Recent reviews by AvWolf

A simple, straight-forward, and fun little game. It clocks in around 20 hours, which is just about perfect for the content (my playthrough was closer to 24, but I also was going for 100% achievements). It's technically a "farming sim" sort of game, but the farming is only barely realized -- you just occasionally water things, there aren't seasons or anything to do with produce except cook it. It's real heart is much more in exploration, which it typically rewards well. I also found the fishing minigame to be pretty satisfying, even though it is also very simple conceptually.

It's bright, colorful, and easy to play; something that I think would be excellent for younger players, but its charms aren't lost on older players either. Since I've got a young daughter, I'm always on the look out for games I think she would enjoy, and I'm definitely putting this one on the list.

A beautiful, beautiful game about life, death, and hugging animal people.

Spiritfarer is as chill as Animal Crossing, with satisfying mechanics almost to the degree of Stardew Valley. The Foundry, in particular, is a best of breed minigame, marrying straightforward design, moderate challenge, and a good representation of a real world action. I also really like cutting down trees because it's super adorable. The game tends to be very respectful of your time also, which is far too rare. Few things that you have to wait for require your presence, and stuff that completes without you (like cooking) has to be ignored for a pretty long time before the game penalizes you for it. Resources regenerate quickly, and there's always something to do to help keep you moving toward your goals. And if not, you can skip through the night to get back to the day where you can travel and interact with your passengers.

Don't be fooled by its looks, though: this is no kids' game. This *is* a game about life and death, starring shockingly well-realized characters. I was not expecting the degree of maturity I found, even though I fell in love with the game by playing the demo (the devs did a good job of keeping the powder dry in the demo and just giving you a taste of what's to come). Alice and Stanley were especially hard for me to emotionally deal with. The spirits in the game are excellently written to be "real" people, who generally had very complex and kind of melancholy lives, and as their Spiritfarer, you'll get to know their joys and moreover, their fears and failings. There's no real violence, I've counted a total of five curse words throughout all the text in the game, and the gameplay could all be easily handled by a youngster, but the characterizations require a degree of maturity that a child won't have. The spirits are uncomfortably well written. I really want to give examples, but that would spoil things you're better off experiencing yourself. Just know that I choked up a few times.

It's not a perfect game: the end of Alice's story line is currently a little buggy (though not enough to actually break anything). I don't feel like Giovanni's story justifies his final comments at the Everdoor (the more important parts of Giovanni's story are all better realized, it's just his last words that seem like you're supposed to have a closer relationship to him than you do). The song that you can play to make your crops grow is paced a little too slowly (otherwise it's a good musical minigame). Watering your plants takes too long and has to be done too often and so gets *very* tedious by the end of the game. The windmill requires a bit too much babysitting for as little as you get out of it. I *really* wish you could look at the map during the night and check your recipe book while food was cooking (those two things would be major quality of life improvements for planning your actions).

That said, Spiritfarer is *extremely good*. I'm looking forward to a second playthrough and I'm probably going to be walking away from the first with all but one achievement (there's one achievement that you have to play through a second time or abuse the autosave system to get). This game will give you a lot of feels on top of a very satisfying farming/management sim and some smooth platforming. Totally worth the price of admission.

I'd really like to recommend the game, because I find the artwork to be very good, and I definitely appreciate that the naughty elements (while far from explicit) are brought into the game play. The writing is...well, definitely translated, and either the writer or the translator considered themselves to be clever, but except for the over long opening narration, it's really not too bad. The girls' taunts get pretty old, but that's only because of the game's glaring issue and the reason I can't, in good conscience, recommend it. The biggest problem is that Match 2 gameplay is -- at best -- *tedious*. At certain points, less kind words spring to mind to describe it, like "intensely boring." There isn't very much strategy to it, and your options are very limited. It's weird that you have more options for moves as you're closer to a game over, though it's pretty difficult to lose if you're paying much attention to the board at all. The worst offender in the Not Fun Olympics of Match 2 gameplay is the final round, when you're waiting for the RNG to decide to give you the tiles you need. In the earlier rounds, you can at least force a tile spawn that might be the one you want, or you can use one from your inventory, but the final round requires the game to choose to spawn one or more (depending on how far along you are in the game) of the "obstacle" blocks. I don't think there's a way to force that spawn, so you just have to wait on the game.

Bottom line, the art's great, but the Match 2 gameplay is so plodding and strategy free that you'll wish this was another Match 3 clone. They may be done to death, but they offer at least an ounce of excitement. To be completely fair, I don't regret getting this game, but I did get it for $2.

Picked this up on a deep sale and didn't have very high expectations, but I was really surprised. The game is quite fun to play and the compact individual regions really hit the "just one more" impulse perfectly.

Forging your own equipment was only very occasionally worthwhile (much more so in the beginning of the game than by the end), and runesmithing is so poorly explained and limited that it's almost entirely worthless. By the very end of the game you *might* be able to runesmith something as powerful as the random gear you've found, but you're probably better off sticking with the random gear and the artifact items that you acquire through the game.

The acquisition of gear is very satisfying. I didn't try anything very fancy with the combat -- the system is clearly capable of more than what I did with it -- but it was fun nevertheless, and has a solid sense of progression where by the end, you're stomping through enemies with joyful abandon. There's a great sense of humor and mostly good writing that pervades the whole game, and the developer tried very hard to make most of the regions have their own vignettes that kept things from getting stale. The platforming sections though...They're kind of rough, in no small part because platforms move out from under you, and some of them move pretty fast. No falling damage, so they're usually not dangerous so much as they're occasionally tedious.

Definitely the most fun I've had for $2 in a long time though. Definitely worth playing, especially if you can get it for a steal. I'm looking forward to seeing where the storyline goes in the sequel.

Something about this game has me seriously hooked. When I'm not playing, I'm usually wishing I was playing. Balrum just scratches an itch for me and is the perfect game for what I want to play right now. A lot of the game isn't particularly intuitive, but once you're able to accept some of the rough edges in the UI, it usually plays well.

Balrum's got a pretty sedate pace, which is a little odd for a game with Hunger, Thirst, and Tiredness meters. But even though the survival mechanics are reasonably well implemented, they simply aren't strict enough to be problematic once you're clear of the early game. This isn't Nethack: as long as you pay a bit of attention and plan slightly ahead, you probably won't have "starving" be your most common death. Since farming and cooking are important mechanics, it's not especially hard to keep yourself going. The game is perfectly happy to let you spend some time dawdling. In a bit of a twist, it's usually *your* character that pretends they're in a hurry ("I'll go do that right away!") and the other characters are much less urgent about the things they ask you to do.

The combat system is...servicable. It's nothing very fancy, and I wish there was a bit more depth to it, unfortunately there's just not enough variety in the things you do (and since everything is weighted to a "turn", this may actually be for the best anyhow). There's a huge amount of status effects, and roleplaying choices are often rewarded with status effects (though it's somewhat frustrating to get these buffs and then not actually be in any position to do any fighting and take advantage of them). There are a specific set of enemies on any given map, with no respawning, so there is a definite ceiling on your experience. And since enemies provide very little experience compared to the huge sums you'll quickly start needing to level up, you'll eventually clear things out, just trying to scrape together as much experience as you can.

Quests provide the bulk of your experience (at least as far as I've gotten in the game) and so you definitely are encouraged to seek them out. Exploration is often rewarded. There are some pretty satisfying puzzles, and there are several quests for which the easy answer isn't the best one. The most valuable resource in the game appears to be the learning points which you spend to get skills. A big problem is that several of the crafting skills don't seem to have much bang for the buck -- at least not at first, I haven't gotten to the point where they're "decent" -- so it feels like a waste to invest in them (which is a shame, because the crafting system is pretty interesting, though not necessarily intuitive).

The lore is, at least to me, quite fascinating. It's scattered around in bits and pieces, and there's often a surprising amount of environmental storytelling -- usually implying a gruesome end to whoever's journal you've been reading. There are some characters who I wish I could tell things to the game doesn't allow. I'd love to be able to give Thurza the letter from her husband that you find on his mauled body.

I sank forty hours into the game, then decided "you know, I *like* this swordplay character, but I'm wondering if I'd be happier as an archer." So I started the game over and happily discovered the answer is "yes" (and then did so again a couple hours later after I discovered that you don't want to take Alchemy as a starting skill -- there's a skill book to teach it to you early on, saving you money and ever-precious learning points; I had always had Alchemy and had picked up Alchemy 2 by the time I got the Herbalism book on my first character, so I didn't get to try out the books and see how they worked until my second character).

Balrum really isn't a game for everyone. Some people won't like the relaxed pace. Some people won't like the just-barely-deep-enough-to-be-interesting combat. Some people won't like the quest structures, which often demand exploration and experimentation or don't give you much to go on. Some people won't care for the survival systems. But me, man, I love this thing.

STASIS is what it says on the tin, a science fiction horror adventure game. It sets out its goal and it achieves it.

The puzzles are almost all good and clear, with a nice mixture of challenge. I really appreciated the environmental clues for the statis tube puzzle in particular. I only found two puzzles I felt were kind of unfair -- the puzzle to get the key to the battery compartments in Project SEED, which is pretty much "use everything on everything until it's solved" and the puzzle for getting the tree sap in hydroponics, which is a timing puzzle based on doing something that is obviously a terrible idea and not obviously a timing puzzle, so when you do the obviously stupid thing out of frustration and an inability to figure out what to do next, you'll probably die instead of getting the next piece of the puzzle anyway; needlessly making the puzzle seem impossible. Another little hint in the form of emails or diary entries would have take care of either of those puzzles. The ending is beautiful and perfect, a terrific payoff for the entire game. It's not a surprise by any means -- I wasn't surprised by any of the elements of the ending, which features a couple twists and turns -- but it's really not about being surprised. It ends the way it should end, the way it must end. It ends RIGHT.

STASIS is very much a horror game. It is NOT a "scary" game. There are technically jump scares, but I missed about half of them because I often wasn't staring directly at the protagonist the whole time; I was looking around the screen for items to interact with, and I occasionally only knew there was a jump scare because of the music swell. It's not a very scary game at all from the context of startling you or making you worried that something might kill you at any moment (as an adventure game, that's true, but only if by "something" you mean "the player's choice in what to click on"). But it is absolutely a horror game. A deliberately paced mounting sense of horror and realization confronts both the player and the protagonist. There are a couple twists that leave you wondering what, in this space-borne house of horrors, the real "monster" is for a satisfying amount of time. The actual reveal of the monsters is almost a bit of a let down; considering the abqttoir you've been through at that point to get to them. But if that seems disappointing, you can always remember where they came from, and the horror of that will keep your stomach turning. It's kind of a classic, near cliched, story for the genre, but it's beautifully realized and masterfully told.

If you want a horror adventure game, where you're left almost psychologically ill by the end, and you're not going to just turn a corner and jump out of your skin, STASIS is an awesome choice. I backed the game on Kickstarter and there are no regrets. A great game.

The Fall is a terrific game, primarily a straight-up adventure title with combat sections to break up the puzzle-solving. It's not very long, but the story is exquisitely told and well-thought out. The voice acting is really excellent throughout, but the protagonist's voice actress stands out as really selling the character throughout her development. The stark sadness and resignation she gives to ARID near the end, when she once more greets the system administration AI is particularly moving.

The puzzles are largely straight-forward; just thought-provoking to be rewarding to solve, without too many head-scratchers where you need to read the developers' minds. The combat sections tend to be of moderate difficulty, it's not too tough to get through if you remember to take advantage of cover and camouflage. Unfortunately, the controls are somewhat cludgy, which is probably why the combat is even of moderate difficulty instead of being easy. The mechanic of needing your gun (with its flashlight) out to interact with things is interesting, but really belongs in a different game than The Fall. Frankly, there just isn't enough reason for stealth to not have the flashlight out almost all the time, which results in you pretty much just holding the right mouse button down the whole game.

The framing for the story is pretty classic science fiction, and the story itself isn't really trodding new ground, but it's less cliched and trite than most game stories. It's told well enough to sweep the player up in the story, so when the twists come, you're always surprised, even though you'll look back and wonder why you didn't see it coming -- that means the developers really did it right. Watching ARID move from simply annotating her internal logs with explanations of her actions to giving justifications for her actions, altering those log files, before finally deciding that she would do anything to complete her objectives -- even if those actions are extreme -- is a delightful and moving treat. ARID gets a real character arc: you watch her grow and change as a result of her experiences. In the era of story-driven characters, a character-driven story is refreshing and captivating.

If you enjoy science fiction stories and adventure games, The Fall is absolutely worth the price of admission.

Note that this review is based on just a few hours of play; I haven't completed the game yet.

Let me get this out of the way first: The cutscenes, both cinematic and in-engine, are pretty terrible and the story isn't anything to write home about. The animation doesn't look especially good, the voice acting is sometimes questionable (on top of that, they don't pronounce things right for French Canadians which hurts my suspension of disbelief), and the writing occasionally veers into downright cringe-worthy. I still appreciate that the cutscenes are there, since they do at least tie the missions/nights together, but I don't really enjoy them, per se.

Sang-Froid is sort of a combination 3rd-person action game and tower defense strategy, and fortunately, it pulls the gameplay off reasonably well. The strategic and tactical elements of planning out your traps and then trying to execute your plan is quite satisfying. The game has a surprising amount of little intricate details, like how your enemies can track you via sound and scent, and how you can use an intimidation system to buy yourself some breathing room, which come together with a variety of traps, many of which require some manual management on your part, to make a game that you can actually sometimes feel cunning during. In a testament to the developers' enemy design, the monsters actually feel fairly varied, even though their variety is in reality little more than rock-paper-scissors, and they kind of fall to the same axework.

The game is at its strongest when you're planning your traps out, or rushing across the map to trip a net full of rocks just in the nick onf time. You really get caught up in the moment, watching your plans come to fruition, or hearing the distant sound of a spike trap impaling a bunch of wolves while you're in the middle of a fight.

Unfortunately, the combat system doesn't measure up to the traps. The ranged combat system has a far too aggressive auto-aim. It's useful when you're trying to line up shots on circling wolves, as the rifle is meant to fire too slowly to make manual aiming feel rewarding. But when you're trying to trigger one out of several clustered traps of nets filled with rocks, the game's inability to know which one you actually wanted to shoot as their autoaim fights each other can completely ruin a trap. Not being able to move while reloading is frustraing, but I understand and accept the developer's decision in that regard, as it does make shooting the rifle "mean" more -- it makes using the weapon a resource beyond just the ammunition it takes, as the reload time can be a serious liability in the middle of a wave of enemies.

The melee combat system feels clunky and vague. It's more like Don't Starve than Arkham Asylum or Assassin's Creed. While hitting enemies with your axe is rewarding, the enemy "tells" for attacks are generally not obvious enough to make the dodge system really pay off. You'll hit a werewolf twice, then suddenly get knocked over when they attack back, seemingly without warning. You also have little control over what you're doing beyond "swing axe," so sometimes you'll knock enemies away when you'd rather be pressing the attack. I find myself perpetually short of stamina, which probably means I'm fighting wrong, but it still is frustrating. The real problem though is that while the enemies behave differently in terms of traps, in combat, they all seem to fight pretty much the same; or at least your tactics for fighting are pretty much the same. All that changes is which weapon the enemy is particularly vulnerable to, which doesn't make for especially satisfying combat. (Then again, I get the feeling that melee combat is *supposed* to be somewhat discouraged in the game, and almost making it dull does sort of discourage it.)

Each night is pretty short, but can be reasonably intense as the timing of some of your traps can be quite tight. This gives each mission an almost bite-sized quality, so it's easy to play a couple nights in spite of a busy schedule. It also lends itself to the "just one more" phenomenon in a way that longer missions would not.

Sang-Froid has its rough spots, but I feel that the game realizes the goals it set out to achieve, and by keeping itself short and sweet it manages to emphasize its fun parts and keeps the less fun parts from becoming tedious.

A perfectly servicable action RPG (with the focus on "action"). Expect something like a simplified science-fiction Torchlight. I could hope for more role-playing elements; or at the very least, a better explanation of what your gear does. What does +10 Rad on a chest plate do? Does that increase my radiation resistance or my radiation damage? (Actually, I couldn't tell that it did either of those things.)

The game is fun enough, for a mindless action RPG, though it clearly was built with tablets in mind as a place to play, since virtually all you can do is click on things or double-click on things, and the game isn't necessarily as picky or precise about what things you're clicking on or whether it's a single or double-click as I'd like. The character classes are pretty widely varied, so there's something for every play style. The inventory system looks like it should be really cool, but without an explanation of what item stats mean, I'm left looking at the handful of things I understand and the cost, and making decisions based on that, so 90% of the inventory ends up being meaningless or undervalued. The art design is generally very good, both the player characters and the enemies look good, and have distinctive sillouettes.

However,, "deep and intriguing story line" is pretty much wishful thinking on the part of the developer. "Cliched, barely explored storyline" might be more accurate from what I've played so far. I *wish* there was a deep storyline. Or at least an explanation of things. Why is the game set in a weird desert city of all places? What are the huge robot pieces lying around from? The Harvest does pretty much no world building. (Who are the Harvesters? Why does every character in the game suddenly, and with no warning, start calling them "Slimers" even though most of them are robots and none so far have been slimy? What makes us humanity's last best hope? How the heck did the Harvesters cause so much damage when I'm only threatened by the minibosses?)

Don't get me wrong: the game is actually pretty good. But it's not particularly imaginative, and while it does its job well enough, it doesn't do much to stand out from the crowd. If you're looking for something in science fiction to distract you from all the fantasy themed ARPGs out there, you could do a lot worse than The Harvest.

A gorgeous action-platformer, with just a hint of JRPG sensibilties. There are stats, inventory, and item crafting, but those elements are (rightly) fairly sidelined by the tight game mechanics. It's an action platformer in true classical style, with a stunning "hand painted" aesthetic. (Also, animal people, which is a thing I'm always excited to see.)

The game plays very well, with satisfying combo sets and abilties. The voice acting is pretty solid; it's not Bastion, but it's still well written and delivered. There's a very snarky, self-aware sense of humor that pervades the game, which I appreciate, especially since, if played straight, the game would probably be pretty grimdark and depressing; a tone that wouldn't mesh nearly as well with the aesthetic and mechanics as the fanciful, winking humor does.

I'm pretty forgiving of the fourth-wall breaking because those references largely come from the "comedy relief animal mascot" character, and that archetype is pretty well known for breaking the fourth wall.

Dust is a great deal of fun, and the art style is truly delightful. Absolutely worth the time and money to play.