Recent reviews by Alberich

This was super charming and fun! The game has so much heart, it's hard to say anything bad about it.

I'm doing my part!

This is a really solid deckbuilder roguelite that has a lot of charm and heart. The gameplay loop is satisfying, as you pilot your starship through a variety of combat and non-combat encounters. For me, an average run from beginning to end takes about 40-60 minutes. I was pleased with the difficulty options available, particularly how they avoid the easily taken route of adding HP padding.

There are a variety of characters and ships to keep the runs feeling fresh, and overall the game feels iterative on the genre - nothing world-shaking in terms of mechanics, but it executes every genre convention very well. What I do find particularly compelling is the narrative arc and how run completion opens up the narrative piece by piece, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Definitely would recommend this to both seasoned veterans of the genre or those looking to dip their toes in the water. Absolutely worth the price, even at 12 hours in at the time of review.

Super impressive effort from a solo developer.

It's hard not to draw comparisons between Dinkum and games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley because the game draws so heavily from them. The game feels both familiar and fresh, and seems like it invites exploration in particular much more readily than its predecessors in the genre.

I haven't had a chance to dig into the multiplayer aspect, but my time in single-player feels well spent and I look forward to the slate of updates mapped out.

I feel like I've spent some good quality time in the game and yet have barely scratched the surface, but I already feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of the game.

This is probably the most mixed review I've ever had to give.

Subnautica as a concept is great. I adored the first game. It was a triumph of level design, gameplay, and (to my surprise) writing. By the time I was finished with Subnautica I was moved to tears by its poignancy.

Below Zero has many of the bones of what made Subnautica so great, and it takes many risks: a storyline with more dialogue and characters rather than a mostly faceless player-insert character; expanding mechanics to transition between the surface and the water regularly, with fresh threats on the surface; new creatures and new environments in which to run, terrified, from them. The basebuilding is still great, and I enjoyed navigating around in the vehicles.

With every risk Below Zero takes, though, it falls short of living up to its potential. I enjoyed most of the character and world development on its own merit, but there are some major unforced errors in the general flow of the game. Major story spoilers begin here: my primary complaint about the game is that the game allows you to completely miss picking up the final thread of discovering Sam's death. She is your reason for coming to this world, and in essentially two playthroughs (before and after the major story update), I managed to completely miss finding the Frozen Leviathan. I take issue with the design in particular in that the game allows you to reach a state where, essentially, the main character decides to fly off with an alien instead of finding out what happened to her presumably-dead sister, with an attitude of "let's leave the past behind". There's also a bit of a shoehorned pseudo-romance in the final moments of the game, with Al-An declaring that he can face anything "with you", and a complete lack of payoff with regards to what happens to the Architect homeworld. It's been a long time since the ending of a game just gutted my prior enjoyment of it. After going to the wiki, the writing made sense, but I would think that with how heavily the game holds your hand for literally every other part of finding the story that they would do so here.

That being said, I do look forward to seeing what comes out of Unknown Worlds in the future. While I didn't expect them to catch lightning in a bottle quite the same way as they did with the first game, I also didn't expect this installment to be a step down in quite so many ways.

The Room Two builds upon all the strengths of its predecessor, and adds some fresh twists while developing the story.

I picked it up on sale, but I feel like I'd be OK with paying full price.

The Room is a fairly short, mostly straightforward point and click puzzle game. It oozes style and solving the puzzles is immensely satisfying to the point of almost giving tactile feedback. The hints were helpful without being insulting, and the sense of uncovering a deeper mystery grew as the game progressed.

I picked it up on sale, but I feel like it's probably worth the full price if puzzle games are your jam.

I didn't know what to expect going into this game, but what I found was a really fun, fresh, exciting take on the series that I've been playing and loving since it was on floppy disks.

It has strategy elements, but doesn't bog you down with them: rather than managing a whole world, you manage a city and its districts and try to keep it from spiraling out of control. It has tactical elements straight out of the prior installments in the series, but mixes things up: missions are executed in a series of "breaches" where you bust/sneak/hack/blast your way into a building and get a round of exchanged fire with the enemies within. Round order is more alternating between sides rather than the entire side going at once, and you have control over your own initiative order when you stage the breach.

All in all, if you like XCOM, it's worth a flyer on this game if it hits your price point. The art assets are stripped down and the characters are pregenerated rather than customizable, but they come with interesting backstories and pretty solid writing.

If you liked XCOM: Apocalypse like I did and also liked the new series, this is *probably* gonna your jam, and you should really consider just buying it right this second.

For context: I backed this on Kickstarter, and was sold on the premise alone.

In my limited playtime in this game, I found that I really enjoyed how well it captures the premise of what's on the tin. The game mechanics elicit the tension, although not quite the details, of a BSG episode, whether it's due to:

-Someone misunderstanding the neighbors bringing over cookies and escalating it to the fleet commander.

-A carrier jumping in on top of your flagship while you're trying to rescue someone in a lifeboat.

-Water riots due to poor planning and bad luck.

Ultimately, you will make decisions and (virtual) people will die because of those decisions. You're on the run, and sometimes people get left behind.

While the game is in early access, my experience with it is that it's been quite stable. with no real issues. Occasionally a new build will come out that will nuke my save, but that's the price we pay for beta. It's been very satisfying watching the development of this game from afar, arriving in its near-complete state.

And speaking of watching it from afar, I'd like to commend the devs on their efforts in keeping the backers updated. There have been constant lines of communication that allowed the backers to see what was being worked on, what was tweaked, all throughout the project's development. I know that Kickstarted and Early Access games have an annoying tendency to cease development as the devs run out of money, interest, or both; I don't really see that happening here. We've got a playable, fun game out of it already, and I'm excited to see what's next.

TL;DR: If you wanna feel like Bill Adama watching the DRADIS contacts fill up your screen while you decide how long you can wait before hitting jump, buy it right now. If you're interested in a solid, albeit unconventional, mashup of resource management, fleet management, space combat, and roguelike gameplay, give it a try. It's very unique and nothing else quite scratches the itch.

This game really scratches an itch I didn't know I had.

It strikes a really pleasant balance between the Metroidvania gameplay, roguelike progression, and Souls-style difficulty. I've never run into a situation yet where I thought I died unfairly - more that I died because I wasn't fast enough. The reaction is "Aw, ♥♥♥♥!" rather than "OH THAT'S ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!"

Definitely worth buying into, on sale or not.