Quasimorph is a turn based grimdark breach-and-enter dungeon crawler roguelike with a reputation for difficulty. The setting is grimdark and the game reflects that. This is a game where you choose between using an inventory slot for food, or using that slot for more weapons so you can eat the corpses of the people kill. This is a setting where people sometimes get a minor injury, and this causes a hallucinatory demon to materialize within them which MAKES THEIR BODY EXPLODE, and that is probably only in the top 3 worst problems humanity is dealing with. Imagine. Just imagine living in this universe. The game is also known for being hard. In that discussion, my argument is that while the perceived difficulty is high, the game is about calculated gambling and mitigating risk. The game becomes easier once you learn all the tricks and mechanics. Every mission is a marathon. The AI mostly plays by the same rules as you, but they significantly outnumber you. And a single untreated ailment or status effect can end your run. So a single wound at early in the mission will still kill you if left untreated. Avoid fair exchanges. You can ignore the odds, blundering into every room with clown shoes and a roaring machinegun. The only thing you gain is that the game gets harder, but you should do as you please. In summary, while there are times when the game boils down to a diceroll, I think the gameplay, graphics, sound design and UI do an admirable job creating an atmosphere to contextualize that diceroll and make it interesting. With that in mind, I really enjoyed Quasimorph and cautiously recommend it to others.
Cryptmaster is a word guessing game that relies on your mastery of English. Actually, there are helpful accessibility options to allow even someone with a language impairment to get through, options which I did not use because I am a master linguinist-- no, I assure you linguinist is a real word. It's someone who cooks pasta and it's definitely not a word I made up. Come on, it's ten letters that HAS to be the answer, please please just let me have this. Visually it has a clear and beautiful style, where everything is black and white because presumably your eyeballs have long since rotted and this makes you colorblind. Or maybe it's the gloomy subsepulchural environment. Subsepulchral I swear that's a word, eleven letters what other word could POSSIBLY have two U's and two L's. The sound design likewise delivers a sort of homely auditory sound design. Auditory, eight letters, what do you mean that's the answer it has eight letters! In short, I enjoyed Cryptmaster. You probably need to enjoy words and English to like it, caveat emptor.
An empire sim where you use decisions and agents to balance stats to make progress, this game has dialogue issues. By that I mean, the dialogue is good and well written, great even. But there's no way to turn it off on repeat playthroughs and like 50% of it is tutorial or exposition. It's that Genshin Impact approach to dialogue, where there's a trillion partitions of text and while there's technically a skip button, it just takes you to the next partition OF THE SAME DIALOGUE. Or maybe you get to advance to another menu, and it hits you with another wall. Sometimes you have to click OK between partitions, or you have to select one of two options but neither option seems to have any impact. There is no true non-neutered skip option, and I don't think the toothless, watered down skip we do have is good enough for getting through the mountains upon mountains of text I've already seen. Another frustrating element is the balance of endgame resource sinks. I guess there have to be resource sinks in any game where you accumulate resources, but I dislike how the empress' soul keeps rising in costs and how each season the merchants bleed me for either a huge amount of reputation or a huge amount of income. "But that's required to keep the game tense and engaging, otherwise our players stopped being invested." I'm not a game designer, so that isn't my problem. I don't like this solution. In summary, this title is okay and often steers into even being kinda good. It's just you lose five minutes or more of your life everytime you replay sections, and the endgame is designed to waste still more of your time.
Nowadays it is rare for a game to impress, much less engross. The big games in the industry are sold on hype and tedious grind. You spend 8000 hours collecting stupidcoins to get a skin, congratulations, the studio just closed the servers and you lost everything. Rimworld always sold itself on a different premise, priding itself as a storytelling simulator. The base game had its moments for sure. Royalty never really grabbed me, but ideology was good and biotech was better. Anomaly on the other hand has me on an upwards lift of constant increasing captivation. As I build my same old colony, I find myself naturally roleplaying an SCP containment facility and becoming further and further engrossed in the Anomaly content. Immersion is high with this one. Then I encountered one of the more complicated new monsters and embarked on a 36 ingame hour journey trying to deal with the threat. In the end, I was succesful. But I suspect that, even though I'm an inveterate savescummer, this was one of the few occasions where I'd be okay with losing a few of my lackeys, or even having my entire colony picked apart. 5/5 stars, I had high expectations and this expansion exceeded them.
I always struggle with the GOG review system. Actually, Steam is no better. Online storefronts everywhere flatten information, consumers forget and ignore nuanced reviews, everyone is (un)happy. I don't know what 5/5 stars means. You don't know either. I had a good time with Hero's Hour, a HOMM-like turn based strategy RPG with a name that alliterates. If I say it's worth 10$, that's almost a backhanded compliment - ten bucks is nothing. Who worries about spendin gten bucks? What kind of cheap, okayish entertainment can be had for ten bucks? But if I say it's NOT worth ten bucks, if I claim that this product is worth either more, or heaven forbid, less than that perfunctory stack of a thousand pennies, things only get more out of whack. You'd have to really, really hate a 10$ game to give it 4/5 stars, at which point you might as well give it 1/5 stars or risk your review being drowned out by the noise. Which means in practice that everyone who slightly dislikes it gives it 1/5 reviews, because the game commited the capital sin of failing to deliver a perpetual entertainment machine. Conversely, if I give it 5/5 stars that must mean the game is literally flawless, a product so perfect that bards will sing about in the 23rd century and beyond. A 5/5 rating must mean the game cooked breakfast for me, cured my back pains and materialized a blonde double D beautiful Swedish girl as my girlfriend (or an attractive partner of any gender or orientation, as you prefer). I don't know, friend. I liked the game. It has like, units and spells, and you can use them against enemies who also have units and spells. Sometimes there's boats. Hero Hour fulfilled my expectations as a consumer.
After 200 hours this is one of my favorite games of all time. The first 40 hours I spent mostly starting new campaigns and getting my ass kicked. The learning curve was steep. There are multiple systems that the game doesn't immediately call attention to, that will send your empire into an unwinnable death spiral after 40 turns or 100 turns. Never mind defeating AI opponents, you have to *stabilize* your nation. You need to keep water and food production up, taxes flowing in, and doing things like building armies or firing/hiring leadership risks creating long term deficits that are difficult to recover from. Not to mention, variety is immense. You might start on a planet surrounded by an endless deathtide of neutrals threatening to overrun you from the start, or barely any neutrals at all. You might face loads of minor or major nations, or maybe it's largely just empty desert out there. You might struggle for every drop of water, or (with the dlc) start on an island surrounded by an ocean that spans the entire planet. Different playthroughs have you engage with completely different systems. The combat reminded me of Hearts of Iron. You build units with a set of customization choices to alter their combat role and performance. Infantry tends to be defensive and then as you progress up the tech tree you unlock offensive and specialized options, tanks, planes, etc. Perhaps the meat of the game and (looking at other reviews) the greatest source of frustration is managing your leadership. Your empire requires leaders, quickly adding up to ten, twenty, thirty people. A single badly chosen leader can have terrible consequences 50 turns later. I think this is where the game can stand to be less opaque and better tutorialized. If you like what you've read so far, I can't recommend this game enough. Shadow Empire is epic and wonderful and I love it. But I do suggest finding a tutorial for the leadership management.
While not truly amazing, Hard West was a solid and memorable experience. At times, it was superior to others in the turn based squad management genre. For a system based on 'luck', it actually has next to no luck involved and is much more reliable than Xcom. Hard West sidestepped much of the frustration of its contemporaries in the genre, while still providing an experience on par. The card system was an interesting spin, the story was engaging and the atmosphere was immersive. All in all, I had a good time, 4/5 stars, would recommend.
Opus magnum is a wonderful puzzle game that doesn't require you to grind 5000 hours or pay your way through a bunch of DLC to get the full experience. Just start it up and start building. I love it for that.
