Recent reviews by TranquilMage

Florence is a really short & sweet game that focuses on the main character Florence's first relationship and is told in short interactive chapters. The game has no dialogue and solely uses your own ability to interact with the narrative to communicate any more complex emotions than what you see on screen.

I found the game to be really well-made, and felt an immediate and very personal connection to the story. The way the game is paced and presented felt perfect for what it wanted to say, and the story actually made me cry pretty hard.

If you want to play through a nice, beautifully illustrated story in an hour of your time, I can absolutely recommend Florence!

A Little To The Left is a series of puzzles that center around ordering items after certain criteria and figuring out what the ideal way to stack, sort or align certain household items is. These can be either very simple, like correctly rotating a picture frame so that it hangs straight, or can get quite complex, like having to sort in an entire toolbox.

The game is incredibly visually appealing and has very well-selected color schemes, great background music and a beautiful variety of items that you have to sort into very statisfying arrangements.

Gameplay-wise I found it a lot of fun to figure out the "twists" of how to sort items, as the game keeps their levels and setups quite creative, and the levels are short enough that it's hard to stop playing. Even the type of items to sort and the environments to sort them into are very varied. My one annoyance with the game was that sometimes it's not very well-communicated if an item is actually "locked in" to the spot, or if the game doesnt fully recognize it as being located correctly, and when you just sorted 35-or-so items and *something* is not correct, that can be quite frustrating. Sometimes it's a bit hard to really understand what the game wants you to do exactly, and I had a few levels where I had to brute-force the start a bit to understand where I am even supposed to place things. And there were 2 or 3 puzzles that I found a bit too much "out there", where it was a bit hard to really understand what the level actually wanted me to do. (and if you suck at jigsaw puzzles there will be one level that will drive you absolutely up the wall)

Overall, I think the game wasn't fully what I expected, but I don't really mean this in a bad way - I expected it to be more of a Zen-like "order these items however you want" type of game, but I found the puzzles to be very engaging and the game really did a lot of creative stuff with this basic premise, and quite positively surprised me. Some levels were a tad bit frustrating, but they're usually balanced out with a lot of fun and creative levels in-between. This is definetly not among the most memorable, impactful or innovative games I've ever played, but it makes for a fun evening or two playing through it and is quite beautiful to look at and fun to interact with.

This game is literally so good, I don't have any critical thoughts on this. Everything is even better than in the first game. I love the characters. Everything is visually stunning. The stakes of this feel way higher and everything is even more dynamic and reactive (Especially Nemesis' gimmick when doing a run is amazing, but there's also just SO much happening in general while you're on your journey). I feel like progression is harder than I found it in Hades I, but I actually really like that. I can't wait for the full release.

If you can handle a bit of horror and are open for a very bizarre and quite intricate interactive experience that discusses pretty high-level philosophical concepts I can warmly recommend this game. Everything you can say about it is kind of a spoiler but there were so many times when we thought we saw everything the game had to offer and it just kept surprising us every time. The way the game delivers horror is really unique and the narrative the game spins is quite memorable and a lot of fun to untangle and understand! Sometimes the navigation is a bit of a pain but you get used to it. I just want everyone ever to play this game so I can talk about it with people

I received this game as a gift, so I had no idea whatsoever what to expect. However, I can definitely recommend Mediterranea Inferno to anyone who is looking for a very experimental queer visual novel horror experience! The story follows three characters who were best friends before Covid, and who lost the beginning of their adulthood to lockdowns. During their time apart from each other, they each turned into different people (not necessarily into better people). This new dynamic creates a lot of tension as they attempt to spend a vacation together.

This game exudes SO MUCH style and clearly put a lot of effort into conveying the story. The audio design is so well-done, and the colors, compositions, and backgrounds are absolutely stunning. It's the only game where I've sent someone a screenshot of the Main Menu because I liked it so much. And I really liked the way the developer's Italian heritage played into this story, and I really felt like this game earnestly had a lot of ideas it wanted to discuss (I didn't agree with all of them but I think that's the point of making art or whatever).

The characters took a bit of warming up for me, but I was surprised by how much I started to like them over the course of the game. The story has a lot to say and tackles all kinds of thoughts with a lot of nuance and earnestness. The plot can develop in several ways, and I appreciated the variety in each playthrough, even though you only make three or so big "choices" in every run.

I really appreciated the game's openness about sex and intimacy, as well as the individual dynamics between the three characters. Understanding how their friendship worked was intriguing, and I found the game quite ambitious in the story it wanted to tell and how well it executed that narrative. The game allows you certain insights into the characters that are very metaphorical stagings of what is going on in the character's psyche while they are doing something instead of really showing you their actions and proceedings, and it's both very insightful for understanding the characters as well as somewhat ambiguous about what is actually *really* happening right now, and I really loved that.

However, there were a few things that didn't quite resonate with me. Occasionally, the character designs of the three protagonists were too similar, making it difficult for me to tell them apart visually, and I wasn't the biggest fan of the character art style specifically. Additionally, the dialogue occasionally felt too stilted and on-the-nose, and I felt like the game was jumping a bit with characters in terms of characterizations to get messages in the game across more easily (I had a few moments where I said "This guy would not know what that word means," out loud or stuff like that, lmao), and while the story is totally an open discussion that you can take away what you personally interpret into it, the one thing I personally found a bit annoying was that the narrative was constantly wallowing in self-pity about how hard our generation has it, even more so than I felt was usually deserved for the moments it happened in, and the narrative had such a general contempt for the "past" as a broad concept that it baffled me a bit, to a degree where I'm not sure if I was missing a layer of irony perhaps. But none of these things made the game less interesting and fun to experience for me, and the way I had to limit myself from just starting to discuss the game's ideas at length here really is an indicator for the fact that the game really had meaningful and thought-provoking things to say!

Overall, I found the game really engaging, and incredibly visually interesting! The characters kind of grew on me as concepts over my playtime, and the story gave me a lot to think about and will certainly stay in my memory for quite a while.

Balatro is a deckbuilder game where you play poker hands to reach the highest possible scores, while only being allowed to play a few hands and redraw cards a few times. The game allows you to buy all kinds of passive and active upgrades to cards, and you need to keep up with the rising stakes of the rounds.

I can really recommend the game for anyone who likes deckbuilder game in general, it's easy to learn, there is a ton of variation, every run feels totally fresh, your strategies will be compeletely different from run to run, and you will end up with a few really fun and totally overpowered combos. It's really not as luck-based as you would expect a poker game to be and the artstyle, music and level of polish make Balatro a really well-rounded experience!

My only criticism of the game is, that I think it's possible to have runs that just aren't all that fun because the items you get just dont work together at all, and sometimes you can't just really "go with" the setup you've been offered and it makes you be "underleveled" for the current run really quickly. But that aside, there is really only positive stuff to say about the game! Really, if you need a casual game to spend a bit of time with, I can totally recommend playing Balatro!

In Chants Of Sennaar you explore a massive "Tower Of Babel"-esque tower, on which various cultures live, that you meet one after the other. The problem is, that each culture has their own language, grammar, and cultural beliefs and ideals that make them clash with the cultures around them, both due to a language barrier and due to their ideas about the other cultures on the tower. As you meet all of these cultures who refuse to interact with each other, you have to understand their cultural beliefs and - more importantly - learn their language, to figure out how to proceed to a higher area in the tower, and maybe even figure out if you can help overcome any of these cultures' conflicts.

There is a lot I loved about the game - the visuals are absolutely striking, the music is very somber and beautiful, the areas were both varied in design and gameplay, and the narrative the game is telling is very coherent and easy to understand even though you spend most of the time in the game not understanding what people tell you.

There is so much love and thought put into the different runes and language systems, and you can understand so much about how the languages were formed, even though the game never explicitly explains most of it. Figuring words out is varied and takes guessing, closely paying attention to context, and even deriving words from other words. Learning a language and understanding people makes you feel really powerful and is hard-earned and really rewarding. Translating a word correctly can't be brute-forced, but you still get confirmation of your assumed words often enough for it not to get tedious. Occasionally, the game accidentally gave a word away with this "vocabulary revelation" mechanic that I hadn't fully earned, but I didn't really mind all that much and it only happened a few times.

For some criticism though, I personally think the game hurts itself by making translation a mechanic in the game. Because for that to work, all the languages needed similar words and concepts so that they are inter-translatable, and it made the individual languages stand out less than they probably could have otherwise. I still think every language and area had an interesting and unique quirk, but I would have preferred to have 2-3 more fleshed out languages to learn than learn very similar vocabulary up to 5 times.

In a similar way, the game was just slightly too big for my taste - each area was just big enough that not finding the next clue could turn out to be quite frustrating and especially the second area in a game was pretty tedious to explore. I didn't find any puzzles contrived, but often the order and manner in which you are supposed to do things isn't really communicated to the player and you just keep coming back to puzzles to check if you can already solve them or if you're still missing something. And in my personal opinion the game didn't really need or benefit from the various action sequences in the story and they usually just felt a bit tedious to me.

That being said, there was so much in the world and the story and the puzzles that I really loved - I had so much fun translating from language to language; playing the fourth area was like playing an even cooler, more concise version of Myst; sometimes words are used in ways that have some really great comedic timing; there are so many cool gimmicks and small interactions that made each area super memorable; and also the ending made me tear up a bit.

This is not really all that much of a "language game", like Heaven's Vault or similar games are, and players who are looking for something like that may be a bit disappointed in a lack of language complexity. But if you like puzzle games you should totally give Chants of Sennaar a try! The world and cultures are absolutely lovely and the game really makes everything work together really well to tell the overall story.

I've played almost every newer Souls game before playing Dark Souls 1 and I was a bit afraid that this game would be too "old" and clunky for me to handle, be too incomprehensible, and generally just not as "fun" as the other games I had played. My assumption was, that the games that were produced later probably had learned a lot from the mechanical mistakes of Dark Souls 1, and that the game was probably only still held in such high esteem due to nostalgia. However, I was not only proven wrong, Dark Souls very quickly became my favorite Souls game I've played so far.

It's very hard to describe, but every element in this game feels like it's exactly at the "right" place. The level design is tight, no area overstays its welcome, and the enemies don't only vary from area to area, they even occasionally are only found in one room in the entire game world. This world felt magical and internally real to me in a way not even other Souls games did, and the variation in world and enemy design is a huge part of that.

I can't believe I'm saying this but I even liked the status effects in the game more than I liked them in other Souls games. Everything in Dark Souls is so deliberately placed and designed that having to figure out how to manage a poison effect feels like a deliberately placed challenge, instead of just being a nuisance that is kind of everywhere in the game. Even "cursed" - a status effect that is so evil that I won't explain it any further - felt cool to me and not all that frustrating, because it is only used in very few instances and the game offered a lot of guidance on how to manage the effect, in a way that added to the experience. The game never really overwhelms you and to me, every challenge just felt like the right amount of difficulty and mean-ness.

Dark Souls level and enemy design is so diverse and well-balanced, that every area in this game stays incredibly memorable. I felt real mystery and awe while exploring this world, in a way no hyperrealistic modern AAA-title's super polished world ever made me feel. I am quite sad that I am almost done with all the content Dark Souls has to offer because playing this game for the first time was one of the best experiences I've had with a game in recent times.

However, I am a bit relieved that this wasn't the first Souls game I've ever played because I don't think I could have appreciated this game as much as I did without already knowing how these games "work". Dark Souls' tutorial isn't really great at helping you understand much about it, and I am absolutely aware that there are ways to play this game that aren't very "fun". So if you never played a Souls game before I would actually rather recommend people start with something like Bloodborne, which I found a bit easier to get into than this game.

Surprisingly, I don't really have that much else to say about the game, I loved the bosses, I loved the world design, I loved the mechanics, I loved the music, I loved(!!!) the level design, I loved the weapons, I 1000% get why people never stopped talking about this game now. This game will be something that's gonna be special to me for a long time and I will definitely replay it a lot in the coming years.

Shadows Of Doubt is a noir detective game set in an entirely procedurally generated chunk of a city, filled with appartment complexes, shops, cafes, bars, and offices, that are populated by hundreds of fully automated NPCs, who all have jobs, friends, go shopping, have work times and home times, partners, an appartment, as well as about 20+ indentifying traits to them raging from fingerprints to income, and from size and voice to handwriting style. Whenever a murder happens in this city, any of these hundreds of NPCs could be the murderer, and it is your job – with very little handholding from the game’s side – to find out who it is.

This game was such a fresh surprise to me in so many ways, I am still a bit in awe of some of the ideas and the immersiveness the developers create in general. Shadows Of Doubt has tons of mechanics I always wanted to see in a detective game – the corkboard with red string that helps you track down suspects lets you put any info you find whatsoever on it – even if it’s a completely irrelevant napkin you found on the street; and the ways to get your information are endless: breaking into homes, breaking into offices, crossreferencing police databases, employee records, asking random people on the street for information, scanning an entire building for a certain fingerprint, calling a phone number and then breaking into your hotel’s basement to see where they redirected the call to, reading a persons private emails, etc. – it’s truly a joy how much creative control the game gives you over how you want to find a piece of evidence.

Shadows Of Doubt is also incredibly good at nailing down the noir vibe of the setting – the constantly rainy or snowly weather, the “survival mechanics” that make you survive on fast food, coffee and cigars, breaking into people's homes to take a shower, the dubious legality of your job – if you play the tutorial, you even are divorced and homeless at the start of the game! I had so much fun immersing myself into this miserable little detective character I had created, and the game certainly makes it very easy.

While Shadows of Doubt is somewhat formulaeic, the people, locations and circumstances of what you are supposed to do and what information you are given differ so much from case to case, that I found it almost a bit reassuring, that certain things are ‘always the same’ so to say – there are about 30 or so different email texts people send each other, so it’s easy to rule out if an email is important or not, NPC AIs are not very smart, every person seems to have sticky note somewhere for their *one* passcode, and after a while you have figured out that every person keeps Document A in the bedroom closet and Document B somewhere on their kitchen counter. But it’s reassuring in the sense that you start to get a bit bolder in how you play the game – breaking into a house while the person is sleeping instead of waiting until they go to work, knowing how to trick cameras and avoid alerting security systems makes the game a lot more fun than if the game would be too realistic and punishing in these scenarios. In the tutorial, when I wasn’t yet familiar with all of the systems, I found the game brutally punishing and pretty hard to play, but it’s really just a matter of getting familiar with the game mechanics.

There are tons of other things I find absolutely wonderful about Shadows Of Doubt – the jobs you can additionally do to earn money are creative and a great spin on the base mechanics and feel quite different than the “main” cases; The fingerprint mechanic should win an award for something, you can literally go to any surface in the game and pull out your scanner and you might get the fingerprints of people who recently were there, which actually realistically maps to light switches, post boxes, doors, etc. more than it does to random walls. The city is just big enough that you don’t really get lost in it and the game's sound design and visual design are both stunning and even further nail down the vibe of the game.

My only 2 complaints would be that the game isn’t really performing all that well (I can’t really blame them, they’re simulating like 200+ NPCs all at once), and that the cases sometimes require you to catch a really specific clue that you may have not thought of (e.g. one case is based around the fact that you think of scanning a really specific item for fingerprints, which isn’t unintitive, but if you don’t do that you find no other connection to the murderer whatsoever) – this is made a bit harder by the fact that the game doesn’t really care about “motive”, so your only goal is to find out who it was, with the game not generating evidence for motive at all – which is a bit confusing, since the tutorial case implies that there *will* be motive to the murders.

Generally, if you don’t mind the game maybe being somewhat clunky and a bit buggy sometimes, and if you like the premise of this game I can really recommend buying it. It’s mechanically innovating, beautiful, and has a true commitment to the detective noir style.

First of all I am already a huge fan of the creator behind the games, I loved Fallen London and Sunless Seas, and Cultist Simulator is probably one of my favorite games of all time, which I have bought literally all bonus content for and in which I played tons of campaigns. So I was already excited for this when it came out. Initially, it took me a bit to get into the game, but after 2 or so hours Book of Hours sucked me in entirely.

This game is so addictive and mechanically such a joy to play and learn, and while the gameplay looks incredibly confusing, it’s really intuitive and takes you a lot more by the hand in familiarizing yourself with the game mechanics than it’s predecessor did. And while the gameplay has a lot of similarities with Cultist Simulator, Book of Hours makes all of that into it’s own completely unique thing – you still read books and gain knowledge and earn money on the side and counsel people of the occult underworld with the knowledge you have gained, but where Cultist Simultator was a tight race against the clock and against your resources and against the authorities and your health and money, Book of Hours is a relaxing game about restoring an old house full of history, cataloguing books, hosting visitors, and about homekeeping, and it still doesn’t lose any of the vibe or intrigue that the first game had.

The Hush House is so intriguing to explore and I had so much fun with learning the history of the house and it’s centuries worth of stories and inhabitants. One incredibly clever thing the developer did to make you pay attention to that, is a rather simple puzzle, that asks you to sort the busts of every head of the house over the centuries into the correct order, which was a genius idea because you are constantly paying attention to the snippets of history about Hush House and I almost had wished for this to go deeper than just ordering the busts. I found all of the characters the game is telling us about incredibly interesting and charming and the story of the house is just an absolute joy to uncover.

Book of Hours is full of really unconventional mechanics and ideas, that all are cleverly interconnected and the game design itself makes you feel like you are a librarian living in the house – to improve the stats of someone who is supposed to restore a room for you, you need to serve them drinks, food, provide them tools, or give them advice using your own skills, like you would host a “real” guest in a house like that. Similarly, all of the side activites you can do neatly tie into the “bigger” mechanics of the game – gardening, cooking, ordering items, all can be used to either help your guests, or for your own study of books and your pursuit of knowledge – but at the same time they just *feel* like things you would do, while living in this house. The ludonarrative coherence in this game is really just insanely good.

The game can be played taking notes, and I kind of wish that I had done that earlier, but in the beginning I wasn’t really sure *what* I was supposed to be taking notes on – so if you just start playing this I recommend keeping track of details about the heads of the house, because some small tidbits of info are gained from the description of a book, etc. and you *think* you will remember that XYZ was the 8th librarian of Hush House – but you will not and it will take you forever to find the book again. Other things you probably should note down are where workbenches are located and what they do, because there are a *lot* of really really specific workbenches in this house and it’s either writing it down, or consulting the wiki (or clicking through all 20+ workbenches).

Some people criticised that the game is so “unorganized” – you can’t take notes in the game and finding an item in the house is quite hard - the house is very big and full of a lot of items, workbenches, books, painting, tools, and you can add even *more* items, like flowers you got from gardening, into the house - but I would argue that is the whole point of the game – if you don’t organize this mess of a house in a way you can keep track of items, then you will have some serious problems, or at least the game will become quite tedious, but Book of Hours offers ample space to help you keep track of items - e.g. there is a wine cellar where you can conveniently put all of the bottles you find, something like this exists for a lot of types of items and for others you can simply make room for them, there are a lot (a lot) of spaces to put things in this game. And I personally liked the idea of noting down things I found on paper more than I would have liked typing them into a fake-journal in the game.

The game however has a bit of jank to it – it has some stutters on my (very bad and old) PC, and even on “high” graphics, some areas of the map you play on are very very low res, some smaller items don’t scale very well when they are shown as bigger images, and putting something on a shelf is a bit more janky than I really would have liked.

[Edit: Added after finishing the game]: I wrote this review when I was 4/5th or so done with the game, and I wanted to add that the last fifth or so of the game felt a bit more tedious than was really necessary. The game becomes pretty grind-y and the rewards you get (later rooms, better soul cards and skill upgrades) become/feel less rewarding, and especially if you want to do the "normal" end of the game (meaning getting a skill to 25), that includes quite some grinding. Also for me personally the game design fell a bit apart at that point, because leveling up skills is bound to a finite resource that you can lose, and I barely could scrape enough of that resource together to get the game done, because I previously didn't realize it *would be* such a scarce rescource at the end. I feel like this is the kind of game where it's totally fine to just play it as far as you really want to, because I found the grindy end personally a bit anticlimatic, and in a lot of ways the opposite of Cultist Simulator, where the stakes in the endgame were higher than ever, it kind of just fizzled out, instead of ending on a particularly high note. This might have to do with me not really understanding the skill levelling up mechanics like intended until it was a bit too late, but I still found the end a bit weak and lacking in any real achievement or resolution.

Overall, Book of Hours is a lovely, quite slow and relaxing game about restoring a house, cataloguing books, organizing the house in a way you can work with, learning about the places’ history and has quite a lot of new and unconventional mechanics that I really enjoyed. I don’t think that the game is for everyone, but I think it’s a game that people should really give a chance, even if it doesn’t sound 100% up their alley, because this game is just absolutely wonderful, even though the last hours of endgame are a bit tedious.