Recent reviews by Caspian Roach

A tentative recommend with BIG caveats:

- The game is very repetitive, mostly consisting of fetch quests, so you will likely want to have a podcast or a video running on a second monitor to not die of boredom
- The UI feels incomplete, like it was shipped mid-development. It's missing tons of button hints, UI prompts and tutorials, which makes it sometimes very confusing to understand what are you supposed to do next.
- Don't expect a farming simulator from this game, all the farming and adjacent stuff is purely in service of fetch quests and there's essentially no reason to interact with it otherwise.

Yes this all sounds very negative, but I still sorta enjoyed my time with it treating it as a podcast-game that doesn't require a big part of your brain to complete.

And the art is very cute.

An excellent fixed dungeon exploration game with cool and varied puzzles and a decent combat system. It really scratched that Tomb Raider itch for me, even though the gameplay is not that similar. The progression is interesting and you get a bunch of new stuff to play around with regularly. If this game released earlier or had more eyes on it it would definitely become a classic.

Of special note I want to highlight the bafflingly quick in-location fast travel and an overall stable 60FPS performance. You click it and you are literally there immediately, surprised me the first time it happened.

Sure it has a couple of minor things I didn't enjoy like some parts of the story that droned about emotions or the strange decision to make it so you sprint only after holding the walk button for a certain amount of time, but they are very easy to overlook to enjoy like 20 hours of great gameplay.

An interesting FMV game with excellent cinematography, good prop/monster design, an interesting premise, a hole-filled plot and aggresively ignorant attention to details, like they never even bothered to consult a single medical or scientific professional. Pretty much every medical action in the game is incredibly dense and incorrect, which makes me wonder if it was done on purpose.

It's quite pretty to look at, if you can somehow disengage your brain from thinking about all the wrong things you're being shown. The amount of different ways in which you can die was a highlight - some of them are really funny.

The game doesn't have a chapter select, but it does have a quick 'skip seen cutscene' button (Tab), which makes getting to see all the different choices quite easy.

A solid okay out of 10.

A decent fishing game, fun to zone out and find all the different fish. Going to be a bit difficult to fully complete without a guide, as there's barely any hints as to where the different varieties of fish are and how many do you still have to get.

Not much else going on in this game though, the story is a few sentences and the upgrade path is very short. The entire game feels like a minigame taken from a bigger game, but hey, at least it's engaging.

It is a strange and gorgeous game about World War I and how war is bad. It's worth a look simply because how pretty it is. You won't be surprised by the included gameplay, which is almost stock standard for all the first person horror games, but it moves the story along, which means you get to look at more cool environments.

I feel that the story is undermined by the inclusion of the mystical elements, which masquerade away the real horrors of the war, and are really there to make the conversion into the gameplay more approachable. It's easier to make a gameplay loop around avoiding a monster than it is to somehow make trench warfare into a game, I suppose.

A short, simple and enjoyable 3D platformer that was clearly made with a lot of love - everything feels nice to play and pretty polished. None of the gameplay mechanics overstay their welcome and there's a bunch of new ones introduced throughout.

Yeah, every aspect of the game could be expanded upon, but for a solo developer the end result is very impressive.

As a special note, I was surprised that I never had to look up a guide for the collectibles - I found all of them on my first run (except for the first level but I wasn't looking for them then). They're all put in pretty obvious "this is where I would hide this if I was hiding a collectible" places which makes them fun to collect.

A cool little deckbuilding game to play while listening to podcasts or youtube videos. The gameplay doesn't require much of your attention while still being engaging. Just wish it was more complex- the fact that the playfield is a slot machine is barely utilized - I was shocked to discover that there are no mechanics around getting full rows of identical symbols and your symbol positioning barely matters.

Still, the synergies between items are cool enough to continue playing, and the characters feels really distinct and interesting to play. Definitely check it out if you're interested in games that don't hold your exclusive attention.

A cool little puzzle game about traversal and gravity, devoured it in one go and got sad there wasn't any more.

Not much else to say, there is some story but it is some flowery philosophical nonsense I tuned out by the second minute, and it has zero bearing on the actual cool gameplay bits, so it doesn't really affect it.

This kind of game could easily support more levels and puzzles, so it's a bummer there's only like 4 levels in it (+ the same 4 levels on hard mode), with each mode taking about 2 hours to complete. Definitely potential for more

A surpsingly good roguelite game flying under the radar. The shooting feels satisfying and intentional, the enemies are nicely varied and there's a bunch of interesting guns. It doesn't invent anything new, but it does the basic gameplay really well, with barely any missteps.

The biggest thing this game lacks is some sort of more interesting/involved meta progression system. I'm probably spoiled by Hades, but the lack of side stuff to unlock is very noticeable. Obviously this is a much smaller game, so it is understandable that they don't have the resources to put more lateral stuff in.

I really enjoyed having the dynamic cover system, incentivizing staying in cover by making you reload faster is very cool and makes you immediately start to strategize when you enter the room as to what place will be more advantageous for you to use.

The game is also very stylish, with near miss dodges slowing down time to look badass as you slide over the table evading the bullets.

A cool game with a fresh gameplay idea of learning your skills through riddles and typing. The word puzzles and puzzle puzzles were enjoyable, almost all of them felt solvable without any external help (and there are hint systems in the game if you feel like you need them).

There are aspects of the game that could be improved (combat targeting is wonky, skill lists are much too long for the length of the game and some locations feel like they were stretched for time), but none of them are too critical for enjoyment of the core loop of the game.

You should check it out if you're a fan of word puzzles.