Recent reviews by Shaaria

It's criminal that this game is free. It's basically an indie take on Phoenix Wright, done really well. It took me 5 hours to play (and I was streaming and reading the dialogue aloud, so a normal play would probably be shorter), but it was a memorable experience. Great writing, interesting characters, notable plot twists, and great animation and sound.

It's clearly the setup for a full-length series, so I am eager to see that manifest. I'll happily toss a few dollars to the devs via their optional cosmetic DLC too; they earned it with this.

Core Defense is a very lightweight and minimalist TD game. It doesn't mess around with trivialities like a plot, a campaign mode, fancy special effects, preset scenarios, alternative game modes, or any of that stuff. Every game, your goal is simple: survive 50 waves of steadily increasing toughness. Each wave takes about a minute, at most, and that's if you play at 1x speed (it can go up to 5x). It's a very good game for short and quick play sessions.

The gimmick is that it's also a roguelike deckbuilder, so you pick towers, abilities and upgrades from a random subset of possibilities offered to you before each wave. And each time you beat the game on the highest available difficulty, a higher one opens up. Each step in difficulty is transparent (the game tells you exactly what's changing) and it's not a linear thing; sometimes enemies get more health, sometimes they get more speed, sometimes you get fewer rewards, sometimes more spots on the grid are unavailable.

A solid entry in the TD genre as it does something very new and different, and gives you a lot of room for exploration with builds. While you can get thoroughly screwed by RNG like in any roguelike deckbuilder, since runs are so short it's not really that big of a deal when it does happen.

It's a $1 game, but it took me about an hour and a half to beat, so it's worth it. A fun little puzzler that doesn't overstay its welcome.

If I could give a middling/okay review I would; I'll give Staxel a thumbs-up because it does one thing very, very well.

You could easily be forgiven for thinking that Staxel is primarily a farming sim. After all, it's tagged as such, and most of its description on the store page talks about running a farm. When you start a new game an NPC gives you the "So you're here to take over this old farm?" spiel that typically opens a farming sim. But Staxel's farming mechanics are about on par with Harvest Moon... the SNES one. The NPCs aren't terribly vibrant; they have an extremely small pool of dialogue outside of their quests, their routine is identical every day, and they never go to sleep or participate in festivals or even comment on those festivals.

"Okay," you ask, "So why are you giving it a thumbs-up?" And that's because of what makes Staxel different - the voxel nature of the game. This is where Staxel shines because you have total and complete freedom over the voxel-based world to reshape it as you want, and the game is designed to get out of your way and just let you do that. You get all the tools necessary to do so early on. The game explicitly tells you, if you use the wrong tool, what you need to break a particular block. There are periodically resetting side areas that let you gather wood and stone without messing up the main area. You can eventually just order any block you have previously picked up or examined, so you'll never run out of a really specific material you want.

And all the things that seem like shortcomings of the rest of the game help prop up the building part. The fact that the shops never close means you can buy materials at any time, any day. The farming and cooking mechanics are easy and simple, but they primarily exist to make it really easy to get ridiculously rich, so you can sink that money into building materials. And you'll need a LOT of materials.

Because the big thing about Staxel - the one that should be put at the forefront, before the "Farming Sim" stuff - is that you have to build everything. Every new villager's house, every new business, you are tasked with building them. But this isn't Dragon Quest Builders where you get a blueprint. Instead you get a sign, and the sign denotes a 3D space, and you just have to place a certain selection of items within that space. You have -total freedom- otherwise. You can follow the style of the town, or get really fancy. You can build beyond the marked-out bounds, so long as you have all the requirements within it. You can even dismantle and reconstruct existing structures, as long as they meet the requirements. This, THIS is the big focus of the game, because you will sink the vast majority of your money into it. It takes complete, full advantage of being a voxel game, so if you want a voxel builder that encourages you to be creative, this is the one.

That said, if that's -not- what you're looking for in a voxel game, then you should probably pass on Staxel. But if you want a chill, relaxing game where you can build elaborate and fancy voxel structures with loose requirements, Staxel provides.

Shapez.io is a niche game, but it fills that niche incredibly well. It's an automation game that reduces the scope down purely to the conveyor belt logistics element, and then expands on that with numerous ways to interact with the belt objects - in this case, shapes.

You rotate, cut, reassemble, stack and paint shapes to make whatever the goal is for the level, plus various other shapes that are needed for upgrades. And, really, that's the game. There's not much more to it than that...

...except for the steadily increasing complexity of the shapes, plus the constantly expanding array of tools at your disposal. The game has a perfect learning curve, starting you off with the absolute bare minimum amount of tools you need. When a new one is unlocked, you get an explanation and demonstration, and the next shape or one coming up soon after will require some simple use of your new tool.

The game is essentially a sandbox with objectives; you have infinite amounts of every building, all resources are infinite, and the map scales infinitely in size. And that's the greatest strength of Shapez.io; it goes at your pace. Experimentation is free, and it's easy to naturally play around and discover ways to make your factory more efficient in size or speed. The game gently nudges you towards doing better by steadily increasing the number of shapes per level, but it's still ultimately up to you how optimized it needs to be.

After level 26, you get your final set of tools, so the game issues you one final challenge: build a factory that can make ANY requested shape, without needing to be changed; each subsequent level requires a randomly-generated shape, so doing it manually is simply no longer practical. Figuring out how to do it is a doozy, but it's a fantastic final challenge to the player to really test what they've learned.

Fantastic game if you like the genre. And it's nice to see more open-source games too.

Aven Colony is a good game. It has some flaws, but overall it's a solid colony builder experience.

Like most colony builders, you have to juggle a whole bunch of demands and needs at once: food, water, air, power, building materials, and residential space. Here's where Aven Colony does its own thing to bring new life to the formula:
- Food isn't just an abstract "food" counter, but rather numerous different food types (kind of like Tropico). Food variety and quality is both tracked and affects morale. Importantly, there are Earth crops, and Aven Prime crops, and the latter are not edible without some extra processing.
- There are seasons with harsh winters, kind of like Endless Legend. Farms shut down, while greenhouses and solar panels operate at half capacity. There are multiple ways to handle this, left up to you, the player. Winter also has lightning strikes, but you can build lightning towers that both protect the colony, and can even charge your batteries.
- Your population consists ONLY of adults. The only way to get more colonists is to have them immigrate off the colony ship in orbit. So you don't have to deal with births rates, child education, or anything like that. Your colonists also don't die of old age (but can suffer other misfortunes).
- While there are some hostile threats, the vast majority of the gameplay is focused on the colony builder aspect, and combat is limited to placing some defensive towers in your colony, or sending expedition parties to go take care of stuff for you. If you're looking for a relatively chill colony builder with a minimal amount of combat, this is the one.

The game is exceptionally good about maintaining a learning curve. In the first couple of missions it will hold your hand every step of the way. After that, your guidance becomes looser and you get more freedom, as the game assumes you now know how to play it. While it doesn't introduce much in the way of new structures or mechanics in later levels, it instead keeps things interesting by changing up the level restrictions. For instance, one level has no arable land near your starting point, so you need to trade for food. Another has exceptionally limited ores available, so you need to choose your buildings carefully at first. And so on.

There are some minor balance issues (greenhouses are almost universally better than farms, and the Drone Tech perk vastly outclasses every other perk) but they are not serious enough to detract from the game meaningfully. Overall it is an excellent game with a very high production quality, and it requires enough play-time to justify the asking price of $30.

This isn't a game, it's some art student's presentation on Norse mythology.

After you wait through the opening cutscene (staring at Senua's back for ten minutes as she rows to an island), while the narrator yammers on constantly, the software (I refuse to call it a game) becomes a walking simulator, with a Tell And Never Even Attempt To Show style of narrative. Since the program refuses to give you any instruction, you'd best be prepared to open up the controls and find out for yourself what Look, Interact and Run are bound to.

Soon you get introduced to the primary puzzle type, which has almost but not quite as much depth as a hidden object game: Given a shape, find a similar one in the environment. And then you get introduced to the combat system; you auto lock-on and can light/heavy/block/dodge, in a sort of diet, low-calorie Dark Souls style. All of your foes are just the same enemy copied and pasted over and over, acting in the exact same way. Initially you fight them one at a time like an old Kung Fu movie, and later you fight more than one at a time, but the fight is essentially the same: wait for an attack, block/dodge, attack a few times. Repeat until you win.

Senua's Sacrifice is deliberately obtuse, in a way that would make La-Mulana blush. It flatly refuses to explain any of its mechanics or offer the player any sort of transparency into how it works, presumably for 'immersion'. But because you can't emprically determine how it works, you just have a confusing experience borne of poor conveyance.

This peaked at the first boss. I had no idea how well I was doing. When he summoned more of the same generic dudes I'd fought over and over before, was it a phase-change, or a timed thing? His attack pattern didn't change. Was I getting anywhere at all? I think I got to phase three (of how many?), but then I mis-timed *one* dodge and he combo'd me to death because I couldn't do anything despite keyboard mashing and mouse-flailing.

Or at least, it was probably death. The screen blacked out, the fight suddenly restarted, and I was getting hit again before I even realized what was happening and that I had control again. The software's refusal to explain anything made me think it was an Eternal Darkness style "this isn't really happening!" rewind moment; and then he did the same death combo again and I realized that, no, it's just poor conveyance.

At that point I gave up, Alt-F4'd, uninstalled, and consigned Senua's Sacrifice to the trashcan where it belongs. On the plus side I got this from a key someone gave me; they'd forgotten what the key was even for. Kind of telling in hindsight, really.

I remember playing the original shareware Constructor back on a Windows 98 computer in the late 90's. There was no music and I sucked at it, but it was still memorable enough that when I stumbled onto Constructor Plus on Steam I knew I had to buy it and play it again.

And hot damn, they did a fantastic job! It perfectly recaptures the original gameplay but modernizes the game itself with improved graphics, music, the ability to alt-tab, achievements, hints, adjustable settings/difficulty, and tons of content. Amazing job!

The game itself is kind of an extremely tongue-in-cheek RTS with a sordid sense of humor, set in a mix of a prohibition-era aesthetic with thick British accents (which is hilarious when combined with American text). You play a dodgy construction company with ties to the mob (much like your opponents) employing violence and subversion to build your empire. You have tons of tools at your disposal with which to wreak havoc, but so do your enemies, and the AI is quite relentless (though the difficulty settings adjust this).

The game is packed with different ways to play it: quick-play missions that include the tutorials and move on to straightforward objectives, a proper campaign-style mode where each level has multiple sequential objectives, free-play modes, and a level designers where you can make your own scenarios. The original game was brutally difficult, and while 'classic' is a selectable difficulty option, you can tone it down both in terms of AI aggressiveness, having the AI attack each other instead of just focusing on you, and reducing the possible set of tenant complaints.

Highly recommended, the game is packed with replayability and does a great job of teaching you how to play it.

I suck at bullet hells, and yet, I enjoyed this game enough to finish it. Not just 'beat the game' but "Get the Finished Gun", which entails playing the game enough to do, see, and unlock just about everything the game has to offer.

It's a hard game but it's not unfairly punishing. When you're new, the game makes itself a little easier with fewer enemy spawns, and slowly ramps you up to the normal difficulty. The game adjusts item spawns to make it fairly common to get a mixture of good and okay stuff each run. You can unlock shortcuts and lots of meta-progression.

There's also just a ton of content. Many possible bosses, a bajillion items, lots of secret and alternate areas, multiple characters, and several different possible final bosses, plus various bonus modes and modifiers (that can be combined). It's a ton of fun and definitely a game where you learn from your mistakes. Definitely recommended even when it's not on sale.

Algo Bot is a very reasonable puzzle game of the 'program a robot' variety (as should be obvious from the title and trailer). Its learning curve is perfect; it starts off exceptionally simple and adds new concepts periodically. Every time a new mechanic is added, the game throws a "gimme" level at you to teach you the mechanic with a simple puzzle, and then ramps up the challenge. Some of the endgame puzzles are very difficult, but overall the game is quite fair and all the solutions make sense in hindsight.

Plus, even if you solve a level, there's the extra challenge of optimizing it. Interestingly for the genre, your goal is not fewest steps EXECUTED, but rather fewest steps PROGRAMMED. So sometimes you need to take a longer path but with fewer instructions.

Admittedly, since may day job is programming, I probably had an easier time of it than most people would, but I still found it to be a very well-designed game that was challenging in good ways. The only complaint I have is that you can't save/load programs; whatever is in the autosave for that level is all you've got, so if you want to experiment, you're doing it live. (Unless you take a screenshot for insurance)

The game is short, but it's priced appropriately. I'd definitely recommend it even while not on sale.