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If this game is Dark Souls, it makes me much less excited to ever play those games.

Brume is a game about punishing the player. You are punished for swinging your weapon while the enemy is just out of range, you are punished for blocking (even with full stamina, in some cases), you are punished for running instead of opting for the painfully slow walk, you are punished for dodging certain attacks too early, you are punished for dodging very similar-looking attacks too late, and you are punished for using a core mechanic in the game that you are forced to learn in the tutorial. A core mechanic that becomes next to useless in the late-game anyway, unless you feel like taking long walks back and forth to farm enemies.

Enemies in this game rotate instantly, some are capable of blocking less than a second after attacking (their recovery frames are fewer than yours, just... why?), and their attacking movement often places them at an uncomfortable distance where you have to move into range before attacking, giving them more time to block or counterattack.

And even if you put up with all of that, there's an achievement locked behind a mode where you do only 1 HP of damage per hit to the strongest enemies, meaning some of them could take forever to defeat even with perfect play.

What an unpleasant game.

Not recommended.

The Hour of the Rat takes place in a single level - in any other game, this would be the final level, where you put your knowledge of enemies, techniques and strategies to the test. This game throws you straight into the deep end and says "figure it out." This wouldn't have been so bad on its own - there's an element of satisfaction from incremental improvement, as the Rogue-like genre shows us.

But there is so, so much that gets in the way of having a satisfying experience with this game.

• The "skid jump" mechanic feels wildly inconsistent, resulting in unreliable jump length and speed
  
• There are many jumps that require a "double jump" item, which makes the standard jump feel inadequate and frustrating
  
• Half of the ninjas can't use the "double jump" item at all, and is difficult to acquire for the other half
  
• Roughly 1/3rd of the level cannot be accessed without either using the double jump or passing through the endgame area
  
• The platforming is unforgiving and will often plummet you to the ground, which only worsens the above problems

This is a rough game, in more ways than one. It's a shame, because you can actually see the seed of something really good, here. The Messenger, published by Adult Swim earlier this year, shows that games based off of the tight combat of Shinobi for the NES can be expanded and refined into really proper gaming experiences. It is really remarkable that The Hour of the Rat was developed by a single person over the span of a mere two months, and when it's good, it's great. I just wish it were consistently good.

Not recommended.

P.S. I wasn't a fan of the shaky-cam.

There are things about Ollie & Bollie I like: The non-linear format, the versatility of certain mechanics, the co-op emphasis.

There are also things I dislike: The lack of conveyance, the bugs, the poor AI. (I had to use 2P mode to build the shed.)

There's a really good game in here, somewhere. If you're patient and have a co-op partner to play with, it's probably worth $3.

For everyone else, it's a bit too rough for a thumbs-up.

Not recommended.

This is a quintessential Sokpop game: Simple mechanics done decently well with a small scope and cute graphics.

Watch the trailer. You can plan on about an hour's worth of that, give or take.

Recommended at a price point you're comfortable with for ~1 hour playtime on your first playthrough.

P.S. I encountered a bug in one of my runs where the locked chests were empty. Unfortunately, if you encounter this, your best course of action is to restart and hope it doesn't happen next time.

After a few false starts, I beat bobo robot in 36 minutes. Two following attempts at speedrunning managed 16 min and 14 min respectively.

It's fine - nothing spectacular but nothing terrible. The mechanics are very standard, don't expect anything fancy.

I wouldn't pick this one up for full price. Recommended at the price point you feel is worth ~40 minutes of gameplay.

I got absurdly lucky in Bandapes: I happened across three units that could all attack with the same two-beat command.

Each time you attack in Bandapes, the opponent's unit is stunned for a few seconds, and any queued actions are discarded. Two of my units had a quick-attack with a one-beat cooldown - this meant I could launch two attacks every third beat. But that's not the worst part: The worst part is that the computer-controlled units could still attack me first in every battle. So clearly there are some shenanigans going on.

There's no rhyme or reason to which units select opponent to attack, so any attempts at strategy are ill-fated - it's entirely possible the first three enemy attacks will target a single one of your units, and they'll be KO'd before they have any chance to defend. Even if they do, defending only increases the chance of dodging, Your best bet is to spam attacks. And until you can spam attacks, you're just hoping the next primate that comes your way will mesh with your current roster somehow.

Even in my absurdly lucky, steamrolling-the-opposition, max-rank-in-half-hour situation, I still didn't find the gameplay very compelling, because I was just spamming attacks over and over again - which, as I established earlier, is the optimal strategy. I also encountered a few crashes. So... yeah.

Not recommended.

Here's the problem with Good Goods Inc.: If you like this game, you are doomed to eventually dislike this game.

There's no efficient process for transferring goods between vehicles at all, and no way to easily check prices of different goods. This means that you'll want to grow your company, but the UI won't let you. You have 30 items loaded on an airplane that need to get to the spot right next to your airport? Guess what, you need to click the "drop" button on the airplane 30 times, and then manually load it into delivery vans.

If the process of buying, transferring and transporting goods could be automated, and the formula for buying/selling prices of goods could be improved, this would make a top-tier game. Managing a global network of transport by land, sea and air sounds great. Instead, it's a game of constant frustration where your path to real growth is obstructed by the UI and controls.

Not recommended.

There are two ways to play Sokbots: PvP, and PvE. They are actually nothing alike.

In PvP, you are aiming to damage your opponent as possible as quickly as you can; the arms race is for damage output and turns into a game of feints and bluffs to drain their shields.

In PvE, you are facing an infinite number of slowly spawning low-level bots; you initially see how high of a score you can get before running out of health, reach a point where you run out of battery instead, and then try to balance the two.

I can't speak confidently about PvP, but in PvE there are two key issues:

1. Most weapons aren't worth their battery drain, and
   
2. Most >$0 parts aren't worth the increase to your repair costs.

This means that unless you're swimming in cash (which you eventually are), you'll opt for a box for your chassis and standard spikes for your melee. This isn't a dealbreaker; in fact this is still a pretty solid game in spite of that. But it's worth pointing out.

Also, the cool arenas in the trailer are only for PvP, sadly. For PvE, you're stuck in a flat boring walled area.

Still, with those caveats - recommended. If you can, buy this one for yourself and a friend, so you'll have a PvP partner to arms race with.

This is a short, surprisingly decent game about caring for penguins.

As with any living animal, this mainly means feeding them and cleaning up their poop.

I was done with it in about 20 minutes. Recommended at a price point you think is worth that runtime.

I was done with this game in exactly five minutes.

The visuals are good, the gameplay is fair. Nothing mindblowing.

It's not bad, but it's extremely short.

Recommended at whatever price point you think is worth five minutes.