Nylige anmeldelser av Dr. Sedula

Look at the reviews and comments, both positive and negative, before buying.

This is an imperfect game as of this writing, so *you* will have to decide whether its good points outweigh its bad points, and whether it's the kind of game you would like to play.

Me? I love it for what it is, despite its flaws, but I'm not you. Make the decision that's right for you.

There's a free downloadable demo on the game's Steam page. Definitely play that before you decide whether or not to buy.

One of the best "ant-farm" style simulation games out there. An elegant and rewarding science-fiction entertainment. Absolutely recommended if these things appeal to you. Restore your colony and help it thrive!

Simple, solo, superhero fun. My first "idle" type of game, so I didn't go in with a lot of expectations of what it should be, or how it should work. As such, I enjoy it. I've noticed that patches, fixes, and updates arrive fairly regularly, so older reviews may no longer accurately reflect the current state of the game. Worth a look if you can spare the cash, and you know what to expect from an indie-game labor of love, instead of a triple-A title from a game publishing megacorp.

A decent start for a retro-graphics indie game, but it's got bugs (I fell through the world instead of respawning normally at one point) and quirky balance issues (every time I respawned normally, more and more enemies would appear nearby each time, so it quickly became a continuous, inescapable die-respawn-die loop from there).

But hey, the game is free. I can't recommend it right now, but give the developers some time to hammer out the bugs and balance issues, then check back later. It could be fun down the line.

If you prefer your "mature content" Visual Novels with actual characters and storytelling -- and you want your VN to be more than just a collection of brain-dead "pr0n" scenes strung together -- The Swordbearer is a good place to start.

It's a medieval-fantasy story at heart, but one which doesn't fall into the cliche of your character being some sort of "I yam the grimdark bringurrrr of deaattttttth!" phony "alpha male" stuff.

Be aware that this VN is unfinished as I type this; the story will undoubtedly be completed as the author makes and patches in additional chapters. This is a fairly standard process for Visual Novels, as they are a significant amount of work to create, especially if the author is working solo.

Recommended, if all this sounds good to you.

Citizen Sleeper is a fairly flawless game if you enjoy story-driven SF games which still allow for player input and choice.

The only players who may not like this game are those who require constant action and violent conflict from every single game they play. It's just not that sort of entertainment,

Story's the thing here, and Citizen Sleeper manages to bring elements to the "cyberpunk" science-fiction genre that go beyond where such games have gone before.

Absolutely recommended to those who are interested.

I enjoyed the demo version, but the full-game version, not so much. After many hours of play, hoping the game would open up, I found myself wishing I'd played under 2 hours, so I could request a refund.

The demo suggests that you have options as a player, in terms of how you deal with this world and its politics, but you don't. It's a grimdark game world in all respects, and every faction you meet shades somewhere between amoral to destructively self-absorbed (a.k.a. "evil"). If that's your thing, you may enjoy this game.

Me? I kept thinking of author Dorothy Jones Heydt's famous Eight Deadly Words which can kill any story: I Don't Care What Happens To These People.

And I don't.

You may love this game, and that's cool. But I regret spending money on it.

My opinions only, of course.

I really liked this game for what it was, up until the ending, and the way the game ended shifted my vote from a "yes" to a reluctant "no".

For most of the game, I was perfectly fine with feeling confused and relatively powerless as I tried to sort out a mystery while the powerful vampire clans who secretly control New York City pursued their own labyrinthine private agendae, and typically got in my way, or blocked my intentions while doing so.

From the get-go this story is about being a "small fish" trying to accomplish certain things while large, unseen forces affect the environment around you.

Even when you take on the job of solving a mystery on behalf the vampire lords, it quickly becomes clear that certain factions are more interested in blocking your progress than assisting it.

The trouble comes toward the end of the game, though. Perhaps it was just a quirk of my particular playthrough, but when answers arrived, they arrived in a sort of "infodump" kind of rush, and there wasn't much context to what I learned.

In the end sequence, I was pretty much still silent, and powerless to affect events. Ironically, the game awarded me the "Bad Ending" achievement for an ending that seemed inevitable all along -- an ending which didn't actually seem so bad; more like, the best resolution one could hope to achieve.

From the beginning, the game essentially hammers at you that you are a small creature surrounded by large forces which care nothing for you.

Perhaps I missed some crucial branching choice which would've opened up other options, but the game does not allow you to save game-states as you play (i.e. saving automatically exits the game afterward); it doesn't even allow you to backtrack dialogue as you play to perhaps make a different choice.

As such, the only way to try for a different ending is to replay the entire game again from the top, and while the game is well-made, once you already know the secret mysteries which lurk behind the central plot, replays lose a lot of what makes the game interesting. I don't think it's worth it, myself.

This is a very well-made game in most respects, and it absolutely nails the sort of moody, introspective modern-gothic tone one would expect from a Vampire: The Masquerade game.

Unfortunately, to preserve its storytelling, I felt that the game sacrificed too much player agency, and did not make clear when certain actions or reactions by the player might be significant. When every action feels equally important or unimportant as you play, you're basically just guessing your way through events -- and the game's structure doesn't make replays involving enough to warrant the time spent slogging through familiar content again, in the hope of seeing different outcomes.

Short Version: A reluctant "no" from me. A well-made story game in so many respects, but certain design decisions genuinely diminish a player's engagement with the tale.

Wanted to like the game, but it's just not enough fun at this point. Why? It's so random right now that too much of whether you do well or not depends on how the random elements configure at the start of the game.

Everything takes time, and each of your crew members will trigger yet another wave of negative effects at the end of their individual turns -- so if, for example, each crewmember starts with a bunch the wrong skills in their inventory for their specialty (e.g. your Engineer holds a bunch of Science skills) while you burn precious actions simply trying to get skills where they can prove most useful, waves of damage and boarders keep coming, so you can get so far behind right from the start that it all feels pointless.

It's certainly possible to win at this game, but too much depends on the random starting conditions for my liking.

My opinions only, of course.

Phoenix Point is effectively a crowd-funded, indie-game version of XCOM from the creator of the original XCOM game, Julian Gollop.

While Phoenix Point lacks the big-budget slickness of the 2K/Firaxis XCOM reboots, I prefer it as a game.

Why? In my opinion, Phoenix Point has a better story, and a broader game-world. The game features diplomacy, allegiances, and decisions which go beyond "kill all aliens".

I bought this game when it first appeared on the Epic Games store a year ago, and bought it again when it finally appeared here on my preferred digital platform, Steam.

Phoenix Point's mixture of story plot, strategy, and tactics may not be for everyone, but I would suggest giving the game the 2-hour tryout to see if it's a game for you.