Recent reviews by render

Short, charming, and fun. An ambitious, albeit imperfect, effort that pays off because it aims for the heart.
Unoptimized? Yes. Your CPU may transform into a snow blower while playing.
Sloppy controls? Yes, and not just on the icy areas of the map.
Collision issues? Yes. In addition to the leash mechanics, you may get trapped in bushes or between objects.
. . . but the undeniable charm and short play time made it easy to look past those minor speed bumps.

A village of emoji-like gnorps use a variety of imaginative ways to mine shards from a mysterious, seemingly invincible rock. This clicker gradually becomes more of an idler as you unlock new upgrades and abilities at the end of each round. Wonderfully kinetic and entertaining presentation. Took about 22 hours to 100% this one.

A great collection of categorized cryptogram puzzles from classic literature, Prose & Codes provides a clean and intuitive interface with just enough art to set the mood. Puzzle-solving gameplay is rewarded with thought-provoking quotes + links back to the source material on the Project Gutenberg website. Took me about 14 hours to get all the achievements. The devs have added more than 75 new ciphers (for free) since launch.

Drag-and-drop one of three note choices up to complete the chord shown. There is no penalty for wrong guesses. The ~140 levels go quickly. Even though my music theory is a bit rusty, Steam reports that it took just 0.6 hours to reach 100% completion. Totally worth a buck if you need the practice or want to revisit basic music theory. Looking forward to the sequel!

Almost plays like a series of thematic escape-the-room scenes that tie together into a story. The gameplay is linear, but the narrative is told out of order across 8 chapters plus a short, but pivotal clickthrough scene.

Each chapter puts you in the shoes of Detective Erin Myers at a new location with a primary objective. Solve the puzzles there to complete the objective, exit the location, and move to the next chapter.

Some locations are a single room. Others have an adjacent room or two to mix things up a bit and spread out the puzzle solving. There are also plenty of "zoom in" areas with closeup details and additional interactions.

Left-clicking interacts with an object, while right-clicking provides description/explanation. A fair amount of the story and characterization is delivered through the right-click mechanism, so it's worth using it extensively unless you only care about the puzzle solving.

The game is all text; no voice-overs, although there are sound effects and music.

Puzzles are inventory based, using/combining items and re-purposing them as needed like most point-and-click adventures. Once used, items will disappear from the inventory list. Puzzle logic was generally sensible and realistic.

The scale of this game is its greatest strength. The story moves along at a brisk pace because each chapter takes only 10-20 minutes to complete. The locations are small enough to keep the puzzle designs from getting overly complicated. This results in an experience that felt like I was playing through a two-hour "movie of the week" -- albeit a grim one.

Plenty of save slots are provided, although you probably won't need more than a few. Full playthrough (including a brief reload to finish 100% of the achievements) took me about 2 hours, which feels spot on for the price.

A peaceful, almost meditative, puzzle game with some imaginative and unexpected tricks up its sleeve. Although most of the interaction is drag-and-drop, it felt unique compared to other puzzle or adventure games. Less than 3 hours of gameplay from start to finish, but worth the asking price.

About 10 hours in so far, and having a great time exploring this alien world in co-op with friends.
Last year's builds didn't handle multiplayer very well, but that's no longer an issue. Private worlds now work, save points are functional, and inventory & base components are persistent.
Crafting and base building mechanics are similar to Ark: Survival Evolved. The density of fauna is low enough to encourage exploration with less threat than Ark, which is a welcome experience because I'm more interested in the survival, exploration, and science aspects of the game.
Have seen some minor bugs, and we can't seem to get into the mine areas in multiplayer yet. Hoping to see that get sorted out. Overall stability is high. No crashes yet.


Our crew each explored the mines asynchronously to move the story/quests along, then resumed our cooperative exploration at some other interesting sites (which I won't spoil here).

Performing in-game activities rewards characters with points which can be used to unlock new blueprints via a 3-way tech tree. These unlocks provide a series of goals to continually reward players in a satisfying loop.

As a result, our humble scrap shelter has been replaced by a series of pre-fab base components from the tech tree, including a main habitat (for storage, a kitchen, a chemical workstation, and a fabrication machine), a barracks (for sleeping/saving, a computer desk, and some props that offer temporary buffs), and a biodome for growing food.

The computer desk can be used to decrypt data disks in a way similar to the pipes/hacking mini-game from Bioshock. Victory results in a new unlocked crafting blueprint. Unfortunately, we've only found about 3 unique recipes. All the other encrypted disks we've found are just repeats of those same items. Would love to see more unlockable technologies or perhaps story chapters/audio logs.

Shield tech in the science tree is also notable since it can surround the base and keep the unfriendly creatures at bay. Bonus: the shields are noticeable from quite far away, and act as visual beacons which helped keep us from getting lost during expeditions.

Diamonds are a major missing component for us right now. There's so much we want to build with them, but we've had no luck finding them. The hunt continues!

Finally found some diamonds! Again, no spoilers, but definitely worth the hunt and we didn't have to leave the initial world to find them.

We unlocked the Laboratory and built vehicles -- a rover, some hover cycles, a humvee-like vehicle with a mounted turret, and spaceships. Lots of fun with those, and the long playtime before unlocking them made it that much more rewarding to obtain them.

The vehicles greatly extend exploration range and we were able to build two additional remote bases at interesting locations where desirable ores were more abundant.

We also built some structures using the custom components in the Engineering branch of the tech tree. They took awhile to unlock, and we were disappointed to discover that they can't be pressurized and thus, they can't be mixed into a prefab base. Hoping that this will change, since the Climate Controller doesn't seem to do much yet.

Once we felt prepared, we took to the stars and explored (and mined) the asteroids and a bit of the other moons. If you've followed some of the game updates, you probably know that they're harsher and potentially more exciting and challenging. However, they seem a bit short on the interesting content like mines, refineries, etc. that made the initial world so intriguing.

As with all games in this genre, things get to a point where the 'chore' factor starts to kick in. We now log in to find ourselves with the busywork of base repairs/upkeep, going out to tap geysers in order to make hydrazene fuel for the vehicle fueling tanks, harvesting biodome crops and prepping meals in the kitchen, repairing our mining tools, etc. However, the endlessly abundant power from solar panels, auto re-planting of crops, and lack of a fuel requirement for the space ships ease this a bit compared to some other survival games.

We certainly got our money's worth from this game over the first 50 hours of play. Excited to see what comes next!

A killer old-school inspired action RPG with randomized loot, multiplayer (up to six players in a party), a new endless dungeon mode, and poster-sized passive skill tree that offers a massive number of build variations.

MInimal and ingenious. At first glance, it might not seem as elegant as games like Hexcells or Lyne, but this 50-level collection of gated circuit-like puzzles is a delight.

Controls are 100% mouse-based, and the gameplay involves removing pieces of the puzzle in the correct order. Mistakes reset the puzzle on the early levels where the layouts are simpler. Later, the more challenging stages provide multiple strikes before resetting the puzzle, since a full restart can be a bit time consuming.

The final levels are particularly fiendish, but Hook neither frustrates nor overstays its welcome.

Total playtime for all puzzles was 1.1 hours. Note that if you collect trading cards for badges, you may have to open the game again after completing it to get the remaining card drops. (In my case, there's one card drop remaining.)

An accesible and lightweight evolution of the original Supreme Commander (and Total Annihilation before it) that shines in online co-op multiplayer vs. AI.

Each of the three factions feels unique enough to encourage different tactics and long-term strategies. AI can be configured with pre-existing difficulty and behavioral profiles or customized to make it laughably incompetent or viciously productive. Both players and AI can be configured in any combination of teams, with or without ability to break alliances during gameplay.

Jeremy Soule's soundtrack is grand and sweeping. It does a fine job underscoring the tension of base building and the escalating arms race just as well as it punctuates the shrapnel-filled battles.

Sure, more maps would be welcome, but luckily there are a few well-balanced layouts that offer tremendous replayability.

My recommendation: Buy it for yourself and 3 or 4 friends when it's on sale, skip the single-player campaigns, and go right for coop multiplayer against a few AIs.