Recent reviews by PHI

Simple, relaxing time-waster. In effect almost more like popping bubble wrap than painting, but feels like something more unique. No challenge and no frustration. Connecting with friends or strangers to waste time together is seamless. Might work as therapy for anxious people, but I'm not a doctor.

A little metroidplatformer romp with good ideas. It has rough edges, but that just makes it fit the retro aesthetic more. ;)

Edit: I haven't played this recently but the developer keeps ramming more items, enemies, and features into this game. Just buy it already. :)

Original review:

I didn't know it was going to be THAT cheap. Skelly Selest won't get any awards for originality, but it takes a straightforward approach to action roguelite and executes it excellently. I have very few ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the gameplay. It's tight and tense but you feel very in control.

The game is light on content (Edit: the dev has been adding more!) and even on the easy side, but more stuff reveals itself to you as you play. There's a few game modes, an entire card game with unlockable cards, and unlockable characters with different playstyles semi-hidden in a menu.

For the price, absolutely. I can't see myself playing it for 20 hours. But the game will entertain you for a weekend and for the occasional pick-up-and-play runthrough.

Short and sweet. This expansion gets some bad cred for some reason. It's not very long and there aren't any new guns or anything, but I found it to be quite a delightful extra helping of Half Life from a slightly different perspective. Smart level design is what makes it.

This game is a ♥♥♥♥.
a ♥♥♥♥.

On the surface it looks to be a bare-bones platformer with rudementary graphics delivered with a fancy and evocative narrative that is almost ironically suggesting of something much "deeper" than blocks on a screen.

While that's close to describing Thomas Was Alone, it misses something pretty important. Beyond serving as a zero-effort art style, the simple geometry this world and its characters are made up of has been utilized in such a way that it offers some genuinely unique platforming gameplay elements which I've never seen done before. The result is a game that's often much more brain teasing than dexterity testing, although there are spots that will require those years of platforming experience you've accumulated. I was quite fascinated by the way simple shapes could fit together to make new gameplay that actually wouldn't have worked had the game been about something other than talking rectangles.

The top-notch narrative does elevate the experience in the end. It takes a simple (though very clever), relatively short game and makes it memorable. Very worth your time.

A work of genius. Fairly brief, but very clever.

Not for people who don't like walking/narrative "games."

Not for people who have no patience for repetition.

Yeah, it's free. It isn't fun. I'm not going to whine to you about it being a ripoff of Ag.ario (someone said it's made by the same guy, I don't know). It's just not a fun game.

It is a neat sort of concept. Not an original one, but neat. Unfortunately it's mostly quite dull, with the only interesting parts happening occasionally with encounters with other cells, at which point you proceed to either screw someone over or get screwed over. Even coming out on top, eating your competitor entirely and absorbing all his mass, hardly feels satisfying as it just feels kind of cheap. There isn't that much room for skill involved. And getting eaten (your game ends) is seriously un-fun. It doesn't matter how long you've tried or what you've accomplished, you're just instantly gone. The game throws you into an ongoing game with other players who already are bigger than you, sometimes overwhelmingly massive compared to you, so you always feel at a disadvantage, unless you actually make it to become top dog, at which point what do you even do? And just to make sure you weren't trying to enjoy yourself too much, the game has INVISIBLE walls around the arena which will regularly make it impossible for you to escape your foes, which is the only thing you can actually do in this game, either chase or try to escape.

The simplicity of the experience makes it feel a bit addictive, like you want to go back and try it again. But you'll regret it every time.

A super-fast moving shooter for the CoD fans with very low TTK. There are a few good ideas in Dirty Bomb, certainly nothing revolutionary. The base move speed is so high that ultimately "skill" in this game comes down to how well you can track fast, jerky online movement while clicking mouse1 and little else. You'll want a giant mousepad because this game requires you to spin and spin. There are a number of class abilities, mostly things just yanked from various other games, and while they are quite powerful the game moves too fast for you to pay attention to what anyone else is doing with them. Airstrikes are "casual" and annoying. This is not a thinking man's game. If you want a shooter that's super-twitchy and tosses in the typical class mechanics to hang with the big boys, this is for you. Kudos to the dev team for making levels that can be easily moved through fluidly, as that's probably the best part of the game here. I play a lot of shooters, but for me, this game demands too much from my mouse and not enough for the rest of my brain.

There's potential here sure; it's not a terrible game, it's not buggy and broken, and yeah it's "beta" (experience has taught me not to get my hopes up), but these fast, low TTK, meat grinder-type FPS games really can't be anything but shallow experiences. I didn't hate it, it just left me wanting. And I'm not going to spend my time doing the same thing over and over while it's more of a suggestion of fun than actual fun.

Cannot argue with the price.

This is some kind of collision between hardcore and casual silliness. Source engine is starting to feel really old school at this point, but the gun mechanics are unique in this game, plus some other fun stuff, so it's certainly not the same old and there's a definite appeal.