Recent reviews by [TM] IMaginatory

Quantity over quality, again. This time I'm sure it's for others, but it's not for me. I would much prefer if every puzzle that didn't ask me to actually expand my understanding of *something* was cut. It's all very well made, well supported, great quality of life, and no obvious "problems" - but it's so unbelievably homogenous, and that hurts the fun value. I feel this way about a lot of these paper-puzzle types, but it's just so blatant here. There are to my knowledge over 1000 boards in the game, and that's at least 700-800 too many. Playing has so far felt like a waste of time.

Don't let this stop you from buying if you think you will enjoy it, because you probably still will. I just know that logic puzzles can be more than just this.

Still a big step in the right direction from IOI.

TBA/10

What devil's bargain would you take to make a novel puzzle game in 2026? This developer took "realtime elements", and the result is the best possible incarnation of what you might expect. There is solid humor throughout, but the level design is why you'll stick around. They knew what they were doing for the bulk of more serious puzzles. Simple, handcrafted "impossibilities" that many other games lack prevent you from getting too frustrated by asking you to think deeply at regular intervals.

Ends a bit weakly/abruptly, but was well worth the time I spent with it.

9.5/10

We have endured a decade of so called "living" games. If something is unfun or unbalanced, it changes. The development cycle is an endless conversation with the playerbase. As the playerbase gains mastery, the changes they demand wall out new players and sow division... and why wouldn't they? A player with 2000 hours is naturally going to have different wants and needs than a new player. It's inevitable.

Instead, spire 1 turned off the faucet and froze the game in time for many years on a particular balance patch, which became the game. And now, finally, we have a full rebuild of the game, with all-new encounters and some new characters. This approach is better for everyone's fun and the longevity of the game. I look forward to when mega crit turns off the faucet on spire 2 as well - once the dust settles.

10/10

EDIT: It is unfortunate that the "dust settling" involves card game players once again tripping over themselves to prove why they are the most odious hobbyists in the space.

EDIT 2: Good grief, it's gotten worse than I could have possibly imagined. If you are downvoting this game and you don't have some very particular reason why you are doing so, I regret to inform you that you are terrible at the game, and that's not the developers' fault. So many people scrub talking and venting their own personal issues over a card game. It's Silksong all over again.

TBA/10 but high, probably 10/10. Review TBA, posting now for algorithms and such.

I'm gonna become the joker.

TBA/10 but low, the writing is very bad. Tough to save it, hard to think I would quit playing an AI game. Poor imitation of Uchi.

Alas

"Traditional" puzzle games with a level select, nondescript unnamed levels, and quasi-static game elements have lost some portion of their appeal in recent years. Now that meta mechanics are known in the puzzle canon and even developing conventions (see: Gentoo Rescue), you really need to meet a stronger standard to compete with the crowd.

Enter the sequel not-sequel to cosmic express, which was maybe the best such static game already. It's less cosmic express 2 and more parallel universe cosmic express. It starts out the same and then diverges into a completely different mechanic set, and by the time some basic mechanics from the first game are reintroduced, they are being used in an utterly different context.

The game felt very long, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing, since the ramp up is more gradual for new players. It's easy to understand at a glance how the game works and I would often stream it to friends who would immediately be able to backseat me no matter how far in the game I was. This does make me wonder if some boards could be trimmed to get the level count down just a bit, but there wasn't anything egregiously repetitive, not really.

I have my gripes with all hint systems and I still doubt that the hint system given (showing a bit of correct track) is appropriate for such a game, but I was able to ignore it. There should be a setting to hide the button (maybe on by default, hints that give that much arbitrary information should be for desperate situations only).

The quality of the end game boards is consistently high, without relying on size. It did occasionally feel like the level designer got to be more clever when designing the puzzle than I got to be while stumbling into a solution, because of just how low-agency non intersecting track drawing on a medium size board is. I suppose I can't ask for more with this mechanic set, and it was explored extremely thoroughly.

Art and music are well above standard for a Draknek&Friends game.

9/10 despite all my moaning, I'm spoiled rotten by the amazing output of these developers and others.

The team behind ElecHead returns with another puzzle platformer, this time more tilted towards the puzzle side. Gone are the retro game projectile obstacles, fake walls are more consistently telegraphed, and the puzzle design has vaulted from "kind of cute on accident" to "lightning in a bottle which should be studied".

Make no mistake, the individual screens are beautiful and comprehensive and elegant and I could sing their praises all day, but where this game really shines is its innovative structure. Many games which attempt to scaffold to bigger ideas accidentally rob stronger players of all the joy of figuring it out, building an idea bit-by-bit before presenting the final product for assembly. (I'm looking at you, parabox). This game is the anti-parabox. The final puzzle of the world is at the very start of the world, every world, and you can solve it at any time. Most other puzzles in a world are just increasingly clear hints for the final one, which is the one that really matters. If you are perceptive, stubborn, and willing to skip content, your first clear can be very short indeed.

The "bonus" levels are an extra-thick layer of frosting on a delicious cake. Above and beyond.

11/10

In my review of Hollow Knight 1 I gave the community a 1.5/10 and said they loved their baby too much. If you've been around in gaming for as long as I have (or longer), you knew the reception to a game this overhyped was going to have some disappointing elements. People were always going to criticize in bad faith, and release a lot of negativity as the tension from their untenable high of hype fizzled away. I expected it.

What I did not expect was the manner in which it happened to irritate me as badly as it did. This is, without exaggeration, the single biggest outpouring of scrub talk I have ever seen in the video game space. Just an absolute torrential flood of scrub talk. Even game journalists got in on the fun and amplified bad narratives. You can find the complaints all over this review section, even in the positive reviews. I'm here to say even the minor complaints are totally misplaced, they have NO merit, and you should ignore them, especially if you're new to the genre or know nothing about this game.

What we have here is a game that bravely throws its loss condition at players' faces and forces them to adapt, knowing some subset will get mad and quit. Silksong does not care. Everything that people claim the newer souls games are, Silksong actually is (in places). Satisfying combat, high skill floor and high skill ceiling, tough bosses with a punishment for failure you go in expecting to endure because it's that type of game.

-If you can't stomach doing some (very satisfying!) platforming or combat for 30-60 seconds, in some minority of encounters, to get another attempt at the boss, then yeah this game is not made for you - because you have no patience. There I said it. If you get mad at playing the game more, your patience has been tested and you have been found lacking.
-If you dislike that your healthbar is effectively shorter because you take more damage but also recover faster, then I equivalently dislike that you can make so many mistakes in the first game and still win the fight without knowing what you're doing. This isn't a gradient from "easy" to "hard", it's a check of "did you learn and engage with the content by figuring out responses to the boss". Your ability to dodge the boss's patterns is tested, and you are found lacking. What are you gonna do - figure it out, or go complain online?
-If you dislike that certain environmental hazards and traps are likely to kill you on your first way through an area, your knowledge of how to navigate that area has been tested and found lacking. "But there's no way I could have known on my first attempt!" I hear you say. Great, good thing you have a second one, and a third and a fourth. Pick yourself up, formulate a strategy, and go achieve victory.

I hope I am being clear when I say that Team Cherry did not make a "game design mistake" when they added things to their game that will kill most players a bunch of times. You also do not have to "enjoy pain" to have fun despite this failure because failure and learning is a part of the experience. This is a soulslike! We've been over this a million times!

In my opinion, instant retries of any given challenge leads to the optimal meta-strategy being to spam attempts for a while to learn everything, and only then start going for the win. This means that if you have enough experience in video games, your victory is all but assured, but if you recognize that all the tension is gone. With just a slight punishment for failure the gravity of each attempt increases fivefold, and you think harder about how you're going to make progress each time, even if you still fail a few times.

Video games can be interactive implements that compel you to learn a skill for your own amusement. Silksong understands that, apparently some people do not. If disliking all friction is what passes for game design sensibility nowadays, you may all stand by and watch as games slowly evolve into movies, where you have no true agency, there is no true loss or win, every mission is scripted to the point of inevitability. Just AAA slop, on rails, no failure, no learning. That's what I see a yearning for when I see the complaints about this game. A yearning to win, but not to put in any effort. There are many, many games that offer that experience (and I like plenty of them!) but this is not one, and it was never meant to be one.

Okay, now that I got that out of my system, let's move on to the game:

It's really really really good!

11/10

A Gnorp-like, though Gnorp did it better. As in the other, a lack of precise numbers in some places will annoy the theoretical among us. And, more than in the other, the endgame will avalanche far too quickly if the correct strategy is identified.

There's nothing offensive about it, but it could have been balanced a bit better.

7/10

The story is a prank.

The gameplay is like if Subway Surfers inhaled enough energy drinks to kill an elephant, and then decided to put on its best Risk of Rain 2 cosplay.

The soundtrack is INSANE. IN-SANE. I am completely at a loss for words on how to gas it up. If you know you know.

-1 point for balancing issues so bad they threw their hands up and added multiple difficulty sliders, -1 point for story awfulness. Please for god's sake nerf the big roots (they are unplayable on sprint mode). It's also pretty buggy on occasion. Everything just feels a little unfinished, but the vision is there.

8/10 but I love it dearly despite its flaws.