Recent reviews by Shaaria

The Tenth Line is a cross between a platformer and an RPG, more heavily weighted towards the latter, and with a lot of new ideas to bring to the genre. You gain items all over the place but they're not consumables or even equipment, and instead are used in the game's various mechanics:
- You don't gain stats from levelling directly. Instead you place items on a grid, where the type and tier of item dictates the bonus you get. This grid also unlocks new moves in-combat.
- You also don't gain power from weapon upgrades, instead you merely gain POTENTIAL power, and you consume items to improve your actual power up to the new limit.
- Items also get used for short-term bonuses to improve a character's unique abilities.
- Touching an enemy on the overworld always results in you getting ambushed. If you attack an enemy from the front it's a normal encounter. If you attack them from behind, you ambush them.
- You control three characters and move them independently, and they each have different speeds, jump heights, and special abilities. It's kind of like The Lost Vikings.
- In combat, your only way to heal is to take the 'Rest' action (which also gives you the MP equivalent so you can bust out stronger skills) or with very specific abilities. Items aren't used for this.

There's a little bit of Menu Hell to this game as it expects you to pop open the Training menu after every fight or two and spend your items, but it's not that bad. I enjoyed the story and particularly the prevalence of non-human characters and protagonists in an RPG who aren't just mascot or comic relief characters but instead have real growth and narrative conflicts. There's also a postgame which is a -little- excessive in its difficulty but I was still able to complete it with a few do-overs. Definitely a fun little adventure.

Clearly inspired by Fire Emblem, yet with a heavy departure from it, Dark Deity stands out on its own among tactical RPGs. Some notable mechanical changes (relative to Fire Emblem):
- No permadeath, but units permanently lose 10% of one of their stats if KO'd. (Depends on the damage type that took them out)
- Criticals are way more common than in FE but only deal x2 rather than x3 damage. Still, if you clench at the sight of a nonzero enemy crit chance in FE, expect anxiety spikes playing Dark Deity.
- All units are guaranteed to get +1 HP every level with a chance at +2, making them less squishy, to alleviate how common crits are.
- No weapon triangle; instead there's a big table of 9 damage types vs. 4 armor types.
- Unit growth rates are shown to you directly so you don't need to wiki dive. All units are usable, there are no crutch characters or Jagen archetypes here.
- Although Irving is technically the main character, nothing actually requires you to field him to combat. You can pick whichever units you like.
- When you recruit a unit who would normally be promoted, you get to pick exactly what class they are from the options their base class gives, as though you were promoting them yourself then and there.
- Units carry 4 infinite-use weapons with different spreads of stats (power, crit, accuracy, balance) that you can upgrade between maps.
- Inventory is, therefore, only used for healing consumables, stat-up items, and "Eternal Aspects" which are basically passives you can equip 1 of to each character.
- Any unit can trade with any other unit who hasn't moved this turn, regardless of distance between them.

The end result is a very unique entry into the TRPG genre. It has a fair few minor bugs (rarely, a wrong portrait or character voice in support conversations; Irving having the wrong portrait after a story event in the midgame for a while; enemy names showing up as "Delian" and then suddenly changing mid-combat for a good chunk of the midgame; some late-game units inexplicably countering 3-tile ranged attacks when they shouldn't be able to; units' visual locations on the map desyncing from their actual locations...) but there was nothing game-breaking in my playthrough. The writing is... sufficient, not bad, but a little lacking in the main story at times.

It also comes with its own randomizer, and three difficulty levels plus customization options, so there's lots of replay value. Definitely worth checking out if you like the genre, and forgiving enough on lower difficulties to be a first game if you're new to tactical RPGs.

It's not as good as the first game but it's still worth playing.

PW2 is to Quake what PW1 is to Doom. You can jump! Enemies are 3D models instead of sprites! Secrets are more about finding buttons and breakable walls than sliding your face along every surface mashing the interact key!

The biggest difference is that each of the 3 episodes has a different protagonist, who plays in a different way. Palmer is the most normal and straightforward. Urd is a glass cannon. Kirsten is tanky but has the most trouble with crowds. Each of these characters has their own set of weapons, with their own upgrade paths, as well as their own unique abilities and damage types. These range from game-breaking in the good way (Palmer's ice powers are ridiculously overpowered if you invest enough into it) to game-breaking in the bad way (Kirsten's void powers are actively detrimental to you and have a memory leak that can bring the game into 'seconds per frame' levels of crawl after just a few levels - don't use them).

And there are other bugs too that are bringing it down. Some are minor, like visual glitches, being able to load 1 extra shell into most shotguns, or the plethora of typos in the text and especially the loading screen tips. Some are nastier, like the aforementioned memory leak, or Urd's multishot crossbow upgrade not working, or scoped weapons having trouble snap-firing for some reason. The game only recently came out of Early Access, so hopefully these will be fixed.

Although there are only 3 episodes, the levels are generally much bigger and sprawling than in the first game, so it balances out in terms of content. The ending is unsatisfying plot-wise, but you don't really play a boomer shooter for the story. The gameplay is the main draw and, when it works, is fun. Like the first game there's tons of ways you can build a character - though not quite as many, since your progression only lasts one episode instead of the entire game, and you have fewer spells and weapons to choose from per-character. Mana isn't gone, per se, but it's just an ammo type now that requires a different stat than Capacity to increase. This is disappointing as having a separate mana pool for your spells made the first game stand out; now, all your spells just use cooldowns instead.

Still, it's not bad, and has plenty of replayability. There's not only multiple difficulties and possible builds, but Realmshift mode lets you play any character in any episode. To accommodate this it turns every ammo drop into "universal ammo" that partly fills up all your guns - it's very hard to run out of ammo in the base game already, so in Realmshift it's basically impossible.

Ultimately, it could do with a bit more polish, but the core is solid.

This is an incredibly charming and well-made puzzle game. It's got a wry sense of humor and good QoL, but the puzzles are the main draw (as you'd expect), and the vast majority of them are very well-made and executed and come in a wide variety. Some of them are staring at the screen until you figure it out, but others involve checking clues like scraps of paper, drawing on maps and taking measurements with a ruler, measuring distances with paces, tangram puzzles for lockpicks, and more. Even the fishing mini-game is actually a puzzle!

There's a couple of optional puzzles that are a little off where it can be hard to figure out the starting position you're supposed to measure from, but by far and away the puzzle design is superb.

Also, not only can you pet the dog, it's a central mechanic of the game.

10/10, highly recommended for puzzle game enjoyers.

If you played Factorio, and liked it, but thought "Man, I wish this was even bigger, and harder, and about ten times more complicated"...

...then Factorio: Space Age is for you.

Manage interplanetary logistics! Figure out how to build and place many, many rocket silos, keeping them all supplied with parts and cargo! Build multiple spaceships that get progressively more complicated to lay out during the game! For practice, try doing the logistic challenge puzzles, since you'll want to minimize space usage.

Visit scenic Fulgora, where you craft your way DOWN the tech tree through recycling, and you always end up with way too much of something, even if that 'something' keeps changing.

Or swampy Gleba, where most of the products you deal with will spoil over time and you can't just leave them sitting on belts like you would on Nauvis. Hope you're good at balancing ratios!

There's also Vulcanus, and I sure hope you like interlacing pipes and properly setting up high-throughput belt layouts.

Finally you get to go to Aquilo where almost every building needs to be adjacent to a heat pipe or it'll freeze and stop operating. It's like having an additional type of pipe you have to lay out between everything, everywhere!

And you can make it even MORE complicated if you start to dip into the new Quality mechanic at any point. It's an additional layer of complexity on top of an already very complicated game and even more complex expansion, but the reward is straight-upgrade versions of any building or entity you want.

Unquestionably worth the $35 asking price, because you'll probably spend at least 35 hours just sitting and starting at the screen figuring out how the heck you're going to do what the game expects you to do THIS time.

I normally like retro shooters, but this one should have stayed in the 90's. Featuring such questionable design decisions as:
- Tank controls in a first-person shooter. You control like a brick.
- Even more cumbersome version of the Hexen style inventory for health/armor restoration (since it was made by the same devs).
- Your weapons have a limited effective range but your only indication of what it is is whether or not things flinch when shot at (and sometimes robotic enemies take damage but don't flinch).
- No visual indicator of when you are taking damage until your health is already critical. No audio indicator of taking damage at all.
- LOTS of completely unmarked hidden walls that you have to find by sweeping your mouse over and seeing if your cursor changes color. And these aren't for secrets - they're required for progress. Ditto for the 'holo walls' that look exactly like normal walls but you can walk straight through them.
- Enemies can drop items that spawn visually under their own corpses. (This would be fine, except for the following:)
- No automatic picking up of items when you get close enough (like in every other game in the genre), you have to put your cursor exactly over their sprite and right-click.
- Items lack any sort of animation or glow (like the ones Doom has) to make them stand out visually and tell you "Hey, this is an item you can pick up". Keycards are literally 3 pixels tall, making them super easy to miss. This also means more pixel-hunting to see if your cursor turns green.
- ...made worse by the Doom-style locked camera so you literally cannot pick up items at your feet.

Leave this one in the past.

11/10. If you like Phoenix Wright games, buy this one. Don't even wait for a sale.

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is basically if you put PW in a blender with D&D, and it works -very- well. Prepare to argue about the finer details of how spells are worded, bearing in mind which spells belong to which schools and thus leave which traces. Figure out the importance of certain verbal or somatic components, and be sure to read the fine print on each spell. This is on top of all the usual Phoenix Wright elements of investigations and courtroom battles, with a very well-written over-arching story following the main characters and exploring their motivations and backstories. It's not a thin reskin; the game makes full use of the originality of its setting, bringing its own ideas to the table to set itself apart from the games that inspired it.

It also doesn't waste your time. There's no 'healthbar' in most courtoom sections, so you don't need to save-scum before every guess. It's more like the classic Phoenix Wright games in its style, where the animations are snappy and don't make you wait for the overly long animation you've already seen 30 times to play out like in the more recent PW games.

So, super strong recommendation, and I eagerly await a sequel because this developer clearly knows what they're doing.

Kubifactorium is a colony builder more than it is an automation game - it doesn't even introduce automation elements until a few missions in. It's very chill and low-complexity and is a game you can take at your own pace, making as much or as little spaghetti as you want.

The setup is a series of missions on different islands, with the meta-progression element that when you finish an island, every building on it gets automatically deconstructed and you get to bring all of the resources you collected with you (up to a certain amount per resource). This gives you a head-start on the next island as you can rebuild your higher tier houses or fancier machines and workshops immediately without having to crawl back up the entire tech tree again. So, even though you start over on each island with no buildings at all, you can skip chunks of the progression to get back to where you were before faster, and build/organize your structures better than last time.

Definitely a fun little game even if there's not much replay value, and a nice take on the genre and formula with its own ideas thrown in. Plus the gradual transition from manual to automated tasks helps really *feel* like proper progression as the more things you automate, the more colonists you have available to do other stuff instead.

Wait for a sale, but do give it a try.

The Surge is a soulslike for Ultra Greatsword Enjoyers, as combat is not fast and twitchy but rather more cautious and methodical. You definitely want to bait attacks and wait for openings, as enemies leave themselves wide open after most attacks. There are fast weapons, but they honestly suck in comparison to being able to deal big damage and stagger just about anything with heavy-duty weapons. If you - like me - went through DS1 with Havel's set and the dragon tooth, you'll be at home here.

If I were making a tier list I'd put The Surge in B tier:
- Excellent theming, 10/10, very creative
- ...but everything looks the same once you're in the interior areas, it's all heavily industrial and easy to get lost.
- Pretty understandable weapon and armor mechanics
- ...though most of the armor set bonuses are underwhelming.
- Very creative new ideas like dismembering enemies for their gear - you steal their weapons and armor by slicing it off them.
- ...but this disincentivizes trying out different weapon types as you'll be invested in both crafting materials AND weapon proficiency ranks.
- Large-scale area design is fantastic, with tons of shortcuts, elevators and one-way doors used to make areas quickly traversible once you unlock them
- ...but there are some serious "Where am I meant to go???" moments, particularly in the first and second areas.
- Good options for customization through "Implants" which are basically the equivalent of rings but also stat boosting
- ...though make sure not to underestimate the max HP boosters as there are some extremely hard-hitting enemies.
- Game does a good job of maintaining an atmosphere of mystery
- ...but leaves a lot of questions unresolved at the end of the game with an obvious sequel hook.

I had a bit of a rough start but once I found my feet in the game I enjoyed it, aside from occasional running around trying to find whatever random door I had missed in order to progress. It's pretty forgiving since you can bank tech scrap (the equivalent of souls/runes) once you get to a safe zone, and it won't be lost. The progression curve seems quite well-tuned, and you never need to grind for materials deliberately if you just do it while exploring by cutting enemies' limbs for materials via finishers.

So, while it does have some issues, I think the end result definitely deserves to be checked out for fans of the genre.

Criminally underrated. Even the most common achievements have rates of around 5% which indicates that people who buy it aren't playing it, and they're missing out. (Update: The dev informed me that achievements were added relatively recently, and this is why the rates are so low)

Indemon Tales is like if you took Pokemon Mystery Dungeon (you're part of a guild, doing quests in randomly-generated dungeons, and more locations become available over time) but not written for children. Oh, and the actual dungeon gameplay is more like *checks notes* ...Stardew Valley? You have swords for melee and you mine stuff for materials along the way. You also have various ranged options such as throwing rocks (damage scales with your mining skill), crossbows, or magic. It's also party-based, and your AI companions are VERY competent. They can use whatever skill you make the active one for them and whatever item is in the leftmost slot on their hotbar. If you give them magic or ranged weapons they are extremely accurate and know how to lead their shots and will be an enormous help as you control the frontmost character. The game also has a unique mechanic of switching between party and solo mode, where the latter makes the non-lead party members disappear, which you can strategically do to avoid taking damage.

Technically you play as Generic Human #45768454 who has absolutely no dialogue or personality and barely any story relevance to such a degree that I can't help but wonder if it's a deliberate jab at other games that do this. Also, this is fine because almost immediately you get the -actual- protagonist in your party, and you can immediately shove the human into the back row of the party and control her instead for 99% of the rest of the game, barring the occasional solo segment.

You have great flexibility with your builds, as all characters get the same skill tree and you can eventually respec if you want to rebuild. You can roll melee, magic, a hybrid, or whatever. No skill or item is useless, it's just a matter of making it good. The game feels very well-balanced as you level up regularly and it never felt too hard or too easy to me.

On top of that, this is a one-man passion project for the developer, who did the entire thing (except the public domain music, which is also great) himself. It's absolutely worth the full price it asks for and deserves to be played. It's well-written, balancing serious moments and occasional comedy, with twists that you won't see coming and a reasonable progression of story. It's well-designed as nothing is ever lost forever and the world map gives you hints about where you still have stuff to discover. Solid recommend.