ManlyMeatMan legutóbbi értékelései

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is a strategy roguelike with a very unique take on the genre. It deftly blends the rules of chess with a turn-based roguelike, creating a game unlike any I’ve seen before.

Shotgun King requires knowledge of the basic rules of chess, but that soon goes out the window once you start drawing cards that change how certain pieces work. Each round you choose a pair of new rules to follow: a positive one that gives you a small advantage, and a negative one that gives enemy pieces a boost. Because they are paired together, you usually get one change that you actually want and one that you’ll tolerate. I like that it adds replayability without making success feel completely luck-based (a common pitfall for roguelikes).

When it comes to the main gameplay mechanics, it’s quite straightforward. Your central goal is to kill the king, which can be easily done in five turns when a run commences, but quickly becomes a complex task with a lot of tactical moves to make, once you get farther along.

Each turn you can either shoot, reload, or move. It’s deceptively simple because even though your options are limited, you always need to be on the lookout for checkmate. Many of my runs ended simply because I forgot about a rook or queen in a dangerous position and spent too much time lining up good shotgun blasts. The real draw comes from the slowly increasing complexity as pieces unlock new moves, the number of enemy pieces begins to grow, and you upgrade your character. Some runs can be huge struggles if you make a poor choice of cards, but it’s balanced out by the runs where you become extremely strong after a few upgrades that synergize well.

The graphics have a nice retro style coupled with a CRT filter for an extra bit of authenticity. The gameplay doesn’t require much in the way of graphical fidelity, so expectations are on the lower end, but it still looks excellent. The developers could have gotten away with slacking, but instead, they deliver a game that looks much nicer than it needs to be.

Musically, it wasn’t as strong as the gameplay or graphics, but it remains decent, probably even above average. It’s the type of music that you wouldn’t take note of while playing. It works well as background music, especially for a small indie title like this.

I didn’t love Shotgun King, but for a $6 game, it’s excellent. Sure, you can beat it in a half-hour, but as with all roguelikes, the main source of entertainment is replayability. I wound up getting five hours out of it, including story and endless mode, and ultimately, I was satisfied with that. I would recommend Shotgun King to anyone that enjoys chess-related strategy games or small-scale roguelikes. It doesn’t have the endless content that something like Binding of Isaac has, so temper your expectations, but it’s still a strong game with a unique take on the roguelike genre.

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

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews, to see more high quality reviews regularly.

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

Songs of Conquest is a turn-based strategy and tactics game inspired by older titles like Heroes of Might & Magic. It’s a nice blend of city management and tactical battles, without giving too much attention to either of them.

SoC is all about using large strategic choices to influence small tactical battles. You will manage a handful of cities and need to strike a balance between growing your economy and your military. It’s pretty straightforward, with only 10-15 buildings per faction. Some buildings produce soldiers while others produce resources. Many of them have synergies, such as a castle requiring a peasant hut in order to upgrade the units it produces, but that’s as complex as it gets.

Then you have the tactical side, where you use the units you’ve trained in a turn-based battle. This is where your army composition matters and you start mixing together magic spells, unit abilities, terrain advantages, and a handful of other variables. It can be a little overwhelming at first, but even early on, I found it enjoyable. Your wielders (basically a general for your army) have various skills to unlock that allow them to specialize in certain combat styles. This allows the same faction to have wildly different playstyles depending on the army composition and the wielder in charge. Sometimes you can make major mistakes that cause you to lose the fight, but you can also pull off great comebacks thanks to the sheer volume of tactical decisions available.

SoC also features two distinct modes: campaign and skirmish. In campaign mode, you play as a specific faction for a handful of levels, while skirmish mode has you playing a standalone match with support for both singleplayer and multiplayer. The developers are mostly focusing on the singleplayer aspects during early access, so I’ll start with the campaigns.

Currently, there are only two campaigns with four levels each, but they are much longer than I expected. You can easily spend an hour or two on a single mission, especially the later ones. The campaigns have their own stories and seem to serve as introductions to the factions. Each mission introduces something new about the faction, and it seems to be leading you towards skirmish mode as the main focus, at least when it comes to replayability.

Skirmish mode has the same core gameplay, the main difference being the lack of plot and optional multiplayer. At present, multiplayer is a bit of an afterthought, although the devs are now adding simultaneous turns to try and improve this aspect. In singleplayer, it’s fun to be able to play as any faction without the restrictions the campaigns tend to place on you. Ultimately, I prefer the story mode, but thanks to modding tools, SoC has the potential to build a strong community that helps extend the game’s content.

Even though only the campaign mode features a central storyline, the developers clearly put a lot of thought into it. It isn’t the most well-written story and it wears its influences on its sleeve, but I still enjoyed it. The world-building is top-notch with plenty of lore and backstory breathing life into what would otherwise be a by-the-numbers fantasy world. The factions are all interestingly designed and their gameplay is thematically consistent with their individual lore. Ultimately, the story elements are a net positive, even though in a vacuum, they’re underwhelming.

I was pleasantly surprised by how excellent the audio and visuals were. Many strategy titles tend to slack on these because the gameplay is the major focus, but SoC manages to excel at both.

Graphically, it’s gorgeous. The art style uses modernized pixel graphics to give off a retro feel while meeting the high visual standards of today. When coupled with the silky smooth animations, you have a recipe for success. The world map obviously looks great, but the visuals really shine once you get into a battle. This is where you get to see the animations in action and they add a lot of weight to a combat system that already feels brutal, especially when the last unit dies and you get to watch a slow-motion closeup of it.

Thankfully, the sound design is no slouch either. The soundtrack fits the game perfectly, both as background music while you concentrate on strategy, and when you hear the bard songs after completing a campaign mission. The bard songs can be goofy, but because they are played straight without a hint of irony, the silliness becomes endearing, kind of like a Rennaissance fair.

Songs of Conquest isn’t a great game yet, but it’s built on such a solid framework that I would be surprised if it doesn’t significantly improve in the next year or so. Even now, it would be good if it was a full release, the only negative being the lack of content. I expect two new campaigns to be added on at some point, hopefully along with some new factions. If this happens, it could wind up being one of my favorite strategy titles ever. As it stands, it’s a terrific game that simply needs more time in the oven.

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

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews, to see more high quality reviews regularly.

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews, to see more high quality reviews regularly.

POSTAL 2 is a first-person shooter about the main character getting fed up with their frustrating and unfulfilling life and eventually “going postal” in his small town. This narrative is accentuated by purposefully tedious game mechanics that the player can only circumvent with extreme violence. On its face, I don’t hate the premise, and I think it has plenty of potential to be a unique experience, but the execution is abysmal.

This is an ugly game, even for its time. Most of the world is drab and uninteresting, even the locations that are supposed to stand out. The town of Paradise blurs together into a boring mess of houses and the occasional large building. Strangely enough, it reminded me of the first Pathologic game, but only the negative aspects: bad graphics, boring gameplay, and awful combat.

POSTAL 2 also features awful audio, thanks mainly to some of the worst audio mixing I’ve experienced in a game. I thought it was a bug or a mistake on my end because the dialogue audio is so much quieter than even the faintest sound effects. There’s no audio slider for dialogue to remedy this issue, so I wound up turning on subtitles and maxing out the volume whenever a cutscene started. The voice acting isn’t great, but given the campy nature of the game, it’s tough to tell how intentional that is.

You are given a few tasks each day in POSTAL 2. They are typically fetch-quests that involve either dropping something off or picking something up. The varied locations of these quests drive the story forward. You are supposed to start the game relatively peacefully, then get fed up with your tedious errands and begin murdering people to speed up your task list. It fits the idea of your character going postal, but in terms of enjoyment, it’s mediocre.

Gunplay is straightforward but lacks an impact. Every gun feels like a peashooter, especially later on when you fight stronger enemies. It’s tough to tell whether the weapons are too weak or the enemies are too strong, but either way, the result is slow, boring combat that wastes your time. Interestingly, my favorite weapon by far was the garden shears, which allow you to decapitate almost every enemy in the game with a single attack. Maybe it’s intentional, but it seems strange to have a variety of firearms that all take longer to kill someone than one of the first weapons you come across.

The first POSTAL game is infamous for its controversial premise, and this one continues the legacy with a new comedic flair. While the first title was solemn and devoid of humor, its sequel maintains a lighter tone. Somewhat strangely, it opts for a purposefully offensive style of comedy that comes off more lame than funny. Most of the jokes feel like you are just supposed to laugh because it’s offensive rather than clever or witty. For example, you encounter terrorists dressed like Osama Bin Laden. It’s clearly played for laughs and not as a serious moment, but what’s the joke? It’s just “haha a stereotype” without anything added on. This same style appears for most people in the game, but the jokes didn’t land for me regardless of who the subject was. A few notable outliers weren’t written as lazily, such as the ATF raid on the Waco compound, but they only stand out because the rest of the game isn’t funny at all.

When it isn’t trying to be offensive, the humor is often childish. You get poop jokes, STD jokes, and excessive swearing; it’s trying to be edgy and outrageous, but it comes off cheap and lazy.

After playing the first POSTAL game and hating it, I didn’t expect to love POSTAL 2, but given the overwhelmingly positive reviews, I expected it to be a big step up. The humor didn’t appeal to me, but the most egregious problem was the gameplay and how dull it was.

Ultimately, this isn’t the game for me because of its myriad issues. I’d give it a mild recommendation if you enjoyed the first one, but even that’s pushing it. For the average first-person shooter fan, I don’t see much reason to choose this over the multitude of open-world FPS games, unless you love this type of humor.

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

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

Roma Invicta is a strategy game that combines turn-based conquest management with real-time battles. It has a lot in common with the Total War franchise, but obviously without the massive AAA budget. The core gameplay involves back-and-forth battles between the Roman invaders and the Gallic tribes defending their territory.

You start out on a small campaign map of Western Europe. Your mission is to start in Italy and eventually conquer every region on the map. There’s a basic supply system that requires you to feed your soldiers, as well as an economic system that gives you money to spend on food and soldiers, but it’s extremely straightforward to the point where it feels dumbed-down. Not everything needs to be a grand strategy game full of political intrigue and complex economic simulation, although a little more depth would have been appreciated.

Once you get into the real-time battles, it becomes more challenging. The AI isn’t spectacular, yet it still manages to provide some much-needed difficulty. The limited amount of possible army compositions means that you will usually fight with the same units, give or take a few. Strategically, you’ll always be trying to execute the same general plan, just with some minor twist. It gets stale after a while, but the game is pretty short and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

After playing the campaign, you can try out the custom battle mode, which removes the strategic map and focuses only on the real-time battles. It’s a nice bonus but ultimately didn’t do much for me. This may change with the recent addition of Steam Workshop support, but this review was written a few days before that feature existed, so I can’t say how meaningful it is.

I loved the graphics, despite them being a little odd-looking. Every part of a soldier is modeled individually and it’s cool to see all the different moving parts during combat. The tradeoff is that performance is significantly worse than it would be with traditional animations. It didn’t impact my enjoyment, although it might be a deal-breaker for someone with an older PC.

Roma Invicta is far from a perfect game, but considering the price and its low-budget indie status, it comes out looking fine. It manages to do more things right than wrong, I just wouldn’t give it a strong recommendation. Fans of the Total War franchise might enjoy it as a smaller, less complex version of those games, although it probably won’t scratch the same itch.

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

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews, to see more high quality reviews regularly.

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

JANITOR BLEEDS is primarily a horror adventure game with some interesting puzzle elements blended in for good measure.

The most striking thing about JANITOR BLEEDS is the visual design. It’s retro-inspired, but it’s just one element used to create its own style rather than an attempt to clone it perfectly. When combined with the setting of an aging arcade, it blurs the lines between the real world that the character inhabits and the video game they play.

On their own, the pixelated graphics are nice to look at, but the star of the show is the lighting. Without giving too much away, light is used to drive home a lot of the horror that might not be as unsettling without it. Overall, I thought there were numerous scary moments that didn’t need to rely on cheap jump scares, although I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes to horror games, so it might not be up to the standards of a horror veteran.

As for the sound design, it more than pulls its weight during certain segments, especially concerning the unnerving atmosphere. Some of the best scares come while you are in an empty room and can only hear something happening through the walls. I could go on and on about the standout moments, but most of their impact comes from how they play with your expectations, and I wouldn’t want to spoil that.

As for gameplay, there are stretches where it feels almost like a walking simulator and others that feature major genre shifts that stand out from the rest of the game. Most of the time, you will be tasked with searching for an item that will allow you to progress to the next area, whether it be the key to a locked door or simply a helpful tool. At times it’s almost like a first-person point-and-click adventure game, especially in the first half. The “gaminess” of these mechanics can be somewhat immersion-breaking, but the omnipresent tension usually helps avoid this.

The overarching narrative didn’t blow me away, but it’s serviceable as a way of building up a mysterious atmosphere. It’s told through a series of messages left throughout the arcade and a good amount of environmental storytelling. It’s on par with what I expect from an indie horror, so in that sense, I wasn’t disappointed, but given how strong the rest of the game is, it stuck out as an underwhelming element.

A solid indie horror game that deftly blends a retro art style with a modern, unique take on horror. The only knocks against it are the occasional bugs you experience and possibly its lack of replay value (although personally, I wasn’t bothered by this). I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys horror games, especially those that play like a walking simulator.

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

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews , to see more high quality reviews regularly.

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

Archipelago is a roguelike tower defense (TD) game that doesn’t do anything remarkable with the genre, but it still manages to be fun for its limited runtime.

As expected, Archipelago has a lot in common with most other TD games, simply due to the nature of the genre. That being said, it effectively works in a couple of twists that aren’t wholly unique but are fresh enough to liven up the game.

The central distinction is that you play on randomized maps with variable tower costs rather than playing through a predetermined set of levels. One might feature a perfect choke point for you to mass your defenses around, while another has multiple winding paths that lend themselves more towards a multilayered approach. Furthermore, the random tower costs mean that you’ll always need to change up your strategy. It helps fight back against the idea of an optimal strategy, which often dumbs down the tactical side of TD games once it has been discovered. I rarely used the same defenses multiple times because I would typically learn that archers are dirt cheap this time, knights are overpriced, etc. This is a crucial element of a roguelike TD, and I think it was pulled off quite well. Furthermore, you will receive items as you play that boost specific units. Most are relatively minor, but they can combine in interesting ways to give your towers strong yet situational power boosts.

To complement its roguelike mechanics, Archipelago also features a standard economy system that encourages you to gamble with your safety. You can spend your money on either defenses for security or gold mines to increase your income. It’s a tricky balance to maintain, but it doesn’t change every round, so it offers some stability and predictability that you can base your overall strategy around.

I also really enjoyed the technology progression while it lasted. It’ll only be a handful of hours before you’ve unlocked everything, but it consistently added new, exciting ways to defend your island. Some might complain about the lack of replayability once you complete the tech tree, but I feel that the content is sufficient for a $5 game, especially given how enjoyable it is.

The graphics aren’t outstanding or an impressive technical feat, but I would still consider them above average for a small indie game. The art style does a lot of the heavy lifting thanks to its consistency and how well it fits into the gameplay. As for the soundtrack, I liked it at first, but it can be tiring to hear the same song over and over. Nevertheless, I liked the soundtrack in general and regard it as a positive across the board.

Archipelago has a modest amount of content, and it’s clearly a low-budget indie title. Despite that, it’s a lot of fun to progress through the tech tree, and it has enough variety to stand out from other indie TD games with similar budgets. I’d recommend it to fans of the genre with the understanding that it’s a good, not great, game.

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews , to see more high quality reviews regularly.

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

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews , to see more high quality reviews regularly.

Mechs V Kaijus is a tower defense game based on Japanese kaiju films like Gojira. Notably, the setting is tweaked to be more favorable towards the human defenders, but ultimately, it does a great job adapting the overall genre to a video game.

The graphics look like your typical 2D indie game; nothing out of this world, but clearly made by a talented artist. I wasn’t a huge fan of the kaiju designs, and the tower designs were a mixed bag, yet it maintained a relatively consistent style that worked well enough.

Sonically, I found the sound effects and voice acting to be par for the course. The soundtrack had some strong highs and some tough lows, but it was typically good.

In a genre like tower defense, nearly all of a game’s enjoyment comes from the gameplay. Most have mediocre graphics, a forgettable story, and maybe a decent soundtrack. MvK is cut from the same cloth but manages to do something unique with its mechanics, primarily the combined arms approach to combat, but also in its level design.

When you first start playing, you’ll notice that you control a mech. This isn’t a super common mechanic, but a number of TD titles give you some sort of ability to shoot at enemies. What sets this apart from the rest is that your mech can be deployed to the battlefield like a tower. Later on, you can bring multiple mechs with you, and even later you can build factories that construct military vehicles to further support your defense. As I unlocked more and more of these units and building it started to remind me of Starcraft custom games, specifically the defense-oriented ones where you control a hero unit while building defenses and training lesser units to hold off the waves of attackers. It also does a surprisingly good job approximating how kaiju films typically portray the earth’s defenses against aliens/monsters. It’s not the most impactful mechanic or anything, but it’s a fun element that helps it stand out from the crowd.

That being said, MvK is not without flaws. Instead of enemies following a set path, they swarm your defenses from the side of the screen. They are loosely split into lanes, but they can get bumped around the edges of a wall you’ve built fairly easily. It’s maybe a more realistic take on TD waves, but it’s frustrating to have enemies get past your defenses because they are a few pixels too narrow. This could have been solved by allowing walls to connect to avoid gaps between them, or by restricting enemy movement to the lane they spawn in. This issue is made worse due to the random placement of tower slots. You can only build on these designated spots, but sometimes they are set up where a wall might block 90% of enemies in a lane while the rest barely walk around it.

MvK features a tech tree to unlock new abilities, towers, mechs, etc., as well as a currency system that can be used for permanent upgrades and temporary boosts. These aren’t groundbreaking ideas or anything, but they’re executed in strange ways.

The tech tree is quite extensive, to the extent that I beat the game, all of the optional levels, and every challenge level, and still had five or so things to research. This also includes when I was grinding research by playing the first level ~15 times in a row due to my technology lagging behind my level progress. The main issue seemed to be pricing, especially some of the later tech that required multiple missions worth of research. This was exacerbated by the inability to refund your research, so you’re stuck with any bad choices you made. I didn’t make any egregious technology decisions, but I still felt like the early game was bland because of how long it takes to unlock more towers and defenses. On the other hand, once I got deeper into the tree, the unlocks were more varied and interesting.

The other half of the progression system is similar to the tech tree, but with a few major differences. First, money is mainly spent on your mechs, rather than your overall defense. Second, while upgrades are permanent, repairs are a neverending money sink, so you will always need to have a small cash reserve for a rainy day. Finally, the number of upgrades is significantly lower than the number of technologies. In totality, this system encourages you to use your mechs as little as possible until you can fully upgrade them, otherwise, you will be stuck wasting your money on repairs. After upgrading everything, you can now spend money on onetime boosts like spawning a tank or calling in an airstrike. It’s a bit odd, but it accomplishes its goal of giving you something to spend your money on later in the game, so I’m fine with it.

I was originally indifferent towards MvK, but I grew to like it more and more as I played. It’s a great game once you get through the rough opening leg, but I suspect many players won’t be willing to put up with its early mediocrity. It also has a noticeable lack of polish, from the clunky UI to the intermittent bugs. I would still recommend it to tower defense fans based on the strength of its back half, but it certainly isn’t a must-play game.

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

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

Insomnis is a horror puzzle game in which you explore an abandoned mansion after inheriting it from your grandfather.

The first thing I noticed was the graphics which are unexpectedly high quality for such a low-budget indie game. The illusion can begin to wear off once animations come into the mix, but aside from that, it looks great. The ambient soundscape complements the graphics nicely, giving the mansion a creepy atmosphere before anything strange has actually happened. Conversely, the voice acting is rough around the edges and kind of takes you out of the experience, but it’s not laughably bad like many projects of this scale.

As soon as you enter the mansion, it gets off to a strong start thanks to some excellent tension building. It feels like something is about to happen after every step you take. Eventually, it hits you with a strong jump scare that got me pretty good, even though I was on the lookout for something like that. Jump scares are often criticized for being used as a crutch to prop up a game with mediocre horror elements, but this one was used to complement the atmosphere, rather than make up for it. It’s a great sequence that I wish could have been replicated as you progress through the house, but sadly, it begins to get repetitive and predictable. Sure, you might still flinch, but you won’t be scared. This also coincides with a shift towards more of a puzzle focus, so it isn’t unwarranted, but I would have loved for the developers to keep the horror going.

After the first chunk of primarily horror adventure gameplay, you start to see more complex puzzles that have the potential to trip you up, rather than the easy puzzles that are just an excuse to make you walk around a spooky mansion. Overall, I felt that there was a good balance between simplicity and challenge, although getting stuck is an absolute nightmare due to the lack of a hint system. One puzzle, in particular, ground the game to a halt until I gave in and looked up the solution. It kills the atmosphere and might explain why horror puzzle games are so difficult to pull off.

Something that many great horror puzzle games do is tie each puzzle to the game world. For Insomnis, this is done by making each solution reveal some backstory about the mansion, the owner, etc. Although the puzzles themselves are a bit far-fetched in terms of realism, they make sense in the context of the story.

The excellent atmosphere dwindles as you progress, but it’s still an above-average horror game complemented by strong puzzles. Horror-puzzle fans will probably enjoy it, although there are certainly better games in the genre that I would recommend playing first.

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews , to see more high quality reviews regularly.

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

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

Deponia is a point-and-click adventure game where you play as Rufus, a sociopathic adventure game protagonist on a quest to rescue a woman that fell from the sky.

Deponia starts off with a comedic musical number outlining the basic premise. It’s a strong opener in the sense that you get a good idea of what the rest of the game is going to be like, but I absolutely hated it. These plot-relevant songs reappear a few more times, each as unfunny as the last.

After this unique opening, you get your first taste of the graphics and they’re pretty solid. Nothing game-changing, but definitely a strong point. The animations are certainly mediocre, although they aren’t bad enough to ruin the game. Similarly, the soundtrack isn’t awful, but you spend so much time listening to the same looping song that it gets stale after a while.

As with most point-and-click adventure games, the narrative is a major focal point. In Deponia, the basic premise is simply the main character, Rufus, trying to help a beautiful woman return home. Obviously, I’m leaving out plenty of details along the way, but the entire story is essentially a prequel to the next entry in the franchise. There isn’t any meaningful character development, and it ends right when things start to pick up. It’s as if the entire narrative is simply filler trying to stall until the sequel comes out.

Even though I found the overall plot to be underwhelming, the dialogue shines through as the worst part of Deponia. Almost every character is used to set up jokes, but they rarely land. Most are corny one-liners or puns that might get a mild chuckle at best. Some come off quite poorly, such as Rufus always trying to be left alone with an unconscious woman, or the stereotypical bearded man in a dress demanding to be called ma’am. Beyond that, the comedy comes from Rufus’s humorous observations.

Rufus is an over-the-top version of a stereotypical adventure game protagonist. It’s a genre full of characters that are supposed to be heroes but often do horrible things to achieve their goals. Here, it’s played for laughs and I generally enjoy the concept, but it’s weighed down by lackluster execution. He’s a monster, but it’s not funny, just unlikable. When the plot needs him to switch into a more heroic role, they slap together a mildly redemptive scene to show he isn’t all bad, but it’s not enough to make him palatable.

You can expect to see all the classic point-and-click game mechanics: vague item-based puzzles, extensive dialogue trees, and hidden objects that blend in with the background. Unfortunately for Deponia, it can’t use its age as an excuse for its shortcomings, because it came out in 2012. Puzzles occasionally venture into “moon logic”, where the solution is so esoteric or nonsensical that you’ll either waste your time guessing or be forced to look up a guide. This isn’t to say every puzzle is exceptionally hard, it’s just that many solutions require you to think exactly as the developers did. This mostly crops up when you need to combine items because your inventory can begin to balloon as you progress, leaving you with dozens of potential combinations to try. Most players will only get stuck once or twice, so a guide isn’t required, but I also didn’t find the puzzles satisfying to solve, so I wouldn’t worry about ruining the experience by checking a walkthrough; frankly, you aren’t missing out on much.

Deponia has a few bits and pieces that are great, but they’re overshadowed by the abysmal comedy and lackluster gameplay. It wastes your time with long, drawn-out puzzles that are more frustrating than challenging. The story is a barebones prologue that should have been trimmed down and combined with its sequel. That being said, the best way to decide if you should give it a shot is to watch the intro song. If you get a chuckle out of it, this might be the game for you. Otherwise, you’re in for a painfully unfunny time.

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

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews , to see more high quality reviews regularly.

Follow our Curator Page, MMM Reviews, for more in-depth reviews and recommendations

The Kids We Were is an adventure game focused on storytelling. There’s little to no gameplay; instead, it’s like a visual novel with exploration mechanics.

Visually, it looks like 3D pixel art. Everything is blocky, yet more detailed than something like Minecraft. It gives off a retro vibe that fits well with the 1980s setting. The collectibles have especially beautiful models that show off the game’s cute aesthetic. It’s far from a technical marvel, but it’s great for an indie title like this.

There’s no voice acting, so the only audio comes from the soundtrack and occasional sound effects. The score features quite a bit of music, definitely more than I expected, I thought the story would be shorter than it was, so the soundtrack wound up being the perfect length and never felt stale. The songs are typically slow and simple, often featuring minimal instrumentation. They are mood setters, not attention grabbers, and they do their job well.

As I mentioned in the intro, the gameplay doesn’t play a major role. You walk around town talking to people and searching for both coins and collectibles. That’s all there is to it. The items you find have little snippets of info, usually pertaining to their relevance in 1980s Japanese culture, but it doesn’t serve a purpose outside of these fun tidbits. Coins are used to buy more collectibles, so they’re essentially the same thing as finding items directly. Walking around is mostly unnecessary because it’s a linear narrative. You can talk to other residents, but it’s only killing time until you go to the next story section. Granted, the dialogue is usually interesting, but it typically isn’t relevant to the plot.

This is where all the meat is. Without the story, there would be no reason to ever play this game. Thankfully, The Kids We Were delivers a meaningful tale with a solid blend of humor, nostalgia, and sadness. It’s balanced well, so nothing feels tacked on or unnatural. It begins with you playing as a young Japanese child in the year 2020. Your family has assorted health issues, but you aren’t given any specific details. This part of the narrative is setting up the main plotline, but I didn’t read the store page before playing, so I was blindsided by the transition to a time travel story. Once it did though, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the writing. Outside of a couple of typos or mistranslations, and some very telegraphed twists, it was excellent. It overstayed its welcome near the end, but only slightly. A few of the later chapters could have been trimmed down and combined into one big chapter, but it didn’t ruin the game or anything like that.

I loved some of the story’s themes, specifically with regards to childhood experiences shaping your adulthood. There were some thought-provoking moments that stuck with me, something that rarely happens to me when I play games. I didn’t love the ending, but it was only a slight step down in quality compared to the strong middle.

The Kids We Were isn’t much of a game in the traditional sense, but it was good as a purely narrative experience. Because of that, it’s going to be fairly hit-or-miss for a lot of players. The heavy, emotional story beats are fantastic, but there are still a few missteps that didn’t go over well. Even though it’s technically an adventure game, visual novel fans are probably the most likely audience to enjoy it. Overall, a solid indie game that might be priced a bit too high, but definitely an enjoyable experience.

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

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews , to see more high quality reviews regularly.