Recent reviews by Shepherd

A very charming point-and-click adventure with silly mini-games. Some of the mini-games are super accessible, and some are a matter of praying that RNG rolls in your favor. There is no inbetween. The animations are delightful, the writing is fun, and the achievements are not worth trying to 100%. It's good on its own. Don't be like me and spend an hour and a half reloading the game over and over to get the pinball achievement. It won't let you retry pinball if you get the normal high score, and it's liable to gutter all your balls anyway. Just play the rest of the game. It's fun and I had a nice time.

A murder mystery with killer aesthetic, bumpin music, and no fail state. There's a big island to explore full of Japanese and Egyptian influences, crazy alt history lore regarding resurrecting alien gods and fending off demons, and likeable characters. I put off playing this game for no good reason for like a year, and when I finally gave it a shot, I binged it in a crazy 17 hour delirium and had an excellent time.

I don't have any complaints, I got to scratch a completionist itch without playing through every possible ending to the investigation, and the music never got annoying. I recommend it!

Charming, fun, a bit buggy on release, but I don't regret purchasing at full price.

Genre: Rogue-lite Dungeon-Crawler + Colony Sim. The dungeon crawls are called "crusades" that you go on to forage for your colony. The cult you build up is full of cute creatures you recruit and effortlessly indoctrinate to do your gardening and building for you. Followers can starve, get sick, die, or worse: start resisting and telling others that you're actually evil. Imprison and re-educate them so that they can be sacrificed, reanimated, and turned into vessels that buff you through future dungeon runs!

Pros: Combat feels good, upgrades to combat and your cult are frequent, and editing the colony is easy (no time wasted moving entire structures/decorations). Music is good, art style is charming, and I did get a little attached to maybe 3 or 4 of the 40+ followers I cycled through. The world has character to it, and you get to be a cute cult-leading lamb that wears the crown of a banished god! It's neat.

Cons: You get 1 weapon and 1 spell from the start of any dungeon, and if you don't like that weapon/spell, that's just gonna be a bad-feeling run. RNG isn't particularly bad in any instance, except in regards to one side-quest that hopefully gets its spawn/drop rates patched in a future update. Your colonists may ask you to go on quests in old dungeons you have no business returning to anymore, and As Of v1.5, only rarely do the follower requests randomly auto-fail upon accepting.

My Grade: B-

It's fun, it's charming, but it's a little rough around the edges. I expect the bugs to get patched out soon enough, and would be delighted to see new content from this developer in the future.

Number go up, feels good. But runs out of content a little abruptly. Not sure when more will be implemented, but I had a nice time while I was able to strive for progression. Get it on sale if you like clicker games, it does some neat stuff and has promise.

Although it is the least visually appealing of Dan Mullen's games, it's still really good. A fun deconstruction of various video game genres, with a narrative that isn't too hard to follow, and gets a proper explanation. Sure, there's a question or two I had after, but that's far fewer than what Pony Island and Inscryption each left with me. I have enjoyed all 3 games, and recommend The Hex as much as I do the others.

Edit #3: okay so I went and 100%'d Inscryption because garbage RNG aside, it's fantastic, it's moody, it's full of fun mechanics, and it's a FANTASTIC deckbuilding roguelite/roguelike. Well worth the... (oh god) ~128 hours I sunk into it. Do I regret it? No. Was a lotta that time spent doing unreasonably hard challenges? Yes. Highly recommend.

I got this for free on Epic, but bought it on Steam because I was enjoying myself so thoroughly that I felt I should do track progress with achievements. I've started this game 3 times now and I just finished 1 ending. So, maybe 40 hours total. I messed around a whole bunch, but I was extremely satisfied with how it played.

I played on mouse/keyboard, and beyond remapping Crouch from C to Ctrl, it wasn't unwieldy. Melee attacks have pretty forgiving hitboxes/range, so that's nice. Ammo is pretty limited, even on Story difficulty, so it's always a little tense managing resources. I was always low on Mineral material, which limited my ability to restock bullets and gloo ammo, and more importantly, neuromods. I'd have liked to see something like a fabricator blueprint that turns Exotic material into other types of material resources, since Typhon continuously respawn as you move around the station.

The special powers (Typhon mods) are all interesting and allow for interesting alternative approaches to getting around the map. If you see a teeny tiny way into a security booth, mimicking a mug and hopping through is a valid approach. So is hacking the door, and so might be finding a maintenance tunnel in. You can create a clone of yourself that draws aggro, you can summon helpers, you can do all kindsa wacky stuff that I'm sure makes some playthroughs crazy. I have got to look up the speedrunning community's takes on Prey.

There was only 1 character in the game that I didn't like, and you're given abundant reason to dislike them (and choice with which how to handle them). Every staff member aboard the station is listed at security stations, and the game tracks which of them you've found, dead or alive. The ones that are alive can still die, whether by your decisions or by negligence. It's possible to save everyone, kill everyone, and many shades inbetween. It didn't feel lousy when the game addressed the choices I'd made, as thematically, it was fitting.

The voice actors all did spectacular jobs- special props to Alex Yu and both of Morgan Yu's VA's. I was never taken out of the experience by weird deliveries. Though I _WAS_ sorta thrown off by multiple friendly human NPC's in the same area all talking over one another, sometimes while I was listening to an audio log _of those same characters._ Very brief and VERY rare occurrence, but I feel it's worth pointing out.

The music is good, and the ambient audio really gets you looking over your shoulder every time something shakes/rattles around the station.

Highly replayable, very approachable, lots of room to make it harder should you want to be able to shatter your legs, suffocate, and have to spend resources on weapon repair maintenance. Written well, isn't pretentious, and ties it all together nicely. I heartily recommend this if you even remotely like the idea of games like Bioshock or Systemshock. This really should have been called "Neuroshock".

I've played this game several times on my Android phone, and had no idea it was available on Steam as well. There's functionally no differences in ports, but it was worth playing again just to show support to the people who put it together. The music slaps, the story is silly, and it's an incremental clicker game I bothered to replay even if there's no alternate endings or routes to take. It's a very good and short game, very worth your time if you like clickers. <3

All of the fun of turn-based tactics games without as many units to worry about losing. Every squad has unique gimmicks that are interesting and change up the way you interact with enemies, your own units, and the map. There's a difference between losing all units and losing too much power in a single playthrough, and it has a rogue-lite mechanic where you choose a single character from your last playthrough to continue into the next one. Aside from pre-made teams, you can create custom (or use random!) teams, every team has little achievements that help you purchase more teams, and I find myself enjoying that replayability. Sure, there's only 4 islands to play through (excluding the ending), but you can choose to go to the final battle with only 2, 3, or all 4 islands complete.

I've greatly enjoyed the 11 hours I've played as of writing this review, and see myself getting at least another 10 or so hours out of the other playthroughs I'll be doing. :)

It's polished, the exploration is very enjoyable, and it's a decent time-sink. My only complaints are that it runs smoothest with low graphical settings, and the harder difficulties drastically limit your ability to store/carry around elements/materials (elongating the grind). Worth a shot if on sale.