Recent reviews by Sabletooth

Get this game, it is amazing and addicting. One of the best games of all time.

I wanted to like this game because of the cute art, but man. It's just not good.

The controls are clunky and unresponsive, but what bothers me the most are the options.
Whatever settings you turn on, the game will reset them all if you restart it.
I played windowed mode, and after dying, the game set itself back to full screen.
And finally, turning off the controller vibration does absolutely nothing - my pad still vibrated despite me supposedly turning it off.

This game is excellent.
It channels a lot of elements from classic SNES and PS1 era action RPGs like Secret of Mana, Terranigma and the likes, as well as themes that resemble that of Phantasy Star Online or .hack.
But despite these inspirations, CrossCode is a completely unique package that has incredibly satisfying combat, an engaging story, mind-breaking puzzles, beautiful graphics for both environments and enemies, and one of the best soundtracks of the year. Super duper highly recommended!!

So, this game is a hidden gem.
You like the classic 2D Sonic games? This one is absolutely for you. Its stages even have similar elements such as loop de loops, or the bouncy mushrooms from Sonic & Knuckles.
However, even though this game wears its inspiration on its sleeve, don't let that fool you. Spark has absolutely a lot of unique mechanics. The biggest one is the fact that the namesake of the game can collect various powerups that allow you additional mobility or increased combat abilities. Since the character transforms in some of them, I was reminded of Kid Chameleon. But don't be fooled, the base form also is quite capable of combat.

Its biggest flaw is that it might be a bit too easy if you like playing 2D platformers, however, there's additional modes that you can unlock that ramp up the difficulty a lot more.

Add to this an absolutely excellent soundtrack.
Underrated, for certain. This game is great, and I heavily recommend anybody who likes platformers to check it out.

Alchemist's Castle is an exploratory platformer that tries to channel Metroidvania titles, and at least for its price does a decent job doing so.

The artwork is quite decent, which is why I picked it up. Upon playing it, I found several flaws (as documented below), but the developers are open to criticism and have made changes based on the issues I encountered with the game.
While there's still a few flaws within the game, such as the nondescript rooms mentioned below, I think that if you like exploration platformers, it's worth picking up for its price of a buck.

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Original review here for archival purposes:
Alchemist's Castle is an exploratory platformer that tries to channel Metroidvania titles but kind of fails doing so.
While I understand that this is a very low budget title, I would not recommend playing it, as there are some fatal flaws that make the game fairly uninteresting.

Given its price, the art is surprisingly decent (and was the main reason I picked this up), but beyond that it kind of falls apart.
I'll start with the map: It's pretty hard to decipher, doesn't have a "you are here" marker - at least as far as I could tell.
Moving along, the font used makes reading the plot scrolls unbearable, at least to me.
There is no indicator that you took damage. Occasionally I think I took fall damage but I'm not sure if that is true or if I grazed an enemy/trap. There is no way to tell.
The progression and level design are... lackluster. These two tie together because whenever I got a powerup, I still didn't know where to go, since the rooms all are so nondescript, and the maze-like construction of the world makes it very hard to remember which path to take for areas where you may have been stuck in before - the map of course doesn't help.

For now, I would recommend you to skip this game, though if some of the issues are cleared up, it definitely has potential as a low budget title.

Mindnight is a game about deduction, strategic thinking, psychology, deception and the skill of lying and convincing others.

If you've ever played the party game Mafia (aka Werewolf, or its video game offshoot Town of Salem) or perhaps the card game The Resistance, you'll feel right at home.

This game presents the core mechanics of The Resistance in an interesting cyperpunk setting with slick pixel art and solid music. It also is very polished (unlike Town of Salem... >_> ), and the developers are working hard on bringing more content to the game, including a voice chat system. They also are very open to feedback and suggestions, and active in their community.

The biggest weakness of this game is that, of course, being an online game, it needs a lively online community. However, unfortunately for Mindnight, the community for this game is very small. You can't really just jump into the game and play, but have to coordinate with other players of the game on the Discord server in order to set up even 5 (let alone 8!) players.

Despite that big issue, I do recommend getting this game. Mindnight deserves a healthy community to play this game. It really does. And perhaps if more people are willing to give it a shot, we will be able to get a proper community playing this intriguing game.

Now that Denuvo has been removed from this game, I can only heavily recommend the purchase of it.

This game has massive issues.
Not only does it have clunky controls and questionable hitboxes, I encountered a game-breaking bug that would force to restart a new file.
I killed a boss and was low on health, so to be safe I went back to the save point to heal and save, walked back in, grabbed the reward item and on the way out of the boss room back to the save point I died to a pit, not paying attention. So I reloaded, and although I had made the save after killing the boss, the boss not only respawned, it also respawned without the capability of taking damage and of course the boss doors close, so there's no way for me to progress without restarting entirely.

Not even worth it for the 60 cents I paid for it if such a stupidly easy to find bug could make it through.

A fantastic platformer with sleek controls. Unlike so many games that try to target the nostalgia factor with look, style and gameplay, Shovel Knight is one of the few games that genuinely pull it off. Accompanied by a fantastic soundtrack composed by Jake "Virt" Kaufman and a few tracks created by Mega Man 1 composer Manami Matsumae, Shovel Knight makes a superb package of gameplay and aesthetics.
Currently there is 2 playable campaigns, but with one more free DLC expansions coming up soon, there is no doubt that Shovel Knight will be a game to come back to every so often.

Short version: Unless you REALLY like playing hidden object games, and you don't mind either spending money or lots of time waiting doing literally nothing, I cannot really recommend this game.

This game gives you quests which are "gather X amount of items", and you gather those items by going to the hidden object scenes, which you unlock by leveling up. Completing one rewards you with one or more random items. The game seems to give priority to those you need for your quests, which is good, as the amount of different items grows exponentially as you continue completing quests.
Now this wouldn't be so bad, but sadly, the game uses the classic browser/mobile game trick where you have "energy", which you spend doing the HO scenes. As you go to locations more and more, they level up and cost more energy to do.

Now, even all of that wouldn't be too bad, but then there's the "characters" you interact with. As you unlock more locales, more NPCs appear, roaming the map. There's several items that you can use with these NPCs to exchange for a random item out of their stock. Sadly, unlike with the HO scenes, the NPCs do not prioritize items you need, and some of these items are exclusive or just about exclusive to just these NPCs, meaning that if you have bad luck with rolls, you don't get the items you need or no needed collectibles at all. If you don't have the item you exchange for interacting with the NPCs, it costs in-game gold to interact with them.
For instance, I had a quest where I needed one item from the Wolf NPCs. It took me about 25 tries to finally get it off of him, and he only had 4 possible drops at the time (most of them didn't drop anything).

In other words, this game is very much designed to extort money from you by making you wait in order to play, and locking needed items behind the 100% random chance NPCs.

If you don't mind all of this, and like Hidden Object games, this game might be for you. Otherwise, though, I'd recommend looking at other ones.