Romancing Saga 2 is a super unique RPG that isn't really very much like anything else I have played.

The premise is that you play as a series of rulers that can pass their power and experience to their children. Over the course of the game, you are trying to unite the continent and defeat a group of legendary villains. In practice, this means that if your main character dies or you complete enough events, you pick an heir, reassemble your party from your willing subjects, and continue playing. It is cool to try out different parties over the course of the game, but assembling and re-equipping your team every time you need to is very cumbersome and annoying.

Romancing Saga 2 is sort of like an open-world game. Many of the areas you can explore are unlocked by hearing about them from rumors in bars or from your advisors. Many of the dungeons and bosses you deal with are events you run across while exploring. Most of the time you don't have much clear direction as to what to do -- the game expects you to just explore things. This gives it a very free-form feel and many of the events have multiple ways to play out, are affected by other events, or can be skipped entirely.

This game can be painful to play for a couple of reasons. As mentioned above, inventory and party management are very rough and unfortunately you are forced to deal with them quite a bit.
Difficulty is very uneven. Many of the baseline enemy groups absolutely devastate your team and the damage you deal and take is very swingy, which can make some fights feel very arbitrary. In addition, encountering enemies increases the difficulty of the game, so grinding isn't really an option to help even this out.

The fact that you pick a new character every time you die makes the game feel a bit like a roguelike, but the classes aren't different enough to make it feel like changing your main character has a major impact. Hidden stats on the characters also negate some of your choices in a way that doesn't seem to serve much purpose -- some warriors are just worse than others and you can't really play around it.
This feels like the beginning of a system that could be super awesome, but just doesn't quite deliver on the promise.

Overall I like this game a lot, and the unique aspects really elevated it for me. I ultimately shelved it because the difficulty curve ends up feeling super unfair and unfun, but it is an interesting game that isn't like anything else.

People say this is the best one in the series. People do not lie here. What you have here is a much tighter and cleaner mystery than previous games with a sheer emphasis on cultish horror and perception of reality. The theming and overall atmosphere is top notch, all topped off with the lead no longer being a 'Im an everyguy cool guy' mary-sue and instead showing someone whos more afraid, scarred and prone to mistakes.

Its still very short and quite easy to plow through thanks to the few rooms... and some of the 'scares' the series likes to use are starting to feel a little old hat at this point. Its still good none the less.

Despite not having Rob Gilbert and Dave Grossman as development leads (as well as Tim Schafer, who only worked as a consultant on Curse), "The Curse of Monkey Island" manages to retain the same wit and charm as the first two games with a fair balance of easy and brain-wracking puzzles. The star of the show, however, is the art and animation. Even though I love the look of Monkey Island 2 Special Edition, this is by far the most cohesive and charming art style in the series. It clearly set the tone for the look of those remasters over a decade later. The only thing hampering it is the low resolution in-game and in cutscenes. An HD cleanup of Curse would be fantastic!

Completed with 100% of achievements unlocked (1,000G). NORCO is a powerfully-written point-and-click adventure game following a tragic, personal story. It has the danger of being a somewhat depressing game to spend time with, but that's testament to the strength of its writing. Be warned that there's a lot of reading and dialogue involved, which can make it a little tricky to get invested in at first - and I'll be honest that it's not a style that particularly appeals to me in general, but it did eventually draw me in. Impressively-detailed pixelart serves to enhance the conceptually dark story, albeit with limited interactivity.

In the end, the open world doesn't really add anything -- it's just an overlong DARK SOULS IV with a map and a horse, and a bullshit quotient not seen since DS2. Honestly, a solid third of this game is just bad, and unfortunately, it's the last third, and double unfortunately, the game is like 200 hours long if you want to do everything, so that's a whole lot of suck. Enemy, encounter, dungeon, and boss design all take nosedives into 'gotcha' meme-ass difficulty (something every successive From game is getting worse and worse with -- is this supposed to be a cool fantasy world I'm immersed in, or am I playing a Berserk-skinned I WANNA BE THE GUY? Fucking pick one), and by the time you get your millionth spell and millionth high-level sword you'll never use because you're not specced for it, you'll really start to feel the pointlessness. (Once you learn that the DS2 guy co-directed this, it allllllllll starts to fall into place.)

Impresses initially, but in the end, it's just another open-world game that didn't need to be.

I played this for a couple of hours and got over half of the Steam achievements in that time. It's a soothe-core, ultra-lite city builder where you have to place different types of buildings on a series of procedurally-generated islands in order to build as high a score as possible. Different buildings gain or lose points depending on what other buildings they're in range of; little numbers pop up to tell you how many points each placement will get you. Situate a lumberjack's hut near to some trees and a saw mill, for example, and you'll net more points than if you'd plonked it in the middle or nowhere. Stick a solitary shaman near a bustling city centre, however, and you'll detract from your score. Once a building is placed it cannot be moved or removed, and the purpose of the game is to fill up a score meter with enough points to be allocated some more buildings to place. Get enough points and you'll move to progressively bigger and more spacious islands, but run out of buildings without generating enough points to be given more and that's the end of your run. After that you're booted back to the beginning for another go with a different island and the same basic set of buildings.

It's fine, but after a couple of runs I'd had my fill. The buildings themselves are barely animated, there aren't that many to choose from, and one run didn't feel different enough from the next to keep me interested. The whole thing felt like something that would be better experienced on an iPad; I wanted a bit more from it. At its best it reminded me of Unpacking: placing objects in empty spaces with a particular purpose in mind while listening to a relaxing ambient soundtrack. But, without Unpacking's underlying narrative and drive, ultimately it's just a wee bit dull.

Still, I'm pretty sure I got it for free, so I won't complain too much.

5/10

Islanders is a cute minimalist city building game with a great art style and a simple gameplay loop. First you randomly generate a colorful low poly island and then you place various buildings on the land given to try and reach a score that takes you to the next randomly generated island. You keep going until you can't score past that point threshold any more.

The depth comes from how each building interacts with each other. Some deduct points if they are placed near an identical building, some require supplemental buildings to rack up a good score like the seaweed farm. And depending on the island you generate certain buildings will be more useful than others. That said there's no real urgency. You take your time and find the best spot for points or even the best looking spot for the building. There's a sandbox mode too if you don't want to mess with score and just want to build a pretty island. Package all that together with some nice chill music and you have a comfy coffee game that'll keep you playing well after you've finished said coffee!

I've enjoyed the vibe of this game so much that I've 100%'d it and I don't do that very often. I still boot this one up every now and again to see how high I can get my score while making an aesthetically pleasing island. Highly recommended if you want a chill minimalist town builder!