Recent reviews by Dave Mongoose

I'm very split on my recommendation, but ultimately the positives outweigh the negatives for me (so far).

At first glance, this seems like just another Something Simulator game thrown together with store-bought assets. You'll probably have seen many of the models and/or textures before in similar games, and some of them look really out of place (in particular the choices for staff you can hire are bizarre - goth girl receptionist and construction worker janitor being two of the more "normal" options)

Playing the game initially isn't much better - you're picking up rubbish and placing furniture via a radial menu, like house flipper with worse controls and less choices. Decorating rooms is particularly rough, as you scroll through around 20 different wallpaper textures of which only about 4 look even halfway decent - why are there two different red brick textures, and why are they both tiny?

Slowly, however, additional events, activities and challenges open up. You add a small store to the motel and guests start asking for room service. Winter sets in and you need to keep the heating fired. You get a phone call from a woman asking if her husband checked in with another woman. The police tell you about a wanted criminal and ask you to call if he checks in. You set up hunting and fishing facilities (and can take part in them yourself).

As well as being surprised by the variety in the game, I'm also impressed with how stable it is. Games like this are notorious for being buggy, particularly at launch, but I've not had a single issue so far in ~6 hours.

It's not all positive - the UI is clunky, particularly for moving items and decorating, and the pace at the start is both a hectic experience in terms of time management (because you're having to be janitor, receptionist and cashier while also completing side tasks until you unlock staff) and painfully slow in terms of progression (because features are locked behind quests that often require a lot of money or materials).

Finally, I feel the need to warn that there is some questionable content in the form of 'secret agent' employees who guests will hire for 'services' - for some reason the guests specify the gender of the agent they want, and the agent just goes into their room for half an hour before walking out with about $100... oh, and the agents all wear revealing clothing and have an 'attractiveness' rating... - so maybe don't buy this for your kids or stream it on your family-friendly twitch channel. Engaging with this system is optional, but I managed to stumble into it accidentally and the euphemistic name doesn't really make it obvious what's going on until you've already accepted your first agent.

But if you can overlook the out-of-place assets, occasionally awkward controls and uneven progression (and you're not put off by the option to be a pimp in an otherwise fairly wholesome game), there's a lot to enjoy here.

An interesting roguelike with extensive skill system and rudimentary town building mechanics. Let down by slow progression and some frustrating randomisation, e.g. Elven settlements are very difficult to navigate because they're spread across multiple levels with scattered staircases, and you sometimes need to trek across half a continent to find a particular tradesperson.

Unfortunately I can't currently recommend it because of a recent influx of right-wing reactionaries praising the dev for being anti-woke / anti-LGBT. It's not really clear to me what the dev's stance is, but the community hub is pretty ugly right now and probably best avoided until the air has cleared.

EDIT: I see the developer has responded; that does little to address my concerns about the audience that they've attracted, intentionally or not. TBH, the news post they link seems to double-down on some of the concerning stuff...

A game full of great ideas, but almost none of them are finished. The end result is an entertaining but incoherent experience that I can't recommend in it's currently state.

On the positives, the world is large and (while the overworld map suffers from repeating ground textures and flat lighting) individual regions are nicely designed, particularly the cities. While the game obviously uses a lot of asset packs, they're all in-keeping with one another and it's clear that the developer knows what they're doing with them. Spell effects look great, as do weather effects and events like meteor showers. Combat is a bit of a click-fest but has some nice ideas like the critical hit mechanic (where aiming at a highlighted spot on an enemy will do extra damage and trigger additional effects like stun or bleed). The grappling hook is a highlight, allowing you to swing from most surfaces or yank enemies towards you, and there's also a wallrun and Breath of the Wild-style climbing mechanic to make for interesting traversal options.

On the negatives, I'll echo the sentiments of many reviews here - it feels like the development lacks focus. Rather than completing and releasing features one by one, they seem to be throwing in idea after idea and leaving them unfinished. Take crafting, for example - the mining skill has a clear progression (stone at level 1, copper at level 5, iron at 10, etc.) and the smelting skill mirrors this, but weaponsmithing has only seven levels with little coherence to the recipes at each level, and armoursmithing is currently not implemented. Damage spells are ridiculously overpowered compared to melee and aren't sufficiently balanced out by mana cost or cooldowns. Skills have unlockable 'perks' as you level them, but the perk trees are empty for most skills. You can build up a town outside your stronghold, but half the building features are marked as 'Not Yet Implemented'.

This scattershot development also leaves things feeling incoherent: The UI is all over the place, with two different types of hotbar, a radial menu, a pop-up consumables menu, different minigames of varying complexity for harvesting and crafting, different styles of progress bar and level-up effects for different skills... the list goes on. The skills list also has dozens of skills but it's difficult to know which of these actually exist and, if they do, how you'd actually train or use them.

I do think this game could end up being good, but they need to address the feature creep and go back to finish what's already there.

- The game is set in 1905 Warsaw, and really digs into the turbulent politics and social tensions of the city, as well as the day-to-day life of its citizens with stylish sketches of everyday scenes. A lot of effort has gone into realising the setting and making it believable.
- Likewise, the more magical aspects of the plot are grounded in folklore and their own internal logic, treated more like a mystic science. The 'salutors', demonic spirits that enable your magical abilities, are all taken from mythical creatures and beautifully modelled, with some quite brutal combat animations.
- There are a lot of significant choices to be made in how you resolve quests and respond to characters, and most of these have meaningful consequences for the story and how others respond to you. Some quests even have unmarked steps, where going to speak to a relevant character or explore a relevant location will open up further options, which feel very rewarding.
- Taking up to 40 hours for a thorough playthrough and with six major endings and dozens of minor variations, there's definitely good value for money here without it overstaying its welcome.

- The voice acting varies quite drastically in quality - most of it is good and some is excellent, but there are also one or two characters with quite bizarre delivery, and certain minor characters have inexplicable American, Irish or English accents despite being Polish or Russian.
- The turn-based combat has some interesting ideas, but certain abilities and tactics are far more effective than others. Battles are rarely challenging even on hard difficulty, although the 'final boss' did take a few tries, and fights are sometimes a bit too frequent.
- Skill points are very easy to earn in the early game but seem to hit a wall around the midpoint, which is also the point where skills begin to cost two or three points to unlock. This combination just feels very unsatisfying, and means that even a completionist will only get around half of the final tier skills.
- The plot feels a bit rushed towards the end, with certain major characters and ideas being introduced without much lead-in. This pacing issue may be, in part, because events accelerate as the stakes rise, but I do think these concepts could have been seeded a bit earlier.

All in all, the biggest reason I'd recommend The Thaumaturge is that it's trying something different and doing a pretty decent job at it - it's no Disco Elysium, but the setting, characters and 'lore' are well-realised and I always felt like my choices had meaningful consequences.

I'm unfortunately going to have to echo what a lot of other reviews have said - this is a game with amazing potential that ends before it really has a chance to get going. It honestly feels more like an opening chapter than an entire game, which is a terrible shame because the process of interrogating and challenging suspects is really well done and the timeline display for testimonies works brilliantly. It's also let down by an ending that dumps far too much exposition at a point where it doesn't really matter anymore.

A simple but effective story presented through an entertaining puzzle game.

You awaken into a strange, abandoned world full of ruined temples and collapsing homes, and slowly discover what happened through tapestries and short animations. Everything is explained in this wordless style (including the game mechanics), but I never found it confusing and I think it does an excellent job of conveying what the devs wanted.

The puzzles themselves are relatively simple and nothing that's not been done before (directing water flow, balancing weights, reflecting light beams, etc.), but they're well integrated into the world and provide both progress and story rewards. Many of them are optional, providing an opportunity to earn more story and collectables if you're keen: this is also the first game I've played in a long time where the optional collectables didn't require a guide.

The only criticism I can level at the game is that the name and store page just aren't engaging - if I hadn't got it 'free' in a bundle then I would have never given it a second look. If the game banner showed some of the tapestry art mentioned previously then I think that would be a lot more interesting that the light path shown at the moment.

A nice little puzzle game for as long as it lasts, but I felt a bit cheated by an ending that suggested more content but was actually just a "To Be Continued"-style sequel hook.

I feel bad saying this, but I wish there was less gameplay in this game.

I'm a massive fan of the prior Off-Peak games in part because of their surreal characters and locations, but we get less of both here - we only really get to see the inside of the titular club and most characters are limited to a few lines of dialogue. In exchange, we do get a quirky dice-based RPG system, but I can't help feeling like the trade wasn't worth it.

First, the positive: this RPG system very much suits the Off-Peak world, featuring 'sensible' skills like Deception and Wits alongside Cooking and Music. The challenges you deploy these skills against are equally unpredictable, and the approaches and outcomes are often joyfully silly. These challenges all take the form of a simple dice game, but re-rolls, modifiers and extra dice get involved to give it some excitement and complexity. You earn and spend money on upgrading your skills to improve the corresponding skill dice and hence improve your odds, and this ends up defining your character in much the same way that levelling up would in a more conventional RPG.

Unfortunately, there are some issues with the system: the freedom in character development encourages repeat playthroughs - particularly because there are some Deus Ex-style alternative paths - but ultimately the gameplay fights the role-playing in this respect. Passing skill challenges is the best way to earn money and hence increase your skills, so it makes sense to complete as many easy challenges as possible in order to maximise your chances of success later. As a result, I found myself doing almost all of the early challenges on every playthrough despite having very different skills each time, meaning a lot of repetition before I could get my skills high enough to see new outcomes. Equally, the higher you level a skill the more expensive it becomes, so most of the time it's better to be a generalist with one or two higher skills rather than a master of a single skill.

Punishment for failures, particularly on tough challenges, can be steep, too - typically removing health, removing sanity, and/or bestowing a debuff that harms your result for a subsequent challenge attempt. These punishments generally just make everything harder, so again it incentivizes levelling up as much as possible early on to avoid them. With the random nature of the dice-based checks, you can sometimes fail even with high skills and on top of this is a permadeath system where losing all of your health or sanity results in a game over, making the compounding effect of a failure even more frustrating.

Although this is my least favourite of Cosmo D's games, it is still an enjoyable experience once you've adapted to the quirks of the system (personally, I resorted to save-scumming fairly often). We do learn some more background lore and interact with some returning characters, and it's always nice to be back in the Off-Peak world. Still, I can't help thinking that some of the magic was lost by putting more gameplay in the mix.

A colourful first person puzzle game that seems desperate to copy Portal, but lacks both the versatility of mechanics and quality of writing.

While the perspective-based puzzles seem clever and interesting at first, it quickly becomes clear that there are really only a handful of challenges that they can solve - typically a button that's difficult to press or a ledge that's too high to climb - and the solutions are similarly limited. As an attempt to address this, the core mechanic behaves differently in certain levels (e.g. at one point rather than picking up objects, it clones them) but you have no control over these temporary changes and there is almost no effort put into explaining them so ultimately it undermines the internal logic and feels out of place.

There are some clever perspective tricks here and there which often made me chuckle in surprise, but very few of these are interactive: a corridor will turn out to just be painted on the wall, or what looks like a shadow will actually be a doorway. One redeeming aspect of the puzzling is that the bonus collectables in each level require a bit more creative thinking, but I often found myself frustrated trying to reach them because positioning objects is fiddly and the physics sometimes freak out when stacking things.

Despite my complaints, the puzzles are probably the best part of the game because the writing certainly isn't. As previously mentioned, the game really wants to be Portal but takes this much too far: You play as a subject going through various tests while being overseen by an AI that speaks with a woman's voice and makes vaguely sarcastic and/or sinister comments; eventually you get 'out of bounds' which causes the digital personality to become increasingly hostile; and then you work your way through various different areas with the final goal of escaping the tests. This alone would have been enough to have me rolling my eyes, but it's also delivered with uninspiring dialogue and terrible pacing.

After a fairly strong introduction the mid portion has very little plot advancement and is essentially just a series of unrelated levels, including one long section with no puzzles that tries to evoke a horror atmosphere but only succeeded in boring me because there was no sense of threat. Even as the story nears its end a lot of the dialogue seems irrelevant or repetitive, and the ending itself is offensively smug and saccharine telling you about how important it is to view your problems from new perspectives as if the developers believe the experience to be somehow profound or educational.

Normally I'm not one to criticise a game's length, but somehow this game felt both too long and too short. The poor pacing left me wishing the game finished sooner, but upon quitting I was shocked to see it had only been 4 hours and I'm unlikely to go back anytime soon.

All in all, I had hoped for a lot from this game but was ultimately disappointed. It might be worth a go on sale just to see the various perspective tricks, optical illusions, etc. that are genuinely smart and surprising, but maybe just watch a playthrough instead.

While at first glance this might seem like a typical indie walking sim, there's an absolute hidden gem here for nature lovers and fans of history and/or philosophy.

I wasn't very familiar with Thoreau's work before playing this game, but even so the care and attention that has gone into realising it in video game form shines through, and I can't think of a better way to experience these quotes than the way they are delivered in-game - with excellent voice acting and beautifully realised natural scenery and wildlife.

The 'survival' aspects aren't particularly demanding and even the 'quests' are listed under a heading of "Things to Do or Not Do" so you can just spend your time exploring if you choose, but I think engaging with the various tasks really rounds out the historical context.

Overall, I found the experience very enjoyable, relaxing and thought-provoking.