Recent reviews by Pyronar

One of the best completely free games I've ever played. Seems to be a cross between a top down arcade shooter and a Vampire Survivors-like progression system. It's fun, challenging, varied, and just overall well designed, and it seems to still be getting active updates. On the whole, I recommend it.

I don't appreciate games I've bought being changed by a new developer for content they consider "in poor taste". Changing concept art and fan art in particular seems especially egregious.

I've only finished one successful run so far, but I played a lot on the demo. Normally, I'd wait for at least another run or so before giving this a review, but I felt compelled to counter the amount of negativity the devs are getting from a small minority of players who seem extremely upset that that there is a gay character interested in the player. But let's rewind, what is Sultan's Game?

This game is best described as turn-based Cultist Simulator if you've ever played that. It's clear the developers were inspired by its mechanics of representing characters, objects, and even abstract concepts as cards with attributes. I think it builds on the idea well and uses the mechanics to tell a 1001 nights style court intrigue story full of interesting characters, mature themes, and fun mysteries. Pushing taboos and letting the player commit extremely immoral choices to survive and advance their goals is one of the core concepts of the game, but you are always given a lot of choice. Evil is frequently a choice but rarely the only one, almost never if you are especially good at the game.

The writing still suffers from some translation issues, but the genuine skill behind it still shines through. It is evocative, colourful, full of symbolism and meaning. The characters have distinct personalities. Your wife is devoted and faithful but she is not a pushover if you mistreat her. The sultan is cruel and capricious but sometimes you can see the hints of fear behind his despicable actions. Your rival is strong-willed and cunning but hides a deeper feeling of respect and even hope for you. This is part of why I'm so against the idea of the developer caving to the pressure and removing something. The characters, the choices, the dilemmas, all of it exists for a reason. It is supposed to make you uncomfortable. Thankfully it doesn't seem like censorship is an option that is being discussed right now.

The art is also stunning. I miss the triumphant music from breaking a card that played in the demo, but the current songs are still fine. The portraits and landscapes of the field and cards are gorgeous. The animated magician deserves a separate mention. I love her. The visual design makes it feel like you are playing a magical board game that just springs to life under your fingers. It's one of the strongest parts of the game, in my opinion.

On the technical side, the game does have a few flaws. For a roguelike designed to be replayed with accumulating advantages it can be quite repetitive. The characters are set individuals with set stories and I like that, but it does mean you will go through those stories on each run and you won't always have the option to try something new and have it fit with your current goals. This was a big problem in the demo. In the full release it seems lessened by there just being more content, but it's still there. The game also used to be extremely punishing in the demo, but in the full release you are given quite a bit of power on both easy and normal difficulty. You may feel you are at the mercy of the deck which can decide to throw a gold conquest at you as your very first card, but with the amount of ways to redraw, rewind, delay, and manipulate rolls you have, the game can actually be surprisingly easy even without unlocks.

However, I've rambled on enough. I thoroughly recommend Sultan's Game. I stumbled onto it by pure chance back when the demo launched and was blown away. This is easily one of my all time favourite games now.

A lot of content for a demo. It almost feels more like an alpha version. The game is very interesting so far, a narrative system game somewhat similar to Cultist Simulator, but turn-based instead of real-time and focused on courtly intrigue rather than secret societies. I'm really enjoying it. Some parts have strange translations, but I'm assuming that will be ironed out with development. I actually really like what I've seen of the writing. The capriciousness of the sultan, the relationships you develop with your closest allies, all the events and opportunities popping up each day... It's fun and interesting to explore. Give this one a chance. As a free demo, this is more than worth your time.

Here is what the game should plaster on every piece of advertising because it would make me buy in instantly: enemies can't hit you as long as you are doing stunts! Wall runs, dives, and slides all turn you into an invincible killing machine. You regain health and slow mo power with kills. In this game you don't die because you pushed too far, you die because you stopped. It's all about going forward-forward-forward! Have I mentioned that everything is made of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ voxels and you can just blast through walls with a handcannon to get to more enemies? The solution to a fight is almost never to hide or retreat. I love this! The guns feel fun and satisfying and there are definitely some standouts you will be excited every time you get. The campaign is short and the enemy variety isn't huge, but there are plenty of levels past the campaign and other things that help spice up the gameplay. The story isn't the focus here. If you want an FPS that rewards you for keeping your foot on the gas 100% of the time, this is it.

I don't usually enjoy visual novels. I find them unengaging, and reading fatigue sets in pretty quick for me. This game managed to more than overcome it. The fact that most of it is voiced with excellent performances is only one reason why. This is one of those games I'd recommend just playing if the premise intrigues you and you can afford to take a gamble. Don't look up too much, don't try to save and load for different routes until you've seen the credits at least once, don't worry about what it will be. Just start the game and enjoy.

Still here? I guess you need more information then. Slay the Princess is a meta-narrative mystery game about slaying (or not slaying) a Princess in a cabin that the Narrator guides you towards. The meta bits are not just meta for the sake of being meta, which is a nice reprieve in a somewhat over-saturated genre. The game definitely takes a lot of inspiration from The Stanley Parable and a little bit from Disco Elysium, but it is distinctly its own thing. The plot is engaging. The art is nice. And the music is phenomenal.

The game took me around 20 hours to 100%. It's meatier than it looks as the sheer number of routes and obscure options is staggering. The first and second playthroughs were my most impactful, but even after them the experience of just poking my nose into more and more absurd branches to explore this monster mash of Princesses was very fun. Some parts of the game get a little grating on your third playthrough when you know what the Narrator is dancing around, but it is a necessity to make every route your posssible first one.

Slay the Princess is the best ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game I've played in a while. It is emotional, funny, exhilirating, and all around novel and fun. This is not just another indie visual novel with a quirky plot. This is premium stuff. Go play it!

This is a difficult game to review. The main thing that made me buy it was the developer's previous title, Primordia, which I have very much enjoyed and recommended thoroughly. It is not an easy sell this time, but I still think there's enough to like to tilt my vote towards "recommend".


The gameplay hasn't changed much. It's still a very standard point-and-click adventure puzzle game. It's not especially difficult, but unlike Primordia the world sometimes works on crazy logic, so don't expect it to be straightforward all the time. This is justified narratively of course, but still don't be afraid to use the game's nice narrative hint system if you need it. Whatever engine the devs are using must have gotten an update since Primordia because it works much better with modern resolutions now and doesn't panic when you dare to minimize the window. The only issue I encountered was that once the game refused to close. So overall: runs well, plays well.


This is easily the game's strongest point. The artist(s) did a fantastic job adapting their already striking style to the nightmarish imagery of the world. The art is full of detail, meaning, and character. This only gets more intense in the second part of the game where they pull out all the stops and embrace the amped up insanity of their setting. The sound manages to not disappoint either. Strangeland has some fantastic music that fits the tone of the game. This time around the standout track was The Yew. It's a shame it's so short. I'd love to hear an extended version. I will criticise some of the voice acting. There are absolutely great performances like Eight-Three, but some were lacking, like the Woman. (As a side note, I don't necessarily blame the actors here. There is a lot that goes into how their voice comes out in the context of the game. It could be any number of things.) Most fall somewhere in the middle with more on the good side than bad.


Well, this is going to be difficult to do without spoilers, but it's also where most of my issues with the game are. Strangeland doesn't have a bad story, but it doesn't have a great one either. Where Primordia took inspiration from classical sci-fi, Strangeland seems (at least to this uninformed observer) inspired by psychological horror. Unfortunately, this makes it fall into some traps of the genre. Because so much of the world is surreal, it's hard to get attached to anyone or anything. Character development or growth is not really present. Half the characters are walking metaphors and the other half spout the same riddles over and over. The answers you will likely figure out far before the protagonist does. It all does tie together into a simple yet emotional story with a powerful message in the end. There is still enough there for a good plot. It's just that it's built on a bare-bones foundation.

On a technical level, I can praise the clever use of metaphors, especially when they are supported by the art. The use of different mythologies was also intriguing, and I have to give props to the effectiveness of the occasional dose of twisted dark humour. However, I can't ignore just how wordy the game can get at times. There are several points where the characters just keep repeating the same thing over and over again in different elaborate ways, as if the writer couldn't choose between four different metaphors and decided to write them all out in a row. Also, the irony of saying this in such a long-winded review that most people will probably never fully read it doesn't escape me, but that's just because I'm bad at this. Still, I will do a full-spoiler addedndum at the end that goes more in depth on my feelings about specifics of the plot and how they shaped the experience.


Strangeland is a good game, if you like what you see on the tin. It will supply a good amount of excellently-crafted horror art, which may be its main sell. It's competent at being a point-and-click puzzle game. And the story follows the themes you'd expect here. The writing has issues in terms of characterization and a lack of brevity, but the plot still holds together and delivers a satisfying conclusion. In my opinion it doesn't live up to the legacy of Primordia, but it doesn't have to. Probably worth the asking price, but if you're not sure about how much you would enjoy a psychological horror point-and-click in a nightmarish world, I wouldn't blame you for waiting for a sale.


This is mainly for the devloper and anyone else who—for some reason—wants to hear my take on the story. So the issue I danced around in my Story section is that everything that's going on is in the protagonist's head. This isn't a bad trope by itself, but it creates some challenges that Strangeland, in my opinion, failed to overcome. The main one being: you essentially have one character, two if you count the Woman. And when you fail to develop that one character, and write off your setting as just the protagonist's head, you are left with nothing but the motions of the plot. The problem is we learn very little about the Stranger beyond his self-loathing and his love for the Woman. We don't even get to see how their love came to be or what it was that held them together. There are plenty of metaphors but like the clever giant Cancer Crab, most of them are striking metaphors of events, not insights into who these people are.

The game reminds me of Jacob's Ladder and Silent Hill 2, but with all the side characters taken out and with way less insight into the main character's past. I wanted to be intrigued by this world. I enjoyed talking to Nineveh and Eight-Three. I loved untangling the convoluted ball of Norse symbolism. I liked applying my (limited) knowledge of tarot to answer Murmur's questions in the way I thought fit best. I don't want this critique to sound like I'm ripping the game's story to shreds. It's just that once you see the main message, once you realize that every single character and every single conversation without exception is tied into death and loss, those characters that intrigued you become hollow shells that you feel silly for expecting more from. They're not just made up, which would have been fine. They're all reduced to a single metaphor. This story had strong emotion. It had a personal message. It had a beautiful depiction of internal struggle. The problem is that it had essentially nothing else.

At the price of absolutely free, this is definitely worth your time. The game isn't explicit but has a lot of suggestive themes so keep that in mind if that's important to you. However, the puzzle gameplay itself is solid, the writing is fun, the art is great, and there's enough challenge here to spend an hour or two in a fun manner. Definitely recommended.

It's hard to say what makes Brothers so good without spoilers. As you are probably already aware from looking at the game's page, it revolves around using one gamepad to control two separate characters with the sticks and the triggers. The game uses this mechanic to convey different themes in its story to great effect. It doesn't simply rely on it as a gimmick, but takes full use of the ability to merge the gameplay with the plot in unique ways.

The main strength of the game is of course the story. Two brothers embark on a quest to save their ill father is a good enough hook, and it builds well from there. Much of the game's storytelling is non-verbal. You can't understand the language the characters are talking in aside from the names and maybe a few repeated phrases which are easy enough to guess, but the way they express themselves and the way the game can show you things without directly telling you anything is what makes the experience so good.

For a potential downside I have to mention the play time. The game took me about 3 hours to complete and I didn't miss much in terms of optional content, only a couple of cool environmental secrets here and there. I also didn't rush through the story, so if you judge games by the amount of time you spend with them, Brothers is a bit of a tough call. I would still highly recommend giving it a shot, but maybe you're better off waiting for a sale. The game also doesn't offer much in terms of challenge. The puzzles are usually easy and the platforming/coordination challenges aren't that hard either. The game also unfortunately all but requires a controller.

Overall, I highly recommend Brothers to anyone who wants to see cool examples of what video games specifically are capable of when it comes to storytelling and interactive fiction, but also to just anyone who likes a good story.

Pandering and advertising rather than good design and passion.

Normally I wouldn't hit "Not Recommended" on a free game, but this is a game designed to sell a product later down the line, so I took a good look at that product, downloading the demo, seeing how it compares to this survival mode, watching where the developers are taking this and I have to say it's not looking good. I won't have much play time on this as I spent more time with the demo and only really used the survival mode to see what changed. Everything in this game's presentation screams at you how much it wants to be a 90s FPS. The developers even namedrop DOOM, Duke Nukem, Blood, and Serious Sam in their trailer. Obviously this was supposed to be a true successor to those games. Well, it's not and here is why.

Out of all of its supposed inspirations, Hellbound only really feels slightly similar to Serious Sam which played a lot differently from the other three. The demo does not give a very good impression of the level design. The maps have some verticality and seem to branch out, but end up being just linear progression paths with possible shortcuts back. There is no meticulousy crafted, full of secrets, free to approach as you will nature of the Build Engine classics. However, it can't quite cut it as a Serious Sam successor, because it lacks the giant open spaces and collosal structures that allowed for the epicness of Serious Sam's giant battles with hoards of monsters (which Hellbound also doesn't have). Serious Sam's insane secrets and exploratory nature are nowhere to be found either.

The enemies feel much like Sam's enemies in that they are either mostly stationery or chase you in a straightforward path. You can't use the level design against them like you would in Blood or Shadow Warrior. You just run and shoot, which would have been fine if the amount of enemies, their variety, and their visual design created the same sense of massive scale battles as Sam. It does not. Overall they feel underwhelming and generic, not as obstacles that present unique challenges.

The guns are decent. You have your usual suspects with some of the game's own creativity thrown in which is decent. I do have to say that making the alt fire on two separate guns an aim-down-sights is perhaps the most un-90s thing you could have gone for, but it's not like you have to use it really. The player's movement is a bigger problem. Compared to old FPS, you move slow and since the levels don't really allow you much freedom or interesting ways to use movement, it feels more like a modern FPS with a coat of old paint. A dedicated combination of two buttons for a sprint feels similarly very unnecessary, convoluted, and contrary to the design the game tries to replicate.

Technically it isn't that bad. The visuals are nice. It runs okay. I will absolutely complain about being unable to turn off motion blur in the demo (it just reenables itself after you hit apply) because I hate it to my soul and a limit of 100 FoV is infuriating too, but those problems don't seem to be present in Survival so maybe they're working on it.

You may have noticed that most of this review is comparing Hellbound to old games. The reason why I did that is because Hellbound so heavily markets itself as a true 90s FPS. If you want to carry the names of Duke Nukem, Blood, DOOM, and Serious Sam in your marketing material, be able to stand up to them. And this game doesn't do that as of yet. Maybe the game will be different on release, but for now it can't back its talk up with good design.