Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred is the game’s big first paid expansion, adding a new class, more story, tweaking mechanics and (in my opinion) attempting to right D4’s wrong in a way like Reaper of Souls did for Diablo 3. The new class is pretty fun, the new bit of story they’ve wrote is alright and the mechanics they’ve added and tweaked are pretty hit or miss. Ultimately this doesn’t change Diablo 4 enough for me to want to go back to it regularly, so I’m not sure if they’ve accomplished their goals. Diablo 4 is still fine, but I’d rather go back to Last Epoch if I had the jonesing for an ARPG at the moment.
Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a neat remake of a tried and true dungeon crawling roguelike where you complete small dungeons by creating a character with a race, class, and gear, then explore a small grid of treasures, monsters and traps. The whole thing is a bit of a puzzle because you only regenerate when discovering new tiles, enemies have set levels and it’s much more inneficient to fight really strong foes, and you have limited resources to use overall. I had an okay time, but it was too simple and didn’t engage me enough to keep playing it.
Earth Defense Force 6 is a love letter to the franchise, mixing a compelling story (something I never would’ve thought writing for an EDF game), a ton of gameplay to go through, creativity with new content and a rethread of some old hits with a twist. The most fun I had with an EDF game for sure and a great game all around. I’m really happy they’ve made this!
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.
Automachef is one of these factory-type game where you place structures and mechanisms around to solve puzzles, using conveyor belts, resource generators and combiners in order to fulfill specific requirements and move to the next stage. In this case the theming is around food, having you cook meat and combine it with bread and cheese in order to deliver burgers, for instance. I really didn’t have a good time with it, I found the mechanisms to be a bit too finnicky and the tutorial didn’t prepare me adequately for the rest of the game (or the game just wasn’t clear about what it wanted).
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.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is an amazing anomaly; something that flew over my radar so hard when it came out that I picked up on a whim (while it was free), but it truely made me wish I would’ve bought it on release. I really had no clue what to expect, a card-based RPG featuring Marvel characters made by the XCOM team? I had the (wrong) idea that there would be dating elements too, but chalk it up to superhero fatigue or a lack of interest specifically for deckbuilders, I had ignored it then. Playing it now - with the DLC and all - was a really fun experience.
Tyrion Cuthbert is an interesting take on Ace Attorney, one definitely more on the Visual Novel side of things with less focus on the puzzle elements. Taking the mantle of a defense lawyer in a world full of magic and mysteries, you investigate crimes, find evidence, then tackle witnesses in court trying to find contradictions by pressing statements, thinking through events, and using some mystical powers of yours as well. I had a really good time with it!
Griftlands is a pretty meat roguelike deck-builder RPG where you adventure across a small part of the world, completing quests, negotiating, fighting, improving your abilities while trying to defeat a powerful boss at the end of a few in-game days while unlocking new cards for your next runs whether you fail or succeed. I had a really good time with it, even tho this kind of game isn’t entirely my cup of tea.
Last Epoch is an amazing action RPG, combining mechanics and systems that satisfyingly come together to create an experience where you just want to keep playing, creating new characters, trying more builds and finding out how things work out. The story is nothing to write home about - especially after the twenieth time through - but I’m just playing it nonstop since it came out of early acccess, and boy is it great.
Lootun has a neat concept, fighting monsters automatically with a leveling up team of heroes while you manage their skills, gear and facilities. In practice, I didn’t have a good time with it at all, everything goes too quickly, you’re bombarded with things to look at and the game doesn’t have time to breathe, ultimately giving you the impression that you’re blazing through mechanics without really interfacing with them.
Playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 after Baldurs Gate 3 gave me a deeper understanding on the trajectory that Larian Studio’s games have taken over the years. This is a fine RPG with a deep, engaging storyline and complex systems, but in my tastes it had too many rough spots that could’ve been sanded out a little to make it truely shine. Perhaps the way I’ve played it - multiplayer co-op - didn’t lend itself perfectly to a first experience as well, but that was the way the cookie crumbled!
Patrick’s Parabox is an amazing puzzle game with a simple concept that grows over time in complexity, but always in a fun, logical way. I had a blast with it, almost beating all the included puzzles in the game and thinking about it for a while after the credits were over. It wasn’t -perfect- perfect, but it was damned close and I almost only have good things to say about it. Really good music and sound design too!
For The King is a neat boardgame-like role playing game where you move characters around the world, complete quests, fight monsters, improve your gear, conquer dungeons and level up. I was fully on board for most of the game, really enjoying the battle system, the style and the overall progression, but ultimately didn’t like the board game concept of moving slowly on a huge board over a certain period of turns by throwing movement dice around. I’m not sure if there would’ve been a way to do it differently, of course, so your milleage may vary!
SoP:FFO is a really cool game on paper, a cheesy final fantasy-infused action game having you punch, slash and blast your way through some semblance of the story of Final Fantasy 1 with just enough going slightly differently to really catch your attention. With a neat class system and the ability to customize your combos, special skills and gear, it could’ve been a slam dunk. That being said, I was eventually ground down by the difficulty, the overabundance of gear and the absence of ways, for me, to overcome the challenges the game placed in my way.
Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden is a strategy game, a bit like XCom or Fire Emblem, where you control a cast of mutated animal humanoids as they try to survive and discover the secrets of a post-apocalyptic world. With a larger focus on exploration, setting up ambushes before fights and customization of your characters via skills and equipment, I was getting ready for a grand ol’ time with it. Ultimately my adventures through MYZ:RTE were cut short by a bunch of really difficult fight that I couldn’t figure my way around, which is a darned shame.
Exapunks is another neat little Zachtronics game about programming and solving complex puzzles through an interesting storyline about hacking, capitalism, physical media and the like. Much like their previous games, such as TIS-100, you’ll tackle challenges, write code using a small vocabulary - that still allows a lot to be done - and get ranked amongst your friends and the global player base. I had a good time with it, although I found the back-and-forth between a PDF and the game a bit tedious and got stuck fairly early.
Your Chronicle is a pretty great idle/increment game that focuses on unlocking individual actions and storytelling, alongside a bunch of mechanics that become available over time and some good focus on managing resource production/consumption, party composition and planning. I ultimately couldn’t keep playing it after a certain point when I realized that it required a bit more active playing than what I was willing to put into it, which is a damned shame!
Rise of Industry is a neat looking industry simulation game that went just over my head immediately when I started playing it, even going through the tutorial. I think it might be a product of how sandboxy it felt and how every mechanic and system is available immediately even if you had zero time to understand how any of it works, so I dropped it fairly quickly. I really love its artstyle, tho!