for this game, so I can't be too harsh on it. Even among racing games, I like ones with a bit less realism, and a bit more fun, and as far as I can tell, this gets quite realistic. So, I don't really have much right to speak about a game I don't understand, but I also can't really recommend it, since I found no fun in driving along rather plain roads with unwieldy cars that kept flying off the track.

Gato Roboto

I'm surprised about the nearly overwhelmingly positive rating of Gato Roboto. It's a cute black and white metroidvania about a cat exploring a weird research facility in a robot suit. You essentially have two forms. As a cat, you can climb walls and swim, as well as fit through smaller passages, but as a robot, you can blast through some loose terrain, open doors, and beat enemies, as well as take a few hits from them. Exiting your robot leaves it standing there, forcing you to either come back for it, or to find a save point, usually. Aside from regular enemies, there are also a few boss fights and some rooms with permanent power-ups.

There's nothing wrong with Gato Roboto, but it's just about the most basic metroidvania you could think of. Map exploration is straightforward, enemies are on the easy side, there are no fancy mechanics, just jumping and shooting. I suppose the only non-standard ability is the possibility to have two forms. On top of that, the game's short, only about 4 hours, split into 4 (or 5) areas, with each area taking about 40-60 minutes.

Ultimately, I felt more-or-less sated while playing it, but once I put it down, I didn't feel like I had had fun. Again, there's nothing wrong with the game, and so it never displeased me, but it's just rather unambitious. I suppose if you just want a metroidvania to kill an evening's worth of time, this is a fine pick, but it's a bit too plain for my tastes and so I can't personally recommend it.

Chronicon

I'm back from my break after getting stuck playing some particularly long games, such as Path of Exile 2. While this post is not about that, it is about Chronicon, which is coincidentally quite similar. Evidently it takes a lot of inspiration from Diablo 2, which I never played, so I can't confirm, but I can say it's quite similar in terms of the gameplay loop to Path of Exile, which I've played a lot.
You start the game by choosing one of 5 classes, each of which has 4 subclasses in the form of talent trees that you can spec into that dictate your active abilities and playstyle. A lot of your power, however, comes from equipment, which the enemies drop in droves. Most equipment is useless, but you're always on the lookout for those rare drops that really boost whatever aspect of your build you're trying to maximize. This does create a problem that seems to be present in most similar games - a lot of time is spent looking through drops, even if you filter out lower rarity ones, and that can become tedious. As for the gameplay itself, you just go through different dungeons, blast through hordes of enemies, rinse and repeat.

The game is fine. There are no glaring issues, and it's reasonably fun to play, but I think that's only the case because the game design is great. Sadly, the game design is also completely copied from existing games, and those existing games have a much higher budget and thus surpass it in every other aspect. And that matters, because graphics are not just eye candy, but also offer clarity on what's happening. Same for audio cues. And while there's plenty of hours to grind here, the amount of varied content is not as high as in other games. It's a fine game, but it makes the fatal mistake of trying to compete with big-budget games, and doesn't offer something unique. Because of this, I unfortunately can't recommend Chronicon. Go play Path of Exile, or one of the other top-down ARPGs instead. They should offer more than enough hours of playtime, at a significantly higher quality.

Crown Trick

Crown Trick is a somewhat interesting take on the turn-based roguelike. I saw a lot of potential in their unique mechanic, where both your basic attack weapon and your 4 skills, which cost mana, have an attack pattern. This pattern defines the tiles in relation to your own where the attack hits. The same is true for enemies, but their attacks are telegraphed by turn timers on the tiles where their attacks will hit. There's also an element system, with half a dozen different elements that apply different debuffs and interact with each other to create new effects. On top of that, enemies have armor that can be broken to stun them, make them vulnerable, and build a stacking combo.
You can find multiple permanent passive upgrades each floor, as well as new, potentially stronger, weapons. There's also a blink ability with limited charges, that lets you reposition yourself in a large area without taking a turn. Both the blink and the mana for casting your 4 skills (which can also be swapped out during the run) refill every time you enter a new room.

That's a long list of not-so-common things you can do in the game, and just from the list, it looks plenty interesting. The problem is that the developers stacked game mechanics without making their game really take advantage of them. Most weapons fall into one of three attack patterns, making the main difference between them be stats, or their passive ability, which tends to be uninteresting. I saw no weapons or abilities with interesting attack patterns, e.g. checkerboards or skipping tiles, only straight lines and rectangles. Enemy attacks tend to be on a 1-turn timer, which means its either trivial to sidestep them, or straight up impossible to dodge unless you use a blink charge. It would have been far more interesting to see multi-turn attacks that force movement in some direction, playing into other enemies or environmental hazards. And the armor break combo system is largely uninteresting for normal enemies as they're too easy, and pointless for bosses, as it's usually not possible to break their armor fast enough.

There's also some minor problems with the game being poorly translated, and some gameplay elements being a bit unclear, but they weren't significant compared to the problems listed above. Overall, I found the game got boring quite fast as there was not much new content in terms of neither game mechanics nor interesting variations on builds from run to run. It's a shame, because I really saw potential in the combination of mechanics, but they were heavily underutilized. So, I can't recommend Crown Trick. If you're looking for something slightly similar, Dungeons of Dredmor still holds up.

Carrion

A very highly rated puzzle metroidvania today - Carrion. I think the high ratings (rank 545 on Steam, as of writing), as well as being published by Devolver Digital, who generally publishes games that are at least decent, are what made me try it. I was left quite disappointed though.

Carrion is a game where you play a mass of flesh and tentacles that crawls around vents and shafts, eating people to increase your size, and finding a few new abilities along the way. The game takes place in a series of rooms that form an interconnected map, and the exploration aspect is a bit like a metroidvania. However, it's not a platformer, and you're basically allowed freeform movement as long as a wall isn't blocking your way. While enemies do shoot at you, they're not really a big threat, and the "puzzles" you have to solve to gain access to new areas aren't particularly difficult. As such, running through the game is quite straightforward and rather fast, at about 4-6 hours for the whole thing.

I'm somewhat surprised by the positive ratings, as I found the game to have a whole lot more style than substance. The game is both easy and simple, with >90% of stuff being handled by your mouse, so it's neither fun by being challenging, nor fun by being mechanically engaging. I just felt myself going through room after room, and very quickly growing bored of it. So, really, I don't see a reason to recommend it.

Timelie

I think I was drawn to Timelie by the overwhelmingly positive reviews as well as the promise of time manipulation, which can be quite a fun mechanic if done well. "With such positive reviews, it probably is," I thought.
I was wrong.

Timelie is essentially a turn-based puzzle game. You have a bunch of levels you have to run through while avoiding enemies who you can't fight against. They're faster than you, but you can both see their cone of vision, as well as the future, so you can plot a path through the levels that avoids them. There's some other mechanics involved with opening and closing doors, repairing broken floors, and also controlling another character at the same time, but none of that really changes the essence of the game.

The problem is, it's boring. The puzzles are simple, somewhat slow to complete as you have to observe the movement of the enemies before doing anything, and the time manipulation aspect doesn't really do anything. If you think about it, it's essentially just the common ability to create checkpoints (saves) in a level and load to them at will. It seems there's only one type of enemy, the levels are quite small, and the game only takes a few hours.

Overall, not much to say. I don't understand the review score. Timelie is a very basic and rather easy puzzle game with neither a high production value nor a lot of content. I found it boring, and I wouldn't recommend it.

Jet Lancer

Jet Lancer is a 2D dogfighter. You pilot a hypermobile fighter jet that retains inertia after turning, allowing for flashy maneuvers such as facing and firing in a different direction than you are flying. The game is stage-based, and depending on the stage, you mostly fight similar enemy jets and ground-based threats, but sometimes also larger bosses with unique designs. You have a basic attack and two special attacks which you can swap between 5 variants, and then 18 modules that you mix and match for other passive bonuses. Each stage also gives you a score and grade based on your speed, combo counter, etc.

The gameplay isn't bad, but I immediately recognized the 2014 game Luftrausers in this. The gameplay and a lot of the general visuals are almost a one-to-one copy. Sadly for Jet Lancer, aside from the boss fights, which I didn't enjoy more than the regular levels, and the level-based gameplay in general, which I definitely didn't enjoy more than the continuous, rogue-like gameplay of Luftrausers, there isn't a lot different here. It's been a while, but I remember enjoying the handling of the plane better in Luftrausers, and the different weapon and engine combinations were definitely more imaginative and fun there. I think the only thing going for Jet Lancer is that it has somewhat more content, but that doesn't really matter to me when that content is inferior.

Overall, I feel Jet Lancer is too much of a copy without even being a better copy of what it was inspired by. I see little reason to play it over Luftrausers, unless you just want a different game for more content that is kind of similar. Personally, the gameplay is a bit too basic in either case for me to really recommend either, but at least I enjoyed Luftrausers enough to complete it. It was a fun enough arcade-like experience. So if you feel you want to try something like that, first play Luftrausers, and if you finish that and want more, feel free to give Jet Lancer a try.

Octopath Traveler

Octopath Traveler looked like a fun enough JRPG with charming pixel art visuals and a decent amount of relatively good reviews on Steam.
It plays like a pretty traditional JRPG, with standard turn-based combat - your team of 4 going against the enemy team, each character taking their action in turn. Unfortunately, the combat is too standard, too basic. There are only two things separating it from being the most basic "I hit you, then you hit me" style combat, and those are that enemies have hidden weaknesses to certain damage types, forcing you to first find those weaknesses by trying different attacks, and then having characters with those types of attacks break the enemies while others pummel them with their best attacks. See, hitting an enemy some amount of times with something they're weak against makes them skip 1-2 turns and take significantly more damage from all sources for the duration. This is the main point of combat. The other unique, but not as interesting, aspect is a boost system, where every turn you don't use a boosted attack, you get 1 point, and can use up to 3 to empower an attack. As the game gives you 8 characters, you can also swap some out depending on the enemies you face, to have access to more suitable skills, but you'll understand in a moment why that's not relevant.

Now, the combat, while basic, isn't that bad. It's fun enough. The problem is that you can't pick your fights. As you run around on the map, you will run into an encounter every few seconds. It's a ridiculous amount of fights, and you earn enough experience from them that it becomes nearly irrelevant what you do. You'll win anyways, the question is only if you'll waste an extra few turns or not.
I would love to tell you more about the rest of the game, but in the 11 hours that I played, I'm not sure if even 2 hours were spent on the story, which is supposed to be the strong suit of this game. The story seemed fine, but it barely had time to pick up, as you're expected to do the stories of all 8 characters at the same time, so I can't really judge the game on this, when all I'm doing in practice is just one pointless fight after another. The bossfights took more skill and thinking, but you only got one every few hours.

So, after a final three hour session, I was finally fed up with the boring loop of going through a pointless combat enocounter, only to get the chance to explore the map for 8 more seconds. The combat just isn't fun enough to make for a standalone game, but that's what it's trying to do. The story might be good enough to warrant going through it, but unless you're willing to spend at least 6 hours of grinding meaningless fights for every 1 hour of story content (and I'm probably being very generous with the ratio here), you won't have the chance to do so. The art, music, and especially the voice acting, even though only the most important parts were fully voiced, are great, but that's not enough to get a recommendation from me.

PS. If you still want to give it a try, then here are the answers to some questions I had:
Does it matter who I start with? Not really, you can and are expected to play through everyone's story.
Can I choose to not play through everyone's story? Kind of. The stories don't interact with each other, but you can't reach the true end without beating them all. Also the balancing will be off, but it's already off even if you play the intended way, so whatever. I also looked up 8 well-written opinion pieces on which stories were the best, and concluded that Olberic's story is by far the most beloved, followed by Primrose, Alfyn, Therion, H'aanit, Cyrus, Tressa, and Ophilia, in that order.

Satisfactory

Factorio's one of my favorite games, so naturally I was waiting for the release of Satisfactory, and jumped straight to playing it as it released. Nearly two months and a hundred hours later, I have finally finished it. It currently sits as the 44th highest rated game on Steam, and I can vouch for it being pretty damn good.

But what is Satisfactory, you ask? It's one of the many automation games that appeared after Factorio's relative success. In fact, it's the only one that actually managed to beat it in popularity so far. It works much the same - set up harvesters for resources, pipes and belts to transport them to crafting machines to make more complicated products, which you then further send to be crafted into even more complicated products, and so on. These products can be used to build more machines to produce even more things even faster, or serve to fill the game's goal to supply the AI with products it asks of you.
It's a fun loop, where you start with a small factory, just producing a few things at a slow rate, and before you know it, you've expanded to thousands of machines across the whole map, with thousands more transport belts zigzagging everywhere, and you barely remembering where everything is and how it all works.

The big improvement, and what probably makes Satisfactory this popular, is that it's 3D and in first person. I think a lot of people find this more approachable, and the game itself also shares many similarities with the survival game genre that has been popular. Compared to Factorio, there is less emphasis on scale and practicality, and more on exploration and aesthetics. Exploring the map gets you alternate recipies by which to make items, and there's enough non-functional building blocks and coloring tools in the game to make all your factories look like works of art, instead of the messes that I love to make.
Unfortunately for it, I will judge it by its gameplay. Aside from the alternate recipes, it doesn't really innovate on the automation genre whatsoever. The 3rd dimension sadly does not provide additional depth to the game, and in fact only reduces the amount of fun you have, because you no longer have to figure out logistics. The first person view makes it very difficult to get an overview of your factory, as placing even a single machine generally covers your entire view. There are no circuit networks or advanced logic options anywhere, which makes certain things, such as proper belt balancing or trains that carry more than one resource, impractical. Worst of all, there are no blueprints (they do exist, but can not be created from existing parts of your factory, and are tiny enough to be practically useless), which means you will have to build everything from scratch every single time.

Overall, while I did have a lot of fun playing it, as a change of pace from the thousand-plus hours I've put into Factorio, unless you care more about base building than automation, I see zero reason to recommend this over Factorio. There's less content, less quality of life, less depth, and basically no reason to go for another run or continue playing after the end of the game, as the map's always the same, and there's nothing to produce after you've completed the game. I suppose it would be a bit hypocritical of me to say I don't recommend this game, since I did have fun for it for almost 100 hours, and everyone else also really loves the game, but I don't think that would have been the case, were I not a fanatical fan of the genre. So, I don't know. I guess I'd recommend it. But try Factorio first, if you haven't.

Mandagon

Mandagon is a short and free game that has been hanging around in my library for nearly a decade now. I was drawn to it due to its thousands of "overwhelmingly" positive reviews. It's a very straightforward platformer where you collect a few items from around the map and deposit them into other places around the map. Aside from moving and jumping, there are some elevators and other objects that assist with movement around the map. The whole thing takes about an hour to complete.

I'll be brief (partly because there isn't much content in the game to begin with), I don't get it. The game looks and sounds nice, but the platforming is just about the most basic it can be to still be called a platformer. There's some cryptic story hidden around the map about death, I think, but it's not very clear.
This was boring to play, boring to read, and even though it was just an hour, I would rather have not spent that time here. I don't understand the review score, and I can't recommend it.