Recent reviews by Tamriilin

If games like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Tales of Maj'Eyal are wheat, the developer of Path of Achra is a thresher: They took the best parts of that corner of the roguelike genre and separated them from the chaff. There are no complicated choices to make each turn about which skill to use and why. Gone are the irritating choices about where to explore. No more will you be forced to assess the risk-reward of fighting a particular boss. All of that stuff? That's livestock feed. What you're left with is the purest expression of run-based video game, at once both absurd in its simplicity and mind-numbing in its complexity. The entire game can be played by simply hitting the Tab key, but what gives Path of Achra legs that go all the way up to Canada is the manner in which your abilities synergize with your gear to completely break the game wide open, causing your guy to launch thermonuclear weapons at everything within 10 miles of the dungeon entrance just because they took a couple steps down the stairs.

Path of Achra should be enshrined in the annals of gamedom as one of the greatest roguelikes of all time. It probably won't, because you're all cowards. But it should. It's also like $10 or something like that, so you should probably grab it now while your soul yet lingers on this plane of existence. Your mortal shell is granted a limited existence, and you'd be wise to spend it playing Path of Achra.

it's final fantasy 9, man. it's a classic. you don't need me to tell you it's good, but it really, really is. peak story, peak aesthetic, peak characters. the mickey mantle of RPGs.

Great game. X-files by way of Hacknet. Sort of.

It's very linear, there's not a ton of "choices matter" stuff here, but it the narrative is compelling, and it's got REALLY good atmosphere and vibes.

My only real gripe with it is that the story doesn't really feel like it reaches a conclusion, more that it hit a dead end. It ties many of its loose ends up, but in a very boring way. But the journey... Whew, boy, the journey makes it totally worth it.

Took me about 2.7 hours to complete, but that's after continuing my save from the demo, the time played from which I assume did not carry over.

For $12-15 you could do much, much worse.

for my money this is one of the best games bioware has ever made and supplants the two entries before it. the narrative is unbelievably ambitious, tying together seemingly-disparate plot threads from across two games (DA1/2) and a DLC (Awakening). It has one of the best story DLC (Trespasser) of any game I've ever played which neatly wraps up the entire narrative arc of the series up to this point. It has one of the most sinister, menacing antagonists I've ever seen in an RPG. It is, in short, an incredible game.

It's also a pretty good open world RPG, I guess, if you're into that sort of thing

btw please don't stay in the hinterlands and get burnt out. there's so much more game to experience.

gives me all the good dopamine of hearthstone battlegrounds without the psychic damage i take when i get 8th place every other game because i'm 10k rating and nobody plays anything but scam.

a+ game would recommend

i wired a bunch of power generators together, then funneled the power into my pistol and it fired a nuke.

super unique roguelike.

We are so back.

Video games are so back.

Dread Delusion is a certified RPG mastapeece.

I'm enjoying my time with Hades II immensely, and it's a no-brainer recommend to anybody who liked the first game and is willing to accept that while Hades II is familiar, it's very different (that's a good thing! a pure rehash of the first game would be boring!)

the only complaints i have are thus:

- certain enemies (the act 3 boss, for instance) hit way too hard, have way too much health, and have poorly-telegraphed attacks. the act 3 boss in the first game was definitely a skill gate, but this one just feels designed to punish you over and over again until you grind enough to brute force it. Mind you, I don't have a problem with the actual grind; there have been a lot of complaints about your inability to bring multiple gathering tools along, but with the number of runs you end up going on, it hasn't been an issue for me. The Grind Is Fine. But forcing the player to grind specifically to get past some arbitrary "gear check" feels really bad.

- please please please add the codex from the first game so I can see who I've given gifts to and what my relationship with them is. If it's already there, I absolutely could not find it. I did find *a* codex, but it does not contain any of that information.

EDIT: ok, so there totally is a section of the codex specifically for this, but you don't unlock it until later. Woops.

- two of the tools I've unlocked thus far (axe and dual blades) feel significantly less powerful than the staff and torches(?). The axe has a lot of heft but is so slow that it's essentially impossible to pull off a full combo without getting hit. The blades just feel... Really bad. I have to be inside enemies' hitboxes in order to hit them with the beginning of the combo. I haven't found a reason to go back to them at all, even if they're the designated weapon for that night. I think a very slight range increase on the blades and a very slight attack speed increase on the axe would go a huge distance here.

Classic high-fantasy roguelike (in the truest sense of the word: It is Like Rogue) with an immense world, tons of stuff to do, about a billion different builds to try out, and a massive amount of interesting, intricate worldbuilding.

If you enjoy games like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Caves of Qud, and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, you'll find a lot to love in ToME.

It's got SERIOUS performance issues, but if you can get past that or just have a beefy PC, there's a lot here.

The microtransactions are... well, they're There. It sucks, but Capcom has also been doing this for a long time with their single player games at this point, so it's nothing new or shocking. You can also earn every single microtx item from just playing the game. You know the camping kit you can buy? I'm barely 5 hours into the game and I have three of them.

Dragon's Dogma 2 has the same magical Juice(tm) that the first one had. It's janky, it's weird, it's kinda obtuse, but... man, it's fun as hell.