Recent reviews by 2ndsights

Would have loved this around 2012...

Visually stunning, diverse gameplay, and interesting music to fit every gorgeous region across Cronos. Runs silky smooth (on ports or right out of the box) on anything even remotely modern, with plenty of Steam guides at your disposal to get you set up in no time.

Note that while HeXen is great from start to finish, don't go in expecting more Heretic. Heretic follows its Doom-y forebears in terms of key-hunting being the core of progression, while HeXen expands upon the simplistic "shoot things and collect three objects" formula with puzzling, backtracking, cryptic hints on how to progress, sprawling multi-area levels, and respawning enemies to keep you on your toes.

But even when you find yourself running in circles with your brain melting out of your ears, you'll find yourself captivated by the music, ambient sounds, and mysterious fantasy environments that was very obviously made by a team of passionate, talented people.

Overall rating: 9 out of 9 obtusely hidden switches

You can pet the cat

Incredibly intense, moody, surreal yet real. Those are the words that initially come to mind fresh off Act 1. FYE pulls a grand sum of zero punches in terms of content but handles it all in a mature, artful way that's still disturbing -- and might have you leaving some lights on tonight. Voice acting is on level with Close Your Eyes, if not better, and the music/audio is fitting, chill, and modern... a hellish audioscape... a deeply harrowing nothingness.... whatever it needs to be, and it does it so well. 3 USD honestly feels like highway robbery. Nothing but praise for Feast Your Eyes -- I can't wait to see where AestheticGamer takes us....

Picross Touch, right out of its digital box, comes with hundreds of puzzles of varied difficulty, and thanks to Steam Workshop, tens of thousands are a click away, with an intuitive editor to create and share your own puzzles and UI palettes as well. This game and userbase also does what many others don't, and caters to all in terms of difficulty -- from the beginners' bite-sized 5x5s to the difficult expanses of the 35x35s.

It also takes full advantage of Steam's cloud save feature, not only auto-saving as you complete puzzles, but allowing you to save and quit in the middle of a puzzle if you'd like to take a break. And if you're into making such a relaxing game into a timed competition, well, the developer has you covered with full Steam Leaderboard functionality.

The only caveat -- if you could call it that -- is that the developer is selling Workshop submissions as 'packs' on the Android and iOS store, as there is no 'Workshop' for mobile users to access. As of posting this, they're currently being sold at 0.79 Euro (0.89 USD) per 600 level pack.

To me, this seems like a simple way for us Steam users to "donate" (aside from money) to the developer for continuing to work on and support a free game, though you may feel differently, so use that information as you will.

All in all, Picross Touch is exactly what it says on the tin. No messing around with ads or paid content, resource-hogging visuals or sounds, or clunky UIs -- just picross as it's meant to be, and completely free.