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Here's my review for the summer sale:

Downwell is a pretty fun arcade-style platformer that I've been playing quite a bit lately. The main gimmick of the game is that you have a pair of gunboots that can fire down at enemies, but can also be used to hover mid-air to help maneuver yourself through the levels. The use of the boots to hover mid-air is crucial, because the game has a "combo" mechanic that encourages you play the game without touching the ground. You can kill enemies by either stomping on them or shooting at them, and for each enemy you kill without touching the ground, your combo increases by 1. What makes this difficult, though, is that your gunboots have a limited amount of energy with which to fire, so you have to be judicious in using your gunboots to make sure you don't run out of energy at an inconvenient time. You can recharge your gunboots by either stomping an enemy or touching the ground -- but touching the ground resets your combo, so in practice stomping enemies becomes your main method of killing them, with firing the gunboots mainly being used to maneuver yourself to the next enemy. The process of trying to maintain your combo while balancing the usage of your gunboots is super addictive, and I would say it's what gives the game most of its appeal.

In addition to the standard "machine gun" boots you start every game with, there are additional boot variants that you can find in side rooms as you travel down the levels. These boots vary greatly in their firepower and energy consumption, and part of the fun of the game is to try and master playing the game with each type of them. Some of the boot variants are clearly better than others, but the game encourages you to pick up different pairs of boots by restoring your health or increasing your maximum energy each time you pick a new pair up. This makes the game a lot more dynamic, as optimal play requires you to switch boots often instead of camping your preferred pair as soon as you find them.

The game has 13 levels, consisting of 4 zones of 3 levels each, plus a final boss. The levels are randomly generated, which ensures that you can't just memorize your way through the whole game. Each zone has its own unique enemies and environmental hazards, which gives each of them its own unique play style. At the end of each level, you can choose from one of several upgrades, each of which has its own unique benefits. The benefits aren't so strong as to fundamentally change the way the game is played or to trivialize its challenges, but they do help provide each game with some variety. Each level is fairly short, so the overall game isn't that long -- but the levels are hard, and each game starts from the first level, so you'll be at for a while until you beat the game! (I'm currently stuck at the final boss, myself.)

My only complaint about the game (besides that I'm not the best at it and I get frustrated when I lose my combo) is that the rewards for obtaining a larger combo cap when you reach 25 combo. Because of this, it's more efficient to repeatedly get your combo to exactly 25 and end it to claim your rewards, than to make a single combo which is as long as possible. However, you're not at a huge disadvantage playing the game the latter way, so I still find it fun to try to continue my combo even when I reach 25. That issue aside, this game is very well designed, and at only $1.49 during the sale, it's a must-buy for anyone who considers themselves a fan of arcade games and/or platformers.

I'll be honest here - I bought this game expecting that I wouldn't enjoy it. And well, here we are. I understand that nobody likes a party pooper who buys overwhelmingly positive rated games just to leave a negative review on them, but I have a few important points to make.

Before anyone starts to think otherwise: In no way do I hate puzzle games. In fact, I would say puzzle games are my favorite genre. The feeling of satisfaction when one solves a difficult puzzle, the 'aha!' moment, is one of the best experiences one can have playing video games. But, for me at least, klocki fails to deliver on this experience.

The goal of each level in the game is to rearrange the pieces in it so that there are no "loose ends" remaining. It's a very simple concept and the game communicates it to the player without using any words, which is one thing I'll give it credit for. Unfortunately, the depth that this system is supposed to allow for is sorely lacking.

When I say that, part of what I mean is that the puzzles are easy in this game. Quite easy, in fact. There weren't many puzzles that took me more than a couple of minutes to solve. Now, I don't demand that every puzzle game be Snakebird levels of hard (even if I prefer it that way), but there's no satisfaction to be had in solving an easy puzzle. Puzzles are supposed to challenge your mind in a way that makes you feel smart when you solve them. If there's no challenge, there's no smart feeling when you solve them. There are a few challenging puzzles in the game, but even those don't really give the game much depth.

Most of the game's difficulty comes through complexity - you make the levels harder by making them larger. This is poor puzzle design. A puzzle game's difficulty should come from exploring the strategies that the ruleset allows for. But in this game, there really isn't much strategy in solving the puzzles at all. When you discount the possibilities that obviously won't lead to a valid solution, each puzzle can be solved through pure trial and error. If a particular piece has some loose ends, you move it around to a different place, and if that messes up the connections of a different piece, you adjust that piece also, and soon enough with this process you'll end up with the solution. The game frequently adds new methods of moving pieces such as rotating handles and sliding tiles, and also new types of connections such as abstract shapes, but these fail to change the basic strategy of trial and error. In the end, they feel like a cover-up for the inherent shallowness of the core game mechanic.

So, if you're looking for a puzzle game that requires clever thinking and intimate knowledge of the game mechanics, you're probably convinced by now that this is not the puzzle game you're looking for. But I suspect that most people here don't really care about difficulty and depth of mechanics - they just want something that can pass the time while also being simple and relaxing. That's perfectly fine; life can be exhausting at times, and you might not want to play super-demanding games after you've had a long day. But even considering that, this game is poor value for your money.

Some people are going to look at me weird for calling a 99 cent game "poor value". But yes, this game is poor value for your money. It took me 45 minutes to complete this game, so that's 0.75 hours of gameplay per dollar. Which doesn't look too bad at first, but let's compare it against my favorite puzzle game, Stephen's Sausage Roll. (I'm sorry, I just can't help but be a zealot for that game. It's soooooo good.) Stephen's Sausage Roll is $30, and it took me 32.5 hours to beat, giving over an hour of gameplay per dollar. Just think about it: a game thirty times the price of this one beat it in value! And Stephen's Sausage Roll's puzzles are much more involved, so you could even say that each hour is more "densely packed" than an hour of klocki. Even worse, you could play free online logic puzzle games such as nonograms or slitherlink, which I would consider to be around the same complexity as this game, giving a hours per dollar ratio of *gasp* infinity!.

Now, I don't think hours per dollar is the best measure of a game's value, as the previous (ridiculous) example shows, but if you're playing games solely to pass the time, then most puzzle games are pretty much interchangeable for that purpose. And in any case, the "good value" angle seems to be what developers try for whenever they release an absurdly low priced game like this, so I wanted to get that out of the way. If you want to spend money on a relaxing logic puzzle game on Steam, I might suggest Everyday Genius: SquareLogic, which provides thousands of procedurally generated Sudoku-like puzzles that actually have quite a bit of depth to them. Or maybe you could try the Hexcells series, which has over 100 handcrafted Minesweeper-like puzzles over three games, plus a random puzzle generator in the third game. Both cost significantly more than the 99 cents klocki costs ($5 and $9 for the entire series, respectively), but hopefully this will reinforce a point that too often goes ignored in this era of cheap indie games and Steam sales: you get what you pay for.

(I think I spent over three times as long writing this review than actually playing the game. What the heck is wrong with me?...)

Before I start this review, let me make something very clear: this is a puzzle game lover's puzzle game. 99% of the enjoyment that this game has to offer is simply the excitement that comes when you finally figure out how to solve a difficult puzzle. There is no form of progression in the game other than moving from one puzzle to the next, and the graphics, music, and story, while fitting for the purpose, are minimal. So, if you require some form of external motivation to stay interested in a puzzle game, I can safely say this game is not for you.

Got that? Good. Now I can talk about why Stephen's Sausage Roll is the greatest puzzle game I've ever played, and what exactly it does that makes it so great.

The creator of the game, Stephen Lavelle, is no stranger to puzzle games. He has released hundreds of short, experimental games, including many puzzle games, on his website[www.increpare.com] for free. He also released a previous commercial puzzle game, English Country Tune, which is available on Steam. He even created an open-source puzzle game engine called PuzzleScript, which many other game developers have used to create simple web-based puzzle games. But it's clear that Stephen's Sausage Roll is his most ambitious project to date.

At first, it seems ridiculous that this game could have possibly been four years in the making. When you first boot up the game, you are greeted by a silly menu theme and a title screen that looks like it was made in 15 minutes in Photoshop, complete with stock fonts. Combined with the absurd topic of the game (who in their right mind would make a game about sausages?), you might begin to suspect that the entire game and its surrounding praise is just an elaborate inside joke if you didn't know better. But as soon as you create your save file and enter the overworld map, you begin to realize what makes this game special.

The first aspect of the game that immediately strikes you is the player character's movement. The only keys used for movement are the arrow keys, but it as not as simple as a press on one of those keys creating a movement in that direction. Your character wields a giant fork as big as the character itself, and while it is invaluable in helping push sausages around, it also restricts the ways that you can move. If you want to move in a direction that is perpendicular to the direction that your fork is pointing towards, you first have to rotate your fork so that the fork is now parallel to the direction you want to move in. At first, this system can feel clunky and frustrating, and simply entering the puzzles on the map may prove to be a challenge, as you have to align yourself and your fork with the ghosts on the map in order to enter the corresponding puzzle. After a while, though, the movement system begins to feel natural, and you get to appreciate the depth that this system allows for.

When you do manage to enter a puzzle and the surrounding terrain falls away to leave room for the level, you realize the second aspect of the game that stands out: that it's really, really, hard. The goal of each puzzle is simply to grill each sausage on the level to perfection, with no square inch of the sausage raw or burnt. A sausage takes up an area of 2 by 1 tiles, with each tile of the sausage having a top and bottom that can be grilled separately for a total of 4 cookable segments. The sausages can be grilled on the various grill tiles in the level, and each segment must touch the grill tile only once in order for it to be perfectly cooked. Despite the simplicity of these rules (which are actually not even stated in the game, you would normally have to figure them out through trial and error), the puzzles that are created with them are fiendishly difficult. It is all too easy to accidentally push a sausage into the surrounding water when trying to move, burn a sausage by moving it in a direction you shouldn't have, or get yourself in a situation where it is impossible to progress because you placed a sausage in a location where you can't retrieve it. You mercifully get unlimited undos to reverse any mistakes you made, but oftentimes the biggest challenge is figuring out how to get the sausages to the grills in the first place, and that is where the game's design comes into its own.

Stephen's Sausage Roll descends from an old Japanese computer game called Sokoban, which literally means "warehouse keeper". In Sokoban, you have to push crates onto their required target locations to complete each level, similarly to how you push sausages onto grills in Stephen's Sausage Roll. Despite this heritage, Stephen's Sausage Roll plays very differently from Sokoban. Sokoban's levels are highly claustrophobic due to their narrow corridors and the inability to push more than one crate at once. By contrast, Stephen's Sausage Roll's levels tend to have few walls, and you are able to push more than one sausage at once. More importantly, though, while Sokoban's challenge tends to come from figuring out the exact sequence of pushes required to complete the level, Stephen's Sausage Roll's challenge comes from figuring out a broader concept that arises from the game's mechanics.

Stephen's Sausage Roll only introduces new gameplay elements once per world, and the new gameplay elements feel like a natural consequence of the existing ruleset rather than something that was added because the existing puzzles were getting boring. For example, the second world introduces walls that you can stab sausages against, allowing for a new method of transporting them that helps get them out of sticky situations, but also prevents you from rotating your fork. The third world explores the consequences of adding a third dimension to the game, letting you roll on sausages by getting on top of them and letting you stack sausages on top of each other, but also introducing three-dimensional obstacles that are even more fiendish than the ones before. Despite the simplicity of these additions, the different challenges and strategies that they allow for are vast, and the possibilities are always fully explored before adding another mechanic to the game.

As of this writing, the game costs a full thirty US dollars, so some might be worried about the amount of content that you get for the price. Fortunately, there are many hours of enjoyment you can get out of the game. I like to think that I'm pretty good at puzzle games, and it took me 32 hours to finish every puzzle in the game. That's less than a dollar per hour, which is a very good value proposition for anybody who enjoys their time with puzzle games. There are actually only 86 puzzles in the game, which doesn't seem like a lot, but that only speaks to how well-crafted the puzzles in the game are. There are no 'filler' puzzles that are just basic applications of principles that you already knew, and puzzles aren't wasted to teach you those principles without providing a significant challenge, either. Every single puzzle will give you that 'aha!' moment that is the joy of all puzzle game fans.

In conclusion: if you enjoy puzzle games, then Stephen's Sausage Roll is a must-play. The puzzles may be very difficult, but if you persist long enough to solve them on your own, the feeling of satisfaction you'll get from them is unrivaled. And for those who think games today are too dumbed down: this is probably the least dumb game you'll ever play. Be ready to think a lot when you play this game!

Note: My actual playtime is far less than what my displayed playtime is. I accidentally left the game running for two days, so my real playtime is probably around 3-4 hours.

Micron is a puzzle game where the goal is to guide streams of bullets towards the exit by placing pieces that the bullets can bounce off of. It's a very simple concept that is immediately understandable, but it turns out that some very interesting puzzles can be created with it.

A number of obstacles present in the levels create the challenge of the game. Present in every level is a barrier that requires four bullets shots to destroy. These do not make much of a difference in the early levels, but create much of the challenge in the later levels where you are forced to cut off the source of your bullets in order to complete the level.
Gates which are initially closed also appear, and they must be opened by a bullet hitting the correspondingly colored switch. In levels with multiple switches of the same color, bullets must hit the similarly colored switches at the same time in order for the gate to open. Finally, there are barriers which only bullets of the same color can pass through.

Later on in the game, portals which the bullets can travel through are introduced. These are a nice addition that add further complexity to the game, but they also make you wonder whether there is anything else that could be added to the game, as they are the only pieces you can place that aren't ones that the bullets bounce off of. Why not have a "vortex" piece that always makes a bullet turn left or right? How about a "splitter" piece that duplicates a bullet? There is a lot of potential for the concept of this game, and I feel that it is not always realized fully.

The game is also rather short, with only 51 main levels and 12 bonus levels. Most of these are easy and can be solved within a few minutes, although a select few of the later levels are quite difficult. Steam Workshop support helps alleviate this a bit, but currently there are not many user levels available.

Despite this, for $4.99 ($1.49 in the current holiday sale), the game is cheap enough to warrant a purchase for any puzzle game fan interested. The game seems to take a "quality over quantity" approach, and for what the game is, that's perfectly fair.