Recent reviews by BUGLISH

At first glance this game might look silly or brainless, but Sakuna punches way above its weight. It's a strange, fascinating, easy-going experience, but peppered with pleasant challenge. It somehow scratches the itch for a comfy and intimate colony farming sim, while also operating as a satisfying platforming beat-em-up.

The farming consists of seasonal minigames, each with their own rituals for optimization. New systems get introduced with each harvest that keep the cycle feeling fresh. There's always just enough to remember and monitor that I never found myself doing everything perfectly - letting the water out soon enough, waiting for the right temperature to hull, bringing the ducks back inside when it sprouts. It feels great to see your character get buff when you do it all correctly.

The combat centers around this grapple hook that doubles as a generous dodge. You constantly sling back and forth throughout fights, set up combos in the air, and blast enemies into each other for big aoe damage. The tutorials aren't great and it might take a while to make sense of its quirks - some core mechanics don't get any explanation until 20 hours in. But it's worth the trouble - the loop is satisfying and reminiscent of Dragon's Crown or Odin Sphere.

There ends up being quite a bit of platforming in the level design, again centered on this grapple-dodge. It feels good to zip around the environments, but this is probably the jankiest mechanic of the game; there's too much guesswork involved in figuring out where you can latch on. Still, I was surprised at how much fun I was having even though I would often struggle to accurately attach onto ledges.

There's a million other tiny quirks and unpolished elements, but what's really holding this game back most is its size. Sakuna is begging for more than a 4-hut village and an archipelago of isolated combat zones. I want to survey the vast rice fields at the end of the game and watch my allies till the fields. As is, it just feels a little bit too small, too claustrophobic. My runner-up complaint is its resource variety and distribution; there's too much inventory noise for little meaningful impact.

I was surprised to realize I actually learned something about rice. Ten hours in I was getting excited for each new tutorial about the phases of growth, when to flood the fields, what type of fertilizer to use. It got me thinking about how important rice is - so many lives have been spent studying this one crop, thinking up new ways to cook and prepare it. There's so much cultural depth behind this one little grain. This game cares about rice, and it wants you to care, too.

Superb detective mystery. I loved getting to know this little world. The mad libs guessing did wear me out by the end, but it's only 5-6 hours long. If you enjoyed Obra Dinn, this is an easy recommendation.

I try to avoid Early Access whenever possible, but I was so tempted by this formula I had to take a peek. It's a delightful mix of the resource/tech scramble of an RTS like Age of Empires, smashed together with the cyclical and timed survival elements of Frostpunk, as well as the logistics and planning of a more traditional city builder. The roguelite system is an excellent fit here and encourages a less nitpicky style of play than I usually fall into with strategy games, while also encouraging experimentation with each session. I love the visual style, there's a well-tuned difficulty curve, and the core loop is rock solid. The unpolished bits (as of November 2022) are in the UI, long-term progression, and strategic depth.

The UI will benefit a lot from some quality of life updates. Many actions get to be repetitive - removing / assigning workers especially, since you're doing it almost all the time. A lot of sound effects are quite similar and it isn't always clear what triggered that obviously important sound you just heard. notifications can get noisy and there's no way to quickly clear them out. Many buildings look very similar and I often found myself hunting for the right building to do the work (the ALT/CTRL modifiers did help with this, though). The icons can be difficult to distinguish between each other, which adds to the initial learning curve.

The roguelite / progression aspect appears to be padded to slow down players before they burn through all the content. There also isn't a lot to be excited about in the tech tree once you get through the "essential" upgrades. It can feel kinda bad because those upgrades seem truly necessary to play the game as it was meant to be experienced (housing and trade in particular), but it can be 10-20 hours before those are all available.

Lastly, I hope there will be some more strategic options available, in terms of how to reach victory in each session. More variety in the map generation or map types could help here too. right now you can choose between generating points through high morale vs. collecting points from events. While in theory you can specialize within these paths - focusing on satisfying a certain race or solving dangerous events vs. treasures - there's no reason not to do everything. If you don't invest in decent morale, your workers will leave during the storm. If you don't collect treasures, you won't win fast enough. On the flip side, the early game is also uniform. The first 10-15 minutes of each session are often the same, because you need the same 3 resources for all tier 2 and 3 structures. As is, the system is still great and it was satisfying to learn all the recipes and affinities. but I see the potential - if they can figure it out, it'll be awesome.

I recommend waiting for the full release since it's only getting better over time, but it's already a blast to play.

I've spent the last decade scrawling the trenches of Steam and Itch for a game like this. I've played through so many poorly written stories, mind-numbing grindfests, pointless skill trees, and flat worlds devoid of detail or nuance. But this is it: the true gem in the rough, the solo indie project from someone who "gets it" on every level. Mechanically, this is one of the most elegant and finely tuned JRPGs ever created. Who needs a story when you're on your own adventure?

The combat plays like a card battler mixed with a tactical iso RPG. All of the numbers and outcomes are transparent, including the enemy's skills and upcoming actions, which allows you to plan your decisions with precision. It takes some time to learn its rules for timing and execution, but it's all deterministic and fair. The job system is all the best parts of FFT, distilled down into unique skillsets with fascinating synergies and equipment-based builds. There are just enough incentives to keep you experimenting, with gimmick bosses and enemies that will force you to review your builds. The difficulty scaling is divine; I spent most of the game feeling challenged, with many bosses demanding 2 or 3 attempts to defeat, yet rarely feeling impossible at my current gear or character level. This is especially impressive given the non-linear open world.

The world is massive - one of the largest I've ever seen from an indie, and far bigger than any classic JRPG. It fully leverages voxels in a rare way, with huge verticality and depth in every zone. It even has some clever technical tricks up its sleeve in how it manages camera angles and cutaways when you're underground. The forced perspective takes some getting used to, but once I saw how many secrets and puzzles leverage this perspective, I began to appreciate it. This world simply wouldn't work if you could rotate the camera. There are secrets hidden everywhere you go, which speaks to another fundamental of good JRPGs: hunting for treasure. There are so many chests to find, and the rewards are worth the effort.

The ubiquitous platforming is easily the most controversial design choice. There are tight platforming segments packed throughout the game and most of them are not optional. Personally, I love jumping puzzles; I spent thousands of hours building similar experiences in Minecraft and I loved the platforming in Guild Wars 2, so this was up my alley. I do think this is more punishing than it needs to be. The placement of water and spikes throughout the world is a concession to the need for a reset mechanism, but it can feel silly. I found myself intentionally diving into spikes in order to get back to my launch point. Still, I love the sweaty palms anxiety of these puzzles. There's clever paths and shortcuts and sequence breaks to discover everywhere you go, As soon you've developed a model for what's possible, you'll get a new tool that forces you to reconsider everywhere you've been. It's an incredible metroidvania, but you rarely find yourself looking at an arbitrarily blocked path thinking "oh, I'll need a new item for that". It's a world of a subtle design.

The artwork, music and aesthetics vary between mediocre and nice, but it's largely stock / CC / marketplace work - an obvious necessity for a solo project of this scale. The choices are all appropriate and consistent, and there's an emphasis on simplicity and functionality (e.g. many animations are simple squash and stretch). My only technical complaint would be that, given the amount of 3D platforming, I wish the main character weren't a 2D sprite or there were more cues for depth.

The UI is better than it has any right to be. An under-appreciated fact of JRPGs is that half of the game is spent inside the menus, reviewing stats and equipment. Most indie games fall flat in this regard, but it's clear the developer understood the importance of fluid, fast navigation through the interface. The biggest nuisance has to be switching between movement modes, but this is mostly an endgame frustration. I strongly recommend going into the assist menu and enabling the enhanced home point!

There's so much more I could say, but this is enough. This is an absolutely incredible achievement. Within just a few minutes of starting my game, I knew this was something special. I'm grateful for the experience and I feel like I can finally leave this genre behind, knowing that someone finally did it right. Well done.

i adore this goofy little guy. janky as hell but made with love.

does what it means to do and functions as a competent hack-n-slash, but it's paper thin and butt ugly to behold. there's a flow you can get into for a bit as you keep the kill combo going, just bulldozing everything in your path, but it tires out quickly as the cacophony of sound and particles flood the screen. the interface is a chore to deal with and the loot - arguably the most important part of the ARPG loop - is all dry and overwhelming. too much garbage, no way to filter through it.

just good enough to scratch the adventuring itch, if that's what you're after. very much a one-dev project with a variety of jank in its movement and controls. i honestly appreciate the imperfections; they add an extra layer to the experience and there's a lot of heart and raw effort in here to make up for the quirks. i enjoyed learning the map and finding the hidden nooks and crannies. the combat gets trivialized by the introduction of a spammable aoe that doubles as a universal block, but it's strangely satisfying to cheese all the encounters this way. the platforming is less fun; there are some frustrating segments to navigate, but they're not long and death is mostly a suggestion anyways.

sweet retro adventurer with a good sense of humor and quality writing. there's strong music and some sharp artwork stowed away in the cutscenes as well. arguably too retro for its own good with its use of screen space, awkward inventory, and the eye-straining movement. not sure if i'll end up beating all the episodes as the minigames have worn out their welcome, but i had a nice time with the first episode.

does what exactly what it says on the tin: tower defense Factorio. looks jankier than it actually is - forgiving its sparing visuals, this is a well-constructed game. the progression is smooth and it has the modern quality of life features expected of a TD these days, so if you know what you're doing you can zip right up the tech tree. it's not as deep or sophisticated as either Factorio or Gemcraft, but scratches the specific itch for those who appreciate both games.

delightful, satisfying optimization puzzler; feels like a Zachtronics minigame inside FTL. i loved whittling down towards that that sweet spot of cost, layout, and configuration. i found some extra fun in the daily challenges, which kinda became my daily sudoku for a minute. i even got some chuckles from the writing. lots of untapped potential here for a much deeper game and i hope they consider a sequel!