Recent reviews by lovinglife139

I absolutely love this game. I love all kinds of strategy, from grand strategy to the simplest, most casual tower defense games, and I play a lot of strategy games. Very rarely does a strategy game scratch the right kind of replayability itch to keep me crawling back. There are three games thus far in my life to have done this: Age of Empires II, Nobunaga's Ambition series (recent), and Old World.

Old World combines the dynasty gameplay of Crusader Kings and its ilk with the 4X gameplay of the Civilization series without becoming so over-complicated that it takes you a ton of time just to get a grasp on the basic mechanics. You decide which civilization to play as out of a handful, and can choose from a myriad of options to set up your game. Other than civilizations, you can play with tribes and barbarians (barbarians are just fodder for XP while tribes aren't as strong as civilizations but have some diplomacy options). You can also choose the type of succession, which is fun to play with. I often set mine to allow only women to inherit, or women to inherit before men. You start out as a character that will rule and die before the end of your game in all likelihood; it's up to you to marry, procreate, and build your civilization from the ground up while paving the way for your successor and dealing with outside threats.

Old World is extremely easy to learn for a game of this breadth, and highly addictive. There are so many options in setting up your gameplay having to do with difficulty, map size/type, types of victories, etc. This is one of those games where losing doesn't hurt, because you had fun and wrote your own story along the way. Events and options pop up quite often, leading you to make decisions that have lasting consequences. You have to balance loyalties between your people, noble families, and other civilizations. Each character has their own relationship with your leader, affected by your actions, your religion, and your personality. You can gain or lose traits depending on what kind of leader you are, and when you eventually die and pass along the torch, you have an entirely new leader and personality to mess with. This gives you an excuse to play under different rules and with a different mindset and it's so much fun to adapt to as you play.

I could ramble on about all the things I love about this game, but I won't. I'll simply say a few more things about what this game does right: playability, and replayability, whether you are looking for strategy first or a simulation first, the difficulty modifiers will get you there. The graphics are beautiful, and the game runs well, only starting to slow down on giant maps and once cities get sprawling and established. I bought all DLC at full price to support the game and haven't been disappointed. More storylines and civilizations to play with, all quality. The game throws challenges at you through achievements or other means that are actually fun to strive for, like completing a game only using one city. The only thing I have to say that could be construed as remotely negative is how difficult it can be to move troops across water until you get used to the anchoring system.

Old World is just a wonderfully addictive game that I keep coming back to and out of all the games I own on Steam, it's one of fifteen or so marked as a "Favorite." I highly recommend you try it if strategy simulations are at all your cup of tea.

I absolutely recommend Star Valor if you are looking for a top-down space RPG that gives you the freedom to do whatever you want to do. One review I read that encouraged me to buy the game at full price to play it right away was this: it's like SPAZ without the zombies. I loved SPAZ, but I'm tired of zombies in games. Now that I've spent way too much time in the game after buying it two weeks ago, I full-heartedly agree with the other review.

Star Valor gives you a ship and a gigantic procedurally-generated universe and hands the reins over to you. There are multiple factions that are warring that you can join, take advantage of, or ignore. Allying with each faction unlocks various missions and ships. You can choose to become a pirate, a trader, a mercenary-for-hire, a fleet manager, an explorer, a scavenger, a craftsperson. You get XP for everything: fighting, completing missions, exploring sectors, crafting, scrapping equipment to learn blueprints, mining, trading. Over time, you unlock the skills and tools necessary to fly gigantic dreadnoughts with space pilots surrounding you and fighting for you, coming back to dock on your ship to repair and fight again. One of my favorite perks in any game is to lead armies or squads, and Star Valor does this. You can outfit each ship, give each pilot a nickname, etc.

The largest problem I've come across in any space game is ease of learning the gameplay, systems, controls, etc. Star Valor is extremely easy to learn. As is the case with most games like this, gameplay is a rinse-and-repeat cycle: explore new sector, do what you want to do there, find jumpgates, move to next sector, repeat. That's not a criticism; I found myself coming back to Star Valor night after night to do more because there's a constant sense of progression. I played primarily as a miner and fleet manager of fighters and support ships. Mining asteroids is consistently satisfying, and I always had a goal: upgrade my ship, a fleet's ship, max out my weapon levels, have nine fleet members, etc. It is stupidly addictive.

Star Valor is not the prettiest looking game. I do prefer the colored themes of SPAZ's systems. There is some of that here, but very little. There are various types of systems (pitch black, nebula, asteroid rush, etc.), and the procedural generation is done really well so that you don't always know how sectors will space their resources, space stations, etc. There are really cool background aesthetics at times, from the planets you fly by or the asteroid fields in the distance. It's also not a terrible looking game, and it runs extraordinarily well.

Overall, Star Valor is one of those space RPGs that you can play regardless of whether you're really determined to fight everyone and rise through levels really quickly, or just be lazy and relax, exploring or mining wherever you choose. There are tons of options for however you want to play, and the open-ended nature of the gameplay encourages many playthroughs for different play styles. I know Star Valor is a game I'll keep coming back to to scratch this particular itch, and I hope Rafael continues to thrive wherever his developer skills take him.

Does anyone else remember Kongregate, the website full of free online games that jumpstarted the tower defense craze of the mid to late-2000s (introducing us to franchises like Bloons and GemCraft)? I do. I played Monstrum's first Monsters' Den release in late-2007 and supported their future games, all on Kongregate (even today). The issue with Kongregate is that flash-based games only saved your progress up until you cleaned you computer and cleared all cookies--then you were starting anew. With this in mind, I was happy to support Monstrum with real money on Steam. I bought all the Monsters' Den games here, but started playing Godfall recently because as far as my knowledge goes, this is the first game of the franchise that is not available for free and I had never played it.

The original Monsters' Den was barely more than a basic procedural dungeon crawler with limited options for gamers who couldn't afford something more. Godfall seeks to improve on the formula, offering not only procedurally-generated dungeons (and lots of them) but a half-hearted attempt at a story, a variety of classes and leveling options, and even some simulation elements as you manage a mercenary company of adventurers and can play as one team as the others are doing as you will elsewhere (making money, leveling, gaining reputation, etc.). There are plenty of missions available to you to pick or reject at your choosing, factions to earn reputation for (both by completing missions and turning in reputation items you get traversing dungeons anyway), and loot to uncover.

Godfall scratches the dungeon crawling itch--but not entirely. While dungeons are procedurally-generated and offer treasures, ambushes, enemies, and more, they are all particularly ugly and no matter how often I tried zooming in to get better immersed, the game would tug the camera back away from me after every battle, so I decided to stop bothering. Travelling through maps can be a bit of a hassle; each room seems to open up to three more, which means you are often in one corner when you have multiple paths everywhere else to get through. In most dungeon crawlers this is something that's fun because it feels like you're (pleasantly) lost in a place you need to fight your way out of. In Godfall, it feels different somehow. Perhaps because the environment isn't particularly interesting, or perhaps because battles are commonplace. Speaking of which...

Battles in Monsters' Den games have always been hit or miss for me. I've seen many reviews here say they are tedious, and they don't remember them being tedious from Kongregate, and I'm here to say: yes, they were. But because the games were free, and we were younger and more willing to forgive, that was something we excused. Compared to other dungeon crawlers, Godfall's battles have far more afflictions put on you by enemies (prepared to be stunned extremely often) and far more healing powers by enemies (many enemies heal so much per turn, and most groups of enemies have dedicated healers). Some of this should be expected. However, the sheer amount of afflictions placed on you while enemies are healing and curing their own makes battles last many turns longer than feel necessary, particularly if the enemies pose no real risk to you. When you're trying to get through an entire dungeon (many floors worth, at Tier 5 and above) and there is an enemy every other room, this gets tedious quickly.

This is all compounded with the fact that most classes need to be unlocked, so you are stuck with the five given to you at the start for a while, and each class has two upgrade trees. You can decide to specialize in one of them (unlocking further upgrades on these skills) or dabble in both (at the risk of losing additional upgrades). Either way, you run out of options quickly. In my 16 hours of playtime, I'd unlocked everything I'd wanted with my main party, but had only unlocked one additional class, meaning I was out of options with my main party but didn't have enough new options to create a totally new/different team to play with. When the main battle system can be so tedious, the last thing I wanted to do was start over with another party that comprised of most of the same classes from the first.

All these negatives seem to indicate I didn't enjoy the game, but I did. It just has a shorter wick than most before burning out its welcome. During my short playtime, I feel like I've seen most of what I came here to see. I might come back to Godfall later, or I might not. I loosely recommend Godfall to players looking for an incredibly casual dungeon crawling experience. If you have time to invest in learning the intricacies of one, I'd recommend diving into a deeper, more comprehensive game. I got Godfall on sale and suggest you do as well. Like others have mentioned, the price tag seems a little steep. I was happy to support them as a whole given I've enjoyed these games in the past. Godfall is a decent game, but only just decent; given the improvements they've made to the franchise, I hope it continues to develop and see success.

Endless Space 2 is a turn based 4X strategy game that takes after its predecessor, which I reviewed favorably last year and applauded it for being the first space-themed 4X game to capture and keep my attention for more than an hour or two. I am only now reviewing Endless Space 2 after having played three separate games as two factions (though I dabbled in other factions for their tutorials).

In Endless Space 2, you pick a faction, explore the galaxy, and decide whether you want to conquer, fight, research, or talk your way to victory over your opponents. The factions here are diverse enough to offer an array of options. For example, for my playthroughs as the United Empire, I focused on conquering while my planets pumped out resources to support my war efforts. These playthroughs included many fights (which you can watch if you choose, which is always fun). This is usually my go-to faction in strategy games: the dominators, conquerors, or authoritarian iron-fists. However, I also played a game as the Vaulters, a DLC faction focused on science and technology. I rarely fought unless I needed to, instead spending most of my time building up resources to support my research, exploring the galaxy for curiosities to support my efforts, and defending my systems while biding my time for a science victory. This was my longest game, and I found I enjoyed it a lot. In games like this, Endless Space 2 feels a lot like a simulation game; there are tons of options for you to build up your solar systems, terraform planets to focus on different resources, and construct wonders or improvements. In this sense, Endless Space 2 can be as relaxing or as relentless as you want it to be.

If you have any experience with 4X games, Endless Space 2 should come fairly naturally to you, though it has multiple tutorial options for players of all skill levels no matter what faction you choose or parameters you set. Endless Space 2 also adds a “Sandbox” difficulty (found below “Easy”); while I haven't yet played in this mode, it is likely to allow you to mess around and get used to gameplay before trying your hand against harder AI. As with the last game, I recommend starting on “Easy” difficulty with the tutorial set to on until you get your bearings.

The one major criticism I had of Endless Space was how you could build up magnificent fleets with the latest technology and get decimated by a particular faction without understanding why. Basically, there are two types of offensive damage and defensive protection: physical (projectiles, hull) and energy (beams, shields). In the original game, it was extremely hard to figure out what your enemy was using, and therefore it was a crap shoot to figure out how to combat it. In Endless Space 2, this is a lot clearer. Each time a battle commences, a screen pops up where you can change tactics and battle strategies. Now there is a plus sign beneath each party, allowing you to view in detail their fleet and its physical/energy attributes. This helps you to choose your battle strategy (some strategies give you bonuses to particular damage/defense types, for example) and perhaps even your build of future ships. Diplomacy also offers you many more options here; as long as you have discovered them, you can attempt diplomacy at any time, and there is now a “suggest terms” option where the game will help you make a deal with another faction if what you want (peace, a trade agreement, etc.) is not quite up to par with what your opponent will accept. (The game will often add a tribute of a special resource, for example.)

What are my criticisms of Endless Space 2? You can no longer claim all victories in one match if you achieve them in tandem. You must instead reload old saves or start new games to go after other victories. That the original Endless Space allowed this was rare, so it's not a huge criticism. Though it is just as beautiful as its predecessor, Endless Space 2's loading screens (particularly the initial screen and the screen before each battle) are far longer. The original loaded battles in seconds; this loads one loads them in about 40-60 seconds. Sometimes, you'll choose to watch all battles, but the game will decide simply to auto-resolve certain battles instead. This bothered me. Every once in a while one particular faction will offer you the same diplomatic action for multiple turns in a row, clogging up your notifications. Horatio was my ally in one game and kept offering me a science agreement I couldn't afford; his notification popped up every single turn for over 60 turns before I finally could afford the resource drain and said, “OKAY, FINE!”

Overall, Endless Space 2 is extremely similar to its predecessor, though it has a few setbacks and a few improvements. This is a game I will keep coming back to. If you already own the original and wonder if you should “upgrade,” I think it's worth it—on sale given the similarities. If you're looking at the franchise and want to know where to start, it's here. The two games are similar enough to where I don't feel you're missing out if you buy one over the other, though the quality of gameplay improvements make Endless Space 2 slightly better than the original. I continue to be impressed by this series and will support future projects by AMPLITUDE Studios.

House Flipper is a relaxing simulation game where you play as a handywoman who takes on renovation projects from home owners (repairs, painting, installation, cleaning, updating, etc.) until you have enough money to buy your own houses to clean, renovate, and resell (hence the "flipping"). This game intrigued me because I have been a landlord for almost twenty years and I find renovations and repairs to be the most fun and rewarding part of my job. House Flipper sounded like it would allow me to do this at a more rapid pace without the real financial risk or the possible bankruptcy or financial ruin that some tenants can pose with their destruction.

I was right: House Flipper is just that. It takes all the best parts of repairing and renovating properties (the choice of aesthetic, the pride you may feel from comparing a broken down property to one that is gorgeous, etc.) and highlights them while minimizing the worst parts of the work (tedium, cost, etc.). This game is extremely relaxing. You start out with a lump sum of cash--not enough to buy even the smallest, dirtiest of homes, but enough to afford materials for starter jobs. I could already afford my first home after two or three contracted projects. Each project will take you between five and forty minutes, and all projects can be turned in at 70%, although I 100% all mine to maximize my profits. There are enough houses here with just the base game and the free DLC to keep you busy for a while; I currently have 23 hours logged and have beat all but five of the external contracts while I've flipped only 5-7 houses, and there are many I haven't yet gotten to. There are a handful of buyers that will bid on your renovated home in an auction that only happens when you designate. They each have their own tastes (one wants a huge living room with multiple TVs, a few don't like kids and want nothing related to children, while families will need more bedrooms and larger gathering areas). It is not stressful in the least to meet these demands, because no matter what, someone will want your property, and there are always other houses you can flip to their specifications. Therefore, for the most part, you are free to quite literally renovate an entire house to your liking and make a tidy profit, allowing you to buy the next and start anew.

Players who enjoy building and outfitting homes in The Sims franchise will adore House Flipper, because while repairs and cleaning are part of the job, the largest amount of time will be spent painting/tiling and furnishing homes. Leveling up grants you perks you can place into different areas of remodeling to make everything convenient and faster. You can demolish and build walls, meaning you're free to completely rearrange rooms of a house if you'd like. There are no time restraints or "rules" that prohibit you from unleashing your creativity and remodeling a burned/flooded/abandoned home to the cottage/ranch/mansion of your dreams. While you do have to earn money to buy the bigger homes, it never feels out of reach. In fact, I am close to affording the most expensive homes in the game after only 23 hours, but there are so many homes needing care as well.

As for negatives, every once in a while it's hard to find an area that needs cleaning even if you see it on the map (one tip: windowsills and the edges of windowsills are often the culprit). Sometimes you'll be remodeling a home trying to sell to one particular buyer for an achievement, and another buyer will insist on loving everything you do and beat them to the top of the list (a quick search in the forums usually gives you tips on how to surpass this, and they've always worked for me). The search feature is sometimes weird when you're looking for something particular to buy, and the categories aren't very helpful (washers, while almost always found in bathrooms in the game, are not found in the bathroom category). Some homes have duplicate layouts, though they often have different furniture set-ups, so it doesn't get old.

Overall, House Flipper is an amazingly relaxing simulation game that I recommend to anyone looking for that soft and fuzzy feeling of accomplishment after beautifying something, or making something out of nothing. Even if you have no skill in these areas in real life, House Flipper allows you to live out your creative dreams and turn abandoned property into a home that people will love. It's a wonderful game and I look forward to supporting future projects by Empyrean.

I love sudoku and was really looking forward to playing Sudoku Universe since it is overwhelmingly recommended. Unfortunately, the game will not allow me to play it. It starts to a white screen where I can only hear music and see no menu. After searching in the forums for a fix, I tried all the suggested fixes, none of which worked. The developer is aware of the issue as a user brought it up to him years ago. The user even posted again in the thread asking for an update because they still couldn't play. The developer still has not responded as of four years later.

I attempted to refund the game, but since it has been over two weeks since my purchase I am unable to. Thus, I needed to leave this negative review as a permanent warning to future purchasers to try the game out as soon as you buy it in case it refuses to work. It's such a shame such a well-loved and simple game won't work for some players; I'm sure I otherwise would have enjoyed it.

Alpha Polaris is a free and short point and click adventure game with horror themes that can be knocked out in an afternoon for gamers unwilling to commit. The graphics are dated even for its release date (2015). This is Turmoil Games' only game, as the team are now split up and working elsewhere. While not mind-blowing in any aspect, Alpha Polaris is a decent little game for your time and is worth a playthrough if you are at all interested in point and click adventure games.

You play as Rune, a graduate student working on his thesis while staying at an oil research station in the isolated Arctic. The setting and atmosphere is reminiscent of John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982), which is both a good thing (what a lovely, isolated place!) and a bad thing (inspirations from arguably better media will remind the consumer that the current media fails to live up to the same expectations). When some mutilated bones are brought into the research station by a crew member, odd events start taking place, and it is up to you to figure out what is happening, why, and how to stop it.

The story here is lackluster, if only because the game doesn't take the time or care to fully flesh out the details. Ideas are introduced but never delved upon. Although the game is absolutely horror-focused in theme, it never even remotely scared me; you are incapable of dying, all confrontations are dealt with via cut scenes, and any attempts at psychological horror are unsuccessful because of a lack of time spent with characters who die or are in peril or a lack of interest in the subject matter because it feels shallow considering--again--a lack of time spent considering them. Still, despite Alpha Polaris's lackluster story, it manages to create a competent point and click adventure game around them. Puzzles are nicely varied, most make logical sense, and there are methods of convenience available to you (click on Rune to get a hint for your next objective, or hit the 'space bar' to see all objects on a screen that can be viewed or acted upon). There are trading cards and achievements to be had, though the achievements would take up to three playthroughs to get (or a couple of nicely-timed reloaded saves to get different results from the same few puzzles).

I should mention that the game lacks an ESRB rating, and since it is free it might attract curious younger kids. Alpha Polaris features some gore, blood, murder, possible suicide, cursing, and worst of all: a horrifically awkward and poorly rendered sex scene with female nudity, that is arguably the most (hilariously) terrifying part of the game.

Alpha Polaris won't win any awards, and it doesn't make any significant strides in the point and click adventure market, but it offers a good time for players looking to spend 2.5-5 hours on a competent game in an interesting and not often visited setting. I recommend it for this reason alone, with a rating of 6.5/10.

Star Crawlers is a first person dungeon crawler set in a cyberpunk world where instead of warriors, healers, mages, and archers, you build a party of hackers, cyberninjas, engineers, smugglers, and more. It has rogue-like elements, some of which can be turned off (permadeath), multiple difficulty settings, and the ability to switch out party members at will in the hub between missions. You are a mercenary party with the ability to do missions for a variety of employers, all of which you can please or backstab at will, affecting your reputation with each. You have the absolute freedom to be a goody-two-shoes "save the world" party, or a backstab everyone, befriend pirates, "I'm only in it for the money" party.

Star Crawlers is beautiful: missions take place on space ships, mining excavation areas, moving trains, and more. What could be grimy and boring environments are spruced up with neon, flashes of light and smoke during hits/explosions, bright technology touch pads, and more. The graphics aren't hyper-realistic, which is great because it's harder for the style to become dated. I never got bored of environments, even when doing missions repeatedly in the same type. Although there is random generation here, it's not predictable or boring like most games with the "feature." Environments are mapped out as you traverse them, and most missions are straightforward: find something, escort an engineer to two particular points, etc. Loot is also randomly generated, leaving no two weapons or armor pieces the same. The issue I normally have with randomly generated loot is an issue here: it's usually lackluster, so you tend to switch gear super often, rendering upgrading everything either an extreme expense (between every mission) or a total loss (why bother?).

Fights are, for the most part, a lot of fun, with each party member taking their turn in the roster of players at the top of the screen. Each party member can unlock abilities that are really unique, considering the setting. However, this leads me to my biggest issue in Star Crawlers: the lack of defensive options you have versus those in the enemy's repertoire. I am a heal-first-hit-later kind of player ("can't do any damage if you're not alive to do it" is my motto). I was appalled at the limited healing options here. There are medkits; each one takes up an individual slot in your absurdly small inventory, and they don't heal much (a small medkit, the most common, only heals a small percentage your health, and nothing I ever found in-game would heal a character to full health). Sometimes weapons have upgrades available that will grant you 1-3% healing upon a critical strike, but that's absurdly tiny and you'll be switching out gear so frequently that it's unlikely to be beneficial for long. The hacker gets access to some pitiful healing options (one would heal for a few percentage of health, but the amount it healed depended on the number of buffs currently active via the hacker, and so it only worked sometimes). Contrarily, as you level up, enemies get access to more and more healing options. Some fights got ridiculously tedious, with the enemies fully healing each turn and spawning more enemies if you kill one. You don't heal at all after each fight (you only heal after each mission). There were entire missions (30 minutes plus) where I would lose everything just because I ran out of options. This is entirely unacceptable, and what's most infuriating is that this is a huge flaw in an otherwise fantastic game.

In the end, this flaw made me stop my game short. Before this issue, I would have given Star Crawlers at least an 8/10. I adore dungeon crawlers, and to have one in a new setting from most made me so happy. However, due to the infuriating nature of the healing system with the additional slap in the face that enemies can heal just fine, I must downgrade my score to a 6/10. It's such a shame--Star Crawlers was fast becoming one of my new favorite dungeon crawlers, but that unequal gameplay is enough to make me think twice about picking it up again. If you love dungeon crawlers, this one is worth a look, but be wary that it was not built to be friendly toward players who prefer defensive strategies.

Numen: Contest of Heroes is a short action RPG from 2010 whose Metacritic score is only slightly higher than its current Steam rating (50%). It often goes on sale for $1.00 or less, which is when I picked it up. Despite the mixed to negative reviews, the mythical Greek atmosphere attracted me enough to take the small risk. I should note that I have a high tolerance for lower-reviewed or lower-quality games; as a little girl, some of my favorite games came out during a great time of innovation for gaming, with hits and misses ('90s, early '00s), so I tend to like trying games that fail to convince others. Beating these types of games feels like a whole different kind of achievement since so many abandon them.

I'm really glad I played Numen. It's a ridiculously short game, which I didn't expect; I beat the entire game in 15.3 hours, which included completing most side quests and getting lost in the minotaur labyrinth for over an hour. The labyrinth seems to be the most memorable part of the game for most given its difficulty; you are placed in a dark maze without the map function and must get through it, defeat a minotaur, and escape, all without the map. Rather than frustrate me, this only motivated me to make a hand-drawn map and create my first-ever guide for this section of the game, which I will include below in case anyone ever needs it.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2454816512

Numen's story is generic. The characters aren't memorable, and there aren't many of them to begin with. Numen has a lot of great ideas that aren't implemented to the fullest (gaining your god's favor, tournaments, travel system, etc.). I had no glitches, though the game did crash once, but I had recently saved so it mattered none. It is a beautiful game, with diverse and interesting locales to traverse. There are three play styles: warrior, archer, and mage. The game told me that whatever I ended up using the most as a child would be my adult class, so I used all three in the first section of the game to see if I could create a hybrid. I couldn't; the game classified me as a warrior and removed my mage/archer abilities, so that was a little disappointing. The game's so short it doesn't end up mattering much, since it doesn't give you time to "miss" other play styles, and you can unlock new abilities for your class all the time given how quick leveling is. I beat the game at level 75 or so, and I have no recollection of leveling up 74 times, so I have no idea if the game starts you out at a higher level or not. Everything in Numen feels like it goes at super speed; you're done with a map in two quests or less, you level up every handful of enemies or so, and awesome loot is dropped so often you never have to pay for equipment at a trader. In many respects, this makes Numen significantly easy. Given Numen's low difficulty (other than the minotaur level and its battle) and short play time, this game is a perfect choice to play when you feel like exploring/fighting in an RPG game without having to put much effort or thought into it.

Overall, I get why Numen isn't the highest-rated RPG in the world, but that it is rated at 50% baffles me. I think this deserves a 60% or so, and that's around where I would rate it on a scale. I enjoyed it. It was short, allowed me to gawk at gorgeous vistas and explore a little taste of mythical ancient Greece, all without requiring too much of my time. Is Numen worth full price ($7.99 at the time of this review)? Although I got more than the $1/hour of playtime out of it, I would say wait for a sale. Half off? Sure. If it's on sale for $1.00 or less, absolutely! Get it and jump into it when you're feeling a bit lazy but want to play an RPG, particularly if you're forgiving of flawed games. Numen is perfectly competent. I probably won't go back to it, but I enjoyed my time with it.

Quest for Infamy is a fairly short indie point & click RPG hybrid where you play as an anti-hero as he gets into trouble with a pompous sheriff, a curse, a cult, and other shenanigans. Full disclosure, I have not played any of the Quest for Glory games as of yet; I have heard many say this is similar, but I can't personally attest to it. Furthermore, I first played Quest for Infamy back in 2016 when I bought it. I really loved it but only got through Act I. Out of my 27.2 hour playtime, 14.0 of that was one complete playthrough as a rogue from start to finish. You can choose one of three paths (as a rogue, sorcerer, or brigand). Each play style offers some varying side quests, though the main story remains the same. Because of this diversity in gameplay, you will come across a lot of items you will never use because they are meant for other play styles. This never annoyed me; I just stored things in my inventory and only tried items when I thought they'd be useful.

Quest for Infamy has a beautiful old school aesthetic and catchy, pleasing music. The game is pretty unique in the point-and-click sphere because it basically plops you down into a rather large world with little constraints and lets you explore to your heart's content. Other than some short-lived blockages like a broken bridge, you are free to wander at will, and it isn't nearly as restrictive as other games of its ilk. This can lead to some "What do I do now?" moments, but the Steam discussion boards and even the developer's walkthrough (easily found on Google) never failed me for these. The developer himself is an awesome guy who often shows up in the forums to personally answer questions; he is one of the few developers I follow on social media (and I truly hope he gets through his health struggles). I love the aesthetic of most point-and-click adventure games, but my patience is thin for their logic and antics. I never remember having that issue with Quest for Infamy. The logic is pretty sound in most instances. There were a few times where I saw other players complaining about the game's logic (using rubbing alcohol on a bush to burn it down will only work after triggering a cut scene, for example), but I never had the same issues I saw complaints about.

If I have any complaints about the game now that I've beaten it fully, it would be twofold: first, the pacing is a little off. Act I is the longest act of the game, possibly due in part to the player's desire to explore as much of the world as possible as soon as you are given the freedom. Yesterday, my husband asked me if I was close to beating the game. I told him I was still in Act One, and that there were three acts. He said, "Oh, wow, that's a big game!" And I agreed. Less than a few hours of game time later, I have beaten the final two acts. In this respect, the game feels quite short--but you'd never expect it given the length of Act I.

My second complaint is that the game's sense of humor is not for everyone. The game is called Quest for Infamy, and if you're good with words you'll understand that means you play as an anti-hero. Still, Roehm's humor can be hit-or-miss, and he often confuses outright disrespect for humor. Roehm is a womanizer, which is fairly common for rogue characters particularly of old school games. Thankfully, many--if not most--of the game's most important characters are capable women, so his remarks are often written off by them, and rightfully so. Still, these characters are ridiculously dressed, so the constant remarks by Roehm and his narrator about their looks and attire can get tiring. Worse are Roehm's comments about overweight characters. For example, there is a particularly sympathetic character named Jan who is really sweet and happens to be obese. Roehm (and his narrator) insult this man's physical appearance multiple times, which I personally found pretty tasteless. I am a lover of dark, edgy, offensive, and juvenile humor, and it's impossible to offend me. Still, these comments just seemed unnecessary, maybe because they weren't funny. So I played the game despite these comments, though I could easily see them turning other players off of the game completely. I have seen a negative review or two of this game for this reason--so fair warning. Much of this game's humor was a win for me otherwise, so much so that it's the reason I remember loving this game so much to come back to it.

Ah--I did remember one other negative. Sometimes clicks don't register right. You have to click on the edge of the screen in the direction you want to travel. Sounds easy enough, right? You have to click as close to the "path" as you can see. Depending on the location, this can be near the top of the screen, the bottom, left, right, etc. Sometimes clicks don't register at all--as happened during a time where I was coming back to town through the woods at night and kept going in circles because the click on one screen didn't register so many times in a row that I thought I misremembered the return path. If a path leads to a corner, good luck figuring out if your click is registering to go to the west/east or to the south/north. I have missed some maps entirely for sections of the game because clicks keep registering for the side of the screen instead of the bottom, for example, so I don't know the other map even exists.

To summarize, I really enjoyed Quest for Infamy, but it is not a game for everyone. You have to be open to more offensive styles of humor, some technical frustrations, and pacing issues. Because the game is much shorter than I expected it to be, I might not come back to it anytime soon. The different paths aren't really worth multiple playthroughs to see a new side quest or two, in my opinion. Still, if you like adventure games, this is one that deserves your time and a little bit of your money. Given it's $9.99 full price, I'd say it's worth full price for its gameplay, though it's a steal when on sale.