Recent reviews by Nystreth

Just a simple score-chasing arcade game. It's based on an older mobile game, which I've never played before, but this one is a good time waster, and it's relatively easy to get all the achievements. After not playing it for about a year, I just finally managed to get the 75+ score achievement today, and I'd forgotten I had more than enough points to unlock the Plumbish and perfect it.

If you're familiar with Hexcells or Hexcells Plus already, this game is yet more of the same, with another set of logic puzzles based on hexagons and minialistic but pleasant sound effects and visual design. You start off with tutorials to get you accustomed to how the game works, so you can start this one even without having played the other two, though I do suggest you play them as well. The best feature of this game is the ability to use an 8 digit number sequence to generate a puzzle field, so once you've finished the main game, you still have 10^8 more different puzzles to do. You can enter numbers manually or have the game use the current date or a totally random number to create new puzzles for you.

You can be a slave to the hexagon masters for the rest of your life!

If you've played the first Hexcells game, this one is pretty much more of the same, though the group of puzzles has larger and more complicated fields which are more difficult to solve. Overall it makes it feel more satisfying to me since it made me work a lot harder. This one retains the feature of unlocking later puzzles with the hexagons you earn from making no mistakes (or as few as possible) while progressing through. This game also introduces some new twists, such as numbers on blue hexagons that indicate a total number of blue hexes inside a determined area beyond just a one tile radius (not including the center), and black tiles with a ? which only serve to annoy you because they don't reveal the number of surrounding hexes. If you haven't played the original Hexcells yet, I'd recommend it first just as an introduction, but you can also start with this game or Hexcells Infinite without any trouble. Each of them gives brief tutorial style intros to get you into it.

This is a great game reminiscent of Minesweeper where the field is based on hexagons instead of squares, with the numbers in black tiles indicating how many of the surrounding tiles will contain blue hexes. You start off slowly, learning the mechanics, and as you progress the levels get more complicated in their logic. My only gripe of the game (at the time I first got it) was that it was very short, only taking a few hours, but I didn't play this game until long after it had been released, and there were already two follow up games, Hexcells Plus, and Hexcells Infinite, so the theme does continue if you want more. The sound effects are also pleasant and minimalistic, like the visuals, but they do make the game very enjoyable.

This is a neat little puzzle game with a minimalist design and a simple idea of connecting a group of tiles with a single line. There are a total of 80 puzzles of increasing complexity, though none of them are extremely difficult. It's a good way to keep yourself busy on a casual basis if you like short puzzle games, though it would be nice if there was a way to mark the line out without holding down the mouse button constantly (letting go will reset your line unless you've solved it).

This was a fun minimalist game, sort of a cross between minesweeper and picross/nonograms and in full 3D. If you like either of those style of games, you would like this one too, and in this one there are added elements such as individual blocks or whole puzzles that can be spun around, or sections of them slid away that serve to complicate the final solution and keep you busy for a few hours. I believe there is a pure logical process to solve each one (as opposed to simply guessing), though I can't be sure of that. I still resorted to guessing quite a few times when I thought I was stuck. It would be nice if the game saved your progress on a puzzle though, instead of making you start from the beginning if you have to leave before you finish solving it, and the processor usage does seem to be quite high while the game is running, but those aren't really huge problems.

The idea of this game is pretty neat, and I do like it after playing it a bit more than when I initially started since I love all things related to Tesla, but the game does seem a bit unbalanced even right from the start. It doesn't take long before the puzzle navigation turns into a mess of repeated insta-deaths as you deal with finicky controls that seem a bit too sensitive, especially once you get the charging cloak. Then once you start making progress and feel more comfortable, you run into boss encounters that can also be maddening (though the third one where you fight a human for the first time was a good one). You just have to stick with it a while until you get used to how it behaves, and then it turns out to be a pretty good game. I think the music is really good too.

Remember years ago, before nonsense like Instagram and Twitter, when words like "meme" and "viral" had no nothing to do with the Internet, and pretentious "content creators" weren't even born yet? If you do, you probably remember those over the top Xiao Xiao animations that were really popular. Did you ever dream about actually playing a Xiao Xiao animation, and brutally sending hordes of stick figures to their death? Well now you can!

One Finger Death Punch is the answer to your prayers and lets you do just that. But there is a price... DO NOT BUTTON MASH. You'll get this drilled into your head pretty quickly since missing a target means you're going to get hit. You'll have to channel your inner Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and whatever other legendary martial artists you love and hone your reflexes and timing to two mere actions: clicking the left or right mouse buttons. It sounds horribly limiting, yes, but you'll find it is extremely satisfying to expertly dispatch gangs of mobs rushing you from both directions with those mere actions, complete with random slow motion zoom in shots of your bone crunching attacks.

This game is easy to learn and despite its simple design, it's easy to spend a lot of time playing. It can also be really frustrating if you're a perfectionist and simply must get Perfect Platinum on every level, which I quickly see I will probably NEVER be able to do, but that doesn't diminish my enjoyment of the game in any way. Much the same way that there are still levels in n++ that I just cannot even complete, much less do perfectly, yet I still spend hours playing (mostly user-made levels though). On the other hand, it's also a really good game to just casually play for a few minutes and then walk away from.

10/10

I've wanted to play this for a long time but never actually picked up the Orange Box collection on the many times I had the chance, but during the last sale I finally picked it up, and I wasn't disappointed. It is surprising how a relatively simple idea of a device that opens static portals can turn into very complicated puzzles, but the base game progresses in a way that doesn't become too difficult, yet still offers a challenge in later levels and the bonus maps. The game is also filled with humor, especially from the always-watching GLaDOS that is quick to offer comments from helpful to snarky, and even downright psychotic near the end of the game, and from automated machine gun turrets that sound and speak like children. To me, though, the best feature of the game is the modding, and there are some excellent mods for this game available both on Steam and other locations on the internet. I recommend Rexaura and Portal: Prelude, the latter of which is a prequel to Portal before the GLaDOS system was first turned on.