Recent reviews by Sum0

A great hook for a game - Golden Idol-style point-and-click investigations, coupled with investigating the medical aspects of the case as a coroner. It's a great addition to familiar gameplay that makes it feel like you're also learning useful medical facts!

I had quite a few "aha..." moments and it really scratched that Golden Idol "but if that's true, then that means..." itch.

I thought the puzzles were really satisfying and the art is just lovely. I guess I sort of agree with others about the UI, but it's really minor nitpicky things (e.g. the lower-right "exit screen" button needs a hover effect) that really don't make a ton of difference to the enjoyment. If that's the biggest gripe it probably means the rest of the game is fine.

HAM is fun, which is the main thing. It feels a little undercooked (pun intended) at the moment, which hopefully will improve over time with the planned roadmap. The physics are a bit janky in a way that is mostly fun, but can be annoying (mainly around the train on that one map). And at first it seems quite a simple party game, but it's deeper than it initially looks.

To begin you're just running around and throwing ham about and it seems quite shallow. It's pretty easy to get max stars on each stage. But then you discover the leaderboards, and start thinking about how you can maximise your score, and the most efficient ways to get around and plan your deliveries and calculate ratios.

The way the maps are laid out means you start thinking about the best route from office, to ingredients, to bins, to deliveries, using the various means at your disposal to get around. How much of each product should you prepare in advance? Should each player take one job, or rotate to where they're needed? It's almost like speedrunning. And as a fan of games like Factorio it starts to become a really interesting proposition. Just how much money can you make on a single stage? I'm excited to keep playing.

Another review called this a "slice-of-life" story, and I would go one further and call it a "slice-of-your-life" story.

It's a tough game to review, for several reasons, not least because talking about it too much kind of spoils the whole thing. But I certainly think it's one of those games I will remember for much longer than it took to finish it.

It feels like a game that is very personal, as in, the game gets in your business in a way that's very uncomfortable (in an entertaining way of course). It's the feeling of being watched through the monitor, perhaps. An almost embarrassing feeling. It feels like your secrets are being pulled out of you as you play. One particular part ... well, I can only say, make sure you play it with headphones.

I don't think a game has ever left me feeling quite like this. It really reminded me of a lot of things in my life, good and bad, in a way I haven't seen in a game since "Emily is Away".

Stationeers reminds me of Dwarf Fortress in a lot of ways: mainly, the deliciously detailed physics simulation, the constant management of hilariously unintended consequences, and the, uh, "esoteric" interface. Like DF, it's one of those "This one time, I..." games.

Like, this one time, I realised my furnace was hugely over-pressurised with waste CO2. So I built a short pipe to vent excess pressure. Naturally, as soon as I installed the vent, the vent started emitting all the pressurised CO2 at once, which sent me flying hundreds of metres into space...

I love this game, but it's really let down by the interface. Even after playing the game for hours, I am constantly grinding my teeth at the little annoyances that go against all kinds of UI/UX conventions. There is not enough room to go into detail, but even after 40 hours, it's just so exhausting to play sometimes. Simple tasks are just such a slog and it takes forever to do anything. (Update: I still love this game after ~40 hours. I could have played it for 100s of hours but the interface is just so exhausting that I've parked it for now.)

It's fine to aim for realism and detail in an interface, but for example, I am forever forgetting to turn off the welding torch (which must be done manually) before unequipping it, and it ends up still turned on, burning fuel in my pocket. I'm not sure that's either realistic or fun.

The learning curve is also rough. In some ways this is fun (furnace explosions) but a lot of really essential stuff just isn't explained in the game. Of course usually you could check the wiki or Reddit, but because the player base is quite small and the game has been out for many years, there's not a lot of help for new players and a lot of information is either for older versions, or aimed at advanced players who have been playing since 2017. I like that you get objectives to guide you through your first steps, but the objectives really need a "How do I do this...?" button.

As it is, it's a vicious cycle. The UI is off-putting and there's a steep difficulty curve, so players are put off early (see the bad reviews), so there isn't a huge community, so new players are even more lost.

But it's SO rewarding. When you finally work out how the furnace works and forge your first piece of precious steel. When you microwave your first potato. When you build your first clumsy air conditioner by filling a pipe with air, cooling that air in the vacuum of space, and then adding a fan to exchange hot air from inside your base with cool air from the pipe. This is exactly the kind of emergent, physics-based gameplay I was looking for and I love it.

I gripe a lot, but I LOVE this game. I wish it would do more to help players through those awkward first few hours. I nearly quit after two hours and that would have been such a shame: if you have any interest in physics or engineering or space, you have to play this game because it's amazing. Stick with it.

A really nice, chill lil' bear guy that's just ... there. Weirdly relaxing to have Sulo just up in the corner of my screen, a bit like those "study with me" videos! Looking forward to more in the full game.

"I really look up to people who are good at violence." is a quote I think about more and more nowadays.

What can you possibly say about Cruelty Squad?

Imagine you took a medieval peasant and brought them to the year 2021. You locked them in a room and forced them to read Das Kapital; then Atlas Shrugged; then Neuromancer; then a badly-translated fan synopsis of Neon Genesis Evangelion. You allowed them to play one (1) hour of Blood (1997) and 5 minutes of Deus Ex (2000) and then taught them game development. Finally, you took them out of the room, gave them a large dose of psychedelics and let them wander around a shopping mall for half a day.

Then you locked them back in the room and said: "Make a game."

Something like Cruelty Squad would come out. A game I am no good at (I don't think I will ever beat the last mission). A game that is both frustrating and utterly compelling, whether you're blasting your way through a quiet neighbourhood, trading body organs on the stock market, or grappling up a corporate skyscraper with your own bowels.

It's kind of terrifying how absurd and yet relevant this game is.

Loralei and the Laser Eyes is very close to being an all-time great, but the second half of the game was just marred by a dozen tiny frustrations that nearly put me off playing.

Loralei could be described as an escape-room-hotel, or (to steal an apt description from other reviews) Resident Evil without the zombies. Unlike the rather empty and flat world of The Witness though, Loralei is positively dripping with style, like you're been thrown into three versions of Last Year at Marienbad made in the 1840s, 1960s and 1980s, with shades of Killer7 and the criminally underrated game The Norwood Suite. This game is art and it knows it. I loved that aspect. I couldn't have finished it without a pen and paper, which is also a great sign in a puzzle game.

For the reader's information, I would call the puzzles in this game "constructed" (Myst-like) rather than "emergent" (Obra Dinn-like). These are mostly artificial logic puzzles - the next number in a sequence, letter and word puzzles etc. - and "non-mimetic" (i.e. hotels have keys, but they don't have rotating statues that unlock the door to the swimming pool). Personally I prefer the "mimetic" style of Obra Dinn but I enjoyed these puzzles nevertheless.

The first half of the game really flows nicely - non-linear, branching puzzles. You get through one locked door and find two more mysteries behind it, which are just itching to be solved. There's always a mystery dangling in front of you and some great moments when you uncover a new key or piece of information and think "I know where this goes!"

But then - not to spoil too much, but you then get a series of linear puzzles that are triggered by means outside the player's control. This really confused and frustrated me, as I found myself running around, not knowing which puzzles I could solve and which could only be solved later in the game, trying to find invisible triggers to move things along. At this point I seriously considered giving up.

Also, in the latter half of the game, the branching, exploration aspect of the game dries up and you end up with these sets of parallel puzzles. A (spoiler-free) example might be - you get a code, that unlocks a room, that contains another lockbox, which contains a key, which opens a hatch, which gives you a password. Let's say there are 8 passwords in total. So you have to do this sequence of 6 puzzles 8 times, each parallel path giving you variations on the same type of puzzle, for a total of 48 actions you need to take to solve the over-arching puzzle.

It's fun the first couple of times, but it's a real chore after you're done it 8 or 9 times. Also, this style of parallel puzzles sucks all the sense of surprise and exploration that felt so good in the early game - i.e. after you've opened 5 lockboxes containing a key, you can probably guess what boxes 6, 7 and 8 will contain. As a result I nearly quit the game for a second time, just thinking about the sheer amount of running around to solve the last set of puzzles which I had already done 4-5 repetitions of.

Finally, at the end of the game, the sheer amount of documents and items you've picked up becomes a little overwhelming. There are many keys that you only use once, or rooms that you only need to enter once, but they hang around as clutter for the entire game. I know this would make the puzzles a little bit easier but honestly the flow and fun of the late game would be so much better if items were removed when they were used or rooms closed off once you'd solved everything in there.

But I did sit down with a pen and paper to smash through the endgame, and I'm glad I did. It's one of those games that I think would be improved with less, not more, so that the really genius stuff can shine. When I think back, I think of the great soundtrack, the maze that was annoying the first two times but felt like an old friend the third time, the series of creepy PSX-style game demos full of bugs, or going from "I'll never be able to solve this!" upon encountering the ridiculously complex and indecipherable supercomputer password entry system to "I can't I believe solved it!" several hours later.

I loved the Case of the Golden Idol so much I nearly bought it again on Steam just to leave a review, so I'm very happy to be able to review the sequel here.

These two games are pretty much the only ones I know of to pick up the baton that Lucas Pope's Return of the Obra Dinn dropped when it comes to detective games. The big flaw with most detective games is that either the player works it out first (but you can't, frustratingly, tell the game that you already guessed it - ahem Ace Attorney) or the game thinks you worked it out already (and you can't make the leaps of logic required to understand what just happened - looking at you, Danganronpa!) Rise of the Golden Idol, with its fill-in-the-gap solution sentences, makes brute force nearly impossible and you really need to think to win each scenario.

This game continues the fantastic setting of the first game and DLCs, in an alternate world where an ancient civilisation created a baffling physics-defying magical idol. We are now in a ersatz version of a 1970s America-like country, and as the omniscient detective we examine bodies, overhear conversations and peer into coat pockets to put together the pieces across a number of scenarios, dropping words into sentences with gaps to explain what has happened in each scenario - usually something sensationally criminal. For example, you might get "[ ][ ] used a [ ] to [ ] [ ] [ ]". Obviously someone did something to someone, but who? And how?

Here, you can't pass each scenario until you really understand what's happening. In theory you can't brute force your way through the puzzle. And when it works, it's amazing. It's so good - it's a feeling like nothing else apart from the other two games in this genre of three.

This is a moment that happened multiple times in this game: I had determined that, let's say, X was the killer. X had to be the killer, because if X wasn't the killer then Y would have done it, and Y couldn't have done it. That would just be silly. But then I can't believe the game isn't accepting my answer. Maybe the puzzle is badly designed. Or maybe it's a bug. Or maybe ... could it be Y? It can't be Y, because we know Y couldn't have done it ... but if it's not X, then...

It WAS Y!

Aaahhhh, it's so good! It's the perfect Sherlock Holmes moment, the lightbulb turns on, the whole case turns upside down and everything falls into place.

I loved how long the game went on - there are plenty of scenarios, across plenty of wacky settings, and with a good mixture of both malicious and more benign crimes (including one that's amusingly centred around some smooth disco moves). The chapter-level puzzles are a great addition, to bring each scenario together into the main storyline. They aren't all as amazing as the cases in the first game, but none of them outstay their welcome, and even the more average scenarios are never frustrating or annoying. It's great, a very worthy sequel. Roll on the DLC!

For those people who really enjoyed Cruelty Squad but thought "too much FPS, not enough frying-pan simulator".

Some speak of Dwarf Fortress, some of Rimworld - two legends that are now a holy trinity with Songs of Syx. Or, "What if Dwarf Fortress scaled up to 30,000 inhabitants?"

Excited yet? Songs of Syx is just incredible, a colony simulator that is clearly inspired by DF and Rimworld but also perfectly happy to go its own way. It files off the intricate edges of Dwarf Fortress but introduces new complexity with its rich system of race, culture and religion.

I love the intricacy of DF, but Songs of Syx is a lot smoother to play. And I love Rimworld's rich stories and characters, but Songs of Syx is a lot wider in its scope.

There are all kinds of little decisions here where the dev has smoothed up some of the more tedious micromanagement in favour of focusing on the interesting decisions. For example, in Dwarf Fortress you had to manage every chair, table and door individually, whereas in Rimworld furniture is built out of thin air. Songs of Syx strikes a balance where you just manage your stock of generic "furniture" by building it in carpentry workshops. It adds complexity but is never too fiddly.

As someone who was let down by how Cities: Skylines 2 was so bland, I also love how it rewards careful attention to detail in your city layouts. Early on I was having some trouble with my Garthimi residents who were very unhappy in my city. Through the well-thought-out feedback system, I realised they didn't like living in stone buildings or using dirt roads. I built them a new district of cave dwellings and fungus roads, carefully adding individual decorations, and it was really rewarding to see them move in and become some of my happiest residents.

And it introduces some ingenious new ideas to the genre. Like it takes inspiration from real medieval science, where knowledge was a precious resource that could be easily lost, and had to be carefully maintained by scholars and librarians. In Songs of Syx your science level is like a global stat that needs to be constantly maintained - if you skim on science you start getting penalties to efficiency as knowledge is lost, or even having to forget some knowledge - a genuine "dark age" for your civilization. On the flip side, you can reshuffle your tech tree as you like, representing knowledge being forgotten and the effort being put in new directions.