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Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Seven Keys is a mystery game in which you investigate a gem theft in Czechia. You play as the titular character, Nancy Drew, in the 34th installment of a franchise that stretches all the way back to 1998. The games have changed a lot over the years but have always retained the same core mechanics: they are point-and-click adventure games built around investigating a crime, questioning suspects, and solving puzzles.

I was looking forward to trying to figure out the mystery before it was revealed, which is always a highlight for me with this type of game. This one doesn’t have a unique premise—a jewel theft isn’t the most creative crime in the world—but that’s okay as long as the writers put in some effort to keep it fresh and interesting.

Prague is a solid setting, even if it is a bit “normal” by video game standards. The history of the city is highlighted by the narrative, weaving it into the real world of Czechia. This is counteracted by the goofiness of the story, which can make it hard to take seriously at times. All that being said, it’s still the most enjoyable part of the game by a fair margin.

Initially, the plot kept my attention quite well. Without bringing up spoilers, there are enough twists to keep you engaged. Having said that, it loses steam near the end and starts to feel like the developers are dragging it out to pad the game’s length. The narrative barely advances in the last third, which is especially disappointing given how fun it had been for the first 10 hours. This is more of an issue with gameplay pacing, but it still negatively affects the story too.

Most Nancy Drew fans probably come for either the story or the puzzles. Unfortunately, much like the storyline, the puzzles start strong but steadily worsen as you play. The most frustrating issue is that many puzzles aren’t particularly hard, just poorly explained. I often struggled to understand what they were asking for, but then solved it almost immediately once figuring out the rules. It’s a weird dynamic where the “eureka” moments are rare and short-lived, when those are usually the building blocks of a good puzzle game. This certainly doesn’t describe every puzzle, but it’s more common than not. I found myself wishing for fewer puzzles and more of the narrative. This is especially true in the last third of the game, which devolves into endless puzzles separated by a line or two of dialogue.

To compound the issues with puzzle design, there’s also a significant lack of polish. There are minor things, like re-using NPC models in the same room, that are noticeable but don’t heavily detract from the experience. Movement is a good example, because it’s not horrible, but it just feels off. It’s as if you can only walk slightly too slow or sprint slightly too fast. Then there are more annoying issues, like the game freezing and forcing you to load a previous save. It’s tough to say how much of this is caused by the switch to a first-person adventure game in unity from the developers’ custom engine designed around point-and-click games. In any case, these aren’t the types of issues you would expect from a franchise that has had 30+ games to perfect the Nancy Drew formula.

ND has never been known for top-of-the-line graphics, and this entry is no different. There has been a noticeable visual upgrade, but it’s still not particularly impressive. Everything feels very low-budget, and I think a big part of it is the switch to a free-look first-person camera instead of a typical point-and-click adventure where you click between scenes. It really draws attention to how empty and lifeless every environment is. Furthermore, it’s set in Prague, one of the biggest cities in Europe and an extremely popular tourist destination, yet you see maybe 20 different people in the entire game, including unnamed NPCs.

It’s not clear why this is the case, but the voice acting is notably bad, and not just because only a handful of characters have Czech accents in Czechia. My guess would be that the voice actors were given very poor direction while recording their lines. Sometimes a sentence will be said with proper emotions and sound like a real person, and other times it sounds like a text-to-speech program. On the other hand, the soundtrack is better, yet flawed. It wasn’t distractingly bad like most of the voice acting, but that’s still not much of a compliment. Furthermore, I’m required—as a fan of older ND games—to complain about the voice actor for Nancy. She does a decent job, but still doesn’t hold a candle to the original.

These small complaints don’t seem to matter on their own, but start to add up quickly. The overall quality of the game feels like a studio running low on funds and cutting corners. Things like the performance of the original voice actress and interacting with the core cast of characters were integral to the franchise. Leaving out established characters and limiting the amount of dialogue they have makes it feel like a completely different game. On the gameplay side, quality of life (QoL) issues are everywhere, from mildly clunky UIs to horrible hitboxes for clicking on items in the world. It feels like the game skipped QA testing and went straight to release.

Mystery of the Seven Keys will not be anyone’s favorite Nancy Drew game. If some of the fat had been trimmed, I would have enjoyed it a bit more, but in its current state, it drags on near the end and squanders all the goodwill it had built up.

For some games, I’d be able to give a half recommendation and say, “Quit when it stops being fun”, but when the whole game leads up to a mystery being revealed, the ending actually matters quite a bit.

I really wanted to like this game, as my wife and I have been fans of Nancy Drew for a long time. There were even a few moments that recaptured the magic of the earlier titles. Unfortunately, the games have gotten worse in recent years, seemingly in an attempt to expand their audience at the cost of losing their identity. It’s sad when a franchise loses its heart and soul in pursuit of maximizing profitability, and in this case, it has resulted in a game that is buggy, janky, and low-budget, without any sense of charm to help you ignore these problems. If you are a huge fan of the series and really want to give it a shot, get it on a substantial sale, because it isn’t worth the asking price. For anyone who isn’t a longtime fan, there are much better games to start with than this one.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Hatred is a twin-stick shooter in the same vein as the first POSTAL game. Its main concern is being offensive and tasteless rather than being fun or well-made. You play as The Antagonist, a somehow edgier version of the POSTAL Dude that looks like he belongs on Metalocalypse.

Hatred is an over-the-top, ridiculous game that is more focused on style than substance. The first cutscene sets the tone, and it’s abysmal. The main character constantly complains about humanity being a parasite, the world needing a cleanse, etc. He’s one step away from dressing up like the Joker and blaming society. Before playing, I thought it might be funny how excessively edgy he is, in a sort of so-bad-it’s-good way. Unfortunately, it’s delivered so earnestly that it’s hard to find humor in his psychotic ramblings and instead elicits eye-rolls. Now I’m sure if you are someone looking for a mass shooter simulator, this will be right up your alley, but for me, it felt hollow.

The developers claim that it’s a statement against political correctness, but aside from playing as a murderer, it doesn’t have anything that could be construed as politically incorrect. It feels more like the devs wanted to make something offensive and controversial, but there’s no meaning or underlying statement. It’s as if they decided, “let’s make something tasteless, just cause”.

I expected the mechanics and combat to be significantly better than POSTAL, a game nearly 20 years older than Hatred. This turned out to be wishful thinking, as it’s just as bad, aside from some minor improvements. You are given an isometric camera and twin-stick shooter controls, somewhat similar to games like Enter The Gungeon and SYNTHETIK. Disappointingly, the art design (the whole game is black and white) makes enemies nearly impossible to see. I like the look of it, but enemies blending into the background make it far more annoying than it needs to be. And yes, they did include a button to highlight all NPCs with a red outline, but I ended up holding it down almost the entire game just to see anything. Without it, you’ll get shot numerous times from seemingly nowhere, which is especially frustrating given the high difficulty level, even on easy.

You can only regain health by executing people, which plays a short cutscene of you slitting someone’s throat, curb-stomping them, etc. Maybe I’ve become desensitized to video game violence, but it really made me roll my eyes more than it appalled me. It’s needlessly gratuitous to the point where you don’t even register it after the first few levels. If anything it becomes tedious, due to how often you need to heal as the game progresses.

There are a handful of weapons to choose from, but due to how scarce ammo is, you wind up mostly using whatever the enemy dropped. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can be fun for a game to force you to improvise and use whatever equipment you can scrounge up, but because 90% of enemies drop one of three guns, it’s pretty bland and uninteresting.

I expected the plot and dialogue to be pretty horrible, so I wasn’t particularly surprised when the main character started rattling off terrible oneliners as he dramatically stabbed his victims. I was hoping it would be done in a more entertaining way, maybe to heighten how over-the-top it was, despite being in poor taste. Instead, it’s played completely seriously and comes off bizarrely.

Outside of the main character’s dialogue, the only other significant writing is the overall plot, which is truly one of the most nonsensical stories I’ve experienced in a game. The Antagonist is trying to take revenge on society through a series of mass shootings at various locations, but where the story ends up is so far from reality that it borders on parody.

It’s almost impossible to recommend Hatred to anyone. The art design has potential and the graphics are decent. That is the extent of the praise I can give it. The narrative is poorly written, the dialogue is cringe-inducing and the gameplay is a frustrating chore. There are minimal redeeming qualities and I don’t understand how any sane person could genuinely enjoy playing it. That being said, I highly recommend it to fans of POSTAL 1/POSTAL Redux. For those people, this will feel like a more polished version of the first POSTAL game and I’m sure they’ll love this take on it.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Bendy and the Ink Machine is a horror puzzle game set in an old-timey animation studio. You play as a former employee returning to the abandoned studio at the behest of your former employer. It takes place over the course of five chapters, totaling roughly four hours of gameplay, more if you decide to replay chapters.

The most striking element of Bendy and the Ink Machine is the visuals. Every environment is depicted with thick black edges and imprecise lines, making the world appear like a cartoon from the 1930s. It’s such a unique art style that is executed almost perfectly. One of the best effects the visuals have is highlighting what doesn’t fit into the cartoon world. Globs of ink drip from the ceiling, ink creatures roam the floors, contrasting with the studio itself. They don’t have the same art style, instead being shown with relatively standard 3D graphics. It’s an interesting stylistic decision that works in tandem with the art design to give weight to the horror elements. The world of Bendy feels familiar, but with something sinister beneath the surface.

On the other hand, I felt that the animations could’ve used some work, especially the player’s animations which looked stiff and uncomfortable. They weren’t horrible, but they didn’t complement the cartoon aesthetic as well as the lighting or art direction did. Similarly, I found the voice acting passable, but it never stood out as one of the game’s strengths.

Within the first thirty minutes, you quickly get a feel for what the whole game will be like. It’s horror blended with a walking simulator, puzzles, and light combat mechanics. Depending on the chapter, there will be a different focus, but for the most part, you’ll be getting one of these three concepts. I found the walking simulator portions to be the strongest; they build tension very well, don’t overstay their welcome, and when they include a jumpscare it feels earned rather than lazy or cheap. You have time to walk around and take in the environment, playing to the game’s visual strengths.

Unfortunately, the puzzle and combat portions were tedious, uninteresting, and killed any atmosphere and tension the game had previously. I generally enjoy puzzles, but most of the ones in Bendy consist of a checklist of items you need to collect, rather than something you need to think about and actually solve. There are a couple of genuine puzzles, but they are few and far between, and certainly not strong enough to be worth the wait.

As for the combat, I felt that it could have been removed from the game without missing much. You only fight the lesser ink creatures and they are quite easy to defeat. They would feel scarier if you actually had to run from them or sneak past them, but forcing you to kill dozens of them waters down their fear factor. They also exclusively spawn from ink piles, so it’s not much of a surprise when they pop up, you can see it coming from a mile away. To make matters worse, the combat mechanics are rudimentary, boiling down to simply clicking on an enemy once to defeat them. It’s clunky because of an odd invincibility window when enemies spawn, coupled with the fact that combat clearly wasn’t fleshed out or polished in any significant way.

While graphically it looks great, you can easily tell that it’s not a AA or AAA game when it comes to polish. There are numerous bugs I encountered during my playtime, although only one was significant; when I got stuck between the game and the pause menu, preventing me from moving or exiting and forcing me to alt-f4. For the rest, they were minor issues like getting stuck on part of the level, an NPC failing to trigger the next part of a level, etc. I also encountered odd frame drops a few times, without a clear explanation as to why. I would assume it was during some effects-heavy portion of the game, but it was hard to say exactly what it was, so your mileage may vary.

Bendy was a mixed bag, but I would ultimately recommend it. If you enjoy walking simulator horror with a little bit more interactivity, this could be right up your alley. The art is fantastic, and the horror is usually solid, but it gets let down by some of its more half-baked mechanics. I don’t know if I would pick it up at full price, but it’s unique enough to be worth checking out the next time it goes on sale.

Mild performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is an action-adventure game with light RPG mechanics. You play as two mercenaries searching for an artifact who get dragged into a series of events involving Wargar (orcs), sorcerors, and demons.

I typically begin my reviews with gameplay, as it’s often the most noticeable element of a game, with the greatest impact on player enjoyment. For Hunted, I’m changing things up because of how quickly it left a bad impression on me. The main menu sets the tone for the whole game, which features the two protagonists standing one in front of the other. Depending on who you are playing as, they will swap places. When the male character swaps with the female character, he slaps her butt. At first, I brushed it off as something that was a bit weird but probably intended as a playful moment between characters. Yet once the game begins, you immediately see that this isn’t an isolated incident. Every notable female character has gigantic breasts and a thin waist, all wearing revealing clothing. Anytime the game does one of those in-engine scene transitions (that definitely aren’t hidden loading screens), the camera zooms in on the female character’s butt or breasts, depending on which animation it’s using. Maybe some players enjoy lusting after an attractive protagonist, but it does nothing for me, and given how common and in-your-face it is, it detracted from the game’s attempt at a semi-serious story.

As for the graphics, they certainly show their age. Lots of blurry textures, poor-looking graphical effects, and mediocre visual design when it comes to most enemies you’ll encounter. If I played it on release, I would have probably been a little more charitable, but it still looks worse than many games from its era.

I had high expectations coming into my playthrough, knowing it was made by the same studio as Wasteland 2, a game I enjoyed a good deal. Unfortunately, my high hopes were dashed when combat turned out to be an odd mix of Gears of War and one of the blandest melee combat systems ever designed. Each character can switch between bows/crossbows, which play like a third-person shooter, and melee weapons, which just use left and right click for attack and block. The male character specializes in melee while the female character is best with their bow. It doesn’t seem to matter who you play as, with regard to the story, so I strongly recommend playing as the archer, who is much stronger in combat and avoids the terribly boring melee system. Both characters get access to a set of spells and skills to upgrade, which are generally uninteresting and clunky to use.

Most of your time will be spent hiding behind cover and mowing down hordes of bland enemies with your bow. You will occasionally encounter a boss that can often be killed by using your damage spells over and over, provided you saved your mana when fighting standard monsters. The other type of boss you’ll face is a puzzle or gimmick boss, where you’ll fight normal enemies and then shoot a catapult or pull a lever to deal damage. Neither type of boss is particularly interesting, usually feeling like a lull in the action, rather than a fun climax.

Finally, we have quality of life issues, which turn this otherwise mediocre game into a chore. The camera feels strangely placed, like it’s too zoomed in to see what you need to see. This gets combined with the clunky movement, giving the whole combat system an awkward vibe before you even begin fighting. The game is also clearly designed around co-op. If you don’t play with a friend, you are given a brainless AI companion that gets stuck on walls while wandering after random enemies. Mercifully, triggering a scene transition will force them to teleport to you, rather than waiting for the pathfinding to eventually work. You’ll also encounter a variety of bugs, like getting stuck in a certain spot, enemies not spawning properly, cutscenes playing audio over a black screen, or a character getting locked into an animation. I wouldn’t say it’s a major problem for Hunted, given all of its much bigger issues, but it’s definitely a buggy, unpolished game.

Now we come to the story. It is disappointingly on par with the rest of the game. A lot of it is quite generic, and the parts that are somewhat original aren’t great either. The protagonists are your typical reluctant heroes, following every trope in the book. They’re only in it for the money, until they decide saving the world is more important than earning gold. Along the way, they meet a cast of mostly irrelevant and unimportant characters that guide them toward the main villain.

There are a few twists of varying quality, but the most egregious has to do with “Sleg”. I won’t spoil it, but it’s so strange that I need to bring it up. For context, Sleg is a liquid that is established very early in the game as something magical that grants you power, but is highly addictive and eventually results in the user turning into a monster. Clearly, not something you want to mess with. It is then revealed later in the game that the liquid has some sort of sinister/evil origin, but it’s played like some big twist that no one saw coming. It’s a small moment overall, but it’s indicative of the problem with much of the game’s writing; every plot point has been done dozens of times before in better games. There’s such a dearth of original content that by the end, it feels like a series of clichés instead of a complete narrative.

Hunted was a chore from the very beginning. Sadly, it’s the worst kind of bad game. Many less-than-stellar RPGs excel in one area and are absolutely abysmal everywhere else, like having an excellent story but awful gameplay, or novel mechanics paired with excessive bugs. Here, everything is so consistently bad that there isn’t a single strong highlight. There’s essentially no reason to ever play this. It brings nothing new to the table, has aged horribly, and its basic style has been pulled off better by countless other games.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Dwarf Fortress is a simulation game that puts you in charge of a dwarven colonial expedition. You’ll not only need to feed and shelter your dwarves, but also build a sustainable economy and strong defenses to protect against invaders.

While there are many games that draw inspiration from DF, none bring the same level of complexity, for better and for worse. Things that most games would gloss over or simplify, like temperature or water physics, are handled in a more realistic way. All of these small details are relatively unimportant on their own, but the interaction between them is what leads to so many unique moments. For example, cats cleaning their fur and drinks being spilled are two mechanics that most sim games wouldn’t include because they are mundane and don’t add much. Yet in DF, these both happen, which can lead to a cat dying of alcohol poisoning if they spend too much time in a crowded tavern. It’s not a game-changing system, but it creates interesting events and stories, which is what DF is all about.

Managing your colony is the core gameplay loop and what you will spend the majority of your time doing. You designate areas to mine, buildings to construct, and items to produce. Your primary concern is survival. It’s not particularly difficult to subsist, but thriving is your true goal and where most of your fun will come from. You could simply dig underground and wall your colony off from the outside world, surviving off underground farming for eternity, but that’s boring. Instead, you might try to tame a wild jaguar and domesticate the species for use as war cats. Or maybe you’d like to set up a gladiator arena where you pit captured enemies against your strongest soldiers. You can even become a hub of culture with a huge library and tavern, attracting visitors from far and wide. The possibilities are nearly endless, making it an amazingly varied and replayable game.

This is the dark side of DF. It’s unrefined, clunky, and will inevitably suffer from performance issues. The steam release fixed many of the UI and usability issues, but it still needs a lot of work to be on par with the industry standard.

Visually, the steam release looks decent. Compared to the old graphics, it’s an insane upgrade, but it can’t compete with more modern titles. The sprites look amazing on their own, but as a whole, the game still suffers from issues with readability. That being said, the new graphics have an excellent art style and add a lot of life to an otherwise text-based game.

Instead of a persistent soundtrack, DF alternates between ambient sound effects that give a nice atmosphere, and traditional music tracks. It's a bit of an odd choice, but it's certainly better than the silence the free version has.

The most disappointing problem is performance. Eventually, your fortress will become so big that the game can’t handle all the different systems running at once. This results in persistent FPS drops that slowly make the game unplayable. Thankfully, the ride up until that point is magnificent and there are certain techniques that can help mitigate the problem (like keeping a low colony population).

Typically, I don’t factor future content into my reviews because I’m focusing on the product you are buying today, not on what it could eventually become. This is a rare exception because it has been receiving constant updates for over a decade and shows no signs of stopping. Steam Workshop support has been added, enabling the already strong modding community to grow even more.

As for official content, the developers themselves consider the game roughly half-finished in terms of planned features and mechanics. No one knows what it will be like ten years from now, but it’s clear that it will certainly be improved from its current state.

It’s difficult to review a game that has been in development for twenty years without inadvertently glossing over some major aspects of it. It’s best described as a colony simulator, but that doesn’t do justice to the sheer number of elements that can come into play during the game. At times, it’s an absurdly complicated game, but that’s all part of the fun. It won’t click for everyone, but I would still recommend this game to anyone who enjoys colony sims. You are almost guaranteed to lose your first ten colonies in embarrassing fashion, and it’ll be a blast.

Noticeable performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Save Room is an extremely straightforward game. It’s technically a puzzle game, but really, it’s an adaptation of the Resident Evil 4 inventory system. Each level tasks you with storing your items in an oddly shaped grid.

Again, this is simply an inventory management puzzle. You make shapes fit in a grid, and there’s not much else to it. Some items can interact with each other, like ammo that can be loaded into a gun or healing herbs that can be mixed together, but that’s the extent of it. You can beat the entire game in an hour or two, without much trouble.

The presentation is pretty solid, with some good, albeit repetitive, music and a nice art style. Graphics aren’t very significant in a game like this, so don’t expect Crysis-tier visuals.

Frankly, there’s not much to say about Save Room. It’s an unambitious puzzle game that achieves its singular goal of emulating inventory management. If that interests you, it’s a solid purchase that will give you a couple of fun hours. If it sounds tedious, this game probably won’t change your mind.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Triple Take is a 2D platformer in which you play each level thrice, but modified every time. It’s a cool idea that gives the developer a lot of freedom to experiment with level design. Ultimately, I don’t think this is a revolutionary game that will change the genre forever, but it’s still good for some platforming fun, coupled with a surprisingly prevalent storyline.

There’s nothing particularly notable about the platforming mechanics. It’s the same stuff you’ve seen hundreds of times before: platforms that break a few seconds after you step on them, wall jumping, ropes you can grab, jump pads, etc. There are a few standout moments of originality, especially during boss fights, but it’s mostly on par with the genre standards, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In a way, it helps highlight the game’s strengths by not taking attention away from the level design.

The main gimmick of playing a level three times sounds pretty bland, but I was impressed with how well it was executed. Many levels open up completely new paths on subsequent runs, rather than simply adding more spikes or taking away platforms. Sometimes the changes aren’t that meaningful and you end up doing the same thing but slightly harder, although these moments are few and far between. There’s an excellent amount of level variety, especially when the designs dip into more novel concepts.

My biggest complaint over the course of the entire game was the final boss fight. It’s significantly harder than even the second toughest level, and it drags on for far too long. It grinds the momentum to a halt and ends the game at a frustrating low point after such a strong build-up. Still, one bad level doesn’t take away the dozens of gems beforehand.

I thought there wouldn’t be much of a plot but was pleasantly surprised by the game’s narrative. The characters were likable and the dialogue got a few chuckles out of me. Obviously, it isn’t particularly story-heavy, but it has good enough writing to stop you from skipping through every cutscene.

The art style is fairly simple and straightforward, but it’s executed quite well. It’s not a technical marvel, and it doesn’t need to be. Each set of levels gets a different color scheme, livening up the already strong visuals. When combined with the level design, every world feels completely different from the previous one.

Interestingly, there is a decent amount of horror scattered throughout the game. It’s a bit odd for a platformer, yet it works with the setting and ultimately becomes intertwined with the story.

The soundtrack is another impressive highlight with one caveat: it’s repetitive. Every track fits the level it plays over, but hearing it over and over can grow tiresome. It’s still a solid soundtrack, I just would have enjoyed a little more variety,

It’s a good, almost great game. The platforming is fine, with a little roughness around the edges. There are some nice details that show a lot of care went into Triple Take. It’s not my favorite platformer, but the evolving level gimmick is such a fun twist on a classic genre that I have to recommend it to anyone that’s a fan of platformers.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Chicken Assassin: Reloaded is an action-clicker game that I expected a lot from, given its excellent review score. Ironically, this was one of the worst games I’ve ever played.

CA:R blends the worst elements of clicker games with bland RPG mechanics and horrifically boring combat. In a vacuum, it should be fine; I have a bit of a soft spot for clicker/idle games, I love RPGs, and side-scrolling brawlers are right up my alley. All of this potential goodwill is squandered almost immediately, thanks to my realization that this is a clicker game with no auto-clicking. You have to manually click for the entirety of the game. The only thing that breaks the monotony is the requirement that you aim your clicks at the enemies that periodically appear on your screen. Even after realizing how terrible the clicker mechanics were, I was hoping the RPG side would make up for it.

In a cruel twist, the RPG systems make an already bad game even worse. You have skills you can upgrade, but they mostly focus on simple stat boosts like extra attack or defense. There’s also an equipment and loot system that gives you small bonuses, as well as a clothing system that basically does the same thing. Altogether, you get a loop where you play a level, equip the loot with the biggest numbers, spend your money on upgrades, and repeat. You get slow, steady progress that doesn’t require strategy, skill, or even paying attention. It’s a truly mindless game, even for the clicker genre.

The presentation is all over the place. Every stage has a completely different setting and theme, so while it’s definitely fresh, it’s also inconsistent. Nothing connects together, it’s simply a series of random settings with a few lines of dialogue trying to justify it.

Outside of the bizarre visual design, there’s another issue: the graphics themselves. Everything has a gross, hazy filter over it, and the parts that you can see clearly, look awful.

Another area it struggles with is sound design. As a clicker game, you are clearly going to be doing a lot of clicking, yet the developers decided to use the most generic sound effects for attacks. It’s torture hearing the same sound effect 1000 times per level for hours on end.

The music may have been the game’s high point, and that’s barely a compliment. Some songs are bad, but most range from mediocre to fine. I would never listen to it by choice, but at least it’s usually tolerable.

Most clicker games don’t have much of a story, and many lack one completely. CA:R on the other hand, features small story transitions for each level. You don’t get some grand tale, but it’s a few lines that help give a small narrative to the game. I thought the plot was mediocre and seemed like it was thrown together at the last minute.

Alongside the basic plot, you have painfully unfunny comedy. There are plenty of name puns where the first letters of the first and last name are swapped, and I guess that’s supposed to get a chuckle out of you. Most of the jokes seem to be going for goofy, zany laughs. For me, it came off as lazy, but humor is subjective and most players seem to enjoy it, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

There are a surprisingly large amount of issues for a game that is relatively simple. First, you have some terrible hitboxes for a clicker game. Instead of clicking on the actual graphic for an enemy, you need to click in a box above their name, which sometimes doesn’t include the whole enemy, and usually covers a lot of empty space too. I also managed to find a bug that probably should have been caught a while ago. Double-clicking the retry button after failing a level will spawn twice as many enemies. Obviously not a huge deal, but when a straightforward and easy-to-fix bug slips by like that, it shows how unpolished the whole game is. Finally, you have the crashes, of which I experienced three in less than 10 hours of play.

I absolutely hated it. The overwhelmingly positive reviews raised my expectations quite a bit; I thought I was about to play one of the best clickers ever made. Yet once I got 15 minutes in, I realized it’s actually one of the most boring games I’ve played, even compared to other clickers. If all you want to do is click on enemies, then you may love this game. But if you’re like me and have higher expectations, this is a soul-crushing experience with little to no redeeming qualities.

Numerous bugs and minor performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Armored Head is an arena shooter with crisp gunplay, fluid movement, and an interesting visual style. It doesn’t have an exorbitant amount of content, but it delivers a tight, polished experience that is well worth its low price point.

The core gameplay loop is very simple; you shoot enemies, they drop resources, then you use those resources to help kill the next wave. You periodically find new weapons, but that’s about it. Despite how bare bones it might seem, it’s executed well, especially the weapon balancing, which I found impressive. Many games are reluctant to give the player weapons that might be too strong and kill any challenge, but Armored Head gets around that by limiting your ammo, not your power. The best weapon in the game is absurdly strong and can defeat a wave in only a few shots, but its max ammo is so low that you can’t make it your main gun. This system encourages you to switch up your weapons and helps keep the combat lively and ever-changing. Some of the game’s best moments come when you’re running low on ammo for your top-tier weapons and have to use a weak submachine gun instead.

This ammo-based balancing carries over into the power-ups, namely dashes and slow motion. They are exceptionally strong and make it nearly impossible to lose, but you run out quickly if you rely on them too much. It’s a fun system that makes you save your dashes for emergencies instead of endlessly jumping around.

Enemy design is another highlight. You have the standard ones that walk/run towards you in a straight line, but then there are some that fly erratically, others that shoot at you from afar, etc. It results in a quite varied roster that’s a lot of fun to fight.

Visually, Armored Head has a minimalist look that utilizes a muted color palette and unrefined 3D models. The result is a game that almost looks like an unfinished prototype, except that it’s clearly intentional rather than rushed graphics.

Additionally, the soundtrack comes together with the visuals and gameplay to give a high-energy vibe to the whole game. It’s not the type of music I would listen to on its own, but it fits the combat perfectly.

Armored Head isn’t revolutionary and actually borrows heavily from games that have come before it. That being said, it’s a stellar take on the arena shooter genre, and it’s a steal for such a low price point. I didn’t notice any major flaws and loved my time with it. I would recommend it to anyone that even moderately enjoys arena shooters, provided that they don’t mind a somewhat short game.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Hello Neighbor is a game about breaking into your neighbor’s house because you suspect him of keeping kidnapped children in his basement. Right off the bat, it’s an excellent premise for a horror game with plenty of opportunities for developers to put their distinctive spin on it. Instead, Dynamic Pixels produced one of the worst genre mashups I’ve played in a while. It clumsily blends a first-person horror game with a point-and-click adventure game to create a uniquely terrible experience.

Graphically, it’s middle-of-the-road, which is fine for most indie games, but the art style is so ugly that it makes the visuals more off-putting than they should be. To make matters worse, there’s a strange filter effect that gives the world a hazy, blurred look, especially when in motion.

The audio is definitely better than the visuals, but it’s not without fault. The music does a great job setting the tone, although the music stings quickly become repetitive. Soundtrack aside, the lack of voice acting would be acceptable, except it’s been replaced by grunts. There are no text boxes either, so most cutscenes consist of some voice actor attempting to emote while only being allowed to mumble.

Before I launched Hello Neighbor, I expected to like the gameplay based on the trailers I had seen, which was true for the first five minutes. You try sneaking in through the window, get caught, then next time he has booby-trapped it, so you can’t get in that way. Some of your progress carries over each time you lose, so it feels a little more dynamic than just replaying the same level over and over. Sadly, once you realize what the gameplay actually entails, it becomes one of the most horrendous slogs I’ve ever witnessed.

You are tasked with finding the key to a padlock, which seems fine initially, but then you need to get a hammer. Then a screwdriver. Then a crowbar. You get saddled with this endless list of objects to find, and you start to lose track of the horror. By the end of the game, I would go 15 minutes without even hearing the neighbor, let alone running or hiding from him. On the rare occasions I did run into him, it simply wasn’t scary due to how easy it is to escape from him.

To make matters worse, you aren’t just rifling through cabinets trying to find these items; you need to solve increasingly complex puzzles. Some are open-ended with multiple solutions, but they often boil down to a combination of physics puzzles and point-and-click style puzzles. Neither are very good, but the physics puzzles are especially weak because of how janky the game is. Something as simple as stacking cardboard boxes can take ten minutes because of how finicky the physics are. The point-and-click puzzles aren’t as frustrating mechanically, but their solutions are so esoteric that you’ll need a walkthrough if you want to finish the game in a reasonable time frame, especially once the puzzles evolve past “put the red key in the red padlock.”

Hello Neighbor also suffers from severe quality of life issues; there are so many it almost deserves its own section of the review. First, movement is awkward and clunky. In a game that requires a decent amount of platforming, this is unacceptable and really puts a damper on how fun it is to explore the neighbor’s home. Then you have your inventory space, which is needlessly limited to four items, requiring a lot of backtracking to solve certain puzzles. You also have the fact that dropped items stay where you leave them, so you can lose an essential item if you leave it in a spot you can’t remember, preventing you from progressing unless you restart. It’s as if the game doesn’t want you to enjoy your time with it like it thinks it’s Pathologic.

I wasn’t hugely disappointed by the story because it isn’t the game’s focus, but it’s undoubtedly lackluster. It’s told almost entirely through wordless cutscenes, so it’s tough to decipher what exactly is going on outside of broad plot points that are extremely obvious. By the end of the game, you can understand some of the backstory, but it’s sparse enough that it could have been explained in a single cutscene with dialogue.

I initially had high hopes for Hello Neighbor, and I was astounded by how mediocre, and even downright bad, it was at times. Leaving aside the usability issues, the gameplay was tedious and frustrating, with few, if any, redeeming qualities. So many of the mechanics clash together that it feels like it’s been cobbled together from the spare parts of better games. Ultimately, I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone. I truly don’t know who this would appeal to, but given the review score, I guess they must be out there somewhere.

Mild performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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