Recent reviews by Emyriad

I feel like one of the definitive qualities of a good indie title is how weird it is willing to get. Cultist Simulator is different than anything else on the market, to the point where it's hard to point out a genre. This one is for the loreheads, assuming the loreheads also like stress.

Without going too deep into its structure, you have some nouns and some adjectives and a slightly increasing selection of verbs, and your goal is to assemble them into coherent sentences before finally determining just what the hell it is you are reading. Time is a factor but not an overly critical one, ticked away in minute intervals that feel unnecessary at first but soon serve to provide you breathing space to respond to crises, form strategems, break out of your routines and into new ones, and just live in your brain for a bit.

As the game unfolds into a mass of ideas and a mess of cards, a narrative about investigating and understanding the occult transpires, while juggling waning sanity, looming conspiracy and a grind of a day job. It's really good, in the spirit and ancestry of the Fallen London/Sunless Seas games in its humor, darkness and esoterica - and like them it is a game with almost no graphics, just gentle abstractions and some text dripping with texture and flavor.

When its good, the mechanics inform the narrative, when its bad, the narrative still prevails - though sometimes you might feel compelled to go wiki-diving to figure out how to read on without dying. I wouldn't say Cultist Simulator is a finished thought in all its respects (particularly as a prelude to Book of Hours, a different but similar follow-up with substantially less maddening stress and fatality) but it is entertainingly broken. If you come in it with a desire to just investigate the world from a position of innocence (Disco style), and uncover a world in fragments to piece it together as a whole (Dark Souls style), you're likely to have a good time.

It's odd how few changes to a winning formula can kinda rile the base. While DG2 looks to be a more animated, easily readable and heavily voiced version of the original, it's plagued by its UI and progression.
Things don't feel as snappy or well put together, the branching options leave the optimal challenge level a little vague and the item progression system effectively equates time spent in game to power. If you are a skilled DG1 player looking to run the Story Challenge equivalent, sorry, you gotta grind randomized unlocks before you can take a stab at Elite (or even Hard, in some cases). This doesn't seem that damning until you remember that Tower Defenses are rarely that complicated to begin with, so messing up on the fundamentals really hurts, since DG is... all fundamentals, really. It's not a new twist on the genre or a bold new take on how to play - it's more DG, but less fun.

This is the quintessential tower defense, a fairly perfect implementation of the formula that's fun to play, easy on the eyes, and well put together. It's the perfect thing to have in your steam library when you have that TD itch - just don't expect any radical twists on the format. Choosing to hire some damn good voice actors elevates the whole thing even as the older graphics start to show wear, but it still runs pretty crisp and clean in a way that's easy to understand.

You'll want the Containment DLC as it continues the story up to DG2. Rather surprising it's not included as the jump from the first to the second makes little sense without it.

So Final Fantasy Tactics is one of the best games ever made, and a remake is an unbelievably challenging concept to get around considering that everything you change is potentially one less perfect thing, including many of its charming imperfections. So far, it's clear that the developers here have been obsessively faithful to the source material while making minor but beneficial changes.

Many of these are just solid UI choices, helpful save functions, and other really minor tweaks. Other times there are more substantive changes based on common player patterns, like allowing the player to "search for enemies" in a zone that you would normally walk back and forth across, letting the years sllp by while the Marquis de Elmberry rots in captivity.

Visually: Doing a damn good job. The graphics are upscaled but faithful to the original, which has aged well, but add a light paper effect that matches the history book tone of the game and improve the look and lighting of some areas. It's visually distinct enough from the original Tactics to stand out, but fully in keeping with what the game wants to be accomplishing. The UI looks clean but not glaringly out of place, everything makes more sense and is explained well, they even color coded the zodiac symbols to make it easier to use the absurdly complicated system of rock paper scissors that no one will ever pay attention to in any possible iteration of the game. It's a style you could hate on, but its also a swing they took and knocked out of the park.

Audibly: Doing an *incredible* job. My biggest concern coming in was the decision to create a new translation for the game to be better suited to voice acting, which meant potentially abandoning the incredible tone and razor-sharp barbs of the War of the Lions translation (a text absolutely dripping with tragic monologues and characters going harder than they have absolutely any right to). But we needn't have worried: the translation is still extremely adherent to WOTL, its changes minimal and reasoned (though I will be nitpicking, and the translators can blame themselves or... Dad?).

And the voice actors who are on this project are *astoundingly* talented and doing some unbelievable work. All these little moments of barely any consequence are spiced with wonderfully characterful deliveries: from the insufferable prig that is the basic knight you kill in the tutorial, to the deathbed sequence of dear old dad, to Dycedarg dripping ire onto Argath with a cold steel that gave me straight chills. Nobody, not a single minor character so far, is phoning it in, and most of these titans are adding depth and heart to a text already brimming with complicated plotting and massive heartbreak.

On top of all of this: an included faithful emulation of the original game, no unnecessary cutscenes or characters attached, and the full War of the Lions translation - the version of the game that everyone wanted, and yet maybe still the inferior version in comparison to what this remake hopes to be. What more can we hope for? Mod support? (yes, we can hope for mod support). And what can possibly be better than playing Tactics again? The answer is playing Tactics again twice.

This review will be subject to revision as we clamor through a hundred plus hours of compare and contrast, but let's be clear: it's Final Fantasy Tactics, the OG, the absolute pinnacle. And unbelievably, in defiance of everything that Square Enix seems to stand for these days, they did not screw it up. Even more unbelievably, they almost certainly have made it better. If you've never played this absolute treasure of a game, you should seriously consider picking one of the two options in this bundle and giving it a start.

(Oh, and if you're having trouble getting the controller to work on the original version, try turning Steam Input on. k bye)

A really impressive game to play with friends, this is a Survivors genre game with a ton of flair, solid difficulty, and a lot of pretty excellent choices made by the designers in terms of getting the gameplay just right. I'm particularly enamored of friendly fire on by default as it adds a level of intricacy (which can be easily turned off, I'll add) that makes understanding and coordinating roles with your teammates more important. On or off, this is best to be played on a discord or solo rather than in an online matchmaking.

It might not have *too* many hours in it, due to the lack of maps and bosses and the next content update being listed as 84 days away. I'd recommend the demo before deciding if you think it has enough under the hood to buy it now or wishlist for later when the game is more fleshed out.

Great experience overall!

Gameplay is a noita wandbuilder with a more roguelike top-down feel and a lot less esoterica. Bullet dodging is a skill but the game really wants to test your ability to math out a build that produces a screen full of whirling death projectiles connected by arcs of poisonous lightning. It pulls essential building blocks from Isaac, Hades, and Noita but feels very unique from any of them. The balance is that nice loosey goosey rogue feel where runs can be razor-thin balance or explosively broken with an emphasis on explosively broken, which means replayability is low but the game probably has 30-50 hours and they're FUN ones.

Story is actively deleterious badly translated humor, but also fairly superfluous to the game. You won't particularly like the main protagonist but it's still fun to have them blow stuff up.

If you liked the first Defenders Quest, congratulations, you are very old.

Defenders Quest II (no plot relation) is a solid improvement on the formula, with more beautiful art, more mature writing, better designs, a little more micromanagement and about the same type and level of gameplay - but this time with a fun pirate aesthetic and an alien color pallete. It's one of those games you can play for ten minutes or lose a day to, both extremely tactical and fully grindable. Speed settings make it easy to advance through the parts that your brain would normally turn off for and cut the fat out in a really satisfying manner, or to relax and watch all the pretty sprites as your strategy executes.

I think my quarrels with it (a more linear path, less interesting rewards for taking on advanced challenges, middling support for widescreen monitors and odd resolutions) are pretty minor, but the general feeling that the game doesn't allow quite as much space for play is maybe the biggest killer. It has a lot of edges filed off, is streamlined and stabilized and not really as funny and quirky as the original was (though the original had a sense of humor that could be be described as "90's webcomic").

You follow the line, play the heroes it gives you in the right places, buy the single item it tells you to buy whenever it tells you to buy it, and then the game ends. While the game was a challenge, I was not challenged enough to even dig into the advanced targeting settings or alter my general strategy by any significant margin. The only place that seems to be taking any risks is the art - which, at least it looks unique.

The game also clocks in a little shorter than DQI, which I currently have about 40 hours in (DQII is 15-20 hours maximum for all available content and lacks side paths, secrets and an entire extra difficulty level). But there's a lot of space in life for games that respect your time, deliver on what they want to, and clock out while you're still feeling good about them.

So, overall, this is a thumbs up from me. It doesn't feel like the culmination of ten years of development but it sure does feel like a lovely little game that's consistently fun to play, and if it's not the pinnacle of the tower defense genre it's at least a fun peak. If there's another one in ten years, I'll still be excited about it.

And it still supports Dvorak so rest easy on that front

Minishoot' is an incredibly simple, charming zelda-like but with shooty spaceships instead of fantasy characters, and it's functionally a perfect game. It lasts about 15 hours if you are going for 100%, the combat and puzzle solving are immaculate, the animations are charming and the music and atmosphere are chill and fun. I liked it better than most Zeldas - the smooth, slidey movement of the character and the speed at which you can zip between points of interest really cuts the game down to its most enjoyable elements, and it decisively does not overstay its welcome. Potentially you will be disappointed if you are looking for a strong story or a reinvention of the wheel - this is just solid game mechanics and shooty spaceships, through and through.

This is a very interesting difference of kind from HoH I. The central areas the game has improved is visual fidelity, procedural generation, and breadth of choice in developing and building out your character, while adopting a more gently paced and narrative experience. It's not as madcap as Heroes I, the combat is slower and more strategic with the addition of a dodge button to every character and a customizeable skill and armor system that leads to more decision points. The difficulty scales well, the progression still has its excellent itemization system on top of a whole pile of other goodies, and the elites are a little tougher and slower, creating a dynamic where they have to be paid attention to and played around rather than just blindly smashing your character into danger.

The games death linking system is better, with revives costing a fraction of both players max health and taking time rather than being instant and taking none. This generates a cost to death that makes it matter but also makes the act of reviving feel pretty good as you choose to take a hit for the team and coordinate with your buddies.

Some things that are about the same, but with some changes: The netcode seems a little iffy. We had a problem where a character dropped without any internet disruption, then when they rejoined, the other players found their characters removed from the map, necessitating a full rehost. The good news is that the game seems to save progress, so this is a lighter problem than it was.

The pacing is also different. The game feels slower, the runs feel longer. It seems to take a little more time to complete a run, but they're fun and capable of being broken into chunks, so that's not a huge issue. It's more contemplative and strategic, with longer cooldowns and more reserved abilities, but lacks some of that raw murderous energy that HoH runs had, at least in the early hours. For all I know you might be killing the same amount of enemies - but divided into smaller camps so that the flow between them is less seamless but there's plenty of space to stop for a water break.

Some things that have gotten worse: the traps are worse. They are mercifully absent or negligible from the first few zones, become lethal obstacles that need to be spotted and called out in the second, and are full HoH 1 traps by the third zone in a *jarring* increase in difficulty.

There's a couple problems here: first, the traps that guard treasure rooms feel a little messier and more complicated, with patterns that make damage likely for a character with low speed and health rather than a problem to be overcome by patience and good timing. Second, there's no "disable the trap" button that we've seen, so every player has to run the trap individually for a reward, rather than letting a skilled player neutralize the trap for others (in HoH 1, we used to divvy up the traps amongst whoever learned the patterns first so everyone was a specialist, and it felt pretty good to find a trap you were solid at and save everyone else a heap of trouble). Third, the new revival system renders the ability to revive a player in the trap in a madcap dash impossible, meaning that if a player dies under a flaming gargoyle, they're simply dead until the next area (or everyone else wipes trying to get them up).

The end result of this is that any member of your four-man who has the skills to succeed at Diablo or Gauntlet but not the reaction time and puzzle-brain to live through a spike floor can kill entire runs, which is a tremendous feel-bad moment that disrupts the whole fun of Heroes of Hammerwatch - playing it with your friends. In HoH 1, this was a problem that could be worked around. In HoH 2, you will either outscale your allies by leaving them outside the trap room or (more likely) end a 1-2 hour run to a simple blunder and risk losing your adventuring party to another game.

It's hard to say that the traps are what define Heroes of Hammerwatch or even that they're an interesting secondary characteristic - and even if they were, I don't think these are as well designed as the traps in the original, so I'd be happy to see them substantially changed in the future.

It's version 1, there's time to make changes, and the overall loop - is very fun. But this is a pretty tentative recommendation for now. Definitely worth trying if you loved the first one and want something a little different this time around, and on that Crackshell has done an excellent job.

Brotato is a masterclass in minmaxing your game design stats.
Storyline? Six-armed potato fighting aliens for no reason. If you didn't know those were aliens its because they didn't tell you except on the store page.
Graphics design? Pretty sure these potatoes are eggs.
Level design? it's a flat square.
But the gameplay: well. THAT, my friends, is top tier.

The minute to minute: Little touches on how the potato swings his arms and how the enemies move and spawn and shoot are present everywhere and make the act of surviving a bare 20-50 seconds an absolutely delicate dance, sometimes a vampire survivor-like and sometimes a bullet hell with much more skill required.

In-between: Drafting involves hundreds of carefully balanced items modifying a host of well-chosen stat lines that vacillate wildly in value based on time and build and are almost never not full of interesting decision points

And because all of this is so simple, there's room for a ton of different characters - 62, post DLC, all of which play surprisingly and thoughtfully different and teach you new ways to play the game. All of this on five difficulty settings to challenge and two different "levels", the second of which demands huge change-ups in patterns from the first. It's easy to crack 200 hours on this game just trying to beat all the stuff, and it doesn't get particularly old.

Brotato is fun. It's super engaging, it's consistently challenging and extremely addicting, and at a crisp 10-20 minutes for a session it's practically impossible not to have a rewarding time. And it costs, like, five dollars. So there's that.