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.

Cliff Empire

Cliff Empire is a slightly futuristic city builder with an emphasis on limited room, logistics, and ramping difficulty. The ground is inhabitable, so you build three cities on three platforms (cliffs), specialize each based on the strengths of that cliff, set up trade between them, and then fulfill the resource demands of the people in orbit or survive natural disasters or hostile attackers.
The game seems to be made by a small team, as the UI and the rest of the graphics are rather basic, almost untextured, and there isn't a lot of content, at least not for a city builder. There is technically content for multiple tens of hours, but the further you get, the more the game starts to drag on.

My first problem with the game is that it doesn't allow for much creativity or strategic expression. You have critical stats, like food, water, electricity, and non-critical stats that are basically various luxuries. Each building consumes some room (which is also a limited resource), and possibly one or more other resources, producing one or more resources or stats in turn. But some buildings are just duplicate, larger versions of themselves, and some are eclipsed by other, more efficient buildings. It's never really a question of what to build, as you always just plop down whatever you need at the moment. Once you figure out the most efficient combos, you just repeat those forever.
There is also no point in keeping your people significantly happy. As long as people at least slowly join your colony, you can ignore all other luxury demands with no penalty. Orbital requests do require you to stockpile all items, at least on one cliff, but you can ignore non-resource-based stats like aesthetics and entertainment.

Secondly, after you get through your initial funds, the game becomes very slow. Every building costs money to build, and the only way to get money is through very labor-intensive buildings which are also incredibly slow, or more reasonably, by shipping large quantities of resources you don't need into orbit. This is, however, limited by there only being a short window during which you can trade resources each day, which also makes it quite difficult later on to fulfill orbital requests, even if you have all the resources - you just can't ship them in the limited time. Worse still, each cliff has its own money reserves. If a cliff runs out of money, you can't send it resources from another cliff, because it can't pay for them. The workaround is to loan them money, but in a cruel mockery, this will lead them deeper and deeper into debt, forcing you to loan them ever more money, because half of what they pay back is interest on the loan. It's comical, because there's no point to this mechanic. You can literally keep loaning more and more, regardless of their debt, which can grow to such astronomical proportions that it will be literally impossible to pay back.
To return to the topic of the game becoming slow, even if you somehow manage to solve your money problems without creating a debt loop of death, you will be gated by research. Unlike every other resource in the game, research accumulates at a fixed maximum speed, with the longest ones taking over an hour even on maximum (7x) speed. This is what makes the game take multiple tens of hours, as the endgame (I'm not sure if there's a win condition, I quit after I was just idling on 7x speed most of the time) requires you to research many of these very long researches.

Overall, the game has several very major flaws which are mostly balance issues. It may sound like I absolutely hated this game, but it was actually very fun to build the city up until these problems ruined my enjoyment. Clearly, many aspects of the game are very well designed, but it feels like the developer just ran out of steam before managing to polish everything up. Despite the lack of content, and the unbearably slow endgame, I enjoyed it for well over 10 hours. For this, I will give it a partial recommendation.

The Outer Worlds

I really have to stop giving AAA games a try. It's not them, it's me. I gave The Outer Worlds a try today and... I don't even know what much to write about it.

It's a story-driven RPG with a lot of FPS combat. Many people compare it to Fallout, but say it's worse. I wouldn't know, since I've never played a Fallout game. As far as I got, which wasn't very far, I didn't really see anything that makes this game unique.
You progress your character by getting new equipment, upgrading it, and leveling your character and slotting points into whatever weapons and skills you want to excel at. Standard RPG stuff. There are stealth and bullet time mechanics, allowing you to sneak past, or into, enemies, and also allowing you to slow down time briefly, to give you an edge in combat. I think you mostly shoot at enemies, but combined with stealth, perhaps more melee-oriented builds are also possible.
As for the story, conversations with characters influence certain events, and you may have extra dialogue options available based on your stats. That system might have interested me if the story had in the slightest. There are strong attempts at hyper-capitalist humor, but I didn't encounter any jokes that I really found funny.

Honestly, I feel like I got what I expected. This seems very on-par with most AAA releases, few as I've played, and perhaps even better due to a relative lack of bugs and other problems. It's well made and seems to mostly accomplish what it wants to. Still, I find it entirely bland and boring, both in terms of gameplay, as well as the story. I wouldn't recommend it. Unless you're looking for something very standard and average, which is what big publishers always seem to be going for.

Kubifaktorium

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

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

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

Throne and Liberty

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

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

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

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

Geometry Arena

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

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

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

Desperados III

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

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

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

Lobotomy Corporation

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

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

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

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

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

Hello Charlotte

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

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

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

NieR:Automata

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

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

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

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

Timespinner

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

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

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

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

Slipways

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

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

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

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

Slasher's Keep

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

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

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

Towertale

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

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