Children of the Zodiarcs is a pretty cool tactics game where you use dice and cards to attack, use special abilities and defeat enemies with a group of interesting characters in a neat setting. Card and dice customization is a big part of the game, and most of the time is spent fighting, leaving some small interludes for story between each mission. I had a good time with it, but at some point it felt like I wasn’t engaging with the game mechanics anymore and just cruising through the game and that lost my interest.
Book of Demons is a pretty neat roguelike heavily inspired by Diablo 1 with a paper / card aesthetic that I really enjoyed where you must go to the bowels of a dungeon to defeat a big devil. Choosing from three classes with a bevy of items and skills, you click away to walk on predefined paths, dodge attacks, perform small minigame-like tasks to overcome enemies, come back to town to cash in rewards, and restart that loop until the end.
Islands of Insight is a really interesting idea, what if you played a big puzzle game, with a ton of different puzzle types, challenges, exploration and progression, but it also was massively multiplayer, somehow? Moving a character around the environments, looking for puzzles to complete, discovering new puzzle types, acquiring skills and cosmetics and solving more complex and difficult versions of puzzles you’re used to. It’s really interesting, and it kinda works! Not a hundred percent, but I had a really good time with this one.
Shapez is a streamlined factory management game where the things you build are colored shapes in their most abstract senses. Starting very simple and quickly building up the complexity, I had a really good time with a game that was not too concerned about optimizing and making the most of limited resources. Creating complex patterns of machines that would take shapes and colors, cut them, rotate them and fuse them without any kind of stress was really enjoyable. It became a bit too complex for me at some point and I couldn’t really figure out what to do, so I dropped the game, but otherwise I had a great time!
The bar was incredibly high for Diablo 4, the expectations were probably impossible to meet and the realities of game development in the year of our lord 2023 for a company like Blizzard seemingly was writing on the wall that it would embrace the “live service” moniker in ways Diablo 3 hadn’t in the past. I love action RPGs, they’re probably up there as my favorite genre of game, I also have a lot of fond memories of Diablo 1, had a ton of fun with Diablo 2 and played Diablo 3 to hell and back. How does 4 fare against the legacy of its predecessors? Not perfectly, but pretty well, I’d say!
Grounded is a neat little twist on the survival genre where your characters are shrunk down and must content with hunger, thirst and the dangers of insects roaming around a backyard while exploring every nook and cranny for resources, power ups and secrets. I had a good time going through the story, even the next thing I needed to do wasn’t clear at times and there were some slight hurdles in the progression that felt more frustrating than challenging. Overall, a cool game!
Headlander is a funny little metroidvania from Double Fine where you play a disembodied head, flying around on a space station, trying to stop an evil computer from controlling humanity. When I first started playing the game, I somehow thought erroneously that it was going to have more of a puzzle slant to it than it ultimately did, but I really enjoyed my time with the game! With a good mix of exploration and combat and only some small gripes related to the controls, I’d recommend Headlander if you’re looking for a chill and very stylish adventure.
Square Valley is a solid puzzler for iOS where you place tiles around a map, draw roads and rivers and try to maximize your score to hit a certain target with the constraints of the level you are in. I had a lot of fun with it, even tho I feel like the game could’ve worded some stuff a bit better and surfaced more data overall. It was still a pretty inventive and interesting game!
Knotwords is a little crossword puzzle-like game on iOS where instead of finding words using hints for lines and rows, you have to ‘untangle’ weirdly shaped ‘knots’ of words on a big grid, which ultimately leads to words appearing on lines and rows. For a free game with a premium unlock, I had a ton of fun, but only when I finally activated a feature that helped me know if my words were correct - the game was a bundle of knots before that! Aha.
Cook, Serve, Delicious is one of these franchises that I really enjoy and would love to devour entirely if I had infinite time. I love the fast cooking action that you can learn to master, the rush of the orders, the mashing of the keys and the perfect gold medal that you get at the end. It’s not without its lot of frustrations, for sure, and there were some parts of 2 that I preferred over 3, but for the things it tries and the new ideas it brings to the table, CSR3 is a pretty good game!
Roundguard is an interesting peggle-like with RPG elements; You shoot your round hero around, hitting enemies, breaking pots to collect gold, use skills and items to get stronger and clear the rooms until ultimately you manage to save the king or die trying and restart, unlocking new powers and challenges to make your next runs different. I had a good time with it, although I’ve found the game a bit too punishing for my tastes.
I had been playing some GemCraft Chasing Shadows - a fun little tower defense game, sequel of a flash game I used to play a while ago - when I noticed that there had been another one of these that I hadn’t tried out, since I am a big fan I gave it a shot! I had a good time with it, but I ultimately couldn’t sink the time or effort required to complete the game because at some point it just became too tough for me and looking at videos or tutorials to beat every level I had issues with wasn’t part of my plans. Still a really interesting tower defense game!
Boyfriend Dungeon, the latest game from Kitfox Games, is a combination of dungeon crawler and dating sim where you play someone going on vacation in a small sunny town with the underlying goal to meet new people and potentially date them. The twist here is that these people can also turn into weapons that you use to fight monsters representing your own fears inside “dunjs” scattered across town, so you use them to fight as well. A neat twist on both genres, I had a good time with Boyfriend Dungeon! The pacing was a bit weird, but there was a lot to smooch here!
The Chronos Principle is a real neat little puzzle game based on sliding a square around increasingly complex levels in order to reach a goal with the twist that levels have a number of “tries” that you get and that each previous try affects the game area while you’re trying to reach the end. Moving squares in specific positions to act as stoppers for your following tries, so you can get in different places. You’ll also have barriers that can only be traversed by your previous tries, and other puzzle elements such as these. I quite enjoyed it, even if the core idea of having multiple tries being tied to real time.
Disco Elysium is an incredible story and world crammed into a very interesting RPG held back by some frustrating and obscure mechanics. Taking the role of an amnesiac detective with a lot of internal thoughts on everything, you try to solve a murder case over a period of multiple days in a small fictional village in a fictional universe with enough parallels to our own world to make it truly fascinating. I managed to get to the end of the game almost by forcing myself to play through it because at some point I just felt I was stuck on everything and spent so much time wandering around aimlessly that my fun with the game was sucked away. It is nonetheless an incredible thing.
Loop Hero is a really neat roguelike that has you automatically loop around a track, fighting monsters, collecting gear and items and placing cards around the map to create forests, villages, deserts and rivers, all in order to help - and sometimes hinder - your hero get strong enough to defeat the boss of the level. With a really interesting art style, good music and some nice progression elements, I really enjoyed what I played of Loop Hero even if my interest for the game fell off near the end and I couldn’t get past the last bumps in difficulty.
VMOD is a simple little puzzle game for iOS where the goal is to activate all buttons on each level. The game goes through a bunch of new mechanics up until the end, so it never gets too boring, but after a while I’ve found that it became difficult for me to properly solve the puzzles, so I did a bit of mindless mashing in some instances. Nevertheless, it’s an okay game and I had some fun with it.
Miracle Merchant is a quite simple puzzle game about brewing potions using cards from four colored decks in order to meet the specific requirements of your stylish clients and get enough points on each turn to continue until you eventually run out of cards. To make things more difficult, you have cursed cards that remove points when you play them - but you sometimes need to - and a few more special cards effects to consider in order to maximize your potion-brewing capabilities. I had a good time with this game, feeling like the great core mechanics weren’t supplemented by enough meat around the bone.
Minimal Dungeon RPG is a strange mix between an idle game and a more classic RPG. It’s certainly incremental in it’s nature, but you’re not waiting for incredibly long periods of time, waiting for something to happen. Instead you tap on tiles in the rooms you’re visiting and you perform actions like exploring or fighting monsters that way. Where you need to wait is for your action and hit points to recover and allow you to keep tapping away. It’s a neat concept, but it got too stale too quickly and it also felt like being a free-to-play game hindered it a little.
INSIDE is the spiritual successor to Limbo; an atmospheric, creepy, strange and sometimes brutal platformer taking place in a strange surreal land. Playing a nameless kid, you strut along buildings, fields and weird facilities for no discernible reason, besides the fact that you are pursued by men in black, dogs, killer mermaids and strange robots. I had a good time with this game, even if some parts were just frustrating and if the balance of puzzles wasn’t always on point. It was still pretty good, and I recommend it!