Recent reviews by Sarstan

Writing as of 0.14. TL;DR: It has issues, but if this sounds like your type of game, it is!
It's got bugs. You'll get the debug menu about items disappearing or other issues. The game has a memory leak and stutters more the longer you play. The UI is a pain to use later on and every time you do anything that pops up its own screen, it closes your inventory and you have to open it back up and reorganize everything. The tutorial also actively puts you in a position to get a hefty fine for illegally salvaging and you'll have no idea.
I bring up the issues because beyond all of its faults, Ostranauts is a blast! The world doesn't care about you, but isn't actively out to get you. You can die relatively easily from small, stupid mistakes. You can die from larger stupid mistakes (like go to sleep on your ship to save from paying for a docking fee, and find your ship has drifted off hours away from KLEG, the starting station). But the game is very fair and reasonable. You can thrive with some considerations. You can get lucky early on and find very high value items or keep stumbling across small, destroyed ships with little to profit from. And it's all a delight because your success is completely on you. Along with that, there's a huge amount of stations out there in space and plenty to discover. Or you can do like me and spend nearly all of your 100+ hours around the starting station.
The atmosphere of the game is a delight. Trying to figure out if it's worth trying to cram more stuff into your ship to haul back and sell is a delight. Spending the time to repair the items or just sell them broken or in poor condition so you can get back out there is a fun decision. And the Newtonian physics of piloting ships is intimidating at first, but is surprisingly easy to manage once you get your feet wet.
There's a lot of tips and suggestions to start, but I recommend just diving in for your first character. Make some mistakes and enjoy finding out how to screw yourself, which are fair and make sense where you go wrong. And after an NPC slams themselves into you at 1000km/s which makes you slam into Ganymede, instantly killing you, feel free to start a new character to start with a better understanding or go back to before you died and work on the faults you have going on. There's tons of content between trading, salvaging, flipping ships, building a reactor, flying off to other planets and stations, getting friendly with the authorities and pirates, and perhaps getting into the struggle that forms as you play.

Interesting, but shallow concept that stays shallow. There's also a bug that can soft lock the game and force you to restart from the beginning.
The expected gameplay is good and cleaning vehicles feels nice. If that doesn't sound like it'll get boring fast, then you'll enjoy this. Usually I'm happy with relatively repetitive gameplay, but this just has no direction after you have your basic tool sets.
I'd suggest Powerwash Simulator instead of this or get it on a steep discount.

I recommend this game, but on a deep sale and with the expectation that it's in early access and not a complete game. It's closer to a tech demo than full release.

The game is relatively short, simple, and frankly repetitive. You get various gun parts that you buy at a shop, which provide more options as your level increases (and you'll max this out quickly). You bring the parts to your shop and assemble them on a work bench. Then put them on display and sell them. You can eventually sell other things, but they all feel closer to a waste of time honestly.

This is the whole cycle. There is a certain level of satisfaction progressing, but nothing to get excited about. Although the environment is a good bit more developed than probably any other aspect of the game. This is a solid concept of a game, but just not together yet. I still enjoyed my time playing however.

Fun game that is otherwise rendered nearly or actually unplayable thanks to the developer's launcher. As of writing this, the launcher refuses is stuck loading and the last time I did get it to work, it took a significant amount of time to do so.
A shame really, the game is good, but you have to be able to actually play it.

It's kind of like Pokemon, but actually fun.

Massively overrated and especially overpriced.
Other reviews go crazy talking about how great the story is and the experience overall. I saw someone say they cried at the end. I thought I'd give it another go after having played briefly and ditched it some time ago. And I wish I didn't bother.
Like others have said, it's a one and done game. You can experience it one time and that's it. You know the story and what to look for. And frankly it's pretty shallow. Yeah, it's cool that all of these things are happening across the map whether you're there or not. Yeah, it's cool you need to be at certain places at certain times to see certain things. But it gets repetitive and old really fast.
First off, there's virtually no story to begin with. You find out you're in a time loop and spend each loop piecing together what happened and how to stop it. That sounds pretty good until you realize you'll spend most of that time fighting some glitches (more on that in a sec) and trying to get back to places that are often annoying to get to to continue the investigation. There is a bit of pleasure in finding some additional clue as you go, but eventually you're just trying to get it all done instead of the fun of exploration. Along with that, there's several points where the solution to certain puzzles or issues isn't obvious and more a matter of trying to figure out what the developer was aiming for than actual reasoning. By the way you're on a crunch for time during this and can expect your progress to reset if you start exploring something too late. Forcing you to go back for a new loop and get through it, wondering if you have time to search for something else or cause a new loop. But ultimately your story unfolds in text logs and minor environment displays. Frankly it's dull and completely forgettable. I imagine most people can't even remember any character names or their relationships with each other because they really just don't matter. Just what was setup for you to solve and even that's a convoluted mess as an excuse to have more puzzles.
Gameplay is moderately solid. Controls work largely as you'd expect. Orbital mechanics are surprisingly in play here (not that you'll actually use them meaningfully). Your character has a painfully short jump along with a very under powered jump pack that can make some parts of the game needlessly difficult. This can be not an issue to a massive problem based on how well you handle platforming games.
Much of the time I have on my playtime is just goofing off and you'll see many people who barely break 10 hours if even that in this game. If you take your time and aren't paying much attention it will probably take 8 hours to do.
That all said, it's not a bad game. Just nowhere near as good as people have been making it out to be. And it's absolutely NOT worth the $25 price tag it has as of this writing. It might be worth closer to $10 and that's being generous. There's plenty of other walking simulation games out there that have far better story for far cheaper and game mechanics that actually matter.

I hate horror games. They annoy me to no end. They restrict your movement, make you vulnerable where a reasonable person never would be. In what world would you go into a house where you have a high chance of being killed by an unspeakable horror and if you get the identity of it right, you make $100?
But I like this game.
There's a surprising depth of mechanics in play and the developer clearly went above and beyond to add a lot of great detail in how each type of ghost plays. I usually play solo, but this is another one of those games where multiplayer is based on how fun your friends already are.
With all of that said, I can see why barely 10% of people have actually completed a contract. The anxiety of the terror is a good bit worse than the actual gameplay scares. That said, even when you know and understand the mechanics, it can spook you pretty good. If you want that fear, don't go looking up the mechanics of the game and watching good players. It can quickly ruin the fun when you watch someone loop the ghost and effectively take away any chance of dying.

Going through the tutorial, follow it as best as you reasonably can, kill all mobs available for exp, familiar with skills available, etc. Get absolutely wrecked by the tutorial boss. How the heck does anyone get into this?

Why do people like this series? It's horrible!
I've tried playing ME1 a few times before and finally bought this thinking maybe I missed something and would give it and the rest of the trilogy another go. And I regret getting it.
I keep hearing people say the characters are fantastic. What characters? Shepard is left to being a pushover or a complete jerk, which is par for BioWare's lineup. And none of those choices ultimately matter when you can pick what you want at the end anyway. The rest of the team are completely forgettable. Now 9 hours in and I only remember Ashley's name because she looked mildly hot in the opening scene, which quickly faded when she opened her mouth. Actually I keep finding myself saying out loud for them to shut up when they interject their opinions. Which are so important that they say nothing on major decisions, before or after. The dialogue system, which I understand was supposed to be so revolutionary for being able to select what to say next while the conversation is still going, doesn't actually match what you end up saying. Fallout 4 took a note from this book. Just like how you have to announce you're going to fight others and beat your chest in conversation instead of just doing it. That's before we talk about how unbelievable the reactions and behaviors of characters are throughout the game.
Okay, the plot. What plot? Bad guy wants to bring about universe ending thing and you hunt him down. There's several hurdles along the way and I keep finding myself wanting to just get this section done and hope there's not another mcguffin stopping me from getting to the good stuff. I still love how you're introduced to the Batarians like they're the well known evildoers of the universe when you come across some random one's schemes. Okay. Just roll with it I suppose.
The game is very glitchy. I understand ME1 came out in 2007, but these couldn't be fixed by now? The load menu for selecting which game doesn't allow controller input and acts odd in general. Enemy projectiles pass through walls and terrain (most easily noticeable in the Mako sections). My computer barely holds 40 fps when it can run Cyberpunk 2077 at 60 fps with ease on the same resolution and high graphics. There's so many places to get the character stuck, especially in combat, that I avoid even entering cover for concerns that I will get locked in and killed. Enemies will utterly skip all animations and pop back into cover or teleport altogether to several feet away in every fight. I'm used to being ready to shift my aim quickly for it now. And while not a glitch, who thought being able to sprint for 10 ft before huffing and puffing was a good idea? Deus Ex: HR ran with this idea too it seems. It's extremely annoying, just like the boosters on the Mako that do literally nothing. Your screen gets stretched and there's camera shake, but you don't move any faster. I also love the touch of all these systems where the overwhelming majority you can do nothing with except the same random encounter map if you hunt around enough.
I feel like this is like GTA3. Where it's a bunch of poorly made systems, but because there's a variety being presented, it's greater than the sum of its parts. That along with rose colored glasses for those who enjoyed this as a kid. I'm a minority in thinking ME is dreadful on all accounts, but if you liked it in the original releases, you might like the refreshed graphics (did they really need to keep such a tight skybox around the Normandy's cockpit though?). For those who never played, I don't know why you'd bother when there's so much better out there. But maybe you're like me trying to find the hype, thinking it's one of those games where "it gets better after X hours" or something.

Just...get this game. Seriously. It's absolutely incredible! The current price is an absolute steal and on sale it's a no brainer. Also the screenshots show in Japanese, but the game is fully in English too, so don't let that deter you.
To start with, I have never played a Touhou game and have never been into shmups. So I don't know the characters from that series or any other media. If you have any attachment to the series already, you might like this. There's clearly a lot of character history already present from the start of the game, but it doesn't detract from the experience if you're not familiar with it like me.
While a business sim at its core, Touhou Mystia's Izakaya is incredibly charming in its presentation and has a constant flow of interesting and varied content to keep you coming. 20 hours in, I'm still looking forward to the next day to see what happens and what recipes I'll unlock. The characters are varied and interesting. I could list so many details about what makes the game absolutely incredible to play, but frankly you'd be better spending that time purchasing the game right now and finding out for yourself.