Recent reviews by daestwen

I have played this game on and off for years and it's still perfect. Wish there were more intuitive controls for the steam deck though!

Either I am very good at this game (#doubt) or the difficulty curve drops significantly after the second level. Resource management on the very easy side - I didn't need to work very hard to get more than I needed for everything. That said, very enjoyable and very satisfying - hoping new game+ will be hardr and need more strategy.

I love all the animal behaviour animations. Sometimes the building input is finicky, but worth it just for all the cute stuff.

This is a tentative thumbs down, as the game is pretty polished and playable but there are a few factors that meant that I'm probably not going to keep playing until there have been another few updates.

PROS
- Game is gorgeous, art is polished and the characters are designed in a lovely way
- Roguelite elements allow for newer players to rougelikes to level up and make the game easier for themselves as they progress

CONS
- If you're a fan of Slay the Spire, you can probably skip this one for now - a lot of the mechanics are lifted wholesale from that game (including card powers and level progression. The main difference is the ability to permanently level up your characters, which lowers the difficulty level - so if you didn't like Slay the spire because it was too hard, this might better suit you.
- There's not a lot of world building or story to cement you in why you're there, why you're collecting gods or what they mean to each other. For a game with so many beautifully designed characters, I'd really love to get to actually experience them on a unique story level for each one

TL'DR I'm going to wait a couple of updates and then try this again

Super chill and weirdly satisfying.

I really enjoyed both Bastion and Transistor, but Hades feels like someone decided to look into exactly how I like to game and design one just for me. I hate how much I love this game. I feel played by how much I love this game.

Even in Early Access form, Niche is a solid game. The graphics even on the lower settings run my computer pretty hot, so it's probably not fully optimised yet, but even without all the features fully implemented, the mechanics of the game are so well put in place that it's still really fun. There's a lot of potential, here, and I am looking forward to the next updates!

There isn't really a tutorial, but it's intuitive enough that it almost doesn't need one. The only real things I would recommend would be to allow the player to be able to select the individual creatures through the family tree, or be able to mark them somehow. (Basically I keep planning out breeding schedules and then forgetting who I was going to breed with who...)

A slight warning for sexual abuse victims, however, there is a mechanic that could be triggering, which involves an unknown 'horny male' randomly appearing and mating with females in your population. The idea behind the mechanic is a good one - introducing unwanted or unknown genes into the gene pool, or adding variability while it wasn't there - but the suddeness of the implementation can be startling and sometimes unsettling.

I tried this one on a whim and ended up enjoying it so much that I played through it a few times.

If you're looking for a game where you can build a vast space empire - this isn't it. But if you just want to fly around and discover strange, bizarre, and sometimes neat creatures - this is it. I can happily sink hours into this game just wandering around and discovering things.

Okay, I am a huge squad-based tactics fan, and I've really enjoyed Double Fine's other games, so I knew I would be biased from the get-go, but: Man, has no other game got me hooked this fast in a while.

The only reason I haven't played it every minute since I bought it is that my computer overheats. (Which is my computer's fault, not the game's.)

Seriously, I love the time element in this game especially - and the fact that there are enemies who even use time in their attacks? Awesome.