Recent reviews by NYKevin

Overall, this is a solid puzzle game in the spirit of Portal. It borrows several puzzle elements from Portal and Portal 2. This is a good thing. It makes the object interactions feel familiar and easy to understand for anyone who's played the Portal series before, and easy to learn for those who haven't. The Entropy Centre has a vastly different core gameplay mechanic to Portal, so it feels like a fresh new experience. I felt highly engaged for the entire duration of my playthrough, and never felt like I was doing something I had already done in Portal or Portal 2. The game takes itself quite a bit more seriously than Portal did, but it sticks the landing reasonably well.

Now for some (minor) complaints. Portal 2 had two hidden mechanics (funneling and scripted momentum) that made its puzzles truly a joy to play, and the absence of those mechanics in The Entropy Centre is felt. At times, you'll be trying to land a difficult jump, and just barely miss. This never happened in Portal 2. This didn't detract from my experience too much, but I was a bit annoyed, since this is a solved problem.

Another thing worth mentioning is that this game expects players to be capable of very basic running and gunning. It's nowhere near the difficulty of a "real" shooter, but it might pose a problem for non-gamers who have poor FPS skills. I'm not entirely sure why the developers felt the need to include these segments, frankly, but most of them are on the short side, so we do get back to puzzles fairly quickly.

It took me about eight hours to get through this game, split across two sessions. I got it on sale for $20 (with soundtrack), and feel that was good value for money. At the regular price of $25, the value for money is slightly lower, but still reasonable in my opinion. There is also replay value from the level editor, so it's hard to knock the game at this price point.

Soundtrack: While there were some moments I liked, overall the music felt more like a complement to the events happening in-game. It works fine as part of the game, but I'm not sure it's worth purchasing separately. Music tastes vary, so some people will probably like it. Expect a relatively moody, atmospheric style of music, with a fair amount of tension.

A delightful take on Sokoban-style puzzles, polished to within an inch of its life. Every level feels like it's there for a reason, and nothing feels wasted or overdone. Patrick's Parabox adds many new mechanics to Sokoban, but strangely they all seem to fit together extremely well. Each mechanic is introduced in a logical and straightforward manner, and its consequences are then explored. The result is a rich series of "aha" moments and clever insights. It's clear the author spent a great deal of time thinking carefully about how the player would engage with the game and its systems, rather than just slapping together a few dozen levels and calling it a day, as is so common with puzzle games these days.

Less interesting tidbits:

• There's no story. But it doesn't need a story.
  
• The graphics look more or less the same as you can see in the trailer (i.e. stylized, flat, and mildly cartoonish). They provide good feedback in response to player actions, including unsuccessful actions (e.g. pushing against a wall).
  
• The music's style is nicely matched to each mechanic, and helps to make each set of levels feel cohesive and unique.
  
• The game supports infinite undo, and also lets you undo the reset button. All puzzle games ought to have that functionality.
  
• If you really hate puzzle games, Patrick's Parabox isn't likely to change your mind. But if you like puzzle games, I strongly recommend it.

Every time I see Steam recommend another game, claiming it is "similar to Outer Wilds," I don't know whether to laugh or cry, because I know I'm never going to experience another game like this again.

No, I'm not going to tell you anything else. You should go in as blind as possible. Don't watch Let's Plays, don't read reviews, just play the damn thing.

An excellent deconstruction of the RPG genre. To say any more would spoil your experience. My only advice is to ignore the advice of everyone else, and play the game as you see fit. Undertale does a great job of communicating how it wants to be played. Fans who try and tell you how to play it have completely missed the point. You're meant to make mistakes on your first playthrough, and learn from them.

This is a free game that takes less than an hour to play through. I automatically recommend all such games unless they have microtransactions (which this does not) or are completely horrible (which this is not).

Beyond that... it's really hard to say anything concrete about The Mirror Lied. As the short description notes, this is not a horror game and you will not experience any jump scares or similar. However, it does have a very creepy atmosphere, mostly because you are all alone and nothing makes any sense. The game continues to not make sense after you finish it, so don't go in expecting an explanation. Some players will find the lack of closure frustrating and may dislike this game on that basis.

First things first: Angels with Scaly Wings is not a mystery. If you read its Steam description carefully, you will see that it has not been explicitly advertised as one, but you could be forgiven for having that impression from some of the screenshots and Steam tags.

With the most important caveat out of the way, we can get to the actual plot. Well, plots, really.

The main plot of the story is essentially a police procedural (but with dragons). As with many visual novels, the plot is not gameified; there isn't much in the way of winning or losing here, unless you're playing for achievements. As a result, this part of the game has almost no replay value. You're not trying to win anything, so once you have seen the ending, the only part left is to explore the options you missed last time. You do learn a few new things, and in one or two cases you can get better outcomes. But there aren't any major reveals because they don't know which options you'll take the first time, and can't risk spoiling the ending. The good news is that the developers knew this kind of material could be really annoying to click through when replaying, so you don't have to do that. The game makes it easy to skip through anything you've already seen, without accidentally skipping things you haven't. As a result, the lack of replay value in this section is unfortunate but does not drag down the rest of the game.

As the tag "Dating Sim" suggests, the rest of the story is focused on meeting and getting to know a few of the main characters in each playthrough. Some of these characters have optional romance scenes, but not all of them. The emphasis is on companionship rather than sex. Unlike some dating sims, AWSW mostly fades to black rather than showing anything explicit, although there are a couple of suggestive images here and there.

The term "dating sim" is problematic in its own right. If you click on the Dating Sim tag, you'll notice that it spans everything from shooters to visual novels, and everything from horror to comedy. Outside of Steam tags, I have also seen it used to describe "normal" games like Mass Effect (actually, I'm pretty sure everything Bioware ever made has been called a "dating sim" at some point). In the case of AWSW, it does have a grain of truth to it, since there are failure states for all of the characters (i.e. you can make them hate you). In some cases, you can trigger these failures quite easily, with relatively little hinting that you're doing something wrong. But it doesn't matter, because the game specifically encourages multiple playthroughs. With the benefit of hindsight (and enough replays), you can befriend anyone.

A game like this will largely stand or fall on its characters, especially given that it specifically wants you to make friends with all of them. Personally, I found them a heartwarming and likable bunch. You probably won't love every single one of them, of course. They're a diverse group, and don't always get along with each other. But they have all been well written, so the average player will take a strong liking to at least one or two of them.

Unlike the main plot, the side plots have a great deal of replay value, and not just because you get to meet more characters. The gameplay has a bit of a Majora's Mask feel to it, in that you're repeating through the same events, never able to help everyone in the same playthrough. It's a bit depressing at first, but the game finds ways to improve on this formula.

The true ending is reasonably satisfying. Most of the bad endings are quite painful to watch, as are some of the "good" endings. This is deliberate, of course, and well executed. The only major problem here is that most of the endings are nearly identical for large portions. The game's skip functionality works as intended here (except for one brief scene which is ever-so-slightly different in each playthrough but still similar enough to annoy), but it further robs the game of replay value it could have had.

Overall, I enjoyed the time I had with this game, but I feel like it squandered some of its potential. While AWSW certainly has more of a plot than a typical dating sim, it still feels less like a story and more like a vehicle for character development. If a sequel is made, I hope it goes further, with a less linear plot and greater emphasis on player agency and story-relevant choices.

Full disclosure: I received this game as a freebie with my video card. I have not agreed to review it in exchange for my copy, nor have I entered into any other agreement with Steam, Firaxis, or anyone else besides the standard EULAs.

Now to business. TL;DR: If you thought Civ V with all DLC was at about the right level of complexity, you'll probably find Civ VI too complicated and unfocused. If you thought Civ V with DLC was too simple, Civ VI might be a good choice for you.

I really wanted to like Civ VI. The graphics are gorgeous, and I think the interface is much cleaner and more beautiful than that of Civ V. Hex visability is a lot more obvious, and the cartographic style of the map (i.e. it looks like a literal paper map) is a really nice touch.

That said, I have started, briefly played, and then abandoned at least three separate games, and I don't feel like I got a lot out of the hours I spent on those games. Civ VI introduces a raft of new mechanics, most blatantly a second tech tree (a "culture" tree), but also city districts, a number of new resources (including housing and city-state influence), per-city happiness (needlessly renamed to "amenity"), a much more elaborate social policy system, and so on. Individually, none of these changes are "bad" as such. But there are many of them, and they all seem to pull the game in different directions.

Expansionism has been curtailed in a somewhat indirect way. Tiles surrounding a city are more cumbersome to upgrade, especially in the early game, because of the need to continually replace your builders as they are expended. Thus, they either occupy slots in your build queue, or they consume an unreasonable amount of gold. Worse, settlers now reduce population by one when finished instead of halting city growth while under production. The combination of these things makes it a lot harder to spam settlers and build lots of cities early. I imagine this was an intentional balance change. But unfortunately, it makes the early game boring and tedious because I don't feel like I'm accomplishing enough.

Cities are also more complicated to administer. Happiness ("amenity") is now per-city instead of global, and each city has a housing limit (raised by various buildings and improvements). Districts and wonders occupy tiles outside the city, so you need to expend a bit of cognitive effort deciding where they should land... for every single district or wonder you build in every single city you control. Combined with the reduced expansionism, this makes it feel like I'm expected to manage fewer cities more intensively.

The increased load on the build queue from builders affects city development, too. So you have to choose between developing your cities, developing your tiles, pumping out army units, and not going broke buying things outside the queue. And, of course, if you have fewer cities, then you can build fewer things at once. In short, you have to manage your build queue a lot more carefully than in Civ V, which is annoying and not much fun. No more "Ooh, I want that thing. Click." In practice, this means wonders are a lot less practical to build because you can't fit them into your build queue.

At the other end of the abstraction spectrum, the social policy trees from Civ V have been coalesced into a single culture tree, which was probably the right move. Unfortunately, they combined this good change with a substantially more complicated social policy system. Now, you unlock policies and systems of government (via the culture tree). You get to have one system of government active at any time. Each system gives you some fixed bonuses, and a few slots for policies. The difficulty with this is that it requires you to decide which policies you want to use (unlike Civ V, where the answer was "all of them"), which again imposes a moderate amount of cognitive load on the player.

Naturally, once policies are unlocked, they remain available in the "pick your active policies" screen forever. So the screen rapidly fills up with useless clutter that you never wanted and don't care about. The game does at least highlight the new ones with an icon, but the interface gets quite full even in the Classical era. I can't imagine how ugly it must be in the Modern era.

City-states got more complicated, too. You now build up "influence" with them, which translates into "envoys", which (finally!) translate into fixed bonuses. No more "give me X gold for Y influence" silliness. Again, the old system sucked. But that doesn't mean the new system is necessarily better. You have to decide which city-states should get your envoys, which determines the bonuses you receive. You only have a limited number of envoys and have to pick your favorite bonuses. Sound familiar?

You also get free envoys for completing "quests," which are a combination of reasonable things like "build a trade route with {city state}" and various random activities which also give half-off discounts on specific items in the tech and culture trees. Individually, many of these make sense (e.g. founding a city on the coast halves the cost of sailing research). But collectively, they end up feeling more like a per-game tutorial, which is odd because the game already has a tutorial.

All this micromanagement is probably fun for some people, but it isn't my cup of tea. I reluctantly have to give Civ VI a thumbs down for being too complicated in too many different areas of gameplay at once.

The only problem I have with this game is that there isn't enough of it. For 99¢, this is a reasonable amount of content, but don't go in expecting more than 2-3 hours of entertainment at most.

Other than that, it's basically perfect.

This is a free game, it has a running time of approximately 20 minutes, and it is not terrible. Why are you still reading this? Download it already and figure out whether or not you like it first hand.

Sometimes, it isn't one big thing, but a lot of little things. In this case, that lot of little things make me feel like I'm playing a university student's final project for their game design class rather than a Real Game That You Pay Money For And Stuff.

Here are some examples, in no particular order:

• There appear to be at most twelve to fifteen different textures for the entire game. Many puzzle elements appear to be deliberately constructed to minimize the number and complexity of their textures. To the game's credit, what textures do exist are visually distinctive, rather than the twenty or thirty variations on "industrial, brown, and ugly" you will find in more than a few "modern" games.
  
• The game's plot appears on a series of simple dialog boxes, and appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with the gameplay except insofar as it dictates the names of a few puzzle elements here and there.
  
• The game presents dual controller/keyboard+mouse prompts everywhere, except for a few places where it displays controller prompts only. It does not adjust the prompts based on the input method, nor is it capable of accepting keyboard+mouse input while in controller mode (or vice-versa). It does (apparently) try to guess the correct input mode, but I only know this because it guessed wrong.
  
• The "data fragments" you are expected to collect are in many cases simply scattered about the level. Finding them is an easter-egg hunt, not a puzzle challenge as with (e.g.) the stars in the Talos Principle. This appears to largely stem from the baffling design choice to provide a fixed three fragments per (short) level rather than making them rare and irregular enough to be interesting.
  
• The cubes you can pick up do not respect the inertia of a moving platform. If you drop them onto a (horizontally) moving platform, the cubes will stay where they are and fall off.
  
• The game has somewhat limited animation. Buttons do not depress when activated. Objects are destroyed by instantly replacing them with untextured particle effects.
  
• The menus are mostly static and not very pretty. They do not take advantage of the high resolution of my monitor. This is not to say they are pixelated or otherwise mangled; they just aren't all that pleasant to look at.

The smoking gun, of course, is the "readme" on the game's main menu, which informs us that the game was made by a small group of people coding it "in their bedrooms," whatever that's supposed to mean. Ordinarily this would inspire lenience in me, especially since I paid a mere $1.50 for it. But the note then goes on to exhort the player to purchase the game if they enjoyed it, which suggests to me it was intended for a demo and (accidentally?) included in the final copy. Combine that with a complete lack of such a warning on the main store page, and I'm just not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Nevertheless, it is better than nothing. Buy it when it's 90% off.