Recent reviews by constantcompile

For the life of me, I don't understand the love for this game.

Yes, there are a crazy amount of particles flying every-which-way. But progression is so stilted. Most games of this sort have some sort of permanent progress locked in with every run; maybe it'll take you longer if your build is sub-optimal but you'll get there.

(the) Gnorp Apologue demands you hit performance metrics with your build, and if you don't, all you'll do during your run is waste your time. If you don't use a guide, your experience will essentially be either attempting to intuit, or else finding through trial-and-error which half of the upgrades are essential, which are helpful, and which are an utter waste of painfully finite resources. And this will take a lot of time. Time in which all you'll accomplish is deducing information that was freely available in a guide the whole time.

"But figuring out the puzzle is half the fun!" To this rebuttal I ask, how? This is partly an idle game, which means you'll go several minutes at a time between having meaningful choices to make. The numbers involved feed into each other in ways that aren't intuitive, and I'd be shocked if the average player found it enjoyable to either crunch the numbers or brute force their way to the most effective combinations while having to wait so long between each click.

Even with a guide, you will be left with fairly significant stretches of time where your best option is to leave and do something else while it "cooks" or else browse your phone. I beat the game after 11 hours, once I'd resorted to a guide for the last few, and I may or may not go through the motions of 100%ing the achievements with guide help later.

I don't like giving thumbs-down to an indie game, but if a friend of mine were to ask about this game I would emphatically recommend against it, and direct them to a different incremental game instead. Maybe I'm wrong! Maybe I just don't get it! Maybe my brain is smoother than the average incremental enjoyer and that's the real problem. Even so, I have to say:

Not recommended.

An idle game for the impatient. A clicker game for those with tired fingers.

Tower of Wizard took me about 5 hours to complete, and during that time, I never felt bored or like I had to let my progression "cook" for half an hour before I could make more decisions.

I'm shocked that the user-defined tags don't include "incremental" yet - descriptions seem to have adopted this descriptor well ahead of Steam's tagging system.

Regardless, this is a game where numbers go up and progress is reasonably brisk. If you're wondering whether you should prestige and get those sweet, sweet upgrade points, the answer is probably yes, unless you're close to the next one.

Solid, cheap, short. Recommended.

I enjoyed this game during it's XBLA days and it's hardly aged a day. 100%'d in half an hour, well worth that time.

Quite enjoyable with local co-op with up to four people, But I'd advise going solo if you're aiming for the deathless achievement.

Recommended.

Chaotic yet fair, competitive yet casual. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling, and options aplenty.

Great to play with younger family members and adults alike.

Chef's kiss. Highly recommended.

Kabuto Park is a lovely little bug battling game, in which your team of bugs attempts to push the enemy team of bugs off the edge of a tambourine.

The mechanics are basic, yet novel - each critter has its own cards that can be used in battle, and you can only draw three at a time, adding a sort of light deckbuilding element.

I 100%'d this game in about two hours flat and enjoyed it throughout. The bug hunts did occasionally get a little dull, but the battles were always exciting. No serious complaints with this one.

Solidly recommended.

Five bucks and change for a short, sweet, wholesome experience? Easy buy.

The gameplay loop of Spilled! is rather simple, and actually calls to mind "dad games" like Powerwash Simulator or Lawnmowing Simulator. You're dragging your good bit across all the bad bits until all the bad bits become good bits. But as the other examples show, simple experiences can still be effective.

What I personally found interesting - YMMV - is that even though you spend your time in the game actively restoring polluted habitat, that habitat remains very, let's say, "anthropocene-coded" even after you've finished. There are buildings everywhere, infrastructure aplenty, and broad human-centered swaths of land like ski courses and camp sites. There are even full shipwrecks left untouched - you can see one of them in the trailer. The narrative sort of picks and chooses which forms of environmental degradation it's concerned about. That's not a criticism, just an observation.

Which isn't to say there's nothing to criticize. Some of the gimmicks can be fiddly, or their purpose can be unclear. The upgrade system seems a little underbaked; I never got my ship speed to a point I was happy with, even when I under-invested in the other components. The finale... struck me as a little strange. And there was a stray achievement that was a slight annoyance to backtrack for, after I thought I'd cleared a previous area.

All that to say - to an extent, your experience with Spilled! is somewhat contingent on your ability to embrace vibes, and just enjoy things. Soak in that crunchy pixellated landscape. Sway your head to that soft piano track. Don't think too hard about the specifics, just kind of let it wash over you. So to speak.

Still. You can do far worse with a fiver and a spare hour.

Recommended.

I was REALLY on the fence about this review. But the lack of a thumbs-sideways option means you need to pick one or the other, and in retrospect, I wish I'd spent my time playing this on a better game.

The problem is, this game gets in the way of you having fun way too often.

Do you want to burn things? You need to wait for them in the mail. Do you want to burn more types of things? You need to slowly bank up money. Even if you follow a guide and precisely burn combos at every opportunity, you will run out of stamps very very quickly if you use them liberally. There is A LOT of waiting in this game. Too much waiting relative to how much burning you're doing.

The combos themselves can be surprisingly fiddly to pull off, since some objects outright destroy others which invalidates the combo. Other objects freeze everything which likewise introduces friction into the process.

The story in the base game is quite good - the ending hits VERY different in 2025. But the DLC feels weirdly lazy in many places - just one extra book for the catalog, some extra combos which barely even qualify as content, a solid first and second act and an almost entirely recycled third act.

Could you do worse than Little Inferno? Sure. But especially these days, I feel like you could do much better. On balance, I do not recommend it.

Nodebuster isn't an awful game, it's just too dull and too grindy for me to feel comfortable recommending it.

Y'know what's a bad sign? When I have a game open, and I start browsing my phone. In nodebuster, somewhere between a third and halfway through the game, you snowball in strength enough that moving the mouse is no longer required for most of the run. Just keep your cursor in the center of the screen, and sweep up the enemy drops every minute or so.

That's what the mid- to late-game looks like. Twiddling your thumbs while the level runs, scooping up currencies every once in a while. It's not terrible - the music is rather good and the satisfaction of scooping up loot is there - but it's just not very good.

Further progression at that point has nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with investing currencies into making your numbers go up. And eventually, it just becomes about sinking currency into the "I'd like to beat the game now" upgrade. And then you beat the game, and that's it.

It's also worth noting that I had to disable the screenshake and the flashing FX, I'm not normally susceptible to that stuff but it began to impact me with this game.

Real talk, if this were an indie game with less than a hundred reviews, this would probably be a mixed thumbs-up review instead of a mixed thumbs-down review. But at over 11,000 reviews and 97% recommended, I think this one can take the hit.

So, for the reasons listed above, I'll say: Not recommended.

Digseum has the exponential growth of a clicker game without the dull monotony of waiting.

It's very likely you'll 100% the game before you even hit Steam's 2-hour refund menu, so you have nothing to lose.

Highly recommended. Some of the best fun-per-time ratio you can buy. Number go up.

Kaizen Game Works, based out of the UK and best known for Paradise Killer, have produced a game that I am not Japanese enough to fully appreciate.

The game uses exclusively Japanese VO, including a well-known voice actor who features in the Yakuza games. Due diligence was done, and the accents and even dialects of the characters are specific to the Kyushu island. There are several puns, plays on words, and twists on common cliche phrases that Japanese players will appreciate.

And these are all wasted on me. I do not speak Japanese. I can hear the quality of the voice performances and would occasionally feel guilty cutting voice lines short, but it wasn't worth staying on a piece of dialogue for half a minute after reading it. I am not familiar enough with Japanese culture to understand... any... of these references. I think I picked up an anime DVD in this game called "Triple Blaster" once. Trigun. Clever. Okay, I got that one.

But what I'm largely left with, and what most English-speaking players will be left with, is several game modes sort of duct-taped together, and a story that is wholesome - borderline saccharine, really - but that I found somehow unsatisfying.

There is too much dialogue. I can't believe I'm saying this, and I can't remember the last time I felt this way about a game. But the writing is just... it is not sufficiently concise. Points will be stated and re-stated and re-re-stated, even within the span of a single conversation. I understand the need to keep players up to speed if they're returning to the game after some time away from it, but I grew genuinely impatient with how long it took to get to the key point of a conversation.

The disparate gameplay elements are good, and I did sometimes hit the sweet-spot flow state of switching between them seamlessly and keeping all of my goals top-of-mind at once. But for much of the game, they feel like they interfere with one another. I have to deal with a crisis again? I have to return to the agency do a life-satisfaction survey again? And man, I barely touched the crane game. Money stopped being an issue for me about a third of the way into the story. And when I say "stopped being an issue," I mean "I was actively searching for more things to spend money on instead of letting it gather dust in my wallet." The crane wasn't a fun enough activity in itself to be worth my time, and the money it awarded meant nothing.

The characters... oof. Kaizen Game Works clearly brings very forward-thinking, western sensibilities to their characters and their story. But it just... it doesn't totally jive. You're telling me (mild spoilers) this crime family, who forces its members to self-mutilate on failure of their mission, is otherwise completely squeaky clean aside from what is essentially white-collar crime? You're telling me (again, mild spoilers) this podunk town, which is lamenting its younger generations fleeing to the city, is actually completely up-to-date with its social attitudes regarding gender expression and personal lifestyles? Despite the repeated comments about preferring "the traditional ways?" This is an anti-capitalist game in which you play as the manager of independent contractors who work on a gig-economy basis. Where forgiveness is freely given to all, except for the bad guys, because they are irredeemable, because that's how they're written. It's just... if you think about it too hard, the whole thing starts to get really messy.

In spite of ALL OF THAT, there is a good game here. It tries to be edgy despite how toothless its characters ultimately are. The writing and VO are good despite the dialogue being way too long-winded. (But I guess I'm one to talk.) The game modes are good. Most of them. Usually.

I completed the achievements in about 20 hours flat. I didn't bother getting 100% of the collectibles, or finishing all of the dialogue trees, or doing the crane game hardly at all. I just wasn't interested.

I'm giving this a thumbs-up, but I'm not quite seeing the GOTY contender that other, more enamored reviewers seem to see in this game.

Tepidly recommended.