Monster Sanctuary blends a 2D-sidescrolling pokemon-like game with metroidvania elements. Use your mosnters to traverse terrain, fight your battles, and overcome all! I really enjoyed the way you unlocked the map through different monsters and got to unravel further puzzles as you… explored. The game is a bit short, but absolutely worth checking out! I don't believe I 100%'d it and may have had some other main content to do, it's been a while between playing the game and writing this review--but I can easily recommend it to anyone who finds it remotely interesting.
While it took me a minute to click with the game, the way Hyper Light Drifter allows you to immerse yourself in its world and pick up the narrative from its somewhat abstract presentation is truly incredible. The action is snappy and… rewarding, with just enough content to leave you fully satisfied without any unnecessary fluff to slow you down. Also a standout soundtrack that you'll keep listening to for hours and hours after credits roll. Truly not a second wasted!
Picked up as part of a Humble Bundle. I expected some decent hack-n-slash gameplay, but Soulstice over-delivered with impressive combos, varied weapons and mechanics, and an honestly incredible fixed-perspective camera system that blew me away for how intuitive and useful it felt.… The soundtrack is amazing and motivates you to absolutely kick ass every step of the way, but what blew me away and makes me still rave about this game to this day was the narrative. Soulstice establishes itself against a simple medieval fantasy + magic backdrop but draws you in with compelling characters, developments and themes. I never expected that but it truly became this title's standout success above an otherwise plenty impressive package.
It's incredible that this soundtrack comes with a story. It's even more incredible that this story comes with a video game. Beacon Pines is essentially a visual novel, but you won't want an auto-clicker for it (as someone who isn't usually into… visual novels, I sometimes admittedly do). The game has excellent pacing, never overstays its welcome, and I had zero frustrations to complain about. I'm still thinking back positively on this experience 2 years after playing it, still holding other games up to this as a standard of comparison. I hope you'll enjoy it just as much as I have.
600 hours on Steam, 1000 hours on iOS. It's that good. Slay the Spire's rich gameplay will overcome any initial reaction to its simple art style. The challenging (but optional!) ascension difficulty modifiers are sure to compel hundreds (or in my case,… thousands) of hours of play time as you explore hundreds of cards, synergies and master the unique bosses and elites of the Spire. After a very fruitful Early Access period, StS includes an impressive soundtrack, four unique and compelling character classes, and up to 20 optional difficulty increments. You can even opt-in during your runs to a bonus Act to really challenge your deckbuilding skills by forgoing certain benefits in your run! Throw in mods for PC and you easily will find 5-10 new character classes to fall in love with ranging from Kill La Kill to Initial D (yes, with drifting) to Hearthstone to Touhou to completely original concepts like the Gardener. Or flip the game on its head via the Downfall mod and play AS the enemies fighting against player-character builds! The well of content runs DEEP in the base game and is near-infinitely deeper thanks to an abundance of high quality mods provided by a very generous and creative community.
This was a blast to play with my friend group. For anyone who wants to have another game similar to Factorio to play with friends I would highly recommend it. The threats presented in Mindustry are pretty different from the Factorio enemies.… In Factorio, you can pretty comfortably rely on one defense strategy and offensives that are launched by you are either completely ineffectual or overwhelming. (This is a pretty large generalization on my part, I realize that.) But in Mindustry I think a bit more thought needs to be put into balancing offense, defense, and economy. In Mindustry I felt the time crunch a lot more that in Factorio... (Though, that's probably because I mostly play on train worlds in Factorio.) It was a lot of fun working with friends under this time crunch to conquer a map. Cons for me would be that it looks pretty ugly, haha. I tend to zone out a bit looking at the graphics. It can be difficult to understand what the graphics in the game are attempting to represent.
Great game that gets you to think about language and communication in general. The in game journal is a fantastic help in keeping track of your translations as you go through the game. Throwing out wild guesses for what a symbol could… mean was good fun. It's "use your words!" the game. In an age of isolation where we would often desire to isolate ourselves I think the message of Chants of Sennaar is timely. As for cons, there were a couple of instances where I couldn't find puzzle elements to interact with them. There wasn't a great way to figure out where these elements are without wandering around (and the in game indicator for one of these was a bit misleading.) So I did end up looking up a guide to figure out where these two things were. The developers have a hints thread in the Steam discussion which helped me out for one of these.
I've bought and played this game (and all the dlc) on multiple platforms. I've platinum'd it on PS5, which requires playing one puzzle every day for 100 days. This is a must play if you're looking for something calm, relaxing, and stress-free.… For Pete's sake, I've started organizing more in real life because of this game!
I firstly met this game through gamepass some years ago(it is still there, so a good way to test it if not sure about buying). I thought it would be just a silly generic poke clone, but I was very wrong, this… game simply is incredible, seeing it again here even made me want to play it again. The mix of using metroidvania mechanics mixed with the monsters is made spectacularly, a must play for fans of this kind of game
It's not a bad little game, you can tell that a lot of heart was put into it and for the most part I enjoyed it. The levels are nice and varied with great backgrounds and ambient sound and music. The puzzles… aren't hard but they are varied, some can be completed with 3 adjustments and others take a decent amount of fiddling around to get the puzzle to complete even though the object is clearly "finished" and you just need all of the surfaces to be within the necessary 1cm boundaries. The only other issue I ran into is that the lack of distinct borders or outlines can make orientation of the pieces a chore, you have no easy way to judge depth outside of rotating the entire thing which you might not want to do based on the piece you are manipulating. A minor gripe is having to go back to the little gumball machine to get another level, it's cute but it kind of breaks the flow and doesn't add much aside from that slight aesthetic. Overall a good little game to puzzle over while listening to a podcast.
I came to the Spelunky party later than most, somewhere in the 2016-2017 era. It was initially launched in its HD form in 2012 to Xbox Live arcade, and I had already played games like Limbo and Braid through the Arcade feature… and didn't want another sidescroller. Man, was that ever a miscalculation. Even though Limbo and Braid are fantastic in their own right, they are limited, 2-5 hour experiences. I must have over 150+ hours in Spelunky alone, not including its sequel (which improves on this game in every way and is 10/10 in its own right). This isn't to say that playtime is equal to quality or value, but only to illustrate that even with 150 hours, I would still go back and play this with enthusiasm and most likely continue to find new and interesting niches of this incredible game. This game was apparently the turning point for many developers; it gave rise to incorporating more "Rouge" like elements into their design. Once they saw Mossmouth's application of the procedurally generated levels, random events, the 1-1 restart instead of the traditional checkpointing in the action-platformer genre, the niche gameplay of 'Rouge-likes' exploded. It spawned an entire sub-genre that then also changed and grew, things we now commonly see as rouge-lites. (This was something that at the time was seen as heretical to OG Rouge fans, but the genre moved forward regardless.) But don't mistake the forerunner as something to only acknowledge, play this game. It is difficult, chaotic, and downright cruel sometimes, but even despite the challenge, its gameplay and controls carrying you forward as you learn everything about it. Eventually learning the secrets of the world to delve even deeper. The reward is a game that is tuned to always respond in a predictable way, even if it may predictably lead to your demise. (Those stupid bats!)
Wargroove's strategy kept me entertained but didn't enthrall me to the point of completion. The pixel graphics are well done and bring a lot of production value despite the limited fidelity. I remember various scenarios and characters from the campaign years later,… so I have to give it a thumbs up on narrative as well even though it wasn't revolutionary by any stretch. Overall decent, bigger fans of Fire Emblem may enjoy it even more than I did.
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