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Without having played the first two games and while knowing very little about the series, I desperately wanted to like Wasteland 3. After the explosive opening, I was extremely hopeful. But I've put 8 hours into the game and I'm remorsefully uninstalling.

Wasteland 3 is a font of wasted potential. It's a roleplaying game that doesn't allow you to play the role of a character, but forces you to run around with a squad of four faceless characters. The game kicks off with a bang, but then cheapens your revenge by characterizing the people who wronged you as crazed lunatics. At the beginning, you're encouraged to choose from several different pairs as your starting characters, but there are no interesting interactions or roleplaying encounters based on their personality and backstories - just a couple of unique accessories. You're given a base to rebuild, staff, and oversee, but the choices you make feel linear and forced; you don't get to make meaningful choices about the way your HQ develops. You're lawbringers that can arrest people, but there's no perceivable benefit to throwing them in your own jail rather than handing them over to the local authorities. Most quests seem to just give you a reputation bonus or malus based on the outcome, and then are never referenced later down the line.

Wasteland 3 is a game built wide, but not deep. There's a lot you can do, but none of it really feels meaningful. There are a handful of options you can make in quests, but they almost always lead to the same conclusion. There are a lot of NPCs and areas to explore, but none of the characters are particularly memorable and the areas all feel designed strictly for gameplay. There are a lot of skills to use and abilities to unlock, but there's tragically little build diversity and most of your choices are already made for you because you have to diversify your squad into every skill to get everything.

Tonally, the game is a mess. Wasteland 3 is trying to tell a story about a brutal and harsh post-apocalyptic wasteland with difficult choices - and none of them are 'right'. But that theme is constantly at odds with over the top NPCs, campy voice acting, and interspersed silliness. The dialogue is constantly shifting between kitschy zaniness and edgy grittiness, which undermines most efforts to be genuinely comedic or serious in equal measure. Most of the major NPCs are voiced well, but for every good voice actor there's at least five characters that are weirdly over the top, like the producer grabbed some random schmo named Craig from the lunch room and asked him to deliver some jokes into a microphone.

Similarly, the story is all over the place. Among its biggest problems is the fact that so much is predicated on you playing the previous games, because everything you do in Wasteland 3 revolves around you wanting to preserve a homeland in Arizona that you never see in this game. So much of the story feels hollow, untapped, or outright unfinished; as if the developers never took a beat to wonder what a player would want to do to resolve a situation. The writing is built to drive you towards a conclusion - usually related to a quest - not immerse you in a world.

My list of issues goes on and on, and I haven't even touched on the actual gameplay yet. Wasteland 3 plays like XCOM without any of the refinement. It's also weighed down by a lot of RPG baggage that doesn't fit with the rest of the mechanics. And somehow, simultaneously, it feels like Wasteland 3 has learned nothing from its predecessors in the CRPG genre.

Playing on Ranger difficulty, I found that I either steamrolled combat by having my entire team go first or got decimated by having the enemies go first. There was never an inbetween. The game actively encourages you to comically position yourself amidst your totally imperceptive enemies, take cover preemptively, and do the Wasteland equivalent of casting Fireball at Sarevok before he has the chance to talk by firing rockets and snipers into groups of enemies instead of triggering any dialogues. Nothing about the combat ever felt tight or interesting or challenging. It just felt gamey, and the game you're playing doesn't feel particularly fun.

Skills are a mish-mash between combat things that affect your ability to kill enemies or access perks and non-combat things that let you get extra dialogue options or access hidden areas. The pool you get for both of these skill types is shared. However, skill checks are black and white: you either pass or fail depending on if you have someone in your party with the requisite rank. This means you're doing a juggling act between all of your squad members, constantly making sure that your out of combat skills are up to date for your point in the story. It's like marking checkboxes on a spreadsheet rather than providing an immersive roleplaying experience. True to form, Wasteland 3 isn't sure what tone it wants to evoke, because alongside Lockpicking, you have Toaster Repair... which is just another way to access loot containers.

There was also a handful of fiddly UI and QoL issues that marred my experience and a few minor bugs - for instance, there's no way to reorder your party without kicking people and I accidentally shot my allies in combat more times than I'm willing to admit. But I'm functionally ranting at this point.

Ultimately, Wasteland 3 is a game for people who are totally ravenous for a new squad based tactics game, who have totally consumed better entries in the CRPG genre, who are just looking to spend sixty hours in a familiar gameplay loop that doesn't do anything particularly well but also isn't totally offensive. I was worried about a fear of missing out - after all, I'm only 8 hours in - but after looking ahead and spoiling some things prior to uninstalling, I'm pretty confident I wouldn't have missed out on much.

I want to love Wasteland 3, but I know there are better games in the genre that I haven't played yet.

Outer Wilds is a refreshing and unique experience rife with exploration and discovery in their rawest form. It's a stellar game that I just want to hand to all of my friends and insist they play with as little context as humanly possible.

Getting over the hump of the first hour or two is difficult, but at some point the game suddenly clicked and I couldn't stop playing it. There is very little direction. At first, this is daunting and uncomfortable. But eventually that freedom becomes one of the things that makes Outer Wilds so brilliant. You get embroiled in the mysteries of this galaxy and all the secrets it holds; once that itch to discover more information and uncover new secrets settles in, it never really lets go.

I don't like open world games because they feel like they're stuffed with filler, but Outer Wilds masterfully encourages you to explore and rewards you for every nook you find. I don't play horror games, but I found the anxiety of searching through the darkest corners of space exhilarating, even if Outer Wilds never truly tries to scare you. I don't find puzzles particularly compelling in my adventure games, but Outer Wilds makes a promise at its onset that the answer will never be too difficult, too obtuse, or too far away to solve - and it keeps that promise throughout its entire playtime.

Everyone owes it to themselves to give Outer Wilds a try, because I'm certain this is a once in a generation game.

I love the Groundhog Day trope. I adore a trashy serial show with a Groundhog Day episode that pauses the drama to explore a character's deep seeded fears and feelings only for them to come out the romp with a new perspective and a little more empathy. Which is why I was pretty excited about 12 Minutes - three A-list actors exploring the consequences of a man being stuck in his apartment with his wife and a cop on a twelve minute loop seems like an absolute treat.

Unfortunately, the game falls short. The first half is incredibly engaging as you unravel the mysteries of these characters, but by the conclusion of the 4-hour journey, 12 Minutes just feels pretentious, edgy, and cruel. The reasons behind why are incredibly difficult to talk about without spoiling things, but it's worth noting that my own expectations and bias about the Groundhog Day trope could have influenced my feelings on the game. Despite that, 12 Minutes definitely overstays its welcome with the trope. There's a reason these shows and movies have a series of smash-cuts of the main character frustratingly trying solutions to get out of the loop instead of spending ten minutes exploring each one. 12 Minutes feels like it spends too much time making you play Bill Murray desperately throwing snow at his love interest while manically screaming "aren't we having so much fun?"

But even that aside, 12 Minutes is rife with technical issues that mar the experience and gameplay missteps that make the latter half a slog. I would recommend the game if one of these wasn't the case - if it was a great, satisfying story with some technical issues OR a story I was not fond of with precise technical execution - but 12 minutes falls short in both categories.

The game looks like a mess. It's shocking that they used MoCap for this. There is clipping everywhere and most movements are incredibly jilty. It looks like they used MoCap for the moments when you make out with your wife, but then she'll just clip through you to go about her daily chores immediately afterwards. Or she looks like a Sim when she sets the table. These seem like minor gripes, but bear with me - the gripes add up.

The dialogue trees in this game aren't handled particularly well, especially when you take into account the voice acting. After the first loop, things get... wonky. You have a myriad of dialogue options available with your wife, but some of them don't feel like they fit with the previous information that you've acquired. You can be frenzied and accusatory without really having a justification. Despite being the one who is stuck in the time loop, your character always starts his dialogue trees the same way. Dialogue options you used on loop #3 in a high-stress situation are still going to be there on loop #11, even though James McAvoy's delivery doesn't make sense for the story's progression at that point. You often have to go through these old dialogue options in order to find the next solutions, too. Another example of this is that no matter what the situation is, if you show your wife a photograph, she will jauntily recall the day you met, even if you're in the middle of a heated argument.

And then there are numerous times where characters will just talk over each other. One character will be in the middle of a monologue and you'll try to interrupt them and there doesn't seem to be any real acknowledgement of that fact. Sometimes characters will repeat themselves for no discernable reason. The list of issues goes on and on.

By the second half of the game, the point-and-click adventure devolves into desperation. You have to present a specific item at a very specific time to progress things. You are spending five minutes desperately clicking through dialogue options trying to figure out what the next step is. You have to click a specific spot on a specific item at a specific time to trigger the necessary events. You have to click through old, seemingly exhausted dialogue options to find the right moment in the tree to trigger the next series of events. It's frustrating, and it detracts sizably from the presentation of the characters when you're just mindlessly clicking and trying to find out solutions. There's an argument to be made that this frustration is intentional and fits the narrative, and I might believe that argument if there wasn't so many other technical issues hampering the overall presentation.

The first half of the mystery is engaging, the voice acting is stellar when the delivery is appropriate, and the core ideas are pretty great. Unfortunately, the product's lack of polish doesn't stand up, the point-and-click frustrations mar the second half, and the ending cheapens the entire experience. It's tragic, because there's a lot to love here, but I can't bring myself to even give an unenthusiastic recommend at the price point.

Bonfire is a game about the bleak gloominess of the end of the world that manages to have a lot of character and be incredibly charming despite its subject. In terms of gameplay, Bonfire borrows ideas and concepts from rogue-lite genres - like the endlessness of its gameplay loops - without emphasizing the finality of loss and defeat that other games might focus more on.

The combat is turn-based. Choose three characters (there are five now, ten planned) to go on an adventure, explore a dungeon, or take a journey to a new land. Each character has three actions - one they can do on themselves, one they can do on an ally, and one they can do against an enemy. You can also equip "rune" abilities that give additional combat options or passive buffs. Whenever you embark on adventure, you can also take a certain amount of the items you have accrued from previous forays.

It's worth noting that the developer appears extremely receptive to feedback and genuinely invested in improving an already great game. This is a complete experience with a lot of challenges to offer already.

If you enjoy games that are tough, challenging, and encourage failure, but you are also tired of leading cadres of faceless mercenaries rather than characters with personalities - hopes, fears, loves, and wants - then you owe it to yourself to try Bonfire.

People are calling this Battle Brothers meets Darkest Dungeon, and while you will probably like this game if you enjoyed those games, that comparison is a bit reductive.

There is no in-battle RNG to this game save for a cumulative -25% chance to hit on ranged attacks when line of sight is blocked. Otherwise, everything always hits and skills always successfully go off. Critical hits only happen in certain circumstances that you create.

The game has some rough edges: Missing tutorials, battle map generation can be wonky, there could be some UI and quality of life improvements, there isn't a great sense of "racial identity" in the factions, etc. Otherwise, it appears to be largely complete and I binged it almost nonstop the day I got it.

What I really enjoy about this game and specifically want to highlight is the level of intentionality in the strategic decisions and the uniqueness of character development. In Darkest Dungeon, a Crusader is just a Crusader with some traits and the best trinkets you can give him; once you are in a dungeon, the tactical choices tend to be fairly obvious. In Battle Brothers, the guy wielding your two-hander is just someone with stars in the right stats and maybe a trait that synergizes; you are always equipping the best gear to him that is available. There is a homogeneity in the characters in these games.

By comparison, in Urtuk, each character has a set of invisible traits that they unlock as they perform certain actions in battle. My Berzerker probably isn't anything like your Berzerker, because my Berzerker developed traits that let him stay alive at 2 HP against an onslaught of melee attacks. He is also incredibly good attacking enemies beneath him, so I always try to pair him with my javelin mercenary who can change elevation.

This is a great game with a very attentive developer and you owe it to yourself to check it out and give them a bit of support. I expect this will be something I come back to years down the line.

Simple, clean, but not easy. This is a great game for the price and is worth a look at. You can easily sink a ton of hours into this. There is a lot of RNG, though this is moreso based on the random characters and items, events, and rewards. Combat is is fairly tame in terms of RNG. My only complaint is that race seems to have a much smaller impact on a character's performance than their items.

tl;dr A Hat in Time is a flawed first outting for an indie platformer that makes up for its numerous small deficits with a boatload of character, heart, nostalgia, and most importantly, fun.

A Hat in Time is short but sweet and can be completed 100% with all achievements in about fifteen hours. That said, that fifteen hours manages to encompass most if not all of the positive aspects of the collectathon games of yore without any of the bloat or filler that those games could often be bogged down by. This game most closely resembles games like Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine in that each level typically houses 8-10 Hourglass Pieces that you can obtain, while unlocking new levels requires that you hit a certain threshold before they're unlocked.

The platforming and movement feel incredibly crisp, mixing double jumping, a dash, and wall climbing to create easily controlled speediness that meshes well with the design of the environments. Three of the four worlds are fairly open in design and afford areas that are large enough to explore but not large enough to illicit boredom or undue traveling times. Time Rifts, which are self-contained levels that can be found throughout the worlds, provide some of the most engaging platforming challenges in the game while showing off some really great linear level design that provides a break from exploration.

The music is phenomenal and ranges from cheery tunes for exploration, frantic melodies for more intense moments, and especially memorable boss music that brings the action of each world to a satisfying and energetic climax. The voice acting does just enough to set the tone of the game. Hat Kid doesn't talk much, but her face is occasionally quite expressive during cutscenes. A Hat in Time chooses its voiced characters well, though, and really hammers in a lot of character for the fairly small amount of voiceover work.

Overall, A Hat in Time has a metric ton of character, but it's riddled with small issues that could potentially inhibit the experience:

-- Unlike Mario games, each chapter in a world is tied to a specific hourglass. The level typically changes in some way to encompass this, but A Hat in Time is lacking the free roam feeling of exploration and the excitement of finding secrets that older collectathons are famous for because hourglasses can't be find by exploration.
-- Most of the platforming surprises or secrets outside of Time Rifts either afford you thread for creating hats or coins for getting music remixes and cosmetic changes, so the sense of accomplishment from roaming an area can quickly dwindle.
-- Hats afford special abilities, but only two feel like they have any real impact on the game or platforming. Even then, their impact is fairly minimal. There's not a lot of back tracking or using hats to unlock secrets. As a counter-point, this does make the game feel more focused and less bloated by filler despite lacking the joy of discovering new ways to use hats.
-- I encountered several collision issues throughout the game, particularly when it came to rounded objects. The game's way of fixing these issues is to teleport you to your last safe spot, which can be jarring.
-- The last third of the game feels rushed and the main antagonist feels underbaked.

These might seem like a lot of negatives for a game, but these were things that I felt compelled to nitpick after my stellar experience. I can't stress enough how much fun this game was to play through despite its flaws and length; I haven't been this enthralled by a collectathon since the N64 era. A Hat in Time captures all the best aspects of those games without falling into the pitfall of being iterative or boring, allowing you to spend just enough time with its characters and worlds before pushing you onto the next experience. While there are issues with the polish, none of those problems threatened to ruin my enchantment with A Hat in Time while I was playing. The sheer amount of heart this game has is incredible, and I was enthralled throughout.

A final important note is that the developers are planning on releasing two new FREE DLC worlds in the future. A modding toolkit will also be readily available to players in due time. It's very clear that the devs have a strong commitment to community, and that means a lot for the game's longevity. It's a great thing to see from a group of folks in the modding community who put out their first game with Kickstarter.

This is the first review for a game that I've ever written on Steam, and I'm writing this because I think it's important to share just how much I enjoyed this game. After reading most of the reviews, I feel like those who didn't recommend the game went into it with the wrong mindset, and while that's totally understandable, it's important to clear up what Masquerada is and what it is not.

The tl;dr is that this is a very linear, story-driven game that has a suitable (but not superb) combat with questionable AI. There are no dialogue options, branching choices, sub quests, or exploring, but the game makes up for it with some incredibly compelling lore and world-building, a succint and satisfying story with its fair share of twists and turns, and an interesting cast of characters that are splendidly portrayed and voice acted. If you play games for the story and characters, buy this now. If you're looking for a sprawling sandbox with a deep combat system, you might want to look elsewhere -- but I'd still encourage you to give the game a try, just to get a glimpse at some of the storytelling and see if it's your cup of tea.

At its heart, Masquerada wants to tell you a story. It plays like a book or movie with some combat sprinkled in, and while it is extremely linear, there is a great deal of charm and heart in the game that more than makes up for its flaws. The tale takes place in a fantasy mirror of Renaissance Italy that is recovering from a tumultuous civil war between the Costadani, who are commoners, and the Masquerada, who are the 'nobility' that wear magical masks to tap into the powers of the elements.

The characters are well written and come alive as the story progresses through action, mystery, and intrigue in an incredibly innovative and interesting world. The music didn't have me humming after closing out of the game, but it adds just the right amount of atmosphere when it's needed. The real aural gem is the voice acting; there are some pretty heavy hitters in the gaming industry doing some pretty astounding work, including Matthew Mercer (various games and anime) and Jennifer Hale (Bastila Shan, Fem!Shep, every cartoon you watched as a kid), and it makes the characters and story so much more engaging to play through.

The game is a little brief by RPG standards. I spent somewhere in the area of ~15-20 hours on the game while playing on hard, and that's probably an above average playtime. The strict linearity and lack of sidequests makes it so that there's rarely a dull moment in the plot as it strides forward, and you never have to deal with filler that isn't somehow meaningful to the characters, if not the overarching tale itself. Masquerada is rife with world-building and awesome lore, which is further expanded upon by a codex/journal that the protagonist writes in first person about the world and his experiences in it, which add additional layers of depth to the characters he interacts with, their history, his thoughts about current events, etc.

The gameplay is an isometric, pause for tactics RPG. Each character is attached to an element (water, wind, fire, earth) and a style of fighting (essentially melee rogue, melee tank, ranged caster). Within the introductory stages of the game, the protagonist chooses his element and can then switch between the three styles of combat at will. Each element has a selection of six active ability and one passive ability, each with their own (small) tree of upgrades, but you can only every have your passive and four active abilities selected in battle, and you don't gain enough skill points in the game to max them out. Combat revolves around positioning around enemies' attacks while using your abilities to create elemental tags that you can then activate for a variety of effects depending on which elements are interacting together and your upgrades. Each character has a Focus arc -- an area in front of them that allows them to block attacks and avoid damage directly to their health until the bar depletes.

Combat can be clunky and finicky, however. Things move too fast and it's hard to keep up without constantly pausing. You have to make sure your characters' Focus arcs are facing the enemies that are attacking you while positioning your rogue archetypes to flank for extra damage, while lining up your abilities to do the most damage possible, while managing who is getting tagged with which elements and who is triggering those tags for the best effect, while trying to avoid your enemies' abilities when they're broadcast. This shouldn't be too complex to handle, but when there are a dozen or more combatants on the screen, things start getting muddled because everyone is attacking several times a second.

These issues are further compounded by the fact that, although the AI has been adjusted in the most recent patch (for the better), trying to a) keep your characters out of enemies' attacks and b) make sure they aren't attacking the wrong targets... both still remain an issue. The most you can do to set up your characters' AI is determine how many targets are around when they use an ability, which isn't ideal. I ended up turning off most of my abilities for automatic AI use for a number of reasons. One character has a great attack steroid, but is mana starved and kept using an ability to open up combat on 3+ targets once the mobs got larger towards the end of the game, which made it so I couldn't use the steroid buff. Each character has an ability to trigger elemental tags, but your only options are to deactivate the AI for these abilities or have them immediately activate the closest elemental tag whenever the cooldown is up -- you can't specify which tags you want to trigger, or under what conditions.

But with some pausing, the combat does work, and it certainly isn't such a hamper that it made me enjoy the game less -- but there are some clear design flaws that could be fixed or worked on, and while I don't want to discourage anyone from playing the game, it's important to know what you're getting into, if only so that you can temper some of your expectations.

Overall, I loved this game. I was deeply impressed by the storytelling and the overarching plot. The characters and voice acting were engaging. And for all the quirks and flaws and linearity, I was incredibly happy and pleasantly surprised by my experience with the game. If you enjoy a good story, play this. None of the game's flaws are glaringly awful or make the game unplayable by any means, and experiencing the world of Masquerada is well worth any mechanical idiosyncrasies with the game.