Recent reviews by Kvòthe

Solasta is a tactical crpg that feels impressively much like D&D while still being an enjoyable videogame.

System-wise, Solasta is absolutely rock-solid and in some places better and more robust than the tabletop ruleset it's built on. Crafting is done well, stealth is done very well, lighting is important and manageable, overland travel is really good, looting (i.e. the Scavengers) is innovative and I hope other new games start using similar concepts. UI, sound design, music, all rock-solid.

There's some bugs and other kinks still to be worked out, for the moment (1st of June, v1.0.18) - a couple spells (bane, aid) aren't working properly, for instance - but overall things were stable for me.

The dialog writing and VA is pretty good. It got me chuckling at times. The party characters don't take themselves too seriously. The personality traits that you assign each character can have a hard time shining through, but they usually work. The timing of each audio snippet gets stilted at times, but the actual dialog is good.

The animation in combat is solid, including the plethora of monsters, and with special credit to how flying creatures are handled in a turn-based game. In contrast, the character posing and animation (and to a lesser extent, models) in cutscenes is... not great. This is definitely a time/budget thing; there's a lot of standing still in a semicircle to talk to someone, and you quickly start to recognize the four or five animations that all the characters use.

This is one of the ways that the game has very carefully limited scope. There is one main questline with few variations, sidequests are short and seldom have more than two scenes, and conversations have at most binary outcomes. There are seldom more than two or three choices for destination at any given time.

That said, it's still a fun tactical turn-based game. You have complete control of your party's strategy and enough character options to let you build up neat party compositions and tactics of your own design. The difficulty curve is bumpy, but that doesn't stop hard fights from being thrilling and easier ones satisfying. The difficulty settings are easy to use and easy to customize in detail if you want to.

And it really does feel like D&D! That's a hard thing to do in a videogame. For one, it's very faithful to the tabletop system and changes only what it needs to to make it fun in a digital format.

Hits are meaty; spells go zorp or thoom; big crit dice go clak-clak-clak-clak-clak. Deciding what to do each round in combat is a series of robust tactical decisions. Deciding on feats and how to use your money and the deluge of magic items you start acquiring is a series of robust strategic decisions.

Solasta is a fun game, is the thing, and in the face of that its rough edges are definitely forgivable.

Cultist Simulator begins with extremely dense exploration. Every single step you take is a series of discoveries, and it's up to you to read everything and put it all together into a coherent view of the world and the game. Quickly, you learn how to survive and recover. Soon after, you learn how to explore further afield and deeper into dream. Eventually, you can begin to plan a proper Work.

Cultist Simulator makes incredible demands of your perceptiveness. It is not a relaxing game. It has no tutorial, but constantly provides you with new pieces of knowledge that you need to read and integrate. You must read everything. When you discover something, you must remember it.

This is at odds with the game's main weakness: It's pretty grindy. Everything takes time, and one of the main resources that mistakes and disasters consume is time. Legacies (alternate starting circumstances after a prior death) are interesting but not particularly potent, and there is a chunk of humdrum that you are likely to end up doing at the start of every new run - up to an hour of it, depending on how conservatively you play, before you really start discovering new things again. Much of the time, you are making no choices but must still pay attention, which is a particularly thorny kind of grind.

A big part of why it often feels so grindy is how much clicking you have to do. Cultist Simulator is hard on the clicking fingers; it's not very keyboard-navigable, and doesn't have any built-in way to say "I'd like to repeat this task indefinitely". I've developed a mod to help alleviate this, and binding double-click to a single key (using some external program) helps a lot too.

Despite that... it's an extraordinary, engaging game. I found myself reading the snippets of books with rapt attention; planning expeditions with care; revelling in higher and higher Lores revealed; spending nights wondering where, exactly, to find the Key of Days. The writing! Quotes from this game stick with me.

It's a challenging game. There's a real sense of mastery in your first ascension - your first proper Mysteries - your first fallen Apostle - your first victory against the Reckoners. Of the available DLC, Exile is the largest, most challenging, and the most novel to someone who's enjoyed the base game.

If you enjoy ARGs, if you enjoy purple words, if you enjoy that kind of book that has you reaching for a pen and note-paper, you will enjoy Cultist Simulator.

Winter is the principle of silence, of endings, and of those things that are not quite dead.

Faithfully realistic! And a lot of fun to tinker with. Some of the material data is a little off - no graphitization temperature for diamond, for instance - but overall still a lot of fun.