Recent reviews by Illusori

Fun if short narrative clicker. It's only about two hours of gameplay, about twice what's in the demo. And the progression of mechanics is unfortunately not that interesting from a gameplay perspective. The price is a bit high for a game with such a short run-time compared to other similarly priced games, but on the other hand the soundtrack is probably worth the price alone.

Did I have fun playing it? Yes. Am I likely to play through it again after a single 2 hour play-through? Probably not other than to load the final chapter save and see if there's some alternate endings possible.

It's a tentative recommend if you liked the demo, but be prepared to basically only get extra storyline... the new mechanics in the full game aren't in any sense meaningful or different to the game as seen in the demo.

Fun game but abandoned due to developer health issues. At this point it's been longer without an update than it was being actively updated.

That said, did I get a couple of quid's worth of enjoyment out of the content that's there? Yes. It's good value for money, but unfortunately in an unfinished state.

On balance I'm giving it a thumbs up because even with that unfinished state it's still value for money, and enjoyable. But with the strong caveat that if you want the narrative to be finished and completing games is important to you, it may leave you annoyed.

The game itself is an interesting visual-novelesque incremental based around automating your path through a choose-your-own-adventure style story, with each loop giving you bonuses to the completed steps. This approach exposes some interesting mechanics compared to many other idler/incremental games, some of which end up having important counter-intuitive ramifications as you get deeper into the game.

This makes it a bit more thoughtful than some other incrementals, but can also lead to frustration when in the later stages multiple counter-intuitive mechanics end up trapping you in a situation where the fact that you're improving actually makes your progress harder. Once you figure these bumps in the road out and change your strategy it stops being an issue, but I suspect many people, after having been trained by multiple hours of gameplay that "getting better is getting better" are going to be a little miffed by the feeling of "getting better now appears actively harmful, and your goal is getting further away on each loop".

Some of this could be mitigated by some tutorialisation or a smoother introduction of the new concepts, but unfortunately most of this is in the final couple of chapters of the game which were the last updates before things dried up, so it may never happen - and it's possible a number of users will give up in frustration and feel the game has been left in a broken state rather than merely an unfinished one.

Hopefully I'll be proven wrong and once the developer returns to health they'll return to development, but reading of the old devblogs talking of 80+ hour weeks, I doubt (and honestly hope) that such an unsustainable pace belongs firmly in the past.

Fantastic story-driven top-down space exploration game. While freedom of exploration is the focus, there's a strong narrative drive to this game and in many ways it gives a strong feeling of "Mass Effect, but 2.5D" By the end of my run, I was certainly feeling as sad about leaving the universe and the friends I'd made along the way, in the same way Mass Effect did. Quite the achievement for a top-down space exploration shooter with no cinematics.

Gameplay is tight, the loop of exploring systems and choose your own adventure events with skill checks is fast and rewarding, building your ship is fun and gives a real sense of progression. The writing is honestly excellent for an indie game, constantly surprising with understated references to other works and some sly humour.

I honestly enjoyed every minute, and aside from two times where I couldn't find a quest objective because it spawned in a system I'd already explored, it was smooth sailing the entire way.

Can't recommend it highly enough, it was a completely unexpected gem of a game. Sad to finish it.

Short and sweet Vampire Survivors clone. It's decent value for the cheap price, but it does lack a lot of depth. There's no real interesting synergies between weapons, and a number of the upgrade decisions have "one obviously best choice".

The main differences between classes are what bullet pattern they fire in, but once you've got a few upgrades they're all pretty much firing in the same near 360 arc, using the same bullets. Those bullets are the only way to proc the other weapons, so maximum number of shots is always the way to go.

Those secondary weapons have mildly distinct patterns, but ultimately they all boil down to "go hard on whichever you pick and it all just ends up as dps in the end".

This all sounds a bit negative, but like I said, it's a very cheap game: it's fun for the price, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. What comes with that price tag though is that it's more limited than other offerings in the genre.

It has cute rats and cheese though, so how far wrong can it go?

Short and sweet idler with just enough interacting systems to keep it interesting and not overstay its welcome. At its dirt-cheap price it's good value for money, despite the fact that there's many idle games with far more depth available for free.

The ending travel zone felt a bit like they ran out of ideas by only adding a single new system with no real interesting decisions and no points of interest to explore, but the true ending is quite charming.

It's nothing ground-breaking, but it's fun, cheap, and as far as I could tell completely bug-free.

I expected this to be fun, but it's really tedious. The puzzles are very simple with one obvious solution (if you know anything about modular synths or signal processing) and on some levels there'll be a counter-intuitive fewer-modules solution that comes from ignoring the actual problem and recreating the intended output signal through some combination of factors that just happens to produce the correct output signal for this particular instance of inputs, but would immediately break with a different set of inputs. Having the "best" solution be a brittle one that only works due to circumstances just feels bad.

The tutorial also just goes on and on and on with trivial problems padded by a story narrative that you can't click through fast enough.

Whole thing feels like not much game with 2-3 minutes of overhead between every 15 seconds of puzzle solving, and the puzzles themselves aren't that interesting. The hghest speed setting feels two times too slow, and the counting up your score animation grates on your nerves by the third time, and then the score screen is split over multiple tabs that adds extra clicks in order to see information that could be on one screen. It's hundreds of clicks for ten clicks worth of gameplay.

It's a shame, it's a really cool concept, and it's clear it's built with a lot of love, and the core UI of the actual puzzle solving is great, but everything surrounding that just gets in the way, and it feels like an attempt to hide how weak the level design is.

Interesting idler incremental concept let down by extremely inconsistent growth curve and pacing, virtually no transparency into how mechanics interact, an obtuse designed-for-touch-screen UI, no real offline mode and a very badly optimised engine.

I found some of the concepts interesting, enough to keep me playing and keep it running for a few hundred hours to figure out some of the interactions, but ultimately the insane grindwall to get to the homeostasis prestige leaves you stuck at 1e290 of 1e300 currency needed with absolutely no indication of how to push any higher except leave it running for a month without any gameplay whatsoever. This is terrible pacing even by idle game standards.

Meanwhile one of the cores on your CPU is pegged at 100% the entire time.

Very little in the game is tooltipped, many of the tooltips tell you information you don't need but not the information you do. The ones that do tell you what you need refer to currencies by names that aren't used anywhere else, because they're displayed with icons that aren't tooltipped. (Is a hypersphere the currency with 6 yellow globes on the icon or the one with 3 white ones? The one with 3 white ones is higher tier counterintuitively.) If you get lucky and there is a tooltip, and it refers to something by name or by icon that is represented in the game with that same name or icon, it'll be displayed to only 1 significant figure, meaning you can't tell what change you're making unless it makes a change on the order of 100% difference. Which it won't, because everything at that stage is giving 0.00000001 increments.

That's if there's even a human-readable string for the tooltip and not a reference into the locale file.

Some of the maths doesn't appear to be understood by the developers themselves. On one of the few things to be well tooltipped a +100% modifier stacks and is reported in x400 format (consistency isn't the game's strong suit) but the x400 format suggests it's twice as effective as it should be which implies it's base * stacks * 200% not base + (stacks * 100)%. So it's not even clear the game is doing what it should be for the bits it DOES bother to explain.

There's also a heavy reliance on randomness, which is fine for the "chance" progression where there's pity timers and it appears to be mostly balanced to power up when you need it, but for the most recently introduced challenge there's only a 0.99^(500 + (challange level * 100)) chance of success on something that takes hours to run. Given that 0.99^100 is about 36% success chance, you've got more chance of tossing a coin and getting heads ten times in a row than completing the final level. There is absolutely no mechanism to let you alter the odds. All you can do is marginally increase the rate at which it runs. This just feels bad in every way as a mechanic. Even worse, the implementation lets you save-scum it, which makes it trivial. So either play the game as intended and be massively punished, or play as it clearly isn't intended and it's no challenge at all. It's a single-player game so do what you want with my blessing, I'm not judging, I'm just saying it's terrible game design to put players in that spot.

As someone who loves idle and incremental games, I can't recommend this. Too janky, doesn't appear to have a team who understand their own progression mechanics, and while it has some nice ideas, you've seen them all in the first 4 or 5 hours.

A little janky at times, this base-building survival-crafting game has a killer twist... your actions will terraform and transform the planet you're on. Step by step from a lifeless barren rock, you'll gradually form a lush ecosystem of various biomes.

The gameplay isn't particularly challenging, and some of the gameplay loops are a little grindy and mechanically obtuse, but this one's a unique gem and probably the best of the (very) small handful of games that truly tackle terraforming from an immersive first-person view.

It has a lot of the atmosphere of a game like Subnautica, without the screaming terror, and without the same degree of polish. Personally I love it, and I've played through it twice, although I wouldn't say there's genuinely much replayability - I just enjoyed it.

Snowrunner, but what if Terratech and cel-shaded?

Has the terrain-traversion, mission-focus, and "your deliveries progress the world" aspects of Snowrunner; but combined with the vehicle building and parts-unlocking of Terratech. All wrapped up in a wonderful 70s pastel-sci-fi visual aesthetic.

I'm not sure there's a vast amount of depth to be had, but it's nevertheless a great game of problem-solving and sometimes-frustrating-but-also-chill driving that hits that "set your own level of challenge" sweet spot.

You CAN choose to offroad like a lunatic making life hard for yourself, you CAN choose to just putter around having a zen time, or anything in between. You'll just end up naturally gravitating towards the play style you enjoy most, or are looking for today.

Might be an interesting game, but can't even get into the fun of the obtuse UI because the entire game runs at 2-3 seconds per frame. Yes, seconds per frame, not frames per second.

This is a known problem with rendering on high resolution screens, and to fix it you need to wait 10 minutes for the game to start and then presumably find out how to open the options screen is (in the deliberately obtuse quaint UI), which involves paging through at least 8 minutes of help screens that each take 30+ seconds to animate or render.

I think that's the process... I don't know, I gave up after 15 minutes. Might be a good game, but completely and utterly brokenly unplayable on a 4K screen.