Recent reviews by Apostatic

I wasn't a big fan of Crypt of the Necrodancer, despite enjoying both rhythm games and traditional roguelikes. Combining those genres had anti-synergy for me.

However, Rift moves away from roguelikes toward being a pure rhythm game, and it's excellent. The innovation here is that the notes are monsters with distinct behaviors as they move down the track, and that is enough that the gameplay feels fresh. Highly recommended if you ever enjoyed Guitar Hero.

It's a light Anno clone + Dungeon Keeper + tower defense. I give it a lukewarm recommendation, if you enjoy the Anno games, but SteamWorld Build is not up to the Anno level of depth or polish. SteamWorld Build is more like something to hold you over if you've already played out Anno 1800, while you are eagerly awaiting the release of Anno 117.

Compared to Anno, you'll only have one city / "island", though you'll need to dig beneath the city in the Dungeon Keeper element to keep your city supplied with resources. While gathering resources in the underground, you'll be attacked by monsters and need to set up tower defenses. This aspect of the game is extremely simple compared to an in-depth tower defense game. Here, you'll only have three different towers to choose from, and the towers don't have any upgrades. Maybe that's fine, because you've got city building and underground excavation to worry about, but if you are expecting something comparable to Bloons TD 6, you'll be very disappointed in the simplicity.

A complete play-through of the first map took me about eleven hours to get to the victory condition of launching a rocket. I was reasonably entertained throughout. But I'm not finding myself particularly excited to follow-up with a second play-through on a different map just yet. So, a lukewarm recommendation it is.

Do you like optimizing production chains? Because Satisfactory has some production chains for you to optimize.

Satisfactory is the most beautiful game in the factory optimization genre, with a well designed world and a progression system which masterfully balances encouragement to explore the world with a constant stream of new technology unlockables to use back at your home factory.

It took me 140 hours to complete all the objectives in the game's main progression, starting from the easiest starting location. Somehow, I played all 140 hours within three real-life calendar weeks -- that's how compelling I found the game. Granted, I have an engineering mindset, and if you don't take great satisfaction in a well engineered solution, you might not find the game as deeply compelling as I have.

My only complaint with the game is that encountering certain enemies before you are properly equipped to handle them can be a frustrating experience.

I look forward to playing through again at the other starting locations in the future, perhaps after some future updates.

I'm in awe that UFO 50 actually exists and with so many sub-games which are so much better than I expected them to be. It has great games which are well within my wheelhouse -- a real-time tactics game, a sokoban game, a deck-builder -- but the in-game collectable system encouraged me to try out so many things outside the genres I usually gravitate toward and I have repeatedly found that those games are also fantastic -- a platformer-adjacent UFO piloting game, SHMUPs, even 'sports' games. I'm repeatedly struck by how special UFO 50 is, and also left wondering if there will be anything that pulls off the same gimmick of a fictional retro game collection as well as it does, ever, in the future. I'm 50 hours in, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of many games which I want to do a deep dive into!

It's my 2024 game of the year, no question.

It's as good as everyone says. Balatro is the deck builder which I've spent, by far, the most time with. It strikes exactly the right balance between simplicity and potential for builds which feels unlikely and unique to the run. The difficulty curve is perfection. No notes.

AC: Valhalla does some things well.

* It's a massive open world with beautiful landscape and scattered with fun little mini-dungeons to find and explore.
* Bits of the main story have compelling moments.
* The castle siege sequences are great, and unlike anything I've seen in a game before.
* The dark ages England setting is well realized.
* Different weapons feel quite different in combat.
* Tons and tons of content.

But it does just as many things badly.

* The pacing on the main story is too slow and it goes on far too long. It feels like development needed someone to say "no," and edit things down to just the good bits.
* In 2024, it's still buggy. I've had a crash-to-desktop every five hours or so. There were cut-scenes with missing people holding torches floating in mid-air. The NPC AI glitches out sometimes, leading to stuck characters, even during escort quests.
* Many of the landmarks on the map are duplicates of the same models, which somewhat ruins the illusion of the huge open world. I've seen the same ruined tower half a dozen time and the same longhouse at least as often.
* The "Path of Exile"-style gigantic skill-tree is tedious and unnecessary.
* The sci-fi and modern world story elements are ridiculous, uninteresting and diminish my engagement with the narrative. I wish they would remove them from future AC games.
* Many of the mini side quests are overly silly in tone and feel trivial.

I'm giving it a "not recommended" generally, but if you are particularly a fan of the setting or AC games in general, then you might be able to overlook the flaws and enjoy it.

Absolutely worth it if you enjoy Diablo or Path of Exile style games. Unlike Path of Exile, you can create a viable build without following a guide for your first character, at least if you are experienced with this type of game. Compared to Diablo 4, it has more mechanical depth and more options for building different character archetypes.

Diablo 4 is still the best choice if you've never played a game like this, and Diablo 4 still has the best story. Path of Exile still has the most absurdly excessive amount of mechanical systems to learn. But Last Epoch holds its own alongside those two giants of the ARPG genre, and is a good buy if you've enjoyed either of those other games.

The ultimate quality over quantity game.

Storyteller is innovative, integrating each puzzle with a story concept in a way never done before, with high production values providing a very cute experience while solving every puzzle. It's also about three hours long.

The puzzles are fairly easy, due to the limited nature of the possible interactions. Part of the process is experimenting to discover what is possible, but the presentation is so good that there is a lot of joy in this discovery process.

I had a fantastic time with Storyteller. I wish there were more of it.

Killer Frequency is exactly what you'd expect: a walking simulator version of an 80's slasher flick, where most of the action happens off-screen through victims-to-be calling in to your radio station. Everything here is competently done, though nothing went beyond my expectations to move the game from good to great, for me.

There are light puzzles, but once you've found the right clues, everything is pretty obvious. The couple of times I was momentarily confused about how to progress, it was because I missed an interactable object in the environment which wasn't intended to be hidden, but I just overlooked it for some reason, and once I found those, I was smoothly back on the storyline. There are no brain-burning logic puzzles here.

A full playthrough is about five hours, and since it is unlikely that you will save all the victims in your first run, you may want to replay to get the achievement for saving all victims (and the alternate one for failing to save any victims), but personally I was satisfied with a single run, so if you are price sensitive in terms of hours for your money, take the length into consideration when deciding whether to wait for a sale.

On the default graphical settings, I did experience some motion sickness. This happens occasionally to me with first person games. I took a break, and when I came back I tweaked the field of view as well as lowering the multisampling settings to get a higher frame rate, and after those changes it was no longer a problem for me.

So, if the core concept of the game is appealing to you, and the content for price ratio not a deal breaker, I'm recommending.

A quality Sokoban adjacent puzzler. Its cape-based mechanics are unique enough that it feels fresh, even if you are familiar with Sokoban games. The difficulty curve felt right for my tastes, and I managed to complete all puzzles without outside help. The amount of content feels good - more than a hundred puzzles.

I bought it on sale, but would happily pay full asking price for the experience. Recommend for folks who have ever enjoyed a Sokoban puzzle.