Recent reviews by ChiralKyle

I've spent over an hour just customizing cosmetics and loadouts.

If you like online coop FPS's or surly dwarf banter then you'll love this game.

This game has had so much love and effort put into it over the couple years its been out that I feel bad playing it for free. A must have for anyone who loves survivors-like reverse bullet hells even if you don't care about Hololive in particular.

It's Runescape turned into a spreadsheet where botting is a feature and where afking something actually means doing it afk. If you like parts of osrs/rs3 where you plan your grind ahead of time so the skills feed into each other more efficiently then you'll love Melvor.

Originally I held off writing a review to give Arrowhead a chance to stabilize the game's performance in a few months since the game is fun when it works. Unfortunately not only has stability not noticeably improved for me in the later months, but now the recent change in requiring a PSN for the whole game, instead of just being optional, is going to stop me from playing at all moving forward.

The security liabilities of a PSN account aren't worth the trouble even for a game this good.

EDIT May.06.24: They've relented on the PSN requirement thankfully, but I'll still randomly dc from games or crash to desktop once every few hrs.

Very good colony and resource management sim. It's casual in that your people will never starve to death, but also with deep mechanics like production and storage bonuses for putting certain building types adjacent to each other will always keep you thinking and experimenting with different layouts. Hexagonal layout makes everything look really clean and organized.

Procedural world gen means that no two runs will be exactly the same, and will force you to really think about resource logistics since you will likely need to specialize production between planets. Customizable difficulty settings like increased construction costs, pollution production, and having a fixed number of peeps that can't reproduce also provide more replayability by allowing creative challenges for subsequent runs.

Definitely worth $20.

Good game for people who like designing autonomous things and watching them go. Nothing beats watching several lanes and trains full of resources moving without a hitch.

400+ hours in and I'm still learning new things and details about this game. Surprisingly (semi-)realistic thermodynamics (albeit one that demands a lot of constant math from your CPU) will make you contemplate local temperatures throughout your base a lot more closely. Very ruthless survival mechanics too, but compared to other brutal survival sims, like Dwarf Fortress, it's not as bad. Expect your first few bases to die before or around the 100 cycle mark as you struggle to figure out truly sustainable solutions for food, water, and, of course, oxygen while also juggling things like temperature, germs, gas pressure, and much more. Also you can automate most things with logic gates (complete with a dedicated overlay) so if you're hailing from Factorio you'll feel right at home making everything as hands free as possible.

Potential Problems: If your CPU isn't top tier then expect significant frame drops once you've got nearly all of the map revealed in the end game; an unfortunate consequence of the many intricate, computational mechanics in this game (however after a few post-launch optimization patches, it's significantly better off now than it was a few months ago). Other than that this game is solid optimization-wise with every major bug that I know of getting squashed at some point during or after leaving Early Access.

The sheer amount of content and attention to detail alone makes the base $25 price a steal in my opinion. If you like management/survival sims then this is a must-have.

Overall it's just okay, and it's games like these that make me wish Steam had a sideways thumb for recommendations.

As someone who enjoyed the somewhat complicated, but satisfying, grind of Graveyard Keeper I figured Swag and Sorcery would be a similar type of crafting sim game, if not a little more shallow to fit the lower price. In short it is, but not without its problems.

For starters the game is slower paced than I'd like it to be. When you assemble your team and send them out they walk on a 2D path left-to-right while stopping to fight monsters and gather resources along the way. It's fun at first but after awhile, particularly when your team is so powerful that you know they'll steamroll everything, the overall slow pace of moving through a zone makes grinding for items feel even more monotonous than grinding for specific items normally feels. A fast-forward button to toggle the speed and move things along would be nice here. Another issue is that there are timers for crafting items out of raw and intermediate materials. While it's only a few seconds normally, this extra time adds up fast when you start crafting more in bulk later on, and to be frank these timers feel like completely pointless padding for a game that's already a micromanagement resource grind by default. It's especially egregious in this game since you already have to micromanage which hero works in which crafting stations (different stats boost product quality for different stations), and how many of each item you want to make since basic materials like metal bars, planks, and leather feed into several different important recipes for this game. In my opinion these crafting times should either be significantly reduced for late-game recipes, or removed entirely because right now they don't make progression feel anymore satisfying.

Despite my gripes however I'm still enjoying my time with this game. It's still satisfying watching your town grow with your heroes as they tackle increasingly treacherous areas with increasingly valuable loot. The sprite art is phenomenal as expected from Lazy Bear at this point, but the character models for heroes and NPC's feel a little too same-ish (what with guys and girls all having the same square-ish body type), and the elite enemy models are just palette swaps of regular enemies which is too cookie-cutter for my tastes (especially obvious here since there's only four enemies per area to begin with, making eight enemies total counting the elites). The retreat button makes it so you can cut a run short if the RNJesus feels sadistic, albeit only letting you leave with one type of resource, which is incredibly helpful when you're still adjusting and growing into a new area. Later on you get active spells that allow to directly help your party, and gives more options to strategize with specific party builds, which you'll need to do if you want to beat later bosses without overleveling. The story is pretty basic and enough to get the game going, but the voice acting for the cat is on-point and adds a little more to otherwise generic cutscenes (the narrator's is pretty meh though).

The game isn't amazing or perfect by any means, but for $13 max I wasn't expecting anything profound in the first place. Of course if that's still a high sell for you, then you can always just wait for it to go on sale like any other steam game (I got it for about $8 using the current sale along with a 10% off coupon). If the slow pace is a serious issue, then you can also wait to see if the devs give it a few much-needed QoL changes as well. If you want a somewhat mindless and easy-going town sim/RPG then you should enjoy this one. Fair warning though, the RNG doesn't pull punches starting out in a new area, and that includes the beginning one too. Expect to retreat a fair bit when you're getting on your feet for the first half-hour.

I see a lot of potential with game. It's like FPS Man, but with powerups that can do more than let you kill the monsters and force them to respawn, and monsters with unique abilities that go beyond simply chasing and cornering you in hallways.

Visually, the game looks stunning on Unreal with dark lighting complimenting the tense atmosphere of trying to suvive long enough to clear the map.

The soundtrack is just as immersive but please for the love of god change it so that the track doesn't keep starting over every time you get in and out of a monkey's panic radius. Hearing the first 5 seconds of both songs repeatedly is really annoying and makes it almost impossible to enjoy the entire track.

Bierce is an amazing character whose snarky commentary adds a nice humorous edge to the intense gameplay. Shoutout to Carolyn Seymour for doing a great job so far with her. I also really hope the story is more fleshed out in the full release because the settings are really interesting so far.

The gameplay is okay right now but I really hope there're more abilities and mechanics to play around with in the full release. I already read about how there's going to be an exp system with the shards and active abilities so I'm hopeful to see what creative but balanced powers get added later.

Speaking of balance, let's talk about the first level because I thought the difficulty was a tad off beating it a few times. There's no real sense escalating difficulty with how the monkeys act as you get more shards; it's just 0 to 100 right after you grab the first shard with the three monkeys immediatly trying to get you surrounded, which is a pretty rough deal for a first level. Good luck, have fun, and hope that you're lucky enough to not get surrounded less than 100 shards in before you find your first power shard/orb on the map. It's frustrating when you pick up 50-some shards before you have to avoid your first monkey only to get flanked by a second one only a few seconds into a life. Pac Man (the game the level pays tribute to) avoids this problem by having the ghosts leave the safehouse one-by-one every 15 seconds at the start of each life, which gives the player a little chance to recoup after just dying. Simply do the same with spawning the monkeys into the map and this first level will feel a lot more fair while still providing a terrifying challenge.

3-4 hrs of fun for $3; it's that simple. This is a neat JRPG visual-novel blend that features a solid plot with developed, complex characters along with beautifully composed orchestrated music featured mostly on the piano and harpsichord. Art-wise the character portraits and cinematics are nicely drawn that gives the game a nice, gothic storybook feel. The actual JRPG elements are pretty standard fare with enemy variety being low since you'll mostly just be fighting and eating little lies (those black cat ghosts) as the title says, but the fights are quick and easy regardless.
That said, there are interrogation sections akin to Ace Attorney/Danganronpa where several of a character's statements will all turn into lie monsters at once, and you then have to pick and fight the actual lie in order to proceed. It's a really innovative way to handle both genres that I wish could've been featured more often in the games.
Overall, if you like playing either JRPGs or reading visual-novels then you won't regret buying this set of games.