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This is a linear series of puzzle boxes, which are each composed of three elements:

• Slide to unlock: Likely >50% of all interactions, these are simple mechanisms requiring little to no thought.
  
• Thinky, somewhat fiddly puzzles: Using a robust set of controls to rearrange many symbols into the required layout.
  
• Interactive component hunt: Visually combing over the box looking for some bit you can slide open to access a necessary tool.

The boxes themselves are lavishly designed, with care and attention put into textures and animations. As a result, even the simple mechanisms are fine, but not terribly satisfying to unlock with a mouse. The proper puzzles are, solidly, good. Challenging without being punishing. Maybe a little on the simple side sometimes, but that's better than hard spikes.

The interactive component hunt was - for me personally - by far the worst aspect of the game. These boxes look nice, but visually interrogating them for asymmetric elements was tedious. Thankfully, the "hint" system basically lets you bypass this step without penalty. If not for that, this review would probably be a thumbs-down.

Despite the store descriptions, I would say the threadbare bits of lore you uncover barely qualify as a story. Don't expect a compelling narrative - this is a puzzle box game. Buy it for 3-ish hours of decent-to-good puzzle boxing. If you have a tablet with modest graphical power, that'll probably be a more satisfying tactile experience than mouse and keyboard.

$15 for three-ish hours of decent gameplay with barely any story probably won't strike most as a compelling bargain, so probably best to wait for a sale - personally I received it as part of the Humble Choice subscription (which I do pay for - this wasn't "free"). If you like puzzle boxes(!) then it is probably worth your time, at least.

For that reason I'll say, tepidly recommended.

Go in blind. If you feel like you're hitting your head against a wall, pursue a different lead.

The DLC is worth every penny. Beat the base game before you buy it.

Will always have a spot in my all-time top 10.

I didn't bother with the achievements. Just beat the game.

Finding local co-op games to play with two young-ish kids is difficult. My two boys were very impressed with the demo, and asked rather persistently if I could buy the full game. At $5, I figured why not.

We then proceeded to blast (pun intended) through the 100-level campaign, which blessedly allows up to 4 players in local co-op. Is it my Game of the Year? No. Was it worth my five dollars? Emphatically, yes.

This is a game that deserves better sales than it seems to be getting. The core mechanic is simple, yet novel. I wouldn't have found it if I weren't specifically searching the Steam store for every last game demo with a "4 player local" tag.

Strongly recommended.

This game is not perfect.

There are bugs that haven't been fixed (I lost progress in a level twice due to soft-locks), there are small, empty areas that were clearly meant to have... something... at some point during development, the puzzles are occasionally obtuse enough that I needed to resort to a guide, and boy howdy would it be nice if collectibles in pitch-dark areas, scattered among similar-looking background props, had permanent UI outlines instead of needing to bring your cursor near them.

That said.

I rolled credits on DEATHLOOP after 35 hours, and generally enjoyed my time with it. There's plenty to critique about this being a "wide, but shallow" game. However, it does come with the handy benefit of actually being digestible in a reasonable length of time. There's no shortage of builds to try if you're interested - to my great shame, I fell into a "stealth archer" build and found it too effective to switch - and although most of the characters in this game are not good people, they are quite effectively characterized.

Recommended at whatever price you feel is fair for 30+ hours of vaguely-60s Dishonored with guns.

EDIT: Just tried PvP for half an hour, and the lag is a more ferocious obstacle than my opponent

It pains me to write this. I do not give thumbs-down reviews lightly, especially for indie games, especially for an indie game that only has 50 reviews at time of writing. But Turbo Sloths is just bad.

I am no stranger to racing games, and I've never played one that felt this horrible on a controller. Your vehicle wants to spin out so badly when you get to any decent speed, and that's with Arcade controls - with "Realism" controls, you will be actively fighting to stay on the track, even on very modest turns. It's like someone put a massive engine and bald wheels on a refrigerator, then sent it out on an ice sheet.

Assuming you are able to stay on the track, you'll be baffled by how much BS the game puts there to get in your way. There are at least three variations of "explosive barrels" that reduce your finite health, some of which have enough knockback to render you temporarily airborne and out of contact with the surface at full speed. There are insta-kill hazards that trigger at seemingly random intervals. Some obstacles can be plowed through no problem, others slow you severely or bring you to a dead halt - you won't know until you hit them.

So, the controls are bad, the track design is bad, how about the story? Well, it alternates between "cliche with poor execution" and "can't decide whether it's self-serious or a self-parody." The character art looks like it was drawn by a high-schooler. Within half an hour of starting the game, you are introduced to three - THREE! - cringey "waifu" characters to accompany you for the whole game - a girl in a form-fitting white button-down to serve as your manager, a punk/goth dommy in tight leather to serve as your rival, and an A.I. with a girl's voice that talks at you during races. How's the voice acting, you ask? I invite you to guess.

If that sounds annoying, rest assured the game has plenty more to annoy you with. There are "camera bots" that hover in front of you for some 15 seconds or so, blocking your vision and being a visual distraction, before snapping a screen-encompassing, bright white, flash photo. (Mercifully, you can turn the intensity of this flash to zero in the settings, but still - whose idea was that?!) There are a constant barrage of "chat comments" on the left side of the HUD cycling through a dozen or so lame phrases. Any contact between you and another racer is a coin flip for who gets thrown off-course.

"Okay, that all sounds pretty damning," I hear you say. "How do I know you're not just a hater? Maybe you're just biased, or bad at racing games, or maybe playing this with an xbox controller was your own mistake when it's meant for a wheel, or maybe you just didn't have the patience to git gud. There are 50 reviews for this game and almost all of them are positive, who are you to come in here and dump on a self-published indie game from people that are trying their best?"

All valid points. That's why I'm not telling you to ignore this game outright - I'm just telling you to make absolutely sure you try the demo before committing to a purchase and adding it to your backlog. Maybe you won't find the artwork and writing as cringe as I did, maybe all of this game's nonsense will strike you as challenging rather than irritating. My review isn't borne from hatred; it's born from regret, from having clicked the "add to cart" button and knowing within half an hour of playing this game that I never wanted to touch it again.

I am urging you not to make the same mistake. I have asked Steam for a refund.
Not recommended.

What a treat. I'm writing this now because I mainlined this game to an irresponsible extent these past few days and I want to take a break before coming back for 100%.

*Tactical Breach Wizards* (TBW) combines the turn-based tactical gameplay of XCOM with the repositioning and RNG-free combat of Into the Breach. The gameplay is rock-solid, the writing is fantastic, and the story is a real page-turner, so to speak.

My one complaint about this game is that the outfit options are a little weak. That's it. Full marks across the board otherwise.

Highly recommended.

If you like engine-building, resource-maximization style board games like Wingspan or Catan, welcome to your new paradise.

I sunk more than 100 hours into Reus 1, so when I tell you that Reus 2 is straight-up better, I don't make that statement lightly. Reus 2 manages to be more complex and less fiddly at the same time. Abbey Games has polished the mechanics to a mirror shine.

I'm posting this review relatively early in my playtime because I want more people to buy this game. The only reason I'm not playing right now is because real-life responsibilities are demanding my attention.

Highly recommended. I can already tell this will be in my all-time top 10.

All the reviews I've seen about this game are either hyperbolically positive or straight-up memes, so let me be a joyless nerd and provide a more nuanced take.

Animal Well is a solid metroidvania with more than its fair share of puzzles and mysteries, none more baffling than how Billy Basso managed to cram all of it into a mere 40 MB. As with many modern puzzle games, there's a sort of exponential difficulty curve; the majority of the puzzles - certainly all that are required to beat the game - are pretty straightforward. Beyond that, truly completing the game, without resorting to a guide, will require an unreasonable amount of hours triple- and quadruple-checking every room on the map for something you missed, and comparing notes with at minimum several dozen of your friends to work out some ARG-level esoterically vague hints.

Mercifully, the truly capricious requirements - the speedruns, the deathless runs, what have you - do not have achievements tied to them. Still, this is a game that you should walk into with the expectation that you will eventually need a guide if you want to keep your sanity. "A traveler's guide to Animal Well" is great, with excellent use of spoiler tags.

I ding'd all of the achievements for Animal Well in a little under 16 hours - which is not to say I completed it. I resorted to the use of the aforementioned guide once I only had a handful of late-game collectibles left, because re-combing the whole labyrinth for where to use my third(!!!) incredibly situational niche item didn't strike me as a good way to spend my time.

If this doesn't strike you as a glowing review, that's because it isn't. Animal Well is definitely good! The thumbs-up is right there; don't come at me. I do like the novel takes on how your character's abilities improve; I recommend Supraland if you want more of those unexpected spins on familiar mechanics. I just didn't walk away from it with the ecstatic euphoria that seems commonplace in its reviews, whether because of the fiddly platforming or because of the aforementioned niche items.

Still, all that said - recommended.

Overland is in my top 10 on Steam, and Pacific Drive could almost be described as a first-person riff on that that game. The rhythm of gameplay is "Loot-and-Scoot" - drive up to a promising location, grab everything that isn't nailed down, and swiftly scurry along before the ambient hostility of the area increases to lethal levels.

I beat the game in just under 30 hours, playing at a fairly brisk pace - "real-time is also a resource," would be my mantra while breezing past resource nodes I felt weren't needed.

22 runs, 0 deaths - though I got very, very close once. My car was absolutely shredded, and so was I - salvation was right there, if I could just drive my car to it, but it couldn't move. I checked everything while slowly dying, and with my final attempt, it slowly slogged forward. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I left the parking brake on. But I like to think the machine spirit of the battered station wagon summoned its last breath to carry me to safety.

It's that kind of game - the kind that stories are spun out of. I had fun with it.

Recommended.

I can't believe I haven't reviewed this game yet. 10/10 neurotic micromanagement simulator. Despite being the definitive 2D take on a "god game" - a genre best encapsulated by the venerable Black & White series - the best comparison that comes to mind is actually Train Valley. Sure, you CAN treat it as just a chill game with your little dude guys doing their thing - but once you start trying to optimize? Once you start trying to maximize? Every in-game minute takes five minutes real-time, because you're pausing every second to tweak the moment-by-moment actions of your giants for maximum efficiency.

If that sounds like fun to you, I have great news! The sequel, Reus 2, iterates upon and changes these core mechanics in fascinating ways! If that sounds tedious and hellish to you, I have great news! The sequel, Reus 2, iterates upon and changes these core mechanics in fascinating ways!

Either way, I highly encourage playing this game first, as the mechanics of its sequel might seem needlessly complex without understanding how they riff on the base mechanics established here. Do note that you may need to download the XNA Framework 4.0 refresh from Microsoft to get it working, and that there is an FNA build as an alternative. Yes, it runs on a discontinued engine. But I promise, the game is worth the upfront technical fixes - and if you can't get it working, you can always refund.

I played this game for about 100 hours before dropping off, then came back - several years later - and completed the four "challenge runs" in 16 hours. Honestly? Time well spent. Love this game.

Highly recommended.