Recent reviews by eltee

(7/10)

Pretty simple 'room' like puzzle box game. Its puzzles are pretty forgiving and there isn't a huge amount of challenge here but the boxes themselves are complex enough to be interesting and have a myriad of different themes to explore and play with.

(10/10)

It's hard to say much about this game that hasn't been said a million times before but yeah legitimately this is pretty much a 'perfect' game. Everything about it is fine tuned, sanded till smooth, given a nice coat of varnish and stain and left sparkling. If you like deckbuilders, this is the best in class. If you like roguelikes this is best in class, if you like deckbuilder roguelikes this is probably the platonic ideal.

The graphics are great for this kind of game, the sound is awesome, the overall flow is essentially flawless, and yeah its easy to lose tens, probably hundreds of hours to this just slowly refining strategies, honing your runs and hoping for the ultimate clear, along with absolutely dozens and dozens of different tweaks and modifiers and difficulty boosts.

(8/10)

I hope most folks know the story (har har) with these narrative adventure games by now. This outing hits somewhat closer to home than most (quite literally as I'm from ostensibly the next town over from Haven (Idaho) springs. It does an amazing job of capturing the small mountain town life and I really enjoyed getting to walk through something quite familiar and warm (except in the winter aka september to june).

All kidding aside, I really enjoyed the characters in this one and outside of a stretch in the middle with a very bare-bones larp that overstayed its welcome a bit I really enjoyed walking through the town and inhabiting the world for the little bit I could.

If you like narrative fiction games this is a pretty good one but definitely do not expect much action, this is much more of an introspective experience (which is for me exactly what I wanted)

(8/10)

Pretty solid 2.5D shooter that harkens back to classic 90s nostalgia, the sprites are large and detailed, hit modeling by critical locations is solid, and the action is pretty unrelenting. If you liked games like Killing Time or other later gen 'doom clones' this one is very much going to scratch that itch.

(8.10)

Very simple concept but perfectly executed. The idea is to slowly grow the play space and enhance your tile score potential round after round until you unlock everything and win. Its exactly what it says on the tin and made me happy for a few days poking it

8.5/10

Its fishing from animal crossing, except you can be an animal, which yeah I think everyone can agree makes it 10x better. Oh its also chill as hell and amazing to hang with folks in a relaxed manner

(9.5/10)

This is the rare game that sets out to do a relatively narrow/limited thing and does it so amazingly well it knocks the whole thing right out of the park into something transformative beyond what I could have ever hoped for. Relatively few games really nail the blending of music, visuals, rhythm elements and a cohesive narrative in the way wild hearts does. Its not 100% perfect as there are a few little issues around the timing of just one small sub-section of the interactive elements and it will take multiple runs through to get the patterns down 100%, but honestly this is almost as much a concept album as it is a game, and that album is so good that you probably will find playing back through it multiple times more enjoyable than painful or annoying if you like these kinds of games/this kind of music at all.

I also greatly appreciated in that respect the actual 'album' mode where you can actually play through not as a series of game stages but as a single cohesive 'long play' of everything and more than once I've actually had folks over and mesmerised just with watching me run that mode and kind of viewing the whole thing like a crazy music video to accompany the whole thing. The only thing I wish it had in a more accessible manner was a free play mode where it wouldn't count scores but also wouldn't skip songs during that long play, so that you could hand the controller off to other folks and they could enjoy it without having to learn the whole game back to front first themselves.

Finally as a testament to just how much I enjoy this game, I came and bought it on steam after having access to it on apple arcade for quite a while just to really enjoy the better screens/response times to help with the very hardest areas. If you have ever liked rhythm or musical games you owe it to yourself to give this one a try (and may just recognize a few homages to your favorites here and there)

(8/10)

Ok well this one has been a heck of a roller-coaster. Elephants in the room were the anti-cheat (still a problem and still honestly can only recommend installing this on Linux where its automatically tamed to its container, not yer whole OS), and obviously the huge controversy over the TOS and account issues.

The game is fine, where 'fine' is brutally hard but still fun and mostly fair. It absolutely requires a full squad, or playing with randoms as going in with less than 4 divers does not have any difficulty forbearance, in fact quite the opposite, it will be punished with additional enemy mobs to raise difficulty even higher.

It is fun, but yeah view it as very much a multiplayer only endeavor, anything else is definitely going to be somewhere between unfair and outright insane. Anyway, the devs have done a heck of a job and if you like this kind of brutal squad run, this is definitely the best one out there right now.

(8/10)

Cute 'detective' style adventure/deduction game using plants. Most of the play centers around identifying and then using the various plants at your disposal, and figuring out clues to find more. There are some branching paths and a bit of a mystery to untangle.

Absolutely worth a play through if you like logic/deduction type games and I definitely appreciated its overall pretty chill ambiance.

(9/10)

Something of a spiritual sequel to FTL. The combat is still turn based, tho this time a bit more of a positioning affair which crosses with a deck-based action mechanic. I love the aesthetic/music/mood/art/etc. The time-loop story isn't the deepest in the world but it doesn't really have to be and is actually quite fun and helps to justify that just one more turn/run/etc kind of play that games like this excel at.

I think the UI for some of the out-of-game stuff like trying to 100% collections and the like could use a little tweaking, like its hard to keep track of if a card you see is or is not one that is actually fully new to you and would unlock if you grab it, vs is another one thats almost the same but you have had maybe 20 playthroughs back.

Overall a great game tho for folks who like rogue-lite card games and an absolute must own for anyone who loved FTL.