Recent reviews by DeepFried

The music slaps, the art is charming, the presentation is clean, and the gameplay is addictive. Great little auto battler to burn a few hours on here and there.

I'm updating my review here from an initial not recommended to recommended. Jalopy still has major issues in terms of bugs and design flaws but either the worst have been dealt with or i'm just adept at avoiding them at this point.

Once you get past the jank there is a lot to like about Jalopy, its a survival style rogue-lite where you have to keep your car running to your destination, or if you fail your car gets teleported back to the start where you can patch it up and try again. Upgrading the car is actually quite fun and the driving itself is a somewhat zen experience.

If this is the sort of thing you might enjoy then Jalopy is worth a go, though it definitely still has major flaws.

The steam controller is very much a niche controller for specifc scenarios. In general, games that require twin sticks will still be better on a twin stick controller like the xbox360 controller, and similarly games that require a mouse will be better with an actual mouse. But there are those games that sit in between, that don't require twitch mouse accuracy or fast action twinstick controls, and in that niche you can fit the steam controller.

I would say this is mostly turn based or action with pause style games, games that need a mouse but don't need you to be super quick or accurate with it. if you have games like that and you want to play them from the couch, then the steam controller is a god send, if not, then its just a suboptimal choice.

Everspace is first and foremost a rogue-like, so if you're looking for a more traditional space sim with trading, exploration etc you're probably taking a wrong turn with Everspace. The gameplay is delivered in discrete chunks punctuated by permadeath, a run might last a matter of minutes or probably at most an hour. Between runs you get to spend the money you gathered in the previous run on perks, which are permanant ship or pilot upgrades. So the game gets easier as your ship gets stronger, and this enables you to get further and make more money, until you reach the critical point of being able to complete an entire run.

The game looks great, and the combat is pretty good, I've no major complaints there, to me it feels a lot like X3 in that regard and I recommend mouse and keyboard controls. There is a scavenging and crafting mechanic, so as you're progressing from one jump to the next you are gathering resources to make ship systems and missles, and also picking up weapons and ship systems from crates. The sectors are procedureally generated but there isn't a huge amount of variety and the basic gameplay loop is quite repetitive even for a rogue-like. This is the biggest problem with the game I think, it isn't sufficiently different between sectors and runs and so you can get somewhat tired of it quickly; i'd say you can probably get 15-20 hours out of it at most before it gets boring.

For me, space sims of any kind live and die on the ability to chose and customise your ship, but in Everspace the lasting ship progression is limited to small stat increases and equipment slot unlocks. This isn't really enough to give you an attachment to your ship or a sense of your ship being unique, or tailored to a role. there aren't really any trade off decisions to be made, all customisations are universal upgrades, more armour is always better, there is no downside or reason to chose an upgrade path.
So you're literally just grinding your way through the entire lot of upgrades to end up with the 'best' version of that ship. meaningful customisation comes to some extent in the ships device and weapon loadout, but this is default at the start of each run, if you want a specific loadout you either have to get lucky and find the items you want, or harvest the materials and craft them, assuming you've been lucky enough to get the blueprint at somepoint.

The upshot of this is that most of the time in a run is spent "gearing up" rather than using the ship loadout you actually want, which as a repetitive process gets annoying. The normal gamplay loop for a space sim is get the best ship you can afford, upgrade it to suit your purpose, then when you have enough money replace it with a better ship, and then upgrade that etc... in Everspace you're just stuck, repeating the first part over and over, the same ship, the same upgrades. Its true there are 3 ships in the game, but these are sidegrades rather than upgrades, they are balanced so that with slighly different tactics they're all equally compotent.

Soma is like a mashup of bioshock, system shock 2 (clear influence here), and amnesia with a strong existential philosophical theme and most of the action and RPG elements stripped out. Its essentially a minimal interaction adventure game, with a potent atmosphere, and an interesting story which asks a lot of questions. It also has a veneer of Frictional's hallmark horror mechanics, basically hide/run from the monster, but this feels like its not a central aspect of the game, they could easily have made Soma as scary as the dark decent but clearly chose not to. On the whole its a short (8hrs) but worthwhile experience, that you probably wont go back to; its not a masterpiece like the dark decent but its not a failure either.

Probably my favourite game, certainly one of the best single player survival games ever made. The long Dark is a large and brutal survival sandbox, modelling hunger, thirst, cold, and injuries. Its you against nature with whatever you can scavenge, craft, or hunt to keep you alive against starvation, wolves, and sub arctic conditions.

Its an unrelenting game of resource management, constant life an death decisions, and optimisation. Every action you take feels important and can end up killing you if you get it wrong.

The main criticisms I would make of TLD are in its user interface, in places its non-intuitive, and throughout there is a lack of ergonomic optimisation. If you want to pick up a stick, you click twice, every time you pick up a stick, two clicks. No reason at all it couldn't have been one click. If you want to transfer a stack of items to a container, you have to click repeatedly on increase/decrease arrows to get the amounts right... why couldn't they let you just type the number of items you want to transfer. So many poor ergonomic design decisions like this make the game a bit of a click feat, so beware if you have carpal tunnel or something similar.

The other criticism I would make is in the prevalence of hostile wolves, this is a defining factor in the TLD game world, but frankly I prefer my challenge in survival games to be weighted much more on surviving the elements and starvation, rather than battling enemies. Fortunately there is a custom difficulty where you can tailor all the elements of the sandbox to your taste, so that mitigates the problem considerably. I still feel its a bit of a shame that the default difficulties lean so heavily on the wolves for the challenge factor however.

On the whole though, I strongly recommend the game to any single player survivial fans.

Perhaps the ultimate platformer, nice aesthetic, great music, super tight controls (controller) and mechanics, and its hard, really really hard. Super Meat Boy is the sort of game you have to throw a lot of time at to hone skills and lightning fast reflexes... and you do this by dying, over and over and over - this is an intentional mechanic, it puts you right back in the action as soon as you die, no down time or loading so it encourages you to learn by repetition.

Many will find this a frustrating game, but through that frustration is complusion and a high skill ceiling, if you put the time in you get rewarded back. Honestly the only way I could beat this game is if I was locked in a room with nothing but this game, for weeks... and frankly I think I would love that, but with so many other games to play and other things to do the frustration of this game ends up with me droping it a few hours after picking it up.

Deadlight is a story driven platformer with nice graphics and production qualities, the platforming is pretty tight and feels good, unfortunately they have used a number of frustrating mechanics such as: Timed sequences, infinitely respawning enemies, teaching through trial and error, and worse it often combines these; frankly these sort of mechanics are anachronistic and shouldn't be in a game like this.
Deadlight is pretty short which honestly is a mercy, its a shame as there is a competent and enjoyable platformer in Deadlight somewhere but I suspect lack of budget has made it what it is.

Its showing its age now but Rainbow Six 3 is still the best tactical FPS in my opinion, and for my money is one of the best single player FPS experiences you can get, assuming you like your FPS slow and butal.

Another high quality and unusual puzzle/adventure game from the makers of Machinarium, Botanicula has a very distinctive art style and supurb sound track/effects, delivering a somewhat artsy but well polished and unique experience. The gameplay has toned down the puzzle aspect in comparison to Machinarium and most of the puzzles are essentially hunting for a set of items which entails exploring and interacting with the world, in fact the puzzles almost seem like an excuse to deliver the art and sound assets, which given the strength of these is excusable.

On the whole a charming and enjoyable artsy adventure.