Recent reviews by Graknorke

A slow game that challenges your skill at taking notes and organising and piecing together fragments of knowledge more than anything else. You can tell that the game's main intent is creating a particular atmosphere, and it's very good at that. Visual and sound design and writing style are the focus more than any kind of intense gameplay challenge. It's nice, I like it.

If you liked Skyrim you might like this. I didn't so I don't. I'll finish the main and faction stories for completion's sake but I can tell from being ~half way through that it's going to be a drag of very repetitive forumulaic gameplay without much in the way of interesting story to spice it up. The game boasts a lot of features but most of them don't really add anything, the core gameplay stays to the familiar pattern of go here, kill someone or get something, come back. The fantastic wonder of travel between the stars reduced to "can you go pick up a package for me thanks".

Again this is basically just the Bethesda game again. If you've played anything they made since Fallout 3 you know what you're getting into.

It's still Dwarf Fortress, but now it has a mouse based interface and graphics a bit fancier than the tile system. There's also some kind of music system that goes between main tracks (yes tracks plural, no longer limited to the two classical guitar riffs over and over) selected based on events and interludes to connect them, which is kind of cool.

As an old head DF player none of this stuff has felt essential to me and I do miss some of the things lost in the name of streamlining (mostly that there's a bunch of menus that had their most important parts shoved somewhere else. combat reports
and petitions are just a type of alert, all military management happens through the squad sidebar, menus seem pretty rigid in what can be accessed from where etc) but it's still the same game underneath and just as enjoyable. But I'm sure it's more approachable now for people who couldn't take to the classic roguelike style UI, which to my understanding was the point of this to begin with.

Some people might call this a "walking simulator" or similar, but they mean it in the most complimentary way possible. The gameplay really does (mostly) consist of going from point A to point B, it makes this your primary challenge. Figuring how much you can carry in cargo and how much in tools, if you can keep it balanced easily or not, what routes you can actually travel along safely or if you want to risk one that's harder to traverse if it gets you there quicker. Makes for a central gameplay loop that that really stays interesting a lot longer than it might sound like at first.

In some ways, this is even better than the base game. It's very dependent on the context of the rest of the game to make sense, but then when it cashes in that set up it really makes the best of it. As well as adding some more complex and in-depth puzzles, which in my opinion was a good move.

A genuinely beautiful game, the exploration gives a sense of wonder and appreciation for the world on a level above and beyond what you usually see in games. It's obvious a lot of care went into designing every planet in ways that guide the audience into being able to learn about things through experience.

The DLC Frog Fractions deserves, the hat is a bit political but if you can look past that it's worth it.

I was worried that my memory of this game would be tinted by nostalgia, but actually it turns out it's every bit as good as I remembered. Maybe better.

really tight tactical FPS gameplay on top of a hitman-style mission structure and a ton of upgrades and secrets make this one an easy recommend

the card game itself is kind of simple on the face of it but builds up into an interesting game with the game outside that: how you build up and upgrade your deck as well as exploring the world to get an advantage. as the game goes on it moves from a simple "put your cards with big attack numbers to win" to carefully balancing different resources and card abilities, as well as having to overcome boss' unique abilities that change up the rules of the card game itself in some way

it took me about 10 hours to beat the first time, and another 10 to go through looking for secrets and achievements. I'm not sure there's a ton of replay value but at the same time I can't say I'd be absolutely sick of the game if I played it through again right now