Most comparable to the moment-to-moment gameplay of Death Stranding, but apply those mechanics to rock climbing. Use the whole controller for navigation and make it into a puzzle. Rock climbing is already a pretty good fit for this, not surprised that this ends up a satisfying experience. This is a guaranteed purchase from me.

languid management/tycoon game that does a good job of making the school setting feel like it's more than just transactions and metrics. the people in your school feel like people, both students and staff - very cute!

This shit is so fucking cool, dog. A city builder in a setting where most other city builders would scream and cry out: "no, stop! you can't do that!". For one, it's geographically interesting, but it's also a depiction of cultures that don't get a lot of attention in games. I'm fully on board with this.

Currently, my greatest weakness is that I've been fiending for a "single-player MMO" for quite some time and this is like a laser beam that feels like it's coming so close to hitting that target. The nearest of near misses. I'll probably still pick this one up and play the hell out of it if there's even remotely good class variety.

is... is this the first somewhat interesting take on a survivors-style game? Forced to always push forward by a machine that creeps behind you, forced to actually play the game by aiming at new things that appear onscreen. like a funky little mashup of Mothergunship and Vampire Survivors (although admittedly this sounds fucking horrendous on paper. sorry!)

From the devs of Severed Steel, and it feels like it. Lightning fast, hypermobile, the works. Harder than their last game, but no less fun. Tribes players are going to be absolute gods at this

I'm a sucker for this kind of city builder, just like I was a sucker for Frostpunk's premise. Absolutely worth trying if you like survival-oriented city builders. Hard to imagine this one feeling as dire as things in Frostpunk can get, but the words "first solar flare" (emphasis mine) have me wondering.

Lots of neat little details that contribute to a feeling of your city growing/feeling lived-in without needing your direct intervention. Love watching power lines and desire paths crop up to support new structures.

This game oozes charm. It's a Zorro video game! Campy characters, the ability to use your environment to create openings, I think there's a lot to like. I'm interested in seeing if the devs are creative enough to stretch this thing out over a full game's runtime.

A fun aesthetic. A little underwhelming on your own but I can see this being a fun Saturday night game with friends, made better by a couple drinks. I maintain that games like these sink or swim by the creativity of their perks and this game's perks are pretty solid. Not earth-shaking, but there's stuff here that's a lot more interesting than several different flavors of "+2 to damage"

Everything here feels chunky and machine-like and conveys the impact of every hit. The animations are excellent! I love the feeling of it, but the issue is that the game needs to do a little more work to make sure that the smaller/more nimble enemies stand out from the brightly colored backgrounds.

Lying and breaking the rules of my own list because I think this is really cool, but I know for a fact if I bought it I would play it for like 30 minutes and never again. I think it does a lot of really creative stuff that keeps a lot of the familiar gameplay from becoming stale, I just never quite enjoy combat in games with this sort of art style. I think it's got a lot of promise though and will probably end up pointing someone towards this game at some point.

it's cute! not worth writing home about but i'd probably pick this one up. very chill supply line puzzle game. not too much to say here!

This is the most "do the kids remember Bloodborne?" game I've ever played. I like some of the changes it makes to combat - the sharpness mechanic is fun and looks sick as hell - but I worry this will get stale by like... hour 3. Could probably also stand to lose some of the sillier ways it uses the Dark Souls formula. It's not like I'm going to send death threats to the devs if I'm allowed to open a set of two large doors in less than 9 real-life seconds.

A city builder with a decent set of mechanics and a gimmick that sets it apart but it's not hitting the right notes for it to be something I come back to in the long term. It hits that kind of stressful city builder resource-juggling midgame VERY early, to the point that you'll probably reach it in your first session of the demo. I may come back later just to poke around a bit more and see if those feelings linger, but I think this has actually talked me OUT of paying full price for this game.

B-list horror, which actually makes the Postal 2-tier graphics work in its favor. This is a lot more interesting than I expected in my short time with it, so depending on its release price, this may be a purchase.

Truly beats the pants off anything in Hogwarts Legacy but I find myself wishing that you could cast spells a little quicker so it would have a faster flow to combat, something like Wizard of Legend. Lots of ways to cheese this combat but I find that endearing. This will absolutely be someone's "underrated gem"

Very... odd game in that it feels like an MMO and a musou game at the same time. This would be pretty compelling if it ran well, but I had pretty frequent issues with stutter, and even when it was running smoothly I didn't feel like my character was responding to my inputs as quickly as you'd like for a game like this. I really like this format, and with a little tuning on the animations/performance I think this would be pretty fun. Got a pretty good translation too!

Helldivers by way of Vampire Survivors. It's competent enough and offers you the option to play it like a twin-stick shooter, but as with every Survivors clone, you can just pick the weapon that spins around you and never think about the game again.

It sounds like the shooting has improved from the prologue, if reviews like psychbomb's are anything to go by, but I'm not really sold on the whole package here. Lots of indie jank - enemies are a little too easy to dispatch despite their damage, and the tuning of all the numbers w/ regard to health and ammo means that this demo is less about the narrative or its enemies and more about running around beating the hell out of wooden furniture to collect pathetic amounts of ammo and bottles of pills that hardly heal anything at all.

BUT! What I will say is that it's unique in a way that I think I find charming, hard to say with this small slice. While it's obviously Max Payne, they've done enough to differentiate the premise, the setting, the character, the soundtrack, that I think it's got a strong identity, I just can't tell from this demo whether the full game is going to have me enjoying this character or asking him to use a different voice. Currently, he always sounds like he's trying to talk himself out of having a panic attack.

The movement here is really fluid and feels like the kind of thing where I'd see crazy highlights on Twitter, but I'm really hoping that the full game is more than just one combat arena.

I mean, it feels like it's got more character than House Flipper 1, at least. I like that it's not so anonymous and suburban but the new art style makes it feel jarring when it's like "Welcome to our cute island home! In order to refinish the countertops, just follow this quick 8-step process". This simulator is a lot like its predecessor in that it feels a lot closer to actual chores than a lot of sims do, and I wish they had scaled that back a little bit.

I don't know of a better way to describe this, but this is the kind of writing you expect when someone is trying to create a "dark and gritty" world but it doesn't land for me when it's coming from the mouth of a pony.

The dinosaurs are cute (and the humans are... uncanny) but I don't really see why you'd play this over another game that is either more polished or more inventive with its mechanics. I don't think it's a bad game but it just... doesn't feel great to interact with the core systems here, which is something that can make a cozy game feel a lot less cozy.

i'm glad we liked For Honor but this feels like a step backwards

https://i.imgur.com/J0oMg3z.png

I like the concept, I like the perspective and the controls grew on me, but 1: why put me on another planet if the starting crops are still just potatoes and carrots! 2: the next stardew/harvest moon game to include a stamina meter is gonna cause me to lose my entire shit. I'm literally just aiming a laser pointer in this one!

Sub Rosa was a jank-ass game that could've overcome all that to become truly legendary if the YouTubers who "popularized" it were cool and not racists. Somehow the driving got worse with this one, though. It's like driving on buttered ice

Show anyone a screenshot of a Vampire Survivors game 20 minutes in and it'll be fucking indecipherable. Ask a player to pause their own game of Vampire Survivors 20 minutes in and they can probably explain to you exactly what's going on. VS is actually very good at giving weapons distinct effects, and even if you don't notice those, the weapons don't move in the same ways enemies do, so you're never sacrificing visual clarity. This game has an aggressive vignetting effect that makes it difficult to see enemies that are outside of melee range, one of the first upgrades you can get is a turret that walks around like an enemy, and the first special enemies you run into are the same color as most of your projectiles.

It doesn't crash the way Bellwright does, but it barely runs even on the lowest settings, none of the enemies match its stated theming, and the guns do not feel good to shoot at all.

This thing LOOKS neat but it crashes so often you've be forgiven for thinking it was a feature