Recent reviews by DrBoklan

Monster Sanctuary is a turn based monster battler with a metroidvania overworld.
It is super polished and very addicting.
Lots of replayability with some super hard optional matches toward the end.
Loved the bestiary component, revisiting areas to try and complete it was fun.

As for the game's weaknesses
- There's a fair bit of grind if you are trying to 100% the game.
- Level caps out at 42 which makes Mob encounters a bit annoying as you need to use multiple turns for each one. This tacks on to the grind element, because often times I'm just trying to farm some resource. The grind itself isn't the problem, it's that there's no way to speed it up because mob encounters are treated the same as any other.

Super cute game. Puzzles are fantastically designed. Very difficult, but incredibly satisfying when you do solve it.
The game is incredibly polished, and it's short enough to work through in a few hours.
Just barely made it through the last puzzle after a day of going back and forth with it.
Subsequently learned that each puzzle could be solved self contained (and I was technically cheating on some of them) which really blows my mind at how difficult some of them are, (I thought thinking out of the box for some of them was the only solution, but I was wrong) penalty is only missing one achievement which is perfect.
Super enjoyable experience, get this if you are a puzzle lover

Pretty good, needs a lot of polish, but base mechanics are fun. 7/10

I played through each of the 6 characters first Dungeons. In total, they span 12 floors and dungeon takes about 1-1.5 hours each at most. Perfect for multiple campaign.

Despite the core mechanic being just rolling dice, I found the strategy of when and where to place die presenting many interesting options to turn even bad RNG in your favor. The game allows for many types of strategies.

Where the game still needs work is balancing. During a campaign the hardest part is definitely the first few floors of a dungeon when you don't have any relics. Once you pick up 4 or 5 relics, you can quickly snowball and plan around combos. When you max out at 12 relics, rarely will you not steamroll any battle, you don't even need to strategize much anymore at that level as you'll have so many dice being rolled each turn due to relics. The final bosses are generally a pushover and definitely needs an HP buff.

Infinite's are super too easy. At time's I'd farm HP from an encounter so I could be better prepared for the next battle. Maybe adding a death mechanic similar to Chocobo Dungeon where the grim reaper appears and chases you down to the next floor if you dawdle.

Ace & Adventures is a single player turn based deck builder with heavy emphasis on meta progression.
You have two decks; a 30 card ability deck and a 52 card standard playing card deck.
You draw up to 5 cards from each, and try to make poker hands to attack and defend against one or more opponents.

There's several viable strategies, but the core strategy the game nudges you towards is to use your abilities to transform your hand into something useful. Cards like Thieves Tools can +1/-1 any card. Other cards allow you change a card's suits or turn any spade into an Ace.

The game suffers from hard early game syndrome, each meta progression pass makes the game much less RNG dependent. I was losing very often in early mission, until I grinded mission 1 a few times, then I blazed through the entire Spring campaign rarely getting hit.

To me the early game is very painful and the late game feels unrewarding.

This game suffers death from a 1000 inconveniences.

* When RNG fails against you in the early game, you need to restart the entire campaign. Versus the late game where you have so many saving throws, you can often make it through an entire campaign without getting hit. All of this is gated behind the level tree which is never explained.
* Wild cards will change to any valid set as you are clicking through. So your four of kind becomes a full house because of the order that you clicked. (Even if it was a four of a kind in your hand)
* Wild Range lets you go +1/-1, but doesn't let an Ace become a 2. This isn't explained.
* When buying from the merchant you can't see your current stats unless you drag the card away.
* Base damage is calculated base on how many cards are in your attacking hand, your straights and four of a kinds deal the same damage. It's just the former is extremely likely to hit and the later is even more likely.
* There's no count for number of cards left in your 52 card deck or the suits, so you are left counting through your discard which can be massive and very densely packed on one line. If you want to see what's the odd the next card draw is a club, there's no easy way.
* Rarely any hint of when a shop will appear. The currency is ability cards so when you know of an upcoming merchant you should play defensively until you max out your hand size.
* Punishing the players choices, I was offered either a interesting item or a level up in one of the stages. Later on I was offered a useless restore or a level up, but I was already max level. If I had taken the item previously I could've used the later one to level up.
* Certain things don't have table markers (or they do and I didn't see them) (Eg. Multiple attacks still have a single attack token, Safe attack)
* Story is bad. I have no idea why they bothered getting a VA. Your choices are just guesses on your first play-through, there's no hints about which enemies are on the other side of the choices.
* Your choices can have you take damage without even being in battle, this is so dumb.
* I wouldn't say your starting deck has useless cards, but there's too many dead cards that pull you in conflicting directions.

Captures the childhood nostalgia feel perfectly. Love the battle royale mode, but be prepared to lose, everyone is really good!

Initially I didn't think I would like this game, but it definitely grew on me as the world expanded and more and more complexities were added. I took a part in the original Humble Bundle so it's very cool to see all those characters in a game together showing off their unique skills through great level design. Has a fantastic nostalgia factor.

There are some serious flaws though. The game lacks a bit of polish as clipping into walls was frequent and I can sometimes go out of bound on certain stages (Dustforces wallkick can get me into places I think the dev forgot about). The game also has bad support for ultrawode monitors as it automatically full screened for me and I couldn't find a menu option to get it to run windowed. It's 90% playable, but sometimes the way it crops the game does sometimes hide critical puzzle elements leaving me stuck guessing where the key might be.

Edit: Turns out there is an option to run windowed, it was just cropped out in full screen. If your using an ultrawide press F on the main map to enter options to switch to windowed mode, hope this helps someone.

Darkwood is a brutal survival horror game with crafting elements.
You spend your days collecting resources and advancing the storyline and your nights defending your homebase.

It's definitely stronger on the horror side then on the crafting side, as I'm finding myself sweating bullets each night,
but cursing the game every time I'm short just one plank of wood or unit of gasoline,
as each trip out puts you in danger and you have no idea where to find the resources you need.

Darkwood strongest point is it's incredible atmosphere and it does its storytelling really well when you encounter those events, the playable prologue had me on the edge of my seat.

Unfortunately it falls flat due to it's own mechanics right after the prologue, as it part open world game, but you quickly realize how closed off everything is. It's "open" in the sense that the maps are procedurally generated, but the game has an artificially slow pacing due to areas being gated by resources.

Managing the scarce resources is quite difficult as a new player as it's a balancing act as with many of the systems in the game. You need light to be able to survive at night, but you need fuel in the generator to power the saw. Resources don't respawn and are sometimes guarded by wolves which you need to avoid until you get a suitable weapon.
The earliest weapon a nail with boards, requires a working saw.

Minor Spoilers Ahead, I'm sure I'm missing something, but In order to exit the first major area, I need access to a Moltov cocktail to burn the infestation. This requires a level 3 Workbench, this needs multiple boards, nails and a toolbox,
It feel like a lot of the horror element is sacrificed when I'm spending multiple days looking for gasoline in order to power the generator in order to create the boards, to finally be able to upgrade the workbench, so I can make the Molotov.
All of this while remembering not to use up too much gasoline as you need to power the lights when it gets dark.

In addition I can understand that it improves the horror aspect to minimize UI, but to me the realistic day/night cycle and mapping system are super annoying. Running out of daylight means certain death if your not in your base and not knowing how much time you have left just adds another element of things to keep track of, which personally I hate.

Overall a polished game with many complex systems, but I find it's really difficult to keep track of all of them in tandem. This games not for me, but if your looking for a difficult survival crafting game and you're okay with a bit of initial grinding, the horror side is really well done and worth checking out for fans of the genre.

Eliza is a wonderful story that shines a light on many of the fears of artificial intelligence.

Eliza plays as a kinetic Novel with branching ending, but it works quite well with the theme of self autonomy. You're not allowed to deviate from the script and the few instances where you can rebel make your decisions feel meaningful. Eliza's strongest part is it's incredibly well written and researched story. As someone who works in technology, I felt a lot of my personal bias's challenged and it opened up a lot of new concerns regarding Artificial Intelligence and it's deeper and deeper integrations with our everyday lives.

In one particular chapter you are granted permission to view the contents of a client's email and texts. The transparency program is completely opt-in only, client's must explicitly choose to enter the program. Even still I began to question the morality of it. When everything your client has tried so far has failed, and you dangle the possibility of a solution in front of them, if they only give up their privacy, how is that ethical?

Eliza is full of stories that will challenge your notions of what part technology should play in our lives.

Short and enjoyable Hidden Object Game. Puzzles were not too difficult, clues and hinting were well done. The sliding puzzles were my favorite as it exercised my lateral thinking for a bit. The hidden object puzzles felt unique by having me combine items to create the listed one. Ran into one or two bugs, but I was able to continue after restarting the game. I'm pretty happy with the length, but I've played a few HOGs that were really drawn out. Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of the genre.

Teenage Blob is punk rock album with mini games to play as you jam out to it's amazing soundtrack.
I played this game during Steams Indie Festival and fell in love with it's world.
I love how it captures the early 2000s so well, the music, the fashion, the style, the inside jokes!
The whole experience was like taking a time machine back when Punk Rock was everywhere.

It's short but all of the mini-games have an addicting, lets try one more time, quality,
You'll comeback to replay the game just to hear the soundtrack, but wind-up trying to perfect your score along the way.

Highly Recommended!