Recent reviews by incnone

An excellent game that succeeds at bringing a bit of classical Zelda/metroidvania exploration/powerup feel to mechanics-heavy block-pushing puzzles. Kept me extremely engaged from start to 100%, with very little downtime.

A big potential issue with making such a game is that either the puzzles get in the way of exploration, so that navigating in general becomes frustrating, or alternatively that the puzzles are made to be so easy that they become mundane. This game does a very impressive job avoiding both issues.

The puzzle design is very "inelegant"; you're mostly just using the tools you have to accomplish various objectives in rooms, and often rooms have two or three objectives, each of which you will get to in a different way. I find this kind of design quite fun (in particular, it avoids rewarding the player for being good at "guessing what the designer intended"), but it is a different feeling from a very "minimalist" pusher like Patrick's Parabox.

The difficulty is solidly middle-of-the-road for modern indie puzzle games; I didn't get seriously stuck on anything, but neither were there many puzzles that were so easy as to be boring. The design of the game makes it almost frictionless to leave a puzzle you're stuck on and return later, which helps a tremendous amount in smoothing out the difficulty experience, and is a major thing lacking in many comparable titles.

The metroidvania/exploration/collectathon aspects are quite well done; it's reasonably easy to see where the items you're missing are, and the existence of "secrets" is well-signposted, so you won't spend a lot of time aimlessly wandering. In addition, the puzzle design does a good job of signaling when you lack the tools to solve a particular challenge (and this often achieves the nice Zelda-like experience where you get to predict what your next powerup will be).

If you enjoy the room-drafting roguelite mechanics, this game will be reasonably fun for 10-20 hours.

If you enjoy the room-drafting AND nontrivial Myst-like puzzle solving, as I do, this game is awesome; it ranks up with the Rhem series as one of my favorites in the genre.

On the other hand, if you only enjoy the puzzle solving, you're going to often find the drafting frustrating and grindy. This would be unfortunate because good puzzle-solving games of this type are pretty rare, but alas, even if you are doing reasonable RNG-mitigation, I think there will still be times where it feels like nothing is happening and the roguelite aspects are getting in the way of investigating the things you feel stuck on.

Fun rhythm game! I don't really know much about rhythm games so I don't feel like I can make too many insightful comments but I am enjoying it and the music is great.

One of the more disappointing releases of the last five years, for me. Gets rid of a bunch of the things that made the original feel unique and replaces them with a smash clone, de-emphasizing the original game's excellent movement mechanics, DI mechanics, and overall speed while adding in simplistic RPS mechanics. I don't even enjoy watching professional matches, finding them to have a similar feel to Ultimate matches; slow, overly neutral-focused, and repetitive.

This would all be fine if it hadn't been advertised as a sequel to the original game -- then it would just be another plat fighter that wasn't for me. If the feel of this game was indeed the Rivals team's intention, I wish they had been clearer about that earlier in the kickstarter process.

Solid non-idle incremental game with a reasonable number of fun builds to figure out. I recommend the NG+ modes after first completion, which pushed me to explore the build space a bit more. Only very occasionally got sloggy for me.

Excellent factory/logistics game that's particularly strong if you enjoy making factories "pretty".

Relatively purist factory/logistics game. Substantially improves upon the issues with the original.

Top-tier puzzle design involving tile-based manipulation of monsters. Feels a lot like the more thinky puzzles in DROD (and has some Bean and Nothingness feel as well). Moderately difficult, very roughly in the "Baba Is You" range. Definitely enough to chew on, and none of the puzzles felt like they trivially gave away their solution, which is a big positive (and a rarity for me in puzzle games).

The game is turn-based; puzzles tend to require precise "timing" in the sense of lining up monsters in precise places on precise turns, giving a somewhat "tactical" feel, but most puzzles also require at least some key insight. The mechanics are quite well thought-out and seem to lead to a lot of puzzle depth (even with relatively few elements).

Biggest complaint is the lack of a feature that would let me warp between visited rooms; I sometimes found myself opening the game, not wanting to work on the puzzle I had been stuck on the last time I had the game open, and also not wanting to walk 9-10 screens to get to a new puzzle, and closing the game. This is compounded by the fact that the overall design is somewhat linear, so you'll experience a number of times where you're bottlenecked on just a few puzzles (and solving all puzzles is required for completion).

Solid atmospheric environmental puzzle game; I really enjoyed my time with it.

Don't expect any puzzles that are too meaty -- much of the game reduces to "put the obvious clue in the nearby input device", so you won't be working your brain too hard, but the atmosphere is well-done and the puzzles are enjoyable enough if you like this sort of thing. (Having the puzzles be easy also means it's pretty difficult to get stuck and wander with no real "hooks", which is a typical failure mode of this sort of genre that this game avoids.)

One of the best games I have ever played. Excellent feelings of exploration & discovery.