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Amanita Design and their games are something of a cult, and this is how the cult started - with a 6-screen flash (before the remaster) game, in 2003. Well, I'm not sure if you can really call Samorost a game. You just search for hotspots on the screen and more or less randomly click on them until one brings progress in the story (which is about preventing an asteroid from colliding with your hero's home). On the other hand, it's playful and creative. Some of the puzzles' solutions will put a smile on your face, or you'll just go, "Oh, nice." Where Samorost excels are the sound and graphics departments. They create a unique, kind of endearing atmosphere. That's pretty much Amanita's trademark. They regularly collect awards for visuals and sound in their games. One thing to appreciate is that Amanita has managed to evolve with the times. While initially it sustained them to be just different and unique, they realized it couldn't last them forever, so their later titles like Creaks actually get some interesting gameplay on top of the artistic (sometimes perhaps artsy) beauty. Don't look for any of that here, though. But you know what? It's a freebie that you can complete in a few minutes - so try it out for yourself, and if you like it, you're pretty much guaranteed to like their later works, too (perhaps with the exception of Samorost 2).
Back in 2015, dating simulators were deader than a zombie shot through the head, and many hardcore gamers - including me - would "never, like ever", consider playing a match-3 on their desktop. And bang, HuniePot crossbred these two and created one of the best adult games I've ever played. What's the secret? The polished, carefully balanced gameplay. This is the unicorn of a hentai game that actually has a strong game element to it. You might buy it for the naughty pictures, but you'll end up playing it for the challenge. You are this shy nerdy gamer who's absolutely impossible around girls, until one day, you meet a love fairy in a bar, and she just insists on helping you become a babe magnet. The game's light-hearted humor just adds to it being so much fun. One part of the gameplay is a dating sim - you earn girls' affection through presents, remembering stuff about them, and showing you're their soul mate. The dates themselves are increasingly more difficult games of match-3, for which you buy power-ups for the two in-game currencies - affection (Hunie) and money (Munie). Finding the right power-ups for your play style and learning to wait with some moves to execute a fat combo later are key. There are 12 dateable girls, including two unlocked through specific chains of actions (I recommend looking it up in the internet, as it's nowhere near intuitive). Each girl has her own distinctive personality, which is always just one or two notches overdone, in line with the game's sense of humor. Add great graphics, some really nice tunes, and a just-about-right learning curve, and you've got a game that theoretically shouldn't exist but actually does, doing a great job at what it decided to do. Why only 4 stars then? Because I would have loved the story to have an ending, because unlocking the two extra girls is totally unintuitive, and because the game slightly overstayed its welcome with me. Still, it's easily one of top 3 H games you can find out there.
A solid set of mechanics, some clever surprises, a lot of heart and humor, and just about the right amount of loving popcult references - if you like puzzle games and pixel art, Dungeons of Dreadrock may offer you more value for your money than many AAA titles. The game takes the usual "weights & levers, doors & floors" principle and puts it into 2D fantasy settings (journey into the depth of a mountain full of monsters to kill an undead king and save your little brother), having its tongue firmly planted in its cheek and repeatedly wrecking the 4th wall. The gameplay is polished. Longer, thinking-heavy levels are followed by shorter, timing/action-oriented ones. Some levels are linked together. What you do in one has consequences in the other, and sometimes you have to back to the previous room. Also, some enemies you not only shouldn't kill because only they can do something specific in that level, but sometimes you even have to get them to follow you to the next one. Original and entertaining; my only gripe would be that it's not clear which levels are one-off affairs and which are linked. The story, targeting perhaps mid teenage audiences, is predictable but manages to balance the serious plot and the humor quite well. The graphics are what pixel graphics should be: they have a consistent style and hand-drawn feel to them. The audio is probably the weakest part of the game. The SFX are mediocre and only two short tunes really caught my attention. Being an old-fashioned gamer, I played through the game without using the hint feature, and it took me about 11 hours. Overall, I'd say about 75% of the game are standard, solid puzzles, 5% were frustrating, and about 20% were either really rewarding or I just thought, "Hey, this is nice!" Anyway, when it comes to puzzlers, my verdict is usually determined by one single criterion. And I'm happy to say that throughout the vast majority of the game I simply had fun.
When I saw the trailers for the game, I fell in love with the art style and the atmosphere that oozed from every note and pixel. Having completed the game, I have to say I'd prefer it to be a cartoon movie instead. The graphics are every bit as stylish as the trailers and screenshots suggest. The soundtrack, too, is as atmospheric as the snippets in the trailers hint, and the callers who present their stories at Radio Nostalgia from Mars indirectly highlight some of the problems of our civilization and where it might be heading. And maybe that's the problem - Golf Club Wasteland (which was the original name) so much focuses on its artistic direction that it neglects the game part. The beautiful idea - playing a round of golf with ruins of the Earth civilization as the backdrops, while discovering what brought your hero back from Mars - is marred by the second half of the game feeling more like a tiresome chore than fun. The playability lacks polish. You do get slightly better over time but never really feel in control of your swing. So your best chance is to find some graphic element for each stroke to aim your cursor at (the corner of this platform, the middle of that beam) until you find one that mostly leads to your ball landing where you need it to, and gradually trial and error your way through each of the 34 levels this way. Unfortunately, my impressions of the gameplay were so bad that the game's ending (even though I could see what the authors were trying to achieve) lacked any catharsis for me. Paradoxically, you find "the medium is the message" as one of the graffiti in the game. I can't shake the feeling a game was either the wrong choice here or it needed more effort and testing invested.
Project: Mirror is a naughty puzzle game where you unlock very short (about 3-5 seconds) hentai clips for every 3 levels you complete. The hentai content isn't bad, but it doesn't stand out, either. What does stand out, unfortunately, is the game, or rather lack thereof. It's the usual match-3 with some extra mechanics. Even though I forced myself to complete it, there's simply nothing I could recommend about it. The gameplay is very random - there are levels where if the random number generator doesn't cooperate, you just don't have a chance. What's even worse, you never really feel in control of the gameplay because you never know which way gravity is going to work in that particular level (where new gems come from and in which direction they fall if you match others), and in which order the conflicting game mechanics will be executed, often resulting in carefully prepared combos not happening. The worst thing, though, is that you just don't have fun. Knowing that you're in the hands of the random generator, you can't really see a learning curve and enjoy gitting gud. And there's no fun in the game mechanics themselves (if you want to play a nice puzzle game, though not naughty, you may want to check out the oldie but goldie Pushover, where every level is a work of game design art). Graphics-wise, some bonuses are so ambiguously colored that it takes a lot of getting used to to differentiate yellow from orange and red, and blue from violet. So you constantly ask yourself: can I match these or not? As for music, there are 100 levels, and only two rather shortish tunes. By the 30th level I had to turn the music off and stick to sound effects only. And finally, there are tiny bugs. Even if I didn't succeed at getting three stars in a level, the level map would still say I got all stars. And in some of the later levels I couldn't execute moves in the leftmost column. Simply put: if you think that erotic games should have a game element in them, look elsewhere.
The Only Traitor is a side story that in the end becomes one of the story inputs in the main game. The DLC's main character travels with his car, looking for a shelter from the Second Visitation. First of all: gameplay-wise, it is better than the main game. You can see that the devs carefully listened to player feedback and removed or heavily changed the most problematic parts... while introducing new issues. The management bit while travelling is now gone. You can just learn the story of your current companion and craft ammo and medkits and then decide it's time to arrive to the next destination. The enemies are more varied than in the base game. Fighting now requires more precision than patience, and you learn more of the backstory, and in more sizeable chunks (which helps). And finally, the DLC's soundtrack is, like, totally awesome. However, there are issues, too. Even though the protagonist's baseball bat is a stronger weapon than Edward's fists in the main game, I was happier with fighting for Edward. I knew exactly how to use the fists, while with the bat, I never learned for sure how the swinging worked. Often it happened that an enemy that I'd normally one-shoot would surprise me with surviving the attack. Also, charging the strong melee attack failed even more frequently than in the base game (originally, I blamed my old mouse, until I found out that other players had the same problem). Also, even though we learn more about the First Visitation and the Council, especially the role of Arthur Vane now makes even less sense than in the base game. Unless you simply accept that there's no point trying to understand alien logic. But then again, why bother learning a story that doesn't make human sense? Technically, The Only Traitor improves on the main game in most areas, has a great soundtrack and explains more of the story. If you liked the base game, you should definitely get it. If not, it wouldn't change your mind.
Your reaction to Sumatra: Fate of Yandi will probably be driven by two factors: whether you like point and click adventures, and what's your view of gaming. If you love gaming for the sheer escapism, living in different worlds, and heroic deeds, give Sumatra a wide berth. If you think that just like any other work of art, games should (at least occasionally) reflect the world around us, then it might be the right game for you, as it has a strong environmental message. Yandi and Ramdan, two fellow workers and best friends, are sent to haul some logs to the factory. Following a landslide and some hours of unconsciousness on a log floating down a river, Yandi finds himself in the middle of a rainforest and has to save himself, find Ramdan, and discover something evil and something magnificent in the process. Point and click equals pixel art. Here it's done right. Though blocky, the graphics have a unique and consistent feel - and once you accept the artistic concept, they're pretty immersive. The audio is mostly silence or ambient sounds, to make the key scenes of the game when music kicks in stand out more. And I didn't encounter a single bug. Difficulty-wise, it's on the easy side. It wants to deliver the message, and so it wants you to win. It doesn't flood your inventory, and most of the puzzles are easy, with just a few medium ones thrown in. It might be used to introduce a friend to the genre or playing together with your kids. The story gets the better the closer you're getting to its end. Initially, the game pushes its message too hard. I often thought, "Yawn, I know what you're trying to say, can we move on, please?" For a while, I even thought of abandoning it. But once you complete the first act with the natives, it took off. Towards the end I was really drawn into the plot, and the (though predictable) ending had me "Yesss!"-ing. Sumatra definitely isn't a game for everyone. I'm not even sure whether it's a game for me, but I'm glad I gave it a chance.
106 years after the "First Visitation" - probably (not surely) a not-so-friendly encounter with an alien civilization - the Earth is (again) flooded with capsules containing a gas that turns most people into monsters. You will have to travel with an experimental train to try to help launching Earth's defense. Whether you'll enjoy The Final Station depends on whether you can enjoy a game that has both stellar and atrocious sides. Tons of heart and effort went into it, but the result isn't perfect. If you go for it, get The Only Traitor DLC, too, as it's better than the main game. Where The Final Station excels is atmosphere (6 stars out of 5). The mystery, the terror, the suspense! The graphics are simple, yet create a vivid world, the story is mysterious, and whenever music kicks in, it amplifies your feelings. Plus the authors do their utmost not to tell the story through the overclichéd "found diary entries". The game never explains its mechanics - you'll have to discover them on your own (warning - holding the right mouse button fails at times). Gameplay consists of railroad travelling and scavenging for supplies and ammo at the stations. The travel part has issues, as your passengers tell you their stories, helping to build the story arch, but you can't really listen to them, having to tend to their wounds and hunger and maintain the train systems. I ended up doing each travel level twice - first learning the story, then restarting and getting it right. The station part is the game's backbone. Fighting the monsters mostly with your fists, as ammo is scarce, can be intense. But there are frequent checkpoints, so you can progress reasonably fast. The story is great to get into and puzzle over it while playing but kinda falls apart in hindsight. Also, I would have certainly and strongly preferred a different ending, but that's a matter of personal taste. Still, I have a bizarre feeling that I would have liked The Final Station more if I had never finished it.
Chuchel is and isn't a computer game, in which Chuchel - the main protagonist - just wants to eat a yummy cherry, and Kekel - something like a pet of his - either sabotages it, or helps Chuchel when some other monsters steal the cherry from them. It's one of a kind; you you could as well rate it with one star ("it's not a game") or five ("it's so cool!"). It 100% relies on comedy, so this marks the first time that when playing something, even when I thought I'd found the solution to a puzzle, I wanted to try all the wrong first answers first just to see what happens. All that done in cartoon graphics that support the concept really well, underlined by a great soundtrack. Chuchel is not a computer game in the meaning of challenging your wits and skills. You just click on different items or monsters and wait what happens. Sometimes these actions are chained in a meaningful order as a puzzle, but as often it's just trial and error. There's no story or even story progression to speak of, either. Just as soon as Chuchel gets hold of the cherry, something or someone steals it from him again. Chuchel can be called a game because it's extremely playful. It's a game in the sense in which inventing a story with your kid is a game. Anything and everything is possible in its dreamy world, and each level is a mini comedy. One relies on you putting on different hats that change the world around you. In another, you'll have to get rid of a monkey by preventing eight froglike creatures from croaking (and in the beginning you won't know that's what you need to do). Etc. Ultimately, it all comes down to whether you'll like the game's sense of humor. With me, it was slightly amiss (even though I enjoyed it and don't regret the purchase), but I was also lucky to see a friend of mine play it, and he was laughing hysterically at almost all of the animated gags, which added to the comedy. So maybe see just a bit of gameplay at YT to see whether it's up your alley, and if so, have fun!
Tyrian 2000 is a vertically scrolling 2D shoot'em up in the most classical vein. And your impressions from it will probably vary depending on when you stop playing. It starts off strong. Lots of enemies and upgradable equipment (weapons, shield, generator, the spaceship itself), graphical variability. The story is told through data cubes that you in part receive between missions and in part get from destroyed enemies. Plus, to encourage experimenting with the weaponry, you can sell your equipment at the same price for which you bought it. The authors just do their utmost to give you a great shmupping experience. So why only three stars? Well, the game is divided into 5 chapters, and all of the above works about till the end of chapter 3. Then the game starts to overstay its welcome. Ultimately, space shmups are about two things: weapon upgrades and progressively more epic boss fights. Near the end of chapter 3 I reached a point when I upgraded my weapons to the max and trying different ones didn't really change anything about fighting strategy. The other equipment worked the "buy whatever's the most expensive" way. Even worse, bosses felt like I'd seen them all before. No more surprising designs or attack patterns. And the final boss was a straight anti-climax: I killed it before it even fully arrived onto the screen! Also, chapter 4 and 5 introduced more humor to the story and even broke the 4th wall. This element was what kept me interested through the rest of the game (was there some surprising, mindboggling twist coming?), but unfortunately, the loose ends never got tied. Tyrian 2000 has impressive 61 levels. If it had about 40 and just a bit more interesting bosses near the end, I would have loved it to bits. As it is, I'd rather recommend you Jets'n'Guns Gold by Rake in Grass (2006), which does successfully what Tyrian 2000 attempted 5 years earlier. But hey, Tyrian is a freebie, so try it out for yourself and have as much fan as you deem suitable. :)