Recent reviews by surc :)

I'm really torn on this it is extremely frustrating in dumb ways but also feels good when it feels good. Initial progression is godawful but it seems to get better once builds come online. I think until they fix the viper fight to not feel like an unfun slog with no relation to the rest of the game balance if you lose, I can't recommend this game. I don't mind losing boss fights, even repeatedly, but that one is so blatantly bad that it feels insulting that they've known about it since launch and haven't fixed it.

Horrible *HORRIBLE* controls. Two parts to that:
1) Badly designed as a control scheme in general (Teleportation requires a double tap of the left stick to enter, then you have to move the indicator to where you want and press the left stick a third time to actually teleport there. Moving without teleporting is extremely slow and requires you to hold the left stick pushed in while you "steer". Moving your camera with the control instead of headset requires you push and hold in the right stick and then you get a very very slowly moving freecam. Keeping in mind this is all for you to basically just move yourself around a table in a small room)
2) Very clearly designed for only the Index, and the control diagram is noisy and hard to parse, especially if you're then having to superimpose that in your mind as to how it'd work on another control. This wouldn't be worth calling out except that the controls are so non-intuitive to begin with)

It's also the only game I get stutter on with SteamVR, I thought that was a thing long of the past. I was able to get it fixed by doing direct display mode, but it still stutters on the menu for some reason, I only realized I'd gotten it better in-level when I gave up on trying to fix it and figured I'd at least try the game out before a refund.

That said, they did a nice job with the aesthetics, visual effects, and the actual marble puzzle gameplay. I bought the game on sale and think It will absolutely be worth what I paid for it. I just wish it would stop getting in the way of me playing it so much.

The first combat mission has infinitely spawning small enemies that don't show up as enemies on your radar which turns the fight into an unfun slog, and also the game's clunky with a gamepad.

This game has a lot of really fun and enjoyable things going for it, unfortunately it commits the cardinal sin of modern game design, it has RNG problems not that make the game too hard to play, but that can make you have to play in non fun ways.

There's a boss, The Void Beast Murmur, which requires you to engage in classic 2D Mario-style platforming challenge where walls of damage with gaps are coming towards you from the right side of the screen and you have to dodge and progress. It randomly creates the pattern of orbs it sends, and one of them is a "full height" wall that you have to hide in one of the limited lowered spaces to avoid. This can spawn extremely frequently. It doesn't cause the platforming to be more challenging, you just run backwards until you get to a safe spot, but it does mean you are at the mercy of a dice roll on whether or not it's *extremely* tedious and boring to get through. When I googled to see if other people had that experience, the advice was "oh just wait until you RNG into one of the mods that makes it not a problem for your character". Again, that sounds tedious and unfun. I don't want to have to wait on additional RNG to hit to unscrew the boss's bad rng and make it an enjoyable encounter where frustration comes from challenge instead of bad luck and tedium.

Similarly you can be in rooms small enough that your attack animation will never finish before an enemy skill which follows you will catch up with you. You solve that by just dodging it until it runs out. However again, due to RNG it is possible for the enemy to immediately follow up with more of that same attack. The dodging itself is not that hard, it's a relatively slow moving projectile compared to your movement, but it's tedious and boring as all get out to dodge it, then dodge another one, then do an attack, then dodge another one, then dodge another one. I could just leave the room, but why make the combat be able to roll into a tedious situation at all? The combat is mostly well designed, why take that away on a dice roll?

This pattern has played out more and more frequently as I progress through the game. It's possible there's some mitigation to it I haven't hit yet, but it really just feels like lazy leaning on RNG that took a game I was loving at the start and is making it progressively less enjoyable as it scales up and opens up more opportunities for dice rolls.

Oregon Trail meets Escape Velocity in a fantasy setting, in an extremely satisfying way.

Key takeaways:
-Simple but satisfying gameplay loops.

-Not a game I'll binge, but one I'll likely return to in short bursts for a while. Felt like I got my money's worth.

-If you don't like "buy low sell high" simple-style trading you will probably not enjoy this game

-Limited character customization and as you progress, cart customization through unlocks. Always love some dress-up/aesthetics options in games :)

-Main campaign took about 10 hours of play, but there are no wasted moments in that time. Despite travel taking in-game calendar time it's almost instantaneous in terms of play time, so 10 hours represents essentially 10 hours of me making decisions and actively interacting, without the down time for travel/loading/etc a lot of games introduce. In addition to the campaign there's an alternate-campaign style of play "Payback" and a sandbox mode which I have not checked out. I don't expect surprises from the Payback gameplay, as I've done the "climb out of debt as the story" trading game before, but I appreciate that they included it as another campaign to have, and will play through it at some point.

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I found this game to be extremely refreshing. I feel like lately there's been such a focus for a lot of games, even indie games, on having every mechanic be part of some revolutionary mind blowing new gaming experience that will forever change the way you blah blah blah, rather than on whether or not it's fun.

This game is definitely not that. I was not kidding when I described it as Oregon Trail meets Escape Velocity, but it goes a bit beyond that. It feels like a lot of classic trading and travel games because it takes what the classics got right as its basis. The interface is clear, the graphics are fun, the story and world+character development is text based, but chunked up into bit size pieces and easily skippable.
This is not a massive resource management or super complex economy simulator, or some open world 8x the size of North America, but it doesn't need to be. It has a variety of simple mechanics that you're looping through in overlapping ways, that were clearly play-tested and revised until they were polished and worked smoothly, and they all fit together into a cohesive whole extremely well.
In this game, you don't stack the deck against yourself and see how hard a challenge you can overcome, you progress through a world and a story, growing your character. A limited amount of aesthetic customization brought in from cart upgrades, and the ability to reskin your merchant, along with a basic leveling system with unlocks, lets you feel a sense of investment and growth, again without needing to be boundlessly deep.

I would probably describe this game best as being "Refined". Simple, clean, in itself not a new idea, but done with a precision and talent that should demand respect. The developer clearly understood both what they wanted, and what made the type of game they wanted enjoyable. It's unfortunately rare to see a game demonstrate understanding how restrictions can be used as a positive, and that understanding is also often the thing that can push a larger project from good to amazing. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for any new games Inexplicable Games puts out in the future.

Charming if a bit clunky Hogwarts Sim Tower, card-draw based room choices. Can generate different mana as resources, which allow you to draw more cards of that mana type.


The mechanics are enjoyable, and the game is a great calm, casual experience. The campaign could use a lot of adjustment, it can feel a bit arbitrary and the only real direction is either provided through trial and error or community written walk-throughs. There isn't particularly a feeling of progressing difficulty or even a real link between the areas as you progress. Challenge cards (You can optionally set a challenge at the start of the campaign, and completing it will unlock the card for future runs) are a cool way to provide goals, but they feel like a side piece rather than a main progressing thread. Some functionality/depth seems underwhelming on it's impact on the game. Cool ideas, but they don't actually end up doing a lot for you if you spend time manage them (ex. get 3-5 school "houses", set priority to different types of magic for the house, drop the people gifted in those types in those houses, stop thinking about houses. There's rarely a benefit to tweaking house settings beyond the initial setup).
A lot of it is that the time limit on campaign levels by default means that you rarely get to see your vision for a tower through, and the kinds of adjustments you get from some features aren't needed for the specific in-area goals, more for min-maxing or seeing your personal vision for the tower through.

Despite my issues with it, I find myself returning to the campaign again and again, and the core gameplay loop is straightforward enough that I don't have trouble settling back in if I want to put the game down for a week and come back to my partially-complete campaign after.


Devs seem to be continuing to provide updates and make tweaks, which is great to see. Took a chance on this game with limited reviews at the time, and it's overall a wonderful twist to the sim tower style building/management that there's been a lack of for a long time. I could see some people not getting what they want from this in its current state, but I'm completely happy with the purchase, and really looking forward to/hoping to see larger scale updates as this progresses through EA, and hopefully eventually a sequel to refine and follow up on the ideas in this game from these developers.

I rarely write reviews, but this is exactly the kind of creative takes and great ideas getting polished that I hope for from early access games. If you're wondering, it's worth it!

Game's still real good. (The rebalances are great at making your progress to getting good more enjoyable, without making the game easier overall).

One of the most intense, immersive, and amazing experiences I've had playing a game.

This game is like if Alan Wake and Fringe had a baby, and it's fantastic. The time stopping mechancis are fun in game, although the combat isn't the best thing ever it's solid 3rd person shooting, the choices are interesting, and the story, graphics, and live action "episodes" are all really cool.

The Story part of this game is ok, but the main draw is the (local) multi-player. You can co-op the story, which makes it more enjoyable. The thing that made me get probably 5-700 hours combined enjoyment out of this on both Xbox and PC is the (local) multi-player VS. mode. It's incredibly fun, and the grapple-instead-of-jump is a twist that works really well. The maps are all pretty well made for it, and provide variations on a few decent style arenas. A large portion of my playtime has been spent doing 1v1, but it only gets more fun the more people you add to it. For $10, it's a steal.