Recent reviews by Chrogion

An excellent retro adventure game. The only downside I can think of is that you have to do a lot of traveling. A fast travel option would have been nice when you quickly want to try something out.

This game is (probably) the first game in a series about the Order of the Thorne. You play as Finn the Bard who tries to win in the king's challenge. He must travel through the faery kingdom to solve problems, gather items and finally find the queen (which is the main objective). Traveling through the lands is wonderful. The scenery is really well done and the pixel style is just beautiful. The voice acting is of good quality and a good variety of characters provide a nice setting for the game's world.

The puzzles are good. A few times you have to pay attention to not miss small objects in the scene. So be observant. You cannot die in this game, so take your time and enjoy the scenery.

This game is all about finding the right balance between trust and mistrust. There's a lot of pointing fingers and blaming going on which is extra funny because every player has exactly the same visual appearance and you cannot distinguish one player from another. It's also a lot about being unpredictable so that other player's don't understand which strategy you follow until it's too late.

This game is very original in concept so let be explain what it is about in more detail:

Everyone is a bunny. A white cuddly cute bunny that has no possiblity of harming anyone with his bunny body. BUT: There is a gigantic robot in the area that can be used to exert dominance over the other bunnies. So it is a good idea to head towards the robot, take control over it and start commanding around the other players. If they do not obey, you can very easily annihilate them with your robot guns. You are now a tyrant and the other bunnies will try to overthrow you by invading the robot themselves. So be vigilant and shoot any bunny that comes too close to your robot.

However, just being agressive will not suffice to be victorious. The objective of every player is to gain 10,000 dollars (or some other currency). Every player has a passive income. The player sitting in the robot has a passive income that is ten times as much as the income of the bunnies outside the robot. Every player can invest his money on items that might give them an advantage ingame. If done correctly, you can win the game, even if you are not in control of the robot.

The interesting thing is: Collaborating players have an advantage. But in the end there will always be only one winner and everyone else loses. So you cannot collaborate at all costs. At some point you have to fight on your own and try to get the lead.

Collaboration can happen between non-robot bunnies and the bunny in the robot. The robot can bribe/reward bunnies that bring him material to the feed box. The feed box is a box on the map where items can be placed. Some items give money or ammunition to the robot. When a bunny delivers an item to the feedbox, the robot may decide to reward him with money, so that it is a win-win situation for both players. But it is stil in the interest of every individual player that no other player has more money than himself.

The controls of the game are simple and sufficient to navigate the terrain and to control the robot. No complaints there.

This game is also fully playable at this moment, even though it is still early access. It is well balanced and it's fun to use the game mechanics to screw over other players. For example, if a bunny dies in a fire, the corpse can be collected and placed in the feed box. When this happens, the player in the robots loses 1000 dollars which is a lot of money. But getting the corpse to the feed box might be a real challenge because the player in the robot will try to monitor all traffic in the map and if he spots you carrying a corpse you have to run for your life.

I think the tutorial does a decent job at explaining the game mechanics.

The only downside of this game is that you need other players to have the best experience. The game has bots that you can play against but this is a game about betrayal and bots are obviously pretty bad at this. But they are still helpful to fill up a lobby. Remember: Every player looks the same. So you cannot even tell if you are looking at a bot or at a real player. And even though the bots are stupid, they do a pretty good job at being hard to distinguish from human players.

You can "follow" this game on Steam to receive notifications when there is a tournament. This way you will know when there are enough players online to have an interesting game.

Really good DLC. Lots of good self-irony and meta-humour.

Excellent puzzle game. Beautiful scenery. Portal fans will love this one.

The game can be a bit tedious sometimes with a lot running back and forth and trying to arrange things so that they work nicely together, but overall it's really worth it.

The Road to Ghenna is also a solid DLC that adds even more cool puzzles.

This game is rich. Rich in content, rich in great storylines and beautiful artwork and music. A real gem. If you like visual novels, then this game is certainly a good addition to your collection.

There are several endings that this visual novel has and not all of them are easy to reach. But you can still look right decisions up in guides without getting spoilers. You can always save the game to revisit your decisions afterwards.

Other reviews have already written in-depth about the content of the game. I won't repeat what they say here :)

Another beautiful hidden object game by Artifex Mundi. Nice story, somewhat okay minigames (but you can always skip them if you don't like them) but most of them were good, Great artwork and sound.

Overall a very solid and fun game.

Just finished the game. It was a long ride, but totally worth it.

A lot of people compare this game to XCOM. There are some shared principles, but you should not see it as an alternative to XCOM, because Massive Chalice is different im many aspects.

What really makes this game shine is Double Fine's humour. The enemies, the items, the stories, the heroes have some nice touches that are weird in a good way. There is just nothing more awesome than the warm and fuzzy feeling that you get when a Wrinkler hits one of your wünderpants-wearing heroes.

The management of your kingdom does not require you to do a lot of planning (at least not in normal mode). What could really be improved is the management of heroes, because you will have a hard time remembering them all. It makes sense to use a paper notebook to keep track of your plans of your heroes. One very central problem of the game is that it's much harder to get attached to your heroes than in XCOM, because your heroes can simply die of old age. The relic system tries to compensate for that, but it could be more epic. I still got attached to some of my heroes during my playthrough, but it was much later in the game. But once the attachment is there, it's just awesome to kick ass on the battlefield with your favorite heroes.

The battles start rather easy, but get a lot tougher in the course of the game. The artificial intelligence is not that clever, but if you don't pay attention, it will still eleminate your heroes with unpleasant efficiency. There were many situations where I really thought that I was screwed but with some thinking and planning I could usually find a way out of the situation. And that was just awesome.

But even if you fail during battles and lose some or all of your heroes, the game still gives you plenty of chances to recover. It's certainly not too easy (imho) and you can still play on hard mode with iron mode if you like a challenge.

In a nutshell, you should get this game if you like
- getting out of sticky situations
- weird humour
- Combining traits, items and seeing how things synergize.
- Round-based battles with lots of positioning and special abilities

You should not get this game if
- You are impatient (A battle takes around 30-60 minutes)
- You want a really complex game
- You want a deep story

A really nice choose-your own adventure game. The texts are well-written and nice to read. Your choices really make a difference (I checked the source code). I recommend to do at least 3 different playthroughts because there are 3 different main paths. These paths overlap, but they show the story from different angles.

A solid adventure. Fun to play. Mostly well designed. Story is reasonably good (especially part 2). But it doesn't match the greatness of the old LucasArts games (maybe it's not absurd enough? I haven't figured out the secret formula yet...).

I do recommend this game. There are better recent adventures like the Book of Unwritten Tales (Part 1 or 2) but it is still a very enjoyable experience.

Oh, and by the way, Vella is awesome.

A well-made FPS.