Hollow Knight is a quintessential metroidvania, oozing with its gloomy charm and strange cast of character, this nail-wielding bug-starring platformer is a game I really enjoyed. A bunch of smart systems working together with familiar tropes and design concepts make for a really well-playing responsive action game with a ton of places to discover and enemies to fight. If you haven’t played Hollow Knight, I really recommend it!
Wilmot’s Warehouse at first felt like it was supposed to be a zen game about re-organizing items in a warehouse and trying to figure out the optimal ways to place your stock, but it just devolved quickly into a stressful mess for me. I really enjoy the minimalist style and the core idea of what the game is trying to do, but I dropped it off quickly because being under time pressure to fulfill orders just wasn’t for me.
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!
Home Quest is an interesting idle game where you build up villages, assign jobs to your villagers, raise an army and fight invaders while discovering new technologies, upgrades and resources. That sense of discovery brought me all the way to the end of the game and while I sometimes felt that you just couldn’t do anything and needed to wait with the game closed for a while - especially in the early game - at the end I was fully enjoying all the different systems you could optimize to beat the challenges the game threw your way. So much so that I bought the gold edition to support it! You should check it out if you enjoy idle games.
Slime Rancher is a simulation game where you manage a ranch filled with cute slimes. Armed with a vacuum gun, you move them around, feed them, expand your ranch, explore the world around your ranch, find new species of slimes, gain upgrades and repeat this loop. I didn’t have a great time with it, sadly - I was looking forward to trying this game - because I found the normal ‘Adventure’ mode to be extremely aimless. I do enjoy a game of that style - I had a blast with Graveyard Keeper earlier this year, for instance - but the lack of objectives combined with technical issues made me put down Slime Rancher quicker than I would’ve hoped.
Gunhouse is a very strange mix of tower defense and puzzle game about matching blocks and using special weapons and abilities to protect your house from wave after wave of strange and unique enemies. With a very interesting visual style, great music and solid mechanics, I had a good time with this game, even if the core of the puzzle system felt a bit hard to grapple with for a big chunk of my time with it and the variety of weapons and powers left me more perplexed than anything else. I finished this one, so you know it’s at least up there in my book!
Shattered Planet is a neat roguelike about exploring procedurally generated planets slowly succombing to a dark plague while fighting enemies, collecting loot and trying to survive while unlocking - and upgrading - new characters, discovering enemies, gear and events. I had a good time with it! I kinda wish it did more than what it does, but what is there is fun, addictive and still fun to play, even though it was released in 2014.
Idle Life Sim is an idle game with a really interesting visual style and core game system, but nothing else going on for it. The absolute lack of player actions beside watching ads and not playing the game for long periods of time (also limited by the game if you don’t buy some expensive doodad) made me lose interest quite quickly. I must say that I’ve tried a bunch of idle games recently and this one continues the trend of not letting the player do anything while idling, which doesn’t work for me. I wish they had made something else out of that game.
I have to admit, I was going to buy the frog hat DLC for Frog Fractions: Game Of The Decade Edition simply to support the game, but when I learned that (spoilers) the hat was actually a NEW Frog Fractions game hidden in that simple hat, I went all-in immediately. Frog Fractions is a series I’ve been following since the first installment, really enjoying the ZZT-fueled craze included in the quirky Glittermitten Grove, going through the random mess of minigames tied together in the strangest of plots. Would this Hat DLC capture the same feeling? It did, yes! I had a good time with this Game Of The Decade Edition, you really should try it out yourself!
Alphaputt is a small mini-putt game with a really nice sense of style, but not much else for me. The game has you putt across all 26 letters of the alphabet, each with their own theme and gimmicks, but with no great way to become better and no good sense of challenge. I went through the whole alphabet, then tried the challenge mode, but was left with no intention to keep up with the game, which is a shame, since it looks and sounds pretty good!
Iconoclasts is a delightful metroidvania that reminded me of a bunch of neat feelings plucked from other games combined together to create this stylish and interesting adventure platformer. Going around with your giant wrench, you fight enemies, solve puzzles and collect things while advancing a riveting story with pretty interesting characters and foes to defeat. I had a good time with it! I found some of the puzzles a bit fiddly and the upgrade system to be too thin, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Inbento is a delightful puzzle game where you need to replicate a target ‘bento box’ with a few pieces in your own box. You switch, move and duplicate food items until you solve the puzzle, then move on. It’s very simple, but also very relaxing, without any stress and the core mechanics are very good. It’s one of these reviews where there is not much to say because the whole experience is well-made and self-contained in a way that makes too long a review a bit pointless. For a little premium game, I totally recommend inbento!
Rebel Inc is the spiritual successor to Plague Inc, a game about infecting the whole world with a deadly virus. In this version of the strategy genre, you have to manage a region of the world in turmoil after a war and get to 100% stability in order to win. To do so, you have a wide range of upgrades you can buy and tactics to deploy, especially when insurgents decide to come into play and require you to act militarily as well. I had an okay time with this game but ultimately found it was too much of a numeric mess with so much data that I just couldn’t process it all and had to make uninformed decisions, which never feels great.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Civilization games. They’re the kind of games I just can get into for endless hours without a care in the world, without going to sleep even if I should, just clicking away at the ‘next turn’ button until my plans either come to fruition or the whole game comes crashing down on me. Of course, I’m not a -great- Civilization player, I just go for the easy-ish difficulty and try to min-max my civilizations into getting one of the various types of victories you can get. Nonetheless, I had a blast playing Civilization VI and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone that has even just an inkling of passion for strategy games.
Knighthood is a mobile RPG with a great look, fairly simple but engaging mechanics and way too many layers of micro-transactions, currencies and other cruft layered on it. You play a ‘Rage Knight’ fighting your way through a land of monsters, collecting gear, leveling up, summoning powerful heroes and trying to keep track of all the activities you can do. I had a nice time with it (never hit a wall where I needed to spend currency) and would’ve played more, but ultimately lost interest.
Looking at an old game like World Of Warcraft Classic is always, in theory, a balancing act. These old games exist to tickle our nostalgia bones and in some cases serve as formative works and warnings for the future game designers among us. Even by keeping that in mind, this is still a product being offered to play today, so I put on my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and dreaded going back to the old school World of Warcraft. After going at it for a while, my conclusions are that it’s still a somewhat enjoyable game but ultimately a snapshot of a different time where I had way much time for MMOs and lower expectations of what the genre could do.
Idle Crafting is a depressingly badly balanced idle game with a nifty style and a cute premise. What if you destroyed blocks in order to gather materials that you then use to craft tools to make you better at destroying blocks? In theory, that’s fine and fun. In practice this game is an ad-fest with blocks getting so difficult to destroy that you need to leave the game and come back later to upgrade your character and automatically-attacking pet friends. What I want from idle games are reasons to stay there and play, not reasons to put them down extremely quickly, and Idle Crafting gives me plenty from the second category.
Action RPGs are my favorite kind of games. I could play them forever if unstopped. I have over 3000 hours easily in ‘recent’ ARPGs and I’m always willing to try new ones. When I heard about Wolcen, I really wanted to dive in, but reports of bugs, weird balance issues and other wonkiness kept me at bay… for about a week. After 45 hours I can safely report that Wolcen needs some more work before it gets to a point where I could easily recommend it to everyone, but they clearly had a running start, being inspired by other ARPGs as it is while making interesting design decisions on their own, so they’ll probably get there. Regardless, I still had a good time with it!
Deep Town is a pretty interesting little idle game where you dig, create items with the resources you find, fight some underground enemies and collect upgrades to create new stuff to keep the whole process going. I found many systems and core tenants of the game to be fun and engaging, but sadly the whole affair is packaged in a free-to-play model that means it sacrifices much of what could make it great in order to sell you premium resources, turning it into a disappointing wait-fest.
TASTEE: Lethal Tactics profoundly disappointed me. From strange technical issues to an overly complicated introduction, what really did me in was the core gameplay that absolutely made no sense to me. In this strategy game, you move units around while planning your actions in order to complete missions and ‘play’ your turns at your own pace. In theory, this is really cool - and the game’s tutorial made the whole process seem really interesting with the many ways you could watch turns play out before picking the right one. In practice, the actual game uses fog of war in a very aggressive way that turns any odds of having fun into a trial-and-error slog.