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Five years ago, Daniel West posted a post-mortem on Gamasutra about his game, Airscape: The Fall of Gravity. The title of the post-mortem read: "Good isn't good enough - releasing an indie game in 2015". It argued that new titles were so abundant nowadays that if your game was merely "good," it would receive little fanfare and be passed over in favor of more talked-about titles.

Magnia is a good game. But it's not a great one. The 3D light puzzle mechanic consists of piecing together toys and other objects, and it's... fine. The lack of control over the Z-Axis makes some angles fiddly to work with. Sometimes you'll have a satisfying mental "click" when you've figured out how some pieces fit together. The sticks and rings, though, as well as the towers, are so basic that they really feel like you're just going through the motions. The ballista is kinda neat, but the catapult seems buggy and inconsistent.

As of a few days ago, the full price of this game was reduced to $0.99, and for that price the gameplay seems well worth it. If you want a light, casual puzzler, I'd say pick this up.

Achievement hunters, do note that I wasn't able to get two of the achievements to pop. Otherwise, recommended.

I 100%'d Space Crew in about 20 hours, and it's clear to me that a lot of love and effort has been put into it.

The problem, IMO, is that Runner Duck hadn't put enough thought and play-testing into the early game. Although it's a crew management game in the vein of FTL: Faster Than Light, the rhythm of gameplay in Space Crew feels more akin to a Tower Defense title like Kingdom Rush. Moment-to-moment decisions primarily revolve around when to use skills that have cooldown timers, and that means that in the early game - when you've unlocked barely any skills, weapons or upgrades - gameplay mainly consists of raging at your crewmembers for being terrible shots.

Once I was a few hours in, and had unlocked more skills - and perhaps more importantly, the railgun - the gameplay clicked into place and everything felt right. I certainly appreciate the latest patch giving the crewmembers better aim, but I suspect Easy difficulty usage among players will largely taper off several hours in. Oh, and concerning the penalty for ship-wiping being too harsh: 1. You only lose a few missions' worth of upgrades, and 2. You always have the option of exiting to the Main Menu and reloading your save, effectively "save-scumming" if things are going south.

All right, so that's a lot of text about the difficulty. How's the rest of the game? Pretty darn good for a $20 title, I'd say. Let's go back to the Tower Defense comparison for a moment. Like TD games, there's a seemingly endless number of baddies to serve as cannon fodder for your cannons, but once you're set in your optimized strategy and loadout, things can start to feel "samey" rather quickly. In terms of content across missions, things move at a brisk pace; beautiful new vistas and clever game concepts are introduced regularly. The problem is that within each mission, you're required to slog through 4-8 sectors of wave-based combat. By the end of the game, I was so sick of the combat that I'd browse my phone while keeping an eye on my cooldown timers, and that's a real shame. To be clear, though, this is a common problem in most games for me; the game stretches on for so long that the core loop starts to feel like filler. My recommendation would be to cut unlock requirements by 20% across the board, and to significantly reduce the number of combat encounters per mission, especially when returning to base.

Overall, I'd say Space Crew is a worthy spiritual successor to Bomber Crew. Like Bomber Crew, it feels too long. Like Bomber Crew, I shamelessly save-scummed my way through the harder bits. But, like Bomber Crew, I enjoyed my time with it and felt like it was worth the money I spent on it.

Recommended.

I'm rooting for Mike Bithell.

I loved Thomas Was Alone, I enjoyed the first half of Volume and I quite liked Subsurface Circular. All Bithell Games take place within a shared narrative, and it's very compelling to look for how the events of earlier games influence the context of later ones. After two "dialogue simulator" games, Solitaire Conspiracy seems to be an attempt to return to more gameplay-focused, uh, gameplay.

Unfortunately, that gameplay is pretty lacking. Most of the reviews so far can be summed up as, "Buy this game if you like Solitaire!" I would revise that to, "Buy this game if you love Solitaire." It's adequate, and the powers are neat, but so situational I often found myself using them only half the time.

The reward structure is so strange. In the main campaign, you earn bonus points for beating a level within a certain number of turns - but you aren't told what that number is, and there's no indication of whether it changes based on whether RNG gives you a tricky hand. (I encountered quite a few Aces stuck behind Kings.) Once you beat the game you unlock Countdown mode, which throws out the turn-based rewards in favor of a time-based reward system. Countdown is absurdly hard, by the way. I don't know what kind of Speed Chess savants are getting to the top of the leaderboard or whether it's just hackers, but less than half of the people who beat Wave 5 manage to get to Wave 10, and you need to get to Wave 15 to 100% the game.

The art is great, the flavor text is mostly good, the FMV acting is... fine? I saw the first twist coming even before the anagram, and the ending wasn't much of a shock. Greg Miller puts in a good effort, but most of the videos consist of him congratulating you for levelling up while the story is running in place, so there's not much for him to work with. Even the mission descriptions are often underwhelming. Between footraces, fistfights and general faffing about, quite a few of them seem to amount of the good guys getting into a measuring contest with the bad guys. Some are so bizarre (breaking fugitives out of prison in the hopes that they'll volunteer nondescript intel afterward?!) that I legitimately thought some of them might have been planted by the bad guys to dupe the good guys into doing their bidding. Unfortunately, nothing that interesting was going on.

There are so many events alluded to that sound more interesting than the card game you're playing. I wanted to read that manifesto! I wanted to see that space station break-in! But no; different flavor text, same game. It brings me no joy to say that I sometimes wished I was looking through a digital artbook or even a graphic novel rather than just moving cards around. Asking players to imagine that rearranging these cards represents the management and maneuvering of agents in the field strains credulity to its breaking point - and that's coming from someone who was 100% bought in to the idea of a small red rectangle being the liberator of artificial intelligence!

Ultimately, the entire experience left me unenthused, which is a shame. Mike Bithell is completely capable of making videogames that really impress me. Unfortunately, this one didn't.

Not recommended.

Credit where it's due: The premise and presentation of this game are certainly charming. The magic powers you get are useful without being broken, and the levels are varied in themes and mechanics.

The problem is that the systems of reward and punishment just don't feel good.

Losing a life is absolutely miserable. Not because lives are scarce - if anything they're over-abundant - but because it takes so much time to get your upgrades back. Quitting a world mid-run forfeits any gold you've earned retroactively. You want to help the village folk? Go ahead, but know that it will take you that much longer to 100% the grindy late-game achievements. You grinded out 50,000 gold? Congratulations! Go ahead and buy the most expensive item - all it will do is unlock a bad ending.

I am absolutely positive this game would be better reviewed if the progression was reworked as follows:

• All money is cumulative, and never lost (with the exception of gold earned in a single run being lost with a game over). Buildings are fixed (unlocked) in a linear order at logical increments, the final building being fixed at 30,000 gold or so.
  
  
• Instead of being re-purchased after each death, charms unlock when particular buildings are fixed, are not lost, and can be toggled from the pause menu. Stronger charms like magnet and multi-ball are unlocked when the last couple buildings are fixed.

Boom - with properly tuned number values, you've removed all need to grind from this game, made later levels feel less BS (because you're no longer doing them charmless post-death), and made the overall gameplay less punishing. It's too easy now, you say? Make charms enact negative multipliers to the gold earned, and make lives no longer retained across worlds. Now you've got the risk/reward back; you start each world with 5 lives and fewer charms give you more rewards, but a greater chance of game over, and losing everything you earned that run.

Instead, shops are largely irrelevant if you already have the charms, which usually makes them feel like a waste of time and a well-positioned orb. You're incentivized to not fix anything until you have the "Filthy Rich" achievement, and - again - losing a life just feels like you're being massively inconvenienced.

Real talk - if this were sitting at "mixed," I'd probably go ahead and give it a thumbs-up anyway. But at 77% positive, the lack of a horizontal-thumb rating means I'm gonna go ahead and say,

Not recommended.

Spaceland has the look and feel of an activity you'd find on the back of a cereal box. It's not going to blow your mind or anything, but it's a good way to spend 5-15 minutes at a time when you want something decently challenging, lighthearted, and forgettable.

Everything is small-scale. You'll be commanding 1-4 characters and engaging enemies at 1-4 tiles away (maybe up to 8 if you use the sniper). It's all very casual, but in a good way. Each level is self-contained, so there's no need to form campaign-long strategies or internalize byzantine systems of weapons and upgrade trees. I took a months-long hiatus from this game, and was able to pick it right back up, hardly missing a step.

Even at the full price of $15 I'd say it's a solid bargain for the 20-hour runtime. Getting it on sale is a bonus.

Recommended.

I think the best description of Crash would be to call it an interquel "mini-sode." It's about half the length of base Supraland, but because it's got more collect-a-thon fetch quest filler, it feels more like a third of the "stuff." The stuff itself is decent, it won't knock your socks off but it's solid. Lighthearted FPS exploration/puzzles/platforming/combat with occasional moments of frustration when you're stuck.

Commendably, the dev is paying keen attention to consumer feedback. He posted a postmortem analysis in the announcements feed (which I'd highly encourage everyone to read) and has now lowered the base price to a more reasonable $13.99 - unfortunately, this won't show up in wishlist emails the way a 35% sale would've.

Is it worth that price? If you liked Supraland enough that you've read my review thus far, and $14 for 7-13 hours of decent gameplay sounds reasonable to you, I would say yes. It tweaks lots of little things in the gameplay that make it feel distinct from Supraland while still feeling comfortably familiar. Not great, but good.

Recommended.

P.S. I completed the achievements in 12 hours. I have 10 bone-piles uncollected and 1 chest under the metal grates in the starting area that I have no idea how to access.

I think much of the appeal of E3 to laypeople was the sheer spectacle of it all; giant life-sized statues of videogame characters and sets designed to evoke the feeling of being inside the videogame world. Until VR rigs were on the market, it was the closest thing people had to actually inhabiting the virtual realm. Yet most laypeople couldn't access the event, and the professionals in attendance would be eviscerated online if they let the sheer joy of it all cause any hint of bias in their coverage.

Devolverland Expo is a commercial, yes, but it feels more... democratic, somehow. It is an opt-in experience, and it delivers a short but solid FPS/stealth/walking simulator arc. Whatever the budget of this game was, would those dollars really have been better spent purchasing airtime on television? Certainly not.

It's so good, in fact, that it wraps back around to being somewhat of a drawback, oddly. The lavishly-rendered viscera of Carrion's booth made the pixellated graphics of the real game look quaint. The humor of Shadow Warrior 3's goofball-esque trailer was underwhelming after the impressive and imposing environmental composition of its booth, which let the imagery do the talking instead of a weirdly-accented and unfunny protagonist.

After finishing Devolverland Expo, rather than wanting to play any of the featured games, I found myself wanting to play DOOM (2016) and A Machine for Pigs. Devolverland Expo didn't give me a taste of well-executed 2D platforming combat or isometric ARPG, it gave me a taste of well-executed first-person visceral action, and first-person stealth horror.

So now I find myself wanting more of that, which was probably not their aim.

Still. It's free, it's an hour long, and it's solid. Recommended.

P.S. You have to shoot the orange thingy to unlock the security door. Just FYI.

As other reviews mention, this isn't the prettiest game, nor is it likely to knock the sock off of anyone familiar with the genre.

Mechanically, though, it's quite sound. There are a variety of species that have significantly different mechanics, a rank-placement system to reduce grind (it's in the options menu), and a steady influx of new cards to keep things fresh.

Like all card games, the deck can feel overly generous at sometimes and fickle at others, which can result in very "swingy" gameplay when you only have six turns to work with. This swinginess extends to a few overpowered cards, in particular the ones that allow you to move 2 spaces with 1 fuel and the "free move off open space" card. One species is so dependent on a single card in particular (*cough*Normadic Tribe*cough*) that it can feel like success or failure in any given round depends on whether you pull it. But this is easy enough to forgive when the broader gameplay is well-balanced.

I unlocked all species and won 50 rounds in ~17 hours of logged time, I got to 100 wins in 34 hours.

Highly recommended.

It's difficult to review, let alone compare, systems-engineering games. Most Zachtronics games can run well into the double- or triple-digits, and this game inhabits a similar genre. That said, even a mere ~7.5 hours into this game, I'm baffled by the design choices that were made for the gameplay. Here's just a few reasons why:

• The difficulty curve is a nightmarish rollercoaster. Some of the most finicky levels I encountered were followed by single-step puzzles with a solution I'd previously learned.
  
• You're given tools that - so far, in my playthrough - you're very rarely incentivized to use, because they will always be far slower than the simpler functions.
  
• Lore-wise, you're given cutesy flavor text about programming self-driving cars for sentient cats in one level, then Orwellian descriptions of political imprisonment in the next. It's all over the place.
  
• No matter the data you're sorting in-universe, though, 99% of the time it shows up on the UI as red, green, and blue shapes - so why even bother?
  
• Why are performance upgrades even a thing? It raises doubts about whether gold medals can be earned on the first playthrough of the level with clever building, or whether the only choice is to return after upgrading.
  
• If performance upgrades ARE a thing, why also tie exorbitant amounts of money for cutesy decorative tat?
  
• Why are startups essentially "golden parachute simulator?" It isn't fulfilling to try to make perfect code the first time, discover the company is failing anyway, then try to bail before it crashes. Unlike every other level, you're not allowed to try again once the company folds, unless you start a new save file (but then you have to do all the other levels over again).
  
• Why are Schemes faster? Why are DLLs faster? Why?

I could go on. I want to like this game, and I admire the aspirations to educate that no doubt inspire it, but as a product - as a videogame - I'm not having very much fun so far. Looking at the reviews, most people also seem to hit a dozen hours or less before moving on.

I would implore the developers to get really good play-testing of this game, start-to-finish, asking at each point whether things are flowing smoothly. It's been rough going for me so far.

Not recommended.

I'll keep this brief, as I don't expect anyone to read this review, but with the Path of the Ferryman update I can now unreservedly recommend Iris and the Giant.

It's a really well-balanced turn-based deckbuilder with a serviceable story, albeit one that takes forever to fully unlock. I'm at nearly 18 hours and still have two memories to go.

I completed all achievements for this game in about 17 hours. Mercifully, the last achievement popped before I had unlocked every single card - it's possible the new post-launch cards count toward the original goal. If so, I hope that's not patched out.

Highly recommended.