Recent reviews by zeno

Players seem to like this one less Axiom Verge 1 (AV1), which I feel is a bit unfair -- players expecting a game very similar to AV1 will not get what they receive, for example, my wife disliked how the main character changed; however, it is still a great game in its own right, with Babylonian references, interesting world that feels more open than the caves if AV1 or Metroid.

It is one of the most popular metroidvanias, and for a good reason. Very similar to Metroid in the general style. The Babylonian references and "glitch"-based story are great.

A very good, free survivors-like. Contrary to Vampire Survivors, HoloCure and Magic Survival, I feel this is more of "bullet hell" than "bullet heaven" -- a large part of the game is avoiding lasers, fireballs, snowflakes, and other attacks; you do not have much control on what your own spells hit (at least when using my favorite spells). Of course the "upgrade fest" element of creating extremely powerful attacks that kill thousands of enemies is still here. I do not like the recently added "Roguelike mode" (the name is silly because it has nothing to do with roguelikes, and also not very good).

I have enjoyed playing (currently free) Beneath a Steel Sky (BASS1) for its great atmosphere, and bought this sequel (BASS2) to get more of that.

And it was worth it. The atmosphere in BASS2 is similar as in BASS1: cyberpunk world, jokes, various easter eggs. The story is very interesting, and a great continuation of how BASS1 ended. It is quite sad that this game is not more popular.

I see the other reviews dislike the 3D graphics. I am not a fan of 3D graphics in general, I think they are fine here (other than some ugly human models), but probably using 2D as in BASS1 and other classic point-and-click adventures would be better, due to lower development costs.

This game makes people who think that a roguelike should be strictly grid-based reconsider their opinions. It plays very much like a traditional coffeebreak roguelike, but your movements are not really restricted to the grid -- you can click in some weird direction and you will move by 1 unit in an arbitrary off-grid direction. Despite this novelty, it still feels very much like a roguelike.

The western theme is also a rare thing in roguelikes. I definitely recommend this game.

(Note about the play time: I have played in for longer, like 2 hours, but somehow it did not register in Steam?)

This is a great game, often recommended in the roguelike discord as a good introduction to roguelikes.

Even if some people think it is not really a roguelike, because of lacking permadeath. But permadeath was not even mentioned in the roguelike definitions for most of the history of the genre (and it defines the player, not the game, anyway). Moonring can still be quite hardcore (the late-game randomized dungeons are quite huge and you need to replay them from the beginning if you fail), and its higher focus on story and puzzle-like weapon shrines, while making the game less appropriate for "restart from 0 if you die" play and reducing replayabiliy, brings some freshness to the genre.

I got interested in this game as an example of a game with roguelike gameplay but without the usual "roguelike elements" (procgen and permadeath), so I have checked it out to see how much it feels like a roguelike. After all, permadeath is just the player's choice, and procgen should not matter if you are playing just once.

The problem with it is that it turned out quite boring. After every battle, my character tended to be quite damaged, so I moved to a safer place, rested there, and returned. And sometimes resting at these "safer places" would also generate bands of monsters, which would damage my character even more. So the ratio of time spent cool things (combat, exploration) to the time spent doing boring things was quite low. In a good roguelike, you do amazingly cool things almost all the time!

It is great that the developer has released this game for free. If you are interested in games on the roguelike boundary like me, I would recommend to try for yourself. The story and graphics are good. Maybe other character classes are more interesting than the mage.

Of course the best roguelikes (such as DCSS, ADOM, Brogue, etc.) are free too.

This game is marketed as "combining deckbuilders and roguelikes", so, as a huge fan of both deckbuilders and roguelikes, I was very interested in trying this game.

However, this is actually just a deckbuilder with no roguelike elements! It appears that this game is called roguelike because of adapting the event system from FTL, however that event system was a Rogue-unlike innovation of that game -- roguelikes usually have spatial consistency which is much more interesting strategically.

It is great that Slay the Spire has inspired hundreds of game developers to create more solitaire deckbuilders, and other "Spire-likes". These games tend to have "roguelike deckbuilder" tag, despite being even less roguelike, and sometimes not deckbuilders. This misleading marketing made the landscape worse (by hiding actual roguelikes which are great games) and thus is a reason to leave a negative review.

I have played quite a lot of Slay the Spire, and it was fun, but then, moved back to Dominion (the game which started the deckbuilder genre) and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (the best roguelike). I would recommend all Slay the Spire fans to play these games. (Dominion is best to play at dominion.games for free, and DCSS is a free game!)

Also play Dream Quest, the game which actually coined the "roguelike deckbuilder" term -- and is somehow much less popular. I would not call it a roguelike (it is more like Desktop Dungeons: there is no spatial consistency, the map is a bit like in a roguelike but the monsters do not move on it), but it is an honest combination.

This game is most well known as being a go-to example of a game where you can compose more complex spells from simpler components.

It is a good game, but if you want that spell composition feature, I would like to recommend other games.

Worlds of Legend: Sons of the Empire (1993) is not very well known, but it is a pre-Diablo isometric Action RPG, and it does have spell composition too. It is of course a sequel to Legend (1992), IMO the sequel is better, it fixes some of the annoyances of the original.

And of course Noita is a great, recent game based on this.

In Magicka, all spells are "scripted" (you enter a combination of runes and the devs have programmed some of them to have various effects). In Noita and Legend, spell composition is more like programming.

This is basically the center of the modern metroidvania genre, so everyone should try it. Combat, exploration, art, story are all great.