Recent reviews by pmrn

Do yourself a favor and stop reading anything people post about this game. If you are a fan of video games, play it.

It's challenging enough to be engaging without being so difficult that it's punishing. The mechanics are finely balanced so that losing stings but you don't lose anything substantial in terms of time commitment. The game challenges you to break it, to operate the underlying mechanics of the game in order to win.

At the core of this game is a decent card game mechanic. I don't care for card games, generally, but this was a fun, tight experience that I completed (less than 100%) in about 15 hours. I'm not sure if I'll play it again but even if I only played it once, this is an experience worth having.

Mini Motorways is the follow-up to the excellent Mini Metro. Both games are abstract (even gestural) traffic management puzzlers, this newer game takes the form of roadways between semi-randomly placed homes and stores. The homes and stores come in different colors, cars are spawned from the homes and they try to commute to a store of the same color. With the ability to place roads, roundabouts, traffic lights, bridges, and highways, the challenge is to keep all of the shops satisfied without traffic snarling to a halt.

There are a few key (to me) similarities between the two games - the biggest of which is probably the soundtrack. Both games do this really fun thing with dynamic background music that is purely constructed out of the sounds the game makes when things occur: a car pulling into a store makes a sound, a new house appearing makes a different sound, etc. All of this is overlaid over a faintly melodic drone and is a real delight to the ear and mind. The minimalist graphics are also still there, but with some fun added details like elevations, and the local map nomenclature labeling the rivers.

At the end of each round (week), you're given a choice between two items - could be extra road tiles, a roundabout, etc just like in Mini Metro. You can freely add and delete roads and other items without penalty once you've acquired them. The puzzling can get pretty deep, when you start thinking about how to demolish and adjust sections of your roadways to keep everything running smoothly.

These games are simple in a lot of ways but also offers a chill puzzling experience that requires continuous attention without feeling hurried. Progression in this game is basically just unlocking the cities and then leader-board chasing, but that's OK. A numerical score is as good a measure as any of progress, and it's really more about getting into the flow and vibe of the game. The game(s) cultivate a novel form of gaming awareness, short periods of interaction followed by pensive planning and staring at your network.

This is a solid full-price purchase if you enjoy chill puzzlers and appreciate a good soundscape and clean minimalist visuals.

Sigma Impact is a physics-based 2d side-scrolling action roguelite with 2-player coop and pvp modes. You - a floating eyeball - move from room to room fighting other floating eyeballs with a hammer-like weapon that you swing using your direction and speed of movement. You can also "let go" of the hammer to throw it, and some weapons have special effects that use the same pool of energy you use to quick-dash - like firing a projectile or restoring lost health. The "feel" of building up the hammer's momentum and swinging it around and hitting something with it is immensely satisfying. The sound design is a big part of that too, making a space that sounds like a "glass dungeon". The dynamic way music is used in the game is fun and clever but there is unfortunately so little of it. What is there is great though.

A run only takes 10-20 minutes, and the arrangements of the rooms that you move through in a linear fashion are pretty limited. There is a "new game plus" mode that gives this game a respectable skillcap. The skill of being good at this game is something novel and lends itself to extremely satisfying and almost balletic maneuvering due to the physics.

This is an extremely fair price for this game and absolutely worth a full-price purchase at 3 bucks. I would love to see more people buy this game because I'd love to see a Sigma Impact 2 with maybe some more complex levels and more enemy variety - and more music!

My 6-year-old loves playing it with me too, even though I have to keep reviving them :)

Until We Die is a delightful mash-up of They Are Billions, Kingdom Two Crowns, and Metro 2033. I saw a youtube of this and was instantly hooked. I am not usually one for the retro pixel aesthetic, but UWD manages to make pixel art look amazing with subtle shading and lighting effects.

The game is far from "retro", it's a tense and clever survival micromanagement sim where you control one leader character who gets things done by giving orders to the other survivors. At first this is the only character with a gun, and the sprint meter is very limited and recovers slowly. Each night in the day/night cycle you get attacked by mutant monsters, and during the day you forage for supplies and build up base defenses.

With a base that extends farther and farther to the left and right, the game really forces you to optimize your priorities - with limited sprint, the distances between your right and left front keep expanding, and the more time you lose to travel, the less orders you can give your survivors (who have very little logic on their own besides to run to the nearest fortification and defend it). There are two main resources in the game - food and supplies - that can be harvested from the tunnels by various means.

There's a deceptively large amount of stuff in this game. You can send groups of three stalkers on expeditions to the surface, making them unavailable to defend your base. New hazards show up as you extend your base's footprint. I've only made it to day 17 so far (the second big wave) and the game has thrown some delightful surprises at me that keep me coming back to see what the next day will bring.

The game is similar to the non-campaign mode of They Are Billions, in that you have to fight off progressively larger waves of enemies while also building your base up and managing resources - just in side-scroller form rather than top-down isometric.

For an early access title that doesn't even have a save feature, this is a remarkably fun and novel game with a soviet pixel aesthetic that is a solid full-price purchase for anyone who liked They Are Billions or Kingdom Two Crowns, people who like management sims that require quick thinking and planning, and fans of survival horror side-scrollers.

Dorfromantik is a casual tile-based landscape building puzzler with soothing music and pleasing visuals. You place hexagonal tiles from a randomized "deck" of tiles and try to match up elements (farmland, houses, trees, waterways, and railways) to satisfy size requirements that are associated with random tiles in the deck. When you meet a requirement, you get more tiles added to your deck, and when the deck is empty the game ends. The trailer on Steam explains the game perfectly and after watching it you pretty much know what to expect from the game. By the end of the run, the rules of the game cause a pleasantly complex landscape to emerge, with towns, railways, farms, and rivers with boats.

This game has a lot in common with the also very excellent casual city-building game "Islanders", to the point where I'm almost certain the two games share developers in common - although the publisher of this game on Steam is different. The music, scoring system, progression, and even the voice narrating the trailer are so similar that I'm convinced it's the same people.

Despite being simple, learning how to progress in the game can get fairly complex, as you learn more about how the different kinds of tiles fit together and the "meta" of the game (best practices for where to put certain types of tiles to prevent blocking yourself later). Like Islanders, the game is simple but not easy. Accessible without being shallow.

This is a solid full-price purchase if you appreciate a chilled-out puzzle experience with consistent and pleasing aesthetics, or if you enjoyed the game "Islanders". If you're looking for more of a management simulation city-builder, the complexity is not there in this game but it's still worth playing for the novel puzzling aspects, clean design, and excellent music and visuals.

I have to start out by saying I don't really like card battlers. They don't appeal to me, had no interest in Slay the Spire. In a motivation drought where I couldn't find any game that sounded good to me (I usually play management sims/automation/building games), I decided to give Griftlands a shot, primarily because of my positive opinion of the developer (I have quadruple-digit hours in Oxygen Not Included and loved Invisible Inc.).

Griftlands is a rogue-like card battler that is also story-driven which is a nice touch. You can select one of three different characters that each have their own game mechanics and overland maps that the game takes place on, which can sometimes intersect in random encounters. Since progression relies on unlocking new cards and buffs between runs, you'll end up skipping dialogue at times because some parts of the run will be the same every time, but in the randomized missions in the game sometimes there are bits of random information like a password that you need to remember later on, so you can't always just blow through all the dialogue even if you remember having done that mission before.

You have two decks of cards each run, one for negotiation and one for combat, and sometimes you have a choice between one or the other. The hazard of always taking the negotiation option, though, is that you need to level-up your combat cards and sometimes combat is unavoidable.

As I've come to expect from this developer, the music and visual style are top-notch, and the game is a treat for the senses. Consider picking it up even if card-battlers aren't your thing, the writing of the dialogue is humorous and well-written, and the negotiation mechanics are interesting enough to be worth the price of admission alone.

There is a lot of low-effort, unoriginal content on Steam for this price-point. Islanders is not that. I've gotten nearly three hours of enjoyment per dollar I spent on this game so far which I consider pretty decent.

Islanders is a chill, simplified city builder/puzzler that presents you with limited choices of what to build and then challenges you to find the "optimal" place to place each building. There is a decent variety of different buildings that give boosts or penalties to your score depending on what other buildings are in range of it when you place it. Score thresholds unlock the next choice of buildings, and if you fail to pass the score threshold the run ends. After passing enough score thresholds you can move on to the next map or continue building.

This is a simple game that gets a lot of important things right. It has a consistent and pleasant visual design, minimal UI, and good sound/music design (the BGM is limited but I honestly never notice, it goes well with the gameplay). There's no resource management or simulated inhabitants, it's a pure puzzle of juxtapositions that results in visually appealing and organically developed villages. I am usually a complexity junky when it comes to building and management games, but rather than finding this game boring, it is a relaxing casual experience while also not being mindless - in the base game mode failure is definitely an option, placing your buildings in less-than-optimal places can end a run even on the first island.

At $5, this is a solid full-price purchase if you enjoy city building games and are interested in a more chill-out and casual experience, or if you like novel puzzlers that you can place at your own pace.

This is one of those rare games I enjoy equally on the PC and mobile. Zen Bound 2 is a puzzle game that takes the form of winding a rope around wood carvings while trying to maximize the surface area of the sculpture in direct contact with the rope. The rope is constantly under tension, and you interact by rotating the sculpture so the rope winds around it. As the levels get more difficult, there is a progression of changes in the gameplay that offer lots of variety and replayability. There is a lot of winding and unwinding and trying to figure out how to eke out that last 2% completion you need to unlock the next stage. There's no timer, no one to compete against, just the rope, the sculpture, the music, and your mouse. It's delightfully minimalist without being lo-fi, calm and unhurried, and easy to pick up and put down for as little or as long as you like. The music is chill, unobtrusive, suitable for the type of puzzle game it is. It is really a unique puzzle game and I don't think I've seen anything like it since, and this game has been around quite a long time! This is a great game to take turns playing locally in groups of 2 or more and is a fun thing to have on in the background during gatherings. Absolutely worth a full-price purchase if you're a fan of novel puzzle games, casual games, minimalist design, or bondage.

DSP is a phenomenal early-access title and absolutely worth a full price purchase if you enjoy Satisfactory or Factorio (two games I love dearly).

The game is an interesting mash-up of influences. Besides the factory-type games, you can detect some subtle shades of other styles of games including Planetary Annihilation and Anno 2205. The game starts off on a single planet, but eventually involves setting up interplanetary and interstellar logistics to acquire and move resources that don't exist on your starting planet. There are no enemies, aliens, competitors, etc, making DSP a chill automate-em-up experience where you can safely walk away from the game and leave it running.

The music is great, somewhere between the tunes that come with Stellaris and Surviving Mars, although unfortunately there isn't a lot of music content and it eventually gets repetitive, although different types of planets have different BGM scores which is pretty cool. One thing I'm hoping for is more music content, a game that lends itself to hours of binge-playing at a time needs more BGM tracks!

The translation is a work in progress (the game appears to be Chinese in origin), you will notice some odd word choices and unhelpful descriptions in the game, but fortunately the devs are super active on discord and recruiting the help of the community so this is something I expect to see improve over time.

The game boots, saves, and exits lightning-fast which was a surprise and a pleasure, and has been extremely stable for the 20+ hours I've been playing so far without a single crash or noticeable bug, which speaks volumes about the devs' quality process! There are some funny choices in the UI design, choices that are slightly puzzling to me like having a tiered toolbar that starts with numbers and ends with function keys when I would usually expect that to work the other way around. Little things like that. There are a number of small refinements they could make, but the game as it stands now is deeply satisfying and fun to play.

The mechanics of plotting and building conveyor belts and sorters is very well thought-out and works very cleanly, making it easy to make a big 'ol pile of spaghetti, one small gripe I have is that I can't figure out how to reverse the direction of belts (despite playing with using the R key), and there's no quick way to upgrade belts from one tier to another, you have to deconstruct it and rebuild it.

Ultimately if you liked Factorio or Satisfactory, there's no question you should buy this game immediately and join the discord! If you didn't like Factorio because of the alien swarm aspect of the gameplay or you didn't like Satisfactory's emphasis on exploration and dealing with feral wild-life, you might like DSP better since it doesn't include those elements. This game should also be strongly considered by science fiction fans who like "big idea" plots about stellar engineering.

At this point 20 hours in I'm only starting to explore other planets in the home system. What I hope to find as I continue playing is fleshed out layers of complexity between interplanetary and interstellar development. Very exciting project, check it out!

This is probably the most heart-breaking thumbs-up I've ever given a game. MGSV is -mostly- the pinnacle of the IP, and you have to take Kojima's high weirdness for granted. It's not -as- weird as Death Stranding but the trajectory is clearly seen in MGSV. You have to sort of look at it as a game based on a tactical military anime that never existed and you'll get it.

The gameplay loop is utterly satisfying, detailed, and curated with a loving touch. You get missions, you do missions, you unlock new gear, you do some more missions, and before you know it it's 5AM the next day. This is without a doubt one of the most satisfying gameplay experiences of its type you'll find anywhere.

Unlike some of my favorite games, there is a natural saturation point where the extended/online content stops becoming interesting and I'd put that somewhere around 200-300 hours, which -still- makes this game an excellent value with a favorable hours-of-enjoyment-per-dollar value.

This is really the apotheosis of Metal Gear, the last word on the matter. You can feel the unfinished nature of the game in the results of Kojima departing the project part-way through, and that gaping wound will leave an impact on you if you play this game. I still say play it. Buy it on sale, though, screw Konami.