Recent reviews by constantcompile

I think describing the landscapes in Manifold Garden as "infinite" is a little disingenuous. They're infinite in the same way that the play area of Asteroids was infinite, in that you could move continuously in a given direction - but that's because the play area loops back around on itself. So the effective play area is actually quite small, there's just the added navigation quirk of falling along a given axis being a useful means of reaching greater heights. Which, to be clear, prior 2D games have done.

However, seeing this applied to 3D environments is still a game-changer. Gazing up or down a forever-spiraling staircase is still beautiful. The non-Euclidean geometry is still striking. This game is a visual experience above all else. The puzzles are decent enough; mostly straightforward with a couple of head-scratchers, and an extra set of post-game challenges for added difficulty (I chose to move on after beating the main game, simply because of my overwhelming backlog).

I beat Manifold Garden in about three-and-a-half hours and enjoyed my time with it. It didn't blow me away but it was solid. If the dollar-to-time ratio seems high, remember that there's post-game content I skipped.

Recommended.

I have to be honest: The presentation of Kaiju Wars kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I just didn't vibe with the art style. In fact, maybe I still don't. But there's a solid game here.

Imagine Into the Breach, but instead of having mechs at your disposal that can match and exceed the Vekk blow-for-blow, you mostly only have conventional military hardware. That means instead of dispatching multiple monsters every turn, your forces can only hope to slow it down - or at best, send it back to its lair to heal for a few turns, before it returns stronger than ever.

I'm about a dozen hours in so far, but only about a third of the way into the story, owing to my completionist tendencies. There's a lot of content here, including a map editor, and everything seems very thoughtfully tuned. Plus, if you're not sure whether you'd like it, you can try the demo free of charge.

Normally I'd complete a game like this one before reviewing it, but since there aren't too many reviews at this point, I'll go ahead and say:

Highly recommended if you're a fan of turn-based tactics.

Novel mechanics, charming presentation, and not too long - yeah, this is exactly what I'm looking for.

Highly recommended.

Let's get this out of the way: Rogueslide ain't exactly a looker. But the same could be said of Slay the Spire.

Like Slay the Spire, Rogueslide skirts the fine line between challenge and BS in terms of what it throws at you, and your primary concern will be limiting HP loss, since recovery is hard to come by. But while there are no shortage of deck-building rogue-lites nowadays, Rogueslide is quite novel in terms of its mechanics. It feels more tactile, somehow, to send every piece on the board careening in a given direction, slamming into and destroying each other.

I had a - barely - successful run on my first try, scraping by with single-digit HP. At one hour logged, I could ignore the extra modes this unlocked and just refund the game, but it was an interesting and fulfilling enough experience that I don't plan to. That said, even if a successful run only takes an hour, the lack of a mid-run save+quit function is unacceptable. I'll give a thumbs-up for now in hopes that the developers add one ASAP, but I may revise that later if they won't.

Recommended - provided you have an uninterrupted full hour for a run attempt.

And that's why I personally refunded it. Trying to play this with an Xbox controller is an exercise in frustration, because the AI opponents are robotically consistent in taking perfect lines even on the second-to-easiest difficulty, and after half an hour of retrying the medium difficulty I gave up. On second-to-easiest, their lines were still basically perfect, but their top speed is heavily sandbagged compared to yours which just feels patronizing.

I'm no stranger to top-down racers; I've 100%'d quite a few. This game is brutally unforgiving. Your tires wear down, so they won't corner as well on the fifth lap as they did on the first. The degree to which you turn your wheels needs to be very precise, more precise than you can be with a joystick, and you need to very carefully watch your speed which makes the lack of an obvious visual indicator questionable.

Is it a good game? Yes! If you have the right setup for it. I don't.

Provided you do - Recommended.

After X-Morph Defense saw Earth colonized by an alien race, now it's humanity's turn to colonize an exo-planet!

The Riftbreaker has you wandering around an alien world, building up bases of various sizes in order to utilize the resources in different areas. The visuals are great. Everything else is... good. The mechanics are all pretty straightforward, the base-building is simple but satisfying, the progression tree sees your numbers increasing at an appropriate rate.

This game tries to do a lot of things at once, and it's remarkable that the final product is this cohesive. That said... there are cracks. The VO ranges from decent to... adequate. Objectives will occasionally seem bugged. You never have a sense of how many defenses you actually need, because unlike most TD+ games you aren't given any sense of exactly how large the attacking force will be. And using the bioscanner is a chore - for that matter, so is picking mods.

But when the game works, it works. Over-engineering the hell out of your defenses and watching them turn your enemies into a fine red mist of viscera is always satisfying, as is planning and constructing your base layout just the way you want it. There are a ton of difficulty customization options, the story is... a little confused, but it's got the spirit, and you can probably find equipment to suit your playstyle.

I beat the main story in about 27 hours, and could probably invest more than three times that if I filled out the bioscanning catalog and played a full run of Survival, plus trying the campaign on a harder difficulty. Watch the trailer, and if you like what you see, go ahead and pick it up. The full MSRP of $30 seems perfectly reasonable, but you can wait for a sale if its imperfections have you hesitating.

Recommended.

Just about any puzzle game is doomed to be an imperfect fit for most of its audience, because every player has an ideal window of difficulty that they prefer. Call of the Sea, for me, was just about right. Each chapter is self-contained in terms of the logic you'll need to work out, and the poking around you'll need to do. The note-taking system very efficiently records the relevant information you'll need, but doesn't spell out the solution for you. I beat the game in about 6 hours and generally enjoyed myself throughout.

Recommended.

In my headline, under-par means "good." Subpar means "bad." They're easy to mix up, but they're two different things. So when you see bylines like "a brilliant narrative experience," that is true. When I say "a mediocre game," that is also true. Those are two different statements.

Golf Club Wasteland has a fantastic soundtrack, great visuals, and tons of atmosphere. It also has poorly-communicated level geometry, an unhelpful UI, and all the subtlety of spray-painted graffiti on a highway overpass. "FAUX NEWS" is a great little jab at a tremendously harmful political propaganda channel. It is also kind of cringey to see emblazoned on a corporate building in neon.

I get it; I promise you, I do. I'm as frustrated as the developers are, and their heart is in the right place. But this is the videogame equivalent of a dubiously-sourced infographic on Twitter: it misrepresents the problem, causes rage and despair for people who are already on board, and changes absolutely no one's mind. But - to its credit - the graphic design is on-point. So there's that.

I mean, at the end of the day, this game is $10 full-price. So I'm still gonna toss it a thumbs-up for the visuals, sounds, and general well-meaning nature of it. I beat it in about 3 hours. If you like to 100% your games, there's an "ironman mode" achievement in here that is probably going to be a deal-breaker; that aside, it does just what it says on the tin.

Recommended at whatever price point you feel 3-ish hours of melancholic post-apocalyptic golfing is worth.

If you're looking for a quick, bite-sized game that you can tear through in less than an hour with the help of a guide, Overboard! has you covered. If you want a rich story full of layered characters that you can spend ten hours on or more - without a guide - it's got you covered there, too.

But here's where I must caution you - if you want a complexly-branching narrative with several different endings, hyper-specific context-sensitive dialogue, and a game that will constantly surprise you with how the developers anticipated every outcome... You need to dial back your expectations.

Overboard! is a small-scale indie title that is $15 at full price. It has not been polished to a mirror shine, and it has a relatively limited scope. What's there is very good - the characters are charming and memorable, and the story is well-told. Although the game usually railroads you into only a few types of major ending states, they are generally very effective and the small flourishes are endearing. In the end, I suppose saying "it left me wanting more than it had" is a compliment, of sorts.

That said - I still recommend it.

Exo One is a game about atmosphere and aesthetic.

That's all it is.

If you want to know whether you'll like this game, search for "Exo One: Prologue" which is its free demo. If you play that, you think, "Yes, more of this, please," and are willing to part with however many dollars in exchange for two-ish hours of (very pretty) new levels, then by all means go ahead.

I personally found the flashing images and the looped garbles of the dialogue kind of irritating, and I wasn't satisfied with the ending. The game is unique enough, and pretty enough, that I'll give it a thumbs up in spite of that - but I really hope the developers add options to disable all of that stuff and just let you play the game uninterrupted.

Recommended if you play "Exo One: Prologue" and are comfortable with the price point for a two-ish-hour campaign.