Recent reviews by Lucachoo

Overall - a good experience, held back by design choices, a visual style that sacrifices accessibility, and shallow story depth. Finished it in about 10 hours.

While it is inspired by Act 1 of Inscryption, Inkshade manages to create a unique twist, with it's own creative "board game", upgrade mechanic, and immersive and creepy atmosphere. I enjoyed the tactics and difficulty of the board game, and the challenge of the final act was very creative. The environmental puzzles are fun, though not all of them quite hit the mark.

The GM's design is creepy and creative. The visual style is gorgeous and unique. It relies heavily on darkness and shadow, which makes for a great atmosphere but can make exploration difficult in some areas (I sometimes was just clicking hoping to hit a hidden coin)

UI elements of the board game, such as enemy health and attack, are also often hidden by walls and shadows, which can create extremely frustrating situations.

Where it disappointed me most was the story and ending. With its inspiration being Inscryption, you can't help but expect a deeper story or [ENDING SPOILER] an ending allowing the protagonist to survive and win against the GM
The fact that nodes on the roguelike map are dedicated to lore (that you can choose instead of an upgrade, for example) make it seem like there's something deeper hiding. Instead, as far as I can tell, the game is linear, and has only one ending that left me wondering "that's it?".

Great rule discovery game on top of classic Solitaire, with an occult twist and an ARG to boot. So much mistery!

Not only is "Gentoo Rescue" a truly brilliant puzzle game with rule discovery that JUST... KEEPS... GOING.. in exploring interesting mechanics, unveiling secrets, and building clever puzzles. ("Oh, you think you're in the endgame? Have another secret mechanic!")

It is also one of the best designed and most accessible puzzlers I've ever played. The game strikes a very difficult balance to be challenging yet approachable.

As you play and uncover more and more mechanics, the game beautifully keeps track them for you, while teasing all the things you have yet to learn. The game's hint system offers increasingly helpful tips, whether you need a gentle nudge or more hands-on help. The mechanics book will generously offer whether you have all knowledge required for a puzzle, or should seek to learn more. I wish I had a fraction of these systems for when I got frustrated with "Baba is you"'s most cryptic puzzles. The various accessibility options are a plus as well.

The game also controls great, with some clever controls that utilize both keyboard and mouse (Undo/Redo with the mouse wheel is awesome!)

Combine all that and you got yourself a gem of a game.

An excellent "idle" game with no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
- A TON of content
- An upfront cost, then no more pay-to-win or pay-to-skip
- No rebirth mechanics or any such nonsense
- Complex, interconnected systems
- Active devs and fresh content incoming

Vroom vroom zap zap boom.

Good game.