Recent reviews by eaglewyng

If you woke up one day in a place where no one spoke your language, how would you connect with the people around you? Chants of Sennaar explores this question. The game is loosely based on the mythical Tower of Babel, and you are on a quest to get to the top of the tower. Comprehending languages is crucial to solving the puzzles that let you progress.

I absolutely adore linguistics, and this game spoke to me. A major part of this game is figuring out what words mean based on context clues and filling in a dictionary with your discoveries. You can annotate guesses using a keyboard, and the game translates the foreign symbols with what you've added to the dictionary. This led to some truly hilarious phrases when I guessed wrong: for example, one NPC allegedly told me "you eat mirrors." These incorrect guesses lead to another round of investigation until you finally get words that work. Luckily, you aren't left guessing forever: the game does eventually confirm your understanding of the words.

Chants presents the player with a different language on each floor, and some of them have unique grammar structures. At a certain point, you get to act as an interpreter for people from different floors. This was a lot of fun. Even though this game works very well on the Steam Deck, I would absolutely recommend using a mouse and keyboard for those portions of the game.

I love the puzzles in Chants, and I don't think any of them were too difficult (provided that you are diligent in filling out your dictionary). I'd put them in a range from easy to medium-hard. There was only one mathy one I needed to consult the internet for, and that was because I wasn't paying attention when the hints were presented to me.

The one part I didn't love about this game were the stealth sections, and they are plentiful. I'll admit that this is a personal preference, but I tend to dislike stealth in video games. Luckily, stealth is not particularly difficult in this game, and I was able to complete each of them with a single-digit number of tries.

Finally, I was pleasantly surprised by the cohesive story presented in Chants of Sennaar. I had expected a pure puzzle game with very little overarching plot -- but I was wrong. The inhabitants of each floor have their own backstory, and their story interacts with those of the other floors. Making connections and bridging differences is a major theme of the plot, and it all comes together to create a satisfying ending.

I enjoyed Chants of Sennaar and would recommend it to anyone who has a passing interest in linguistics and a penchant for puzzles. The gameplay, music, and art are masterful, and I'm glad I played it. 3.9/5 (Great).

PS: This game is good for completionists. Getting all the achievements only took me 15 extra minutes.

Playing FF1 Pixel Remaster is an excellent way to see how the series started! The remade music is top notch, and I recognized some of the songs that later made it into FF14 (which were, of course, originally in FF1 -- but I had played FFXIV first).

Even though the story is rather simplistic and the character personalities are nonexistent, I still enjoyed the narrative. This game is an essential piece of video game history, and the Pixel Remaster version makes it extremely accessible and enjoyable.

I played FF1 Pixel Remaster on a Steam Deck OLED at 60FPS and no special power settings, and the estimated battery life was well over 5 hours.

I really enjoyed FF2's unique leveling system -- where most early JRPGs level up stats via weighted randomness, FF2 levels up stats via skill usage. If you use magic a lot, your characters will level up their magic stats. If you get hit a lot, your characters will level up their HP and Stamina. If you use a lot of physical attacks, Strength and weapon skills will level up. I've heard mixed things about this leveling system from the original, but I didn't have any problem with it in the Pixel Remaster -- no grinding required.

The remade music is excellent (especially the last dungeon's background music), and seeing the evolution of the series from FF1 is fascinating. The story is more fleshed out, the characters have more personality, and the systems have been overhauled from the first game. I played this right after the FF1 Pixel Remaster, and I enjoyed the experience.

I played this game on the Steam Deck OLED and had >5 hour battery life at 60FPS with no performance problems.

Have you ever wanted to become a cheese monster in a desperate attempt to keep your possibly-doomed pizza parlor afloat? If so, you might be interested in Pizza Tower!


In Pizza Tower, you play as Peppino Spaghetti. Peppino has a pizza shop and is in debt to an evil landlord, but that's not his only problem. An anthropomorphic pizza man has also threatened destroy his pizza parlor by shooting a laser at it!

Throughout the game, Peppino gathers ingredients hidden throughout levels to earn money to pay back his landlord while scaling a tower with increasingly unhinged levels in order to confront the evil pizza man.

The game itself has the player go through 5 "floors" which contain ~26 levels total. Each level has its own unique theme and mechanics which are honestly pretty impressive. To beat a level, the Peppino must first reach the "end" of the stage and then run back to the start under time pressure. After beating a level, the player is given a letter rank based on their score, which increases with each defeated enemy, combo, and collectable item. In order to get to the next floor of the tower, Peppino has to beat a boss -- which often includes bullet hell mechanics.


I have so much respect for this game. I could see this being on some people's favorite games list. However, I just wasn't into it. The art style grates on me quite a bit, and I tended to get quite stressed at the end of each level when I had to race back to the start under time pressure.

The music, however, is top notch. I have the soundtrack on my video game music playlist on Spotify and rarely skip over any of the songs. The variety of mechanics in this game are also extremely interesting -- I don't think I've played any other game where I can fly with a chicken on my head, ride on a weenie-horse, and become a ball of cheese in order to defeat evil. The controls are pretty tight too.


This game runs at a flawless 60FPS on the Steam Deck with 4+ hour battery life. It's an excellent Deck game.


Rating: 3.2/5: good, just not my thing

If a 10 kilometer asteroid was going to hit the earth in a few months, how would you change the way you lived your life?

That’s the question Goodbye Volcano High explores. The game follows Fang, a senior in high school who is also the lead singer in a rock band. Their goal? To make it big at the local Battle of the Bands and then go touring with their bandmates after graduation.

As their luck would have it, however, scientists soon spot a huge asteroid hurtling towards the earth, and there's a good chance of an impact. Predictably, this causes biggest global existential crisis in prehistory. Could life end on Pangea as they know it?


This game performed very well on the Steam Deck OLED -- it seemed to run at 90FPS with no hitches, though I did limit it to 60 FPS for 5-hour battery life.

Unfortunately, the game had some noticeable bugs throughout. Some of these were minor, but others were more of a nuisance. Here's a list of the ones I noticed, from most severe to least severe:
- Some settings were lost every time I restarted the game. For example, I needed to turn colored character names on every time I started the game or it would reset to "off".
- Twice, the game stopped detecting button presses on both my PC and steam deck. Restarting the game fixed it for me
- Some dialog was auto-skipped without a button press after a word or so which made me reload my save so I could listen to it
- Every so often, a character's lips wouldn't move when they were talking
- The background glitched out every so often


Goodbye Volcano High is a great game. It explores many difficult topics -- from trying to become a rockstar while everything is falling apart to growing up LGBTQ+. It also examines diverse character's psychological states during times of crisis. The characters are well written and develop uniquely throughout the game. I found the story to be poignant, thought-provoking, and even triumphant at times.

The blend of visual novel and rhythm game added a lot and made the story more impactful. Not to mention the top-tier music that I'll continue to listen to.

My chief complaint about this game is that I want *more* of it. The game is rather bite-sized with a 7-hour runtime, but I can't help feeling like it should have been at least 10. There were story beats which felt underdeveloped and could have (*should have*) been explored more thoroughly. The lack of a chapter select, unique save files, and replayable rhythm game sections with customizable difficulty also seem like glaring omissions for a game of this price and caliber.


Overall, I recommend this game!

**3.6/5: Very Good**

If you've ever wanted to play a vampire-anime soulslike, this is the game for you! Overall, I'd recommend this game if you want to experience a soulslike with a more flexible combat system and do not mind repetitive stages and enemy types.

However, for games like this, I wish I could give something between a recommended and not recommended rating.

Things I like about this game:

- This game works perfectly with the Steam Deck out of the box
- Most of the boss fights are well-designed
- The combat system is flexible and makes gameplay extremely interesting
- This game has a more explicit narrative than any soulslike I've played. I found many of the cutscenes and story interesting, but it fell off a bit towards the end.
- There is a mechanic in this game for exploring character backgrounds (and it's required to unlock new abilities). This added a ton of depth to the world.

However, there were some major negatives to the game:

- The main enemy types got very repetitive quickly. There are only a few archetypes of enemies and they tend to repeat throughout the entire game.
- Some of the level design was pretty bad. The Cathedral of the Sacred Blood almost made me quit the game completely. I ultimately looked up a guide and finished it with the encouragement of the friends I was streaming to, but it was rough. It's the main reason I will not do new game plus for the other endings. There was also another area further on that felt very similar to the Cathedral except with a different tint -- it definitely reused assets.
- There were many bugs with the multiplayer. When I wanted to do co-op with a friend, I could join his world without a hitch -- but he could only join my world about once a day before an error occurred every time we tried to connect. Another friend and I were able to play without any problems whatsoever. YMMV.
- Another issue with multiplayer: elevators. The elevators sometimes do not appear for the guest, and sometimes they take 10 minutes to get to the next floor. Other times, both players were able to get into the elevator but one fell through the floor once it started moving.

Very cute game. I highly recommend a blind playthrough.

This is the best game I've finished so far in 2023.

Excellent soundtrack, charming art, and heartwrenching story. Seriously one of the best narratives I've played in a video game. I'll be thinking about this one for years.

I used the CEP mod (Community Enhancement Pack) for an expanded number of save slots and quality of life fixes from the community. I'd recommend it -- made playing through a better experience. I also recommend being careful with saves so you can experience the various endings without needing to backtrack too much.

One minor nit: there is no steam cloud save support, so you have to manually transfer your saves between Steam Deck and PC if you play that way.

Pretty great escape room game! Support for larger screens is questionable -- I'd recommend setting it to windowed 1920x1080 if you have issues with a large screen.

What an excellent game! In Tunic, you explore to discover not only the world around you, but the game mechanics themselves. The combat is engaging and approachable in many different ways, and the boss fights can be as difficult as some of the hardest fights I've encountered in any video game (though there are ways to make them more manageable).

I also enjoyed how the story is told throughout the game through the game's environment and the occasional cutscene. It drove me to do more exploration than I'd usually do.

Finally, a shout out to the many accessibility and difficulty options included in the Options menu. While I enjoyed the base combat difficulty, there is a "No Fail" and easier difficulty mode for those who want to focus on exploration and puzzles.