Recent reviews by Peacku

I remember seeing a lot of these "puzzle box" type games popping up on mobile app stores a while ago and it's really nice seeing how gorgeous an actual PC game can look like following the same recipe.
Sadly despite how pretty it looks I must say the game is a bit too straight-forward for my liking. Except for a couple ingenuous puzzles here and there it is mostly just about operating the boxes mechanisms with no challenge whatsoever.

For example one puzzle featured in the trailer shows this: solving an easy sliding mechanism gives you 2 coins with a different symbol engraved on each coin. You repeat the same steps on the other side of the box for another 2 coins. You then place them in each one of the 4 receptacles around the box, minding that the symbol on the coin matches the symbol on the receptacle. It does this with incredible sound effects and animations but the action of collecting the coins and placing them was no challenge in itself. When a lot of these "puzzles" follow each other it gets tedious and a little bit boring, at least for me.

Still, I really appreciated the game and enjoyed finishing it. The atmosphere laid by the story and music is really mysterious and eerie which fits the type of game perfectly. I would have loved more difficult puzzles and better hidden mechanisms but I still appreciated my time with it, especially since it's quite short.

Worth noting if you're an achievement hunter than you can get to 100% achievements just by going normally through the whole game.

Despite how short it is, this is a really cute and well made game and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The music was incredible and the story very touching and meaningful.

Valheim reminded me of Minecraft, starting from nothing and slowly building up and I had so much fun exploring the world and the game mechanics and building a home. However as a solo player the game is brutally unforgiving, requiring a lot of grinding resources and a lot of time spent moving things around and building new shelters, and providing almost no safety, which is to say that being reckless or an unfortunate accident can make you lose tons of resource or even strand you somewhere and soft reset your progression until you can make it back. Progression is made by exploring a new biome, gathering new resources and crafts and eventually beating a biome boss to progress to the next tier of content.
Overall I'm enjoying the game a lot but it takes a lot of time to do everything and there are certain game decisions that I feel make the experience less enjoyable. I'm still discovering the game and trying to look up as little as possible so I may be missing things.
Things I wish were different: (don't read if you want to experience things yourself)
- Raids are tedious, almost no time to react, hard to defend without just ending up running around in circles kiting enemies, defensive buildings are almost completely useless and dying during a raid and having to run around naked while chased is really not fun to me. I read that a common tactic is to dig around to break enemy pathing but that sounds more like an exploit than an actual strategy.
- The impossibility to use portals with metals at first seemed like a good incentive to really set up in a new biome instead of rushing through things and teleporting everywhere but it's really tedious having to gather tons of wood and other resources like skins to rebuild everything multiple times. I spent so much time cutting trees, gathering copper, building shelters that are aesthetically pleasing but also somewhat safe and also don't use too many resources so I don't have to grind tons of basic resources. I'm currently residing in a base near a Swamp so I can melt Iron and I don't really feel like spending the time making that base what I would want it to be because I know I'll be forced to abandon it soon. It would make more sense to me if beating a boss allowed me to teleport that tier of metal (e.g. beating Elder allows you to teleport Copper and Tin) so my home base near the spawn could gradually get improved with new crafts that use those metals and be more of a central place, while still being forced to really settle in every new biome. Walking to my spawn with 20 ingots at a time or sailing against the wind for hours doesn't really feel like a fun option.
- The combat is pretty good and challenging at times, parries are not too challenging but still require effort and I really felt a learning curve with the weapons moveset, learning enemy patterns and behaviours which was as satisfying as playing a Souls game. However dying is so punishing (running to corpse for days with no stamina or having to waste food when your body might be guarded by archers that just one shot you, losing skill points feels so bad). In Souls game I embrace that I will die a lot and learn, but here I just get stressed and frustrated and it doesn't help that there is a lot of wonkiness in enemy pathing and AI that often lead to deaths that don't feel very fair. I wish the "corpse run" buff applied when running back to your corpse instead of after picking it up, and also I really hate losing progress on skills.
- I don't understand why it's not possible to sleep in a bed without setting your spawn, especially since being awake at night is really not recommended in some biomes. It doesn't feel good having to choose between giving up your preferred spawn point or having to endure a night with potential monsters invading and raids as well as the cold draining your stamina regen.
I'm curious how different these issues would feel in multiplayer but sadly my friends have either already played this game too much or no interest in picking it up. All in all I do recommend trying Valheim, especially since it's not that expensive and still being worked on but I do think the game could do with some improvements to respect the player's time a little bit more without impacting the difficulty too much.

EDIT: I realised some of my criticism is addressed by an option called "World Modifiers" that allows you to tweak certain settings. It's a fine line between quality of life and straight up cheating but that definitely alleviated some of my early frustrations (less raids and less skill point loss on death)

When I first started the game and went through the initial area, I thought "that's cool, but that's it?". After I reached the mainland, the path laid before me: 4 spirits to rescue in 4 areas, 3 towers per area, evil goo becomes pure light. It almost felt like I was playing Prince of Persia 2008 again and I don't mean it in a good way. It was fun but I eyed all the other games in my Library waiting for me to give them a try.
However I had barely spent any time with the game so I decided to persevere. At least to get my money's worth. Well I am glad I did, because it turns out the experience, although very formulaic is FUN. Based on achievements I got and how many players got them, I have a feeling a lot of people gave up early on this game. I am just getting started but I can't wait to continue playing. So far, it just keeps getting better and better.

I had a blast (no pun intended) with this game! I'm by no means into the bullet hell or twin stick shooter genre so I can't speak about how it feels for a veteran but I have a feeling it might be too easy. For me it was just right. A bit challenging at times and always satisfying.

Minishoot Adventures might come off as too simple for a game that released in 2022, but to me it is actually a blessing in disguise. The purest elements of what makes an 2D adventure game fun are well executed and you can definitely feel the old school Zelda influence. There isn't a ton of environmental detail or crazy particle effects, but it results in a very clean aesthetic that was much needed for me given the amount of enemies and projectiles that can quickly overcome the entire playfield.

The systems are flexible and forgiving, letting you respec your character at any point in time and granting you abilities that can make the game easier if you're struggling or turn it into a higher risk, higher reward situation. The overall progression is quite linear with a touch of backtracking here and there but as you power up you quickly learn to fly faster and start soaring through the environment, which makes exploring around greatly enjoyable.

There's a fair share of side content, upgrades, challenges and endgame content that compliment the classic Zelda dungeon chain very well. I felt like the creators of the game enjoyed Hollow Knight's Pantheon, and I enjoyed their rendition of it although it was (thankfully) not nearly as challenging. All in all the game doesn't innovate greatly from other games or blows your mind with its story and characters, but it delivers a solid experience that would make a great first game for someone who's not too familiar with all those gaming tropes.

I was afraid that the music would grow old on me but there's a couple tracks that are actually really nice, and again you can tell the composer(s?) love gaming and to reference it in their work. Special mention to the Forest theme, a videogame music trope that I adore ever since I played Chrono Trigger. The song that plays when you open the game was actually my least favourite.

It took me about 10 hours to fully complete the game and all achievements (save for one which is replaying the game in Advanced difficulty), so it's up to you to decide whether that's enough bang for your buck. It definitely was for me and I'm very curious to see what else this studio has in store for us in the future!

I've played through most of this game series and as usual I had a ton of fun with this one (only played the free parts so far). Compared to the previous iterations, this one has a lot less sneakily hidden cats however it makes up for it by providing a much bigger artwork to explore and quantity of cats (and stuff) to find.

What made this one particularly enjoyable over the previous ones was the amount of videogame and pop culture references scattered throughout: FromSoftware games, Nintendo games, FNAF, Sonic... There's so much detail that went into the artwork beyond just having cats everywhere and tons of little stories and easter eggs.

I usually don't use hints because I enjoy spending the time but ended up using it with 2-3 things to find remaining as it is so vast and I was a bit disappointed that it points exactly at the missing location and highlights it. I would have preferred to be pointed towards the general direction so maybe it would be nice to have distinction between "guide me" and just "show me the answer" for people who like figuring things out by themselves as much as possible.

10/10! Free game, super cute, super enjoyable!

I absolutely adored this game. It doesn't last too long and isn't on the difficult side, but it is SO satisfying to play, well polished and incredibly charming, from the graphics to the music and sound design, down to the puzzle solving formula, story and message. 10/10

The puzzles are nice and it's a interesting concept for sure, but the game has poor performance for how it looks, is incredibly buggy and I had a ton of intermittent network issues when it is mostly singleplayer.

As of now I have a bunch of puzzles that are unsolvable because my mouse cursor disappear when I open them and it's impossible to complete them. Apparently it's a controller issue (the game does not support controller btw) and I was unable to fix it after an hour of troubleshooting.

I think this is a perfect example of a good concept turned into modern gaming hell: always online singleplayer, microtransactions, daily quests and cosmetic currencies, and the looming threat of a giant Privacy Policy from the Publisher that includes a lot more personal data than what should be needed for a game company.

It could be a joyous, completionist-friendly open world puzzler (which is such an interesting and original idea) but right now I can't recommend it, especially with a price tag. I hope it gets better though!

The puzzle design isn't always satisfying because a lot of the puzzles only present one possible course of action, which is the puzzle solution. Those solutions are super ingenious and look super cool when you execute them, but they don't feel as rewarding because the path leading to it was very obvious. I will say thought that I play a ton of puzzle games so I guess I'm approaching this with a bit more experience.

Visually, the game is incredible. The way you traverse environments, the different ambiances, music, sound design and even the very vague storytelling are all very well executed and polished. I wish the game was much longer and introduced harder puzzles because towards the end it starts bringing certain concepts that would be amazing to explore further. Alas, the game ends there.

Still, a very cool experience that deserves a lot of praise and brings me excitement for future games that this studio will be developing.

A very good coop roguelike experience, easy to jump in and out of friends' games thanks to the meta-progression making it worthwhile to repeat content. The gameplay is fast and snappy and easy to pick up, with some added complexity as you obtain better weapons or gear with specific effects. There's not enough content yet for it to be played non-stop, but it shows incredible promise and I can't wait to see the complete version. In the meantime, it's a great game to pick up to play with friends for a couple hours, and it's currently quite cheap too.