Recent reviews by danopian

Incredible puzzle game, but not those puzzles, puzzle puzzles, but also jigsaws

Very pleasant. Strikes a good balance between needing to think strategically and having some elbow room to mess up or get distracted filling in every space.

Really something special. A resource-based, story-and-choice-driven RPG similar to Disco Elysium, Fallen London, Citizen Sleeper, or (without the ship combat) Sunless Sea or Sunless Skies. You have 40 days as the new Roadwarden (like a more responsible witcher) in a frontier area to scope it out on behalf of a colonizing merchant guild, help out people, find what happened to your predecessor, ally with various factions against one another or your employers - the web of decisions and possible story threads to pick at is bewildering, and you won't have time (unless you are a strict min/maxer) to do it all. So your playthrough feels very personal. Haven't felt this great about a story-and-choice-driven RPG since Citizen Sleeper. Highly recommend.

Subnautica on land with long-term terraforming mechanics (make numbers go up) and base automation. Exploring the world is satisfying; seeing it change over time is truly unique. Just fantastic.

This is a must-play for puzzle fans, and....free?!?

Hades, but Minesweeper

Tons of fun. Essentially takes the card-dragging mechanics of Cultist Simulator and makes it more punchy and tangible.

Mellow, moving exploration of the ethics of technology & trying to find meaning in your career & searching for connection with people in an isolated society & grappling with the choices of your past & playing solitaire in the form of a beautiful illustrated visual novel.

I was startled by how much I loved this game. After some thought, I've concluded that it's because it's such a perfect example of how limitations allow for creativity. On the surface this is a minimalistic game - grid-based, fairly simple RPG systems, no dialogue or NPCs or towns, fairly limited character progression systems. But oh man, what this game does within those constraints is masterful.

What might not come across in the screenshots or descriptions is that the real meat of the game is its puzzles and secrets. This game is full of really hard, really satisfying puzzles and verrry obscure secrets, which are realistically solvable but require close attention and some fairly outside-the-box thinking. This is a game that respects your intellect and does not hold your hand. I think of Fez and La Mulana as very close examples.

The dungeon-crawling and combat are unique, fashioned after a very specific older genre, but while fun those elements mostly were the bun around the puzzle meat. Together they achieve a great feedback loop, though, where leveling up & upgrading your kit lets you push a bit further into new areas and not spectacularly die, and solving puzzles almost always nets you objectively better tools for survival.

And survival is the bar to clear for the majority of the game - it's hard. Expect lots of trips back to a healing crystal with one or two limping characters hauling their dead colleagues back for a res', and white-knuckle boss fights that you're shocked to beat. But like the puzzles, the difficulty of the combat is just right - challenging, but possible. Clearing these challenges and exploring the world piece by piece, gradually filling in the map (which lets you take notes & place icons!), felt like slowly unravelling a tangled knot. So good.

This game has nothing connecting it to the first, plot-wise, and personally (having briefly tried 1) I connected better with this one, with its wider variety of environments that give you intermittent reprieves from claustrophobic dungeon environments. You can jump straight to it. I played it on the normal difficulty level which felt just right, while I both respect and am concerned for folks who played it on the harder level or optional ironman perma-death mode or other difficulty toggles. I also played with the default party and appreciated its balance, because I hate getting hours into an RPG only to figure out my party balance is busted, but you can make one yourself.

Incredibly challenging, incredibly satisfying. Like many Zachtronics games, this distills the experience of coding and problem solving to its most essential parts. The goals of each challenge are clear, keeping what you're trying to accomplish focused, but the game offers a wide amount of freedom to solve puzzles your own way (or hyper-optimize your solution to compete against friends).

This game's unique conceit of having the guide to the coding language (a simple assembly-like language with networking) and contextual clues for each puzzle contained in a "Zine" which you can print or view as a PDF is really clever, and makes the whole experience really immersive (particularly if you have a connection to the '80s/'90s and early programming).

The rest of the presentation was also surprisingly top-notch, a step forward from recent Zachtronics games, with excellent cutscenes and voiced dialogue, great music, and even more than the usual generosity in the interface. There's the usual bespoke Solitaire-like card game, but also (some spoilers here but not much) a fully functioning miniature game development suite where you use the game's coding language to write games for a Gameboy-like handheld, as well as the ability to create and share puzzles on Steam Workshop.

The only downsides I would highlight are A) if you're not interested in printing the 'Zines it can be a little tedious to back out to the main menu and open the PDFs and then to alt-tab between them and the game, and B) it can sometimes be hard to process what's happen on the visualization side of the screen on the puzzles with lots of Exas, compared to the absolute perfectly comprehensibility of Opus Magnum. But neither of those significantly detracted from the experience.

If you've enjoyed other Zachtronics games, this is a no-brainer. If you haven't, you should absolutely try it if you've done any coding and enjoy code challenges, but if you're not a coder, try Opus Magnum first.