Recent reviews by Lord Guynius

I've been trying to scratch my colony manager sim itch for a long, long time now, and this hybrid with making it a roguelite game seems to be what did it. Every settlement gives me a chance to refine my fundamentals while exploring new content and strategies, increasing the difficulty a little if I feel like I can handle it, and not get bogged down with mistakes that I made 20 hours ago. My issue in similar games is always "man if I had known this 10 hours ago, I would've done it differently", leading me to restart the game and have to replay five hours of stuff I've already done before. Against the Storm keeps it fresh, and packs it all in a very pleasant gameplay loop and visual style. The devs are actively balancing the game even now after release, and it gets better with each patch. I had high expectations for this game and it smashed them, so if you think this might scratch your itch, there's a good chance it will!

I knew I would like this game before I played it, but I did not expect just how much I would love it. This game hits basically every note that I could ask from a game and does it with style and a unique flavor that shows the developers' heart through and through.

The visual style, spritework, art, and animation are just stellar. Just top notch stuff that reminds me of the prime of the PS1 era. It's lively, consistent, detailed, and just springs to life. There's just enough of everything to pull you into the world, with basically no unnecessary fat. Everything was put there with care and consideration, creating a world that draws you in with very little.

The story, the characters in it, and how it's told are all top notch. The game does an amazing job of telling its story from the perspective of the rodents it portrays, mixing reality with fantasy, the believable with the unbelievable, to make a compelling narrative that you can't help but care about right from the first second. The writing is witty, sleek, funny, and very engaging and believable. Characters have clear personalities, manners of speaking, and principles that come forth in how they engage with each other. None of it feels contrived or overdone, and very often I found myself saying something out loud, only for the character on the screen to say basically the same thing. It's a game that can joke about itself and recognize that it's a game, but still have itself be taken seriously and be dramatic at times when it's needed. That balance is a hard one to strike, and I feel that this game nails it. I will remember a lot of these characters for a long time to come.

The gameplay is great. As I said earlier, there is no unneeded fat anywhere. The gameplay stands in service of the story, to make you feel part of the characters' narrative and struggles. There are no random encounters, every fight has been planned out and that makes every encounter meaningful, and gives it a place in the adventure that you're going through. In that regard, while the game has RPG elements, it has exactly enough of those, too. This game is much more an adventure game, or a classic Role Playing Game, than a stat-heavy menu magic number cruncher. If you min-max, the battles border on easy, but this doesn't detract from the game for me at all. I'm engaged in the adventure, and I want the fights to be scenes in that. I want to feel like the badass protagonist in a game like this, not grind levels and minmax my equipment for hours. But if you do like that sort of stuff, that's in here, too! Optional boss battles, secret treasures and upgrades, all of that's there. I like how the level up system works, too. Finding story bits, roleplaying and interacting with the world gives you levels up, rather than grinding for XP, and this gives the game a chance to make the characters grow with the pace of the story.

So like I said at the start, I knew I'd like it, but I didn't know how much I would LOVE this game. It hits absolutely every note for me, and with a ~10 hour ish runtime that is all fun and no fat, I feel like I can play this game again in the future, and show it to friends even if they're not typically into games like this. Just a fantastic experience top to bottom. And that soundtrack is going to be the soundtrack of my life the next few weeks.

As someone who's never really gotten into any of the thousands of survival games out there, the Arks and Rusts of this world, Valheim really caught me by surprise and sucked me in super hard. For a 0.1 Early Access game, it's surprisingly complete.

The developers clearly have a vision in mind for a Viking fantasy and everything in the game stands in service of it. It's a survival game with an objective and the survival elements are there to keep you focused but they don't get in the way. Finding resources takes effort but doesn't really get tedious. There's always things to do, progress to make, and even exploration is rewarding.

Multiplayer is super easy. Characters and worlds are separately instanced, you can take your character to any world, and any world can be turned into a multiplayer experience with friends or strangers with just a button. I've personally gone so far as setting up a dedicated server, an option the game also already ships with. Multiplayer is smooth. There's some rubber banding and lag, but the netcode in a 0.1 Early Access game just kind of has that. It often sorts itself out quickly, or it's just a matter of leaving the world and restarting it, which takes ten seconds. Multiplayer really elevates games like this, so having it sorted out and super accessible right from the start is a big plus.

A lot of the systems are implemented 90% and need some tweaking, but for the phase of development the game is in, it's a lot more complete and functional than most. I have full confidence that any creases will be ironed out before the full release.

Valheim has sucked me in way more than I thought it would. Part of this is attributed to being able to play with friends really easily, but I'll even sometimes sneak in to fix my storage system, build an expansion to a base or get some resources so it's smoother when my friends come back online. The game is engaging, and that's coming from someone who almost skipped it based on the description and my general indifference towards survival games. 4 million sales well-earned, I'd say.

Easily one of the best RPG games I've ever played. There's just so much game. I can't even properly wrap my head around it. Worth all the hype and praise it gets.

It's a fun take on the SRPG genre with some more real-time interaction tied into the strategical gameplay. The difficulty curve is a bit weird at first, but the game forces you to be smart about your progress and doesn't really allow grinding. I haven't quite hit a wall that I couldn't circumvent with smart thinking, though. Definitely recommend this game if you're into gritty post-apoc stories or into SRPG games and want something fresh.

Simple at face-value, Recettear quickly becomes an intricate management RPG with likeable characters, a steep difficulty slope (which is luckily manageable) and the question: do I adventure to risk it all and possibly win it all, or do I take the safe route of just runing the shop? The story evolves around you, and no two runs through this game are the same. The more often you play it the more your strategy changes, and then the game still manages to snipe you with surprises and hurdles that're hard to overcome. Also the child is evil. EVIL I TELL YOU.

Great game, epic AI, fantastic co-op functions. I'm kind of bored on shooters, but I really love this one!

Best arcade FPS ever, period.