Recent reviews by Powie

While generally I think this is a very good idle game, I can't in good conscience give a recommendation considering the use of AI-generated images.

I'm scared of how quickly I got used to the UI and colours.

This game's dev forgot to switch on armor values doing anything for two years, and nobody noticed.

Jokes aside, Cruelty Squad is just a good im-sim. After a few hours, if you can make it that long, your eyes adjust to the aesthetic. You don't even notice the pulsating health blob after a while. The game rewards exploring the levels as much as you can with new weapons and new gear. There's so many ways to traverse the levels and take down your targets. The game 'punishes' you in the start when you inevitably die multiple times in the first level (it's a hard game, especially at first) by turning down the difficulty and giving you the ability to [redacted] to restore health, but constantly telling you that you're on easy mode now, you're a worm, a useless pile of waste and frankly kind of stinky. The way you restore a higher difficulty is through proving you're good enough to deserve it.

The game's very good. Getting good at the game *feels* very good.
My tips;
Get fishing
Invest in CIVs
Harvest every organ you find
Have fun

A wary recommendation.

I enjoyed the ~three and a half hours I spent on this game.
Most of the puzzles were good, and the mansion is well designed. There's a good narrative you unmask as you play and learn more about the mansion and its former inhabitants.

Positive:
Good variety of puzzles.
Decent hint system for when you're stuck.
Good aesthetics, decently detailed and consistent, even if the model qualities might not be the best.
Fun to explore the mansion and find hidden clues and objects.

Cons;
Can get tiring to walk back and forth from one side of the mansion to the next to unlock a door, and then pick up a key there that goes to a door back where you came from.
Some of the puzzles felt a bit 'I don't know exactly what they want from me, so I'll just click until something happens'.
A couple of the puzzles were a bit too obscure
The hint system *does not account for* if you forgot to pick up an item. It checks if you went into a room, and assumed you grabbed something (Spent five minutes looking for a corkscrew the hint system claimed I had).

Overall, this is a good puzzle game, it's a cool story, but it's rough around some edges.

Killer Frequency is a 4-5 hour mystery game with horror/detective themeing and a neat 80s aesthetic.

Short review; I really enjoyed my time playing this, I enjoyed the narrative and the voice acting, and piecing together what was happening, and why it was happening. The game has some elements of exploring the offices, but the main gameplay loop is based around dialogue trees and reading notes for clues. Overall, a great experience, well worth the time to play it. It was funny, sometimes spooky, and generally thrilling.

Longer review;
You play as Forrest Nash, a former star radio host who around a week ago started working in the small town of Gallows Creek. It's 1987. You and your producer, Peggy, are starting your night shift at your radio station when you get a call from the town's apparently only 911 operator, presenting you with the premise:
The sheriff is dead.
Another cop is out cold.
The last cop is on leave out of town.
The phone lines to other towns are down.
There's a whistling murderer on the loose.
The operator is driving out of town to get help.
All 911 calls in the town will be routed to you, and help won't arrive for several hours.
Good luck.

It's a silly premise, but it works well for what it is.

The artstyle of the game is nice and consistently stylized. The aesthetic is very much comic book inspired with cel-shading and outlines which usually looks very good, with slightly janky outlines sometimes (but this is a difficult shading style to use, so I'll still give them huge props for what they managed). The colours are vibrant and the world looks convincingly 80s.

The voice acting is quite good. Some of the accents of some of the characters are slightly rough, in the sense that they seem to be doing accents that aren't their native ones, but it doesn't take you out of it. The line reads, the emotions they're portraying, and importantly the audio quality, are all consistent and good. I, at least, didn't notice any moments of 'This person clearly recorded their lines in the wrong environment', which can be a common issue for indie games, so kudos to whoever did the audio as well.

Finally, I'd like to praise the writing. Again, the premise is a bit goofy, and there's some silly moments around, but the game does a great job at creating a cohesive narrative which sprinkles hints throughout that you *can* pick up, and if not, can at least think back to and go 'Ooooh, that makes sense!'. The characters are well written. The game also does a good job of balancing the tone of the game, being able to be very funny at times, but also being very serious when it needs to, without it feeling jarring. There's good breathing room between the more heavy and serious bits where you can have a laugh and breathe out before you go into the next heavy moment, without it feeling like a bad emotional rollercoaster.

I highly recommend this game if you like narrative-driven mysteries.

made my adhd-having ass late for therapy

This game is 10% doing raids, 20% fighting random mobs, 35% doing chores and 35% managing your economy. Still more fun than my day job. 8/10. Put on a podcast and shut off your brain.

This game is my go-to time-killer at the moment, so I feel it deserves a review. If I know I have a few minutes to spare I'll jump in and do a couple of missions and quit, and I'll still feel like I'm making progress.

Heat Signature is a top-down spaceship infiltration game with roguelike elements. You play as a character with the ultimate goal of beating their personal mission and at some point retiring them and then take control of someone else, as you try to take over the surrounding stations. You fly around in your pod, a tiny ship that can only move around, pick you up and dock ships and stations, until you get to the ship you're planning on boarding. Once there you can pause time and find out how you want to go about achieving your objective, whether you want to kill everyone, knock everyone out or not engage at all, whether you want to sneak around, teleport and steal keys or run around and shoot as many as you can, and whether you want to capture the ship or not.

You gain better equipment as you play the game by finding them on ships or upgrading the shops to stock certain items, and certain enemies can only be damaged under certain conditions. If you retire your character, you're able to leave an item you have as a named item a future character can find. Usually though, you'll end up dying.

Overall, the game achieves what it sets out to do. As the description of the game says, this is a game about one thing, and it does that thing well, and again, it's a game that's great to just jump into, do a mission or two, and quit out, without feeling you're breaking the flow of anything.

Corroded is a battle arena game heavily inspired by the Warcraft 3 mod Warlocks. The game has a lot of interesting mechanics and abilities, and is generally a lot of fun to play. The biggest issue with the game at the moment is a lack of players, which will hopefully be fixed once it leaves Early Access.

Three old-school shooter franchises have recently been revisited. Shadow Warrior, Wolfenstein and Doom.
Doom is the one I'd say most sticks to its roots. The objective of the game is simple. Go from point A to point B, and kill every demon bastard that gets in your way. The secrets and potential for trying to beat your own time in generally fast-paced levels offers a ton of replayability to this game. It's a simple formula, it doesn't offer much in terms of story, and it's not super hard, it's just pure murderous mayhem, and if that's what you're looking for, this is the game for you.

(also i might be writing this review only because of the steam awards. But this was the game I chose to write it for.)