It's not quite as emotionally hard hitting as the later Blackwell titles, but it's more thematically up my alley -- I work in machine learning/computer vision and Primordia touches on quite a few of the topics my grad school friends and I would riff on to avoid actually doing our work. The writing, music, art, voice acting, etc. are all also absolutely on point. My only complaint is a little bit of frustrating pixel hunting here and there. One instance almost lead to me missing a really nice touch in my preferred ending, but I caught it while checking out the other endings. Still, a minor problem compared to how much Primordia got right.

This is absolute poetry. Beautifully written and powerfully atmospheric. I could feel just how much grief went into the creation of this deeply-personal game. I can't imagine many would make it through without feeling a strong resonance with at least a scene or two.

I love how unflinchingly bizarre the world of Strangeland is. Many scenes reminded me in the best way possible of the less-gratuitous (in terms of shock-value, at the least) David Firth animations, albeit far more heady; particularly the cicada and teratoma interactions. Every corner of Strangeland is dripping with Giger and Poe and various mythological and biblical allusions. These references thankfully serve to strengthen the unique narrative of Strangeland -- it never feels like a hollow vessel for previous works. In fact, there's a great comment or two in the game about leaning heavily on quotation.

The puzzles and interactive gameplay elements serve their purpose well in creating a connection to the narrative. I never felt too stuck or frustrated, and a simple call to the operator could point me in the right direction if I'd overlooked a cue.

I'm not particularly keen on replaying this one any time too soon, however. It was just a lot to take in! I finished Primordia earlier this week, and will almost certainly return to it sooner than this, despite the excellent evolution in design. All of that being said, I'm very happy to have had the experience and give Strangeland my highest recommendation.

There are a lot of game design decisions in Biomutant that left me scratching my head. Character progression was off, with too many upgrades for powerful playstyles and not enough for weaker ones. Loot progression was mishandled -- I only ended up finding 2-3 upgrades on the weapon type I liked in the 25 hours I played. Assets were blatantly and distractingly copied and pasted across zones in many occasions. The combat could be clunky at times, and the balance was just off between melee and ranged weapons. The story line was also very minimal.

Despite all of that, I had a great time with Biomutant. The environments were gorgeous, and the world was fun to explore. The character and creature designs were unique and endearing. Despite being clunky at times, the combat was overall very fun, allowing you to combo gun and melee and pepper in psionic and mutagenic abilities. The storyline and characters were charming. The various mounts and vehicles were particularly enjoyable ways to traverse the landscapes.

I think Biomutant shares a similar fate to the original Fable -- it promised a world of innovation, but only delivered a charming action RPG with a few gimmicks. I'm fine with that. I wish the systems were a bit more fleshed out and impactful, but in the end, I enjoyed myself and the game put a smile on my face.

I'm giving Biomutant a 3.5/5. Most of the individual components of Biomutant were 2/5 or maybe 3/5, but, for me, it just came together to be an all around good time despite its shortcomings. A game only needs to do a couple of things really well, as long as its mediocre aspects don't detract too heavily from the experience. Biomutant nailed the atmosphere and environments, while delivering plenty of fun along the way.

Dungeon Scavenger is a super stripped down 1v1 dungeon crawler that can be completed in a ~5 hours. You click around the dungeon on a 2D map, get some choose-one-of-3-outcomes random events, open some trapped chests or fight some monsters (but only one at a time). There's a bunch of classes to choose from, giving a couple of active spells and some passives each. Everyone can tame monsters by using consumable scrolls, which is nice little feature, I suppose.

You upgrade your town each time you win, there's extra floors from the DLC, and multiple difficulty levels, but there's just not quite enough going on to justify more than the 5 hours. It's not a great game on any level, but I enjoyed my afternoon with it well enough.

Tower Song is an enjoyable small indie RPG.

The standout feature is the combat design, with each character having their own unique systems. One uses tarot cards, another has a sniper rifle with ammunition, another changes between elemental stances, and so on. Fights feel a lot more dynamic than the standard set by classic Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

I enjoyed the characters. The plot and setting were both very cool, but a bit lean. What's there is certainly worth the money, especially if you have interest in replaying with a different main character to see new dialogue and mix up the gameplay a bit.

Character and monster designs are great, and the environments are substantially better than most RPGmaker titles. I really enjoyed the music, though the overall sound design and mixing was a bit off at times.

I recommend the game for anyone who likes shorter RPGs with that indie flair and lots of unique ideas.

Well, this was a fun little RPGmaker experience. Great visuals and audio. I loved the color choices and enemy design. The story felt more like an abstract set of ideas to set a mood than anything completely coherent, but the broad strokes still painted enough of a picture to avoid feeling like nonsense. The combat, stats, and equipment systems were odd, but held together well enough for a 12 hour game. With most stats governing both offense and defense of a certain type, it felt a bit difficult to specialize. Luckily, there were enough intricacies between the variety of passive abilities and the equipment providing both stats and active abilities to keep me engaged for the short run time.

Overall, it was a good time all about the spooky vibes, and I'm down for that.

Tinyfolks takes the Darkest Dungeons formula and condenses it down to a bite-size 4 hour package, maintaining most of the fun and losing all of the tedium. Despite the small form factor, there are enough options to explore to warrant a couple of playthroughs, which is exactly what I'd look for in this sort of release. It may not have Wayne June delivering banger lines one-after-another, but the audio and visual design manages to be very charming nonetheless. Highly recommended - it's a great way to spend an afternoon or two.

This is a fun little twin stick shooter (dual-joystick shooter according to Grouvee's categories haha) arena survival game. I think it plays most like Crimsonland due to the perks and ability to aim, but it's definitely a part of the Vampire Survivor inspired wave of games that's been coming out recently. It has tighter gameplay than most of it's kin, but the build variety is a bit limited at the moment. I like the minimalist color choice aesthetically, but it can get really hard to parse the screen with certain builds. There is meta progression, but you don't need it to beat the initial difficulty levels.

Overall, worth the 3 bucks. I've had a good amount of fun to this point and look forward to more diversity being added as early access continues.

Edit: The graphical clarity complaints have been substantially improved. Bumped from 3 to 3.5 stars.

Spirit Hunters was my least favorite "Vampire Survivors clone" that I played last year. The metaprogression was extremely grindy, and there was never a feeling of being overpowered that is key to the genre.

1.0 released last month, so I gave it another go. The metaprogression is now far more reasonable, and I had plenty of runs with that nice feeling of being overpowered. I don't really have too much else to say about the game, but I can now recommend Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde as a competent entry in the arena survival/bullet heaven genre.