Recent reviews by 1-800-CAT-BOYS

PEAK is top-tier friendslop: goofy and colorful, intuitively designed, with direct and uncomplicated goals. It doesn't take a lot of brainpower to get a sense for what you need to do or how you need to do it, and the process of achieving that seemingly simple objective results in oodles of dramatic and extremely funny slapstick failure.

But PEAK is also really enjoyable solitaire, too. It doesn't adjust the parameters for solo play beyond removing some items from play, elegantly shifting your priorities and forcing you to reconsider your strategies, undertaking a challenge that is both slow and deliberate while also requiring speed and adaptability.

It's peak.

[Disclosure: I was given a copy of the game by the developer to stream!]

A stand-out comedy game and one of 2025's thus-far-most-slept-on contenders. It's punchy, spectacular, and lavishly illustrated -- feels almost like playing a circa-2010 Xbox Live Arcade adaptation of your favorite webcomic, but significantly better-looking and surprisingly fun to play!

A significant chunk of the game is familiar to anyone who has taken an interest in indie narrative games in recent years, as you wander around 3D environments and humorous NPCs billboard at you to have funny conversations -- like Smile For Me or Anthology of the Killer, for example. In this respect, the game excels; it is often Genuinely Funny and never fails to be utterly charming. Its huge cast of characters, both major and minor, have extremely vibrant personalities, and even bit characters who only speak one or two lines of dialogue leave tremendous impressions.

Unlike its contemporaries, though, Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion also features (lightweight!) first person shooter combat segments. The gunplay is simple and the combat is not really challenging -- neither of those things is "the point" -- but for a solo dev effort, the mobility options and overall Feel of combat are hugely satisfying. You have a double-jump that pulls triple duty as "also a melee attack" and "also a wall bounce maneuver" and it kicks ass.

As for nits to pick: it's, from a technical perspective, very much what you'd expect from a solo effort. The game itself is presented in a kind of 'rough-and-ready' state -- the game's executable doesn't really have any options at all beyond a language toggle and a fullscreen toggle (which there's a shortcut for! F11! as far as i know nothing tells you that!), and there's no options for setting target resolution or target framerate, or even adjusting volume in-game. If you wanna lower the volume (say, for EQ reasons, if you're streaming it) you have to lower it directly through the Windows volume mixer, which is mildly annoying. Also, even fullscreen, the cursor seems to have a way of un-trapping itself from the client, in windowed causing you to sporadically resize the game, and in fullscreen occasionally causing the game to just inexplicably not read your clicks.

These annoyances are mild and infrequent, though, and did not really do much to get in the way of me either enjoying or finishing the game. And mercifully: these issues are fixable, with a little elbow grease, and by the time you have bought and are playing the game (as I think you should!!!), they might even be resolved.

If you like "funny jokes" or "remembering that video games are fun", you owe it to yourself to give the game a shot. Maybe even hundreds of shots, from perhaps a pair of handguns or maybe even a pair of uzis.

A Vampire-Survivors-like does not really need a lot to be good, so it's delightful for one to come swinging with a great soundtrack, cool presentation, and actual storytelling! The game's meta progression and unlocks reward experimenting, and its variety of interesting weapons give you a lot to experiment with.

If I have any issues with it at all, it's that certain sub-systems like Statues and Drillers feel so crucial to the flow of the game to be locked behind the progression system. You can unlock them very quickly, but I also think the game is lesser with them disabled.

Also, refreshingly, unlike its bullet heaven progenitor, Picayune Dreams gives you very specific goals, and ultimately is more respectful of your time than how aimless these sorts of games tend to be. While runs are every bit as long -- a winning run is liable to clock around 40 realtime minutes -- the story unlocks in such a way that if you only ever finish the game properly once you can still feel satisfied.

My playtime at time of review represents a significant amount of achievement-hunting. I would love to see the devs make another game in this vein, or otherwise continue adding occasional big bunches of stuff to this game like they did recently. But either way: worth the extremely modest price of admission.

Initial impressions: the thumb-sign is only here for the uninitiated consumer. "I live in the USA / the European Union / Israel. Should I spend the regional equivalent of forty US dollars on this video game and expect commensurate Enjoyment Value, relative to all the other forty US dollar video games on Steam?"

Flatly, no. I don't think anyone who reads Steam reviews before buying a video game to know if they'll like it or not is going to think the game is worth the ticket price. (Which, notably, is much lower if you live in the "Global South"; if you can pick this up for a regional equivalent of ten or twenty dollars it's probably worth a try.) If you know this game is for you -- that you have to play it -- my "Not Recommended" review will not steer you from your course.

Which is fine! I think Psycho Patrol R is, even in its unfinished state, kind of a tremendous work of art. For better or worse, no one really makes video games like Ville Kallio. Cruelty Squad is an all-time favorite of mine, and Psycho Patrol R feels like a video game whose first creative breath was Ville apologizing for the mistake of Cruelty Squad ever having been fun.

Enter, the ultimate power-fantasy: an unaccountable federal supercop, tethered so tightly to the motor nerves of the apparatus of state that YOU are the one who moves it; decked out with guns, armor, psychic power, and a mission from God, with a whole ensemble cast of various and vibrant professionals who exist, in some fashion or another, to propel you towards crusade. And I didn't even mention the customizable mech, which you can take stomping through the streets of the city at whim, gunning down foes with outrageous force and, ideally, overwhelming style. It's called a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "V-Stalker!" Signifiers for the supercop supreme, to be sure.

There is a chance that you will simply be gunned down with impunity within seconds of getting onto the street. And if you pass the level transition zones on either far end of the street, you'll go to one of two zones: one populated by snipers and enemy mechs, the other with communist militants. A heroic gunfight on either end is far less likely than being effortlessly and immediately ventilated, V-Stalker or not. Were you wearing a helmet, or body armor? No, of course not. You can go back to base and requisition some with your own money... but, ah, you dropped it where you died. Everyone loves Dark Souls mechanics, right? And in the middle of the shoot-on-sight militant communists, it looks like, where if you DID kill any they have all respawned as certainly as you did.

Us hardcore gamers, after all, do so love to be punished for our hubris, and to overcome Adversity, however overwhelming it may be.

...I'm not really a smart or well-read enough person to offer insightful commentary on the game's repeated references to Wilhelm Reich's The Psychology of Fascism, or to talk at length about its venomous satire, but I can at least say: Psycho Patrol R is not content to simply cast your player character as a masochistic dog for a conflicted and all-consuming order of psychotic violence, but rather, takes great pains to make sure the act of playing the game feels like the horror it's asking you to imagine.

And it's very impressive, to me. It might even be to you! But also Assassin's Creed: Shadows will probably cost this much in a month or two and you might prefer something that hates you a little less than Psycho Patrol R. I own this game and not that one, though, so make of that what you will.

It's Peggle Balatro. If you want that, it's that.

Do you like Ace Attorney and/or Dangan Ronpa and wish there were more of those? Want something with fun characters, compelling intrigue, gorgeous presentation, and teeth? OTD is a mature and undiluted cyberpunk murder mystery which tasks you with evaluating the evidence and defending your client, all while getting tangled up in complex politics and trying to keep your head off the chopping block. (But you do sometimes gotta put your neck out... just be sure it's not in the way of the guillotine when it falls.) Elegantly written and thoughtfully arranged, oozing with style, with a well-developed setting and sharp dialogue.

Give the Devil its due -- it's pretty damn good.

Gunkmaxxed tacticool eyeball-melting cyberpunk biohorror soul-seller simulator. Mission-based sandboxes in a Deus Ex lite fashion. An immersive sim if you were immersed in vomit. Life is cheap and death is money. CEO mindset.

Practice mindfulness techniques and maintain a flexible perspective to optimally maximize your assets for revenue generation. Be inventive, assertive, dangerous, merciless. All of existence is reducible to this dichotomy: you, and that which can be leveraged for your profit.

This will hurt.

The one and only comedy slasher horror cartoon show set in Murder Civilization.

Because of the release's nature -- an interactive wrapper for launching what were at one point separate releases, each themselves learning exercises -- there is an experimental quality to the collection, and it's missing certain basic quality of life features (like the ability to save).

However, beneath the rough-hewn Video Game is an experience with charming artwork, incisive writing, and an imitable sense of humor. Highly recommended that you stream this in a Discord call with some friends and have everyone do live-read voice acting.

A tightly paced and well-crafted narrative horror game about the horrors of working for minimum wage in space. A lot of psychological horror games tend to be dumb and bad and pointless, so it's nice to play one with clarity of purpose, and the attention-to-detail to back it up.

My playtime at time of review represents a fairly brisk and direct playthrough with minimal investigating or messing around. I would encourage you to luxuriate more than I did; there's lots of fun details you only pick up if you pay really close attention!

In a world where the Ace Attorney series remains bafflingly dead and Dangan Ronpa is... well, what it is... you need a new problem-causing crime-solving visual novel.

nth Circle's debut effort is incisively written and beautifully illustrated, with a flashy UI to tie it all together. It's preem.

Also, Farah Reyes is in it, so that's a factor too.