Great indie title with an interesting visual style that marries cute "Happy friends" animal characters with the macabre, violent tendencies of cult management. Sometimes the visuals in dungeons can make fighting a bit tricky as background elements obscure enemies or colors are too saturated to see things. With lots of reds and vibrant colors, enemies can blend into the bushes or trees and your character can as well, making accidental damage a not uncommon experience. Luckily, there's no damage on touch! The other aspect that hurts the game is the management aspect. As the cult grows so do their needs and soon you won't be able to get by with just grass, a few measly fish or what have you. This is what brings down the game for me and made me drop it after a few hours after Cult of the Lamb launched. The dungeon delving is sidelined at times in order to fish over and over to make food (that's more filling that grass or berries). Since everyone needs to eat or they'll die, it can feel like the devs are padding out the game time by making food ressources difficult to obtain (since recipes are bit strict). At the end of the day, I'm still having fun with it, but I have gripes which potential players should be warned about. I'll keep playing to see if my concerns are rectified by some later buildings or if certain rituals make the cultists more independent, but I doubt it.
Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story had me intrigued because there were several titles in the series, and the Spy story spinoff, with references to spy films, stealth games and so on seemed fun enough to try out. I got the game on sale and tried it out. The cartoony designs are appealing enough, as are the puns on potatoes. The basic premise of the game is that you run a spy agency, recruit spies with different strenghts, train them up and send them on missions. Rinse and repeat as the game gets harder. However, where the game falls apart is that as the missions get harder, so too do the punishments for failure. Whenever you're about to start a new mission you've got to pick a "route" that matches as closely as possible the strengths of your various spies. You can mitigate weaknesses somewhat using tools you develop, and use certain abilities to improve your odds. However, the cost of getting the information on each obstacle (a door, camera, bystander, guard, etc), becomes increasingly more expensive, very often outweighing the reward. As a result of this, even 1 well researched but still risking operation can cost you time, money and all your spy tools and sends your spy into a recovery phase. Often your best chance is to unlock additional routes and hope they match your spies better, but I've found that later in the game their requirements are too high (usually because the obstacles are more lenient, or vice versa). Either way, in my first playthrough I went bankrupt twice, and game over'ed when I failed the main mission because I was trying to clear side quests to get enough money to train up to the main quest, and my "best" spy got caught because all the buffs from the tools couldn't offset his weakest attribute. Visually speaking, the cartoon graphics are alright, but the missions which you'd think would be the main attraction, is relegated to a tiny screen in the bottom left corner. Audio is sufficient and the story is adequate but nothing thrilling.
