Recent reviews by Syntax Error

2D Beat 'Em Up style fightin' game where you play as Anna, an immigrant from elsewhere come here to take a job fighting the town's monster menace. Story lines and allegories abound about immigration, addiction, mental health, relationships, etc wrapped up in some pretty competent monster punching action with a good array of power-ups, new moves and new equipment to help you through the action sequences. Between fights is some town exploration and plot but no active choices to make (aside from perhaps ignoring some NPCs). Although the story is told in a single play through, you'll need to New Game+ to finish all the NPC stories and get one or two new scenes. Luckily the game itself isn't very long. Finally there's an Arcade mode to just focus on the monster punching.

Artwork is crude but works; I found it somewhat charming but your opinion may vary. Soundtrack is instrumental tracks from a few artists (each represented numerous times). I could see hesitating to spend $10 on a 3-5hr game (inc NG+) but could be a fun time when on sale.

Short horror game of the sort with a stalking monster, jump scares and some light problem solving. Not my usual genre of game but I was looking for relatively new and little reviewed games for the Steam Summer Sale and took a chance on this one. The graphics are suitably surreal and atmospheric, the music selections work well and the whole package was entertaining for an hour. The description says that this was made by a sixth grader so well done. What story there is doesn't really come up until the third and final chapter but I assume most people play these for the overall vibe and getting chased by weird stuff and this game delivers on that.

A few quibbles are that the lighting can get a little wonky, some sort of sound feedback would be great for the levers (which have a delayed visual effect so you wind up spamming it and not knowing if you hit it for a few moments) and the achievement for completing Chapter One seems to be broken. Nothing really game breaking but worth remembering for the next game or giving this one a polish.

Janky and confusing game where you go out and shoot slimes and collect their hearts. The graphics are fine in an indie low-poly way but there's no sound and the shooting mechanics feel flat and inaccurate. At points, some presence (your dad? I dunno) demands hearts and you need to either pay up and get a power-up boost in return or sacrifice your own heart ending the game. The concept is fine for a weird little indie title but the execution isn't much fun, neither in understanding what you're doing or in the act of doing it.

A qualified thumbs up at the sale price, Dungeon: Cradle of Hell starts off strong but turns into a slog at the end. A basic tile dungeon crawler, you're trying to escape from Hell as you travel through grid based maps fighting monsters, collecting gear and avoiding traps. In rogue-like fashion, you can spend gold on the main map (or after your death) to increase base stats in damage, gold collection, etc. There's some comedic elements but not at the expense of an enjoyable dungeon crawling loop. There's a few bits of translation confusion -- is Damage Block different from Block Damage different from Protection from Attack? -- but nothing preventing game play and overall bug free.

Unfortunately, towards the end, you've capped out your purchasable stats and the game turns into an random chance sim where you lose half or more of your health before acquiring any gear, stumble blindly into traps, and feebly swat at enemies with few methods of regaining any health or correcting your death spiral. Without any more progression options, it's just running the same map over and over waiting for the perfect rolls of equipment drops, finding health and avoiding traps to reach the end. It's still a fun run up to that point and I bought it on sale so got my 69¢ worth but I think the back half of the game could use either more health gains or less traps/damage over time effects to make it more likely to finish before boredom with the loop sets in.

[Edit: Although the fifth dungeon was a lot of tries as described above, the sixth was actually fairly easy. Also, the final achievement for beating the game didn't add for me, oh well]

Short little puzzle game where you are a detective solving five different crimes. The crime scene is littered in easily identified clues and suspects which you investigate, gather evidence then select who you believe is the culprit and three pieces of evidence to support it. The solving part was a little janky just because sometimes it felt as though more pieces of evidence supported the case and I picked the "wrong" items but you can just go back and try again (and probably brute force the solutions if you really wanted). Game play is probably an hour or less for all five cases but I was entertained.

Dungeon crawling roguelike where you lead your warrior, cleric, thief and wizard through a tile based map, finding equipment, taps and enemies along the way. Combat takes place on a grid with figures represented as gaming miniatures and additional columns, crates or other obstacles to add some tactics. Your inventory is small (two weapons, one "item" and one consumable) and better weapons have cool downs so you need to make some tough choices.

Unfortunately, the game is plagued primarily by a lack of information, You have no idea what the hit points, armor or weapons of your enemies are and don't even really know what many of your own spells or abilities do. Burn seems to add a damage over time effect but you have no idea how much and "Froze" doesn't seem to do much at all. The first boss self-heals but you have no idea how much. A few other quirks also mar the experience such as your heals being able to miss their target and the lack of diagonal movement or attacks makes many turns feel wasted. It's a simple but fun idea with the concept, tiles and maps but the execution left me feeling like every game ended cheaply and in confusion about how I could have done better.

Thought I would give this game a chance but it's basically unplayable in its current state. You're told to press Right Mouse Button to use weapon abilities but RMB crashes the game. The weapon equip key doesn't work. You're given no instructions for how to interact with the game beginning. There's no sound. This isn't a functioning game at this time and shouldn't be purchased; I hope the dev manages to improve it into a working state.

Single player Dead by Daylight-esque experience where you creep across the map, trying to evade the stalker as you search for fuses to unlock your escape. The primary gimmick is that you're essentially blind and only by making sound can you briefly illuminate your surroundings. Obviously sound also attracts the stalker so then you need to sneak and hide and, of course, fuse boxes are exceptionally noisy to open and investigate. Right now the game has three maps and two flavors of stalker-monster. Supposedly the dev plans to add more but I imagine that'll depend a lot on how the game does.

While the game is usually a tense experience, the inability to see sometimes turns a confusing experience into a plodding one as you blunder about trying to find doorways or track back to the door. The easiest map (per description) is a bunch of hallways and rooms that are a bit obnoxious to navigate. The hardest map is a grocery store where the stalker has easy access to you but at least you can see where things are. For the relatively low price, it's probably worth a try for people who enjoy this sort of game play.

A marginal thumbs up to this game for being low priced and doing what it says it does while providing a bug-free, playable experience. Twin-stick shooter style game where you kill monsters to retrieve the candy that YOU wanted to eat. Extra hazards such as cannons firing at you means there's more to worry about than just the mobile enemies. Typical array of power-ups abound. Cartoonish graphics, decent looping peppy music and anime-style voice acting for the complete Candy Girl experience.

I can't seriously recommend a purchase though due to a few factors: There's no twin-stick controller support which you really want for a game like this and the time it takes to kill enemies makes this more plodding than fast-paced like you'd expect from the genre. The game works without any obvious flaws but isn't as fun to play as other low-priced twin-stick games.

Guitar Hero style clone where you import your own music files (no streaming) and tap your way through four colors to the beat of the song. Sort of -- the music detection feels rather lacking compared to the bigger names in procedural music game generation such as Beat Hazard or Audiosurf but still entertaining enough for casual play. Native controller support and remapping to let you find what's most comfortable for you on the controller or keyboard in lieu of a plastic guitar. A decent little game for the price and always happy to see another title in the "Play Your Music" genre pop up. Although actual game play worked fine, there were a few instances of me backing out of a menu to a blank screen that required me to force close the program.