Heroes III: Horn of the Abyss is, without a doubt, one of the best mods made for any game, ever. It has single-handedly revived my interest in this decades-old game and, when combined with the HD+ mod, has become a perma-install on any computer I own due to the enormous amount of fun I get out of such a small space investment. If you own HOMM3 from GOG, you have basically no excuse not to install this; the mod allows you to play 'au naturelle' at will if the rebalancings, and the pirates, and all the loads of other cool new free stuff they added, somehow doesn't tickle your fancy.
Shogun Showdown is turn-based roguelike where you pick a character with a unique ability and use a 'deck' of 2-6 attacks or other ablities on cooldown to battle your way through a selection of random encounters and minibosses to your showdown with the game's boss, the Shogun, Slay the Spire-style. Unlike Slay the Spire your character controls by keyboard and moves and acts alongside the monsters, making the ability to plan out moves ahead and tactical movement a premium. Not much else to say here, gameplay loop is fun and rewards comboes and a little bit of thinking. I guess my main issue with Shogun Showdown is that it explicitly competes with Slay the Spire for the same parts of my brain who wants to play turn-based roguelikes, and while Shogun Showdown's gameplay means it its different, it can't avoid niche overlap and that leads me to automatically make unfavourable comparisons. You 100% are dependent on luck to make no-damage or low-turn runs due to the random spawning of monsters, your ability to construct a good character is more randomised due to the way the game hands out new tiles and skills, and this also means that unlocking new tiles and skills from the game's shop will sometimes outright weaken your overall performance because it waters out your pool of tiles and skills with ones that simply aren't as universally useful as the ones you already have (seriously, the 'use character's ability in both directions' ability is so useful that unlocking almost any new green skill overall makes you worse off). Also, your ability to real-time speedrun a turn-based game is given more prominence in the game's progression system, which professionally annoys me. Yeah, I know you only *need* four criteria out of five to unlock the third starting weapon set, but it's still there. Prominent. Mocking me. Overall, recommended to the turn-based roguelike fan crowd, especially those who like pixel art and Japan. Absolutely try the demo first though.
Curse of Monkey Island was one of the first point-and-click adventure games I ever played, way back on one of the first Windows computers I owned in the misty distant past of 1997. It remains, twenty years later, one of my very favourite ones despite having played both its predecessors, its sequels, and most of the Lucasart catalogue since. The soundtrack is brilliant, the voicework and characters hilarious, the puzzles intuitive and fun, and the Sid Meier's Pirates minigame in act 3 makes for a fun little genre shift interlude. About the only complaint I can muster for this release is that an mp3 soundtrack is not included in the extras.
