Touhou Kikamu ~ Elegant Impermanence of Sakura

In an actual coincidence, I played another Touhou fangame - Touhou Kikamu. This one is a traditional bullet hell, and very much like the mainline Touhou games. In fact, it's so much like the mainline Touhou games, that I could mostly copy-paste my review from there. But fine, I'll repeat myself.

Touhou Kikamu is a bog standard bullet hell game, without even the one unique mechanic regular Touhou games have, to my knowledge. You shoot bullets, you avoid getting hit by bullets, but if you do get hit, you can use a bomb to save your life and clear the screen. Shoot basic enemies for a little while, then complete a boss fight, then do it again in the next stage. There was actually some unique system dubbed "dyeing", which I'm glad they spelled correctly considering the rest of the translation was bad enough that I could not figure out how this system worked. Genuinely, I can't explain it to you because I never found out.

But yeah, everything else was just really standard, and I have the same issues of auto-fire not being on, even though there's no downside to firing. No correct color-coding of your bullets vs enemy bullets or pickups. No mouse control. No enemy indicators at the bottom of the screen. The entire game was very short too, but of course you're expected to play it over and over again, chasing a higher score and completing on higher difficulties.

In conclusion, I can't recommend it. It did nothing well, and it did many things below my expectations. I don't really see much reason to play this over many other bullet hell games, and perhaps this has been my wake-up call to judge Touhou games harsher, despite their positive reviews.

Tempest of the Heavens and Earth

Played another Touhou fangame today. A sidescrolling action one this time. Rather unpopular, but reasonably highly rated, it's Tempest of the Heavens and Earth. I initially thought this was a 2018 game, as the Steam store would suggest, which would already make it somewhat old, but no, it actually came out in 2013. That fact is a bit more apparent when you realize upon launching the game that the resolution is upscaled from 480p or something like that and looks blurry as all hell.

Let's be a bit more specific about what kind of game this is. The gameplay is divided into stages, which themselves are divided into areas with a bunch of weaker enemies and some platforming, and end in a grandiose bossfight. You control a character with a double jump, an invulnerability dash, a melee attack, and a couple of meters to fuel your other attacks. There is an automatically refilling meter that fuels your sword attacks and dashes, and then a meter that fills as you hit any attacks which don't use that meter. The latter meter can be used to either fire ranged attacks, or perform ultra-powerful special attacks. You also have 3 different attack sets which swap out your ranged and special attacks. You can choose those attacks from a selection of over a dozen of both, and there are also combo attacks which can be done using certain combinations of movement and attack keys. Overall, the game puts a lot of emphasis on combat expression and incentivizes to actually switch your playstyle every so often.
Also, apparently important is a technique where if you sword attack an enemy whose attack you dodged through, you change the weather and thus gain extra powers. I specifically mention this, because if you think you want to go play it after reading this, know that the game explains itself really, really badly, and you may not ever figure this out yourself, but you do need to know this to progress.

On that note, the game is rather obtuse in general. I find the controls to be awkward, and I often fumbled my actions, pressing the wrong buttons. This is especially annoying if it causes you to fall off the map, instantly killing you. There is no indication which attacks are in your currently selected attack set - you just have to memorize what attacks you put under "woe", "ire", and whatever the third set's name was. Also, you have health, but no health bar. I think it automatically regenerates, but I have no way to confirm this.
This is all a shame, because I find the combat of the game to be excellent in theory. I absolutely love how expressive you can be with your attacks, and how you can totally play in different styles. The combat's fast, responsive, flashy, and when I wasn't messing up my buttons, it felt exhilarating. It's also a more score-oriented game, incentivizing replaying it while not being a particularly long game, but I can't say it has much replayability, unless you yourself decide to switch up your playstyle.

Overall, considering the many shortcomings I listed, I couldn't bring myself to complete it. I think I got a bit less than halfway through, but the little frustrations piled up and overpowered my enjoyment of the combat. If you think can overlook the issues I listed and would like a high-action score attack game, then Tempest of the Heavens and Earth might suit you. Personally though, I can't recommend it. Maybe it was better 10 years ago when it first came out.

Manifold Garden

I had higher hopes for Manifold Garden. The trailer video for it was beautiful, and even playing it, the surreal geometry stretching to infinity was stunning. Still, I value games for their gameplay. Perhaps their story, to some extent, but the visuals are not all that important in the end. Manifold Garden is a puzzle game first and foremost, and I think it isn't quite that great at it.

The main themes of the game are gravity shifting (choosing which of the 6 sides is "down"), and circular dimensions (if you go far enough in a direction, you are back where you started, generally achieved by falling and landing on the roof or crossing a small gap), with a pinch of other non-Euclidean geometry. Using this gravity manipulation, you must cleverly place cubes, which retain their gravity direction in spite of you, and solve various puzzles with them. There's also some other elements, moreso towards the later half of the game, but the essence remains the same.

While not trivial, I didn't feel the puzzles were all that difficult, nor were they particularly exciting. After experiencing each mechanic once, and saying "cool" out loud, that was kind of it. I feel like I generally spent more time solving the puzzles than thinking about their solutions, which isn't a good outlook for a puzzle game. The infinite spaces were cool to look at, but then a lot of the game was also set indoors. I'd say that defeated the point, but there wasn't much point to the infinity anyways aside from visuals, and occasionally acting like a portal from the floor to the ceiling / wall.

Overall, a fancy looking puzzle game, which is only a few hours long, and even at that short length feels a bit padded out. I could maybe recommend it as a polished introductory puzzle game, but it just didn't feel fun, interesting, or challenging to play. So I can't recommend it on a personal level.

Immortal Planet

Another one of the oldest games I still have on my list. Added back in 2017, it's Immortal Planet.
I'm surprised by its relatively positive reception, because I couldn't stick with it for long.

Immortal Planet advertises itself as a Souls-like, and I can believe that. You run, you dash (dodge roll), attack, block (or parry), and a lot of focus in combat is on stamina, which every action takes. I don't think this combat style is bad or overdone, but Immortal Planet just implements it really badly. Perhaps part of it is that it suggests I play with a gamepad, which I didn't, but some basic movement is just plain out broken, like dash following your cursor unless you're sprinting without changing direction? It's a very core part of the game, so it being broken might just be a case of a low quality standard. Another example of this is that despite it being an action game with tight dodging and blocking mechanics, the animations just... don't exist. Enemy goes from "standby" frame to "readied attack" frame, to "you're already hit" frame. It's not possible to dodge or block by reaction, not because the attacks are too fast, but because there's no indication when they're coming. (The "readied attack" frame is too long to go off of that alone.) Not only does this make the gameplay unnecessarily difficult, but it also looks really bad. On that note, it also sounds bad, mostly in terms of the music.

A short review for a game I only played for a short while, but I hope you can understand why. Right from the beginning of the game, I found bugs relating to the core combat, which, even if it was functioning properly, felt really bad. I just found no joy in playing, and there's plenty of Souls-like games out there, so I didn't feel like sticking around to give it a longer chance, and I couldn't recommend it to you either.

Stationflow

Not a very popular game this time around, but something from a genre I thought I might personally enjoy. Stationflow has you building a metro station network, with many entrances, many train lines, a whole bunch of people, and a whole bunch of needs that those people want satisfied, which aren't limited to getting to their station or exit.

After doing the brief tutorial, I thought the game looked rather simple, so I set the difficulty settings to "very hard". Despite that, it never really got difficult. While there is some thinking involved in terms of efficient planning, it is mostly just a simple case of building paths that connect all points of interest and then adding items and rooms at various intervals to satisfy the miscellanious needs your passangers may have. Most of the difficulty comes from people not just needing these items to exist, but needing to find them. For that, you have to manually put up signs literally everywhere that point to every possible thing a passanger could desire. I do not exaggarate when I say this game is more settings up signs than everything else combined. And honestly, while not completely braindead and predetermined, there isn't a lot of thought to put into how you should label these signs. 95% of the time, just make sure every sign lists everything in that direction if it's closer than the same thing in some other direction that is visible from that point.

I think that mostly explains why I didn't find the game very fun. While it's cool to see the station expand and all the people mill about in an efficient manner, I rarely feel like I designed (or could design) the station particularly well. Just have to make sure I didn't forget anything from a sign, and that I have enough of everything that the passangers want. Not enough of something? Add another. Someone got lost? Must have forgot something from a sign. It's a simple back-and-forth where if a passanger is angry at something, you don't have to think, but just satisfy what they were angry about.
Another thing is that, the game quickly got to hundreds of passangers being in the station at once. That was nice to look at but I wondered, "Huh, how have they handled large crowds?" It's usually in the early thousands that games start to have trouble without advanced programming techniques. Well, turns out they haven't. As you reach 1000-2000 people, you'll "lose", not because you played badly, but because the game stops running at a reasonable speed.

So, in addition to not being a difficult or complicated game, you can't even enjoy Stationflow if you just want to look at crowds going through the station you've designed. At least not for long. I wouldn't recommend this game anyways, but anything that breaks down just as it starts to get to the best parts is clearly something I can't advocate for. There's a lot of building and management games out there, so I'm sure you can find something better, even if you want a peaceful game that doesn't have combat.

Melty Blood: Type Lumina

Melty Blood had a free weekend on Steam a while ago, during which I thought I'd give it a try. I'm not generally a fan of traditional fighting games, but it won't hurt to try one every once in a while. Truthfully, I am well aware of the fact that fighting game enthusiasts, like is the case for many PvP games, spend a lot of time perfecting their craft. Unlike for the many games that I play that can be completed, I am quite certain I can not give an adequate overview of the nuances of Melty Blood, how it differs from other fighting games, or how well it's made in comparison. Though I did play it for almost 8 hours straight, which is longer than like 90% of the games I write about, that is not enough. So, this will be more of a brief overview, and my thoughts on fighting games in general, instead of a useful review of Melty Blood.

I can at least mention that Melty Blood: Type Lumina is a newer iteration of the original Melty Blood fighting game, and they feature characters from the Tsukihime visual novel (and some from the Fate series). As far as I can tell, the source material is of no detriment to the quality of the game. The gameplay feels pretty solid, the art is great, and it wasn't too hard to pick up even for a mechanically-challenged player like me.
Being bad at fighting games is the same reason I'm not a fan of them, and it's not technically unique to fighting games. It's not that I can't play action games at all, but I'm slow at anything that's not a binary reaction, and I can not for the life of me input button combinations in the heat of battle. Not for a lack of practice, mind you. I have played probably hundreds of hours of action games total that require these skills to some degree, and it's consistently something I fail at. I've just accepted it at this point. Of course, this is what traditional fighting games are all about. Split-second reactions, instantly choosing the correct counter-move to some action the opponent did, and often inputting a pre-learned sequence of keypresses at very precise timings to perform some move or combo. I can handle something like Brawlhalla, which is a Smash-like, but all of these things I call traditional fighting games, where the characters are 2D sprites that take up most of the screen, have correct body proportions, and can only double jump or do a single air dash, have featured some input system that requires either pressing multiple buttons at a time, or doing a motion with the joystick, which of course corresponds to a tight chain of button presses. Honestly, Melty Blood is actually light on these features, but still features the quarter-circle and whatever a 623 or 421 is called, and I can't do those.
This massive arsenal of moves, and expectance to know frame timings and stay up to date on which combos can be done in which situations is just too much for me, especially given that even if I learn them, I still can't execute them in a real fight. And nothing frustrates me more than knowing what I am supposed to do, but failing to do it. I can execute the keypresses in my head, but not with my hands.

I'm rambling, and there's no good conclusion to this. I can't in good faith blame fighting games for my own incompetence. I had previously held a belief that the button combinations are needlessly complicated, and that may still be the case, especially in other fighting games with half-circles and whatnot that's more than 4 keys. However, I tried playing for a while, having created macro keys for both quarter circles and the other combiation I mentioned, and I still failed to do them in battle. Of course, reducing the input complexity would also reduce the depth of the game, and I can see what that is undesired.
Regardless of all that, I think fighting games should still strive to be more accessible and easier to play, perhaps shifting complexity to other areas of gameplay. Backing this up is that even the most popular fighting games are quite niche in comparison to most other PvP games. Even most of the worst players still playing are significantly good at the game, and so going to a matchmade game will guarantee getting your ass kicked for hours on end until you either improve or quit the game. I'm afraid most people quit, myself included, and can you fault them? Few other game genres test the mental resolve of new players like this.

So, yeah, I don't know. Melty Blood was kind of fun. Wouldn't play it again though. Art is very cool. The girls are cute. Neco-Arc is life. I will instantly quit the next game that asks me to input a quarter circle.

GoNNER

What a throwback. Gonner was one of the first games I wrote about on this blog, back when I was still writing about not just every game I played, but every game I found (that I thought had potential) on Steam. Well, due to Steam's more-than-liberal policy of what to allow on itself, that didn't last long. But at least I have a look-back at what I thought about Gonner all the way back then.

"A procedurally generated platformer. It's got plenty of action, and from the looks of it, it's quite hectic. So, looks interesting, hopefully not too repetitive."
That's all I wrote, and I wasn't wrong. Gonner isn't a particularly complicated game. Run, jump, shoot, maybe get a new gun sometime. Levels are short, and you're rewarded for going through them quickly, racking up a kill combo. But, damn, it's kind of unfun to play, even if I liked speedrun-like action games.

Despite different guns, what's the deal with only being able to shoot forwards. Most enemies fly or scale walls, so combining waiting for them to get down, so they don't hit you on the head and make you lose (hitting them on the head damages them, not you, at least), with the fast pace of the game kind of isn't fun. Also you have multiple lives, but you lose "pieces" of yourself if you get hit once, not just a life, and have to pick them back up to continue shooting. Finally, everything else aside, it is quite repetitive. You're just chasing higher-and-higher scores and some arbitrary end level, but the road there is mostly the same.
Oh, and the artstyle is a bit too wobbly for something that should be a high-speed precision-based game. It really doesn't define the hitboxes very well.

Overall, old game, some people said it was better before some large update they made, but I doubt I would have enjoyed it either way. The levels are too short, your actions are too limited (please let me aim if you're giving me a ranged weapon), and it's kind of just the same thing over and over again. Wouldn't recommend.

Subnautica

I initially passed over Subnautica, ignoring it, as I had never been a fan on the "open world survival craft" genre. Some of my friends commented on how this was one of their favorite games ever, so considering that, and its ever increasing popularity, as well as it being regarded as possibly the best game in the genre, I finally caved and gave it a try.

Subnautica is a game where you survive a spaceship crashing into a large, watery world. Having only your escape pod with its built-in item fabricator, you must scavenge the ocean for resources and craft ever better equipment, tools, and eventually even build new bases and submarines. There is a lot of very hostile stuff in the ocean though, especially the further you go. Add to that hunger, thirst, and most importantly, limited oxygen reserves, and there's plenty to impede your progress.

While I haven't played a whole lot of survival games, Subnautica didn't strike me as something particularly unique. It's quite well made, seems to have a sizable amount of content, and does take place underwater, which is at least scenically unique. I don't have anything objectively bad to say about it, but I think it just further cemented that I don't like the genre.
Most all the game is not exploration, but mindless busywork. Grab more resources, craft new things, don't forget to forage for food and drink, evade wildlife. It's not challenging, but it takes time, annoyingly much so when you can't find a resource you're looking for. The limited inventory space, while realistic, forces you to throw away resources you would need in the future. I don't consider myself a hoarder, but the inventory management was so annoying. And even when I did get to explore, it wasn't very exciting. Finding a new resource or species didn't feel satisfying or an accomplishment. It just kind of happened. It was maybe fun for the first hour, but for the next few that I managed to bear, it was just a boring grind.

I'll readily admit that I'm not the best person to review a survival game, and that Subnautica probably is good if you're already a fan of the genre. But if you are, then you've probably already played it. If you're not, then I really don't see anything special here that might tide you over. So, on a personal level, I can't recommend this.

Overdungeon

Oh man, what a game Overdungeon was. Apparently abandoned in development for about three years, and only just recently picked back up. I am not sure if it's actually a mobile game, but it feels like one, and has an auto-play button, so it might as well be. And I could've sworn the character I happened to play had the same character model as those dozens of hentai shooter clones on Steam. At the same time, for about 10 minutes, I was having so much fun, I was laughing like a maniac. Then the game ended.

Despite being out of Early Access, Overdungeon feels very much unfinished. There are 4 characters, basically no unlockable content, only 3 floors, each having less than ten encounters (battles / rest points / stores / etc.) It is also unbalanced, as I beat the game easily on my first try on the hardest difficulty. But, I have yet to mention what it actually is.
So, Overdungeon is off the heels of the Roguelike Deckbuilder craze, which I still haven't explored much. You choose a character, get some starter cards, get to upgrade those cards, get some passives, get rid of some cards, and try to build the strongest synergy in your deck possible. Standard stuff. Where Overdungeon differs, is that you're on a sharp time limit of a few seconds per card, and there is always a battle happening between your summons and the enemy's on the battlefield located between you two. A lot of cards can place buildings on the field or summon units, which will autonomously do their thing.

While there isn't much content to the game, there do seem to be a lot of synergies. Animals created on the field can trigger traps, which can summon more animals. Cards that gain power every time they're played. And what won my game, was a passive item that removed the effect from cards that made them not be shuffled back into the deck, allowing me to play a card that played all the cards from my hand, and then clone that card's upgraded version that played all the cards from my hand twice. Add in some card draw cards, and I ended up playing more than 20 cards on some turns, instead of the default 2. Fun, but just briefly, as it was far too strong.

Honestly, the production quality, and, well, almost everything, about Overdungeon isn't great. I love the absolute mayhem that was happening on screen in the later stages, and I caught a glimpse of some bosses actually being fairly strong, so I think there's potential in balancing the late game by just making both parties ridiculously overpowered. Sadly, I don't have faith after all this time (and because it's a mobile game), that they will fix all the problems with the game and also add a good chunk of content. It was fun for the hour or so that I played it, but I have no desire to replay it, and I couldn't give it a serious recommendation.

Disc Room

Another game from Devolver Digital, who's known for publishing at least okay quality indie games. The review scores for this are pretty good, but it's not a well-known game. It's Disc Room.

Disc Room is an interesting take on the bullet hell genre. Instead of enemies that fire bullets who you have to kill, the enemies essentially are the bullets, and you can't kill them, but have to survive for as long as possible. Most rooms have a goal of surviving for some 10 or 20 seconds, but they may also have a variation on that, such as the timer only going up while in a zone. There are also other goals, like dying to different discs, which there are almost as many of as there are different rooms. Completing goals unlocks new rooms, progressing the game. You will also unlock new skills (invulnerability frames, bullet time, etc.) as the game progresses, only one of which can be used at a time.
The rooms are quite short, depending of course on how well you can play, but the overall game time should be around 3-4 hours. After that, you can go for completing all goals, dying to all discs, or just going for a high score in each room. The difficulty also ramps up quite fast, so maybe you'll complete the first half of the rooms in an hour, and then spend three in the other half.

I like this bullet hell variation, and I think Disc Room was well executed in terms of the vision it had. I didn't notice any instances of the game being broken, or missing the mark on some of its mechanics or anything. However, I do think the vision wasn't quite as good as it could have been. While reasonably difficult, simply running around and dodging isn't the most fun gameplay. It's kind of repetitive, despite the large number of different discs, but at the end of the day it just boils down to not overlapping your player box with the enemy boxes. It's also kind of short, even if you did want to enjoy it for more than a couple of hours. And finally, many rooms have a greater or lesser degree of randomness in them, which can get really annoying in an otherwise heavily skill-based game.

So, overall, good execution, subpar idea, and too short. I wouldn't recommend it to most people, but if you're big on bullet hell games and/or chasing high scores in short bursts of gameplay, then maybe you'll find it fun while it lasts. Although to my knowledge, the randomness in this game may very heavily clash with the usual strategy of learning attack patterns in bullet hell games, so consider that.

Void Bastards

My initial impressions of Void Bastards were pretty positive. The graphics were stylized, some of the story was told through animated comic panels, the narrator was slightly humorous, and exploring unknown spaceships was somewhat exciting, as I didn't really know what I was going to find.
To elaborate, Void Bastards is an FPS roguelike about exploring and looting randomly generated spaceships. It reminded me a bit of Heat Signature if it was first person, didn't have time stop, and just had fewer features overall. See, I'm already getting into some pain points here, as Void Bastards very quickly fell off. Around the second or third spaceship, I kind of developed a general route I would take through the ship. Helm first, as that highlights the loot, and then just loot all the stuff that wasn't near enemies and kill a minimal amount as that only wastes weapons and health.
There are also some decisions on which ship to board next, based on what kind of items you're looking for, but at least as far as I got, that boiled down to just going for ships which unlock a new item, and don't lock me out of my overall goal. I'd say the worst was that there weren't any interesting decisions to make. Each weapon was mostly suitable for each level, so you'd just go with whatever you had ammo for. There were no major differences in strategy between ships, and rather obvious best picks for which ships to explore next. To top it all off, death was very inconsequential, as you kept all the items and upgrades you had, and only got new character traits and a fresh batch of ammo, food, fuel, and other consumables.

Despite the criticism, I wouldn't actually say Void Bastards is a bad game. It's well made, it's witty, and the gameplay is okay, but it's not good enough to carry the nonexistent meta progression. There's just far too little strategy, decision making, and personal improvement throughout the game. If you think you'll really like the core gameplay loop of looting randomly generated ships, evading some enemies, killing others, and you don't care about the lack of variety, then maybe you can enjoy it. Otherwise, I just can't recommend it.

Amid Evil

I really gotta stop even trying these retro FPS games. I don't like them, and I won't play long enough nor know enough about them to give a good review on them. But rules are rules - I played Amid Evil, now I gotta talk about it.

As I said, it's a retro FPS, even though it starts you off with a big melee axe. The graphics are low-poly, the textures are pixelated, and in my honest opinion, it not only looks like shit, it's very unapproachable, because it's difficult to make out the important parts of the game like where the enemies are. But hey, that's just the aesthetic they were going for. Can you blame them? I sure can.
The movement's the same, floaty jumping, running backwards as fast as forwards, and just generally hopping backwards to fight many enemies, just like Devil Dagger or what other popular retro FPS games there are. As I said, I'm not really knoweldgeable, sorry.
You have pickups for health and mana, which serves as your ranged ammunition, and then soul points which can make you hit really really hard for a while once you cap them.
There's different levels, different difficulty settings, and you're being timed, because as usual with these types of games, time matters. I've never been big on neither speedrunning nor timed challenges, so that's another pain point for me, personally.

Well, that's my really brief review of Amid Evil. It doesn't really say much about the game, now that I look back at it. To tell you of things that are not my personal experiences, but that may be more useful: The whole game takes about 10 hours to complete. It's one of the higher rated retro FPS games out there, and is by the same publisher that made Ultrakill and Dusk, which are supposedly a lot better. (I don't know why I didn't try those instead, but I won't anymore.) It's clear I didn't like it, but don't let that stop you. If you enjoyed the two previously mentioned games, Amid Evil's probably more of the same.

The Beginner's Guide

Well, that was a philosophical journey and a half. And a damn old one too, from late 2015. The Beginner's Guide was a far shorter experience than I had anticipated, at only 1.5 hours. To make matters worse for reviewing it, it almost entirely consists of spoilers. But I will do my best to skirt around the spoilers, and give an idea of what the game is about anyways.

The Beginner's Guide is a walking simulator, narrated by its creator. It features a bit over a dozen chapters, each of which is a tiny video game made in the Source Engine, and not particularly polished. You slowly go through them, listen to narrator, and maybe form some thoughts about it all at the end.
That's about as much as I can tell you, because really, there isn't much substance to these little games. I can tell you that despite the eerie atmosphere, there will not be any jumpscares - this is not a horror game. I can also say that I felt I saw through the game rather early, but then again, maybe the game wasn't expecting to fool anyone or everyone, and either way, it probably didn't matter.
Despite the little games being very non-stimulating, I felt the narrator kept me going through it, and it never lingered too long on any bit. Unlike other small, I dare say, experimental, games I've played - I think that while the content of the mini-games was significant, it wasn't important that it was what it was. It was more of a chosen example, to illustrate the ideas The Beginner's Guide was trying to convey.

This is already going in the direction of a philosophical dissection, which I really don't care to do, nor do I think I should do. While the narrative is about video game development, it can easily be interpreted to be about any kind of art. It is most certainly not a game for everyone, and I think that if you have pursued or wish to pursue any artistic field, you will understand the story a bit better. Whether you'll like it or not, regardless of the previous condition, I can not say. I can only say that it failed to really reach me. As much as I found open questions in this game, I felt I had answers for all of them, for myself. So, because I didn't personally enjoy it, and because I think the target audience is a bit niche in any case, I wouldn't recommend it.

Vaporum

One of the older games still left on my list - from late 2017 - it's Vaporum.

I'm going to be upfront - I did not give this game a fair try. It's basically Legend of Grimrock, which came out 5 years earlier, but worse. And Legend of Grimrock itself is a throwback to old RPGs, which I haven't played, but can only assume couldn't afford proper collision detection or such due to the technology of the time, and thus defaulted to having all combat and movement be on a grid. The entire game is exploring this pre-built dungeon (meaning little-to-no replayability). There's traps, there's small puzzles, and there'a a bunch of enemies. The enemies, once close enough, take an action every some unit of time, either moving closer to you, or attacking you. Mind you, despite the game being set on a grid, and enemies acting almost as on fixed ticks, the game is actually action-based. You (or your party, if we're talking about Grimrock) are generally faster than everything else, allowing you to abuse the tick rate and outmanoeuver the enemies, dodging their attacks by timing, while getting your own in.
There are of course also the usual RPG elements, such as collecting consumables, new items and weapons, levelling up, different skills, etc.

Now, while I only played Vaporum for about an hour, I have closer to a dozen hours in Grimrock, which is why I felt confident in abandoning the game so soon. I just dislike almost everything unique about it. The combat and movement systems of times past, used again here, weren't like that by design, but by necessity, I'm quite sure. It feels terrible, and that's not only because I think combining turn-based and action gameplay is a bad idea. I would much rather go on a one-on-one whacking contest with each enemy than do the tedious dance of maybe having to do three movements in quick succession, not fucking any up, before I could land a hit on an enemy without retaliation. It makes the combat drag on so, but is necessary to not run out of health and resources.
Also the puzzles are kind of lame, and finding little hidden buttons on walls isn't enjoyable in my experience. Vaporum especially didn't give me the impression that the dungeon was designed very well, and the production quality of everything from graphics to voice acting was a bit below the bar I'd like.

All-in-all, definitely not a game for me. For the most part, gameplay of the past should be kept in the past, and mixing genres doesn't end well, and I don't think Vaproum is an exception. Combine that with the not-great overall quality, and I have no reason to recommend it. Perhaps if you really liked Grimrock and are looking for more games exactly like that, because I don't think there's many of them around.

Unreal Life

You never really know what something's going to be like until you actually experience it. Unreal Life didn't seem like anything particularly special from its store page, but managed to strangely hook me in the first hour of playing it. It hooked me for the wrong reasons, but as I kept playing, I discovered other reasons to keep playing further, and despite a somewhat rough journey, I saw it through to the end.

Unreal Life is a story adventure game, which is to say it has no real gameplay to speak of. It's kind of like a point-and-click game. You pick up items and interact with the environment and the characters in it, but it doesn't really place much emphasis on making the puzzles actually difficult to solve or the way forward difficult to guess. I can't say I'm a big fan of busywork in the middle of my stories, but perhaps this quiet time helps some people process events that have already transpired, or helps grow closer to the characters, by spending more time with them. Of course, if this was written as a visual novel instead, I wouldn't be writing about it here, so my complaint is a bit paradoxical, but I do think some puzzle segments involved a bit more walking back-and-forth than most would be comfortable with.
Of note is a somewhat unique mechanic of being able to see the last prominent memory of inanimate objects. This was the mentioned initial hook for me, but I soon discovered that it's not really utilized much from the puzzle perspective.

It's not really important, but while I think the art and music were good, they had much more spirit than actual quality. Especially the art - some of the sprites were or had pieces that were nigh unrecognizable. Still, the overall composition and feel of all the visuals were fantastic and made up for the lack of quality.

Enough about the gameplay. You shouldn't come for that. You should come for the story. Unreal Life is a mystery about a girl waking up with memory loss in a strange world. There's a sentient traffic light, and animals can talk. Inanimate objects have memories, and doors can teleport. You know only you need to find a woman by the name of Sakura. Things don't make a lot of sense, and you're troubled by headaches as your memories slowly return, revealing bits and pieces of the mystery. Still, the inhabitants of this mostly empty world alleviate and help to come to terms with the traumatic things you remember and do their best to make you feel cozy despite the looming unease and dread.
I remember hearing from someone, many years back, that only young children and fully-grown adults can appreciate fairytales. Being in neither age group at the time, I couldn't ever see myself enjoying a fairytale again in the future. I still wouldn't say the statement is entirely true, but I think Unreal Life is something that a child could enjoy, while also being something that I enjoyed. Sometimes the story was just so simple and childish, yet I couldn't help but smile. I wish I could tell you more details about the story, instead of my emotions, but as with all stories, especially mysteries, that would spoil it.
I will say that the ending was a bit dissatisfactory, with a slightly forced conclusion, but I decided that it wasn't important. Much like the story tells you - it's not about the destination, it's about the journey. I felt a lot of happiness through it all, and a less than perfect ending wasn't going to take that away from me. But... perhaps you notice the few missing achievements after you complete the game, even after really going through every interaction. I would have no idea how to unlock them, but luckily, watching a 30 minute walkthrough showed me something very interesting... For better or worse, this game has a very hidden supposedly "true" ending. It's brief, but if you choose to acknowledge it, it changes everything. My feelings on the "truth" are conflicted, because on one hand, accepting it resolves my grievances with the regular ending, but at the same time throws away so much else I loved about the story. I know I'm being cryptic, but that's all I can say without spoiling anything. In any case, it's a very unique detail to add to a story.

To sum up the long ramble, Unreal Life is a wonderful story. It has its shortcoming in its execution, but I loved that it could make me appreciate some moments of childlike wonder, while telling a touching and serious story in the background. I would absolutely recommend it to fans of story-only games. I would also like to see these developers make more stories, hopefully smoothing out some of the rough edges next time.

UnderMine

UnderMine is an action roguelike where you dungeon crawl through a bunch of floors, each of which has a bunch of rooms. Most rooms have you defeating a bunch of enemies before you may leave, but some other rooms have a store, or a passive powerup (artifact), or some other event. You also get one slot for a potion, which is your one-time consumable, and some of the gold gathered during a run carries over to buy upgrades between runs. You have a melee and a ranged attack (but can't melee attack until your ranged attack has returned to you like a boomerang), and can dodge in the form of a jump which can also cross gaps.
There's also some other stuff, but that's most of it. If you've played anything like Binding of Isaac, UnderMine will feel very familiar.

Now, my problem is that UnderMine is a bit too familiar for how unimpressive it is. It's not a bad game. There's a good amount of content and upgrades and replayability, but it's pretty bland and not executed well enough to stand out. I've said it time and again, but if your game doesn't innovate, then it needs to be really, really good.
To just list some grievances: The jump feels very floaty, and it can be difficult to see where you're going to land. It doesn't let you reposition well, but gives you a very lengthy invulnerability period. The ranged attack feels a bit too strong compared to how small and risky a melee attack is. Potions, which are kind of underwhelming in terms of combat strength anyways, have you stand still for multiple seconds to activate them - often not feasible in combat. Every time anything drops gold, you have to play some dumb minigame where a bunch of slimes appear out of the walls to steal it and you have to get to it first or beat them off.

Overall, I don't have anything interesting to say about UnderMine. If you're a fan of action roguelikes in the vein of Binding of Isaac, and you just want a new one to play, UnderMine might well be worth your time. It's a solid game, but for me who's only a slight fan of the genre, it is neither unique nor of superb quality, so I don't really have a reason to recommend it over the many other games like it.

Supraland

I do not understand the positive reception of Supraland at all.
It's a game centered around exploration, solving puzzles, and collecting things, with some combat thrown in. I don't really know how to further elaborate on the gameplay, since it's not particularly remarkable. The exploration happens in an open world. Puzzles are largely physics-based, and collectibles are mostly coins, but also some power-ups. The combat is poorly done, with few enemy types, and weapons that are too powerful for the task. For example, the beginner sword just had no attack cooldown, allowing for effectively infinite damage.

It's not just the aesthetic, but I feel the game is designed more for children. The narrative, the world being a literal child's playground, the art style, the really simple and poorly written dialogue. I also found the art assets and visual design of the game to be rather basic. Add to that the fact that I'm not big on games centered around just running around and collecting things, and I just don't have anything positive to say about the game.
I mean, it's not that terrible, but I do feel the review score is too high even if I don't just consider my personal preferences. Regardless, whether this game is actually bad or I'm not just the right person to review it, I can in no way recommend playing Supraland.

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.