Recent reviews by Offspec

All of the depth and challenge of launch Hollow Knight and more. I have ~twice as much time in this game as I do in HK at the time of writing, ~77 hours here and ~40 hours in HK, and have achieved 100% completion in both. The challenge felt great all the way through, give or take one miyazaki inspired hell hole, and generally speaking I would not describe it as "more of the same" of Hollow Knight. There are new skills to learn, new tools to master, and new enemies to download. If you're trying to play Hollow Knight 2 you will likely have a particularly difficult time, but if you're willing to play Silksong you will likely adapt very quickly and enjoy a plethora of new bugs good and bad.

Wizard Cats is a really interesting addition to the rich space of spell crafting games! The spell crafting is much looser than something like Noita, but is still fun to play with as the primary conceit of the system is that the spells are generated by a machine learning model. You can generally predict the outcome of the given runes, but as a player who is particularly interested in understanding the minutia of a system I do find that I wish I had a bit more control over the outcome of a particular spell. Disregarding the spell crafting; the overall gameplay loop is pretty tight and the rougelike structure is a good fit for a system that can't guarantee the tools to make solid progress. Hitting runs where everything comes together feels really good, though I do wish the talent tree had a bit more player expression to make the end game feel more varied. Overall I had a great time with the demo and can't wait to see what comes next.

Hunt showdown is already like choking down rusty nails, but now you literally can't even get to the part where you put the nails in your mouth without 40 thousand extra clicks because the developers prefer to target the TV audience.

They have since resolved much of the hassle in the UI, I'm not confident the workflow is *better* than it was before the major UI changes, but it's certainly closer to a lateral move. Overall it looks prettier, but when it's an interface you largely only deal with immediately after getting popped with one bullet by a pistol with a scope from 100m you're going to be negatively predisposed to it anyways. Still could use automatic provisioning of hunters, perks, and weapons to smooth things along. Overall the gameplay loop still seems to reward incredibly lame gameplay and higher echelons o the ranked system are going to be plagued by incredibly boring strategies because they're effective. If all of that is fine with you, I ultimate still play the game because the highs are really high, and it feels quite good to get a lobby wipe.

Great concept and excellent execution. I've you've enjoyed the likes of neverputt, golf it, or golf with your friends and are a bit of a nerd this is probably going to be a hit for you. Orienting yourself in the unfamiliar space is definitely awkward first, but with time and experience it becomes intuitive.

Tough learning curve but exceptional pay off. You get the full wizard experience of going from weak and stupid to mastery over the wand-building that can make you busted in any run.

Pretty good

Difficult but rewarding. I thoroughly enjoy the terminal as a major feature, I wish it had a bit more depth but just as a general tool it is useful. Planning out a route through levels feels good, though I would appreciate some more up-front information about things like how long the current rundown (campaign) will last and how some mechanics like sneaking work. Finding out how to kill enemies like scouts was done through google but could have been figured out given enough time.

It's pretty good

Bro we killin' Benji?

Pretty solid game, would easily recommend as a single or multiplayer experience.