Recent reviews by ado

Was hoping to see some more improvements since early access, but it’s clear the team’s lack of funding forced this game to ship was sooner than it should’ve. They’ve tried some interesting new mechanics, but I think they all lead towards making this a very slow-paced deckbuilder. The overly verbose storylets don’t seem to provide enough interest and could still provide the gritty tone with less. The burn-and-play card playing system draws out turns more than a more standard system, and encourages really slow infinites.

Bigger failings on basic items like poor procedural generation of routes (like four elites in a row) and questionable card synergy design were big turn offs early in my first 1.0 run.

I played about 20 hours of Monster Train before abandoning it to buy the sequel when it was getting such great reviews. They’ve made so many small changes that have made big impacts, most importantly being the deployment phase, but in general the new clans are so much more fun to me.

Since then I haven’t looked back, and really enjoyed the 100 hours to get 100% of the achievements. There’s still much more to achieve in the game, and I’ll look forward to more content coming, both free updates and DLC next year.

Simple but addicting gameplay. I really can’t stop playing. Took like 10 hrs to get my first win in the Woodlands, but after that I quickly got 3 more, so it’s clearly somewhat RNG dependent. Looking forward to trying out the Swamp and Kingmaker.

It’s in pretty good shape for Early Access but I expect they’ll only tighten it up to mitigate the RNG a bit. I’d love it if there were some more unique item sets to encourage more build variety.

In this gorgeous, turn-based tactics card game, you play as three paladins tasked with restoring order after the king is assassinated. You face plenty of choices of who to support in their challenge for the throne. The world lore is interesting, the cast of characters is morally gray, and your choices drastically change the fates of others, encouraging replays.

I was always excited to see the boss art drop before a fight, even if there were a few too many fights in the gauntlet at the end. While I played on normal, I’d really recommend higher difficulties to best engage with some more interesting mechanics around the ancestral relics, or don’t rely on duping Hael’s Benediction card like I did

Promising demo with a solid twist on the deck builder genre. Playing sigils feels so satisfying and there are some unique synergies that are fun to explore. Will definitely be a one-more-run game to look out for in the future.

Rift Riff has such cute art, great sound design, and snappy UI interactions that combine to make this a satisfying minimalist tower defense game. It’s a perfect game for a 15-30 minute session!

After only a few hours, there is a pretty wide build variety available to you. There’s also room for players to choose the next level and upgrade. Interesting choices for your tools before each scenario, but also more complex mid-wave decision points with more upgrades as you go.

It feels great when you intuit the perfect counter to a level, but there are still times where a poor choice overwhelms you. Failing never feels frustrating because the runs are short and there are some forgiving quality of life features (refund towers for full cost, failure restarts wave instead of full scenario). I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead!

This game is so great from top to bottom. The bite-sized strategic turn-based combat is fun and varied, with optional objectives in each fight to up the challenge. Each new wizard that joins the rag-tag crew adds a new way to approach combat, and there's tons of room for creativity. The game encourages this creativity and trying new things, with a generous rewind ability that doesn't punish you for trying something without anticipating its consequences.

If the combat gets you through the door, you'll stay around for the writing. It's dripping with personality, an interesting magi-tech world, humor that lands, and it's got heart too. It wants you to love these flawed characters, who work out their anxieties in their dreams, and you will love them.

The art attracted me to this game, but the addictive gameplay really sealed my love for it. Like other great roguelikes, it really shines by introducing other characters whose unique mechanics make you look at the same puzzles in wildly different ways. The minesweeper/style puzzle combat was way more fun than I expected.

It's more forgiving than the most challenging roguelikes, but the higher difficulties do pose a challenge, and you'll likely find you vibe with some characters more than others. It's nice to have more bite-sized roguelikes. You can finish a run in 10-30 minutes and snag all the achievements in under 15 hours if you're hunting, but it'll take longer to perfect your skills with every character. Also runs perfectly on Steam Deck.

If you're like me, you'll play it so much you'll get the Tetris effect and you'll be revealing tiles as you drift off to sleep.

I loved the writing, pixel art, and character design of this game so much. I suspected I wasn’t going to like the tarot card design mechanic, but it doesn’t really take any artistic talent to create cool and interesting cards. I think there may be some more depth to intentional card creation I could do on a second play through.

The vibes are great, like Kentucky Route Zero or Coffee Talk, but the story is more reactive and the people feel more real. I’d like to see how it would feel if I made some different choices on another run, but I really loved the Fortuna I got.