dajhorn

Below Zero has the resource grind of the original Subnautica, but in a smaller world. The protagonist is a powerful smart wily athletic black female PhD that talks her way through a made-for-television movie plot involving other strong and independent women. Secondary characters tick all of the the rainbow boxes in ways that are required to get big studio funding and government tax breaks.

Subnautica 1 is a punishing resource grind. Essential items spawn randomly in a way that can block progression for hours. Base construction and inventory control is janky. This game also breaks gaming conventions in way that sometimes needs a tutorial or yellow bars.

This game is a straight clone of other puzzle box games, but the art is delightful and the user interface is jankless. You might be able to finish it in one sitting.

A she/her protagonist, a they/them personification of death, and a pudgy weak male character. Return to Ash is a slow and plodding wall-of-text choose-your-own adventure. This game gets one point for not being funded by a government grant.

Returnal made me realize that "rogue like" just means that the developer couldn't figure out how to balance game difficulty and make it fun. Returnal is an unrewarding repetitious grind.

Just play the first game. The Horizon Forbidden West sequel offers nothing new and most of the game content is sidequest filler that you've seen before. The dialogue writing is particularly bad; all of the female characters are an archetype of the uglified girlboss.

Indika is a short story (and walking simulator) about faith and Orthodox Christianity set in an Russian steampunk world. The 8-bit minigames are jarring in a novel way. The game has minor blasphemy that is mildly entertaining, but fails to deliver a philosophical or religious message.

Outland is my favorite platformer. Familiar mechanics and novelty are correctly balanced. The art style stays fresh throughout the game.

Gris is plodding and slow. The aesthetic is gorgeous but not enough to carry the game. Each theme in Gris seems familiar because other titles did them better.

I didn't understand the tutorial and got bored after fifteen minutes. The Falconeer reminds me of 1990s shareware, and is similarly forgettable.

Enjoyable, immersive, and beautiful. This first big studio game that I entirely played through in a long time. The story and narrative doesn't have the aftertaste that you get from most western studios that are driven by committee.

Sunless Skies is a mildly woke written book for people that still care about pronouns or think that getting a degree in literary English is a good idea. Nothing happened in the first 30 minutes of reading this book; I won't use the word "gameplay" here because it is undeserved.

Doors Paradox is bright and beautiful, but none of the puzzles gave me a feeling of satisfaction or accomplishment. This game feels like a grind after a few levels, and it lost me when there was a color-matching puzzle involving shades of pink-red and blue-green.

Shoot many zombies. Craft your motorbike. Grind a few levels. Enjoy the scenery. The Days Gone writers ticked the bare-minimum number of woke story elements required by the publisher, and just by doing that, made a game that is more enjoyable than most large studio products.

Quitted, deleted, and refunded in less than five minutes. Labyrinthine is work, not entertainment. Unplayable in a lit room.

Spiritfarer is nearly excellent. Beautiful art and music. Heartwarming story. An easy platformer and construction game. A mild woke theme in the story could leave a bad aftertaste if you have fatigue, but can be forgiven, and was likely a publishing requirement because the authors took Canadian government money.

A gentle enjoyable platformer. Super nice to have a game that doesn't propagandize the player.

Breathedge is tedious and disrespectful of player time, and the gamepad user interface is sloppy and poorly implemented. Most of the humor and story is lost on a player that is frustrated with the gameplay experience.

Tacoma a self-parody of ham-fisted wokeness. Social politics are poor basis for a video game.

Back In The Grove is a slow moving PC remake that is true to the original slow moving Sega Genesis console game. Probably not worthwhile unless you're nostalgic for 90s Sega properties. The closing credits were novel and better than most of the regular gameplay.

A gentle and easy puzzle platformer. Poorly written dialog and thin unsatisfying story. The voice acting grates before the second act.

A sad clone of the Railroad Tycoon classics. The non-American voice acting is jarring, the art style is something from mobile gaming, and the user interface is janky and frustrating.

If you ever did machine-level software development, or if you ever used **** on a DOS computer, then Rogue Bit might be cute for ten minutes. After that, this game is drudgery like working a boring day job, and a reminder that the Nintendo eStore sells junk.

I don't usually enjoy card games, but Ancient Enemy was enjoyable and relaxing. The game is quick to learn and plays easy.

Filament is a good puzzle game that was nearly excellent. The mechanic alone deserves a good review, but the lack of explanation for how each level changes gameplay is tiresome, not smart or satisfying.

The World Next Door is a cartoonish game for young children, but it is too slow and too verbose to keep their attention. The voice acting is so completely obnoxious that I can't be in the same room as somebody playing this game.

The difficulty in this game is miscalibrated and unfun. Boredom within five minutes.

The Old City Leviathan is a tedious overwrought book pretending to be a video game. It isn't mysterious. It is slow, plodding, and poorly written. It is like that chore homework that a self-important associate professor gave you for that mandatory undergraduate course in philosophy.

The Fall is a tiresome game with awkward controls and illogical puzzles. The authors had a story and atmosphere in mind, but failed to plug any fun into the equation.

A reading game that is slow, boring, and lacking the story or characters **** book. Orwell might be hero fantasy fulfillment for bureaucrats and paper pushers that accomplish nothing in their actual lives. Too clever by half to have any kind of general gaming appeal.

To Burn In Memory is a choose-your-own-adventure book with a tiny unreadable font that would be better implemented as a web site. I gave up on this game after a moment of squinting at my monitor and searching for an options button.

Catherine has a unique premise based on sexual infidelity that attracted a cult following, but for casual gamers, it suffers from several unforgivable design sins like unskippable cut scenes, bad defaults, inane repeating audio cues, and an unnecessary save system. Themes of alcoholism and things like a pregnancy scare were novel, but the supernatural anime-style ending ruined the plot build-up.

Mafia II is like a Grand Theft Auto episode on rails. It has a world and a basic linear campaign, but not enough material for sandbox fun or side missions. This results in low replay value. Some parts of the game are polished, and things like the licensed Playboy media are novel, but it isn't enough to make Mafia II a worthwhile purchase.

Nothing happened after twenty minutes of playing this game. No story. No action. No interest. Slender The Arrival is a zero for people that have played any other survival horror game.

Spelunky combines random instant death with start-from-the-beginning repetitiveness, which can be fun in small amounts but is ultimately tiresome. The word "roguelike" in game reviews seems to be a new way to say Unbalanced or Nintendo-Hard.

The physics, design, and art in Pinball FX2 are excellent and way more than enough evoke nostalgia for the real thing. Excellent value, lots of replayability, and a variety of tables to keep things fun.

Toki Tori is a solid puzzle game, but it doesn't keep me interested for more than a few minutes at a time. The levels don't have a enough variety, and the audio/visual features become repetitive and annoying.

Stick It To The Man is probably a tribute to Psychonauts. This game is an easy puzzle platformer, but the goofy humor and story is what makes it enjoyable. Excellent art and voice acting too.

Sir You Are Being Hunted is much like Don't Starve with a 3D engine. The player is dropped into a randomly generated world and must run around collecting randomly hidden objects, which is tiresome because the primary gimmick is too shallow. The mix of stealth, strategy, and shooting game elements in SYABH ultimately doesn't work.

Dynamite Jack is a fun game with a good difficulty ramp and fair replayability. I was frustrated by this game on a tablet, but playing it on a PC with a game pad was much better.

Risk of Rain is an 8-bit shooting platformer that is a grind for gold coins and experience points. The first five minutes of play is essentially the whole game. "Rogue-like" is becoming a way to describe old, boring, and Nintendo-hard.

Kill The Bad Guy is a simple physics puzzler that uses comedic murder as a gimmick. The premise certainly has potential, but the soundtrack, controls, and visual style are all jarring and unpleasant. This game needs a design overhaul. Murdering public figures could have been more entertainingly tasteless if the method of revenge was somehow ironic or poetic, but it seems like the game writers didn't have enough material, or enough courage to lampoon anybody that might fight back.

The Cat Lady is a tedious and plodding animated cartoon pretending to be a video game. Production values are low, with chunky side scrolling and a plot progression that runs on rails. Discovering that the spacebar skips dialog was enough to get me through the first chapter, but not enough for the second.

I suffered UI glitching that made Bridge Project unplayable. This game seems like a clone of the original Pontifex and Bridge Construction Set that were made by Chronic Logic years ago.

Outlast is nightmare fuel in the tradition of Hellraiser or Silent Hill. The player alternates between sneaking past adversaries and panicked escape. Many jump-shock-horror moments.

Stacking is cute and absurd and something totally different. Perfect for kids, but balanced for adults. Some of the extended puzzles are a stretch if you are trying for achievements, but the hint system is helpful.

Pacific Storm is slow, verbose, complex, and generally too difficult to learn in a short enough time to be entertaining. The tutorial was a slog and I saw nothing in the game that made me want to suffer my way through it into the first level.

Little Inferno starts with a bang and then fizzles into a gimmick of combining objects based on bad puns. I burned out on this game within an hour of lighting it up for the first time.

Mutant Blobs Attack is an all around fun game that is a cross between Katamari Damacy and Super Meat Boy. The production values are solid throughout and the game tributes many other famous games.

The Dark Eye is a picture book that the player clicks through, and not much ****. Sometimes this can be okay, but all of the Daedalic titles seem to have bland stories and bad writing. Maybe this studio is targeting some kind of European audience, but I lost interest after a half hour of nothing happening.