Recent reviews by MellowTigger

This is a sort of city-builder sim game, but with a twist. You build a magic school. You train students and hire teachers while simultaneously using magic to repel a destructive fog and fight off monsters and their incursions. I liked the artwork and enjoyed several of the animations too much. I'm looking at you, lava pig.

The building process is generally quite easy, and completing an enclosed wall/roof/floor structure will automatically fill in appropriate wall appearance for the kind of room. What kind of room is the enclosure? That depends on many factors, including the room's geometry and what items are placed inside the room. This room creation process is a nice addition to the familiar process from other games.

As I practiced more with schedules, task priorities, and food permissions, they all became familiar processes too. The one thing that still feels a little "off" is the pace of acquiring/hiring/graduating mage students. I always seem to slow down too much, which makes some other goals much slower to achieve.

It's still in early access, getting new features, and getting bug fixes. It's very playable even in its current state. it plays well on Linux Mint with Proton. It definitely would benefit, however, from added support for controllers so this game could be enjoyed on the Steam Deck too.

I played the original games (Pharoah / Cleopatra) extensively back when they first came out, and this game is a faithful recreation of it. There are settings that let you play just like the original, or toggle them off (worker pool) for an improved experience. I find myself returning to the same notes I made more than a decade ago to help me organize my cities while playing this new game. The military section is still a bit lackluster, but I'm hopeful that the developer will improve it over time. I'm so glad to have a useful update to a very old favorite game of mine.

Oxygen Not Included (ONI) is one of the most challenging base building games I have ever played, but it's also quite rewarding. While the mechanics are simple enough, the true complexity of the game physics doesn't become apparent until those physics have unrolled for great durations of time. For example, it's easy enough to heat or cool a small room, but you don't realize until later that you need to manage heat globally. Like climate change, the trends that you create now will affect you later and perhaps require even greater technologies to overcome. While you learn the game, those adorable minions are fun to watch as they labor through their work day.

You can find many tutorials online that will help you create some technological contraptions. They're fun to watch, but you don't NEED them to play your game well. Many of them are too complicated to easily follow along. Use technologies as your imagination leads you. That's the real genius of this game. You can strip mine resources or preserve them as much as feasible. It's your choice. You decide how to play the game and what "goal" you wish to pursue. After 1,000 hours in ONI, I still have 5 Steam achievements unfulfilled. I'm working on them now... at my own pace.

I said earlier that the mechanics are simple. That's true enough in the early and mid game, with one glaring exception. It's never clear to me what the priority of liquid flow should be in pipes at some junctions. There are fancy ways to use the pipe bypass, and I always have to investigate them online whenever I need them. It's not obvious what happens from the icons used on the screen. I wish the developers could improve those icons to offer hints as to what physics the player can expect from pipe connections.

For anyone just starting out the first time, I have a few pearls of wisdom to offer for DAY ONE of your new colony:
1) Build bathrooms/latrines now. Don't wait. Do it now. You don't want your inhabitants to pee on the floor (or in your water supply), and they absolutely will.
2) Don't gather more than a few inhabitants until you've seen how your current infrastructure works after dozens of "cycles" (game days). I've played to 1,000 cycles, and I still have only a dozen inhabitants total. Start with 4 then see how they fare. As you learn to handle oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, and heat, then you can add more people, then accomplish your colony tasks faster with all of the extra helpers.
3) Place your first 2 science stations on each side of the portal. The portal has a small light on top, and it will give you a productivity bonus at the stations placed under its helpful glow. It offers free lighting with no cost in electricity or heat, so make use of it!
4) Dig downward as needed to let the carbon dioxide float to the bottom where it is out of your way. You'll learn later how to make better use of the troublesome gas, but for now just let it sink to the bottom of your map. Don't dig farther than you need to. Opening more of the map to visibility will also open you up to more heat management issues, so dig downwards as needed. But dig upwards as fast as you can. You will need the "sky" sooner than you think, so keep going upwards as you learn the skills needed to break the harder rocks you encounter.

Have fun! Your duplicants are here to entertain you as they (and you) work to solve their sustainability troubles.

P.S. I've played on Linux Mint since I first bought the game, and it has worked wonderfully.

With over 600 hours of gameplay completed, you can guess that I like this game. I skipped it for 4 years due to the initial bad rollout, but it's definitely a worthwhile game now. It also plays well on Linux Mint today, although it sometimes had major issues during the last year. (It would help if the devs would work with Valve on Steam Deck compatibility. Hopefully that effort is coming.)

This game is very much about exploration and discovery. There are star systems to encounter, planets to roam, creatures and plants to identify, and starships to find. It's all procedurally generated, meaning that the sheer variety provides opportunity for exploration that never truly ends. When you find a place that you like, you can also construct a home base for yourself with a thorough collection of parts available to you.

There are many ways to acquire wealth in the game. The duplication of paths to riches means that you can play the game as it suits you, not restricted by a particular method favored by a developer. Harvest raw inorganic resources, or craft food products, or assemble tech products, or run various missions, or... you get the idea. Play the game in a way that suits you!

There is some combat, but it's minor. You will never be a combat hero in this game, and I am glad of that distinction. For example, the enemies you fight are infinite in number, so you can never actually defeat them. You fight them to accomplish a particular small goal, if necessary, and then you run away. Running away is always the final step of combat. Run away, or eventually die to the infinite spawn. I like this solution to combat. It reinforces the idea that your purpose here is to indulge your imagination by finding new vistas to explore (and sometimes to build in).

This lesser-known city building game really should be recognized as a classic of the genre. Taking less than 200MB of drive space, it delivers a challenging survival simulation. And it runs well on Linux with Proton compatibility.

Harvest native foods (but don't overharvest), build new homes to avoid a population crash as your people grow too old to have more children of their own, prepare space for potential nomads to join your community (else they will freeze in winter and die), buy seeds and livestock so you can start your own production. Be sure to keep your people well stocked in fuel for their home fires and clothes for when they are outside. The winters can be deadly.

The only real bug in the game that was never addressed is the population breeding problem. Households do not "reset" to better optimize use of homes for raising families. You can end up with houses taken only by single widows/widowers, while potential new couples are stuck living single in their parents house. Get around it by freezing time, marking all homes for demolition, turn on time again so that people have to vacate their houses, then slowly un-mark those demolitions so people move back in again. This time, there will be better optimization, so you don't have to drastically overbuild houses, risking a population worse boom/bust cycle.

Otherwise, very simple and very fun.

Godhood is a small and innovative game. It's a curious combination of simulation, strategy, and god game. It's not heavy on the city-building aspect (although you do see your city grow). Instead, it's more of a fun exploration of how a civilization's characteristics might change over time. You create your own religion, and you add new customizations to it over time as your population grows. The religion determines what skills your villagers have. You grow your religion by converting other people to your cause during challenges that happen at the end of each "turn" of the game. Your villagers try to outperform your opponents using skills that are either physical or social in nature. The stylized "combat" turns take place in the center of a stage while both sets of villagers watch the team performance. Think "Lucha Libre" entertainment.

They released a Linux client, which worked well and can still be played. The studio eventually scaled back, though, and dropped ongoing support. Thankfully, the Windows version also plays well in Proton on my Linux Mint 20 machine.

I did not understand the game at all. Cards appeared, cards disappeared, timers counted down, icons appeared. No explanation or coordination. Just baffling.

Runs great on Linux Mint, though.

Plays well on Linux in Proton version (currently beta) 5.9. Unfortunately requires UPlay account and login, but at least you get UPlay points from playing the game this way, which allows you to buy custom cosmetic changes. I bought the llama mount.

HOMM7 avoids the randomization of earlier hero skills during level-up in favor of fixed traits. It's impossible to build exactly the hero you want this way (while fighting the random number generator of HOMM5), but at least you know what you're getting when you select a hero.

This "Trial by Fire" version features a dwarven campaign. Each hero I've seen so far includes the Fire skill tree, but the cities produce mage towers only to level 2. You have to acquire higher spells by other means.

This title does not work on Linux, not even with the latest (currently beta) version 5.9 of Proton. The UPlay requirement is a hindrance, because it remains contantly "Looking for patches". Stick with "Might & Magic 6" for the best old gameplay.

Does not work in Linux, not even with the latest (currently beta) version 5.9 of Proton. How can something this old not work with compatibility tools?