Recent reviews by OPleasus

A very simple and very charming climbing game.
You have a set amount of stamina drained by running, jumping, and climbing. Max stamina is decreased by hunger, injuries, weight, and other more worrying circumstances. Climb through 4 biomes and you get to go home.
One thing I will say is that you really need to play it with friends. Having friends opens up entire other mechanics (rope usage, reviving, grabbing hands), and the climbing is so dead simple that you need SOMETHING else to occupy your attention. Yapping with friends is an ideal state of mind for this.

Viscera Cleanup Detail with a good plot.

You clean up bodies, blood, and evidence. There is no time pressure, and the game gives you an upgradeable detective vision to point out everything that's out of place. If you are r/g colorblind, you WILL need that vision.

One detail that detracted was (the main character) Kovalsky's voice lines. They felt entirely too confident and snide for someone that was supposed to be going through trauma. It makes the times when the game points out a silence a lot stronger, but I wish they'd simply told him to be less chipper about scrubbing copious amounts of blood.

A fantastic little terrain strategy game.

Restoring biomes can mean destroying others in controlled fires, or blowing holes for ponds to make into rocks to build on. At the end of it all you have to ensure that at least some of every animal is happy - meaning getting an abundance of space, food, and climate placed correctly.

Maps are heavily themed but the exact layout is slightly randomized each time. Not all that hard on the normal difficulty - I would recommend trying on Hard if you actually want a puzzler you can fail!

Long story short: A fairly complex dice battler with enough mechanical depth to encourage you to explore new gameplay tactics. Very very fun. Just... don't expect a good plot.

Gameplay is fun, though if you know what you're doing its very hard to make a bad set of dice to play. Purification is healing for you/damage for enemies, corruption is the opposite - this allows for almost any damage dice to optionally be sustain, allowing for very risky tactics.
Visuals are excellent, effective stylization and tweening make things feel storybook.
Audio is high flying and string and piano heavy, very appropriate for a hybrid between a cosmic adventure and a fantasy one.

Story is actually the weak point. The intro is excellent at setting stakes, but then only the first and sixth out of six characters have more than a description to their name. This game very very badly needs every character to have an intro with flavor and characterization. Its very hard to care for any of them like this. The setting also kind of gestures vaguely at five other planets but you're stuck on one, and you don't even get any info on that. Perhaps that could be fixed with lore blurbs for each of the blessings you can get. But that's not there.

Many simple picross puzzles, each of which unlocks a furniture item for your expanding house or a cosmetic item for your customizable rat. You also receive stickers to customize your menus, though a lot of elements will cover up more than they indicate on the sticker screen.
The difficulty is quite forgiving, with hints and error checking available on a quick timer. There's also handful of quality of life improvements, like box counting and row/column highlights.
I do think that the progression gating is a little much, as I tend to like very large puzzles and the game refuses to give me any larger than 20x25 hours into the game. Seeing that I needed to solve HUNDREDS of puzzles to unlock more than two rooms was also jaw-dropping.

Overall a very cute and low pressure experience: great for a cooldown after a long day or when you've worn out your adrenaline on a shooter game. I also like making the rat squeak.

This is only a recommendation for THE FIRST THIRD TO TWO THIRDS OF THE GAME.

This is a puzzle/exploration game that does so brilliantly for the first third, and then falls apart disgustingly fast afterwards.

When you stop having fun, quit immediately.

For that first third, you go around collecting many different pieces to puzzles and exploring what the house has to offer, sometimes struggling with getting things in the right order but you almost always have something to look at or do or try to reach. You have a steady drip of rewards and revelations, culminating in a credits sequence and an invitation to keep going and explore more.

This is when the game nosedives.

The postgame puzzles are still well put together but they start becoming so obscure or hidden that it's easy to not realize that you're looking at a piece of a puzzle, or that these specific things go together. Puzzles stop being "put these two rooms close together and have knowledge of what to do" but "have incredibly specific knowledge AND collect FIVE different RARE rooms and RARE items in the same house and pray they're close enough that that a deadly curse doesn't wipe all your progress today"

All of this would be kinda acceptable in a puzzle game. But this is not a puzzle game. It is a puzzle/RANDOM EXPLORATION game. The random number generator can decide that you DO NOT GET TO COMPLETE THIS PUZZLE, and then you have to go through an hour or so of setup trying to get another few attempts. This is far less frustrating when you have more puzzles and less complex puzzles, or when you have some amount of persistent control over these things. You do not. Your permanent upgrades are very helpful, but they NEVER stop a good run from being utterly ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over.

tl;dr An equal follow up to the first game, but wait for a sale.
The art style is marker-ish and tween heavy rather than pixel art, so the ugliness of the style feels less deliberate and more out of development necessity. With the exception of a few shots, it does look worse.
The plot gets going faster, and wraps around on itself in a satisfying manner. The actual *direction* of the plot feels slightly meandering. and I'm personally not a fan of the ending. I also preferred the characters of the first, although it's a narrow thing.
The puzzles, the main attraction, are perhaps a bit better than the first game. I greatly enjoyed that they broke the plot summaries into a by-chapter thing rather than expecting you to remember everything in one massive block at the end.

A very simple concept: every character you control is a six-sided die, the result of which determines what action they take that turn. The complexity comes in when you add increasingly complex keywords to the basic actions, and items that can simply improve them or dramatically change how some of them play.

VERY similar to Into the Breach, but more customizable.

This game has not aged 20 years. It takes some pride in things that were only notable in 2008 or earlier, but it feels shockingly modern.
Some physics jank, but classic for a reason

A very good adventure overall with a nostalgic look. The gameplay is part exploration, part puzzles and about half dungeon crawling.
The lore was interesting, and it made me wish that there was more we could do to dive into historical ruins than clearing them out of monsters.
Movement and melee is entirely orthogonal, i.e. NSEW directions only. Ranged follows orthogonal paths too, though they look straight, meaning you can get nicked by something that should have missed you.

Things being information gated means that there were some systems that either don't exist... or I never figured out how to activate them. I never found out how to do potion or item crafting, despite picking many herbs and seeing many crafted items in my postgame look. I also never got enough information to cast even ONE spell, despite scouring a bookcase heavy dungeon twice; there are at least 10 spells. This feels like an almost forgotten mechanic.

BE WARNED: THIS IS STILL IN A BUGGY STATE **ESPECIALLY** AROUND DEATHS. You will die and some progress will be reverted and some will not, most obviously your MAP PROGRESS will NOT be reverted and your ITEM CONSUMPTION will NOT be reverted! You can run out of healing or status items VERY easily because of this!

Despite my issues, I still had fun. The base gameplay is strong. This definitely feels like a game that needed to be put away for an extra year and given polish... but for a free title I'm willing to forgive a lot. Very good showing.