Fairly certain this is my favorite game to come out of the wave inspired by vampire survivors.

I've always been a big fan of minion based gameplay, and, as the name suggests, that's the focus here. You'd expect a game about minions to be fairly passive to play, but you're dodging for you life and trying to get off spell casts regularly here, so it ends up being among the more engaging games in the genre. There's also a great variety of classes, spells, minions, relics, maps, tower defense type structures to build on the maps, etc. to keep things fresh for a good long time as well.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the strange mix of faux olde English and juvenile humor strewn throughout every bit of text in the game. For me, it's so dumb that it wraps back around to having its own charm, but I could see some being turned off by it.

Endgame of Devil is a fun little drafting based roguelike, most similar to Luck Be a Landlord. Instead of building a slot machine, you're building an army of evil. Every turn your army is randomly placed on a board along with heroes, who have to be defeated within a time limit. Let too many heroes through, and you lose. Additionally, at the end of every turn you can draft a new unit to your army, and at the end of each wave of heroes, you can choose a new passive for your army -- basically the same design as Luck.

With all that laid out, Endgame of Devil is similar enough to Luck Be a Landlord that you could rightfully call it a clone. However, I find it more fun. There's a smaller pool to draft from, and you get more rerolls and removal. It allows for much more control of what's happening, while still leaving you limited enough that you can't force the same playstyle every time. I also enjoy the aesthetic of building an army of lizard men more than making a slot machine to pay rent haha. The main downsides are that it's perhaps a bit too easy, and you do see the same builds a bit more than would be optimal. Still, I had fun for the full 9 hours it took me to complete the 20 difficulties the game offers.

Distraint is a cool little horror title. Nothing too scary, but there's a great creepy atmosphere with a bit of whimsy to it that I really enjoyed. I loved the art style -- the environments were great, and the faces had a lot of expressiveness. The audio was well done, too. The characters and story were decent, though it wasn't a particularly nuanced take on the ethics of property seizure... not that I'd expect or necessarily want that from a 2 hour horror game. More importantly, it did a solid job of exploring the main character's mental state throughout the events. My only complaint was that walking back and forth to complete the puzzles and investigate the environments was a bit slow, but the game is short enough it didn't grate that much. Definitely worth the time.

Little Noah is a very cute action platformer roguelite, with a generic and slightly under-baked, but charming story.

The gameplay centers around collecting "lilliput" over the course of each run. These lilliput can then either be assigned to your main attack combo or put in one of two skill slots to use as special moves. Much like Catmaze or Ender Lilies pressing the attack button then summons the lilliput to do an attack and then quickly disappear again. Figuring out how to build your attack chain of lilliput and which skills to use ends up being surprisingly fun. Outside of the lilliput system, the game largely sticks to the genre staples. My only complaint about the gameplay is that the screen can get quite busy and some room see multiple waves of enemies spawning in, leading to somewhat frustrating moments where you don't see an enemy before it's too late.

I'm really not sure why the game is a roguelite, to be honest. The storyline doesn't particularly lend itself to the format and could have used more room to breathe, and I think the systems would have been more fun to interact with in a metroidvania or even standard action platformer format. The last form of the final boss was the only part I struggled with after getting the basics down, but it takes an hour to get back there. I'd seen everything the game had to offer by hour 4, but it took me 6 hours to finish since it took me a couple of times to learn the bosses patterns. Note that I took a few months off between my first couple of runs and finishing the game, and was only a single hit off winning on my second try at the final boss-- if you're good at these games, you could probably win in half the time I took. That said, I enjoyed the base gameplay well enough, it wasn't so bad having an excuse to play for a couple more hours.

Definitely a good game to pick up on sale if you want a cute diversion for a few hours.

I got Brotato in a bundle a little while back and finally decided to give it a go for myself. It's a decent little vampire survivor style game with de-emphasized metaprogression, set in a smaller arena with a more explicit wave-based structure.

Brotato controls well and has great basic mechanics. Unfortunately, it's a bit same-y from run to run, which isn't a great trait for this sort of game. I found it a bit easy as well. I only lost a couple of times on my way to a win on the highest difficulty, but I've watched Retromation play here and there over the last year, so I had a good idea of the general strategies going in. I'm marking it as finished for now, but I could see myself coming back to try out a new build from time to time.

I'm a big fan of Yoko Taro-isms, so Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars hit the spot for me. Very fun writing and characters, and the overall plot is decent as well, though not on the level of the Nier series. Keichi Okabe's music is great as always. I really enjoyed presentation style with the audiobook-like narration and card-based visual setup.

The problem is that the combat is about as basic and boring as JRPGs get. Worse, there are random battles that occur with a mind-numbing frequency. As a result, it felt like a bit of a slog, despite the short runtime. Luckily, at some point between launch and my playthrough they added a turbo mode. Funnily enough, it seems to increase the overall game speed, so while my real-world finish time was 10 hours, my in-game time was 14 hours. I'm definitely glad to have saved those 4 hours, and I can imagine my score may have been a bit lower otherwise.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to the sequels. It sounds like they didn't do anything to improve the combat, though, so I'll play a few other games first.

Psychedelic dungeon crawling trip through the tower Samsara. The combat will bore you straight into enlightenment on the Noble Truth of dukkha, but that's not the reason to play Disillusion. The avantgarde minimalistic tracks and garishly psychedelic visuals are the real attraction, along with the crazy lore. Lots of Buddhist, Hindu, Greek, Egyptian and (if you find some fake walls to walk through in a secret library on accident) Abrahamic influences come together (in roughly that order of importance) to build a surprisingly interesting world. You also get a lot of nonsense from the poor souls trapped in the tower experiencing the loss of ego to amp up the bizarre indie vibes.

Definitely a neat way to spend 5 hours.

The game starts out a bit rough, but man does it go places. I wish I were in the mood to write a full review, because there's a lot worth writing about here. Maddmike and NightTray cover most of what I'd have to say in their reviews, though, so I'll just mention a few things for now.

I think the basic combat mechanics are a bit clunky. There's a bit of a stiffness to attacking, dodging, and shielding that feels slightly off. Some enemies, particularly early on, have annoying tells for their attacks. I frankly didn't understand why people liked the combat at first. Then more systems opened. More and more new skills and spells became available. My opinion of the combat steadily rose until I was having an absolute blast by the midgame. There's nothing quite like it and I really love the emphasis on using i-frames from spells to dodge attacks -- it allows for a grant offensive pace. The underlying clunkiness never really goes away, but it becomes such a small part of the combat that it almost entirely stopped bothering me.

One other gameplay note: I started on hard and the enemies felt annoyingly spongy making the game rather grindy, so I bumped it down to normal. Normal was honestly a bit too easy, though. I only had to bother learning boss patterns when I challenged some content much earlier than intended. That didn't really impede my fun, though!

The story is absolutely over the top anime nonsense and I love it. The best comparison I can think of for the amount of escalation in the plot is Gurren Lagann. It just keeps getting bigger and crazier, but manages to stay meaningful and coherent. I also found the characters grew on me a ton over the course of the game despite some tropiness.

Definitely one of the best games I've played this year, and it's already been a great gaming year for me!

Awesome little puzzle game. The ambient music and "fungipunk" aesthetic create excellent vibes to solve the challenging, but not too difficult puzzles. You're presented with bits of text framing a loose narrative prior to each puzzle, which, while not creating an entirely coherent narrative, do a nice job in setting the mood. Much to my shame, I got stuck on the last level and ended up looking up a small hint after nearly 2 hours of missing a stupid simple trick and I'm very disappointed because I have no one to blame but myself since it was actually a very reasonable and well made puzzle and now my experience with this beautiful game is forever tainted by my own weakness and I'm not sure that my fragile intellectual ego will ever recover from this blow but maybe it's good to be humbled from time to time and I probably made the right choice to move on and not torture myself but I still hate everything.

Highly recommended for the puzzle fans out there.

I love solo dev projects. It can be very inspiring to see what an individual can come up with and follow through on building. Despite some rough edges, this is one of those inspiring projects.

Caves of Lore is an RPG dungeon crawl with clear influence from the old Ultima games. As you explore the various dungeons and towns, you gather lore from books and people that helps you piece together the mystery of why people seem to be losing their memories. While the overarching storyline and character development are both a bit minimal by modern RPG standards, the world building and lore are very well done and kept me interested throughout the 35 hours it took me to beat the game. There are secrets around every corner, many of which reward you with both unique items in addition to lore. This lore often serves a gameplay purpose as well, cluing you into how to find yet more secrets. This secret hunting, exploration, and gathering clues was easily my favorite portion of the game.

The combat, on the other hand, is a bit more hit or miss. The basic systems are competently executed, with a nice variety of spells and abilities to give you plenty of options in the tactical, grid based battles. However, many of these options begin to lose value as the game progresses. Being able to freeze a large threat is great early game, when there is typical only one or two threatening enemies in combat. Later in the game, fights tend to be bigger, and will drag on if you aren't spamming large AoE DPS and the highest damage single target moves. Many other abilities are just never effective enough to be worth a turn-- lowering defense in a PBAoE just isn't worth a turn when you could otherwise be slamming an enemy for great damage and a chance to stun. This is made more annoying by the fact that mastering these less worthwhile abilities through repeated use is required to unlock other abilities at times. Worse yet, the encounter density is legitimately twice what I would have preferred. You can stealth past enemies, but that makes it far harder to explore and can leave you in a dangerous situation if you need to rest and heal up. Finally, the bosses are absolute pushovers, going down in far too few hits. All of that said, though, the basic systems are enjoyable. Combat IS enjoyable overall, there's just way too much of it and some balance issues remaining here and there.

There are some other annoyances as well. New companions join with almost nothing in the way of skills and absolutely no levels in their spells or abilities. Getting them combat-ready is a huge investment of time and money, and simply wasn't worth it for the last few who joined. One of the forms of secrets are based on runes that are sensitive to the position of the games 3 moons. These become more and more common as the game progresses, and require some fairly tedious waiting. I skipped a few here and there just so I didn't have to wait around so much. Finally, the storyline ended with a clear hook for a sequel rather than properly resolving. That's always a bit frustrating when the sequel is still a long ways out. Of course, I cared enough that I was frustrated, so that's not entirely a bad thing.

Still, despite those issues, I had a really good time with the game. The world, lore, and exploration are enough to move past the game's shortcomings. It's definitely worth the time for those who enjoy the genre.

What a charming little trilogy.

All three games together have a runtime of about 3 hours, and the gameplay is very simple -- you collect items from the environment and trade them with other characters to get what you need to solve the mysteries. I'd say it lands a bit closer to walking simulator than what you'd expect from point and click games.

The fun comes from the goofy, sometimes absurd, and frequently awkward writing. I was grinning throughout the series, and even laughed out loud on multiple occasions. Top that off with enjoyable music and cute artistic direction, and you've got a great package. There's nothing mind blowing here, but the ending managed to be surprisingly impactful for such a short, silly series. Definitely worth the time!

Well, that was a unique experience. The melee combat is fairly entertaining and the gun combat is serviceable. The narrative is interesting enough to keep attention, but not spectacular.

The atmosphere is amazing, though. Insane character designs and motivations, bizarre dialogue and music, strange landscapes. I absolutely love the acid trip this game provides.

Zeno Clash took about 3.5 hours playing on normal difficulty -- a bit short, but appropriate for what the game offers. I could easily see it growing stale as a 10-15 hour game, but, luckily, it was paced out well.