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I picked up Skin Deep on the recommendation that it was an ImSim to some degree inspired by Heat Signature, and after completing it, would recommend it heavily to any ImSim fan looking for some fresh takes on the genre with a unique identity. Skin Deep may struggle to manage its complex systems interactions, it may be visually a bit exhausting, but it's sufficiently packed with fun, solid ideas and executes them in a charming way that makes the sheer jankiness of it all forgivable. It's got a great comedic style of bizarre slapstick, and ends nicely, if a bit tepidly, right around the point that it has exhausted all of its tricks. Each mission has a satisfying arc as you go from hiding in the shadows tripping people with banana peels, luring them into traps, and dumping them down trash chutes, to an explosive finale where you finally get to wield some firepower of your own.

Skin Deep was an unexpected surprise, and I hope we'll continue to see small indie studios lead the revival of the ImSim genre with experiments like this one.

Project Silverfish needs a little more time to cook, but as an exercise in creating tension and tone, it's pretty remarkable. It's not for everyone, but it accomplishes what it is trying to do.

Gunfights are swift, chaotic, and brutally punishing; enemies throw grenades, move aggressively, shine lights in your eyes, acquire targets quickly, and a few bullets will take you or them down. Monsters skitter around in the dark, make scary noises, and can mess you up in seconds if you let your guard down. Each time I encountered a new foe, I was torn between fear, aggression, and curiosity. Visibility is a serious hazard, since flashlights give away your position. Quests don't have markers and often don't have much evidence to go on; it feels very Morrowind in how it forces you to really pay attention to the environment, unless you're a coward like me and just look things up whenever you're stuck.

The result of all of this is a game that is at times oppressively difficult in a way that forces the player to engage with it maximally. You'll scan every corner of the environments for signs of movement. You'll listen closely for enemy footsteps. You'll be terrified to wander too far from home or risk losing everything you've collected.

It's got some problems of course. Environments, loot, encounters, and non-hostile characters need a little more variety and interactivity. NPCs can seemingly instantly identify your faction allegiance in the dark, such that sometimes the easiest way to tell if someone is hostile is just to see if they shoot at you. Some of the intentional UI jank crosses into just being annoying (why can't I place food in my hotbar?). The game is a little *too* punishing IMO; it only takes a fraction of a second to die in a gunfight, and then you're in for a corpse run that could take several minutes across a huge map. I chose to disable dropping items on death and gave my character 2 stacks of the Speed Boost trait, which made a huge difference, but also compromised a lot of the game's tension and immersion.

Fans of the STALKER series should strongly consider picking up Project Silverfish. People who are more generally fans of open world FPS-RPGs might keep a close eye on this one as it develops.

I almost overlooked Abalon, but the more I played it, the more it grew on me. I've now probably played a dozen runs and would now definitely recommend it as a fun and casual tactics roguelite. It's satisfying to start a new run, gradually pick up neat new gear and cards, and eventually shape it into a powerful build by exploiting all the different synergies and effects. The difficulty is a little uneven at times, especially when you're starting out; most battles, even boss fights, will be trivial, but a handful will be brutal if you're caught off guard. Luckily, as I figured out wayyy too late into the game, you can basically instantly retreat from battles with only a modest score penalty.

The runs themselves are pretty similar, so the feel of a given run will be more dictated by your character and deck than anything about the maps themselves. It does kinda feel like you've seen most of what there is to see in the first 2 or 3 runs. Still, there's comfort in repetition. There's also a couple nice metaprogression elements - unlocking new characters, and the ability to start new runs with a couple pieces of equipment, for instance.

Overall, cute, fun, easy to pick up, I like it.

I wanted to meet Paradise Killer where it's at - open-world murder mystery set in a surreal vaporwave tropical island run by genocidal cultists is such a wild pitch, and the game's got the strong narrative voice and visual style to pull it off. But the experience of actually playing it just isn't very fun.

The collect-a-thon gameplay feels like at best filler, and at worst an impediment to the supposed premise of the game by robbing the mystery element of any intentionality. Most of the clues I discovered weren't motivated by my own cleverness or following a lead, but by just meticulously winding my way through each location picking up random junk until I found important evidence. On that note, some extremely critical information is easy to miss, including one particular element that, near as I can tell, is not telegraphed to the player anywhere, doesn't show up when using the "meditation" upgrade, and is tucked away in some foliage in an extremely remote part of the map. Finding this element not only *straight-up tells you the real solution to the game's biggest mystery*, but that particular solution is impossible to find *without* this clue. Frankly baffling choice.

The other half of the game, the murder mystery/visual novel, is honestly not that great either. The writing is full of whacky, larger than life characters, but none of them are agents in the story: they don't react to any of your choices, don't remember anything you've done, and their relationship with you swings wildly from second to second: they'll happily socialize with you and treat you as a trusted friend minutes after you've bluntly told them that you have proof they committed a crime - in a world where the punishment is death! The protagonist herself has inconsistent characterization as well - she'll wax philosophical about the nature and psychology of crime and justice... but she's part of an organization that is committing, in her own words, a genocide! And she doesn't seem to have any thoughts on that genocide besides mild disapproval? At the end, when you decide who to convict for which crimes, you personally execute them on the spot, and nobody, protagonist included, reacts to it at all! Some of these characters she's known for millennia, some are her closest friends, and you can kill any of them with equal curt dispassion. It felt like a waste of the characterization the game had been building up its entire runtime.

Ultimately, while it is fun to put the pieces together, and the trial sequence at the end is a satisfying victory lap, the game just doesn't really *feel* like you're investigating a mystery. It feels like you're a janitor. You clean up the random garbage left behind after the island has been abandoned so that it'll stop clogging up your meditation screen, just as you rotely exhaust every conversation option with every character so it'll stop clogging up your dialog screen.

Just kind of disappointing.

I've been following Arcen Games' work for some time and I think HotM has to be their best yet. It has everything I've come to expect from this studio: a novel angle on an existing strategy genre, an eclectic pile of mechanics and systems to mess with, a mix of simulation and narrative driven stories, and totally off-the-wall sci-fi worldbuilding.

In my current playthrough, I was in the midst of fending off an army of mutant velociraptors pouring into the city when the local private military spotted my skyscraper-sized liquid metal dragon and freaked out. I found myself fighting off dinosaurs and enormous mechs using my own armies of teleporting karate androids. Just when it looked hopeless, I unlocked a new armor-piercing weapon that let me chew through the mechs while the dinosaur invasion turned tail and ran. It ruled.

Like all these games, HotM often struggles to direct player attention to what matters, which can make playing it a bit mentally fatiguing, but it's also a bit more narrativized and on-rails than their other games, which eases the burden. Arcen continues to make games that are wild and unique experiments; nobody does it quite like these guys.

Edit: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ okay, forget everything I just said about this game being too on-rails, I just unlocked the time travel mechanic. This game kicks ass.

A unique and cute hybridization of genres. It's satisfying to build up a small army of souped-up forest critters to follow you around and chew through armies of enemies.

It does suffer from some balance/positive feedback issues; the game has a few different core resources to juggle but some of them (like Sylph) don't really matter. Overextending your squad is an easy mistake to make, and it only takes a few seconds to lose all of them, at which point it's very difficult to recover.

The demo is plenty of time to decide if you'll like it; the full game is pretty much more of it. It gets a recommend from me because it's a unique idea that is competently executed.

Shadow of Doubt's premise - procedurally generated murders - sounds too good to be true, and it is. Like any game that relies heavily on procedural generation, SoD is in a race against human pattern recognition. The first few mysteries are incredibly cool, as you scan for fingerprints, break into phone routers for call logs, scrub through security cam footage, and record all your findings on a sprawling murder board. The level of detail in the sim is impressive.

Quickly, though, you work out the patterns for solving each type of case, and the game becomes stale.

The best moments in Shadows of Doubt are those where you earnestly use your own reasoning to draw conclusions about a case. The worst moments in the game are when you hit a wall, and aren't sure whether you're missing a critical clue, blocked by a bug, or are just attributing too much trust in the sim's fidelity.

Overall, Shadows of Doubt is a game that is often either irritating or deeply compelling, (rarely anything in between). The game is most fun if you do a bit of roleplaying, leaning into the noir setting by grabbing a drink at a bar while you read the newspaper for clues to your latest case.

Reluctant thumbs down. I didn't play the game while it was in early access, so I can't corroborate what others are saying about the game being stripped down from its previous versions. All I can say is that what's here is shallow, samey, and a bit mediocre, with occasionally glimpses of a project that was clearly larger in scope.

I enjoyed going through the motions of combat and exploration while I had a podcast or video running on another screen. Other than that, I didn't get much out of the 14 hours I spent playing this game, and didn't feel any need to pursue side content or endgame content.

For a ratio of "how long it takes to play" to "how long you'll think about it when you're done," you can't do much better than Mouthwashing. I think the best case for the game is made by the amount of loving fanart it has inspired on its subreddit that is bizarrely at odds with the game's bleak tone. By the end of the game's two hour runtime, all we want is for the crew of the Tulpar to just be okay.

They never will be.

Hard to overstate just how much of a joy Tactical Breach Wizards is. Every turn is an open-ended puzzle and devising your own clever solutions feels like magic. The ability to freely try things out and quickly rewind takes away all the pressure and replaces it with the glee of discovery. The first time you set up an absurd chain of six perfect actions to knock 3 people out of windows with a single click, you'll be hooked.

On top of that, the writing - both the larger plot and the moment to moment banter between characters - is a blast. Even if it gets a bit whedonesque at times, that just means the parts where characters let their guards down are extra impactful; there's a surprising amount of heart in this story about wizards exploding doors as a metaphor for their own personal anxieties. It all concludes in an off-the-wall finale that had me grinning the whole time.

There's something here for everyone. Puzzle fans will love tinkering with all the game's tools and rules. Turn based strategy fans will love getting cool new abilities to kit out their team with. Fans of Tom Francis' previous work will love seeing new iterations of the ideas he's been developing since Gunpoint. Wizard fans will love wearing silly outfits and shooting lightning at people.

10/10, wouldn't change a thing