Recent reviews by Cykelero

Into the Breach as a deckbuilder.

Really fun and quickly challenging. Definitely lacks clarity at times—both in broadcasting what will happen, and explaining what's happening—but clear enough. Love it!

The puzzles are roughly just as good as in the first game—nice! A lot of the story being told, however, is much more bland, forgettable, which is disappointing.
So, you still get the pleasure of solving each scenario, but usually they ultimately depict a pretty mundane anecdote; whereas in the The Case of the Golden Idol, you'd very often be rewarded with suddenly understanding a crazy story beat, directly linked to the also-crazy overarching plot.

Still! A nice play.

Gameplay doesn't flow well—it's full of friction and unpleasant blockers.
The story is a bit hard to follow; I think the dialogue sort of changes based on what responses you pick, but as a result the characters sometimes refer to things they actually never discussed.
Visuals are nice.

After finishing Tacoma, it felt just OK: not bad, but fine.

Where Gone Home made me cry buckets, Tacoma just held my attention. It wasn't boring, but it wasn't captivating. Not bland, but not rich. Just… OK!

An excellent remake!
On the one hand, it's gorgeous, and incredibly respectful of the original in most places.
On the other hand, there's a lot of changes—some big, some small—which mostly feel very deliberate, and well thought-out.

As a puzzle game it's better still than the original, as the puzzles and overall pacing have been refined. It's hard to judge the game as if I'd never played the 1997 version, but I think it's real good!

An artful game.
The visuals are gorgeous and so is the mood. The music is subtly interactive, which works great.
The gameplay is mostly light, but interesting enough. There's never annoying friction; I actually enjoyed failing because it meant I'd see more of the game in action.

Warmly recommended!

Janky gameplay, unpolished everything, full of mediocre dialogue, and and barely coherent sidequests.
Probably enjoyable if unlike me you're used to the sad blandness of AAA open-world games; otherwise, yyyyyikes.

Good ideas, nice views; but the writing is a mess, and the story and its okay twists quickly get confusing, and are never very satisfying.

The visuals are beautiful, but the gameplay is very average—fights don't feel that interesting, upgrades barely have an effect, and level layouts are hard to navigate. On top of that, the writing is mediocre; sometimes it's just very flat, often it's confused.
Not a terrible game, but a very flawed one. You might enjoy the visuals, maybe even the combat, but definitely not the story.