Recent reviews by Merusworks

An intensely difficult puzzle driven adventure game (in the style of Myst). It's good because it gets what makes Myst interesting: weird devices with predictable rules, putting disparate bits of information together, and the puzzle box design where opening one path closes another. It's an old game and it does look very rough in spots, but you will not find a game near as good at making you question whether finally opening the way forward you've been looking for will cause you headaches down the line. Getting into the new SE content is a little tedious, though.

An intensely difficult puzzle driven adventure game (in the style of Myst). It's good because it gets what makes Myst interesting: weird devices with predictable rules, putting disparate bits of information together, and the puzzle box design where opening one path closes another. It is a little easier on the eyes than its predecessor, and the way it opens up in the mid-game is genuinely intimidating.

I earned 5 money while playing the game, so I feel like it was good value, and while doing so I helped a frog solve a gentle mystery.

This is a mystery game presented as a full 3D, first-person, 1-bit, Macintosh style game, which is quite a technical feat! You explore an abandoned ship, the Obra Dinn, with a pocketwatch that lets you step back to the moment of each crew member's death. Your goal is to identify what killed them (usually pretty obvious) and who they are (usually pretty difficult!). There are subtle hints to each crew members' identity in each scene, from belongings, to behaviour, to their relationships to other crew members. The mystery mechanics help keep the mystery in your brain, rather than leading you along step-by-step or encouraging you to brute-force it (I had to in a couple of places, but it turns out I missed clues that would have definitively identified certain people). It took me about 8 hours to unravel, all up, and had fun the entire time.

Weirdly hollow and pretentious; you move through empty factories and pick up cassette tapes that load low-fi virtual worlds, but the puzzles are always very obvious and the themes never really coalesce into something interesting. It's an extension of a game jam game with a neat hook (the tapes-to-VR thing) but extending it into a full game lost the thrill of the unexpected that made it interesting.

A platformer where you play as a snake that moves like a snake. It's kind of a thrill to go from flailing about to keeping good grip to watching your balance on a bit of bamboo to being able to weave your way almost anywhere. It's an inviting looking game; I reckon there'll be some kids somewhere for whom this will be a part of their childhood.

A delightful little metroidvania.

At this point Saints Row has abandoned posturing and has just embraced its silliness. Sometimes this means you get a purple dildo baseball bat. Most of the time it means the game treating anything you do as perfectly reasonable and legitimate. It is nice to have a game that tries very hard to be straight-up entertaining without also being relentlessly juvenile or socially regressive.

Entertaining!