Dave Gilbert and WadjetEye are definitely among my favorite developers of all time at this point.

The puzzles were all pretty trivial. I only had to slow down a couple of time over the course of the game to figure things out, and I never needed any sort of outside help. I'm 100% ok with that since I'm not a huge fan of point and click game puzzles in most cases. I mostly see Point and Click as a vehicle to give players a bit more involvement in a narrative, rather than a genre I enjoy on its own.

The background and character portraits are all gorgeous and go a long way to setting the mood. Unfortunately, the character sprite work aren't quite up to snuff. The walking animations are in particular very wooden and awkward.

The voice acting was generally good, but there were some lines here and there that didn't land quite right. The audio quality seemed a little uneven throughout, but I'm not enough of an audiophile to really be able to say why or how.

It was very well written. Great characters and great overall plot and twists, with plenty of foreshadowing and logical conclusions to the decisions you make along the way. It never quite had the emotional impact of the best portions of the Blackwell Series for me. I think it's the grittier, gorier, grimmer writing. That said, there definitely were well written emotional scenes, and the twists and overall plot were top notch. I really loved the callbacks to Blackwell, as well. Tastefully handled.

Definitely worth a playthrough if Point and Click isn't a major turn off and you want a well-written urban fantasy adventure.

This game is too damn addictive. It's basically Dragon Quest Monsters meets Magic The Gathering with aRPG style near-infinite scaling. You've got synergies synergizing with synergies and triggers triggering triggers left and right. It's really fun for a while, but then you just keep wanting to unlock the next thing or figure out the next piece of your build, and it becomes an obsession. Great for a playthrough, but I need to stay away from infinite time sinks like this for my mental health, if nothing else. Calling it at 40 hours this playthrough despite the fact that there's still an absolute boatload of post game content I haven't even begun to see.

Siralim has always been a paradise for theory-crafters/min-maxers. Ultimate takes that a step further and adds better turbo-modes and the ability to hide all battle text/animations to speed things up even more. Builds based around getting 100 triggers to go off before turn one are less painful than they were in 2 or 3.

Man, that was a neat game. Really enjoyed the 90s nostalgia. The art, music, and writing were all on point. I have fond-ish memories of geocities and xanga and the like, and it was fun to explore a well-done and humorous recreation of that period.

Unfortunately, in only 6.5 hours, it managed to be both frustrating and monotonous. Most of the first handful of cases felt more tedious than engaging (looking through dozens of pages for "shocker" images in particular), and the final case was just a bit too esoteric for my liking. I only missed one little thing (something that showed up temporarily on a flashing page) and ended up spiraling off, despite knowing the general type of thing I needed to find. I ended up using a guide to figure out that bit since I'd hit my frustration point. Oh well.

Still, it worked really well as an interactive art gallery with a bit of a story to it. Definitely worth the time if you have any amount of 90s nostalgia or just enjoy the particular stylings of the period. Just don't torture yourself for hours on the last case like I did haha.

I had more fun with Earthlock than I expected based on the negative reviews. I really enjoyed the visual design, and the combat was more engaging than most menu-driven JRPGs. Character customization was also quite good. There is a grid based system you could allocate stats, passive talents, and active abilities in, along with a 'bond' system that gives characters rather meaningful passive bonuses based on who they partner with in combat. The music was well done, if not as memorable as other games in the genre. There was a lot of charm to the game, overall.

Unfortunately the writing was almost non-existant. A character could die and there'd only be a line or two of dialogue to acknowledge it. Of course, this means the characterizations and overall plot were sorely lacking. That's a rather huge flaw for a JRPG, but given the short runtime (~20 hours), the visual charm and combat carried my interest to the end of the game.

Not a game I'm likely to replay, but it was a nice JRPG fix that I got passively through a humble bundle.

Well, this is the first game in the series that takes a bit of a step back.

The art just isn't quite as good as Convergence. The portraits lost their animation while talking, which, given how much talking there is in the game, makes everything feel more static. The character sprites also seem to have gone in an odd direction, maybe more cartoony? Whatever the case, I'm not the biggest fan of Rosa's new sprite in particular, which is unfortunate since you're looking at it for 90% of the game.

The individual cases and their side stories overall didn't feel quite as compelling as previous entries to me. The writing was still good, I think it was mainly that "college student" and "office temp" aren't quite as inherently interesting as "formerly homeless artist" or "jazz musician" for me. I think it was more of an atmosphere thing than a writing thing.

Some of the puzzles were a bit more intricate than necessary (e.g., getting the key from the nursing home), and from time to time the solution was a bit obscure. That said, I only resorted to looking things up in one instance, and I'd actually already solved the puzzle, I just didn't know how to reset it to do the correct solution.

Of course, those are relatively minor issues. Deception had double the runtime of previous entries (~6 hours), which gave it more room to breathe and feel like a complete experience in its own right. The main characters and overall plot was great. Joey, in particular, really had some good, emotional beats this time around. The introduction of the big bad may be a little cheesy by some standards, but I loved it.

All in all, it was still a great experience, and I may not have even had those minor quibbles if I didn't like the previous games in the series so much.

Wow, the series just keeps getting better. I liked the stronger noir vibes in Unbound, but everything else about Convergence was another step forward.

Most importantly, there were no puzzles that made me feel like I needed to mind meld with Dave Gilbert to solve. That's a big sticking point for me in the point and click genre, so it was nice to avoid for once. They also finally let you ask your spirit partner for a tip on what to do next if your stuck, which is really nice for the times when you suspect you missed something but aren't sure where you're best off spending your time looking. I had to pay attention, but I was never frustrated, so the gameplay was spot on for my preferences.

The story delves a bit deeper into the universe's lore and is even more introspective with the characters motivations and emotional states. The character writing and voice acting remain strong points for the game. As with the previous Blackwell games, it does a lot with a very short 3 hour run time.

The art moves to a higher resolution while maintaining the same overall style, which I enjoyed. The music brought in quite a bit of jazz influences from the second game, while largely returning to the more modern sound track of the first game. Very well done.

This is an auto-battler take on the Slay the Spire/Monster Train type rogue-lite. You pick 3 heroes initially (and 2 more over the course of the playthrough) from a decent sized roster (~15), and then progress through a game board with various types of nodes, much like in the aforementioned titles. Being an auto-battler, your decisions are in which heroes to select, what to equip them with, how to position them at the beginning of battle, and when to use consumable potions during battle. There's a surprisingly good depth of gameplay for the simple concept. As with the other games in the genre there's an incremental difficulty increase unlocked as you beat the game each time. I've managed to make it about halfway in (8/20) without repeating the same strategy twice so far, so there's a great variety of options that are viable.

I'd definitely recommend giving this a shot if you're looking for another rogue-lite fix. I've already put in 11 hours this week, and see myself jumping in for a run or two here and there for quite a while.

Glad I finally got around to this. It deserves all the indie-cred it got back when it came out. The characters and dialogue are excellent, and the story has a really cool mood to it. The music and visuals were also on point, creating an appropriately unnerving environment.

I only have two small complaints. Everything is a bit slow, which helps with the mood, but makes some of the walking and radio tuning get just a bit tiring by the end. The bigger complaint is about the repetition late in the game, but I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilers.

Still, a really cool little game that is definitely worth a few hours of your time if you like story/walking simulator games.