Recent reviews by Lumiere

So far, so good. Is it a little pricey? Yea. Even at the bundle discount, it's a little much for DS ports. Maybe it should have been $25 each / $60 for all three, but it is realistically about 80+ hours each if you're into this type of game. For me, I've been a big fan since the first game and played all of them on release. I'll admit, I haven't played the first one since I originally beat it, so I don't remember a whole lot.

Pros:
- HD graphcs (looks ok on my 1440p, and obviously better than it looked on the DS)
- Up to 150 FPS (why though)
- Has V-SYNC
- Automapping option from later games and Persona Q
- Switches between Dualsense and keyboard/mouse seamlessly
- Retains the option to draw maps like in the original
- Some small improvements, like selecting amount of items to buy/sell
- Can type notes with keyboard instead of slowly selecting letters
- Optional easier difficulties

Neutral / Uncertain:
- I think the original didn't have a multi-select function when selling. I know later games did, but I can't remember if this one originally did. Pro if it's new.
- Mapping feels odd with a controller, and decent with a mouse. Not as good as it was on the DS. Con if you want to manually map.
- The skill trees look odd because they try to fit it on one screen, I think? I seem to remember the older games scrolled to the right. This one loops around.

Cons:
- I could have sworn shortcuts used to have visual cues, like flowers etc. I'm not seeing them in this one, so shortcuts are harder to find.
- No ultra-wide support, which would make the squished mapping view better.
- Draw distance is still short. Rooms and walls pop-in when you're 3 or so tiles away. This could have been a nice improvement to increase the draw distance much further.
- Some controls feel better on controller, and some better on keyboard/mouse. At least you can use both simultaneously.

Edit: Two people confirmed that the original game didn't have visual cues for shortcuts.

One of the best roguelikes I've played in a decade.

On the surface, I thought this would be a game about inventory space management. However, it's a lot deeper than that.

Items have a lot of synergies, so it's not about if it fits in your backpack, but where it fits. For example, helmets have to be on the top row or it becomes useless, some items must be chained with conducting items to buff a bigger amount of gear, and so on.

Two days in a row, I didn't realize it was 3AM because I wanted to play one more floor.

I don't know if it's too easy in the long run until I play more. But I didn't expect to reach floor 15 with Pochette on my second run with her (first run was just a couple of rooms to get a feel for the character).

This game is honestly a ~7/10, but Steam makes it look like the best thing since sliced bread.

Good:
- fishing minigames are better than average
- upgrades are noticeable
- lots of little mechanics and details

Bad:
- game is repetitive past the first couple of hours (disclaimer: I had already played the demo for 2 hours)
- equipment mount points are fixed
- grind to complete encyclopedia
- nothing much to do with money or materials after max upgrade, which can be done by mid-game
- low replayability
- "missable" quests
- story is sparse, but maybe I'm realizing I just don't care for Lovecrafian horror compared to others

It's about as close as you can get to a multiplayer Rune Factory.

It's significantly improved from the first one.

This one has shared achievements, and a lot of quality-of-life improvements.

Played the first with the SO, and in the middle of this one. There's so few games like it, which is why I can safely recommend it. It's a dungeon crawling, crafting, and "town" management multiplayer game.

It's not a bad game. It's simple to learn, has multiplayer, and somewhat addicting.

But the main reason I can't recommend it is that it simply crashes too much for me. By the third or so biome, I was pretty much crashing once every 30-60 minutes most of the time. This is with 16 GB of RAM, and only a small wood factory. No big monster factory, no automatic sprinkler.

I play larger 3D games that don't crash like this. For a sprite-based game, there's some underlying memory leak. If they fix that, then I might think about recommending it.

For the game itself, fishing is too unrewarding. Mining levels too slow. I dug really far away trying to find points of interest, and there's not really anything outside of the radius that you don't actually know about unless you look things up. Some of the game is unbalanced, such as the green biome with swarms of farmers and gun-totting assassins. I'm at end-game and that area is still harder to explore than anywhere else because of how much spawns there. Gears and ancient gemstones don't seem to drop enough, making you want to build a auto farm to get them. I might have been tempted if I didn't already crash all the time.

Most roguelikes of recent years don't feel like Rogue. Either due to being too roguelite, too real time, or too much freedom of movement.

This game is the first game in a long time that's felt like the old Rogue/Angband/Moria type games. The mechanics all feel familiar, but with an obvious playability polish given. Sword of the Stars: The Pit is probably the only other game in the last decade that's felt "right."

After two deaths early on, I got the hang of it. Cleared maybe a dozen dungeons in about 2 hours. Felt like I accomplished quite a bit. Unlike games like Rogue, this isn't one giant dungeon. Instead, it's split into small dungeons with different difficulties. This allows you to play a little at a time, and doesn't feel overwhelming like games with 100 floors.

The humor is light, but fits well into the game.

All in all, I would recommend it to anyone who's looking for a polished version of Rogue/Angband/Moria/Nethack.

Pro:
- Availability of an actual Mahjong game that isn't Mahjong solitaire.

Con:
- One of the worst Mahjong games I've ever played.
- Not beginners friendly.
- Not intermediates friendly.
- Not all text is translated.

Either pro or con:
- For a game that features "pretty girls," there is a surprising lack of substance.