Recent reviews by Szkieletor

Cool game, but all the waifus are flat.

This isn't a game, it's a glorified video player. But it delivers much more than many so-called "H-games" on Steam.

What you get is a selection of scenes that follow a very simple storyline. You can simply let it all play, clicking through dialogue or setting it to continue automatically, or pick a scene and loop it. And that's about it.

As you probably tell from the store page trailer and screenshots, the art and animation are gorgeous and detailed. I was particularly impressed by how expressive the animation is. It's not your run-of-the-mill Flash loop, there's care and attention put into each individual scene. An unfortunate side-effect of the animations running at 60 FPS is that sometimes, the interpolation is visible - and while I haven't found it to detract from the quality of the animations, it is a flaw worth mentioning.

As far as selection of scenes, there's a lot of cool stuff here. You'll get vanilla, some femdom, a bunch of different positions. Nothing out of the ordinary, but you'll surely find a favorite.

I've actually bought it previously on DLSite, right when it came out. This developer deserves all the support they can get. Their work is amazing quality, relatively cheap, and they keep improving with every title.

Also, there's funscripts available at the usual place, integrated right into the game.

A pretty solid boss rush game. Simple but satisfying mechanics, interesting and fun boss patterns that remain challenging without being confusing or obtuse, and stellar pixel art animation.

What's most interesting to me about Klaroro, is that it's clearly not what it was meant to be. It doesn't take Batman to find traces of a full-fledged eroge metroidvania in this game, that was probably shafted due to time or budget constraints. The game opens with a typical metroidvania tutorial area, almost immediately funnels you into a boss fight, and then you're just dropped into an obvious hub area and told to select the next boss to fight.

Maybe the game failed to find a publisher and hit budget constraints. Maybe the dev got burnt out and decided to focus on art rather than making a full game. I have no idea, but what I do have is a desire for more. The core mechanics are very high quality for an eroge, so it's a shame the game lasts about 30 minutes.

An addictive third-person colony sim with some pretty interesting mechanics.

The basic gameplay is pretty standard. You land on a randomly generated island, with a spread of resources and POIs. What sets ASKA apart from most open world survival craft games is the focus on the base-building.

Instead of doing things yourself, you can summon villagers and have them work for you. But villagers have needs. Food, water, shelter, safety. A lot of your efforts will be spent on fulfilling those needs, by building farms, water storage, houses, and training warriors. In order to make this process less tedious, you can summon more villagers... but that means you need a bigger farm, more houses, and so on.

And that's the basic gameplay loop, a self-sustaining cycle of "the village must grow". The Factorio reference is deliberate - while these two games are very different, they both share the addictive nature of expanding your base, with ever-increasing resource requirements, and the solution always being something that consumes more resources.

While there's not a whole lot of content at this point in time, you'll get a lot of mileage from it. It took me 20 hours to get to iron for the first time, and I still struggle with getting my tools and armors ready in time for the second winter.

Of course, there's bugs, jank, and lots of QOL improvements to be made. But for an early access release, ASKA is very playable, and very hard to put down. The performance is alright, none of the bugs I've encountered have been game breaking, I've never lost any progress, and most issues are resolved by simply restarting the game. There's also coop - I don't have any friends to test it out with, but it's always nice to have that option available.

I will definitely be following ASKA's development. It's a very promising game that has already given me my money's worth, and then some.

There's more JoJo references in here than sex scenes.

The Arrogant Kaiju Princess and The Detective Servant falls into the common H genre of time-management VNs. Tedious, boring, repetitive and forgettable, but also serviceable in the short term, hard to really ♥♥♥♥ up, and usually cheap. The fast food of H games.

The Detective Servant stands out because of it's high level of polish. Yeah, it's still just a Big Mac, but it's a really well prepared Big Mac, that looks almost like the promotional image, and tastes just as good. Every element has received a high level of attention and polish, which elevates it above other examples of it's genre. I enjoyed the story, the art, even the OST is surprisingly large, and the ED movie slaps. I love the cute dance they do. More of that art style, please.

The only real negative is the translation quality. It's generally good, but has a lot of typos, some words are just missing, and there's inexplicable homophones. And it's not the hard-to-romanize names that have this issue, but regular words in regular sentences.

In summary, it's enjoyable and worth your time, but perhaps more of a "buy on sale" kind of game. I like what the devs are cooking, they clearly have passion for their work, and they deserve a bigger budget for their next title.

Vampire Survivors gameplay meets Hades upgrade system, with Diablo-style loot for permanent progression.

Everything is pretty good even at such an early stage, and the gameplay is addicting, as expected from the genre. The art in particular is gorgeous. The only complaint is that the muted color palette makes distinguishing your own spell effects and enemy sprites difficult. The music is nice, the progression is solid, the writing strikes a good balance between funny haha references and serious world-building.

For the current price, it's a no-brainer, and it can only get better from here. If you liked Hades or Vampire Survivors, it's a must-have. I want Winter to step on me.

Game's fun, but I gotta go with not recommended because of AI voices. If you're not using the tech to generate custom, unique responses on the fly, then just hire real voice actors. You can't even choose your own team name for ranked play - huge missed opportunity.

Once that's sorted out, gonna change to positive. The game is pretty good - a fast-paced, objective-based shooter. The TTK is a bit high, with most weapons using up the entire magazine for a single kill unless you hit >50% headshots, but that means it's very hard to wipe a team on your own, and there's very few frustrating instakills, further reinforcing the teamplay aspect.

Music is good, graphics are good, and the game features an impressive environmental destruction system that forms the core of gameplay. And it's free, with the equipment unlock grind being pretty easy and fast. Nothing to lose in trying it.

Great foundation for a sandbox RPG. Feels like a combination of classic Mount & Blade, with a similar overworld, and a first-person action RPG with freeform builds and interesting movement options.

Unfortunately, at this stage, the game is plagued by technical issues. Primarily, the performance. Turning 360 degrees in any location will have my FPS fluctuate betwen 140 and 40, for seemingly no reason. You might say "but Early Access!", but how many EA games do you know of that have actually improved their performance issues? Because I honestly can't think of a single one. It only ever gets worse, if anything.

And this heavily compounds the next issue - camera. The game is designed for first person with mouselook, which makes it baffling that mouselook simply does not work. There's some sort of negative acceleration that you can't disable, which makes actually looking around with the mouse a torturous and inconsistent experience. This is in addition to random mouse skipping, and the camera just likes to jump to a random direction for no reason. You'll be fighting goblins when suddenly, you're looking at the ceiling and getting shanked from behind.

Fix the mouselook, allow raw input, and improve performance, and this is an easy recommend. For now, I'd say wait a while and see if things improve. The potential is there, but too many Early Access titles never capitalize on this, so I can't give a recommendation this early on.

I have a soft spot for lewd 2D action platformers - Eroico, The Lab, Setaria. There's just something charming about these janky, low-budget metroidvanias that resemble mid 2000s Flash games more than commercial products.

Succubus Affection is definitely a title worth your attention, especially if you share this sentiment, as charm is something it has in droves.

The basics are simple. Each enemy you defeat is permanently befriended, and gives you stat upgrades and new abilities. You can slot up to 12 of those, and there's plenty of variety to be found, from sword moves and projectiles to summons and movement skills. The only complaint is there's little nuance to enemy placement and level design, making every encounter feel more or less the same. The bosses are definitely highlights.

The character are fun, and the wholesome atmosphere gets to you. Characters you defeat can be seen hanging around the village later on, the dialogue is nice and cheery, and the whole thing has this cosy vibe to it.

In simple terms, the game is fun and comfy. Absolutely worth it on a sale, I would even recommend full price if you're into these kinds of games already. Just remember to grab the free patch on Kagura Games' website.

So, get this. Instead of hyping up the game for years before launch, making empty promises and dumping millions into marketing, these guys poured the cash into development instead, made a game, and released it. And didn't even tell anyone about it, until it was ready.

And it was ready. None of that "day 1 patch" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. No Early Access. No "beta". No constant crashes, framerate drops, gamebreaking bugs. This ♥♥♥♥ is polished, and complete.

And, stay with me - it's fun. That's it. It's just FUN. It doesn't have to be anything more - it's not thought-provoking, it won't keep you awake at night, it's not a deep and complex experience. It's just unapologetically fun. You run around a corporate city, and beat the ♥♥♥♥ out of robots to the beat of rock music. What more could you want from a video game?

You've got fun combat, simple, but engaging gimmicks, fantastic art style, great music, and it's 30$. Just get the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. Unless Bethesda actually learns something from their third-party studios and Starfield is a finished game on launch, this is GOTY.