Jack Rhys-Burgess

Games Shorts

This is a section dedicated to smaller/less detailed/less structured reviews, any game I want to give thoughts on but don’t to dedicate a full post-worthy review. They’ll largely range from a few lines to a few paragraphs and x/5 rating (OR placeholder “preview”/“pending” rated on a rougher GOOD/MEH/BAD scale to be completed at a later date.)

This page will be a big list of reviews, alphabetised using game name.

Update

0-9

6180 the moon

An awful title for a game, but a cute and comfy platformer, with its sole top-to-bottom screenwrap gimmick enough to provide entertainment over what would be an otherwise ordinary platformer. Its not going on any ‘all time best’ lists, but its one of those few games that’s nice to play on a lazy rainy afternoon.

64.0

Short and simple arcade (not a rhythm game! despite the music, playing it like that is a way to lose easily), if incredibly hard. Reminds me of Super Hexagon, if less graphically flashy.

7 Billion Humans

Need to play this more, looks like a wholehearted extension/expansion on what Human Resource Machine began, looking at moving people at scale and doing the same rather direct low-level programming logic and moving it very slightly higher (e.g. IF statements are introduced very early on)

ironically I hope it doesn’t fall into the same uncanny valley that Human Resource Machine did, in being too much like a raw assembly programming game with a veneer over it - and as someone who spends my day-job programming, it felt just a little too close to work than a puzzle game should.

A

Among Us

A small, social deduction party game that’s had a, let’s say, outsized cultural impact. Not my favourite in this genre (Secret Hitler my beloved), nor with the most depth, but its simplicity is deliberate, meaning its quick to get people roped in and playing along in a big VC/Discord call.

Why this game caught on in the way it did, I really have no idea, but the game itself is competent enough - and pretty much any decent multiplayer game can be spun into hours of gold with a good bunch of friends.

Arknights

During my time as a time-poor and money-poor student, I played a fair amount of gachas on my crap phone, mainly this and Girls’ Frontline.

It deserves recognition that its F2P friendly (something many gachas cannot be described as!), and that the tower defense gameplay is interesting even though I’m not the biggest fan, plus some issues in execution/difficulty balancing (for a casual gacha, it can veer wildly in difficulty) - and there’s only so much experimenting you can do in one session with the inbuilt engergy/stamina mechanic common in many gachas.

Everything else ranges from the good (the Art, unsurprisingly) to the meh/whatever (e.g. the Story and Soundtrack), which in gacha terms, makes this one of the ‘best’ in the genre.

Antichamber

A mindbending MC Escher-like maze of a puzzle game - when I first tried this way back I really enjoyed it but was too ‘dumb’ to finish, at some point I will sit down for a day or two and play it back to front.

Advance Wars

A deceptively cute and charming game containing a damn tough, if relatively simple and understandable tactics game - giving the feeling of a distilled wargame that could be played on paper or a a board game. Also unique in the “Advance War” series of games on having a very extended tutorial separate to the campaign - very much welcome (and begs the question why so many games integrate them together) and ensures this game and its campaign are are absolutely tough as nails, much tougher than any of the sequels.

Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

A sequel in its most classic sense, “the same but more” - can always be a cause for complaint but when the original was so good, why mess with the formula?

Advance Wars: Dual Strike

More of the same again, really - with a few more additions here and there and some neat (if somewhat gimmicky) additions to take advantage of the DS’ multiple screens via multiple battlefields. Somewhere along the way the balance and difficulty has also taken a big nosedive unfortunately (and the Dual Strike mechanic is a big culprit!), but the fundamentals are all still solid, unsurprisingly enough.

Advance Wars: Dark Conflict/Days of Ruin

Quite a departure from previous Advance Wars entries - the standard template of a game is still here but plenty has been tinkered with in terms of balance (weaker CO powers, some widespread balance changes, a new unit experience system etc.) and aesthetic (out with the old colourful pixel-art, in with the gritty and post-apocalyptic wasteland). A bit of an outlier in the series, but I do commend the designers on reigning in the power level. Out of all of the Advance Wars games, this is the game I’m most interested in returning to the most, simply due to its oddball status.

B

(The) Bridge

I adore the artstyle and aesthetic (pencilled drawings of M.C. Escher), and its a reliable puzzle game - but it never quite clicked mentally for me, and solving the puzzles didn’t just quite feel satisfying enough for me to ever finish it - despite all the neat mechanics in place that are featured. Check it out if you like the artstyle and some environmental storytelling/mechanic explanation, maybe you’ll enjoy it more than me.

Brütal Legend

There are games that I love, there are games that I hate, but very few games I hate that I don’t love more. Brutal Legend is filed under that unique category - this should totally be up my alley, essentially being a love letter to metal and a proper passion project. It should be a slam-dunk, but the mediocre hack-n-slash and the even worse RTS elements that comprise this game’s story missions are just absolutely no fun to get through.

Burnout 3: Takedown

An incredible arcade racer, a game made entirely of pure distilled racing fun. I remember having an absolute blast as a young-un with my PS2, and I had an absolute blast revisiting it many years later via emulation. The sense of speed makes every other racer seem pedestrian, and the boost/takedown system pair incredibly well to both incentivize absurdly reckless driving and turns crashing into an art form. The soundtrack pairs incredibly too to create pure adrenaline fun.

Secondary shoutout to the ‘puzzles’ that are also featured that more extensively use the crash and aftertouch system - set scenarios where you’re tasked with causing as much damage as possible by driving into traffic. I don’t see this mentioned often but to me, this was as enjoyable as the mainline racing itself, purely because the crash system is just so good.

Baba is You

One of those puzzle games that works very very hard to initially make you feel very very stupid, and then very very smart once you work it all out. Just good luck working it out sometimes!

Banished

Enjoyed game initially but needs a revisit, bounced off it quite quickly

The Binding of Isaac

A flash blast-from-the-past - did enjoy this back in the day but worth revisiting if only to answer the question of whether its worth playing post Rebirth.

C

Counter Strike: Global Offensive

I don’t tend to play a) FPS games and b) Multiplayer games, but here’s my 2 pence-worth of thoughts regardless.

The game is fun once you know what you’re doing and with friends (playing solo-q with random russians should count as cruel and unusual punishment by contrast), and not taking the game too seriously. A competitive party game, essentially.

Whilst a lot of my friends also play other games in the same vein such as R6:Siege, Valorant or once-upon-a-time Overwatch, I’ve never felt the same pull to join in, and thats partially down to CS:GO’s ‘relative’ surface simplicity (It might also be sunk cost fallacy to be honest!).

There are absolutely problems and valid complaints with this game, but based on all the complaints about R6:Siege, Valorant etc. I hear from friends they have similar themes, leading me to think that the Stroustrup quote about programming languages (“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.) also broadly applies to team-based games like CS.

Still excited for the upcoming CSGO2 regardless.

Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal

Another flash series classic, and an interesting take on the RTS genre with fighting an endless liquid tide vs fighting discrete enemies.

Crusader Kings 3

Definitely slick and polished (and was actually decent on launch!) and very much a good base to build on, but found it quickly to be lacking in flavour like many Paradox games on launch - maybe its worth a revisit?

D

Despotism 3k

A neat, pixel-art roguelike management game with a dystopian bent, playing as a evil sentient AI and using humans as slave workers. Its a fun timewaster for a few hours and the management is simple yet effective, but the roguelike elements can often inadvertently screw you over - you’ll need multiple play-throughs to work out the right choices, and the wrong choices and quickly bring a game to an end. At least each attempt is nice and short.

Dicey Dungeons

Very addicting and very fun! A little card-based roguelike using dice - you have a loadout of equipment which is activated by the dice you rolled, with certain equipment preferring either high rolls, low rolls, evens or odds.

Combat is nice and simple, a turn based affair, however the ifferent classes all play very differently to augment the simple backbone of the game, ranging from simple (Warrior and Thief which like high/low rolls) to the remarkably complicated (mainly the Witch, which ditches the equipment in favour of a spellbook).

The visuals, artstyle and music really does add a lot, with cute monster designs aplenty. Terry and Chipzel did a great job on this side. The polish also continues with the act of playing, its super simple and you can rattle through games super quickly, it has the ease-of-use of a mobile game without sacrificing the PC experience.

The core gameplay loop is tons of fun with the different characters and rulesets which the game offers as twists on a standard run, and each run ending in completion is never too long in the grand scheme of things for a roguelike (45 minutes max?) - but 6 episodes each character is a lot, and the harder episodes/classes do make the margin of error rather tight (e.g. Witch’s Elimination round took me ~20 attempts, its a laughably weak class), sometimes to the point of fustration and feeling like at the mercy of dicerolls - which certainly clashes with the more cutesy/casual feel of the game.

Another great indie game by Terry, however, lots of fun to be had here!

Doki Doki Literature Club!

Man, remember this? Another game that spread like wildfire via word-of-mouth due to the gimmicks contained inside (expectation subversion, slowly opening the door, 4th wall breaking etc.).

Admittedly, it doesn’t do anything new in particular, nor have much to offer once the gimmick is revealed (hence no incentive to play it again later), but the writing and pacing leading you there was was great (in that it was perfectly innocent and average) for what it needed to be, it worked on me at least. Although the real joy was pushing it to other friends and seeing their reactions :)

It may not have the same potency today, nor last much more beyond that little window of time (I don’t forsee myself playing DDLC!+ anytime soon) but it was solid, if unspectacular in retrospect, made a little better by being in the moment when it was relevant, and that’s perfectly fine. You kinda had to be there.

Downwell

A simple, well executed and beautiful pixel roguelike. Difficult but its very tight, sharp and extremely satisfying to beat every single time - pulling off the simple rule of “easy to learn, hard to master” very very well. This combined with the great aesthetics simply makes it a joy to play, even as you get your teeth kicked in. Not much to say, but that’s really because the game speaks for, and sells, itself.

Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist

A small, free, fun little game from one of the devs behind The Stanley Parable. It has a similar style, being a walking sim with some light interaction and an unseen narrator guiding you through. The subtext of running the game “behind the scenes” is a fun concept, but it doesn’t feel tremendously deep compared to other games in this vein.

Dungeon Keeper

One of my favourite games of all time, a really unique blending of genres (RTS, Management Sim and God Game) with a fantastic atmosphere and attitude of “Its good to be bad” that has been oft copied and yet never bettered.

Are there flaws? Yes, of course, the base game balancing is all over the place, and the blending of RTS and Management complements the game well but means their individual mechanics are rather rudimentary. However, honestly? I couldn’t care less when I’m having a blast digging out a dungeon, training my creatures and eventually getting the Lord of the Land’s head on a spike. Game is an absolute blast to play, and easiest its ever been with the fan patch/expansion KeeperFX keeping this game alive all these years later.

Dungeon Keeper 2

I’ve always had complicated thoughts on DK2, and I’ve always found it difficult to critique - I love DK1 to bits, but despite playing it for hundreds of hours I’d struggle to fully explain why it works, and judging from its absolutely byzantine development history, I’m not sure the devs fully understood either. It’s a perfect storm that all, somehow, comes together. How do you improve on that though?

Well I think DK2 makes a good stab at it, retaining a lot of core gameplay loop while adding in sensible evolutions, such as the mana system, introducing a sandbox mode (My Pet Dungeon) and jumping into the graphical world of full 3D etc. and on this front the game makes, while not perfect (making the talismanic Horned Reaper into a spell was an awful idea), good progress on being less idiosyncratic than its predecessor.

However, I feel as if the core gameplay loop that DK1 pulls off so well, is again here, just weaker in almost every aspect. Some of which is obvious, the game is glacially slow, and some less obvious, like the creature lineup (Where’d the Dragons, Orcs, and Samurai go?) and variation being overall more homogeneous and, in my opinion, weaker.
DK1 was very idiosyncratic at times and all over the place with balancing and design issues, but I’m much more confident in overlooking them - I cannot unfortunately say the same about DK2.

I don’t want to get the impression that I think this game is in any way awful, no, it looks, works, and functions as a perfectly servicable Dungeon Keeper game, it just looks mediocre when compared to its predecessor. Perhaps the EA acquisition of Bullfrog and subsequent departure of Peter Molyneux had a significant influence?

I would still recommend checking it out anyway, I still enjoyed playing through and beating the campaign once again despite my issues with it, confirming that beyond curiosity/nostalgia, I’d stick with the original. There’s a critical lack of Dungeon Keeper games, especially after DK3 was shitcanned thanks to EA absorbing/killing off Bullfrog. Thanks EA.

Dungeon of the Endless

A very odd mish-mash of genres, bolting a Tower Defense game onto a Roguelike Dungeon Crawler (or vice versa), with other aspects of resource/economy and hero management. By and large though, all these systems do come to complement each other pretty well, even if not perfectly.

While the games’ tutorial is functionally non-existent, once you start to understand what is expected and what is broadly a winning strategy in DotE, the core gameplay loop is actually very fun. You explore a dungeon one door at a time to gain resources and find loot, but then are faced with a wave of monsters (akin to a wave in Tower Defense) to defend against. Once cleared, you have all the time you need to strategise, assess, and then repeat the door-opening process.

Once you get the hang of this it is very enjoyable to go through this loop - however DotE is a tough, tough game that does not pull punches, and due to the Roguelike nature of the game it can quickly sour the mood. A successful run of this game is ~6 hours worth of gameplay (which is too long, I’d cut the number of floors down), which is asking a lot to get right consistently, and extremely frustrating to throw away 3-4 hours worth of time and effort down the tubes. DotE doesn’t always play fair either unfortunately, randomness may be a fickle mistress but some quirks in design make this game feel downright unfair or “cheap”, which for something already so tough and long is just salt in the wound.

Definitely worth taking the game for a spin and beating on Too Easy difficulty (ha ha guys, very funny), and may come back to this to try the other pods which do change the gameplay quite a bit (I just stuck to the default Escape Pod) - whether I have time or inclination is another story.

Dwarf Fortress

No review could do this game justice. It is a product of a lifelong ambition to create one of the deepest, most all-encompassing colony management simulation games, with all manner of bells and whistles and quirks and unnecessary detail that only a labour of love could produce. I’ve sunk hundreds and hundreds of hours and I have barely scratched the surface of the surface of this beast.

Now that the 2022 Steam Release, adding graphics and a sane(r) UI exists, there is no better time than ever to pick this up.

Even if this is not the game I have sunk time into the most (there are many alternate universes where I sell my soul exclusively to this game), it is certainly the most artistically ambitious game I have ever seen, and I struggle to see how it could be ever topped in the near-distant future, and the game is still nowhere near “done”.

E

(The) End is Nigh

A ‘spiritual successor’ to Super Meat Boy, inasmuch as being another tough as nails tight 2D platformer where you expect to die a lot. The unique innovation is the semi-open world design where each level flows into another as opposed to being discrete segments, and numerous collectibles and hidden areas scattered about.

Unfortunately, despite 106%‘ing Super Meat Boy, I’ve ended up bouncing twice from The End Is Nigh. Its a combination of factors, movement feels more restrictive, ledge grabbing can be inconsistent, a larger emphasis on puzzles being all about ‘timing’, and the game itself is wrapped in a grey and melancholic “why bother?” attitude compared to Super Meat Boy’s relatively colourful and upbeat attitude, encouraging you to persevere. The End Is Nigh does the opposite, and so it makes it a lot harder mentally to work through.

Endless Space 2

A solid and beautifully slick game from Amplitude, if largely paint-by-numbers including a lot of the standard 4X cliches. Note this was reviewed with no DLC (they don’t appear to have a good reputation online anyways)

Positives:

Negatives:

There’s a scarcity of good 4X games, let alone good space-themed 4X games, so I would recommend at least picking this up and checking it out.

Europa Universalis IV

It has enough breadth and just enough depth to keep you ticking away, in my case for 1.5k hours, and yet nothing is ever deep or fleshed out enough to not feel shallow. You can do anything… as long as said anything fits within the constraints of the system.

There’s not many games that allow you to simulate this period of history, and play any country, ranging from European monarchies, to a nomadic horde, to Indian sultanates, to African and New World tribes, all within the same game, using a combination of shared and unique mechanics, and run those countries for 400-odd years. But in giving this range, it can never do every country and area justice, and everything eventually feels half-baked. However, I understand why, as any deeper would turn the scope of the game into something completely unworkable.

Sure, there’s empire building, but there’s not much to do other than clicking buttons, putting down buildings. In fact, now that I think about it, a vast majority of the gameplay is clicking a range of buttons of varying forms. Invariably, this means it becomes a highly-detailed, complex map painter, with a Renaissance-themed lick of paint.

Also the fact this game is still being actively developed is astonishing to me, I can’t fathom how ugly the codebase must be - I would have thought EU5 would have been announced years ago. I know the DLC money must be good, but jeez.

F

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G

Girls’ Frontline

The first gacha I picked up during my broke university years, sinking a fair number of hours into it.

As gacha’s go I found it very F2P friendly (no premium currency for getting characters is a big boon in that regard), although more time consuming as a trade-off. What gameplay there is, is meh - creating and theorycrafting teams/echelons teams of 5 is fun, the actual map based combat not-so-much (especially in late-game/ranking content where micro is a must), this is an extra issue given the consistent client and performance issues that plagued the EN client throughout.

The art is great and the story is more competent than an average gacha - honestly, I’d love to play an XCOM-like, or just a non-gacha game in this universe MICA’s created (and it looks like Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery is exactly what I’m looking for).

(Minor kudos to doing a VA-11 Hall-A collab and getting me to play it!).

Golf With Your Friends

A (mini) golf game, that you can play with your friends, surprisingly enough. Base mini-golf is quite boring however, and its no different here, but given enough friends and enough of the silly options turned on (collision, jumping, low gravity, weirder golf-ball shapes etc.) good fun can be wringed out, despite all the weird glitches and bugs that come associated with said silly options.

Solid, unspectacular party game.

H

Hearthstone

My very first CCG, and not a great one in retrospect. Its foundations, the presentation etc. were all rock solid, but the balancing, man, the balancing was just not there, and a chronic slowness to fix or tone down broken cards defeated a lot of the point/advantage of being an online CCG.

It was definitely enjoyable while it lasted, and I’m glad I picked this game up, beginning my love for card games, but I’m also happy for getting off the Hearthstone ride when I did.

(For reference, I started around mid-2015 and quit around mid-2017, its been a while and perhaps the game radically changed, I haven’t seen much evidence to prove otherwise however)

Hearts of Iron IV

A WW2 sandbox simulator that suffers similarly to EU4 (really all current-gen paradox games) in being wide and shallow, yet is somehow even moreso. That combined with the standard paradox DLC-fest propping up a lackluster base game, makes an ultimately lackluster experience, and hence have not sunk anywhere near as many hours into this than EU4.

Big up the modding community/workshop however, lots of good free content that also circumvents the need for the raft of DLC, just a shame it has to be attached to something agressively average.

Helltaker

Well, the guy made it because said guy wanted more demon girls, and lo and behold more demon girls created. I respect him for that (hey, nothing wrong with being the change you want to be in the world), but the game itself feels like an afterthought to the art.

Hexcells

A slick, casual hexagon-based puzzle game, playing something very similar to Minesweeper, although all levels can be solved with pure deduction and no guesswork. A little too easy, but I see it less as a standalone game and more as an introduction to the harder sequels, Hexcells Plus and Hexcells Infinite.

Another small complaint (and this carries over to all games unfortunately) is that the punishment system is too harsh in the sense it doesn’t really protect against misclicks, which are easy to do. I get why it exists, but its still annoying, and said game can always be bruteforced and screenshotted if anyone does wish to “cheat” a puzzle.

Hexcells Plus

Mainly more of the same, borrowing a lot from the original Hexcells, but a few more rules and constraints sprinkled in, and significantly harder, although there’s still a nice difficulty gradiant at play throughout. The added rules do elevate this above being a plain ‘ol level pack.

The punishment system is still an issue.

Hexcells Infinite

Hexcells taken its logical conclusion, with some absolutely tough-as-nails levels as well adding support for both user-created and auto-generated levels. While it doesn’t add really anything more to the formula, Infinite is an apt title. Hexcells and Hexcells Plus were one-and-done games, Infinite can be dipped into again and again.

I just wish oh so much the punishment system wasn’t an issue. Learn to not misclick I suppose.

I

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J

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K

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L

Left 4 Dead 2

I’m no FPS-guy, but this game is fun as fuck. Simple, but endlessly enjoyable (if needed, continually augment with craploads of steam workshop mods). A blast with friends, and even fun to just play through solo, even with the stupid bots.

Limbo

Lots of style, not all that much substance to complement said style, mainly consisting of average platforming and simple puzzles. Said puzzles are not all too bad, but rely heavily on trial-and-error and death (I’d conjecture this is an artistic choice, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating) to determine what is actually required. The variety also works against it, I’d occasionally get stuck due to not grasping a puzzle mechanic that was introduced seemingly at random.

That criticism actually applies to a lot of Limbo, its general inconsistency. The first half starts by exploring the unfriendly, wooded outside world, and at the second half you end up in an abandoned, functioning factory. The first half has you avoiding spike pits and pools of water by climbing trees or moving wooden boxes, the second half has you using a myriad of switches to manipulate electricity and gravity - and given how wonkily the game handles this, there’s a sense of the game having “jumped the shark”.

I’m glad that the “indie game explosion” happened, and perhaps Limbo contributed towards it (?), but detached from that context I don’t see the hype.

M

Marble Blast Gold

There has been no game I’ve played more than this (+ the various custom levels and fan games), and this will 100% stay the most played game to my grave. The game I have the most nostalgia for and yet a game I still play to this day, over 15 years later. Trying to review this in-depth, would be like reviewing my very being, and it would be an incoherent rave of praise.

What I say though, is that its an utterly fantastic nailing of the “early to learn, hard to master” epithet.

The only bad thing I could muster up about this is that the utterly janky physics engine uses, feels so great to play around in, is that its subsequently ruined any other marble game I’ve tried due to the physics not being exactly the same (Sorry Marble It Up! in particular - really the next-gen version of this game.)

A great big shoutout to the tireless community that has kept this game alive with oodles of fan-made content, ranging from simple custom levels to full-blown mods. Check out marbleblast.com - this game hasn’t been purchasable for a long long time.

Marble Blast Ultra

The same fantastic original game (Marble Blast Gold) on console, with a few extra additions here and there, mainly around the new fantastic Multiplayer in the form of Gem Hunt - along with some Singleplayer levels, old and new, and a whole lot of shiny polish.

Tim Trance is also still fantastic, all these years later.

Master of Orion

I have a full review here!

But my short review is that this is the best 4X game ever released. Seriously. And given it coined the 4X moniker, its certainly a genre that peaked early.

Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk

A simple, short and to-the-point VN (20 minutes worth), but a worthy experience at that - with the core backbone being the surreal and highly distorted pixel artstyle, with it all being seeped in a reddish-pink, done in order to portray a world warped by debilitating mental illness. The odd dialogue, off-kilter bleeps ‘n’ bloops of music and the simple mundanity of the story that comprise this VN only serve as extra hints at what this girl may be suffering with, but it never explicitly states what. We see that getting milk is one daunting task for this girl, but not exactly why.

The actual visual novel options are rather obvious as an approach, and this game in retrospect looks like a demo/proof-of-concept for the “Milk Outside…” sequel - but this doesn’t at all take away from what is a short, well executed and well presented depiction of mental illness.

Milk Outside a Bag of Milk Outside a Bag of Milk

If the first game (Milk Inside…) was “inside the box”, helping a girl cope with mental illness and achieve the basic task of getting milk - then Milk Outside… is certainly “outside the box” (hence the name!), instead exploring deeply how said girl is affected by her many mental issues and affectations.

This game both builds on and continues directly on from Milk Inside… with the higher-fidelity visuals, refined soundtrack and the VN formula being augmented with point-and-click sections. The VN itself is just longer, bigger and better and allows great opportunities to be immersed and to deconstruct the warped world that this girl inhabits, done by conversing to her (with VN dialogue options that feels vastly more natural) and helping her getting into a medicine-induced sleep. The dream sequence forms the ending, and what is dreamt up depends on some of the choices you make along the way.

There is a lot of substance presented here behind the surrealism that Milk Inside… only hinted at, and while I’d struggle to put exactly my thoughts into words reasoning about what is presented and my interpretation of this girl and her situation/what she suffers from - the main strength of this game’s experience is that it offers this opportunity to let the themes sit, to be stewed and mulled over in your mind long after finishing.

Well worth an experience even with a passing interest in psych horror or Visual Novels.

Minecraft

I fully understand and acknowledge that calling a sandbox game “unfocused” or “boring” is foolish. But I really don’t know what else to say, the vanilla gameplay loop is great for a short amount of time, but rather easy to get bored of (especially with the lack of direction!) - yet mods simultaneously feel extremely overwhelming.

Its a game I’d pick up every few years or so to play on a friends’ server (vanilla or mods), play heavily for a few weeks, get my fill and quit. Rinse and repeat.

Perhaps I’ll be able to work out and articulate why Minecraft doesn’t click, because I’ve certainly enjoyed similar sandbox-y games, however I’ll just chalk it down to it being a me problem. (spectacular soundtrack though!)

Mini Metro

Immaculately done minimal puzzle game, that makes a good timewaster every now and then. Also a good demonstration that I’m no good at planning rail transport links.

Mini Motorways

Mini Metro, but more chaotic and thus the entertaining and frustrating value both go up massively.

Muse Dash

A perfectly fine and solid anime 2k/’taiko’ rhythm game. No comprehensive reinventing of the wheel here, but its extremely visual and colourful, and while it is quite aggressively anime in its aesthetics and music choices, the visual flair keeps it from being just another forgettable rhythm game.

Myst (Masterpiece Edition)

A very beautiful and very enjoyable puzzle game. Perhaps a bit clunky to move around (making copious notes will help!) and was occasionally tripped up by the movement clunkiness, but the puzzles themselves never really did (although that underground maze did suck!), once you got past the first few you intuitively build up an expectation of how a puzzle may look like, what may be clues etc. and it never really drifts from that intuition, even if again inputting the solution was clunky.

The different worlds/ages and general atmosphere/ambience is just absolutely fantastic, and is really a great incentive to stick around, stay immersed and get those puzzles solved.

If this is just a warmup to Riven, I’d better plan to play it sooner rather than later.

N

Ninja Pizza Girl

A small and short platformer that is serviceable, but not much more than that, and the combat mechanic introduced clashes pretty badly with the focus on speed. Everything else - graphics/music/story, is again nothing special, and while an attempt is made to have a nice message/moral its very cliche and hamfisted making it fall pretty flat.

I don’t even like pizza, sadly.

O

oO

A fun ‘lil cheap puzzle game with one simple concept, being able to move inside or outside a circle to avoid obstacles. Its simple enough to be a good timewaster for a few hours if you’re ok with tearing you own hair out at your own slow reaction time.

osu!

Certainly one of the rhythm games of all time! In the abstract, I would say its a perfectly good free rhythm game, with multiple game modes (with osu!standard being the… standard one taken from Elite Beat Agents, and the one I’ll implicitly reference in criticism) and an absolute crap-load of user-generated content since its release. I spent quite a few years with it and definitely had some good fun playing and sinking several hundred hours into it, but there are some weaknesses.

A lot of them unfortunately derive from the initial concept of just cloning/”emulating” Elite Beat Agents, with some wonky concepts such as:

There are also others which stem from the unenviable task of trying to algorithmically determine the difficulty of each beatmap, and the reward of performance points (the main metric of ranking players) each play should be associated with. It will never be perfect, but it does highlight one of the positives of having a rhythm game be more tailored in what it offers.

Despite that though, if you enjoy the fusion of aim and rhythm that osu!standard demands from you, then there’s a veritable limitless well of content to pull from, and a limitless skill ceiling to try and climb towards, all rather easily downloadable and all free - and not many rhythm games can compete with that value proposition up-front, especially as a broke teenager wanting something fun to kill time with.

Out There Somewhere

Short, solid platformer. Perhaps a little easy but it plays well, the teleportation gun gimmick is a lot of fun to play with and the game certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome.

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Please Fix The Road

Its certainly a beautiful puzzle game, and an awful lot of work has been done give it such a distinct style, and it really is a great feast for the eyes and ears.

Its a shame then, that the puzzle game itself contained within, manipulating the environment (by removing, adding, swapping and transforming) never quite clicked with me. Its unfortunate, but my main issue stems from the game forcing you to perform the requisite to solve the puzzle in a deliberate sequential order.

This meant, combined with the sometimes confusing UI of what moves you actually have available - meant it felt required to use lots and lots of ‘trail-and-error’/‘dumb luck’ to actually solve the individual puzzles which severely reduces the sense of achievement. It doesn’t matter in the introductory puzzles when the solutions are reasonably obvious and introducing concepts, but it can feel super frustrating later. That combined with sometimes having difficulty digging through the visual eye candy (e.g. determining what’s elevated and what’s not) and some of the later puzzles having “red” herring actions that are redundant but cannot be skipped which feels like a poor joke.

Its a shame, there’s a lot to like (I think its worth recommending to anyone who enjoys comfy puzzle games), and I really appreciate the hint system integrated into the game to guide you on, but when I realised that I was using it as a crutch to solve levels, I wound up dropping it soon after.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

The Professor Layton series is an odd one when explained in a bare-bones fashion, combining the DS’s “brain training” puzzle genre and attaching a story onto it, complete with various characters and a unique setting - but even in this first foray the formula works surprisingly well.

The game begins as you follow the two main protagonists Professor Layton, a charming top-hat wearing gentleman and Luke, a cheeky and playful younger boy and Layton’s apprentice/sidekick, travelling into the main location of St. Mystere, a quaint English village, in order to solve the mystery of the “Golden Apple”. Soon after arriving, a murder occurs kicking off the plot, and you are required to explore the village in search of clues, often needing to converse with the puzzle-obsessed residents of St. Mystere.

The game really oozes comfiness and charm, there’s a real laid back atmosphere throughout (which make the occasional twists and dramatic scenes hit all the more harder) that makes exploring St. Mystere just extremely pleasurable, which is all fuelled by the beautiful art style that would easily belong in a good children’s book… and then there a bunch of puzzles tacked on as well for the gameplay.

There’s no bones about it, the puzzle ‘integration’ within the actual story is very weak, and it would seem like it would get old/boring quickly… yet it simply just doesn’t. There’s an awful lot of variett in both content and presentation and so each puzzle put forward feels like a brand new challenge to solve. With no time limit, hints for each puzzle, with a lot of them skippable or can be retried at a later date, you never feel helplessly stuck. The game may provide all these questions, puzzles and challenges but it also wants you to succeed and take great pleasure at answering them, one at a time. The quality of puzzle does tend to slip a little towards the end, but it takes much longer than one would expect.

I’d also recommend having a pen and paper to hand when playing, as a lack of a good memo/notepad function can really be felt after having experienced some of the subsequent sequels.

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box/the Diabolical Box

The second in the Professor Layton series, and it does exactly what a sequel should do. It takes what works from the first (which is most of it!) and continues the formula with a few improvements here and there - for example the puzzles are definitely more integrated into the story, and the presence of small QoL features, e.g. Memo, Diary etc. are extremely welcomed.

The story itself is a lot more ambitious, complex and involves multiple locations (The Molentary Express, Dropstone and Folsense) which is certainly welcome, and some of the locations, namely Dropstone were extremely enjoyable to explore. Despite this ambition, I did find the progression between different locations to be a little disjointed at times? The great plot-twist reveal at the end is also unfortunately a little underwhelming.

We also see further emphasis of little mini-games as begun in Curious Village (although there wasn’t all that much there), which are fun but do feel a little tacked on - and I appear to be in the minority in finding the Tea Set minigame annoying to complete.

A small, solid improvement from Curious Village.

Q

Quantum Protocol

A weird, anime, singleplayer deckbuilder card game, with the theme of hacking.

I really have no idea what to make of this at the moment, its a mishmash of quite a few things and while I’m not sure it all works? But the card game itself contained within is certainly quite interesting.

q.u.q

A beautiful VN, with a very distinctive art style - some minimalist designs combined with harsh blocks of colours, mainly shadows, with most of the scenes being some combination of black, white and red. The soundtrack is fantastic too, an eclectic mix that pair well for each scene used - to the point that the few periods of silence stand out.

For all the wonderful surreal art and environments built, the story in question that is set… is hard to really make any heads or tails of. It veers wildly in tone from scene to scene, is similarly wild in its themes (and so it never quite feels like it all adds up) and the relative crassness/humour of the few characters can undercut some of the more emotional moments. My best analogy is that its a box of puzzle pieces, containing 3 different half-complete puzzles that don’t fit together. Its definitely flawed, there’s a lot left up to interpretation or simply left deliberately vague/unexplained and the inconsistency in themes makes its harder to ascertain what, if anything, to take from the story.

However, despite my complaints, its clearly a passion project and it shines through and I can definitely see (in my admittedly limited VN experience!) others enjoying or excusing what I perceive as mistakes (and perhaps vice versa), and besides, it is worth to take in the excellent audio and visuals.

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Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri

Quite often checking out games without having the benefit of growing up with them/nostalgia can be very difficult, games evolve in both raw mechanics and in presentation - and what was standard or even groundbreaking back then… often don’t survive 20+ years of age. That’s not unique to games, but given the relative newness of computers as a whole it certainly affects them more than most. Old Civilization games certainly do suffer in their clunkiness, and Alpha Centauri is no exception - however to point out an old game is, in fact old and clunky nowadays, feels like missing the point.

The real reason to check this out, and why this game remains a cult classic to this day is the beautiful exploration of hard science fiction. Very few games have so whole-heartedly created a vision for the future of mankind as ambitious as Alpha Centauri has. This is not so much a statement of “Alpha Centauri is all style over substance”, its that the style is presents is both ridiculously good and totally inseparable from Alpha Centauri’s substance.

The 7 distinct factions all split with distinct political ideologies and with their own philosophical ideas on how to run civilization. The initial battle of survival, grappling with the very alien nature of “Planet” and the horrible Mind Worms. Unlocking near-future technology to begin thriving and exploiting the Planet for resources, research and military. Engaging diplomatically with other factions that align with your ways of thinking, and waging conflict with those that politically oppose you. Fighting Planet itself as you continue to exploit and terraform causing ecological damage, leading to increased and aggressive alien activity. Perhaps even an atrocity such as nerve stapling on the way to keep the people in check. All in the pursuit in transcendence.

Its all wrapped up in some superb flavour, with great writing and voice acting and music to bring everything to life, be it the good, the bad or the horrifying. Its a game worthy of its high praise because of its ambition and unique themes that really have yet to be matched elsewhere in a 4X game, and judging by the reputation of Civilization: Beyond Earth, one doesn’t hold out much hope of another Alpha Centauri suddenly emerging from the shadows - so one feels compelled to sing the praises of this game to anyone and everyone willing to listen.

Sid Meier’s Civilization 4

No question my favourite and the best mainline Civilization game in the series - and a accumulation of all the good ideas generated from Civ 1 thru 3 (whilst culling quite a lot of the bad ones!) distilled into one excellent package. Subsequent sequels 5 and 6 do their own interesting thing, and I certainly admire attempts to mine new depths, but I have personal disagreements (mainly 1UPT to be fair) that prevent my from sinking too much time into them. Civ 4 ends up sitting in the perfect goldilocks zone for me.

Pretty much all of the overarching mechanics work well and are suprisingly un-wonky for how complex they all are (compare to Civ 3, where nonsensical game rules are strewn throughout), and the “Cities cost maintenance, Buildings are free” approach to limiting endless expansion should never have been abandoned in subsequent games. That combined with a serviceable AI (doomstacks, love ‘em or hate ‘em, do a lot to help AI’s out with conquering), nicely transparent diplomacy and a really well constructed tech tree make this game still fun to play after thousands of hours into the game.

Its certainly not perfect, there are weak points/‘one right plays’ present (e.g. Slavery Civic being mandatory for high-level play, Great Lighthouse busted on high-water maps, mass tech trading if enabled etc.) and games can still be a slog to end due to some lacking automation and too-high victory requirements - but honestly? These complaints are not new to the 4X genre, and with the game old enough to have abundant modding effort poured into it, the game has never been in a better state than now.

Super Hexagon

A brutal arcade game in its most literal sense, with its flashy visuals, catchy music, and super quick gameplay! The one simple mechanic this game presents combined with the insane difficulty leads to lots of restarts and trial-by-error learning, only without being rinsed out of all of your loose change.

It makes for a well-designed indie game, doing one thing well - and while I feel it can be a one-and-done game once you beat the highest difficulties (or quit in disgust as your eyes/fingers/brain refuse to cooperate and help you win), I’m still certainly happy I checked this game out and have it on my virtual game shelf - even if I’m just a little bitter I never beat the last difficulty!

Super Meat Boy

A great fast-paced 2D platformer, difficult but never feeling overly fustrating thanks to the instant respawn/infinite retries mechanic. Not much to say, but beating this game (and getting to grips with Meat Boy’s slippery movement) was just, very satisfying, and continued to be satisfying for a long long time, no matter what the game threw at me. That combined with the stellar Danny Baranowsky OST was enough to propel me to both 106% and get some of the frankly unfair complete-whole-world-without-dying achievements.

The few downsides is that in retrospect, a lot of the unlockable characters are not as fun to play around with than Mr Meat Boy himself (other than to trivialise the odd level here and there), meaning that the incentive to 106% is minimal outside of self-pride, and it wears the newgrounds/flash aesthetic on its sleeve, for good or for ill.

T

Tabletop Simulator

A great base foundation to play an absolute barrel-load of any kind of tabletop game you can think of, without the need to meet-up in person nor even own the actual tabletop game. Getting up to speed with the controls etc. is also pretty damn easy, and while it’ll never be as smooth as in-person its about as good as you can expect (without being specialised to 1 game or just 1 specific genre of games), making this great to sit in your virtual back-pocket. I’ve played DnD, Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Secret Hitler, UNO, Coup and more (sometimes trying to crash the game itself by summoning a crapload of objects then flipping the table can be a funny way to round off a tabletop session).

Yes, playing in person is better, but I’d rather play on Tabletop Simulator than be forced not to play at all.

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Wargroove

At first blush its medieval themed Advance Wars, given it copies the core gameplay of turn-based tactics, the pixel-art units and combat animations - and so a comparison is rather unavoidable. If you enjoy Advance Wars, you’ll likely enjoy this and vice versa - but make no mistake, this has small but significant changes and deviations to give Wargroove its own twist on the genre and not just be a strict clone. I make note of this deliberately because a lot of complaints and “I wanted to enjoy this game more than I did” seem to derive from these few but impactful changes (myself included!).

These are the changes below:

Wargroove is built on a rock solid foundation that Advance Wars synthesised but has some changes which a lot don’t neatly fit into a strict “better vs. worse” category, they’re simply a different take on the genre, and one focused on balanced/“competitive” multiplayer matches emphasising the chess-like aspect (and conversely, de-emphasising the big blowout turns that Advance Wars have).

Despite the multiplayer emphasis, there’s a boatload of single-player content (including an editor and a host of user-created maps), and while the Campaign is pretty meh (in both story and map design), there’s also Arcade, Puzzle (which is very chess-like!), Co-op and the aforementioned user-generated content to play and enjoy.

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