Recent reviews by Tsukichild

What should be a relaxing and fun game to play is actually quite buggy and frustrating. Disappointing.

On steam deck, I ran into an issue where it crashed as I finished a puzzle, which makes every level I play on it crash as well. I cannot continue there.

On PC, it runs poorly and is quite demanding. It freezes a lot on puzzle completion but will continue to work after.

The menu is not great and lacks clear labeling, there is no tutorial. The placement of objects on higher levels is frustrating For instance, a block cannot "float" so you cannot hide the lower level, and you need to get your mouse on the exact spot on an existing connection if the lower level has nothing below the one you want to place.

The lack of better visibility options makes this more tedious than it should. Yes you can click the hammer icon and toggle levels and their visibility, but no this is not enough with many things looking very similar. Color blind options would be welcome.

The sounds are fine, the visuals fit and are nice enough to look at. But the game play really brings down my rating.

Finally. And works good on the deck, except 2 for some reason.

Found this game through playtracker's seasonal challenges.

An interesting point and click meets VN. Not much in the way of puzzles but bigger on mystery and horror if that's your thing. Fully text guided if you get stuck too!

Gameplay was fine, a bit slow to walk around at times but double clicking had you running. I wish the hint for interactions was a different color, as it was incredibly hard to see sometimes. Especially if you play classic horror mode (I tried and had to quit early on)

Generally, the art was okay. Nothing particularly noteworthy, but everything fit and looked like it belonged.

Story was decent. A bit predictable in some cases, but had me wanting to stick through to see if I was right. Has a few different endings too (not just early death ones), some of which I found more interesting than others. The true ending was quite fitting though, which is welcome.

Has auto save every time you enter a new room, which is quite handy when you die or otherwise choose a wrong choice.

A few bugs. Game performed badly at the Prophets place nearly every time I went inside. Also kneeling animations were a bit wonky. With sounds turned off, some ending lines were still voiced. Nothing major though!

All in all, was a good use of my time, and I would suggest getting it on sale to support some smaller devs!

Short review:
If you think it looks interesting, buy it.

Longer review:
I have been telling people about this game off steam for some time. It's a game I keep coming back to, especially as updates have added and balanced new things. It is set to come out of EA, so I thought it was time to review.

First off, I love the style of this game. The colors pop, though I do wish there was some more variability in some levels due to my colorblindness. It is minimalism done well.

The sounds are also on point. I can hear the call of the night even when I am not playing. But, it also a perfect game to mute and listen to your own sound track if you prefer.

Tutorial was just revamped, and I think it does well. I didn't check to see if you could read it at any time though. If not, that would be a good addition for people who take longer breaks.

Game play is fun, addictive, and challenging. It is a top down game, and the maps are just large enough you can't see everything at once, but your mini map helps a great deal for figuring out where you need to route to. The different weapons, towers, fighters, archers, and buildings give you a lot different ways to deal with oncoming danger.

I very much appreciate there is unlimited day time to upgrade, position, and read/consider which upgrade is best for your next wave.

You have 8 maps. 6 are normal levels, 1 is a tutorial, and 1 is a season gauntlet style. Each normal map has it's own leader board and 6 challenges for you to earn crowns with. These challenges vary from simply winning, to getting a certain score, to using specific weapons and modifiers. Some are very easy. Some are not.

Based on what you choose, and how your map is set up, you will have a good deal of variability to deal with whatever comes for you. You will fail from time to time, but you are rewarded with more unlocks as you level up that will both help you and make the game harder.

Score is calculated with a combination of gold earned, continues used, and mutations used. Before you start your level, you will see how much your choice will add to your score. This is handy for score challenges, or if you want to leader board climb.

The gauntlet style game play has you fighting against an endless night more or less. It has a seasonal leader board.

Achievements in the game are mostly self explanatory, and I am still working on roughly half of them. As stated above, it's a game I come back to every couple of months and do some levels or challenges. Once it is out of EA, I plan to focus on it more and hopefully finish it.

I was excited for this one, but hesitant. Simulation games are either very good or mediocre. This one falls into the latter category. Hopefully future updates can solve these issues though!

Lets start with the good.

• Tutorial is decent. It explains the basics and gets you started.
  
• There is a good variety of items to sell.
  
• You are kept busy while playing. good at least initially.
  
• Breaks were fixed so employees auto break now.
  
• There are three levels of difficulty, easy will block some achievements as a note.
  
• Keeping employees satisfied is easy, just pay them enough for their skill level.
  
• There is a timeskip to skip from end of day to start of next day which is handy.

Some things mentioned in other reviews or posts.
You can add music. The music is an item in the storage room that you need to interact with and then set up speakers in the store. None of the songs are particularly good, so maybe just listen to your own music.

To rotate the store, at least with mouse, it's middle mouse button held down.

If you are struggling at the start, run the store yourself with only one type of item until you get a real cash flow in. I skipped animals entirely.

There are rabbits, fish, turtles and mice. You need to clean and feed them (not fish though). Rabbits you can pet. Customers bring in their dogs. You can give them treats.

And finally for the bad.

• It is boring after the first hour. You are the only one who can take care of animals, you must open the store each day, you must call and dismiss all employees, you can hire a guard but otherwise you need to catch thieves, warehouse workers are extremely slow even on level 3, you are the only one who can fix self checkouts, etc.
  
• A lot of things are not explained (like what skill up really means for your employees).
  
• Pricing is weird. I played on normal, a mouse is 400 and an entire new part of the building is 10k.
  
• You can sell things for double, and no one really seems to care. You can also sell only one type of item, and no one cares.
  
• Achievements seem very buggy.
  
• Interaction with customers is some of the worst I have seen. You play a quick time memory match game and if you misclick or take a second too long you instantly fail.
  
• Levels take a long time. You can delevel if you fail an interaction, if a customer doesn't get helped, or if they cannot check out.
• There is an achievement for max level, I am not sure what this is, but it is over 55.
  
• I have to save and reload every single work day as employees and customers remain in the store after close and are uninteractable which makes it impossible to time skip skip or renovate.
  
• There is no fast forward during the day, and you cannot alter store opening hours from 8-4 (You can just not open the store or close early)

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Standard animal themed nonogram game with over 55 puzzles. When you solve then, you are shown a colored version which is nice.

Unfortunately, it lacks anything to really make it stand out. While it does have an undo, reset, and marking, it lacks features that other nonogram game make standard. This is not an issue on smaller puzzles, but the last several are made more annoying to check potential mistakes.

All achievements presumably work though, I have a few puzzles left to confirm. It should take you about 10 hours.

If you want to find other fun games to play,

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A Roxy Raccoon Universe game without raccoons! Instead, we have a Hotline Miami meets dungeon maze (?) entry into the series. Not my usual style of game, but was fun.

Game play wise, you have 35 normal levels and several boss levels. Normal levels you'll sneak through the dungeons, avoiding traps, witches, and goblins. You'll also need to use an arsenal of weapons to get by. Different ones are available throughout the game and more unlock as you go, I believe there are 10 or so in total. They don't have names, but I really like the weaker fly homing spells, and the firework spread spell. The game gets harder as you go along, but also introduces some enemy-less levels later on that I found to be a nice break.

Boss battles usually are in an arena type battle where you get a few choice of weapons to deal with them. They are fairly straight forward, and you get an achievement for each.

Speaking of achievements, they are for completing the story, watching credits at the end, playing various mini games, and a couple about time and amount of kills in levels. No achievement is particularly difficult.

I really liked some music on the levels, the sounds match what I am doing. I never got annoyed by anything sound wise either. But it's also not particularly noteworthy.

Story wise, this focuses on Donna. Introducing us to the other witches and her family. We learn a bit more about her, and that this is a prequel to Roxy Raccoon.

Dev added a few accessibility options that I asked for that made the game much better for me. They are always open to requests like this, and that is very important to me.

Cute human tamagotchi simulator. All you need in a mouse with left click. It's a small sticker like window that just sits over whatever you doing, but! It's very quick so don't expect you'll be able to do any real work while it's living.

The game has 14 hidden achievements, pretty much all tied to death of your human in some manner. Reading the name and description should give you a hint about how to do so. In total, it took me about an hour to get them all. Depending how long it takes to get the 14th "death", your time will vary.

Music in the game is cute, and when partying you can turn on various buttons to add variations to the music. You can completely turn it off if you wish too.

The controls are explained, but they are a bit hard to read in my opinion. The buttons fill up needs, the switch toggles life and part mode, and holding the small pin button on the bottom will reset your human should they die.. or you just want a new one.

All in all, was a fun little game and I am curious what else the devs will put out in the future.

Very cute and can be useful if you need a pomodoro timer. The plant cycle works over 8 weeks (each week is a single focus session). You must buy, plant, and water in your free time. You use snails earned to unlock more plants, more rewards, and auto water/plant/sell.

Technically all achievements are straightforward, but they do require you to play 30 different days and focus for over 83 hours. The latter is an issue because of bugs.

Not much is really explained in game, at least not well. The focus timer is the time you aren't playing. You will have three cycles of short and then one cycle of long. You can adjust these times as you see fit. Peas earned during focus isn't really explained, and end of season refund doesn't seem to work like explained.

If your computer goes to sleep when it is launched, the timer will stop counting. I don't consider this a bug, but some people might be surprised by this.

But there are various bugs reported. For me, it crashes a lot and you lose progress, and the dev doesn't seem reachable.

Unfortunately, I have to give it a thumbs down for the issues. If you just want a cute timer that sometimes works, go for it.

Short: Classic Sims like experience, pixelated. Classic cheats included. I haven't encountered any bugs, I've achieved all achievements. And plan to periodically go back and check out new things.


Slightly Longer:

Honestly, my short hours in this don't do it justice, and I've enjoyed it immensely. Dev is updating frequently with new improvements and interactions which further round out the experience. I am curious where else it will go.

A major plus for some players; tinies are not always dying to the slightest inconvenience. They can and will die, but not as easily as some Sim entries.

I don't play with mods personally, but it does have workshop support, and it seems to have a healthy community uploading there.

Music and sounds are what I'd expect from this type of game. The world size seems to be quite good (and you can have multiple), there are various lot types, and it is very easy to swap between tiny families if you want to. Achievements have an in game pop-up and tracker.

There are a few small things I would change but I'm not too bothered;

1. Build menu, I wish the items were more clearly identified without having to mouse over. BUT, I also don't want this cluttered looking, so I don't mind this too much.

2. When I am playing, and can just enter a tinies house and do stuff, I do wish there was a way they could tell me off or something. But, that's also minor for my playstyle.

3, Half jokingly, we added trash rummaging, where are the raccoons? (But also some more wild life would be neat to see)



Lastly, if you like life simulation games, give it a try. I was instantly drawn to it once I started. It even has a demo at the time of writing.