Recent reviews by Gradius

This colony sim is promising still, but fundamentally incomplete despite it coming out of EA and into a 1.0 release.
I don't mean in the general sense of "I'd like more content" either, it is genuinely full of unfinished or missing content.

The balance of crafting is often confusing, you'll unlock things 10 hours before you can actually unlock the items needed to use or craft them. Of the five or so explorable islands, two of which are genuinely empty, with one containing a big sign reading "Experimental" and then the island itself has no collision whatsoever so your boat goes through it. One of the first items on your hotbar is labelled "Experimental" and only works with the multiplayer - there is no multiplayer though. Certain items cannot be crafted and have to be bought in tiny quantities despite being something you need lots of to progress. Some islands you fall off of and get teleported back onto, some you teleport back to your main island, and some you cannot fall off of because of invisible walls. There's a button to talk to settlers but it just gives you a message about not trying to break the game then disables itself if you try again. By the 10 hour mark the game will be hideously slow because of mechanics that cause infinite spawning follower creatures. The game looks significantly better with antialiasing disabled because of a broken implementation that causes immense blur (and also for buildings to 'lag' weirdly when the camera moves).

At every turn the game feels like a title in early beta, so to see it touted as a finished release - even if it's one still recieving active development - feels both misleading and like a poor sign for its future. There's fun to be had here, but you aren't getting a finished game. Not when half of it is so unfinished that it has signs all over it literally saying that features are experimental or unfinished.

I may revisit this in a year or two, and perhaps then the game won't feel like it should still be deep in early access.

A good little dice-roll based roguelite with a charming presentation and great soundtrack. Some of the later challenges (specifically involving the Witch character) do get a little RNG-dependent as far as difficulty though.

A 4-5 hour adventure through a surreal dying world kept struggling along by the efforts of our protagonist. Beautiful art, music, and top quality narration. The gameplay is often fairly light puzzling and platforming, there is no death to avoid here. The touching story and art is the main driver here. Unfortunately the game leans a little too heavily on unskippable cutscenes that make the game somewhat frustratingly stop-start at times, especially when animations draw on just that bit too long before you get control. But if you can handle a game that makes you wait a little too long at times I think it's a highly memorable and emotionally engaging experience about knowing when to let go of things.

I genuinely don't know why I played this. Was it fun? I don't even know. But in the words of Benoit Blanc: Compels me though.

Excellent 3D factory building game with a decent focus on world exploration. The story's a little thin, and I think building can often be unnecessarily painful (though that's still a complex problem to solve in 3D space when you've got terrain in the mix too), but that only detracts so much from an incredibly engaging experience.

Intricate Escher-inspired puzzler set in infinitely recursive (i.e. looping) worlds where you control gravity. Occasionally brain melting, frequently psychedelic, and doesn't outstay its welcome. Very trippy and very enjoyable. Difficulty is also not too punishing either.

A very solid cyberpunk RPG presented in sidescrolling perspective with lovely pixel art (that, unfortunately, the camera is often a bit too zoomed out to fully appreciate). The story is a mix of various cyberpunk staples, you'll find lots of Deus Ex, Shadowrun, Neuromancer, and more here. That does mean it will likely stay short of providing much in the way of genuine plot twists, it's that much of a genre-piece. But the game as a whole is solid. A little clunky at times, and some elements could have been tutorialised better - I did find myself having to work out how to use guns or change weapons in cyberspace, and I also felt like the early game was a little punishing until I'd learned the ropes and gotten more upgrades. But the experience as a whole very still very compelling and there's enough content that it felt like a decently sized adventure without also overstaying its welcome. There's nothing here worldchanging, but with the last Deus Ex title closer and closer to a decade old (though admittedly this is a year older), this definitely scratches the itch. I think I had put this off due to it having some mixed reviews, despite looking great, but honestly I don't share the sentiment. Combat could be a little more fluid (and you basically never have a great reason to use guns), but the gameplay is definitely solid enough to carry a story-based RPG. If you've missed sneaking through vents and hacking people's computers in games, this is still definitely one to check out.

At this point, this feels like a complete game to me. This comes on the back of games like Vampire Survivor, but is more of an active arena shooter or bullet hell type of game with a similar 2000s flash game aesthetic that you'd see in the likes of Binding of Isaac. Plenty of content here, though I do feel as though the balancing leans a little towards luck more than skill as victory on higher difficulties has always depended on getting a snowball rolling. If you don't get some early luck with item drops, you'll inevitably be overwhelmed in the midgame, if you can get that snowball going you'll often win easily by the end. I didn't get better though, I just got good dice rolls. I'd imagine people who are better than I can may be able to more easily salvage runs, but I did find myself wishing more runs were viable even if they were difficult. But that's only an issue that began to frustrate me a solid 40 hours in when I become interested in completing the different characters on the hardest difficulty. Oh, and it'd have been nice to have a stats screen for your various playthroughs. Perhaps that's something the devs can add eventually.

Short sweet puzzle game with cutesy player characters that feels like it's inspirations were somewhere between Lara Croft GO and Monument Valley. There's nothing here that is likely to blow anyone's mind, but the experience was wholly pleasant and never felt like it was outstaying its welcome. 3 hours well spent!

Gloomwood is the new Thief-inspired stealth game from the folks at Newblood. You play as an unnamed (for the time being, at least) doctor working his way through a city for as-of-yet unknown reasons while evading and fighting off inhuman ‘huntsmen’ (which have some very fun voice acting) and a variety of other creatures.

As this is early access, you’re only getting a slice of the first area of the game (and probably with some of the plot trimmed too), representing about 3–4 distinct areas and about two hours of gameplay—depending on your playstyle. For those that played the demo, you won’t see that area present here, as I believe it was crafted purely for that demo (though aspects of that may still make its way into some later part of the game).

Your basic gameplay toolbox here includes sneaking, climbing onto obstacles and ropes, a ‘lightgem’ that shows when you’re in shadow, a fashionable yet practical cane sword that enables instant kill backstabs to unaware enemies, a suitcase that can store weapons and other items, the ability to pick up and throw object as distractions or to use at platforms, the ability to lean around corners, and whatever shooty-bang-bangs you can find lying about the place.

While the ability to clamber onto objects feels like it’s out of Dishonored (I don’t believe any of the original Thief games implement climbing in this kind of way), the movement is much slower (devoid of any run function), and there’s no stealth-breaking ‘cheats’ like the ability to teleport or see vision cones (at least yet—I wouldn’t be surprised to see vision cones eventually at least as an accessibility option for less skilled or less patient players). There’s also no quicksaves to be had here, at least on the default difficulty, and instead you save your progress at phonographs (old-timey record players) dotted sparingly through the levels.

This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise though, given its distinctly 2002-ish aesthetic, looking even more technologically basic than 2004’s Thief: Deadly Shadows did with its at-the-time cutting-edge bump mapping and hard-edged dynamic stencil shadows. Not that the game looks ‘bad’, there’s plenty of detail to the levels and pleasing art design, but you should take the retro graphics to inform you that this will be a retro experience. This reduction in speed and agility compared to recent stealth games may throw some players off though. I also feel like it might not entirely gel with the much larger level sizes compared to games of the era, as backtracking to the start of an area might take 15 minutes at the player’s fastest walking speed.

The stealth itself feels largely solid if not hugely complex outside of the use of throwable distractions (or just shooting the enemy with a gun), with a few caveats. You can lean around corners or push up against doors to hear behind them, but leaning will allow enemies to see you (though the dev has promised a buff of some sort). Thankfully they don’t enter a searching state, so it still remains functional, but it does diminish how useful it is. There also doesn’t appear to be a way to softly open doors (or it isn’t telegraphed to you at the moment). There is some form of sound propagation system, though sometimes making a loud noise or throwing something won’t alert enemies that are relatively close. Since this largely works in the player’s favor, this doesn’t seem like a real issue currently. I did however find the use of hiding in shadows a problem, even hiding in the ‘maximum’ amount of shadows and staying out of the path directly in front of enemies I could be spotted by the huntsmen pretty easily. This was to the point that only staying behind them really appeared to be a solid strategy. I suspect this needs tweaking to increase the effectiveness of shadows, or to reduce the range they can spot you in shadows at. There also seemed to be a very limited amount of ways of handling huntsmen with firearms if you accidentally alert one. Melee huntsmen can be easily baited into long attack animations, but short of slapping them with a cane sword before they can wipe out all your health, there’s no real way of handling the ones with guns. Fighting them obviously shouldn’t be your main strategy, but there ought to be at least some way of handling them beyond simply hoping to run away before they get a shot off in my opinion.

Your briefcase, effectively your inventory, is handled pretty well as a physical item you whip out when you have enough physical space around you. You can place anything appropriately small into it, rearrange to your will, and pull items back out. Currently it doesn’t clearly instruct you how to rotate items about or to pull out bottles without just dropping them (just click them once then close the briefcase, you’re welcome), but that can be easily fixed. I did find the need to make space in the inventory to do things like load free ammo into the gun or to unload enemy guns a bit tedious though. You wouldn’t stash them into the inventory in real life if all you were going to do was take the bullets out of them, so I don’t particularly like having to keep that much free space just to do it in the game. It’s a fun implementation of an inventory though, and pretty snappy to use.

This leads me to some of the polish quibbles I have: You’re very likely to get confused by what amount of bullets your guns have in them due to the inventory also showing a quickswap number key for the gun that you’re almost certainly going to mistake for an ammo count at first. At certain points you can flip switches to lower down ropes as shortcuts for backtracking. These appear as hard to see thin ropes just lowering out of nowhere from wooden beams, surely there should be some sort of winch model employed but that’s not the case so in a dark area it can be hard to even tell what flipping the switch changed. You finally get a light source at no less than the halfway point of the content available and this feels far too late, at least offer some very minor brightening around the player so we’re not bumping into walls here!

Those I feel are likely to be addressed by release though. Mostly I’d like to see some improvements to how enemy visibility is handled so you don’t feel as though you’re constantly getting spotted while hiding in deep shadow. There’s also occasional spots of getting lost in a level that could be smoothed out, and perhaps the first area feels a little too tough (though far from impossible) for non-veteran stealth players on the default difficulty.
Sound design is generally solid with some nice bits of voice acting for the enemies and the few characters you encounter. Music appears non-existent outside of the repeating jingle of the save-phonographs, but I’m unsure as to if there will be any in the final game.

If you liked the Thief series or retro ‘imsims’ like Deus Ex, I’m sure you’ll enjoy Gloomwood immensely. If you’re coming from a more action-orientated game like Metal Gear or Dishonored, be prepared for a change of pace though. There’s plenty of tense action, but it’s also slower and more methodical. We’re still a couple of years from anything close to a complete game, but even at this early stage most of the polish is fairly close to where it should be and there’s enormous promise. This is a solid first preview of a game I’m looking forward to a lot.