I can forgive the stuff that will be fixed by patches over the next few weeks, but my complaints are more fundamental. The game is too grindy. It wastes your time on stuff that isn't fun, and that ruins the whole experience. Firstly, I've never seen an FPS with so many junk items. For every minute of combat, you'll spend two minutes looting the environment. If you don't collect the junk items, you can't craft or upgrade your equipment, so psychologically it's hard ignore all these prompts to pick up ashtrays and soda cans. It's really dull shoving your face in bookcases and briefcases to pick mundane crap up after every battle. The game would be much better without collectable items all over the environment, but unfortunately they balanced crafting/upgrading around having so much junk around, so I doubt they're going to fix it. Secondly, so many of the upgrades are incremental: 10% extra damage, 2% chance of electric discharge, etc. Once you find your preferred weapon type, most character/equipment advances won't affect the gameplay, but you'll be forced to make 1000s of decisions on whether you want to sacrifice 0.1 shots per second for 1.7 more DPS, or whether you want to wear an uglier t-shirt because it gives you 0.6 more defense. These decisions cost time and effort, but rarely give you the satisfaction of having actually improved your experience. The story, exploration and FPS parts are genuinely fun, but it's hard to enjoy them when they pad the game so much with unnecessary loot management.
It gets 2 stars because I made it to the end without rage-quitting, but overall it's not very good. You'll probably want to play with a walkthrough. The puzzles / interactions needed to proceed aren't complete moon logic, but just have to be done in precise ways with no real hints. You'll get stuck a lot, and have to try every combination of interactions until one succeeds. The story is really disconnected and doesn't make much sense. There were so many NPCs with limited dialog options, and interesting bits of scenery with minimal descriptions... It's like they were actually avoiding every opportunity to add some flavor to the game world and characters.
Dwarrows is a mix of different styles of non-violent gameplay, all woven into one cohesive whole. Puzzle solving, pet collection, exploration, questing and city building. There's always lots of goals to work towards, and being able to switch to some other task at any time means that it doesn't get boring. Overall it plays really well and has ~15 hours of content. However, it could have used more time in early access. Even though it has heaps of content and you can tell they've already spent a lot of time on making content, there are still aspects of the game that feel completely unpolished. It has broken achievements, a frustratingly slow and repetitive minigame for pet taming, a game-breaking bug near the ending (I can't get the queen to visit because I completed the quests in an unexpected order), and just generally annoying pacing where at multiple points you can't even make any further progress until you find certain hidden objects that allow you to expand your resource storage. So overall, there's a lot of fun to be had, the bugs/lack of polish doesn't ruin the game but it's enough for me to deduct a star. Probably worth buying in a couple months once they've fixed it.
Maize is a pretty average adventure game. The story revolves around its attempts at comedy, but it all just ends up with characters calling each other stupid. That's it. The script repeats "you're an idiot", "this is so stupid" and "moron!" over and over as if it were a punch line. If you have the sense of humor of an 8-year old, you'll probably love this game! Everyone else: don't bother.
The screenshots flat-out lie about the type of game this is. It looks like an over-the-shoulder third-person action-adventure, but most of those screenshots are completely fudged and can't be replicated in game. The game is played by hacking and looking through security cameras. Virtually everything you see in the game has a grainy security camera filter on it, and the camera angles are all from where you'd expect security cameras to be(corners of rooms), not positioned at eye-level or over characters' shoulders. Republique is basically a point-and-click game where you're trying to guide the main character to sneak past the many many guards with just a radio connection. You're not in control, you click on places and items to tell the character to go and interact with them. It feels very detached and every time they get caught by a guard you curse the control scheme. The story seems good, but IMO it's too little story with too much frustrating gameplay.
I love adventure games, but never really enjoyed the modern "your choices matter" story-based adventure games, or the puzzle games masquerading as adventure games. Obduction isn't like that. It's almost pure adventure. You're continuously finding new stuff and unlocking new areas, and the game just keeps growing and growing the more you play it. It's an absolute delight that feels like it will never end. If you haven't played any Myst games but you like adventure games, you're in for a unique and amazing experience like nothing you've ever felt before. If you have played the Myst games, I can assure you that Obduction is a worthy spiritual successor. Even though I adore Uru and I see it through my nostalgia goggles as one of the best games of all time, I feel Obduction has surpassed it.
The Feeble Files just isn't fun to play. The puzzles often require combining unrelated items until they work, or repeating the same action several times until you get a new result. It's very easy to get stuck, with no hints and no obvious new actions to try. You'll quickly get sick of hearing "Those weren't created to work together" every time you try to use the wrong item on something. Good luck finishing this game without a walkthrough. If you've ever played a LucasArts or Sierra adventure game, your standards probably have already been raised too high for you to appreciate this game. There's just too much tedium per ounce of enjoyment.
