Recent reviews by AngoraFish

I was expecting to settle down for a few hours of cheese, but actually the game holds up really well.

The written dialogue and voice acting is almost universally fantastic, the songs are catchy and engaging in the musical theatre style you would expect, and the art is exceptionally easy on the eye.

Despite being a pretty standard on-rails visual novel there was enough in the choices to give me a sense of agency.

For the first couple of hours I was genuinely blown away, and I still have the songs stuck in my head.

The second half falls off a bit, as I find is typical when a developer’s ambition exceeds their budget, but it’s a minor quibble.

Slightly more jarring is how hard the game tries to get you to romance the main characters. Everyone is a love interest, and the interactions come across as forced and inauthentic. I mean, really, centuries old Greek gods swooning for a human after only a couple of days interaction is more than a little bit creepy.

One wonders what could have been, had the developers invested a little more time into strengthening the main story arc instead of fragmenting it with distracting and unnecessary relationship drama.

Which also leans into my main criticism, which is that the protagonist is a classic Mary Sue. Honestly, the game is far better in the first half where the protagonist is being swept up into a drama far greater than herself, compared to the second half which inexplicably flips to her more or less leading the whole shebang. It’s ultimately a lazy and uninspired story arc that leaves you with a touch of whiplash.

The game also treats murder and death far too glibly for my taste. If nothing else, the main protagonist’s reactions are implausibly comfortable with circumstances that would be traumatic for anyone who isn’t an actual sociopath. Sure, it's a game, but it's a game that leans heavily into emotional authenticity, and mostly does so very well, so it feels particularly jarring in that context.

As a result, I had to struggle through the second half of the game, and I have no particular interest in revisiting this world to see the missed content, or to buy the DLC, which is a shame.

Still, I can happily recommend the game for what it is, and parts continue to linger, which is more than I can say for 99% of the games in my library.

I'm not normally prone to hyperbole, but I Was a Teenage Exocolonist genuinely is a modern classic. The quality of the writing, the complexity of the characters, the emotional investment, and the amazing replayability make this game stand out.

Currently Exocolonist has nowhere near the profile or credit it deserves, and I would encourage anyone on the fence about whether this is likely to be their thing to give it a go. Please.

Exocolonist is very much its own game, however it straddles a space somewhere between visual novel (VN), RPG and princess builders (such as Long Live the Queen and Volcano Princess).

The risk of dropping a term like “visual novel” about a game such as this is that it risks creating the impression of click and read. I hate click and read, and most VNs leave me cold. I therefore use the term advisedly because it’s not like that at all. What the game is, instead, is heavily story driven with more reading than most people are likely used to.

In Exocolonist you play as the main protagonist arriving on a new colony world. Your primary interactions are with other colony ship children who age together with you across seasons and years until you are 20 years old, at which point the game ends.

Gameplay involves walking around different, smallish, maps interacting with other characters, building up skills and relationships, and revealing factoids about the other children, the new world you have colonised, and ultimately the adult world going on around you and their politics.

Most events and interactions trigger stat increases across 12 broad categories. What areas you focus on can dramatically alter the events that you trigger and the skill checks you are able to pass across your journey.

All main characters are potentially romanceable, although mostly in a pragmatic way – which is to say, most romance chains stay effectively platonic and the characters you romance maintain their own autonomy and quirks. The relationship outro also inevitably peters off into melancholy – for example distant characters stay distant, they drift away emotionally or get absorbed in their work, etc. Kind of like real life.

Or you can completely skip all romance chains and focus on saving your colony from collapse, or investigating this strange new planet you have found yourself living on, or on a career, or (eventually) playing politics with the adults.

It’s all very adult, and realistic, and emotionally impactful, but may feel a touch unsatisfying if your main goal in computer gaming is pure escapism.

Other than walking around maps, training up stats, triggering events, and interacting with other characters the other main element of gamification here is the card system.

As you experience the world you are rewarded with cards as a proxy for life’s experiences – such as [played] “Hide and Seek with Nougat”, “Harvesting Mushwood” and [learned] “Dys's Secret”. The cards have one of three different colors, corresponding to broad stat building themes, and a number. Later events as you age inevitably reward cards with higher values. To pass a skill check you need to arrange your cards into straights and runs.

The card system was more than complex enough for me as it gives a wonderful sense of agency, without being overly onerous or punishing. The tests are inevitably a reasonably straightforward exercise in pair matching and light mental arithmetic.

Finally, I absolutely despise replaying most games - one run though of a game is inevitably enough. Except in this case, where I have completed three full runs and started a fourth. (A full run takes around 7 hours.)

Exocolonist has a wonderful ability to encourage replayability. In part, this is because it is so content-dense that it is literally impossible to experience more than a fraction of what the game has to offer on a single playthough. The game also, very smartly, acknowledges the conceit with references to past (and future) lives and an end of game admonishment to “do better next time”.

There is, indeed, a lot of incentive to do better next time, in part because bad things happen in the game to nice people, and across multiple replays you can find ways to save them and to improve the colony's chances of success.

Taking certain routes through the story can also unlock additional story lines and options in future playthroughs.

If you haven’t worked this out already, I cannot recommend this game highly enough.

Citizen Sleeper is a visual novel, not an RPG.

I completed my first play through in around 4.5 hours and only have middling desire to return – mainly because I largely managed to skip an area (a mushroom growing hippie commune) and should be able to click through dialogue quick enough to justify another quick run-through to pick up half a dozen extra achievements.

The actual game involves clicking on highlighted icons scattered over a isometric picture of a ship, which you scroll right and left along with the mouse wheel, or similar. Clicking on an icon triggers a dialogue or some actions. There is no walking around.

Backgrounds and the occasional character pic are rare, even compared to what is typical of lower-budget visual novels.

The game includes minor gamification elements, mainly an energy bar that you need to manage and a “dice” system where you get up to five pre-rolled numbers each round that can be spent on certain actions, although you always progress the story regardless. There’s also a skill tree that may be the smallest I have ever seen. Still, all of that at least generates enough engagement to break up the click and read.

The quality of the writing is above average, which is about the main thing the game has going for it, although "average" writing in computer games isn't a particularly high bar. The characters are endearing, with a slightly poignant edge, although in the end they inevitably devolve into parody stereotypes. Later in the game there’s at least one groan-inducing moment that further undermines the claim to writing “quality”. (A quest chain where a ship yard is surprised when their payment for repairing a huge spaceship is a box of mushrooms - are we seriously expected to believe that people are this incompetent?)

The story is a mix of linear elements and side-quests, although the nature of the game means that most will end up being completed along the way.

The website Rock Paper Shotgun is currently having an inexplicable love affair with this game (as of writing it’s #10 on their best RPG top 50 list), although if you read their write up their take is mostly the same as the above, except that they like the characters more than I clearly did. Aside from the fact that this game is manifestly not an RPG, it simply does not deserve to be in a top 50 list of anything, and particularly not compared to modern classics such as I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, which has many similar elements but does them so, so much better, and which deserves a far higher profile than this game has. Indie game development is an unfair and capricious place.

Backback Battles is a casual autobattler, with a game flow very similar to Super Auto Pets, which I also recommend.

In this case you buy objects, arrange them in traditional RPG-style backpacks so that different components can play off each other’s synergies, click play, and see if your current build beats someone else’s build, and then do it all again until you win or are eliminated.

Over time you accumulate trophies that you can use to unlock cosmetics, although the grind for full outfits is pretty steep. There is also a fairly traditional ranking system that should eventually place you against opponents of relatively even skill level.

Like Super Auto Pets rounds are quick (less than a minute) and you can pick up or take a break from the game between any round as you like. Also like Super Auto Pets the game is cute, colourful, and very easy on the eye and the brain, making for a wonderfully relaxing experience watching things bounce around and wiggle.

Although in theory there is a puzzle element, item placements are almost always intuitive and/or signalled explicitly in game. Positive relationships are indicated in game with gold diamonds and glowing magnetic-style lines encouraging you to place synergistic objects together. This has been more than enough for me to win a bunch of games without ever having to read any actual descriptions or try to min/max in any particularly rigorous way.

Funnily enough, I completely despise backpack Tetris in traditional RPGs so much that I’ll go looking for an infinite backpack mod even before I’ve started playing my first game. In this case, however, most of the traditional drawbacks of the limited backpack space system just aren’t present here – you almost always have sufficient space, and I'd rarely sell more than half a dozen items throughout a run, and then only because they’re not really contributing to my build, or to snaffle a couple of extra dinero to buy a bigger, better piece of gear.

At the moment the game is arguably a bit light on content, however I’ve managed to get 24 hours of fun out of it, and the game is still in Early Access, so heck. I’m more than happy to recommend this right now at this price and with the existing amount of content. Any additional content added in from this point will just be a bonus.

For an early access game I’ve experienced no bugs whatsoever, and given that game has already sold over half a million copies, more content seems an absolute certainty.

I'm having some fun with Balatro, but it's also leaving me unsatisfied.

Poker is both the game's strength and its weakness.

It's a strength because anyone with even a passing familiarity with Poker will have no problem getting into the flow, and its simplicity makes for a low effort casual experience.

It's a weakness because you're bound by the conventions of Poker, however overlaying Balatro's game mechanics on top breaks some fundamental parts of that game. For example, with Poker you'd mostly be happy with a high pair of face cards, whereas Balatro has you pulling flushes on the first roll and thereby immediately devaluing that as an achievement. If you ever have to play down a single pair in this game you may as well just about concede your entire run at that point. Seriously.

This gives the game nowhere to go for those big pay off moments, like laying a full house of 2s and 3s over the top of a couple of pairs of aces and queens. Instead, Balatro is mostly about tweaking stats and multipliers and replaying the same hands over and over while watching your score get bigger and bigger.

On a similar note, the odds and associated payoffs are flawed because they're based on Poker odds, they're not adjusted for this game's quirks. For example, Balatro has both much larger hand sizes and also much more capacity for draw. This strongly favours flushes, which are generously rewarded, over pairs/triples/four of a kind because there's 13 of each suit and only 4 of each rank.

The game also lacks any type of theme other than some quirky joker pictures, you're just watching hearts and clubs. (One might argue that this is inevitable when you're stuck with a standard 52 card deck, but there are many solitaire variants that make theming work really well.)

Balatro trades Poker's push your luck tension and simplicity for something that is ultimately less interesting, that is, ride the wave of higher and higher scores until the game breaks your strat by changing the rules on you without notice (you can never see further than one boss ahead) - which should be a cardinal sin in a game that only allows you to make tiny incremental tweaks along the way, and that absolutely does not reward flexible deck building.

Balatro isn't badly done, and it's got the usual addictive qualities of slot machines and other gambling-based games, but it's only a soft recommendation from me. Something significant has been missed in trading the satisfaction of laying down an amazing hand against the odds for something that is ultimately much less interesting - tweaking your score multipliers over multiple rounds while you play essentially the same hand, round after round, until either the game breaks you or you break the game.

EDIT (3 March 24): Given that a lot of the comments below seem to have missed this, I thought it worth re-emphasising that the review mentions the viability of pairs, not to complain that pairs aren’t a particularly viable strategy (although this is true), but to illustrate the following points.

1) Very rare hands in poker are extremely common in Balatro; meaning that they’re not particularly exciting when you get them. In Poker a pair is the default - you can win with it, but you can’t win hard. In Balatro that applies to every hand, so, meh. The fact that this makes pairs a sub-viable strategy is just a byproduct of making the hail mary hands easier to get.

2) In Balatro the odds are wrong. All payouts and multipliers are based on Poker odds, even though hands like straights and flushes drop much more frequently in Balatro. In fact, given the difficulty of running pairs builds, actually winning a run with a pairs build is the rare outcome. Unfortunately, the game’s systems don’t reflect the difficulty of pulling off that achievement. Just being able to boast about a pairs win in a comments section isn’t enough, for me at least.

3) The flow of Poker is typically mostly a few hands of low wins, a couple of triples, two pair, maybe even an ace high, with occasional rounds where you’re tempted to go all in on a royal flush, or similar. These “all in” rounds are where the real emotional payoff comes from. Balatro would benefit from more of these experiences along the way, rather than just watching your multipliers increase while you double down on the same hand, round after round.

Apologies for restating the same arguments again for those who got it the first time.

Demo for a game released 25 May 2023. There's more than enough game here to know if this is your jam, although the demo does cap out just when the pace starts picking up and things start coming together.

Above Snakes is a pretty chilled isometric crafting survival game, heavily inspired by games such as Don't Starve. Unlike Don't Starve, however, the game is not too taxing and has no real time pressure, which suits me just fine. :-)

Some of the screen shots make the game look a bit like a puzzler, but the gameplay arc is more about collecting resources you pick up walking around the isometric map and then crafting things with them.

You accumulate exploration points by collecting stuff, which enables you to discover new tile types (biomes) over time, and then place them on the world map. This does give a nice sense of ownership in creating your environment, although the main strategic element here is just to ensure you have a diversity of biomes close to your main base to save you from having to walk too far to collect recipe components.

There is some very light questing and story, mainly serving to provide some direction to incentivise building new stuff and exploring further afield.

I'm looking forward to the main game, and can see myself sinking quite a few casual hours pottering around in it and exploring new biomes as they unlock.

It’s not that it’s bad, as such, it’s just that the game is a one trick pony. The world is full of idle games and this one would be very far down the list.

If you want simple, accelerating numbers, try Clicker Heroes or Adventure Capitalist.

If you want to start at the top of the genre, with three or four games in one, try Cell to Singularity.

If you want complex and not really that idle, try Idle Champions of the Forgotten Reams, or perhaps Shakes and Fidget.

If you want not actually idle at all (and not free), but a relatively stressless experience nonetheless with numbers that creep up, try Max Gentleman’s Sexy Business (trust me on this).

Leaf Blower Revolution, on the other hand, is a piece of not very much. Leaf blowing reverts to looking at the menu upgrade screen in a few hours, at most.

After that it’s more or less click, check if there are automation options you can turn on, check if other menus need clicking, click again.

Between resets, check a guide to ensure you’re selecting the optimum options. And guides are important, since a bunch of click options are so vastly sub-optimal as to waste both your time and resources unless you check first… yeah/nah.

This is a game of clicking the right buttons in the right order in the right menus with no real flavor to speak of. Seriously guys, there are so many alternatives that do it so much better, start with them instead.

And before the haters get into it, yeah, I have a few hours in this, it's an idle game. Meh.

And yeah, I've kept playing more hours than at review time, that too. I have an addiction, so sue me.

Best value I've had for the price of a cup of coffee since I first started gaming.

Weapons auto fire, so your main goal here is to circle around the map killing mobs while dodging damage and collecting experience until you become a one person killbox.

Not a lot of thought involved, just pure adrenaline. Simple, endless fun.

Super Auto Pets is a super-casual autobattler.

For those unfamiliar with the genre it's a variation of "autochess" style games where you pick units, place them in a way that enables their abilities to combo off each other, and then watch your units battle it out on their own against another player's team.

Between rounds you collect buffs, upgrade your units or buy more advanced units and then do it all again until you win or are eliminated.

This is the autobattler you want if your life involves constant interruptions from kids and phone calls, or if you just want to sneak in a quick game between writing emails while you're working from home.

SAP runs are quick, no more than 10 mins for a complete game, and you can dip in and out whenever you like, playing just a round or two then coming back later to finish the game after you've walked the dogs. There are no timers in the main mode, so you can take as long as you like to select a team.

All opponents appear to be real people, and the game seems well populated.

There's a traditional mode if you want it, with fixed opponents, selection timers and elimination rounds. It's a fine mode if you do want a more traditional experience and enjoy trying to game a fixed unit pool. For my money, however, that's about the point where I'm more likely to be thinking Hearthstone Battlegrounds instead.

The game is free, so there's absolutely no reason not to give it a whirl. There is an option to pay to add a few extra unit types to the draw pool, perhaps another 20% or so, but it's not a necessary purchase and free and paid unit pool players are kept separate so there are no pay to win elements.

This is currently my go-to game when I don't have the time to load up something more substantial.

I have been looking around for a decent single player card battler for quite a while. So many are either adapted multiplayer boardgames, or turn-based strategy, or weird hybrid puzzle tile-laying games, or CCGs, or god knows what else passes as a 'card' battler or deckbuilder nowadays - the whole idea is becoming as genericly meaningless as 'roguelike'.

Anyhow, I needed something closer to Slay the Spite and Monster Train, or my favourite underrated gem, Dark Mist. After a few too many misfires along the way I finally found it here.

Pick a class, run through a series of mob encounters to a final boss, unlock stuff and tweak your deck along the way. Perfect.

There's more than enough going on here to keep the format interesting without straying too far into gimmicks.

Ignore the horrible "Vault of the Void" representative image that looks like it was produced in MS Paint, and is no doubt costing the game significant sales. In reality, Vault's in-game art looks gorgeous and everything is very easy on the eye, super-professional and readable - easily comparable with Vault's better-known competition.

Cards move smoothly and do the physical throwing/card flicking thing in a satisfying way.

Vault of the Void can at times appear a bit overwhelming in terms of the number of things to keep track of. Having said this, I managed to clear the game with the first hero on my third run, mostly staying with starter cards and largely ignoring anything that made my brain hurt. Over time I've been able to mix things up organically and build on some combos through the normal flow of the game as I've observed how things are supposed to work.

Which should not be taken to imply that the game is easy, more like easy enough to get into without tears. After a few hours in, however, I feel that I'm still only scratching the surface, and that's without yet having fiddled with the extensive difficulty settings and challenge modes, including a daily.

The solo developer is very friendly and responsive.

I would have preferred a few more intermediate micro-unlocks to keep me coming back and playing, but it's a small criticism.

Recommended.