Another Crab's Treasure, as I write this review, is the latest game from developer team Aggro Crab. I must disclaim that I really like Aggro Crab's previous (and first released) game, Going Under. So I went into Another Crab's with the perspective of someone who was really looking forward to playing the game.

I wasn't disappointed. I like Souls games, and I kind of like soulslikes too. I've played Lies of P before I played Dark Souls. I've played a lot of Code Vein. And I'm at least curious about Lords of the Fallen, The Surge, Steelrising, etc.

For me, soulslikes can never be as bad as they are when the environments are repetitive and not well designed and we get lost while trying to find our way forward. So I'm relieved to say that level designs aren't a problem in Another Crab's. You have access to a rudimentar map in the pause menu, so you also have that.

Combat, and combat encounters, are the weakest part of Another Crab's, IMO. I don't like that the first enemies you find have similar behaviour to their late game correspondent enemies. The patterns are hard, your dash is too short. Parrying is not only hard, but weird too. Sometimes, there are too many enemies in a given scenario, and things get frustrating. There is a particular blowfish enemy that always screws the game's camera.

These things might have been detrimental to my enjoyment of Another Crab's, but the game released with a ton of accessibility options. Turn off corpse runs? Yes, please. Take less damage? Yes, please. On "easy" mode, with most of this stuff turned on, Another Crab's feels like a hardcore version of a Zelda game, combat-wise.

This game is carried mostly by its personality. There are awesome anti-capitalism themes in both Going Under and Another Crab's Treasure. The humour is spot on.

As for the journey, you'll be pleased to find out that Another Crab's is a relatively meaty soulslike. I've finished it in a couple of days, but it took me 20h, so these were hardcore gaming sessions for me.

I really recommend y'all to play this one and Going Under. Aggro Crab is one of my favorite developer teams out there, and I think a lot of people might like their work if they try it.

The Sims was bombastic, life-changing, even, back in the now ancient year of 2000.

I swear to y'all: I couldn't wrap my childish mind around the idea of a life simulation game hyped to be so deep. It wasn't as deep as I expected back then (I expected The Sims 3 right off the bat), but it was amazing as it was.

The Sims 1 is iconic. Now that I'm balding and getting a pouch belly, I think a lot about Bob Newbie, who was bald, had a pouch, and what looked like garbage juices spread around his clothes. I've never looked as dirty as Bob Newbie, but, who knows? Give me some time.

The songs are a whole thing in this game. Are children ready for jazz? Are children ready for the most melancholic piano pieces since the XIXth century? People at Maxis judged this questions and decided that yes, children deserved to hear amazing, mature music.

I remember the somberest of pieces, which popped in sometimes in building mode. That song made me suddenly reflexive and a little afraid. Sometimes I got a prank call a little after hearing the somber song. "You have been warned. They're coming for you" - said the trickster looking happy mask on the phone. After that, young me could barely move his legs to the kitchen to drink a glass of water. The Sims 1 spooked me like that.

I used a bazillion cheat codes for TS1. If you think that real adults lives are too busy, grindy and unrewarding, you should really experience The Sims 1 to see how bad all that stuff can get. The Sims 1 is a distopic capitalist experience. I'm sure that someone already defended this on some reddit post or youtube video, because it is so true. The Sims 1 is a game in which you NEGLECT YOUR NEEDS in order to PROGRESS at WORK, and you'll HAVE NO FRIENDS.

You'll poop for FORTY MINUTES, cook for TWO HOURS, call someone to your house, and then hug them until your sim FALL ON THE FLOOR FROM EXAUSTION. The time economy is bananas, and it is crooked against you.

Will I ever play The Sims 1 again? I don't think so. But I'll never forget this game and all the ideas and experiences that surrounded it. I love The Sims.

This game is a good tie-in for an anime show that I didn't watch. My lack of knowledge was alright, though. The story, for what I understood, was very spin-offy, if you know what I mean.

Deedlit isn't a metroidvania as much as it is a "Castlevania-like". You'll get Symphony of the Night vibes immediately. Your character even leaves a trail.

The game isn't very hard. This genre leans towards soulslike trappings, these years, and Deedlit doesn't go down that same road. Some battles can be challenging, but this is one of those metroidvanias in which you can farm easily. There are a lot of rooms with easy monsters right by the entrance, so you can exit, enter, kill, exit, enter, kill...

Combat is defined by directional strikes (you can point your sword horizontally, vertically, and even diagonally) and "auras". You have a red aura and a blue aura. Some enemy skills emit red or blue projectiles, and you can absorb those as MP if you're wearing the same colored aura.

This carries over to exploration too. Blue aura can float a little, and red aura can survive fire. I didn't feel particularly challenged by any of the platforming sections, which is good for me.

Also, there are magic skills that you can practically spam if you want, and they are very powerful. The very first you obtain is a barrage of homing missiles. You can kill most enemies, even bosses, by spamming missiles, if you want.

The map is kind of good. It informs you well, if you look at it hard enough. It is medium sized, and I liked the different biomes.

At the end of the day, this feels exactly like what it is: a metroidvania that is above average, but that doesn't feel super special.

I didn't like Infernax the first time I've played it. It was still on Game Pass. My Xbox console was fairly new. I opened it, and found it (a) very 8 bit looking, which is a style I don't have fond memories of, as I was born in the 16 bit age, (b) punishing, (c) I really didn't care for the game.

Almost a couple of years later, I give Infernax another shot. The game instantly hooks me. I liked the upgrade system. I liked the sidequesting. The 2D dungeons in this game are amazing.

I recommend it.

Silent Hope is a master of walking the fine line between potentially boring and perfectly fine.

This is a 3DS-looking game that tells the story of a kingdom that lost its words. The king, aeons ago, stole the words (?) and went into a huge dungeon, or something. The princess cried so hard she turned into a crystal. Now, her voice called 7 heroes to her, and these heroes are you. You can take the heroes, one at a time, to tackle the big dungeon in which the old king lies in wait.

Fortunately, they didn't make the dungeon all subterranean, looking like old temples and caves all the time. Actually, the dungeon looks like overworld type environments. Think "autumnal forest" and "grassy hills" and "halloween woods". Every environment has its fair share of different enemies, who look like very 3DS versions of classic fantasy monsters, lizard warriors, wolfs, mmorpg-looking jumping bunnies. I kid you not: I'm 10 hours in and yet no spiders showed up.

If you aren't fighting and crawling in the dungeon, you probably are in the hub area. The hub area acts like a mobile game about managing a farm. You get raw materials in the dungeon, and the hub area has facilities that turn those materials into the good ones that can be used to craft gear. You queue tasks for these facilities, that take real time to pump out your desired objects. So you'll probably jump back into the dungeon to make the most out of your time.

Heroes are very 3DS looking dudes that do not look like main characters, IMO. As the game's story is about a king who stole words, they are silent, which may be a blessing. The game incentivizes you to switch between different heroes in a run. You only have 2 healing potions with each one of them, and after you use those, you'll be safer if you just switch your guys and take one that still has its consumables on.

That said, heroes can be geared up and they also can learn and upgrade skills. This is the coolest part of the upgrade system. You start with a base class and the possibility to acquire 3 different active skills. As the game progresses, you open 2 more classes for each character, and you can combine active skills of all the classes for making your own setup of possible actions.

For me, this is an absolutely 7/10 game. If you want a simple ARPG that won't ask you to min-max nor to engage with advanced item management, this is one of the best games available. But this is the kind of game that, although its good, exists in order to pass the time. You play Silent Hope while you listen to a podcast, and then you wonder were those precious hours went.

I hate that I can't even access the ingame store to buy stuff with my ingame cash because I need a 2K account and the 2K website refuses to work well enough for me to make one (at least in my country the site does not work).

That said, this is a very good, very easy racing game. It feels like Forza Horizon, but with a lot of cartoony features that ensure the fun never stops. You turbo'ed too hard in the road and fell off to the lake? No problemo, amigo! Your car automatically turns into a boat, and you just drift and turbo more, now on water.

The physics of the game is interesting and a lot of mini games felt at least amusing to complete. Maybe the game would be better if they made a lot more racing with a little less minigames, but, still.

I recommend this one to everybody who enjoys racing games for kids. I enjoy those immensely, so I really liked this game and do not regret the purchase, even with the aforementioned contrivances I faced.

After buying Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2 for dirt cheap, I didn't know what to expect. I'm the kind of guy who likes very good games, but I also enjoy mediocre stuff. Back in my day, you could have licensed shovelware for days. These days, the mobile market pretty much had completely absorbed all of this market, and we don't have a lot of budget licensed console games no more.

That said, I had kind of a blast with the second game. I played all the cups and most of the challenges. I thought about getting NKR3 too. It wasn't too expensive on Steam Sale. I got it.

NKR2 felt like Mario Kart 8 on the antonym of steroids. It was a very OKAY game. The driving is kind of fire, though. It isn't amazing, but I would have to lie to say that I was not entertained.

NKR3 feels a lot like Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. They figured out how to make water, and they went all out on it. Every track has a water part in which your kart becomes a boat. The boat parts play a lot like the normal parts, though, so it isn't a big nuisance, just an annoyingly reocurring aspect of the courses. It is most glaring when the course itself doesn't mesh well with the idea of a water part. You have water parts on the FARM course, and I bet I won't finish this game without seeing water on the DESERT courses too.

The game looks super good... Besides the fact that they cranked the bloom up to the moon. I recommend you to play this game with sunglasses on. What I mean is, the courses look good in a technical level, and the character models are great.

You get coins for racing, and you can grind for new characters, karts and motorcycles. Yes, they put bikes on NKR 3. Bikes are so light and fast that I feel stupid for racing with my karts sometimes. I still do it, though, because some characters look like they are more of car-persons.

This game have you choosing an ultimate skill + a pair of passive skills that guarantee advantages under certain conditions. All these skills have cooldowns. The ultimate must be charged by getting "slimed" in the races. You can do this by racing over slime puddles, picking up slime coins, or if you get in front of slime pipes that spit a lot of slime on you. The passive skills recharge over a short time.

NKR 3 also implements shortcuts, usually in the form of slime slides... Those are fast grinding sections in which you go really fast down a slime slide. There are little walls here and there to hinder you velocity. If you time your jumps to skip those, you can go really fast.

The shortcuts aren't well hidden, though, and it's so hard to miss them that they feel like the canon course.

I'm saying all this mediocre details, but NKR 3 is kinda fire ngl. I'm having fun with it, and I recommend it on sale. (I paid like $5,00 for it and found the purchase to be totally worth it.)

Zwei is a simple game that does a lot right. You're Ragna, a red-haired heroic treasure-hunter who loves airplanes. You start the game piloting one. And then some anime villains shoot you, and you crash into a floating island that looks like Zeal, from Chrono Trigger.

You wake up in the house of kind strangers and find out that the reason why you aren't dead is that this vampire princess named Alween made you semi-vampiric so you could help her challenge the demons who took her castle from her.

The game is structured in the traditional "town -> dungeon" way of RPGs. Towns are great, and you won't be bored to death by what NPCs have to say. They've made a low number of unique NPCs in each town, and I think that is way better than the character-generator looking NPCs of almost every game.

Combat is simple AF. There are 150+ enemies in this game, and you can button mash 'em all to death. It is weirdly satisfying, though, because enemies explode like money filled piñatas, and their deaths also sometimes gives you food.

Food is both health regenating and XP boosting, in this game. You don't earn XP directly from monsters, and the only way for upgrading your pair of characters is by eating. You can buy "XP food" from a vendor, though, so there is a direct relationship between gold and XP. (Every monster drops gold, so you'll never be fighting for nothing.)

This game is charming in that "uber PS1" way. It looks like a very good PSP game. You can't rotate the camera, as this game is ancient, but a lot of quality of life features are present (you can warp, skip cutscenes, save whenever). So this really feels like a PSP game, a really simple dungeon crawling experience that doubles up on the charm.

Dungeons are nicer than you would expect. They have cool gimmicks, and I liked a lot of them. Rewards are all significant. They have that tileset-dungeon feel to them, but not in a particularly bad way. They're fine.

So, everytime I saw Zwei I thought that the game, being kind of old and dirt cheap, might be too mediocre. After buying and playing it, I don't believe in this anymore. Zwei is actually a hidden gem and a good game to get for pennies when it goes on sale.

Em Dredge, você é um pescador que acorda com amnésia em uma vila pesqueira. O prefeito te empresta um barco para você ir pagando conforme pesca. O último pescador sumiu, e todo mundo te avisa, com urgência, para você tomar cuidado de noite.

Pescar é relaxante: tem uns peixes bem pertinho do píer da sua vila. Há outros pontos de pesca mais longe, mas pense em um barco lento, e é bem capaz que ele ainda seja um pouco mais rápido que esse barco que o prefeito te emprestou.

Navegar de noite realmente é perigoso. Primeiro, é escuro pra caramba, deixando fácil pra você bater o barco em paredões de pedra. Segundo, realmente há monstros lá fora. Tudo indica que você e todos seus amigos moram na parte mais Lovecraft do mar. Terceiro, você, o capitão, confrontado com esses horrores além da compreensão, começa a ter alucinações.

Pra mim, todos os aspectos do jogo funcionam bem. É gostoso planejar expedições para pescar, colher materiais, visando melhorar seu barco. Quando você melhora seu barco, você fica mais rápido e passa a poder carregar mais coisas. Quanto mais rápido você fica, mais longe dá pra ir sem passar perrengue.

O jogo é estruturado em "linhas de aventuras", uma pra cada região do mapa. Lá pro fim do jogo, as regiões impõem condições hostis de exploração. O desafio nunca passa do ponto, realça o jogo sem deixá-lo frustrante.

A reta final de Dredge é bem bacana... O final tem uma sacada boa, que deixa a trama mais marcante. Recomendo pra todo mundo. Possivelmente meu indie preferido de 2023.

What I find the most incredible about Slay the Spire is that: this is a game that released in 1997, on the Playstation 1, kicking off a whole generation of roguelite deckbuilders that continues to this day. You would bet that, in those 30 years of developers trying to catch up with Slay the Spire, they would have done it by now, and might have even surpassed it in its own genre, right? But they hadn't. You can buy all the roguelite deckbuilders on Steam, and not one of them dethrones the masterpiece that is Slay the Spire.

OK, so Evil West released yesteryear, but there is no denying that what this game really is is a blast from the past. A recent past. This game evokes the Xbox 360 era of third person shooter videogames, when graphics were as cool as they ever were, but on the other hand games were as linear as corridors, characters were stiff and couldn't jump, lots of actions were contextual button presses, basically QTEs, etc.

So you might be asking yourself why am I giving this game 4 stars out of five, and not three stars or something. And that is because the game is basically combat, and the combat feels good. I mean it. This game's protagonist carries a whole arsenal in his back, which is hilarious. The way the game maps these weapons as actions is, every weapon has its own button. Like, "square" is the shotgun. You use the D-PAD to alternate weapons, so the controller can get mapped to twice as much weapons.

The game boldly discarded a lock on feature, choosing instead to give you ways to get close and personal if you want. Melee is risky, but you'll get more healing out of killing enemies with your bare hands. You'll find yourself shooting minions with your pistol until they're weak, then zapping up to their face with your electric gauntlet-whip, and combo-punchying them to death, in order to recover some health and keep going. Things can get frantic in Evil West.

The meat of the gameplay occurs in these combat arenas, where you fight a lot of foes. Lots of enemies feel like mini bosses in this game, and I usually have to retry combat encounters in order to succeed. It is dumb fun, and it plays well. The only thing that I wish was more responsive is the electrical gauntlet-whip thing. It also works well most of the time, but sometimes the game wants you to use it so you pull flying enemies from the air, or ranged enemies for their advantage positions. In these scenarios, the gauntlet is unreliable, which can be frustrating, although not deal breaking.

In between combat, you'll solve the dumbest puzzles ever presented to mankind. This game has some "PASSAGE BLOCKED BY ROCKS", "FLUORESCENT TNT CRATES GLOW BY THE SIDE OF THE ROCKS " kind of puzzle. If you're running forward and you don't know what to do next, you missed something stupid, because the answer is always in front of you. If you find an invisible wall, look up. There will be something for you to shoot and make passage forward to the rest of the game.

I said that this game evokes Xbox 360 era, but there is a major difference in the visuals department. Evil West is super colorful. It does the "Sea of Stars" thing of having its missions occur in a vast array of different visual themes. You'll fight in a brightly lit orange canyon, in green swamps whose water exudes purplish fumes, in misty forests that look like Alan Wake... The wild west feels like an adventure themed park ride in this game, and it works with the dumb fun vibes that Evil West already has.

This game has a story, but it is hard to care. The main character is a vampire-hunting ranger who is the son of the man who runs the vampire-hunting institution. The father wants the son to become a leader of sorts, delegating stuff to others. But the son is an adventurer by heart, a wild spirit, who wants nothing but to be part of the action. Are you sleeping yet?

To finish things up, I think that this game is good, dumb fun. Nothing more, nothing else. I like to play it in short bursts, but I can see someone going for a fast completion of this game without getting too bored. If they skip the cutscenes, that is.

Why have they had to release Tevi two days away from a huge Steam sale? I was already feeling somewhat embarassed by what I've spent on games in the last weekend. And then I open Steam and I am greeted by the cutest bunny lady I've ever seen, Tevi.

I thought to myself: don't do it! You have a huge backlog, dude! You just bought, like, a trillion soulslikes! You're playing Evil West! Don't buy it!

And I was like, okay, I won't buy it. But I will play the demo.

The demo of Tevi is really cool. The devs made a little alternate adventure to show a lot of aspects of their game. And you won't get spoiled by anything, as the demo feels like a filler episode to the anime that is the full game.

The demo was so fire that I couldn't not buy Tevi. And so I bought it.

Game is horny AF. You know anime that emphasizes young woman being hot? Like, Shantae? And how they sometimes play it coy, like, being super näive in tone while also obviously feeling the hots for their characters? Tevi isn't like that, this is an openly horny game. It reminded me of Gust outings, like the Atelier series, Mana Khemia, etc.

Even if you find it cringe (and the game dabbles in fetishes I find somewhat weird), there's no denying how much quality is in this game. Tevi has combos for days, bunny girl hits like Dante from Devil May Cry. The game seems to have learned all the big lessons from decades of 2D game design, and incorporates every quality of life feature that you usually wish for in games of this kind.

Game opens up fast, and you'll be deciding your next adventure in no time. Tevi is story-heavy, and the game almost feels like a visual novel at times. It doesn't drag the pacing too much, and Tevi is a charismatic character. This game can establish relationships between NPCs and its main character, in a way that isn't super common.

Of course, I'm like 5 hours in while writing this, and the game can do the classic "get bad in the final stretch" thing that is so usual of the industry. But, even then, I think that Tevi is a special game. I know for sure that its a very good game in its genre. I'll wait a little for saying what I really think right now: this might be one of the best.

I feel very alone in really liking Stray Blade. Maybe that's because I didn't play the game in its original state, which must have sucked, because no one in the internet dared to rate this game higher than 6.

But, man, Stray Blade is kind of fire. In the sense that it is badly optimized and turns your GPU into an ambient heater? Yeah, that too. But, also, this is the best simplified soulslike experience I've ever had.

Soulslikes often fall into the trap of trying to best Dark Souls in frustration. Like, I love Lies of P, but that game is hard as nails, and inflexible: the player gits gud or quits. Lords of the Fallen, from what I've been hearing about it, has too many ganks and ranged enemies... The list goes on! But Stray Blade is oddly relaxing.

The game relaxes a lot of the soulslike staples. You don't lose your hard earned XP after dying. You explore areas blindly at first, but you're also able to get a map for them, usually hidden in a corner at their end. The build system is simplified and has a cool gimmick: you don't have attributes, only upgrades that you can buy on a skill tree. For open an upgrade, you have to master the weapon correspondent to its upgrade.

The upgrade system is nice because it ties up a lot of the aspects of this game. You want to explore throughly so you can find crafting resources, as you only acquire weapons and armor by crafting in this game. Using a new weapon fastly leads to mastering it. And mastering it make you able to invest your level up points on an upgrade. Those upgrades are substantial: they add damage to your attacks, life and stamina to your bars, etc.

The story is a soulstory, but streamlined AF. It's like playing Dark Souls with a chatty friend explaining it to you. Farren West, the main character (the armor dude, who is always in armor), is at least somewhat of a prick. He sounds like a jaded game dev. But it isn't too bad, actually. He has some qualities too. Your furry companion, Goji, is more charismatic. Both characters kind of have their arcs, which may culminate in a solid friendship.

I'm some 6h into the game, so I'll probably change my rating and add something here if the game suddenly gets too bad. But it doesn't seem like it is going too.

Edit: You are in a single valley for the whole game, and although the game can pull off some visuals, the limited scope of the fiction (and probably the limited resources, also) makes the environments look a little too much alike. That doesn't ruin the game, because you have guiding tools that really help you navigate the world. But it is something to be mindful of: the game gets visually repetitive after a while.

Edit 2: The level design got a little more confusing, too. I already walked some circles in early areas. Then I went further into the game and felt that the design was getting more confusing. Maybe this game really is a 6/10, lol.

I both loved and hated this game while playing. The game is slick: combat feels amazing after you master the weird time of its parries. The lighting and scenery are both gorgeous. And despite all this flair, the game runs with absolute consistence. This is a game that released in a pretty much finished state, and is kind of sad to recognize how amazing this feels, to be able to play a recently released game.

Some of its bosses are VERY hard. I spent hours and hours in some of them. I needed a week to beat the Green Swamp Monster. I've fought the King of Puppets countless times. And the last boss, damn. I can't even believe that I've beaten it.

Maybe the game is too hard? Lies of P feels like the idea of Dark Souls of people who haven't played Dark Souls. Lies of P enforces getting gud. It's linear (you'll visit its words in an order that's set in stone) and it's brutal.

I can't dismiss what Lies of P achieves, though. This is a very consistent "soulslike" experience. Even the later levels are still somewhat good. It has high highs and pretty decent lows. You add that to the technical prowess, and you get a great game that is a joy to play if you enjoy soulslike brutality.