When I finished Pagan: Autogeny my first thought was "wow, that was good, but I wish that the endgame wasn't so repetitive- I wish it was greater in scope, and that it didn't reveal its whole hand so quickly. I wish it was more mechanically dense. Oh well."

Now that I've played it, I can say without a doubt that Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair is exactly what I wanted out of Autogeny. It's a mechanically dense puzzle box of an open-world RPG, a scavenger hunt that consistently surprised me. Progression relies just as much on finding out where to go as it does on learning the game's systems through experimentation. It presents you with a city governed by forces you don't understand and rivals who understand them far better than you do, and invites you to scour every nook and cranny, learn from failure, and find ways to survive in spite of the world often feeling totally indifferent to whether you fail or not. Getting into a fight in the early game is a death sentence; it took me an hour to even find a weapon, and another hour or so to learn how to not immediately die in combat. Progress is hard fought, but immensely satisfying when you finally do break through. I'm like begging you right now- if some stroke of luck makes Harlequin Fair blow up in popularity two years after its release- and God, I hope it does- play it blind. I realize it's totally possible that this is just so squarely my shit that it'll seem like I'm being hyperbolic here, but I loved every second of this.