Recent reviews by Mindshadow

tl;dr version: Is this the kind of game you'll play for ages and have ranked tournaments with months from now? No. Is it $5 worth of Halloween entertainment for the next month or so? Absolutely!

Hide and Shriek is a very well balanced 1v1 scarematch game where you have to either outscore or outscare (or ideally both) your opponent. The fact that resources are randomly distributed - even the runes you use to craft spells are randomly chosen at the start of the match - means that there's no one preferred location or ideal loadout you can use. Having to continually scramble about looking for resources and never quite having the right spell components in place keeps it from being too comfortable at any point. (It is admittedly true that sometimes the RNG blesses you with abundant resources of exactly the right kind for your strategy but you can never count on this being true.)

The way the match feels will vary wildly depending on the chosen tactics of the two participants. For example, two people who enjoy turtling or ambushing will feel very lonely and a bit silly after a while if they don't switch tactics. But this is part of the appeal of the game. It prioritizes thinking on your feet and making use of what's available and adapting to your opponent rather than twitch reflex competition. The benefit from skill plateaus quickly - beyond a basic knowledge of how the game works that's required to compete at all, greater skill simply doesn't give you the overwhelming advantage it does in other games. You still face the exact same limits as your opponent.

While this game does have some jump-scare elements, I've found it's pretty rare to be totally surprised. It's more often an "oh **** I hit a trap nooooo" and then the other player finishes me off while I'm stunned. The fact that you're able to strike back on equal terms suppresses a lot of the overwhelming sensation of some jump scare games.

To get back to the tl;dr, yeah, this is probably not a game I'm going to play for more than a couple of weeks around halloween. But I definitely feel I'm going to get my money's worth from it.

Inexpensive casual game involving liquid physics - always tricky as liquid rarely wants to do what you want it to do. Not really diverting for long periods due to the lack of a soundtrack and the sameyness of the gameplay, but it's a $1 casual game, what do you want?

Cute little pixellated stealth game about the impact of poor building codes on impressionable young minds. Guide Lily through a deranged nightmare cellar that would make the town fire marshall weep inconsolably, all in search of her stray teddy bear.

Controls could be a little slow in responding some times, but it's not a platformer, and you're not really supposed to be running around all crazy when you might stumble into a hungry cellar monster. Overally, it was inexpensively entertaining.

*Disclosure: I backed the game on Kickstarter so to some extent the kool-aid has already been consumed*

Halcyon 6 calls back to a time when men were real men, women caused things to explode with tricorders, and uniforms were made of high quality velour. It combines a little bit of combat, a little bit of base building, a little bit of exploration, and a lot of wanting to slap the alien-of-the-week upside the head for being crazy.

It has character and captures the feel of the genre it's aiming for, and that to some extent weighs more heavily than its gameplay problems, since you can rebalance gameplay more easily than you can revamp the feel of the game.

Pros:
* Pixel graphics master race
* Aliens are hilariously insane in a manner that reflects the Star Trek style genre without being too direct a copy
* Cadets die with appropriate frequency when sent below decks to find out what that sound was
* Combat relies heavily on applying/consuming debuffs, which can make for some interesting tactical choices (do you consume a sensor disable debuff to do more damage, or leave it on to keep enemy accuracy low?)

Cons:
* Illusion of choice in ship selection - there are other ships in tier 1 other than the ones you start with for example but their ability balance leaves them subpar in actual usage
* Play is vulnerable to the "doom loop", where losing trained personnel in combat can mean being unable to continue, since it's not possible to train and equip new personnel fast enough to keep up with higher tier enemies. It is even likely to be completely unable to continue, in that attempts to harvest resources to rebuild a fleet after several ship losses and/or research higher tier ships can be stymied by your resource harvesting fleets being destroyed by pirates. The inability to retreat from combat when outmatched compounds this issue.
* Illusion of choice in deployments due to limited officers - in theory having 4 officers is good, since you can send 1 to explore levels or harvest resources, or even split up 2 groups of 2 - in practice this is a recipe for failure since you can be ambushed and there is no option for retreating if you stumble upon enemies that you might have been able to handle if you had a group of 3 officers. See "doom loop".

I am somewhat hesitant to recommend the game as it is now, but presumably the above balance issues will be addressed in future development before it escapes Early Access. If they aren't this review will have to change to a downvote.

Short kinetic (no choices) visual novel about a bunch of kids telling each other "scary" stories in the dark. "Scary" in the way that they might be scary if you were actually listening to someone telling the story in the flickering candle-light with a tone of mad conviction in their voice, but then you can never explain later why they got you worked up. Only you're reading them to begin with so they're more silly than scary. Way more.

Cute character designs and catchy music round it out, and it's free!

An inexplicably engaging game about a lie-consuming dragon and her con-man guardian and their adventures dealing with lie-related mysteries, a task of course made much easier by the fact that one of the two characters can make lies physically manifest so that she can eat them. The actual mechanics of the game are to put it mildly simplistic, with combat being mostly of a token nature with more effort often required if you want to lose fights for achievements than to win them, and a great deal of time is spent poking random corners of rooms to see if there is candy (or clues) there.

Despite, or perhaps, because of, the simplicity of the mechanics, the game's characters and cuteness show through clearly. This is not a game to play because of Srs RPG Fites, but to be entertained by the endearing tale of someone who wants to eat all the lies in the world to make things better.

Should be named the "Ways To Randomly Die Horribly In Space Simulator".

With procedural generation, and little story elements interspersed between, it's possible to provide the illusion of story, simply due to the human ability to construct a narrative out of any series of roughly connected events, and many games have hung their hat upon this post. But this does not make it a story game.

Just as it provides the illusion of story, it also provides the illusion of resource management. The semblence of a resource management game is there, with the need to balance limited cargo space with the three essentials (fuel, oxygen and hull repair material) and improved tech (and the necessary parts to build it). However, since it's impossible to predict the availability of any of these resources or technology there is no possibility of informed play. Learning more about the mechanics of how things work in the universe provides absolutely no advantage, as the available systems to travel to may be lacking in oxygen that you can harvest, or you may run out of fuel because there's nowhere to refuel (despite an earlier playthrough having gas giants on every corner waiting to be sipped from).

If anything, playing this seems to be indistinguishable from randomly choosing from the available possibilities. You might as well have it make the choice for you and then simply progress through by hitting space bar, reading the 'story', until your inevitable horrible death. It's art - but is it a game?

A cute, short (~1.5 hours) pixel based platformer. The mechanics are simple and familiar, the boss fights entertaining in the classic platformer sense, and the music has that catchy simplicity of the digital soundtracks of yore. Several achievements add a bit more for you to do if you are unsatisfied with the short play time, but it's priced appropriately for the time you'll spend with it. Rather than really seeming short or sparse, it's just that there's very little filler in the game. Setups are rarely repeated, so you're running from new thing to new thing at a brisk clip. Thoroughly enjoyable.

An inexpensive and entertaining point and click puzzle game where you assist a 7 year old girl with her plans for total world domination. The game is also fairly short, which saves it from overstaying its welcome. The humor is dark (in a good way) in most of the game, though it ventures now and then into cheap gutter humor in a way that is less than endearing.

Pros:
* Accurately depicts school life
* Finally a game that provides a positive portrayal of carnivorism
* A proactive protagonist who is genuinely committed to solving the problems of the modern world instead of whining about them
* The way the art style is done adds a lot of character to the game

Cons:
* Occasional bouts of gutter humor (the whole prostitute sequence - really?)
* Creators appearing in their own world to talk about how awesome they are
* Puzzles aren't too complicated (this may or may not be a con)

It should also be noted that like most humor, your level of tolerance is going to vary spectacularly.

A fantastic puzzle game built around the infiltration of secure facilities. The 'puzzles' involve the main character (Richard Conway, Freelance Spy) having the ability to remotely rewire vulnerable electronic systems to allow him to open doors or incapacitate patrolling guards. There are usually multiple solutions to any given situation beyond the initial 'tutorial' puzzles, and you can choose how much of a jerk you want the main character to be - whether you will avoid lethal force on hapless guards, or just kill everyone you come across.

The mechanic of rewiring is simple - find an input, route it to an output, when input is triggered, output is activated - but allows for increasingly complex event chains during later maps, for example, wiring a motion sensing camera to trigger an elevator call button, which will activate a sound sensor when the elevator arrives with a 'ding!' which is wired to a door, behind which is a guard whose pistol's electronic controller has been wired to trigger something else entirely so that when the door opens and he sees you and tries to shoot...

Combined with a snarky script, a very 'cyberpunk noir' atmosphere, and very generous checkpointing, the game is fun throughout. And there's even a level editor in case the stock missions just weren't enough for you.