Banishers is a perfectly adequate 3rd person action adventure. The story, setting, characters, and action are all solid Bs across the board. The character choice is solid for the genre and the talent tree offers good variety in gameplay.

The problem is the backbreaking lack of any sort of variety, particularly in enemy types. You will fight the exact same 5-8 monsters over and over again, and it just drags by the end.

A decently fun, arcade splatoon ripoff. In desperate need of additional maps and game modes.

Dreadful walking simulator with a bizarre story. Controller feedback and sound design were good, props for being free and short.

Fun demo, cool setup with fun and inventive lore. Looking forward to the full release and hope its well optimized for the Steam Deck.

This was a game I desperately wanted to love. The Like a Dragon from 2020 is one of my favorites from the last few years. The story, characters, and spirit were all, and still are, high points of the genre for me, especially Ichiban.

I never played any of the other Yakuza games that featured Kiryu and this is definitely what tripped me up on Infinite Wealth. Halfway through the game the party gets split, setting up alternating chapters where Ichiban and Kiryu are the main characters. Making you play through an extended introspective and recollective chapter for several hours as Kiryu kind of killed the flow of the game for me, and I was not really invested in his character or a re exploration of the previous games city.

The first 7 chapters in Hawaii are as wonderful as ever for this game, the spirit and characters are alive and well here.

Hoping to maybe come back to this down the road.

Palworld is a exceedingly average game, there is basically nothing about the exploration, base building, survival, or combat mechanics that shows any sort of inspiration or creative juice.

The base building in particular shows no real development, you really do have to mine over 10,000 pieces of ore just to keep expanding and leveling up your base.

Combat is floaty and mostly the Pal's do the damage so you really are just there for the ride.

Hopefully by the time they release 1.0 there is actually something here.

Exellent, if standard, metroidvania with insanely fluid motion and traversal mechanics and strong combat. While the PS2-ish era story and characters leave a little to be desired there is no doubting the moment to moment fun to be had here.

A complete, and welcome, overhaul of the Prince of Persia series.

Decent mashup of Hades and Vampire Survivors. Barebones but fun to grind out levels, excited for potential future updates.

Early Access

Perfectly acceptable, fun, and vibrant metroidvania. The movement and combat is good, difficulty is mostly negligible thoughout. Awesome score, decent pixel graphics.

The release of Phantom Liberty, and version 2.0, upgraded this hollow game to great new heights. While I still encountered numerous visual and mechanical glitches, the game never crashed once after the update. The combat took a huge step forward with more sensible weapon and tech tree options. The story here was top form CDPR output, characters were deeply fleshed out in side quests and conversations, motivations were clear and it was impossible to make it through with everyone alive and happy, which is a good thing for this universe.

The Night is Grey is a serviceable point and click adventure with very dark core The mechanics and puzzles are bare bones and can be very frustrating at times, constantly making you retrace steps and retalk to NPCs. The ending saved it from being completely generic enough and provided some engaging storytelling and twists

Froguelike is very simple and clear Vampire Survivors Clone. the games trades weapons/spells and monsters for tongues and bugs. The loop is fun and engaging enough, but doesn't offer nearly enough variety in weapons and enemies. I think the game only offers 6 total tongue weapon types, and then a standard array of buff tongues, such as attack speed, cooldown, damage, etc. Like its inspiration, the game is fun though, the screen gets full and the movement gets hectic. Hopeful for it to be able to build into something that can stand on its own.

NOTE: Game is in early access.

Found this not nearly as fun or engaging as I had hoped.

A fun and simple meditative climbing game. The lore and story is barebones but the simple gameplay loop and scenic vistas were enough fun to push through. Played through in 1 sitting.

Liked the lore and the callbacks. Unfortunately I don't think this version of combat is up to snuff enough for a fully realized and kind of half backed roguelike.