Recent reviews by Toren_S [Also Friendly]

An excellent superhero battle game. It works best if you liked games like Three Houses or Persona 5 where half the game is the combat and half is the social simulator aspect, but the Abbey is still largely skippable if it doesn't interest you as much.

Combat revolves around attacks, support, and heroic cards. Attack and support cards build heroism while heroic cards or environmental attacks spend it, so balancing what you've got available keeps you in a good place. The game won't allow you to make decks that are _too_ unbalanced, so you're encouraged to experiment. Heroic cards are basically just 'better' attack or support cards, and both types of cards have a lot of different things they can do even if attack cards largely deal damage and support cards largely don't.

Each hero has a distinct flavor and personality and basically all of them are interesting, there's a lot of options with deckbuilding but also the decks are small at 8 cards per hero so it's not going to overwhelm anyone who doesn't like decks, and the storyline is interesting. The writing style is very comic-book, many quips at the start although it gets more and more serious as things go more and more south in the world. If the jokey nature of the beginning missions is offputting to you it doesn't stay like that. However, I personally felt that everything exuded the comic book feel I was expecting and all the voice actors do a great job in their roles.

Combat is largely flexible to be as hard as you want it to be, the harder you make things the more you're going to have to synergize and build decks that work with each other since your heroes will go down in 4-5 hits. I found Heroic 1 a nice balance of fun without things being trivial, but you could push it to Heroic 2 or 3 probably if you're looking for a decent 'hard' mode. While there are some potential quibbles about not having enough plays to set up good combos except if you get lucky, the nature of the game forces you to switch up your team constantly which gives things a lot of variety.

With the DLCs purchased, I enjoyed their missions but it did remove some desire to try to 100% all the friendship stuff since there's more heroes to deal with. Thankfully, all that stuff is optional. The game dragged perhaps a few hours longer than its content could manage, but not so much that it felt dreary. It was about the time I got the 'hey it's the final mission so finish up what you want' that I was ready to be done, so that's about perfect.

Excellent survival horror game with lovecraftian overtones. Allows for a variety of playstyles while still discouraging trying to kill absolutely everything due to the enemy revival mechanics. Story is interesting and made for interpretation rather than purely literal.

Note: My time is more like 40 hours, I played a lot in offline mode.

This game is sort of like a spiritual successor to Frostpunk in space. A lot of people have commented on the difficulty, coming from Frostpunk I didn't find that Ixion was particularly difficult. The difficulty is largely around good planning and the ability to think ahead of when you might need to redesign your entire city to accomodate new upgrades and try to make sure you're capable of doing it, as well as making sure you build some redundancies in for when things go wrong.

The game only has a few resource types. Iron is made into Alloy, Carbon into Polymer, Silicon into Electronics, Ice into Water (late), and Hydrogen into Power (very late). In addition to those, Food is needed to keep the populace going. The base resource types are mined out and have to be converted into the usable resources, while your science ships act like scouts and gain science in their adventures that let you research new technology. Unlike Frostpunk you can't generate research passively except incredibly slowly, and you can't build multiple tech labs, so the game neatly avoids the degenerate research rush strategy that was needed there.

I personally used saves a lot to make sure I got optimal results out of science scouting (including a lot of loading back and replaying sections), but then at the end I had boatloads of extra science and nothing I truly cared about researching so I don't feel like this was necessary at all. The game puts increasing penalties to happiness on your entire ship as the plotline goes along, which makes sure you keep up with the various upgrades and bonuses, but again a properly planned city works out just fine.

I encountered a few what I think may have been glitches, and late game the game chugged a bit trying to handle the massive city and swarm of ships, but overall nothing that really detracted from the experience. I don't know if the team was trying to make Frostpunk in space, but they put their own flavor on it and I really really enjoyed the experience.

This is a game for people who are willing to think about city planning and how they progress but without having to worry about a lot of complicated resource interactions. I found there was always something to do, especially as the city expanded, but also that it wasn't just a series of spinning plates, you could stop paying attention to just about anything once you got things set up right.

An amazingly reactive and interesting visual novel with many many dialogue choices. It does a great job of presenting mutually exclusive dialogue choices in a meaningful way, as well as optional dialogue choices that both give you reasons to take them and not to take them. The only downside is that it isn't all released yet, so now I have to wait until it is.

If you like horror and mystery and reactivity in games, this one is for you.

A fun adventure game with excellent British English voice acting that is only dragged down a little by the rough nature of dealing with controlling a man in a wheelchair. While there are a few minor issues, it was a good romp with solid puzzles and a well executed story that didn't overstay its welcome.

There was only one time I got stalled out trying to figure out what to do for more than 15 minutes and it turned out it was simply not realizing something I already had in my inventory could be used as a lockpick.

A fun homage to resident evil games and interesting in its own right. Plays very similarly to RE7 with a medley of puzzles and backtracking through a giant hotel. There aren't a lot of monster types or monsters in general, but ammo is scarce so you need to be accurate if you engage and kill them. There's several boss encounters as well, but basically the meat of the game is puzzles, story, and interacting with your camera that gives you clues that can't be seen normally. A solid B+, quite enjoyable and worth your play. The story is interesting but the end is confusing, so if you're not the type to let that ruin your day, I'd definitely recommend a purchase.

An excellent point and click adventure game with a slow-burn psychological horror feel. There was only one point I got stuck but it could have been resolved by paying more attention to the 'show hotspots' in every room.

I'd say the story, atmosphere, and voice acting are a stronger point than the puzzles, but there were definitely some that felt pretty satisfying to figure out.

An evolution and improvement of the first one of the series. It's an mostly open world RPG with a focus on tactical choices and requiring you to clear dungeons in one go rather than plink away at them and regain resources. It's balanced well, on Veteran (hard) difficulty some adept thinking and careful use of the rare consumables carries you through, and since it's an open world with fairly clearly laid out sections of difficulty it's easy to know where you can try to go to get some more levels and stuff if you're having problems in one place. Doesn't require playing the first one if you're coming in fresh.

For returning people, the keep building is dramatically improved by giving you a pool of total resources instead of an income of resources, now there's no need or value to wander around trying to wait days to have income. XP is doled out in random encounters (albeit in small parcels) so you don't feel like it's a complete waste dealing with them. There's a lot more extra abilities anyone can learn scattered around the world. The core of the game is the same as 1, and I haven't seen anything I thought was done worse than the first so far, only better.

It's an easy recommend for anyone who likes Vogel's games or the first one, and worth checking out even for people who were a bit turned away by the first since those are the areas he focused on improving the most.

A good sequel to the original, if you liked the original you'll probably like this and if you didn't like it you probably won't like this. Somniums are a little more serious puzzles than the original but also a little more on rails, which is kind of a sidegrade as far as I'm concerned. Some of the surrealistic stuff that's lost was fun, but they're also more intuitive now because the dream logic is at least intuitively followable. For the rest, it's mostly similar to its predecessor, with solid voice acting and production values.

It's just as zany as before, so stay away if you can't handle something not taking itself seriously, but the story has a solid foundation and there's solid groundwork laid for the major story beats. Largely this is a visual novel interspersed with some puzzly sections, much like the rest of the games by the director.

An excellent slice of life / investigation game that leaves you wanting more at the end. It's a slower paced game, so keep that in mind if you're thinking about picking it up.
The game is largely 'help six british randos solve their problems and make it out alive', but the main characters are interesting and have some fun side support, so it's interesting to see how the various decisions affect the timeline and the ways you can make things better for everyone. Gameplay is largely just walking around and watching scenes and tweaking the decisions people make, there's a couple mild puzzles to figure out how to get places and the main puzzle of just resolving the scenario optimally in the first place.
The main critique I have of it is just that there's a fascinating time travel premise behind it, but aside from some scattered rare commentary from your control operator through the game, not enough is done with it. Hopefully the team makes a sequel or another game that expands on the universe they created.
Still, it was an enjoyable 8 hours that I enjoyed experiencing.