Recent reviews by Manna Marchi

Blue Prince is a puzzle game where you play as the heir of a huge mansion, exploring its rooms that change every day. Your goal is to find room 46 within a limited time, as the villa’s shifting corridors and architecture turn each day into a unique spatial puzzle. Managing keys, exploring newly discovered rooms, and trying to anticipate the changes in the villa’s floorplan are part of the experience of Blue Prince, while you look for the 46th room of the mansion.

Starting with the good, the game has an undeniable charm: the mysterious villa, the graphical style and the possibility of finding new, unexplored rooms are all great aspects of the game. The main game loop revolves around you entering the villa each day, having to choose what room (out of 3 that you draft each time) lies behind each door that you will open. This means that the floorplan will change with each playthrough, creating a weird spatial puzzle where you have to control your chances and adopt strategies to not succumb to RNG (after all, one of Machiavelli's The Prince main topics is about controlling chances with skill, so this seems fitting in a game with a very similar title). Failing to do so will stop you from progressing, usually because you opened all doors and all your corridors and rooms are dead ends.

What I appreciated the most about the game is the great exploration, especially when it came to finding new rooms: every room in this game has a special effect, meaning that new rooms also unlock new strategies. Even better, some rooms interact with each other, unlocking powerful yet hard to obtain effects. All in all, i really, really enjoyed Blue Prince's main puzzle, which didn't get old at all.

Unfortunately, the game has terrible, terrible progression. Why? Because it is very much tied to RNG. The game requires you to reach the top of the mansion (a special room called the antechamber) to do a winning run, at least for the first ending. This can be difficult by itself, because room drafting is very RNG-dependent and you may draft no rooms going in the direction you want, even if re-drafting using items multiple times. This means that you can be one step away from your goal, drowning in keys, gems and gold, and the game can (and will) slap you in the face for only having 2 retries instead of, I don't know, 5. This can be frustrating by itself if it wasn't that reaching the first ending also requires you to complete a small set of goals that are very room dependent. You didn't draft the room you needed, or maybe you did but cannot find the necessary item? Too bad, failed run for you! Tying everything to chances (room drafting, room direction, item spawns in said rooms, etc) makes Blue Prince a very frustrating game. Especially because some rooms that can help you reach your goal are not easy to draft at all (yes, I'm looking at you Greenhouse!) In my 10th of playtime, I almost reached my goal two times, planning stuff very carefully and yet failing at the very end for stupid reasons. One time the game refused to give me a room connecting left, even though I re-drafted multiple times. All of this only for me to finally (and completely randomly) have a god run and finding everything I needed with very little effort. Finding room 46 didn't give me too much satisfaction, because it just felt like luck.

Another issue with the game is that it is very slow in a bunch of actions that are repeated over and over. You dig in an item spot? Fade to black. You use an elevator that you take almost every run? Long ass animation that fades to black. Picking up an item you saw countless times already? The game will open the description every time, just in case you forgot. These are small things, and they would be ok for interactions that do not happen that often (like speaking with THE GREAT ALZARA), but otherwise they just add to the frustration.

All in all, did I have fun with Blue Prince? Yes. Did I wish I had reached the first ending by careful planning instead of lucking out? Also yes. Did I close it multiple times because the villa was insulting me with its room options? Absolutely. Butt all in all I will not be seeking the next ending and secrets, especially because I expect them to be even harder to find out and I, for once, do not have the patience to go through this again. If I could give a neutral rating here, I would. It would be nice to be able to write an informative review without the thumb. But I can't, so negative it is :\

The Thaumaturge is a supernatural detective RPG set in early 20th-century Warsaw, where you play as Wiktor Szulski, a mystical investigator who can command demon-like entities called Salutors. While the game attempts to mix investigation mechanics with turn-based combat in an atmospheric historical setting, it unfortunately suffers from overambitious design choices that exceed the developer's execution capabilities.

Investigation System
The core investigation gameplay is disappointingly linear. Despite being advertised as an investigative experience, there's no actual deduction involved: you simply walk around clicking on random items around the map until you've collected every clue. On top of that, the point-and-click movement feels clunky and outdated, turning exploration into a tedious exercise of item hunting rather than meaningful investigation.

The most frustrating aspect is that Wiktor can only reach conclusions after finding every single clue, even when the solution is obvious to the player. This artificial progression removes any sense to investigations. Worse still, the conclusions remain identical regardless of the order you discover clues or which NPCs you interact with, making the investigation feel scripted rather than dynamic.

Combat: Complexity
The turn-based combat system feels like it was designed to appear sophisticated rather than actually be engaging. While the game provides mechanics like focus management, Salutor switching, and status effects, these elements feel unnecessarily convoluted for the uninteresting enemies you fight like random Tsarist soldiers and drunkards.

Budget spending
A significant portion of the budget appears to have been allocated to fully dubbed cutscenes with facial animations (and there are a lot of them), but the execution quality is surprisingly poor. The facial expressions look stiff and unconvincing, while the voice acting feels sometimes amateurish. This makes me wonder why the developers didn't opt for text-based dialogue without cutscenes - the saved resources could have been invested in polishing the core gameplay mechanics that desperately needed refinement.

Technical Issues in Unreal Engine 5
Running on UE5 introduces several visual problems, particularly severe ghosting effects. During heavy snowfall scenes, every snowflake leaves ghosting trails across the screen, while shadow rendering is inconsistent throughout. The only workaround is forcing DLSS4 through NVIDIA drivers, but without this fix, outdoor environments look terrible and ruin the atmospheric experience the game is trying to create.

Final Verdict
While I'm confident the story has its merits and Warsaw appears to be authentically represented, the gameplay is such a slog that I couldn't force myself to continue. The Thaumaturge feels like a passion project where the developers' ambitions exceeded their technical and design capabilities. Instead of focusing on a few core elements and executing them well, they spread themselves too thin across multiple systems that all feel half-baked.

TL;DR Split Fiction is the latest coop game from the creators of It Takes Two and A Way Out. It is an very derivative game that doesn’t understand what made It Takes Two so good and just puts up a sequence of random ideas that ultimately bring nowhere. Gone are the interesting characters of the previous game, together with the carefully balanced difficulty level and interesting level design: now we just have an extremely linear sets of levels, with mostly uninspired designs. Split Fiction could’ve been decent if released before It Takes Two, but on a direct comparison with its predecessor, it just looks like a downgrade on almost all levels.

The story
In Split Fiction you play as a couple of storywriters that anxious of getting their stories published, get trapped in “The Machine” (yup, that’s the name they picked...), a contraption made to steal ideas from their minds. In The Machine, they somehow live their stories while they’re getting stolen, but our characters are different. Due to a fight with the staff while entering the machine, they ended up in the same pod, causing glitches in the system, which they now have to chase to tear The Machine apart.

The weakest part of the story however are not even the events themselves (even though nothing is interesting about them as they are just there as an excuse for the setting of the game), but the characters. The two protagonists of this game are as flat as any character could be. The first is a “let’s be friends” yapper and the second is the exact opposite. They are so boring, you could skip every single cutscene in the game and enjoy the game just the same. Which is a shame, because the previous game had engaging dialogues: characters were not extremely originals, but at least they would keep you interested. Here you can’t wait for them to stop talking.

Gameplay and level design
Level design also took a strong hit. With a game where the ideas of a fantasy and scifi writers come to reality, I was expecting so many great things. Instead what we’ve got are the most generic fantasy and scifi tropes ever. Seriously?? Super soldier attacking an enemy base? Cyber-ninjas looking for vengeance? ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ How to train your dragon?? In all of these basic stories, the only memorable ones are (some of ) the side-stories. Here the devs probably thought they could be more daring, since sides are short, optional content, but many of them still fall flat.

Another big absence is the sort of hubs that were placed in the previous game, where you could go around, explore and interact with the environment. Here there’s just a handful and it’s one of the aspects I miss the most, as in It Takes Two it was incredibly fun to go around and do crazy stuff. Unfortunately though, not only there are no hubs in Split Fiction, but exploration is almost non-existent, with the game feeling incredibly linear.

The design of levels in general is rather dull, the devs gave up trying to make it ‘make sense’ and just placed switches, activation panels and random level elements wherever they wanted, whether it made sense or not. In don’t expect every aspect of Split Fiction to make perfect sense, but it is clear that here the design was studied only with the coop aspect in mind, giving up all coherency and visual aspects of the levels themselves: because of this, the environments where the action takes place are easily forgettable.

Graphics
The game is solidly made in UE5, meaning that graphics are pretty good (but not fenomenal) without all the issue this engine usually brings. Sutters are at a minimum and the game runs generally well. Graphical styles vary a lot based on the level, with the main stories having a bland and uninspired kind-of-realistic style and side stories opening up to more levels of craziness. The latters can be very enjoyable, but in general the graphical style of It Takes Two was more inspired. Ghosting caused to TAA is sometimes visible but generally kept to a minimum.

Take a heaping cup of store-bought assets, mix with broken platforming mechanics, and bake at max frustration until the desync makes you question reality. Serve with a generous topping of bugs and a side of disappointment.

Overview
Legion TD 2 is a tower defense/MOBA game, coming from a Warcraft 3 mod called Legion TD that was made in 2009. Unlike many tower defense games, you won’t be recruiting turrets around a specific path that the enemies will follow. Instead, you’ll be recruiting fighters in your lane that will charge the enemy to protect your king. Oh, and you can also recruit mercenaries to attack the opponents’ lanes. And have I mentioned the fact that doing that also makes you earn more gold? Legion TD 2 is a pretty complex game, so let’s unveil it in this review.

Defend. Attack. Earn. Defend…
Legion TD 2 is one of those games where a tutorial is fundamental to start playing properly without having to do hours upon hours of trial and error: luckily the game has one that covers all aspects of the game in a bearable amount of time which, considering the amount of stuff it has to explain, is not the easiest of feats. This is a title with an extremely simple concept, that is instead very complex under the hood, thanks to its many different mechanics. The grand goal of a Legion TD 2 match is easy: protect your king and kill the enemies’ one. In order to do this, you have to hire fighters to protect your lane against increasingly harder hordes of enemies. In order to recruit them, you will use gold that is earned by killing the attacking enemies and by completing waves. Pretty easy right? This is where things get messy.

Besides defending, you can also attack your opponents. This is done by hiring mercenaries using mythium, another resource that, unlike gold, is earned in time by training miners. Mercenaries will attack one specific opponent (decided at the start of the game) and, once trained, will boost the gold you earn by completing waves for the rest of the game. This opens up a myriad of possibilities, since the game offers a lot of different mercenaries that can be used in very different scenarios: the snail is the very first mercenary you’ll hire in every game, offering basically no power but boosting your initial earnings. There are tank mercenaries, and some that give you reduced income but that are more powerful in terms of attack, hp pool or even special abilities. Basically, every match follows a loop: spend gold to train fighters, which defeat enemies and earn gold. Plus, spend gold to train miners, which earn mythium, which you can use to hire mercenaries that attack your opponent AND give you a permanent gold boost on each wave.

A common strategy is to keep spending mythium on weak mercenaries to build the economy in the early game. Then, when waves get tougher, you can start saving it to send multiple stronger mercenaries in the same wave as bosses or particularly strong enemies. This also creates a very interesting carry/support strategy, since training miners costs gold, one player can focus more on attacking, while the ally can spend more gold on fighters and protect the king.

The Teammate Leaked So I Became a Plumber
Another important concept in Legion TD 2 is leaking. This game heavily relies on coordination with your teammate(s), so much so that a slightly under-performing ally can doom your game: this is particularly true in the mastermind mode (the 2v2 ranked playlist), which at times can be very frustrating. Thus, before buying Legion TD 2, I would really think about convincing a friend to get it too. But let’s get back to leaking: we say that a lane leaks when the invaders destroy all defending forces. Your lane could leak, or your friend’s or your enemies’. The important aspect of leaking is that, if properly managed, it’s not a tragedy: the different lanes do in fact converge into a single one before getting to your team’s king. Here, all the fighters that cleared their lanes are gathered, so that they can make one last defense against the leaked waves. This opens up the strategy that I was talking about in the last chapter: one player can focus on attacking the opponent and making him leak. While he does this, he focuses less on defenses because the other teammate can catch leaks for him.

Speaking of defending and fighters, while the mercenaries roster stays the same every game, the roster of defending creatures will change every game, depending on the selected game mode: in 4v4 you get to decide which roster to pick out of 8 different legions, each one having a specific and balanced set of fighters that follow the legion’s theme. In Mastermind, Legion’s ranked mode, you will instead play 2v2 and get a randomized set of fighters, with the possibility of control that randomization at the start of the game. Again, the game opens up to very different strategies, allowing you to pick the path you think will be the best: you can either go for a full random approach and get more gold right from the start, or you could try to control the randomness and lock in a fighter and gets unit rerolls. This title offers a truly incredible amount of options, which is also why I liked it so much.

Technical Side
There’s not too much to say about Legion’s technical side: this is a competition-first title that thus doesn’t rely on incredible graphics or jaw-breaking RTX effects. The graphical models are instead made to be as light on the hardware as possible, making it a title with very simple graphics. Fighters’ models follow the same rule and have very few polygons, but most of the time you will be watching them from far away, so you won’t notice it so much.

Verdict
Legion TD 2 is an incredibly technical game: you might hate it or you might love it. All I can say is that mechanics are fresh, well-implemented and the game hardly gets boring even after hours of gameplay, due to its very competitive nature and the different line-ups at the start of each match. Just be sure to buy it with a friend: every game is funnier with a friend, but this title really shines when building strategies together.

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Overview
For some reason, adventure games in the style of Zelda never clicked with me: I have been trying to finish a Zelda game for years, but I simply abandon them after the first one or two hours: I simply stop playing and don’t pick them up anymore. Like a lot of other players, I noticed Garden Story because of some apparent similarities with Stardew Valley, even if it is a completely different game. Don’t get me wrong, the two games have some aspects in common, but the core of the game is completely different: for starters, you’re a grape. Then we can also say that, instead of managing a farm, you are instead the guardian of a village in the Grove, where some animals and different fruits coexist peacefully. But a sneaky evil is damaging the Grove: you will have to protect your friends against the emerging menace of the Rot and, in the meanwhile, fish and grow a library while you’re at it!

What Is Garden Story about?

Garden Story can be a pretty confusing game at first: watching the screenshots and reading the description in the Steam Store page could mistake someone into thinking that this title is something on the lines of Stardew Valley. While the two games surely have some mechanics in common, Garden Story is instead way more similar to an adventure game to the likes of the older Zelda titles than it is to a management one. While you will travel in the same areas a lot, throughout the story you’ll be able to move to other villages and you will fight a lot, whereas the completion of objectives like the library and farming will be fun activities that will always be in the background.

The Duties of a Guardian
As guardian of Spring Hamlet, you’ll have to listen to the request of the villagers and work towards fulfilling them: each day you will find new requests on a notice board. These are made by the villagers and divided into three different sections: Maintenance, Forage and Conflict. Completing these tasks each day gives experience to the respective category of the village where we complete it, while a failure to fulfil them before the end of the day means that the village won’t level up and a short sentence will describe the consequences.

While this is a fine distraction from the not very active villages (especially at the start of the game), the requests become repetitive in the matter of a couple of days. At the third or fourth day, the probability of finding a request you already completed the days before is really high and, after something like 8-9 days you will remember them all by heart. Why? Because they not only are really simple activities, on the lines of “Kill 7 enemies” or “Repair the bridge in this portion of the map”, but they usually take very little time to complete and there are simply not enough of them. The ones where you fight are simply not challenging at all, while the ones that have some sort of puzzle linked to them never change.

Even worse, there are no real consequences for not completing a request: if I don’t destroy the rot invasion in Treepath and the game tells me that it grew stronger, why doesn’t it? I could find stronger enemies the following day, making it harder for me to use that path, but instead it’s like it has always been. The consequences of not completing a request are simply not there, besides the fact that the village is not levelling up.

Protecting the Grove
Protecting the Grove is not an easy feat: not only you have to help the villagers repair buildings and gathering resources, but you also have to protect them against the Rot! The Rot can manifest under different forms: being giant Glomps or pesky Acorns, you will have to know your way around a sword. Garden Story’s combat can be a little clunky and requires a little bit of practice at the beginning. This is due to its stamina mechanic, which is required to use the shield, attack with your sword and roll. While this is pretty standard, the initial amount of stamina is 2, which means you can only attack two times in quick succession before having to recover. Luckily, you can get stronger by using memories, which grant different bonuses and can be changed at the start of the day, or breaking some special orbs that you can find around the world.

Usually, after a few days of completed requests the story advances, opening up a dungeon that has a boss fight in the end. Each village has its own dungeon with its own big, Rot monster in the end: boss fights are more on the easier side, but some situations can prove challenging and personally I died to each boss at least once. Once you remember their (rather simple) attack patterns, though, these big monsters can be easily beaten without getting you stuck. Beating these fights means that you will be ready to move to the next village, for a total of four: Spring Hamlet, Summer Bar, Autumn Town and Winter Glade!

Verdict
In the end, I finished up enjoying Garden Story despite its faults. The colourful graphics, the cute characters and the vibrant world have bested the repetition of the daily tasks and the initial clunkiness of the combat. If you’re interested but not completely sold, I would suggest to get this title on a discount.

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Overview
I’m not a photo person. For instance, I’m one of those individuals that come back from a vacation with two new photos on his phone. The same is for videogames and screenshots: I very rarely take them thinking “Oh! This needs to be screenshotted!”. It’s more like an “Oh! This could be a useful screenshot for the review”. With Sable instead, I’m finding myself drowning in screenshots. That should help you understand how beautiful Sable is, if not as an experience, at least visually. But let’s go in order…

From the Bottom of the Desert to the Highest Peak
Sable starts small. You have to complete a bunch of starting missions to gather three important things: the components that will make your hoverbike, your gliding stone and your mask. While the first and the latter don’t really need much introduction, the gliding stone is an artefact that gives you the power of a glider. This power manifests in people of a certain age and is lost as the wearer gets older, but our protagonist isn’t really in any danger of losing it and, instead, will find it incredibly useful to roam around the map. Since the protagonist is able to glide and is in possession of a very good agility, which allows her to climb most of the surfaces in the game (in a Zelda: Breath of the Wild-style), most of the map is explorable, except for the highest peaks.

Besides gliding, climbing and the hoverbike, there’s little more to Sable in terms of mechanics: you can interact with NPCs, which at times will offer you different quests. These will range from normal fetch quests to more complex stories, but they are usually on the simpler side. One aspect that I really appreciated in this regard is the oftentimes absence of markers: NPCs will usually tell you what you have to look out for, like a trail of symbols to reach a new mask or a particular vista in the desert. This makes exploration and quest completion so much more satisfying, opposed to most of the new titles where it is a mere reach marker-pick up mission item-return to NPC.

Simoon
During the exploration of Sable’s world, Midden, we will be accompanied by a very silent entity: our own hoverbike. Its name is Simoon and it has one because it is believed that machines have a soul and can speak. While you won’t have access to Simoon right away, you will recover its parts and build it during the initial tutorial phase of the game. After that, you can use it to travel across the desert as you like, making it a fundamental companion in our travels.

Eventually, we will also find cuts (Sable’s world currency), which we will be able to spend to acquire new parts for our hoverbike. These upgrades will not only change its look, but also some stats, which are acceleration, top speed and stability. This aspect of the game changes only the ease of exploration, as you will only use Simoon to move around and there are no races or fights in this game, but are a great way to make Simoon feel unique to each player. When we reach a location with our hoverbike, we also unlock its position on the map, which marks it and unlocks fast travel to it: the latter is not something I used much at all during my time with Sable. Travelling around is soothing and a great experience overall, thus fast travelling feels like breaking the game a little bit, at least to me.

Exploration
Sable always has something new to see: a new biome, an ancient temple or a dark and forgotten starship. All these locations, besides being interesting to just visit, usually hide additional elements of the game: you could find an ancient AI to speak to, which will unveil new pieces of information about the untold story of Midden, or you could find NPCs to buy clothing or hoverbike pieces from. Pots filled with cuts can be found everywhere (even on starships, which is not very realistic) but, most importantly, you will find yourself in awe at most of Sable’s locations.

Some Dust up My Hoverbike’s Wings
Sable is an amazing experience, but not an incredibly polished one: starting from the free climbing feature, it is great to be able to climb (almost) any surface, but the system is often unprecise, which can lead to falls (which, even without gliding, are never fatal). While climbing, getting stuck in geometry is also a thing and the character can take a few seconds to find a stable position. Regarding the game as a whole instead, many zones of the game suffer from sudden frame drops with no apparent reason, while stuttering is almost always present, even in very open, empty, areas: this can easily hinder an instead wonderful travelling experience when we are riding our hoverbike.

Verdict
Sable is an incredible exploration experience, a game that has almost no other titles similar to it and that can be played by basically everyone. An incredible world awaits you, a world that, unfortunately, could have been even better with better-implemented mechanics and a more solid technical part.

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Overview
While the demons are slowly coming at our gates in late 2021 with Total War: Warhammer 3, Creative Assembly released the last DLC for Total War: Warhammer 2. This lords pack marks the final step for this game's journey (and what a journey it has been), introducing new lord and units for the races of lizardmen and beastmen, also introducing the latter in the Vortex campaign. Is this addition good enough for a proper closure of the incredible title that Total War: Warhammer 2 has been?

Horns and Fury
Let's start with my favourite addition: the beastmen in the Vortex campaign, under the control of Taurox the Brass Bull. Taurox is, simply said, an absolute beast (emh, yes, that was meant as a joke). He is a melee expert that simply excels at everything: he has incredibly good damage (and armor-piercing one), good speed, plenty of hp and can basically charge the enemy general head-on, even if enemy units are in the way. The amount of damage that this lord can do is simply too high, resulting in an incredibly easy early game for its Vortex campaign, considering that he also gets very good starting units. The beastmen got the longer end of the stick in this lords pack, also thanks to the long-awaited race rework: the lords of the race now have the ability to raise herdstones in the settlements they destroy. These are special outposts that transform the adjacent lands into bloodgrounds: while fighting and razing settlements into these areas, beastmen gather Marks of Destruction, the resource needed for victory. These important changes finally made one of the most boring and weak races fun to play and, also thanks to the new unit additions, stronger. This new strength can also be noticed in the campaign, which is in my opinion too easy to play: the early game is a charm thanks to the very strong starting creatures, while into the late game Taurox becomes an absolute powerhouse capable of not only destroying entire units (he's a melee expert), but also to duel with the strongest lords of rival factions (thanks to his incredible stats). You will probably reach a point where you'll be auto resolving all but the toughest battles, because you can just steamroll through every opponent.

Besides Taurox itself, the DLC adds new heroes and units that I found to be incredibly useful to the beastmen roster: the new heroes are great additions both in the offensive and defensive sides of battles. Gorgons are incredible four-armed anti-large beasts, capable of health regeneration, that can start bringing down enemy creatures from the start of Taurox' campaign, since you get one from the start. Jabberslythes, opposed to gorgons, are instead powerful anti-infantry monstruosities: even if they cannot fly (yes, they are like penguins), their poisonous vortex and size make them able to stomp through the strongest units. Again, great additions to the roster.

The silence before the ambush
As opposed to beastmen, the new lizardmen lord is instead very hard to play: his starting position is terrifying, as he literally starts (and plays for most of the campaign) encircled by enemies: Norscans to the north and east, Dark Elves to the south and west. Really not a great point to start, especially considering that you will get declared war on very easily even if you don't provoke anyone. The region does not aid in your multiple-fronts war, since it is particularly income-poor and lizardmen are not the strongest race economically speaking. Speaking of the new additions to the roster instead, personally I never like ranged lords, thus I can't really find myself at ease with Oxyotl: he's not bad, but he seems very (too) little when compared to the devastating figure that is Taurox. Chameleon Skinks really shine under his command though, also thanks to special banners that Oxyotl can unlock and that give effects to the missiles fired by the assigned unit (magical, fire, poison damage or special effects).

Oxyotl's campaign mechanics are instead really interesting, but now very cleverly implemented: you are a bulwark against dark forces and are assigned missions to fight enemy armies around the continent. This allows you to teleport your armies around the world to fight these armies and complete missions which, upon completion, will give you various buffs. Watch out though, as failing mission can empower the enemy armies or even start chaos revolts in your own territories. Everything seems fine but gets ultimately ruined by the start position of the faction: you are already defending against multiple enemies and, since you don't have a great economy, you can only afford one army: you really don't have the multiple turns required to send your soldiers around the world and complete the missions! And, when you do have the time, attacking the enemy army requires you to be at war with that faction, so here you go, even more enemies for you. Personally, I found the early game of this faction quite frustrating, with it only getting better after a slow and long expansion of the territory.

The lizardmen new units are... ok. The oracle hero has a nice selection of spells on the first tier, but none on the second one, which is weird. It is however nice to have spells from different lores. Chameleon Stalkers are a nice unit of shock infantry, but I didn't find a really good use for them inside the lizardmen roster. The Coatl is a very powerful creature, capable of casting spells from skies and tear apart entire units of enemies, especially if they are stacked upon each other. The Feral Troglodon is a very effecting monster-deleter with his poisonous anti-large ranged attacks and speed. Overall, these are not bad additions for the lizardmen, but the campaign should be fixed.

Verdict
In the end, The Silence and the Fury is a ok Lord Pack: the biggest change with this update is made by the free rework for the beastmen, which is not tied to the DLC itself. The new factions have nice ideas, but are either not very balanced (Taurox) or not well-thought (Oxyotl's placement, given its mechanics). If you are buying this solely for the lizardmen, wait for a lower price, otherwise have fun steamrolling through everything (both in single and multiplayer) with the new beast-beastman!

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Overview
After the success of games like Slay the Spire, which were able to create a new approach to card games where you control your character(s) directly using the cards you draw. Normally this kind of games have one thing in common: they start out very slowly and get progressively more exciting the more cards you gather, both inside runs and in between them, simply due to the fact that more powerful cards give you access to often crazy combos. In this regard, Tainted Grail: Conquest follows the games that came before it, adding a dark atmosphere and tons of content to the mix. Will it be able to succeed?

A Wyrd Setting
Tainted Grail follows the legends of Arthur, although re-imagined in a dark way: an incredibly powerful force called the Wyrdness has overcome the lands, killing and corrupting everything it touches. Weird and dangerous creatures started roaming these lands, while lost souls seek shelter from the darkness. Powerful ancient way stones could be able to keep this corruption at bay, but they are few, scattered and dying, as the druids that could have helped in restoring them were killed. The future is not looking good and the present is getting grimmer: heroes must rise against this dark force.

Luckily, Tainted Grail: Conquest provides a great diversity of classes: whereas in this kind of games you get three of four classes, this title provides you with 9, each one with completely different playstyles and cards. These classes are divided into three different factions: the Children Of Morrigan focuses on melee fighters with direct approaches, the Moonring faction can instead use magic and bend the Wyrdness to their favour by summoning a number of different creatures. Last but not least, the Watchers of Tuathan focus on ranged fighting, shooting arrows at their enemies and making thoughtful preparations to empower them. The best aspect of these classes is, again, how much they play differently even inside a faction: taking the Moonring classes (they are my favourites, hands down), they are all able to summon the same creatures, but while the Summoner uses its energy to improve them and make them as big as possible, the Blood Mage uses instead its HP and the Necromancer doesn’t really improve them, sacrificing them instead to gain energy for its lich form.

This doesn’t mean that all classes are made equal though, as balancing isn’t always perfect. Balancing 9 different classes in a card game can quickly become a very daunting task as more cards are added to the game and personally I found the game to be way easier with some classes: starting with the Wyrdhunter, the only available class in the beginning, I found the game to be very hard and was barely able to defeat the first boss, whereas in my first run with the Summoner I was able to steamroll through packs of enemies, losing my fight against the third boss only because of a misplay.

A Safe Place
Outside combat you will get a chance to explore the tainted land and to speak with the lost souls that inhabit it. At the start of each run, you will find yourself in the village, a place spared from the Wyrdness thanks to the presence of a grim statue overlooking the center of the place: here you will find a lot of empty buildings, that will eventually return to life when you will find and save different characters that you will find in the Wyrdness. These characters will help you during your runs and represent, along with the earning of new cards, the rogue-lite aspect of the game. Besides providing new items and cards, you will also be able to have interesting conversations with them from time to time.

When not in the village, you will venture into the Wyrdness to find and slay four different guardians: the Wyrdness is not a safe place and you will be provided with Wyrd candles to help you in your journey: these make for an interesting gameplay mechanic where you can light a candle (that will burn over time) and cast away the Wyrdness from around you. The utility in doing this is that the Wyrdness makes encounters more dangerous, so these effectively act as difficulty-lowering candles, lowering the dangerousness of the enemies the brighter the candle is burning. Speaking of exploration, into the Wyrdness you will not only find monsters to fight, but also different NPCs to interact with: they will sometimes sell interesting items, stats boost or cards… while sometimes they will just have an interesting story to tell.

Darkest Lands
Tainted Grail’s setting is truly fascinating, similarly to Darkest Dungeon’s: wandering a land filled with corrupting energy and horrible creatures ready to devour you certainly has its… charm we could say. Most of the creatures during combats resemble very well the corrupting power of the Wyrdness by showing monster of horror resembling tortured souls, tentacle-like creatures and totems to dark gods. Venturing in the Wyrdness feels dangerous, especially when you don’t have a Wyrdcandle lit, but the world outside combat does also feel a little bit dead, with you exploring what effectively are maps made out of corridors where enemies are sitting still waiting for you. Exploration is still enjoyable, don’t get me wrong, but overall it would have been a better experience if the whole thing felt more alive.

Verdict
Tainted Grail is a really well built deckbuilding roguelite game with a few unpolished edges. Overall, it offers a really great experience for players that appreciated games like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, featuring a lot of different classes and in general a lot of content. The dark setting is either love or hate, so follow your taste in this regard and, if you suits you, give Tainted Grail a go, you won’t be disappointed!

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Overview
Hokko Life is an Animal Crossing clone arriving on Steam Early Access the June 2nd. This is a title that clearly tries to exploit the absence of Animal Crossing on the PC gaming landscape, similarly to how Temtem used the absence of a Pokémon game. But Hokko Life doesn’t only try to copy the mechanics of the brand, adding instead interesting feature that will please a lot of Animal Crossing’s fans!
Sleeping on a Train

Hokko Life makes a very short introduction on how we got the little dusty city in the middle of nowhere that we will call home: we overslept on the train and ended up there! And, how! How unfortunate! The next train will take days to come! Luckily, the little bar that we find ourselves in is filled with two very kind gentlemen (can an elephant be a gentleman?) that offer us a place to stay for a few nights. Obviously, in order to repay them, we will offer our help to make this little forgotten town a little bit more welcoming to new visitors!

This quick introduction, while not particularly original, allows us to put our hands on the game immediately, without the need to wait for long dialogues that could’ve been boring. After that, we start off immediately with a place to sleep and our trusty axe: the latter will be particularly useful in the first two hours of the game, since most of the quests will involve gathering wood to build a bunch of items. In these first two hours we are also introduced to new characters, all different animals following Animal Crossing’s tradition, and complete a bunch of quests for them, culminating in the building of the first home for a new citizen.

As for its current state, the very first hours of the game leave little freedom to the player in terms of activities: we will in fact work for the various NPCs that inhabit the village, gathering resource, crafting items and placing them, all according to their requests. In terms of gameplay, this quickly becomes a checklist of things to do: – go to Oma to get the quest – gather x resources – go to Moss to deliver them – Moss crafts something and asks us to place it wherever we want. I certainly would’ve appreciated to have more choices during this first part, in order to break the otherwise serrated rhythm of the initial quests.

A Few Planks Make a Chair
After the first bunch of quests, you’ll get access to the more advanced features that Hokko Life offers to its players: besides having items to craft, like in Animal Crossing, you will also have the possibility to design completely new items. This is done by starting from smaller, craftable parts, like a wooden leg of a chair or a plank of wood: by using for leg and one plank, for example, we could create a small table to decorate our home or, if we are willing to share, also the entire village by putting it outside. This system gives an incredible degree of freedom to the players, allowing them to create incredible items to display in their villages, with some limitations: the first one is that complex objects will obviously use more items to craft, plus the designed object must fit inside a bounding box that limits the size of the final result. In this case, bigger objects can designed by talking to Sallie, the carpenter, who sells both bigger bounding boxes and new item pieces to merge together.

Obviously all this freedom in the hand of the internet could be a little dangerous, and I honestly expect to see tons of peni… tentiaries filling a lot of players’ villages. Luckily though, since this a game that will also be played by little kids, Hokko Life will only be singleplayer, with no plans for multiplayer or cooperative sessions: the only way to visit other player’s villages will be via the screenshots on Steam I fear.

Nice House You Have Here!
Similarly to Animal Crossing, we won’t have an entire house at our disposal from the very beginning, which means that we will have to work hard to earn one. After that, we will have complete liberty and customize it however we want. The customization of our home allows players to create really nice interiors, given that they have the right items to decorate them, and this can also be seen from the start by looking at the cozy little houses where the first few NPCs live in.

Speaking of NPCs, we will start with just a couple of them, randomized at the start. On my second savegame (the first got corrupted after an update, something that the developer said won’t happen during the EA period) I started playing with a really rude dog called Oleander and a cute pink elephant called Mei. While the villagers are initially random, once you expand your town you will get new ones, eventually gathering them all to your friendly neighbourhood: in total there are 24 of them, with the possibility that more will be added during the Early Access period.

Verdict
Hokko Life is an interesting Animal Crossing clone: while it doesn’t add new groundbreaking features, it also puts the foundations for a title that could potentially be the one filling the void in the PC gaming landscape, similarly to what Temtem did for Pokémon games. Unfortunately, seasoned Animal Crossing players won’t find a whole lot of new stuff in the game, but PC players that never experienced this kind of title could be in for a surprise!

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