Recent reviews by Grim

tl;dr Parkitect is a dedicated and very well-made spiritual successor to the classic Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2, and if you liked those games you'll likely love Parkitect. The management gameplay is great, and the creation tools are robust enough to make things that look good, without being overwhelmingly complicated.

A quick breakdown:

• Like in the classic RCT games, you create your park by placing rides, paths, and shops down on a square grid. The game is viewed from a bird's-eye camera that can be set to rotate freely or snap to the classic isometric diagonal angles.
  
• Decoration now plays a larger role in your park's design compared to the classic RCT games. Guests enjoy being in well-decorated areas, which raises their Immersion stat. Most decorations can be placed off-grid, meaning your aesthetic taste is less restricted than in the older games, and it's very easy to make something that looks good even just using the pre-made assets.
  
• Shops must now be supplied by hiring Haulers to carry boxes from your shipping center near the park entrance. The Depot, a new utility building, may be placed within your park and connected to the shipping center via an underground pipeline to lessen the walk time of your Haulers; However, when a guest can see a Depot or a Hauler carrying supplies, they lose Immersion and happiness. The game design encourages you to create employee only areas behind shops, and hide the employee only paths and the Depot with fences, trees or other decorations.
  
• The campaign mode provides you with a map that steadily reveals itself as you unlock levels, otherwise operating similarly to the classic RCT levels. Objectives include "Have 500 guests in your park", "Sell 800 entry tickets", "Have X amount of money", "Sustain Y profit for 3 consecutive months", "build a coaster with certain stats" and "have no loan debts", with the average level having 3 objectives. Clearing a level earns you a medal, and a second medal can be optionally achieved by completing the objectives within a certain amount of time, e.g. "before June, Year 2" (harkening back to the original RCT games, where all levels were time-restricted). The map periodically splits off to provide multiple choices, and when paths converge, you must have a certain amount of medals, giving you the option to either clear every level available, or to earn secondary medals to cover the difference.
  
• Clearing a park in campaign mode adds it to the Sandbox mode, where you can choose to play without money restrictions, without needing to research anything, and without objectives; or you can choose to toggle on any of the three at your leisure. At the game's start, a few empty, flat sandbox parks of varying sizes, and some featuring additional terrain features such as a river, are already unlocked.

Compared to Planet Coaster, the other big theme park management simulator you may or may not be considering: My personal experience is that Parkitect trades off a little bit of creative freedom in exchange for a smoother, more streamlined management game. PC allows for much more detail, but I found it easy to get lost in the weeds and difficult to create something that looked as good as I desired mostly because there was too much freedom and too many requirements to make something seem good. Parkitect is more straightforward, and its restrictions help to put less focus on the minute details and more on creating an efficient park, while still allowing the player to create something that looks nice within the game's art style. (Also, Parkitect is less resource-intensive too!)

They're both good games, but if you're really looking for something that will remind you of the original Roller Coaster Tycoon, or if you want something where you can focus more on the money than the aesthetics, Parkitect is the one I'd choose.

Best of luck in your tycoon endeavors!

Baba Is You is one of those weird game concepts that comes out of nowhere despite seeming obvious in retrospect, and while some of the puzzles can be INCREDIBLY obtuse thanks to the nature of the game, it's a concept that's incredibly well executed.

The core gameplay is to put an object that IS YOU (e.g. controlled by the player character) onto the same tile as an object that IS WIN. You can only move up/down/left/right or wait for a turn, allowing any object that IS MOVE to take a single step forward; There is no "interact" button. A set of Words on every stage can be pushed (like boxes in traditional block-pushing games) to create Rules which then apply universally to everything in the level. No objects have any inherent meaning; A wall will only become solid if "WALL IS STOP" is written, either horizontally or vertically, somewhere in the level.

There are ten worlds in the game, most of which introduce one new concept and use it throughout (later worlds occasionally have multiple concepts, which are explored in isolated subsections). The game does a very good job at the setpiece/antepiece relationship; The early levels in any given world will usually be straightforward puzzles, steadily growing more complex, allowing you to ease into a concept without needing it to be explicitly described to you.

Predictably, some of the later worlds can be ruthlessly difficult as concepts are blended together and reused in clever ways. Almost no two puzzles are alike; It feels like every level has a distinct solution from the rest, to the game's benefit. However, I'd advise not looking up details about the game before playing; There may be a few surprising secrets that you want to wait and see about…

Highly recommended. The game looks simple for $15, but there's far more than enough content for it to be worth it if you like unusual puzzlers.

Donut County is a well-executed concept with only a smattering of real "flaws".

If you don't already know, the basic premise of the game is that you control a hole in the ground, consuming objects by making them fall in and growing the hole in turn. Unlike similar "collect to grow" games such as the genre-spawning Katamari Damacy, Donut County's levels are more puzzle-like, rather than being free-form collect-a-thons.

By and large, each stage has its own gimmick in the pursuit of making an increasingly larger void. One stage requires you to use a snake's tail sticking from the hole to scare chickens onto the ground; Another sees you launching fireworks to break parts of the stage; Another still has you cooking soup. Stages are typically self-contained, most of them taking place in a set of "screens" that are automatically moved between as you complete each one.

That is one of the game's few flaws; If you approach it from the perspective of a Katamari Damacy fan, you'll likely find a very different game than you wanted. By design, there are very few secret objects, because the levels typically only progress when you've collected everything there is to collect. There is no time limit to race against, and the levels sometimes feel more like a vehicle for the story, as there is no fear of failure until the final stages. Still, the game clearly takes its inspiration from the series; Between stages, you get the chance to look at the "trashopedia" which lists descriptions of the objects you've collected, in similar fashion to the collections in KD.

However, regardless of how close it is to the KD formula, Donut County succeeds on its own merits when decoupled from that expectation. Not only are the levels entertaining to play and consistently unique, but from a design standpoint mechanics are introduced well and allowed to be learned through experimentation, steadily getting more complex over time. The story of the game is simple, but easy to appreciate, and the writing is entertaining.

Truth be told, the only real problem I have with the game is that it's short, a few hours. Hope for a sequel someday.

It's short. It's free. It's a competent bite-size platformer. Why not?

Downwell is a perfect example of a simple concept done exceedingly well.

It's something of a reverse shoot-em-up: Rather than steadily scrolling upward and firing bullets at enemies above you, the game is a platformer entirely centered around downward movement. Bouncing on enemies doesn't launch you especially high, as it would in Mario; Wall jumping is possible, but cannot be chained and is tricky to use to actually climb upwards; and your Gunboots (which can only fire downward) carry just enough recoil to stop your descent momentarily, allowing you to drift from side to side and stomp on enemies.

There are four worlds, each broken up into three levels, and at the end of each level you can select an upgrade. Downwell is unique, as far as roguelikes go, in that all of its upgrades are solely beneficial; the worst of them are mediocre, such as the Apple (which gives you +4 HP exactly once) or Gem Sick (which increases the max size of your "Gem High" bar, which increases your attack power when active, and is not difficult to maintain).

Throughout the levels, you can find "Time voids" which freeze time while you're in them. The time voids lead to side areas which can either contain Gun Modules, crystal piles, or shops. Gun Modules let you change your gun type, and also add 1 health or increase your Charge (ammo); there are seven guns, ranging from the bog-standard Machine Gun, to the powerful but charge-munching Shotgun and Laser. The shop carries items which allow you to regain Health, increase your max Charge, or, rarely, increase your max health (which can also be done by overfilling your HP gauge four times).

All in all, though, the game runs on simplicity. It uses only three colors, but contains over 30 alternate palettes which can be unlocked by accumulating Gems over multiple runs. The sprites, as such, are specifically designed so that you can take a glance and immediately understand what you're looking at: Gun modules are marked with a single letter (which you'll soon become acquainted with), the harmless scenery is white, enemies you can stomp on are red and white, while enemies you can't stomp on are primarily red. There are only a few enemies, with behaviors that are simple enough that you can always tell what they're about to do as soon as you register their presence. Once you're used to the game, it becomes a kind of zen as your brain can automatically process what's happening without you even needing to think about it.

For a $3 game, Downwell is absolutely worth it. If you're not convinced from the review, go watch some videos and see what I mean. You'll very quickly know whether or not it's your kind of game just by looking at it.

A brief review:

Opus Magnum is a Zachtronics game that isn't quite like Zach's usual fare. While similar in style to his previous Steam game, SpaceChem, in that you're assembling atoms together to form a certain product, Opus Magnum's main story mode is considerably easier than the rest of his puzzle games for two reasons:

• Inputs are fixed: Unlike in all of Zach's other Steam releases (TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, SpaceChem, Infinifactory), there is no variance and no concept of branch control either. Levels are much less of a headache in this sense. Your only goal is to create an arrangement of items and a sequence of commands which will produce the desired output using entirely predictable repetition.
  
• There are no limits: The playing field is far larger than any reasonable solution should require, as is the programming area. If there is a limit, it's inordinately large. Neither price nor time nor surface area have an impact on your success and serve only as a method to rank yourself against other players (though this aspect is similar to the other games). The only limitation is in the postgame campaign and certain bonus puzzles in the Journal, which contain "Production Engines" that are severely limited in space. There aren't even achievements about completing levels with special requirements, as seen in Spacechem, Infinifactory and TIS-100.

In this sense, Opus Magnum is, in certain ways, easier than Zach's other games. You're given free reign to complete your task, and most everything can be solved very "clumsily" if you're willing to work through the tedium, something that can't be said about certain other Zachtronics games.

That being said, don't believe that Opus Magnum is an "easy" game. It's a solid, tricky puzzler through and through, and one whose puzzles might take you some time before the "a-ha" moment. But it's also not as infamously difficult as Spacechem, and won't leave you dumbstruck and scrambling for "one last hack" nearly as long.

If you've played Zachtronics before: Get it, it's a solid Zachtronics game, but it may be a bit easier than you remember.
If you haven't: Get it - as the "simplest" Zachtronics game, it's the easiest introduction to Zach's style.

A lot's been said about Enter the Gungeon, so I'll keep it brief: EtG is probably one of my favorite roguelikes, ever. It has a fantastic item variety, it's hard as heck, and I'm probably going to be playing it until the day I die.

Go shoot some bullets.

Portal Stories: Mel is a fantastic side-story to Portal and namely Portal 2, especially for a free mod. It features clever puzzles (which can be played both in normal mode and a slightly easier 'story mode'), entertaining writing, and map design that feels right at home with the professionally-made Portal 2. It's a completely free mod, so there's nothing to lose - but having played through it, it's easily worth $5 or so. If you like Portal and Portal 2 especially, you'll like Portal Stories: Mel.

If klocki were priced much higher than it is, I'd have to give this a thumbs down. But the fact of the matter is, the game is very good for its price.

klocki is a simple game: Make all the tiles activate by swapping, rotating, sliding, etc. Some tiles are 'wires' that need to be connected with no loose ends. Some tiles are black boxes that will turn into white circles when they're isolated from other tiles of their kind. Some tiles are circular and rotate on their axis; later levels will have you rotate entire chunks of the level to connect the lines.

It's a short game, so don't expect to spent a whole day playing klocki. And it's not massively challenging, either. All the levels can be solved with a little critical thinking and a solid thought process. But for a dollar it's a pleasant little experience and more than worth the money if you like simple puzzles and have nothing else to use that spare buck on.

This game is hard to review because it fills a very specific niche, even compared to Zachtronics' usual fare. So, before proceeding in this review, I have three questions:

Are you good at thinking outside the box?
Would you buy a game if you couldn't complete it in a couple weeks after buying it?
Can you play a game with no music, minimal sound and a bare-bones interface?

If you answered no to any of these questions, TIS-100 is not a game for you.

That out of the way, TIS-100 is still a great game. Just not for everyone. TIS-100 has 50 puzzles, each of which gives the player a goal: Take a series of numbers from up to 4 inputs, manipulate the data, and then send results to the outputs. As usual, Zach starts the player off easy, introducing concepts one at a time, and then quickly ramps up the difficulty and forces the player to test their skills with little "down time". Players will find themselves selecting maxes, sorting sequences, calculating mathematical operations and in the later stages even drawing onto a limited-color pixel canvas in accordance with the data.

Though some puzzles are incredibly difficult, even for someone with a programmer's mind like myself, Zach gives a reprieve - the player is not required to complete every puzzle in sequence to proceed; they can cherry-pick puzzles and unlock each row one by one just by completing a certain number of segments. If a particular puzzle is too difficult, the player can just choose to come back to it later. And even after the player completes a stage, there's plenty of replay value - like other Zachtronics games, each stage gives the player metrics on their performance - how many instructions they used, how long it took the program to complete the puzzle, and nodes used. After a puzzle is completed, the player gets to see how they stacked up to the data of other players, meaning there's always room for improvement.

If you're not worried about being unable to complete the game and you enjoy racking your brain for unconventional solutions, I'd definitely reccommend TIS-100.