I loved Ben There, Dan That & Time Gentlemen, Please! They were lovely adventure game throwbacks that captured the old 90s charm. I will briefly say what I liked about LotCG before diving into why it is mostly dreadful. Some of the dialogue can be laugh out loud funny. The Alien Spaceship is by far the best portion of the game. The meta-commentary often works. The adventure puzzles were for the most part okay if not bordering on too easy. Now the bad. I'll start with the easy stuff. The game runs terribly for what is essentially pixel art. The FPS drops to the 10s when you fire the gun during platforming sections. The game isn't very nice looking to have this kind of issue. I experienced frequent softlocks requiring restarts. The game tried to make controllers and keyboards work, and incidentally neither do. The platforming is horrendous compared to dedicated platformers. There's an intentional in game "glitch" that is terribly obnoxious but left intentionally as a kind of meta-joke that is later used to solve a puzzle. That the player is not made aware the glitch is intentional makes this puzzle all the more obtuse and was the moment I went from tolerating the game to actively hating it. Now the trickier bit. LotCG wants to be smarter than it is. The first 2 games were just two British chaps bumbling out and quipping. It worked well. LotCG wants to be a social critique, and it does this critique by just "stating" their critique rather than infusing it intelligently into the game. Worse, they can't help but dive into the culture wars and drag out Brexiteers in an extremely terribly segment that has no business in what I thought was a playful adventure game. Their stereotyping of Brexiteers (and earlier chavs) is made all the worse when earlier in the game they start virtue signaling about being feminists and against racism. It's hypocrisy writ large by smug video game programmers, and the developers become stereotypes themselves. What a tragedy.
I don't want to repeat what others have said, so I'm going to highlight what is so great about this game. There is no other game with a better cast of characters than the Witcher 3. And I've played all the Biowares, the Mass Effects, Walking Dead, Ubisoft's garbage, your Naughty Dogs, what have you. They are nothing compared to the Witcher. While the voice acting may be as good or even better than the Witcher 3 in the aforementioned games, the story here cannot be beat. We finally have a game where you have to make morally grey choices, where the 'right' decision isn't obvious. This isn't a moronic good/evil system that so many other games employ, it can be really hard to know what the right call to make is. It treats people as people; complicated, with different personalities and values and ideals, where both sides have cause to claim the scepter of righteousness. This is only part of what makes it so much better than the other games, which are little more than movies that you sometimes push a button to pause/unpause. The choices you make vastly change the outcome of the characters you are involved with. And as you get to know these people you care more about their fates. No other game offers this kind of player choice and really makes you feel the consequences of your actions, despite your best intentions. Graphically it's fabulous. The audio is atmospheric, and the atmosphere is great. Now. That's what's good. The bad is everything else. Notably combat, gear, inventory management, the alchemy system, and the FarCry style "find the pip on the map and chase it"-style of RPG questing. It does make it easier to get yourself involved in the story, but this system is so brainless and dull it detracts from the otherwise awesome experience. While you could just ignore it the game has not been designed for that and trying to find a quest-needle in a haystack without the minimap icons. The terrible gameplay is the tax you pay for the amazing interactive story.
Steamworld Dig 2 was like getting not just an extra slice of pie, but having to eat the entire thing and regretting it halfway through. I liked the first one for what it was; a short little exploration game with a tight game play loop of dig-get money-buy items-dig some more. Steamworld Dig 2 follows the same formula except this time it just felt tiresome. Over the course of some 6 hours it was Dig until my inventory was full, come back up, make linear upgrades that makes digging easier, then head back down and dig some more. Over and over again. The enemies are rarely a threat, and I only died once the entire game due to a falling brick I wasn't paying attention to. The biggest problem I had was running out of lamp oil, and I eschewed most every combat upgrade in favor of more inventory capacity and more lamp oil. Some of this tedium is buttressed by the beautiful hand drawn arts and sprites, but even that can be so nice to look at for so long. The only break up in this dreariness are the small challenge rooms. Thankfully these are numerous but only a handful were at all difficult to complete. There is some hidden loot in some of these levels but these were less of an interesting puzzle to solve and more of a 'find-the-invisible-wall' game that plays like a bad game of hide and seek. There is some customization with modules that give small perks to different Dot's abilities, but they aren't major game changers. Beyond that there are only ~ 3-4 boss battles that are, again, fairly easy. The story is forgettable and I can't recall any of the side character's names. It's not a bad game, in the sense it's broken, glitchy, or frustrating. The controls work well and the platforming is seamless. The game is just kind of... is.
1404 is really the peak of the ANNO series. For those unfamiliar it's a city builder, but with less focus on placing houses and commercial structures properly, and more about producing goods that can require many different inputs, and shipping them in the right quantities to the areas that need them. It's a game of logistics more than it's a game of construction. But it's still really, really good. It's more like Factorio than SimCity, as a single hiccup in your supply chain will cause downstream consequences you won't know about until your Noblemen start revolting. And it is so oh so addictive. So infamous is its addictive potential the game will politely remind you of how long your current play session is lasting for. Then came ANNO 2070, which while decent, was marred by Ubisoft DRM. Then came 2202, which made it even worse. A close second is ANNO 1800. It is also very good, with more end game than 1404, but a tutorial and campaign so atrocious I almost stop playing the game entirely. However once I finished a sandbox I had no desire to play it more. Whereas with ANNO 1404 and its Venice expansion, there is tons of replayability with the scenarios and achievements. I'm not going to recommend this game for city builder fans because again, it's less about the building than it is about producing goods and managing supply chains. Automating a a network of trade ships delivering luxury goods to your populous that's all self running is a thing beauty and the pay off for all your hard work. Graphically it's aged wonderfully and still looks wonderful to this day. My only wish is some of the quality of life improvement from ANNO 1800 made it here. Namely blueprint mode and auto-refilling Norias/mines. At least there are mods for that.
Rebel Galaxy has at least the trappings for a fun Western inspired Sci-Fi themed ship combat 'simulator'. I use the term simulator loosely as this really doesn't simulator anything close to ship-to-ship combat. For what, you are only flying in a 2D plane, there is no verticality here. And second, the controls are dead simple and not very challenging. The game at least looks good, but after the okay-to-good voice acting and nice looking ships wears off you have a game without much depth or excitement. Here's how the game works: You receive your first mission from a generic space station. You then proceed to a waypoint on your map, kill some ships, and then go to the next waypoint. You will be doing a lot of combat and sadly it's just not that fun. You have 3 different weapons: Turrets mounted on your ship that you will largely let automatically fire at things, a secondary weapon which shoots some weapons out to the side (not targetable), and then a powerful broadside targetable attack. This broadside attack makes up most of the damage. It's very similar to Black Flag only requires even less aiming. It is mildly amusing at first but gets much worse as the game goes on. All Space Station with very few minor differences are essentially the same. They all have a Bar Tender, they all have a market (really just a list of good you can purchase or sell), and they all have some ability to let you buy new ships or outfit your current one. You will be constantly interrupting when traveling. You'll learn to ignore the distress beacons as the payoff just isn't worth going for. And then there's the grind, you will have to make money some how and there isn't a lot of efficient or more importantly, fun ways to go about it. All the side missions - which are spit out automatically in a procedurally generated fashion, are just facsimiles of each other.
