Recent reviews by OPleasus

tl;dr An equal follow up to the first game, but wait for a sale.
The art style is marker-ish and tween heavy rather than pixel art, so the ugliness of the style feels less deliberate and more out of development necessity. With the exception of a few shots, it does look worse.
The plot gets going faster, and wraps around on itself in a satisfying manner. The actual *direction* of the plot feels slightly meandering. and I'm personally not a fan of the ending. I also preferred the characters of the first, although it's a narrow thing.
The puzzles, the main attraction, are perhaps a bit better than the first game. I greatly enjoyed that they broke the plot summaries into a by-chapter thing rather than expecting you to remember everything in one massive block at the end.

A very simple concept: every character you control is a six-sided die, the result of which determines what action they take that turn. The complexity comes in when you add increasingly complex keywords to the basic actions, and items that can simply improve them or dramatically change how some of them play.

VERY similar to Into the Breach, but more customizable.

This game has not aged 20 years. It takes some pride in things that were only notable in 2008 or earlier, but it feels shockingly modern.
Some physics jank, but classic for a reason

A very good adventure overall with a nostalgic look. The gameplay is part exploration, part puzzles and about half dungeon crawling.
The lore was interesting, and it made me wish that there was more we could do to dive into historical ruins than clearing them out of monsters.
Movement and melee is entirely orthogonal, i.e. NSEW directions only. Ranged follows orthogonal paths too, though they look straight, meaning you can get nicked by something that should have missed you.

Things being information gated means that there were some systems that either don't exist... or I never figured out how to activate them. I never found out how to do potion or item crafting, despite picking many herbs and seeing many crafted items in my postgame look. I also never got enough information to cast even ONE spell, despite scouring a bookcase heavy dungeon twice; there are at least 10 spells. This feels like an almost forgotten mechanic.

BE WARNED: THIS IS STILL IN A BUGGY STATE **ESPECIALLY** AROUND DEATHS. You will die and some progress will be reverted and some will not, most obviously your MAP PROGRESS will NOT be reverted and your ITEM CONSUMPTION will NOT be reverted! You can run out of healing or status items VERY easily because of this!

Despite my issues, I still had fun. The base gameplay is strong. This definitely feels like a game that needed to be put away for an extra year and given polish... but for a free title I'm willing to forgive a lot. Very good showing.

For clarity: I received a key for the cosmetic bundle but not the game itself.

It's good. Despite having very few active hazards, the game manages to create an air of hostility by having your travel itself be dangerous. It requires you to weigh the benefits of different methods, although I tend to find going offroad to be worth it every time once you grab offroad tires.

Scrounging also feels good. You're regularly breaking into places or smashing stuff up, adding to the feeling of "it doesn't matter what happens here anymore". The need to scrounge decreases as you get deeper into the game and can pack 3 of each repair kit with comfortable room for salvage. The anomalies get a lot worse about disabling parts of your car though, up to outright stealing pieces if you don't avoid them. So stopping to get raw materials is still important.

It knows what buttons to push and is remarkably polished for such a cheap game. I'd recommend it even at $45. Please enjoy.

Red Faction meets L4D2 with a delightfully low poly style. Death to the bugs!

It's linear for a souls game and has some awful to find side areas.
still very fun
ign/10

Disco Elysium is a psychodrama that stumbles over detective noire bleeding in an alley, sniffs speed over it's not-quite-dead body, then solves the crime while debating Communist theory with itself. 9/10

From defining and redefining (sometimes UNdefining) your character to getting caught in the tangle of proto-rave to doing some absolutely fascinating paperwork, this game doesn't like to let up on its trippy impressionist style for a second. The dialog and characterizations are incredibly strong and it's worth doing a second playthrough with a contrasting build simply to see what your inner self screams and what that can do for you.
Try Encyclopedia for buckets of info, Perception to see the truth, Inland Empire for strange hunches, and Shivers for the scary hunches.
Don't be afraid of drugs. They love you back, with interest.
Failed checks aren't the end of the world. Resist savescumming. It's fine.
There are a few weaknesses I must say however. The gameplay itself is all visual novel: no QTEs, no tactical cover, no testing player skill besides their own judgement. This means the engagement is exactly as deep as you care about the world and its people. When the game opens up, you end up spending a long amount of time simply traversing the environment between tasks. Meanwhile the third act regretfully narrows down to the inevitable path of the ending, but makes up for this by having some incredibly powerful scenes and some of the most Lynch-ian experiences I've ever felt.
The world is wide and interesting and alien enough that I desperately want to see more of Elysium, Revachol, and even Jamrock. Thank you ZA/UM.

Incredibly cute love letter to Paper Mario. Lots of quality of life adjustments, a fun battle system, and a plotline that I genuinely wasn't expecting to go there.
Please give it a try.

A bright, flashy game where you fight imperialist clones and capitalist cultists. Acrobatics can feel very smooth if you pull it off right. Guns all have strong character and design. Grinding is annoying if you invest heavily in weapon variety, especially if you want achievements or min-maxed weaponry.
A neat game, but unless you like to grind it's not worth the results.