Recent reviews by Chef Excellence

Gigantic is back!

Fluid and frantic in the moment-to-moment, high TTK keeps engagements strategic, the heroes have designs that are both thematic and extremely interesting (especially in combination with one another) - very strongly recommend. Matchmaking seems to be weird but that's my only complaint.

If they don't suffocate, they starve. Sorry, little colonists. I'm doing my best.

Cute city-builder, but frustrating and shallow.

Frustrating:
No grid snapping feature- walls and paths are a pain to line up. Buildings, too. There are overlays for ore and soil fertility, but nothing else. Want to see if your parks and such are reaching your structures? Too bad, won't happen.
Random events pop up but they have minimal impact on the game.
Seasons change but the only difference is that your pops need more fuel for their houses in the winter.
You can't click on a given pop (perhaps you're curious where your miners live) and you can't check who's working where. There's list of your people but you can't do anything with it.

Shallow:
People don't seem to care where they work- miners are as happy as fisherfolks, who are as happy as farmers, etc.
Population simulation- your pops want luxuries appropriate to their class, but they don't care which luxury and there's no effect to any of them. They're either happy because they have Furniture or unhappy because they don't have anything.
Your king (or whatever) asks you for resources but there's no downside or time limit. Fill them at your leisure. You also seem to get nothing from it.
You can't track inputs and outputs, or see what's going where except to watch people coming and going from place to place.
No meaningful traffic / congestion mechanics and if there is, I can't see one. It doesn't matter if everybody in your town uses one road to go in and out. There also aren't any carts, wheelbarrows, or other contraptions. Everybody just walks.
Social dynamics underdeveloped- some of the random events make a given social class more or less happy or safe and that's about it.
Workforce management boils down to 'leave some people as workers and assign the rest to a class of workplace.' You can adjust the numbers of workers at an individual workplace but that's tedious. There's also no way to prioritize certain kinds of work so if your situation changes you're back to changing the number manually and then watching your stockpile grow or shrink.

Maybe the game changes substantially after 150 pops (the highest I got, in my second attempt) but I'm not really interested in finding out. I built supply lines for my candle-making shop and had an excess of every possible supply and spent the tail end of my time with the game waiting for more pops. I hate waiting for more pops. Even at 10x speed, it feels like everything takes forever to happen.

Maybe in a year or two I'll come back and change my recommendation. If you enjoy the game, good for you. I just kept wondering when I'd get to the good part. I feel like six hours of focused play is enough to decide if a game is worth more of my time. This one, at this stage, isn't.

Lovely. A not-idle idle game. Creative and innovative within the boundaries of its genre. 10/10, and I don't say that lightly.

'Don't bother me, I'm pondering my orb!'

After further play, I will say: it remains good, sometimes slightly frustrating, some systems feel underutilized, still strong recommend

Great characterization, compelling tactical combat, gorgeous art style- lots of adventures to be had. One of my all-time favorite games, a real joy to play and to strategerize with. Fantastic. Can't say enough good things about Renowned Explorers.

Strong recommend. What if Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress had a pixel art baby and a bronze age setting? Generate a random map and a random site and get to building something.

PRO:
Good graphics
Detailed citybuilding- build each room and place crafting stations, which your pops will dutifully carry materials to and from and work inside of
Fun citizen simulation- Pops idle and skinnydip, goof off and commit vandalism. They get cold in the winter and like to
Comprehensive modding tools
Relaxing gameplay! Minimal combat.
Randomized world map + starting situations + NPC polities
Game 'feels good' to play

CON:
Distasteful handling of slavery and certain other elements in the game. Example: Why does everybody hate immigrants? It's the only way to get people into my city until I reach a certain population, but inviting people in makes them mad? This is both inaccurate to the 'bronze age' and extremely annoying for gameplay. Also= why on earth do I have to unlock Nurseries before my pops will have kids?
Poor selection of gods/religions, there are four and they're all boring.
NO MUDBRICK BUILDINGS??
Trading boring, hard to track- set imports and exports basically automatically and watch money come or go. Goods move at seemingly random rates, so you never know if bread you auto-import will hit in the dead of winter when you need it or right after harvest when you have no storage space...
UI gets in its own way, hard to read important stats in-game. (IE: why is my carpenter's workload so low when I have so much wood and yet no furniture? why is this guy homeless when I have spare buildings? why can't I set a limit on my haulers?)
Limited decoration / aesthetic options (in a game where decorations provide in-game bonuses. get ready to see a lot of the exact same tree...

7.5/10, higher w/mods, will almost certainly increase as the devs continue to iterate and develop game and core gameplay concepts further. I recommend it higher (8-8.5) to fans of the genre for its frankly innovative concepts and good execution. What it gets right, it gets RIGHT.

Highly recommend. It's a roguelite in the spirit of Dark Souls, or maybe Bushido Blade. You play as an amnesiac in a truly bleak world, fighting your way through scores of bandits and wizards and monsters. Smash (or burn) nearly everything to turn it into raw materials to upgrade the weapons you found along the way, or make an offering at an altar you find. Manage your stamina in battles, and your spacing. Dodge or parry enemy attacks to create the opportunity to swing your own weapon. Walk slow to try and notice traps (or ambushes). Mementos give fun and interesting bonuses to your stats or abilities.

It is kind of a pain going through every level to get every resource you can, but at least the maps are interesting and varied.

Highly recommend. Brilliant characters with witty and distinctive writing and beautiful art clash words and blades and bullets across a decadent world of slugmen and mutated beasts and fish-crusaders. Character development in the form of deckbuilding and relationship building.

I got 40 extremely entertaining hours out of it (multiple playthroughs). Cool!

Vampire Survivors + Diablo 2. Good-looking pixel art and tight gameplay mechanics. A lot of little details that show me that the devs are true fans of both genres and styles of game. Fantastic in its own right. Active devs with thought-out changes and improvements (so far!)

Strong recommend.

Strong recommend. 8.5/10
17 hours in- the game feels like Slay the Spire turned into a roguelike. You build a party of up to three adventurers out of a pool of nine and develop their decks over time as you overcome challenges and defeat enemies. Every time you level, your character gets a skill point, which gives you new cards to add to your deck, increases attributes, whatever. You know how these work. The cool twist is that you actually build the skill tree yourself- every 4 levels, you choose between one of three skill tree chunks (forget what they're called in game) and you stick that on there, too. The net effect is that you're not only building each character's deck, you're also building their skill tree as you go.

This also means that the game's complexity increases as you play it, so what was once a super simple decision between a few cards becomes a piece in a larger puzzle. This also lets the game's characters develop organically. It's super cool.

Oh, and each character has three pools of cards they can draw from, so you can choose as you build your skill tree whether you want your Druid to have another Primal card or an Elemental card (or whatever your class gets up to). Each card pool has a set of somewhat synergistic cards, and you can decide at any time outside of battle to temporarily remove cards from your available set or add them back in. It's a lot, but it's really satisfying to build a custom character and a custom party with lots of synergy.

I will say, the game is on the easy side. So far (I'm on Act 3) I have had three character deaths- one at the first act boss, and two at the second act boss. Since you can see where the enemies will attack and what they attack with, it's pretty easy to just attack and then as your last action, move out of range. For example. I'm hoping the game gets harder, and gives me a reason to take some defensive cards or gives me room to play with some more unusual builds.

There are some other odd design choices, to be sure, but they're pretty minor, relatively. Camping is fun but sort of mechanical. I found a lot of characters have camping abilities that I don't get much use out of, and there's no way to change those moves or swap them out that I could find. Very disappointing. The exploration sub-maps never give enough room to really explore or roam, and I find myself simply going directly at the most valuable map node and then leaving the exploration zone. What a missed opportunity!

Anyways, if you can't tell, I really like this one and I think it features some great design. Looking forwards to finishing the campaign mode and seeing what else the game has to offer!