Recent reviews by Cykelero

Endearing characters, fun music, and super detailed world. I caught on to a bunch of things, and clearly there was a ton more that I could have noticed.

Neat! Puzzles are often a bit arbitrary, but that’s not rare for the genre, and probably the only bad thing I have to say about Phonopolis. It sounds great, looks great, feels great to play. The narrative is simple but cute. It’s very neat!

Excellent gamefeel, a few different interesting weapons, and a bunch of different enemies that make the game look varied. But the upgrades are really unexciting (+5% damage! 25% ammo reload!), and the game isn't challenging enough to make progress exciting. It's pretty weird (and a shame!) seeing a game that's got such good feel, but really bland overall structure; and that really wastes the roguelike aspect.

Tedious, if good-looking. The first area (at the lighthouse) was by far the most entertaining to me; the next 3/4 of the game mostly felt like a slog.

Love how there’s a few different layers of gameplay, and how they fit together in an interesting way. They’re each pretty simple but add up to a system with a lot of possibilities. The game has a lot of new bits of gameplay it regularly adds, too.

Plus, the magical realism and humor are really good. The mood is a bit eerie (without being especially serious) and I found the world genuinely intriguing.

Atmospheric, and the climbing mechanics feel learnable and fair.

Strangely not challenging, even when bumping the difficulty a bit from default; instead, you have little ammo, so you're constantly out. To get more ammo, the main way is to spend another kind of ammo, of which you can also be out. So: moderately frustrating, never very satisfying, to me.

Also there's a million weapons and mods and upgrades and combos and things, and they're all introduce very quickly—through incessant tutorial overlays, which pause the game to tell you incredibly obvious things—so you never have
the time to explore much of a gameplay mechanic before another one pops up.

Not a terrible game by any means, but wasn't the fun, quick, gratifying experience I expected it to be.

The game is very stylish; superficially it looks very polished.

Everything else is OK at best! The weapons don't feel good to shoot at all. The upgrades aren't satisfying. The puzzles aren't particularly interesting. The voice acting and writing are off and a bit confusing.

Everything in the game lacks punch, flavor; the visuals and the music are the only really nice parts, and they sort of paper over how lackluster the rest is. Oh well!

Intricate but tedious. If you've played other text parser-based adventure games, you know what you're getting into; I didn't.

Interacting with the world is slow and cumbersome, requiring a lot of typing to do basic actions; and you'll occasionally be fighting the text parser, looking for the exact right way of phrasing what you're trying to do. Even opening doors is a bit of typing.

The game is surprisingly full of details and optional findings, conversations, etc; which also means you can easily miss a ton of information and scenes. Whether you like this is pretty personal; this is made better/worse by the fact that the game eventually rewards you for these findings: the more you missed, the worst you'll feel. But, if you have good tolerance for busywork, you'll be properly rewarded by the game recognizing your thoroughness.

So: if you're OK with tedious controls, you'll really enjoy the game's depth and intricate environments. Otherwise, you'll be looking at the official guide all throughought, to just get things over with.

Into the Breach as a deckbuilder.

Really fun and quickly challenging. Definitely lacks clarity at times—both in broadcasting what will happen, and explaining what's happening—but clear enough. Love it!