Dagon and its DLC are word for word adaptions of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Certainly faithful to the source material, but this treatment doesn't lend itself to a particularly compelling game. The graphics are good enough, but it's just an incredibly simplistic affair - you're presented with a static location and get to hear a paragraph of the story, then spin around the camera a bit (you can't physically move) in order to find the icon for the next paragraph. For some pieces of trivia about the author you have some pixel hunting to do, but there are no puzzles or even the basics of a walking sim here, and there's no way to go back if you misclick and accidentally press for the story to continue instead of unlocking trivia (sometimes they're very close to each other). Given that the base game is cheap, the DLC is cheap and helps charity and the narrator is quite good - and the source material is excellent - there's some enjoyment to be found here, but I'd have enjoyed a bit more creative freedom in favor of gameplay than what is essentially an illustrated radio play where you have to push a button to continue after every sentence. Some editing to remove visual descriptions - as the player can see the locations - and the occasional Myst-like puzzle (there are at least a few events in the stories here that would be suitable for puzzles) could've made this a considerably better game, and some of his stories - such as those of the Dream Cycle - could even lend themselves quite well for a game adaption.
The game evokes the likes of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Off World Trading Company, Aven Colony, Surviving Mars and other colony builders. I'm admittedly only a handful of hours in, so haven't seen the full extent of the tech tree, but it doesn't seem like it'll get quite as deep as any of the others mentioned. There's a need to balance population happiness, energy consumtion and environmental impact, maintaining your colonies with repairs and cleaning, with occasional disasters/events if you let structure conditions drop too low or pollution go too high. It does not feel like there's an underlying model as much as a handful of bars moving up and down though, but it's enjoyable enough, even though it doesn't get close to the simulations of some of the competitors. On a technical level, the game runs decently, with a fairly clean interface and good graphics. I've been getting occasional lockups that last for a few seconds, but the game resumes afterwards. The lock ups got me worried enough to make lots of manual saves, but it never fully crashed, so I didn't have to revert to them. The tech tree has both permanent research and "licenses", which only last for the current mission and uses a separate currency which you get during specific events in the story. You figure the system out quickly enough, but I still wouldn't mind if the tutorial was better at explaining it. The tutorial also glosses over some pretty important mechanics on how buildings interact with each other and need to be adjacent to each other in order to be upgraded. Thankfully they're easy to relocate after they've been built, so errors can easily be fixed, but if the system was explained better you wouldn't make these mistakes in the first place. All in all, I think this is a good game. No glaring flaws, but nothing that stands out as great either. It's cheap and worth the money if you enjoy the genre or are interesting in trying a simpler one out before diving into the more complex titles.
I didn't play much of with the previous New World, so I won't compare the two. Meridian: Squad 22 is a single player only RTS, which may concern some people, as that severely limits the replayability. The game mostly makes up for it with a solid campaign mode - in which the titular Squad 22 arrives at the planet Meridian to look for missing colonists - as well as two additional modes. First there's Squad Missions, akin to Command & Conquer's commando missions, where you have a set number of units to complete the mission objectives and which requires some tactical planning to get past tricky defenses; Then there's the Conquest mode, where you conquer Meridian region by region through procedurally generated maps. Research progress is saved across missions and it reminds me of Emperor: Battle For Dune's campaign. As for gameplay, the game falls into the Blizzard mold with worker units, unit abilities and a research system for additional units and improvements. For the most part the pathfinding is good, worker units will return to mining after finishing construction, lessening the time spent finding idle units. On occasion they stack up and get stuck, but thankfully that's a rare event. The UI is my biggest complaint, it's spread out around the corners of the screen in a confusing manner, with buttons that are hard to read (especially "set rally point" and "sell structure" are placed right among the unit construction options). The layout makes it really easy to misclick. For some reason your units get unselected when entering the research window too, which is tedious since you often pick up research points when exploring the map. I've also had some cutscene glitches - the intro plays fine, but after it there have been compression artifacts and stuck frames. All in all, I don't think the negatives outweigh the positives, and I've enjoyed the game. The graphics are absolutely beautiful, and the music while a bit understated does a good job at building up the atmosphere.
