Recent reviews by Gemstone seller

This game is great, combat mechanics are unique and can be tackled in many different ways and styles (once you get to mid-game and beyond). The ways in which you can build the various floors is incredibly fun.

This game would be a 10/10 if it wasn't for the fact that it's very grindy. The loot you get after encounters, the "pages", are essentially card packs, like in Pokemon/MTG and sometimes the pages you get don't give the thing you want. So you need to repeat the encounters to get more pages. These pages are also used to initiate future encounters, and you lose them when you die. So if you die in a later stage with only one pages of that type left, you have to re-do the previous encounter to get the pages back. And some late encounters can easily take over 30-60 minutes

These mechanics turn the later half of the game into a very grindy and repetitive experience and make me less likely to revisit it in the future.

I held off on buying this game until it came out of Early Access, hoping that the translation issue would be resolved. I bought it just to find out most of the text is still not translated. And based on the lack of dev communication in the past year, I'm not very hopeful it'll ever get translated fully.

Please fix the English translation, or clearly state on the store page that English language is not supported (like on the store pages of the original Touhou games). As-is, most items have translated descriptions (some better than others) but many other things are not translated so you won't know what you're buying/picking until you spend your currency, and some of these upgrades take several runs to save up for.

The game plays great, so it's really sad to see the translation in such a sorry state.

(If you're fine with not always knowing what's going on and figuring things out by trial and error, then this isn't a big issue. Mostly just a warning for anyone expecting a fully translated product.)

As has been said in countless other reviews, if you like Etrian Odyssey even a bit, you should buy this.
This game has the best and most fun turn-based combat mechanics I've ever seen in a JRPG/dungeon crawler. It uses an ATB system combined with swapping party members in/out to adapt to the situation at hand. You have 4 "active" members that can perform actions/take hits/receive buffs with 8 members in reserve for a total party size of 12 members. If all active members die you lose the fight.
Each character has a limited set of moves and passives that often leave a few gaps in their gameplan. In this sense, your party of 12 becomes a wildly versatile toolbox that you can adapt on the fly. And as the game gives you more characters to choose from, you get more freedom in how you design this toolbox of yours to tackle the challenge at hand. (Once you've beaten the game you can play through the game with all party members unlocked, which adds a lot of replay value)
Most of the fun comes from constructing your 12-girl (or 11-girl and 1-man)-party, and seeing if the party can execute the plan you had in mind.

This is without even taking into account the amount of customization you can do on each character's stats, levels and equipment as well as the subclass system which can slightly expand each character's options.

The main draw here are specifically the boss and FOE fights which require increasing amounts of strategy and party optimization. Almost every boss fight (assuming you fight them at/below the recommended level) is like a small puzzle and they're incredibly fun.
Random encounters mostly come down to outspeeding monsters and hitting them with AoE moves they're weak to. Luckily animations and transitions are fast, and you can even force encounters to make grinding a breeze.

The story is nothing to write home about, but the dialogue is very entertaining (and very meta at times). Prior experience with the Touhou universe is not required but does make some jokes/relationships easier to understand.
Good character art, good music.
The actual act of exploring the dungeon is very basic, but it's fast and on occasion has some interesting switch and teleport puzzles.

My only two critiques are some of the postgame content being horribly imbalanced and/or grindy if you're going for 100%.
And the other critique being that it's borderline impossible to unlock all characters/bosses without the help of an external guide. Some of the unlock requirements are not made clear to the player at all, so you either fulfill the requirements by dumb luck or by using a guide. Luckily the Touhou Wiki has a fantastic page with all the info you could possibly need and I highly recommend you use it.

I'm terrible at FPS games but Ultrakill is incredibly fun regardless, and really rewards you learning it's mechanics. Super fun game and definitely worth the price even in early access.

Truly a wonderful game. Despite having over a 1000 hours in it I'm still far from bored.
Between the 4 different base characters, different Ascension (difficulty) levels, daily runs and custom runs there are enough options for players to spice up the gameplay, and that's not even talking about the amazing mods the community has made over the years!

I bought this game a little over a year ago, and it was already a great and fully fleshed out experience back then.
And the devs are still updating the game to this day (there's a beta of a new update as I'm writing this), adding new ways to play, new enemies, QoL changes, balance adjustments, and even adding tons of community suggested items.

Besides the game being very fun, I just want to commend the devs on the great response to community feedback and wonderful updates. The game was very good upon release and it's truly gotten better with each major update.

The Rollback netcode patch has been great! Actually allows me to play the game online with other EU players. Great fun!

Hollow Knight is a wonderful and expansive metroidvania. Huge world with many paths to take from A to B. Simple but well designed combat (and there's lots of it!). Fantastic visuals, music, and story. The Charm system let's players power up as they see fit. 10/10

All that for a full price of $15/€15 is an absolute steal.

Great zoo simulation/management game held back by a huge list of bugs, a clunky user interface and some very questionable gameplay choices. This game needed way more time to iron out all bugs and get the UI working properly. The amount of times the UI is unclear, hard to navigate, or missing the info you're looking for is staggering.
Still gets a recommendation from me because the core gameplay loop is very fun despite these issues. On top of that the game is still getting updates so I assume most of these issues will be ironed out in time.

Astalon is a wonderful metroidvania game with great retro graphics and music, and some of the best map design in the genre. If you're into Metroidvania games I'd highly suggest getting this one, read on if you want some more details.

I want to hone in on my favorite aspect of Astalon: it's fantastic map design.

There are some parts of the map locked behind a powerup or boss kill, but the most common obstacle you'll face are locked doors. These doors can be opened with single use keys of differing colors. Once you're past the first area you'll often have multiple routes you can take towards your destination. Often times you will find one key and have multiple doors you can open with it, locking off the other doors until you find more keys. Very few of these doors do not lead to meaningful progress, and there are slightly more keys than doors to ensure you can't get stuck. this makes exploration feel very "freeform". On top of that, once you get some powerups enhancing your mobility you can skip quite a few doors entirely which is pretty cool. Drawback of course being that it's way easier to get lost on this map than the likes of Ori or Metroid Dread. That's a plus for me though.

Speaking of powerups, very few of them are actually required to get through the main game due to the doors being the most common obstacle. I personally like this design decision but I understand it if others don't.

Almost all secret rooms in this game are clearly indicated visually, and there are a lot of them. There's very little guessing as to where they are if you look close enough (no shooting or running into every wall to find them). These secret rooms can range from simple stashes of currency, to a powerup, to even more secret rooms or a door which lead to alternate paths or entirely new areas.

Tightly related to this brilliant map design is the way health and death work in this game. There are very few ways to recover health and every death sends you back to the entrance of the dungeon (on top of allowing you to upgrade your stats). However, every powerup, elevator floor, warp point, and shortcut you unlock remains available to you after death. Each life becomes a careful game of managing your health and seeing how far you can explore, until you find the next shortcut/elevator/etc.

I could gush on about the map design for longer but you get the point. I'd almost say it's worth getting just for that.

Besides the great map design, the art and music is wonderful, and the setting/story is basic but works great.

The game does not come without it's issues, though.
- Movement is limited and sluggish until you get some powerups and even then only two characters get any marginally meaningful options (a grounded dash and an endless walljump respectively). You can find a universal speed boost halfway through the game but the base movement speed should've been as high as the boosted speed is now.
- In tandem with this limited movement come un-engaging enemy/boss designs. Besides the first Gorgon boss and the encounters with the Black Knight I felt none of the bosses or enemies had any interesting things going on.
(late game/100% spoilers)
- The true ending being locked behind 100% is ridiculous. You can get all plot relevant items that relate to that ending and you will not get the true ending unless you have everything.
- The extra characters add almost nothing meaningful besides access to a few additional parts of the map. These could've been additional powerups instead, which would've been way less disruptive.

★★★★☆