Recent reviews by 🐊 big challenges 🐊

The ending of this game made me cry super hard. A mandatory title for anyone's who's made their way through the series.

I am not Tamil, but as a second-generation colombian immigrant, this story of cultural connection and disconnection felt oddly close to home. In that regard, I highly recommend this game.

Settlemoon is an idle game inspired by MMOs. It is about a fantasy world of bugs that has lost its sun. You must run the town of Settlemoon, building and stocking shops and attractions and sending adventurers out on quests while keeping a moon in the sky.

The game is designed to make a lot of it's exact mechanics unclear, with very minimal tutorializing. If you're ever stuck, it's worthwhile to check the steam forum or try to find other places of discussion. As someone who has played their share of MMOs, this feels very much along those lines.

I spent about a month and a half going through my first playthrough. It is a beautiful yet melancholic game, but not overbearing in that sense. This might be one of my favorite games to come out this year.

Good Warhammer games can be hard to come by, and this one is pretty good! Embraces the sort of comical over-the-top violence needed for a good time with 40k, with a nice occasional touch of dark comedy. This game is meant to capture the excitement a teenager in the 90s would feel from playing DOOM for the first time. In order the heighten things, the game borrows the arena sections that embody DOOM 2016, as well as having a degree of health management through killing hordes of enemies. That being said, it feels much closer to a classic shooter since this is generally a secondary form of health management, and most of your health pickups will come from running around the map picking up health and armor.

The guns all feel really cool and unique and the gameplay can get quite intense. I highly recommend this if you're a fan of first person shooters. Although perhaps if you're a stickler for authenticity, this might not whet your whistle as efficiently. My biggest complaints are that it's a pain to navigate due to dark identical corridors and a lack of a map system, and how the game classifies "secrets" as certain types of power-ups, regardless of how well-hidden they may or may not be.

Slayers X is a spinoff of Hypnospace Outlaw, being an in-universe game made by the character Zane Lofton (with help from a high school friend), now a father in his late 30s.

The game is modeled after build engine games like Duke Nukem 3D and Redneck Rampage and parodies their edgy sense of comedy by filtering it thorugh the lens of a 37-year-old teenage boy who doesn't like to swear in front of relatives. The monster is defanged, or perhaps it never grew its fangs in to begin with. Although it doesn't quite hit the emotional highs of Hypnospace Outlaw, it comes from the same sense empathy for internet weirdos as well as capturing the same general sense of comedy.

As for the gameplay, the game is pretty fun to play, with weapons that are goofy gimmicky twists on the usual sort of FPS loadout of the time. Dual pistols held sideways, a shotgun that shoots glass sharts (sic) collected by breaking windows, a sludge grenade launcher that summons rats to aid you, a chaingun with enough recoil that pointing it at the ground makes you fly, a triple friecracker rocket launcher, and of course, hacker-themed laser blasts that you fire out of your hands like a kamehameha wave.

Like any build engine game of its salt, the levels are meant to mimic real-world locations (or at least the locations of the Hypnospace Outlaw version of Boise, Idaho) A dollar store, a mini-golf course, a laundromat, upper-middle class suburban homes, and of course, the Boise potato festival. You really get a feeling for the sort of working class life Zane lives.

All in all, if you're a fan of retro shooters, edgy 90s pop culture, or were brought to tears by hypnospace outlaw, I can't recommend this game enough.

This game takes the apocrypha of Zelda being based on Shigeru Miyamoto playing in the woods as a child and goes a step further by making a BOTW-inspired platformer where you are literally a little kid playing in the woods. It's really sweet and funny and has some valuable things to say about growing up and the importance of confrontation.

SLARPG managed to slide in at the last minute as my Game Of The Year for 2022. It's beautiful, funny, sad, truthful, and most importantly, gay.

The characters all have fun, unique designs, the writing is top-notch and manages to make you both laugh and cry, the turn-based combat is well tuned and allows for some interesting builds, the pixel art is absolutely stunning. So much love and care is put into this RPG maker game and I can't recommend it enough.

I think people are quick to write this off as a "streamer game" but I believe it comes from a genuine appreciation of visual novels, 90s anime, and cosmic horror fiction. I'm normally not the type to play horror games and I'll admit the comedy aspects of the game disarmed me, but it's approach to horror is well-composed and very effective.

All the characters (including the protagonist) are very fun and well-written. The game is admittedly pretty short but it makes good use of its time. Definitely among my top 10 for 2022.

A charming little last hurrah for the series. Fun art style, entertaining writing, and some decent jokes. Nothing laugh-out-loud, but certainly a sensible chuckle.

I recommend, but perhaps you might want to take the sensible advice from the end of the first game and wait for it to go on sale.

Paradise Killer is a beautiful game about a horrible world. The cast of the game are all very interesting and entertaining (and hot). Amazing soundtrack, too.