One of the best, most unhinged b-movie kind of games I've ever played: it's absolutely not a coinsidence that it is set mostly in Italy, the Italian cinematic exploitation masters would be so proud.

Game-wise It takes all the good shit from the Sniper Elite series (the dynamic marksmanship, the slo-mo kills, the WWII setting, the tactical set-ups for that good good murder), ditches all the boring stuff (samey levels, way too much time spent solving stealth situations), and just all-around ramps up the fun factor. Similairly to Sniper Elite it's a bit too long and repetetive, but unlike Sniper Elite there's a clear sense of constant escalation of both difficulty and just the sheer scale and ridicilousness of everything that is going on.

Aesthetics-wise you get all of the nazi- and zombiesploitation goodies you can ask for. Wanna shoot a zombie SS commander in the gonads in goregous slo-mo? You got it. Wanna lure a crowd of zombies into zombie shark's mouth? Fucking go for it. Zombie tanks? Yeah, we got those. Demon Hitler riding a giant zombie tank fortress? Yep, that too. The design on all of the zombies is top-notch, there are neat easter eggs for various horror classics strewn about, and in general it feels like the game has been made with a big love for classic exploitation cinema in mind. Which alone would be enough to sell this game to me, but it also doesn't hurt that it's just a big cheesy hunk of ridiclous trashy fun.

Like a 3D Celeste (climbing and exploration as a metaphor for self-affirmation and self-discovery), but with challenge dial turned way down, and the focus firmly on chill travelling. It's extremely beautiful, the art gets tens across the board. The pacifist, solarpunk, utopian politics of the game show that its heart is in the right place as well. The gaming aspects themselves are where the game fails, since most of them are pretty simplistic and feel like an afterthought, but i really enjoyed exploring the Le Guin-esque story and world, and nailed every single trophy just to see as much of it as possible.

Almost entirely rides on the coattails of the first game, but even that is enough for a great experience. You can never even play Subnautica for the second time to the full effect, so making it again is a doomed undertaking.

Below Zero offers a lot of QOL upgrades, bug fixes, and performance improvements that make it a nice way of revisiting the glory of Subnautica in a more compact, more finely tuned package. Just as with the first game, I got completely obsessed and played for up to 6 hours a day, so shorter length was a bit of blessing for my productivity.

I was a bit disappointed that they tuned the horror down - some unfortunate creature design decisions (Leviathan class was massacred in this game) and even just the amount of dangerous encounters is to blame.

Nothing will ever top the intergalactic environmental disaster mystery of the first game, but it's cool that they tried to tell a more traditional story through the medium of Subnautica. Robin's journey was engaging, but there was some turmoil in writers' team and definitely shows - the story is confusing and feels unfinished, and the main quest of the game ends being a completely unrelated thing.

The biggest miss of the game is definitely the land sections. They are super long and boring, a pain in the ass to navigate, and I hated the feel of the dedicated land vehicle. I ended up just hoofing through all of these massive locations in the Prawn, and don't want to ever revisit them.

Subnautica is one of my top 5 games of all time, so needless to say I will buy any ticket to 4546B on offer in a blink of an eye. Below Zero was mostly good for reminding me of how much I love Subnautica, but that is absolutely good enough.

Reviewing all of the additional content for Dead Cells, since I haven't played any of it before, and the game had some massive additions since 2020.

I haven't opened Dead Cells in a hot minute, also known as 3 of the worst years of my life. In that time it somehow turned into a massive Deadpool-like project for roguelite and metroidvania games. References to other games are littered throughout the levels, there are homage quests, homage items and homage secrets. Like these thing go, some of it made me smile, some of it missed the spot, cause I haven't played whatever was referenced. Overall it's not too memorable, and the biggest homage, the sprawling Castlevania DLC, is not for me, as I'm mostly familiar with that world through the animated series (not much of a classics gamer).

The quality of life improvements are huge, and very welcome. It is much more streamlined and responsive experience than it was years ago.

The additional content is hit and miss. The new items are fun, but the vast majority feel gimmicky and not very useful. If you want to survive a run with any Boss Cells activated you need to steer clear of all the new shiny things, and they serve as a major annoyance because they clutter the space in the shops and chests. The companion items are very cute and, unlike most of the additions, powerful, but have zero play to them, they just go around and kill stuff for you.

The added levels leave a better impression. They experiment with stuff a lot in them, for example Lighthouse level gives an exciting vertical moving boss fight with traps and a ticking clock of a fire underneath you. Even for someone who is not particularly into Castlevania, everything in those locations looks and sounds awesome, as is with most of the new levels.

The core experience of Dead Cells is still probably the best 2D action I ever played, and you can't take that away from the game. On balance, the new additions are mostly entertaining fluff rather than something substantial. After completing all the new levels a couple of times, I mostly stuck to the original routes.

One of the cases when the presentation completely tanks whatever good ideas the creators might have had for the game. Sure, there are a lot of neat interactions with the world, but who cares when the world looks and sounds like it was cobbled together by a bored 12-year old in a week, and all the narrative and world-building elements hinge on "humor" from about the same age category. Also combat fucking sucks, just stupid pixel balls bouncing against each other with no dynamics, weight or reason.

An idea so brilliant that it's just shocking that nobody came up with it sooner. Lovecraftian mythos lends itself perfectly to fishing, and fishing mini-games or full on fishing games have been trendy in the last couple of years. John Langan's awesome novel The Fisherman got there first on the Lovecraft/fishing connection, but Dredge made the concept into a fully-realized game, tagging Resident Evil inventory management and cutesy cottagecore indie aesthetics along the way.

Could have used more variety in gameplay and more things to do with resources (maybe cosmetics for the boat, or some building) - it felt a bit deflating to not have anything to spend money on after the final boat upgrade (for me, at least 30% of the game time).

Otherwise, enjoyed the hell out of the short time with the game, my eternal Subnautica itch was given a good scratch.

Beautiful art and music. Some of the most original and in-depth cooking mechanics I've seen in games. And a thoughtful story that feels part of the recent wave of indie films that reevaluate the immigrants' experiences and the constant struggle between authenticity and assimilation. And, of course, a celebration of one of the greatest cuisines in the world.

Great little vibrant experience, I only wish there was more of it! Like hours and hours more! Maybe even with actually challenging cooking puzzles that utilize the most out of the cool mechanics.

Not only called my parents, which certainly was the intended effect, but added like half a dozen things to my recipe wishlist as well. Good thing I had a lot of experience cooking Indian dishes (in fact, cooked a Chicken Madras the day I started Venba lol), I imagine this was much harder to figure out for the majority of my generation who can't cook a damn egg.

Played it first a year ago when it was on PS Plus, and enjoyed it way more back then - got really obsessed, knocked out like 20 hours in a week. Now it's still charming, but feels a lot more shallow.

The biggest problem is that I didn't notice any significant additions, even though I tapped out of the game for over a year. All the missions, characters, items etc were exactly the same as I remember them from Jan 2022, I didn't even need any onboarding and just hopped back in. There was some seasonal content announced, but none of the missions I went on had any of it. There were a couple new types of enemies, but they didn't lend much variety to the gameplay.

Just like all of these, it's probably way more fun with friends, but since I always have to play with randos, I have to judge it on that. The community back on PS Plus was surprisingly friendly and cooperative, an outlier by a pretty wide margin compared to other multiplayer games I've played. Now on Steam I found it much more alienating: everyone was just doing their thing, it was even rare to get a celebratory "Rock and Stone" or "For Karl!" from the lads, which is, like, 60% of enjoyment from the game.

Might come back one day if by some miracle I find videogame playing friends lol.

Yet another one of the somehow-legal-crack-cocaine-on-Steam-store roguelites, on par with Vampire Survivors with how good it pumps the ol' dopamine drip and eats the time allocated to your responsibilities, social life, and hygiene.

Its pool of mechanics is concise, shockingly well-balanced for a game in early access, and, as of 20 hours of game time, still producing new results every run. In sheer variety of approaches, Tiny Rogues easily beats Vampire Survivors, and gets close to such giants like Isaac and Dead Cells. The interaction between skills gained on level ups, innate character abilities (and there are so many characters), equipment, and consumables is really rich and varied, and makes planning a build a delight each time.

The tiny SNES-like action of the game is, again, shockingly satisfying, dynamic and, unlike Vampire Survivors, never lets you just kick back and enjoy the show. The first 5 levels or so are usually very breezy, but they let you focus on perfecting your build. The later levels are the real test of both the build and your skill, where the bullet hell aspect of the game comes through full force.

The only downside is that the game pretty much doesn't have any lore or story. It has a cute 8-bit aesthetic and even cuter homages to Dark Souls, but that's the extent of aesthetic engagement. It's so fun, that you don't actively notice it, but I imagine it will impact how much I remember of the game and how much I'm willing to return to it after, say, 40 hours.

I'm a self-taught musician and been practicing daily for the past 10 years. I can play three instruments, and have released four albums of, dare I say, very much rhythmical music. Just as I started playing Rhythm Heaven Fever, I was going through an online course on West African polyrhythms.

Imagine the shame I brought on my family, when a monkey in the first level of a Nintendo rhythm game was repeatedly hitting my player character in the nuts with golf balls because I fucked up half of its musical cues.

The music in this game is amazing. I'm not a huge fan of Nintendo's hyper colorful aesthetic, but it works great here, and the mini-games are constantly inventive. But. The difficulty curve is straight up sociopathic. Hidetaka Miyazaki looked at the monkey watch level in the second stack and wept.

To somewhat cover my musician dignity, I can say that, from a musical point of view, Rhythm Heaven Fever just isn't very musical. Don't get me wrong, the rhythms themselves are great, there's a ton of syncopation, contrasts, all the good shit. And there's a lot of variety in musical styles. Rather, it's what game wants from the player that is not musical. You're required to hit every beat right on the money. A fraction of a second late or early, and it's counted as a failure.

In other words, the game wants you to be a sequencer, not a musician. Every instrument player worth their salt knows that the sweet spot is in playing just a skosh behind or ahead of the beat. That's what gives the performance life, makes it less robotic.

These imperfections of an individual playing style are the hardest to replicate with sampling and sequencing, and I imagine they would be just as hard to evaluate in a rhythm game. Maybe a different, more forgiving approach altogether would benefit such a game. Making it about the joy of music, rather than programming those 4s, 8s and 16s right on the head.

Found it much less engaging and charming than the main game. There's no sense of wonder and exploration, you're basically just solving one isolated puzzle level instead of piecing together the mystery of an entire game world.

The light-based mechanics are very nice, and the planet is a cool addition to the roster, and obviously much bigger than all the main ones, but the things that made me look past the more annoying aspects of Outer Wilds are just not there anymore. Space plays virtually no role in the DLC, you're just booking it to the same place over and over again. The mystery seemed small and inconsequential compared to the multiple intertwined mysteries of the main game.

The annoying aspects themselves, however, are still very much there. The runback in the main game could feel brutal, but you just couldn't wait to explore more of the story, so you just bite the bullet and retrace your steps for the tenth time. In the DLC the runback is many times more exhausting (go into the DLC world, swim to the location you need, enter the subworld there, runback to the place you need there), and there's just not that much that compelled me to come back.

Might return to it later, but for now it even began to tarnish the good memories I had of the main game, which is just unacceptable.

Good for a few hours, but quickly gets repetitive. Not enough depth and variety.

A lot of weird hate for Enter the Gungeon in the reviews, but Gungeon is a superior game in every way, even though obviously inspired by Nuclear Throne. Gungeon simply offers so much more variety for every playthrough - of items, characters, situations to solve, secrets, unlockables etc.

At its core Nuclear Throne has a solid fast-paced action loop. But it quickly gets boring, because every run is samey, the only thing you unlock (at least in the first ~5 hours that i played) is new characters.

There's a lack of variety in items and upgrades. Most guns within a bullet type largely do the same thing, and there's a lot of crossover between the types, too (energy and bolts pretty much do the same thing, as well as shotguns and explosives). Mutations are either highly situational or do the same boring utility thing (there's at least 3 different flavors for "get more bullets"). Compare that to Gungeon or Isaac where every pickup drastically alters your playthrough.

The characters are fun, but all the 5 additional ones that I unlocked seemed to be gimmick characters designed for runs with added challenge (one has 2 HP, for example). The basic two characters are the only two (that I've seen) that have any defensive capabilities, and that makes them far more useful.