Recent reviews by LimyMonkey

Shaw!

Shapez 2 is the most "pure" factory building game I've ever played. It's as if you took the genre of factory building games and distilled it down to only the most essential pieces and removed all fluff, and released this. There is infinite space, infinite resources, no time limits, no power usage, and almost nothing getting in the way of building your factories. The only limiting factor is how many platforms you can place. In many ways, this greatly improves upon the genre. In other ways, it simplifies and shortens the title, and means that the "end game" is quite a bit simpler than alternate titles.

In terms of the good, shapez 2 has the absolute best blueprinting system of any factory building game I've ever played or seen. You can go as detailed as you'd like, building and condensing factories piece by piece. The game encourages you to build each action (i.e. painting your shape) into one of these blueprints, then taking your blueprints and putting them together in new ways to build new parts. This can feel fantastic, zooming in to change the most minute detail, and then zooming out to put these pieces together in new and novel ways.

The other novel thing shapez 2 introduces is logic gates with wires and signals. I didn't personally play around with these much, though I saw designs online for "make anything machines" that can automatically receive a desired shape and build this shape without manual intervention. While I think this is very interesting and cool, by the end of the game, it feels like this machine would be more tedious to build than anything, and once this is complete, you can simply leave the game running with zero intervention and accumulate as many points as you'd like.

In terms of the bad, shapez 2 often feels like the things you've built are no longer necessary and your previous factories go either forgotten or completely deleted to make room for new factories building new parts. New shapes you're tasked with creating are usually not dependent on previous shapes. This left me feeling more than once like I wasted my time accomplishing the goals the game set out for me. The only thing carried over are the blueprints you've created along the way.

Overall, I quite enjoyed playing shapez 2, but once I've completed the primary objectives, I have no interest in coming back to the game for more. New shapes don't feel much more complicated than previous shapes, and there's no real sense of building up to something big and grand. The end simply left me feeling "meh." That's not to say it's a bad game though, it certainly does some things better than any other game in the factory building genre, and has novel ideas and ways to build your parts. If you're looking for a no-fluff, roughly 20 hour factory building game, then shapez 2 is a great option. If you're looking for more complicated builds and sinking your teeth into a game for hundreds of hours, probably look elsewhere.

Timberborn is a cute city-builder with light automation elements. Your goal is to direct your colony of beavers to build a settlement alongside a river, and collect and farm food, wood, and water to survive. Along the way, there will be droughts and "bad water" events that test your resilience and preparations.

The early game can be a bit stressful, particularly on higher difficulties, but once you've grown out your colony and built up your dam, droughts and badwater events can be automated into non-issues. At this point, the game turns into simply making your colony more efficient and making your beavers happier, and Timberborn becomes a very calming and relaxing game.

I very much enjoyed this game up until the late game. While there are some automation capabilities and goals, you can quickly exhaust these capabilities, and soon turn to simply farming new types of food and building your faction's "wonder," at which point the game tells you that you've won. The game then expects you to start a new save on a new map, and start all over again, throwing away your ~20 hours of work and progress. Instead, for me personally, this left me wanting more automation and new things to build, leading me towards playing a new game (in this case, I picked up shapez 2).

If you're one to enjoy starting new saves and building a new colony on a new map, then Timberborn is absolutely for you! Personally, I am happy with getting my two 20-30 hours run out of the game and then setting it down and moving on to a new game. If you're looking for more late game automation and adding layers of complexity to the things you're building, a different factory building game may be best instead.

I'm speechless. Slay the Princess is easily the best game I've played in years, standing up alongside my all time favorite video games of Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Hades.

Slay the Princess is a fully voice-acted, short narrative choice game, with a vast range of choices and branches. I beat the game in under 5 hours (would have been shorter, but I would pause and talk on Discord or on other apps while the game was still running), and in this time I received only 15 out of 123 non-guaranteed achievements, accounting for 12% of the game's choices, and less than half of the major branches. The writing and voice acting is phenomenal as well, which when combined with the number of branches and choices makes the game feel extremely natural and like each and every choice is truly important.

I have so much more to praise with Slay the Princess, but to do so would be to spoil important things about the game, whether that's the story, choices you can make, results or otherwise. If you are interested in choice driven games, I believe you should go into Slay the Princess as blind as possible, and simply experience it for yourself.

In terms of what could be improved: Once you complete the game, you get a gallery of choices you've made and branches you've taken. I wish this feature was more fully fleshed out and would allow you to begin playing from these chapters with the necessary choices made to get to that point, and information about how many paths you haven't seen from that chapter and beyond. Some of this is alleviated by manual saves before important choices, but as someone who would like to see everything the game has to offer, this feels like a largely missed quality of life improvement.

Nonetheless, I've been very thoroughly enjoying my time playing Slay the Princess and plan to continue playing for some time to come. To steal a friend's concise rating system in this apt circumstance, Slay the Princess is truly UNMISSABLE.

Oxenfree is a slow paced, atmospheric story game, with a heavy emphasis on dialogue and paranormal thriller elements. The game excels at this niche, quickly becoming one of my favorite games I've played recently. Oxenfree borrows the best elements of a few different games / genres to create its own identity that is better than the sum of its parts. It borrows the atmospheric immersion and gameplay from walking sims like Firewatch and What Remains of Edit Finch, paranormal thriller elements of horror games like Phasmophobia and Alan Wake, and branching choice story elements from RPGs like Until Dawn and Life is Strange. These all add up to create an extremely compelling game that left me at the edge of my seat for hours.

While I did have some small annoyances with Oxenfree, such as frequent and rather tedious backtracking, and dialogue that is often too easy to accidentally skip, these annoyances are massively outweighed by everything the game got right.

In summary, I would recommend Oxenfree to anyone that enjoys slower atmospheric games and paranormal thrillers. If that fits you, I feel that full price ($10) is extremely fair and I for one would happily pay more than that to experience this game again for the first time.

Quite possibly the best free video game I've ever played. Sheepy effortlessly packs so much into a one-hour experience while maintaining a consistent level of polish and satisfyingly well crafted controls that it has left me thinking about it long after completion. This is most impressive when considering this is the first game by the development team. I look forward to trying anything these developers go on to do in the future.

As best I can tell, Mitoza was originally a 2011 Flash game on Kongregate created by one of the founders of Rusty Lake, and re-released in 2021 by Rusty Lake's publishing program. For the game itself, there is an RL easter egg, but Mitoza is otherwise unrelated to the story of the RL series.

This "toy" as RL describes Mitoza, consists of making a choice between two options, with each option showing a different cut-scene and then presenting a new choice, making a binary tree of outcomes. Going through all options took me under 30 minutes and the toy is free, so if you're taking the time to read reviews and interested by the connection to Rusty Lake, I'd say just play it.

Not a single word is spoken, and yet I feel like I know my character's life better than she knows herself. I highly recommend this game if you're interested in a tranquil, zen experience that genuinely evokes bliss.

First, before I begin, I feel that I need to give a couple gameplay details. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is a roguelite adventure, where each round of robbing the bank has a very short timer (starts at 3 minutes). You begin each round in the same location with all enemies respawned, and you need to go back to wherever you last were to continue the story. This gives the feeling of never being safe, and always being rushed, adding up to a level of anxiety I needed to accept in order to enjoy this game.

I played, beat, and reviewed the first installment of this series 6 months ago at the time of writing this review. In that review, I brought up three primary aspects of gameplay. I'll look at the same three aspects in this review, as diving into these three aspects sum up my opinions on this sequel perfectly.

- Story: In the first game, I raved about the story. It was cute, playful, and the highlight of my experience. In this sequel, the story takes a backseat. There are still adorable monologues, characters, and hilarious dialogue, but this is marred by the feeling of being rushed by a clock that only lasts a couple minutes during gameplay. This got better for me over time as I realized the clock pauses during dialogue and as more whimsical characters are introduced, but nonetheless, the sequel does not come close to the original story.
- Action/Combat takes center-stage in this sequel. While I complained about the combat not being polished in the original, the sequel takes large strides to improves this. I actively want to continue playing after getting 100% achievements because the combat improvements, and while Turnip Boy's combat is still not as good as dedicated shoot 'em up games, I enjoyed it quite a lot.
- Metroidvania/Map: This is where the biggest improvements were made in the sequel. Traversing the map is the most important aspect of roguelite adventures, and where I criticized the backtracking in the original, this is possibly my favorite part of the sequel. The map is split into visually distinct sections which are all connected with interesting points of interest at every corner. The map still took a couple hours before I started understanding and memorizing, but once I did, my outlook on this game changed drastically, and I no longer felt nearly as rushed to do what needed to be done.

Overall, Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is a fantastic sequel to the cult classic Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. I can't wait for the third installment "Turnip Boy Commits Genocide." I recommend playing the first installment before playing this sequel, but I still highly recommend both, and would be happy paying full price for both.

Convergence is a 2D metroidvania platformer that follows an original story of Ekko from the League of Legends Runeterra universe, as he tries to defend his people and the cities of Zaun and Piltover from destruction. The highlights of Convergence are the tight controls, good platforming, and tie-in with League of Legends lore.

The story is original and reasonably interesting, incorporating pieces of Ekko's character in the city of Zaun. This leads him to interact with and fight a number of other names recognized from League of Legends and Arcane, as well as new characters and enemies. Overall, the story and writing are about average, and worth paying attention to, but often somewhat monotonous and predictable. The most interesting piece of Convergence's story is the fact that this fits into the larger League of Legends cannon, and helps fill in gaps in the existing lore.

As for the metroidvania-platformer gameplay piece of Convergence, movement and controls are of upmost importance to me. In this sense, Convergence is great and feels very good to play. While Ekko's movement is not as precise as dedicated platformers, and not as satisfying as dedicated fighting games, Convergence finds a good middle ground that makes movement generally feel intentional and effective.
The defining newly introduced mechanic to the metroidvania genre is the ability to rewind time. In theory, this allows you to experience what will happen in a fight, go back in time, and change your actions based on this new knowledge. In practice, rewind charges feel a lot more like health points and aren't executed quite as effectively as I would have hoped, though is incorporated well enough with the other mechanics as to not detract from the gameplay.
As for boss fights, most are relatively simple, with a couple end-game exceptions. I was reasonably satisfied with the bosses, though I think the difficulty ramp could have been spread throughout the game better, however perhaps I should have chosen an increased difficulty to begin with.

Overall, I would say Convergence is a worthwhile experience, particularly for those that enjoy metroidvanias and the league of legends universe. I don't believe it's quite worth full price however, and would recommend waiting for a sale to purchase.