Recent reviews by ellipsis

This game rivals Factorio in its effectiveness as a time machine into the future.

At its core, it's a game about building an automated solver for Minesweeper variants. You do this by writing "rules," which describe a situation on the board and draw conclusions about the cells in question. For example, given a region which must contain zero mines, you can conclude that every cell in the region is safe. As the game progresses, the rules get way more complicated, describing general facts and concepts rather than specific situations.

The key difference between this and a Minesweeper game is that there's no tedium or repetition here. Where you might normally reason through a situation in your head to solve it, only to run into it again later, in this game you can't solve things manually. Instead, you get to watch the computer fly through levels solving things automatically until it hits something your rules don't cover. Then you get to puzzle out how to express to the computer the right property of the situation to let the rest of your rules take over, and it's back to flying through levels again. Since you never hit the same situation twice, every "puzzle" (rule to add) is unique, and it doesn't get boring.

Then you unlock variables in your rules, and get to go back and optimize them!

Overall, 10/10. This is as worthy a successor to genuine Zachlikes as I've ever seen. The graphics aren't up to Zachtronics' level, but the gameplay is stellar and the inherent "progression" between levels gives a great feeling of accomplishment when the rules you've built can fly through hundreds of levels in a second or two.

RimWorld is the definitive tactical space-themed war-crime management simulator.

You start the game all innocent and normal, and before you know it you're torturing prisoners, harvesting organs, and making hats out of your enemies.

10/10

A fun minimalist puzzle game, but just be warned that it's not very long. It took me about 45 minutes to finish the entire game, so keep that in mind before purchasing. It's fun, easy to get into, and well-made - despite the length, I'd definitely recommend it given the price.

What I Liked:
The puzzle mechanics in Glitchspace are really interesting. The node-based 'hacking' puzzles are well-thought-out and they introduce enough elements quickly enough that I never really felt like they were rehashing a previous puzzle. The graphics style is clean, minimalistic and fairly simple; although there's some visual noise from the glitching blocks, that never really gets in the way.

What I Didn't Like:
My primary issue is that the game's way too short. It might be the fact that I'm already a programmer, but it took me half an hour to finish all the levels, including a good ten minutes of screwing around because I wasn't sure which button edits the gun. The current levels feel more like a tutorial section than actual puzzles, although the last few levels are more difficult.

Your progress through the levels isn't saved and level numbers aren't shown anywhere, so if you accidentally go to the level select screen it can take a few tries to get back to where you were. Video options are lacking - the only one there is enable/disable Oculus Rift support. I realize it's in Early Access, but a windowed mode option or a resolution selector would have been helpful.

Overall:
Good game, if a bit simplistic at the moment. It seems like the simplicity is more an effect of the early access nature of the game, so I'm hoping it gets more complex in future updates. Generally speaking, if you're interested in programming or puzzle games like SpaceChem, you'll probably like Glitchspace.