Recent reviews by Celer

The controls are just clunky, which is lethal in a stealth game where I want to be exactly in control of what my character is doing at all times.

Desta has four hours of solid entertainment for basically everyone who likes tactics games or is desperate for LGTBQ+ content. I didn't like it enough to want to play Nightmare or Challenge mode, but the base campaign is quite solid, with some interesting ideas around the basic concept of "throwing balls is the key mechanic". Recommended on sale, but I don't think it quite has enough content to justify a $17 price point for me.

80% Skyrim, 40% Elden Ring. Dark fantasy, excellent combat with a range of builds and options, powerful storylines, and most of all deep ludonarrative consonance (why and how is spoilers, but I'll just say there's excellent thematic resonance between the main quest, the side quests, and the decisions you make as a player). You meet a complicated world, and it will likely change you. Very strongly recommended. After I finish my first playthrough I'm going to do my second.

The only caveat is that it's buggy, like you'd expect a game with a substantial Skyrim influence to be. I'm playing it very soon after it was released: I expect it to smooth out over time, and the devs have done good work giving you ways to fix things if something goes wrong (shoutout to the unsticking button!).

You can probably tell from my hours on record that I like the game, so I'll try to explain what might make *you* like the game: Together in Battle is a roguelike (in the sense that you can do endless and varied runs, though unlike many modern roguelikes the only advantage to a new try is being smarter) tactics game (in the middle of a scale between Fire Emblem and XCOM in many ways) where probability takes a back seat to good planning. Characters have relationships between each other, though you're not fully in control of them.

This is a decent $2 game that I somewhat overpaid for. Strongly not recommended at the current price point: I usually look for $5/hour as my bare minimum. Too dependent on RNG in unenjoyable ways.

It's just a great RPG: the combat is fun, the characters are interesting, the reveal is perhaps a bit obvious but the ethical choices are interesting. Strongly recommended. "What if you took the whole grand story of an open-world RPG, and just concentrated it down into the good bits?"

It's a 20 hour game with a few interesting concepts and some gorgeous movement. The story doesn't always make a ton of sense, and they can't quite decide whether they want moral complexity or not, but the action is very solid. Camera controls can be a little tricky at times, but I enjoyed learning enemy patterns and using it to brutally punish them.

Recommended for: someone who thinks that Soulslikes are too hardcore, but is interested in something that's a little bit like that and a little bit like a normal open world action RPG. Anyone who likes aerial combos.

Recommended for people who like heist games. Not as good as Blades of the Shogun or Partisans 1941, but a solid entry in the genre and worth a shot for those new to it. Particularly fun for planners who like lots of optimization followed by watching perfect plans unfold (a hardcore challenge is to run an entire map just off of a pre-planned route). I recommend checking it out given the competitive price.

There's a *great* game here. I requested a refund. If you want a very hardcore tactics experience, strongly recommended. But I couldn't get through the UI to enjoy it. Recommended to people who are *very* into tactics games and want to enjoy many moving parts and interesting combinations, from elemental ground effects to slowly learned skills. But I wasn't quite willing to go there.

A game is a series of interesting choices. Pretensions to a visual novel that involve following a single linear path are *not* what I'm into. The characters are cute, and the art and music are solid, but the combat design is dull for how long the loading times are. I was ultimately disappointed by the game. My true playtime is a fraction of what's shown, simply because I would flip to another view when another long loading screen hit.