Senaste recensioner av zeno

A good, cheap and relatively short metrodvania, although nothing special.

You play as an actual cat, not a humanoid with cat face! (The cat is mostly wearing a robot suit, but still.)

A very good soulsvania, with good combat, interesting art, and exploration.

Always great to see a game using a different art style. A warning though: this game was very buggy (IIRC it would often crash when switching areas, or something like that).

This is a hit, and for good reasons. Beautiful animal-based design, interesting upgrades, and multiple layers of riddles. If you love riddles, you should love this, if not, you can stop at the first layer :)

A great game pushing the roguelike genre in new directions. While still remaining a true roguelike.

I got Trine because I wanted to play a game where you play multiple characters who cooperate (like Lost Vikings or less known and much more primitive but still cool and unique Heads over Heels from 1987), and I have seen Trine mentioned in some thread about such games. I did not get what I wanted, the gameplay would be essentially the same if a single character had all the abilities, contrary to e.g. Lost Vikings, where lots of challenges and solutions depend on having multiple characters with different abilities. Maybe it is more fun in multiplayer (but this would require us to use a gamepad, and my wife got bored with Trine instantly anyway).

Dominion is the game that has started the deckbuilder genre, and it is still amazing, getting better with every expansion!

While Slay the Spire is also good, I think it is as popular as it is mostly because most people do now know classic deckbuilders (confusing them with pay-to-win CCGs, and not taking physical card games like Dominion into account) nor classic roguelikes (confusing them with roguelites) -- I would rather play more Dominion or more classic roguelikes than more StS.

My playtime for this Steam version is quite low, but I play the online implementation of Dominion (dominion.games) quite a lot, and also the physical card version -- so this review is more for the game itself than this particular implementation, although I believe the implementation is quite good too.

A great game! It is a real-time game, but it plays very much like a traditional roguelike, in the style of Brogue. The way it procedurally generates its quests (graph grammar-based system) is also quite amazing. Definitely worth to play!

Since there is a box "check if received for free", full disclosure: I have received Unexplored from the dev (by means of a key exchange) -- IMO that does not count as "for free" but someone may think otherwise.

Well, it is a free game, so yeah, I do recommend playing it! :)

I did not like The Witness, but I found this parody of The Witness to be very fun and good.

So I have lots of appreciation for falling sand/real-time artillery games, roguelikes, "magic programming", and Finnish games. Liero, IVAN, things like that. In the mid-90s I have been working on a falling sand real-time artillery game myself, but unfortunately lost a bit of progress at some point (and switched to making roguelikes with complex magic systems).

Noita combines all of these, so when I have heard about it, I knew right away that I had to play it to see what is possible in the modern times! Although I read that it takes about 100 hours to complete, so I had to wait until I had time.

The game is indeed amazing -- other than the "falling sand" aspect, the system of building wands is also very interesting. And it feels closer to roguelikes in the traditional sense than most games commonly called roguelikes (arcade games with short runs).

But my concerns about long play time turned out to be valid too. Modern roguelikes tend to feature "anti-grind" design, the best described in the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup design philosophy: the optimal way to play the game should be also the most fun. It seems Noita seems to take more from the older, more grindy designs. Also some aspects of the design make it harder to improvize/experiment, while experimentation is one of the best thing about Noita (and also roguelikes in general).

Luckily, there are mods addressing most of my concerns. So far I have won unmodded Noita twice, but I am planning to enable mods for further play (and I think new players should consider that too). I mean the following changes:

* larger inventory -- I hate limited inventories in general, and in Noita it is exceptionally small (just 4 wands, 4 items, and not too many spells), so you either avoid experimentation or spend extra time to get to your stash.
* disable permadeath -- Noita has runs taking few hours, and there are ways to suddenly lose even if you are very powerful. Permadeath is great for experts who know what they are doing, but for more experimental/casual play it might be fun to turn it off.
* select starting perks -- Tinker Everywhere for easier experimentation, etc.

There are mods for this and many more (I just listed the most critical ones).