Recent reviews by AtkinsSJ

It's a great game, but once you've played the JGR Patch, it's hard to go back to vanilla. I'd strongly recommend looking that up and installing it instead.

I got it for sale at 90% off. For that price, it would have been worth it even if it wasn't fun, but I'm having a blast!

The main difference obviously is the Portal-ness. They've done a good job at imitating the Aperture aesthetic and casual disregard for human life. The writing is not quite up there, but the real humour comes from the absolute chaos when things go wrong. It's fun just seeing how badly your "perfect" solution for a single vehicle fails horrendously when sending a whole convoy through it. Also, having to transport companion cubes or high-energy pellets through the same area as your vehicles adds a lot of interesting challenge.

Compared to other games like this, it's quite streamlined. You only have two materials: steel and cable. It tracks how much you spent, but doesn't actually care. (No high-scores, or goals for lower costs.) As long as you get the vehicles to the exit, you're good. But I didn't mind that. It does have the same disadvantages as other physicsy games too - a minor adjustment to one area can have a huge effect elsewhere, but that's par for the course.

What I do mind is that the controls are a bit awkward. It seems designed for mobile, so with a mouse it can be hard to click on what you want, because rather than selecting what's under your cursor, it picks something nearby. Not enough for me to not enjoy the game, but it's a little irritating.

Also, something about the physics engine seems to have changed since many of the workshop levels were submitted. A few "just press play and watch" levels are completely broken for me. That might be because I'm playing on Linux, who knows. But it's a shame.

So overall, if it seems at all interesting, go for it! Especially in a sale.

This game is my childhood. I don't know how many hundreds of hours I played it back in the day! And it holds up very well even now. I highly recommend it!

It's hard to really describe... the basics you can see in the trailer: Running around top-down 2D levels, throwing hammers at monsters, and collecting brains. It's very weird. There are puzzles, and secrets, and a big assortment of daft enemies, and a silly number of unlockable things. But also, there's a huge variety in the player-created worlds. Some are plain arenas, others are highly elaborate and polished, with custom enemies and graphics, and complex cross-level scripting. Over the decades since Supreme's original release, the level editor has gained more and more features, and I'm looking forward to seeing what stuff people can create now. (I'm now trying "Gloom Valley" on the workshop and it's a great example of the craziness you can do now!)

It's a weird one. Granted, it's early in Early Access, but I didn't get along with it. I think it's a great concept, and I want it to work, but I just didn't find it enjoyable. Some examples:

1) You need to both sell resources, and also stockpile those resources. You turn on automatic selling for a limited number of products, and can upgrade how many get sold at once. BUT, everything that is marked to be sold sells at that same rate - so if you're producing 15 widgets, and the selling level is at 20, you'll never stockpile any. But you need to sell them to make money to progress. So you either have to keep toggling it on and off, or always build every production line to produce more than the sell amount.
2) A lot of advanced products sell for less money than their raw materials, due to the randomness of the market. I think this is being worked on but it's still weird.
3) You don't know how much a building upgrade will change its stats until you do it. That's kind of important when you're trying to balance resource production and consumption.
4) Something about the art style means everything feels the same? I had trouble keeping track of what facilities are where, and it gets worse the more densely you build. (And you need to build densely to reduce fuel costs.)
5) Similarly, unlocking new buildings doesn't feel special? It's just more stuff to plop down that feels the same as the old stuff. (Especially when #2 happens and it's not even profitable.)
6) With the tile modifiers, neighbour bonuses, resource placement and fuel cost, there should be an interesting puzzle here of designing efficient factory setups. But I never felt like I was designing anything.

I hope the developer keeps improving things, but right now, I don't enjoy it.

My opinion is somewhere between recommending and not recommending, but I want more games like this to exist so I'm giving it a thumbs-up. Probably get it on sale though.

I have to applaud it for what it tries to be. Clambering around a stark and beautiful ruined city, finding hidden paths and uncovering the story of what happened, all without combat or requiring quick reflexes.

It does fall a bit short though. The environments get quite repetitive quickly. If I was trying to get to a certain area in my boat, I'd have to constantly check the map because most of the buildings look the same so I couldn't navigate by them. When climbing the main buildings, collecting the emergency crate at the top immediately sends you home, so you either have to go and climb the building again, or you start trying to anticipate which paths aren't the main one, and back tracking, to try and find the secrets first.

The lack of action-gameplay is nice, but also can make things a bit tedious. Climbing is often just a case of pointing your analogue stick in the right direction and waiting, which makes your character's movements feel slow even though they're not. Perhaps some kind of environmental puzzles would liven it up, but I don't know if that would fit the setting really.

There's the usual gamey things of invisible walls (which make even less sense here as you're impressively athletic and acrobatic) and the dissonance of being in a hurry to help your very sick brother, but then spending most of the time collecting shiny trinkets. But hey, videogames are videogames!

I didn't like the ending. Without going into details, it didn't answer any questions I had, or feel like it made sense.

I'm sounding very negative. I guess I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. I don't think it's bad. I just really want a Tomb Raider-type game without the violence. This isn't that. I do wish more people would try developing games like this though!

BRAIN is HURT

It's such a mind-bending delight when you figure out a puzzle. It's made me laugh so many times at the bizarre absurdity and surprise of some of the things you can (and must) do. I've only unlocked half the areas, and I can't wait to see what the others have in store!

For a game where you can change the properties of anything (and nothing), you'd think that having so much power would make every level trivial. But quite the opposite. Often you're given very little to work with, and the goal seems impossible, and then you solve it anyway because the universe is insane!

It's very good.

I'm on the fence. I want to like it, but it's a different game than I wanted it to be.

A large amount of the puzzles and challenges involve making quick colour-swaps under pressure, without being able to plan in advance, and where a mistake sends you back to the start of the level. For example: jumping between horizontal and vertical moving platforms, with 5 or 6 different colours of deadly lasers pointed in all directions, on a level that is much larger than will fit on the screen at once. Having to execute things perfectly and figure out what to do at the same time, is too much for my brain, and I ended up making mistakes over and over. (The small differences between yellow/orange and pink/purple are definitely not helping either.)

This is definitely a personal thing! Lots of people here obviously love it, and I can see why. It feels really polished. But it's not for me.

The original games were awesome, and this compilation makes them better!

For people knew to these: the Robot Wants <COVETED_OBJECT> games are platformers where you start with almost nothing (Kitty doesn't even start with you being able to jump) and gradually you gain new abilities, which lets you access new areas of the map. You can complete any one of them in a single sitting, generally less than 30 minutes each, and sometimes under 5 minutes.

Now, that might sound like there's less than 10 hours worth of game here, but just completing each game is not the goal. You're rewarded for fast times, few deaths, finding secrets, defeating all enemies, and shooting accurately, among many other things that I haven't found yet. (You're not told what they are until you achieve them!) The better you do, the sooner you can unlock alternative maps and other things. It encourages you to experiment, and to become skilled at it. There's an ever-present timer, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a speed-running community pop up around this game.

I'm generally terrible at any game that requires reflexes and skill, but I still enjoy these a lot. They're great for taking a quick break from working. You can't lose in any of them, dying just teleports you back to the last checkpoint, without losing any progress.

They're also really daft. In Robot Wants Puppy, your weapon is a cat, which you throw at enemies. Humour is very subjective, but I really like it.

If you want to try them out before buying, several of the games are still free online at https://www.kongregate.com/accounts/Hamumu - they're Flash-based, and don't have any of the between-game progression and achievements, but if you can get them to run, you'll have a good idea of whether you'd enjoy this or not.

It's Hexcells, with far more variety, some much tougher puzzles, and a really cool drawing mode where you can scribble all over the puzzle to make notes. It's really good. Also, it's really cheap!

The main downside is you will definitely find your brain thinking about it all the time, when you're trying to concentrate on something else.

Also, sometimes you'll make a dumb mistake on a puzzle you've been working on for ages, from a lapse of concentration, which is not fun[/]™. There are a bunch of options in the launcher you can tweak to reduce how much counting you have to do yourself, vs making the game do it for you. Also, you should really enable "Night Mode" if you don't enjoy being blinded.

Freebird are so, so good at what they do. It's very much an interactive story more than a game. I think it's telling that Kan Gao lists himself in the credits as "Writer and Director". The premise is fantastic, and the mixture of humour in with the more sentimental stuff is well balanced. I can't believe I waited so long after this was released before playing it! I won't make that mistake again.

I'd really recommend playing To the Moon first. You don't have to, but stories always make more sense in order, and if you enjoy this game then you're really going to want to play that one too! Might as well start there.