Recent reviews by gnawg

I enjoyed it a lot; I can see some people bouncing off it, but I think it's worth a shot for most people. A few notes and caveats:

* It's a pretty tight experience. No open world exploration or complex builds to be found here; just 20-ish hours of gameplay.

* There are some rough edges, but nothing that'll force you to restart, or really derail your experience by more than a few seconds. Dialogue might repeat, and some mechanics (looking at you, automatons) don't handle time-warping perfectly.

* You might enjoy this more if you like setting your own goals and playing with the system. Merely winning each fight is trivial, but if you're the sort that'll appreciate the satisfaction of orchestrating a pixel-perfect symphony of environmental hazards and explosions, you'll enjoy playing around with this game.

* You might enjoy this more if you like experimenting. You'll have a couple dozen abilities and combat options, and you really only need a few to clear the game. If you're the sort to find your favorites early and stick to them, you may end up rather bored.

Definitely looking forward to a possible Iron Danger 2!

Rogue-lites are often some mix of risk-taking, trial-and-error learning, and analyzing the information you're given. There's some room for learning events and rewards, but Crying Suns is up-front with most of its key information. You'll know your odds of succeeding at a planetary expedition. Officers and squadrons have their effects clearly described. Even the time it takes for a squadron to reach its destination is labeled in-combat.

When I lost, I could usually trace it to a bad call. While there's enough leeway that one can almost always recover from bad luck alone, losing isn't dragged out if you've made unwise decisions either -- and those decisions could be as simple as saving scrap when you ought to have purchased mercenaries, or repairing a squadron when you ought to have saved for a shop. With careful play and a little luck, I think it's entirely possible to play through the main story on Normal without dying. I made it to chapter 3, and lost while learning how to best use a new battleship.

Crying Suns rewards close analysis and optimization on both resource-management and tactical levels. You'll have to look at the map ahead and assess what kinds of risks you'll want to take, the right mix and order of shops, anomalies, and planetary expeditions, how much fuel you'll have, and how much you value the option to fork at jump 3, depending on how jumps 1 and 2 went.

Careful positioning is rewarded in combat. The tactics start simple enough: position your squadrons to avoid excess damage from enemy boomer drones, get said explosive enemies to detonate on each other, and cycle your squadrons to keep them from being wrecked to maintain their pristine advantage against the ill-maintained Scrapper fleets. As chapters progress, you get to make use of enemy battleships and strategies, maneuvering in the ways you were previously trying to avoid. The pause mechanic is crucial here, as is the waypoint system. This compounds with learning to use a variety of battleship weapons, using and countering stealth, capturables, hazards, asteroid fields, and so on.

If you have any familiarity with FTL or similar rogue-lites, there's enough overlap that you can quickly get your bearings, but Crying Suns is very much a distinct game. Crying Suns is very much story-forward in a way that FTL is not, and if you have an interest in themes of technological singularity, cloning and identity, hubris and control, I think you'll find it at least interesting.

It's worth emphasizing that Hexcells never requires guessing to complete a puzzle; there is no luck in Hexcells. If you feel like you really can't progress without guessing, there's an excellent steam guide which walks through the logical deduction for every puzzle. I'd even go so far as to say that guessing is missing out on content; the puzzles are pretty carefully crafted, and there's usually a specific order in which the puzzle is solved.

My main QOL wishes are that the game could save partial completion even after closing the game. I find that leaving and coming back to a puzzle helps a lot -- currently that means leaving the game open while doing something else.

I'd also like to option to mark cells without commiting to an answer, just so I can sketch out some more complex possibilities. But there's always MS Paint.

I did get pretty tired of counting hexes; it would be nice if it could auto-fill trivial deductions like minesweeper traditionally does. E.g.: if the cell is marked with 3 adjacent blues, and there's only 3 adjacent oranges left, just auto-mark those. Or if a line is marked with 2 and two blues are already marked, auto-clear the rest.

The non-consecutive notation (e.g. -3-) could be made more obvious to a new player. A new player may initially interpret -5- on a line to mean no two blue hexes are adjacent to each other -- which is not true. It simply indicates that you don't have all 5 hexes in a row. For example, possible to have 4 adjacent, and 1 separated blue hexes