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Fortune Summoners is a side-scrolling JRPG with its highly difficult battle mechanics as one of its main selling point. I like to call it a souls-like even though the original Japanese release actually predates the Dark Souls series.

Unfortunately, the battle mechanics are nothing short of frustrating. Its design fails to achieve a proper balance between difficulty and fairness to the player. As a souls-like, you are expected to learn your enemies' attack patterns, time your reactions to them, and execute your moves precisely to overcome your enemies. Unfortunately however:

• Your player character's movements are "slippery" and there is a small but noticeable lag between the end of a battle animation (i.e. swing of a sword) to your player character being able to react to your next input. This lag makes even small movements like turning from left to right tedious to execute in the heat of a battle.
  
• Enemies tend to react instantaneously and often perfectly to your inputs, especially so at higher difficulties. For example, flying enemies instantly fly backwards the exact moment you jump towards them.
  
• Even regular enemies have relatively high amount of HP, making it time-consuming and tedious to progress at earlier levels. Later enemies can cast healing spells to restore their HP back to full so you can start all over again.
  
• Enemy spell casting takes about 1.5 seconds to complete, including devastating offensive spells that does huge damage and unleash status effects on your party members. Spellcasters are usually protected by melee enemies so good luck getting to them before they finish their casting animation.
  
• Status effects are extremely unforgiving. Sleep renders you completely immobile for as long as 40 seconds, and an enemy type you encounter early in the game can carpet-bomb an area-of-effect version of sleep repeatedly. In late-game, confusion, which causes the affected character to attack the closest unit in combat, usually your party members, lasts 15 long seconds although it will usually wipe out your party in half the time. You also spend a significant portion of the game solo with no party members so certain immobilizing status effects allow your enemies to get in free hits or juggle a combo move on you while you are completely hapless.

A combination of 2 or 3 of the above usually makes for a challenging souls-like. Having all of them together in the same game is simply poor game design. Not to mention that avoiding damage is almost impossible against large group of enemies in late-game dungeons so it is more about having enough healing and mana potions to brute force through to reach the next save point.

Fortune Summoners has a number of redeeming factors, such as its well-designed characters, decent story and outstanding graphics for a 2D JRPG in the late 2000s. However, the story ends on a cliff-hanger with no sequels forthcoming, and the one-man developer Lizsoft has already given up updating the English version of the game, likely due to the publisher being disbanded.

The developer has actually released a more updated Japanese version on Steam instead. As such, the English version you see on this page is effectively an inferior version. Overall, there is really not a good reason you should buy this game, Japanese version or not, when there are much better options out there.

Odyssey - The Story of Science is a one-of-a-kind edutainment game in its concept and execution. Odyssey brings you to a remote tropical island where you must follow clues in the form of torn journal pages and solve puzzles along the way that test your understanding of basic astronomy and Newtonian physics concepts. The ultimate goal of the narrative is to find a family who are on the island on an archaeological expedition but find themselves hiding from unexpected visitors with ill intentions.

The game does a remarkable job of narrating its scientific concepts with the use of a heavily worded but carefully composed journal that retraces the historic arguments and proofs using simple and easy-to-understand language. After reading through the journal pages, you are then faced with puzzles in the form of levers, switches, and buttons that help to reinforce your understanding of the concepts you have just acquired. It is a highly well designed interactive experience that helps the player grasp the basic tenets of the scientific method.

Looks wise, the graphics are pretty decent for a Unity engine game, although some of the terrain textures does not look good when up close. Many reviewers find the game play of reading journals and finding clues among the abandoned man-made structures on the uninhabited tropical island that serves as the setting of Odyssey resembling the atmosphere in the game Myst, which I agree. Unlike Myst though however, the music and sound design of Odyssey can only be described as mediocre at best. Still, the overall visual and audio experience does manage to give the game its slightly mystical atmosphere.

Odyssey is very linear in its game play. You traverse the environment in a first person perspective, there is no jumping or falling off of edges, you cannot miss objects related to story progression as they are all out in the open at very visible locations, and it is almost always obvious where you should be going next.

Overall, I would recommend this game if you can afford to spend a couple of hours to sit down, relax, and enjoy learning some basic astronomy concepts in a relatively stress-free setting. I certainly enjoyed this game and hope that the developers release a sequel.

Helltaker offers a surprisingly enjoyable and complete experience despite being a very short game that can be completed in an hour or less. If you are a great fan of anime-styled artwork, cute demon girls, a catchy soundtrack, this is a game that you shouldn't miss. It's free.