Ramin Ostad
Jotun is a well-crafted experience made for anyone fond of great storytelling mixed with satisfying combat.
Little Nightmares takes the budding “hide-and-seek-horror” genre to another level by implementing a visual style that is both grotesque and inescapable.
Despite its utterly insane difficulty curve, Nex Machina is a pure joy to play.
Octahedron is a bombastic, prismatic, punishing rhythm game that is a ton of fun, while it lasts.
Few games have been as effective as Clustertruck at making me want “just one more try”.
______________________ “There's a special methodology to Steredenn that makes the madness of its gameplay incredibly addicting.
It didn’t take long for Vikings to bludgeon those expectations into a meaty, undulating pulp.
The difficulty in these puzzles is inconsistent throughout, which can be a double-edged sword.
Jumpsuit clearly put a lot of effort and ingenuity to work to create an elegant and challenging experience.
…playing with a full suite of five plays offers moments of exhilarating chaos.
There is certainly enough great stuff in this game to make Antigraviator worth buying. There is a healthy number of tracks that will take hours to master, cool Gravs and parts to unlock, and it's a joy to look at and listen to while you do it. But with a little polish and workshopping, Antigraviator could have gone from really good, to really great.
While some may dismiss Flinthook initially, the game will sink its hooks into you if you give it a chance. The controls are sharp, the progression is satisfying, and the vibrant and unique art style will keep you smiling along the way.
When the puzzles and chase sequences are pulled off smoothly, they feel incredibly rewarding.
Time Recoil packs a lot of fun into a relatively short experience, but the lack of effort invested into the plot, visuals, and audio holds it back from sitting at the top of the genre.
Hallways are outlined with hash symbols, doorways are represented with plus signs, crafting items are letters of the alphabet, and the dungeon map is a faithful top-down expression of a traditional rogue-like.
Sonic Team tried to bring together two franchises as classic as peanut butter and/or chocolate, separately. But in combination, they mix about as well as oil and water.
Xenoraid does do a lot to try and stand apart from the deluge of similar games out there, and it should be commended for that effort. But with its lack of refinement, progression resetting, and fairly bland overall presentation, it's unlikely we'll be looking back on this one a year from now.
Styx: Shards of Darkness never progresses beyond being a moderately functional game with low-fantasy aspirations.
________________________ “It's a simple premise that's executed using straightforward mechanics.
In the end, Rocketbirds 2: Evolution is just not much fun. It's a relatively lengthy but disappointing experience with little replay value. The controls are blunt and clumsy, the humour is often witless, and the puzzles are at times so basic that there's not a lot of satisfaction in solving them. While there is a lot of potential on the surface, Ratloop may have wanted to sit on this egg a bit longer before it hatched.