Recent reviews by Rue

Maybe the best RPGMaker horror game I've ever played, made by someone with a true and genuine appreciation for the art of body horror. You can really see the love poured into every monster design and every strange encounter. Atmospheric, creepy, bizarre, but tempered with light-hearted moments in-between. This game overwhelmingly exceeded my expectations for what it was going to be, in every aspect.

Don't spoil yourself. Play it blind. It's worth it.

Light-hearted horror co-op run-and-loot game. Really great fun with a group of friends. It has the shockingly unique feature of letting you compact yourself down small and hide in cabinets and under small tables. This game is an awesome way to spend an evening with a group of buddies. Not a game for loners.

It's better than both World and Rise. By far the best-feeling of the "modern" monster hunter games. A lot of the armor sets look awesome, and the layered armor glamour system lets me always hunt in style. I don't usually care much about monster hunter storylines, but this one actually had some substance and made me feel like a badass, so I have to give it a surprising bonus thumbs up for that. Great game to play with friends. I have high hopes for eventual content DLCs.

A casual and atmospheric puzzle game where you have to make use of a Groundhog Day time loop to solve and prevent various murders in a fantastical opulent mansion full of masquerade guests. This game has a phenomenal art style and a lovely soundtrack. If I had any complaints, it would just be that it is a very easy game. There are no particularly fiendish puzzles; pretty much all of them are straightforward once you've collected all the information. By the end, I was yearning for one really complicated and elaborate day where everything came together into a huge final puzzle, but unfortunately, this is not the case, and the game remains easy all the way to the end. Mild spoiler: The final loop where you save everyone at once simply plays out in a non-interactive cutscene.

That said, if you're looking for a visually delightful casual puzzle experience with low stakes that you can take your time meandering through, enjoying the scenery, and fully complete in one or two afternoons, you won't go wrong with this one.

An unbelievably good open-world RPG. One of the few games that has managed to make me lose sleep playing it into the night. Before I played this game, I was always resigned to open-world games being mostly flat empty expanses with dotted points of interest. This game is different. Every little portion of the world feels populated and alive. I can't believe how many times I was exploring a beautiful scenic area, only to stumble upon something completely new and unexpected: a hidden merchant, a secret weapon, an entire mini-dungeon, or maybe just a crowd of knights fighting some monsters in a valley.

Of course, this game is famous for being difficult, but truthfully most of that comes from a combination of marketing, and a steadfast refusal on the part of the community to engage with a lot of the game's mechanics. I am not some elite god gamer. Moderately skilled for a casual player is the best I can self-describe. But I've been able to progress through the game with reasonable speed while wearing only outfits I like the look of, using only weapons I think are cool, and leveling up as I see fit without worrying about whatever's "meta".

Everything in this game is so flexible. Even dealing with enemy resistances is easy. If I'm using a fire weapon and I meet a thing that looks like it's already on fire, I can switch my weapon infusion to do some other damage type instead: something that can be done at any grace (checkpoint) instantly for no cost. When I'm having trouble with a tough boss or group of enemies, I can summon an npc with my spirit ashes to help me out. If I'm REALLY having trouble, I can simply go exploring anyplace else and find more gear, more tools, more items, and more levels anywhere I look, coming back stronger when I return.

My only real complaint is that playing this game has raised my standards for how good an RPG (and any open-world game for that matter) could be. It will be so much harder to settle for less going forward.

This is a full and proper expansion to the base game, something you hardly ever see anymore these days. An entire new continent to experience, and an entire additional set of stat scaling, so that you can't walk in at max level and steamroll everything immediately. No P2W, no bloat. This is what DLC should be like. If you loved the base game, this is straightforwardly more of what you love. I wish I could recommend this more than a single thumbs up.

An interesting setting and artistically pretty, colorful environments. Unfortunately, there's hardly any player interaction, and the few scattered puzzles are effortlessly simple. Most of the game is various NPCs expositing information, which makes it more egregious that nearly every single character in this game talks down to you. NPC attitudes range from friendly-but-arrogant "genius" characters who condescendingly recite trivia and expospeak to your character, all the way down to NPCs who are outright abusive. In the latter case, you are told to just suck it up and deal with it, as the character's tragic backstory apparently excuses any wrongdoing on their part.

There's ostensibly a message buried in here somewhere about accepting people as they are, but the delivery comes across as simply saying "sit down, shut up, and let smarter people than you tell you what to do." The crisp art and occasional moment of charming flavor text from interacting with the scenery is just not worth having to trudge through the many hours of toxic sludge this game has prepared. Not recommended.

I played the demo of this game for 40 hours before the full game came out, and I can say with confidence it's only become increasingly addictive since then.

If you were looking for a game where you fiddle with oddly shaped tiles, carefully arranging and rearranging them for ten minutes, followed by watching your finely-orchestrated synergy annihilate somebody in 10 seconds flat, this is the game for you. Personally, I find it very satisfying.

The devs are very active and have been continuously adding new items and rebalancing existing ones. The four available player classes all feel very distinct in how you construct your backpack. The meta changes fairly frequently, and the game manages to stay fresh week after week. Highly recommend.

An addictingly fun roguelite first-person run-and-gun shooter-and-looter. Each run has randomized dungeon layouts, enemy and shop spawns, and so on. Each hero has a pool of different possible current-run-only skills that you can acquire over the course of the run, which, along with the random weapon drops, makes it a sure thing that even the same hero will have different builds between runs. On the roguelite side, you've also got a persistent-between-runs talent tree, shiny achievements, and tons of unlockables for new heroes, difficulties, and game modes, along with new scrolls and weapons to get sprinkled into every subsequent run. The replayability is absolutely immense.The game feels great both in singleplayer and multiplayer. The multiplayer implementation was clearly very carefully thought out, and the polish really shows. The difficulty scales with the number of players, and (rare for a game like this) the amount of scaling actually feels really nicely balanced, neither trivializing fights nor making them frustratingly hard. It genuinely feels like the increased power of having another person on the team is offset by increased enemy spawns and stats just the right amount to make game progress proceed at roughly the same pace no matter how many players you have.Furthermore, when you or your friend go down, the other person can revive them and you can always keep going together, avoiding the "my friend is better than me so now it's a spectator sport" syndrome that other games (cough RoR2) suffer from. It's not easy to build a compelling multiplayer experience into a roguelite game, but Gunfire Reborn definitely cracked the code. Highly recommend.

Where Overcooked is a game about desperately trying to serve meals despite the most hilariously and atrociously laid-out kitchens imaginable, PlateUp puts you in control by letting YOU design (and repeatedly redesign!) the restaurant layouts yourself, with increasingly chaotic and complex requirements as you progress. Simple game mechanics makes it incredibly easy to learn, while the ramping challenge modifiers continually push you to improve and maintain kitchen efficiency.

RNG-based challenge modifiers (tempered with the ability to choose for yourself from the random selection given to you), along with a large variety of different main dishes, side dishes, and desserts gives the game a huge amount of replayability.

Playable with 1-4 people (yes, including solo!) with good challenge scaling based on the number of people. You can also combine local couch and online multiplayer, and your multiplayer progression exp in other people's lobbies carries over to your own file as well, so everyone can get unlocks no matter who the host is. It supports steam remote play as well.

If you have friends who love Overcooked-like chaotic co-op, this is a must-play. Even if you don't have friends, this game is still fantastic as a solo experience. Cheers to them for somehow making it possible to beat this game singleplayer. Highly recommend all around.