Recent reviews by Razorflamekun

Time to 100%: ~15-30 hours


This DLC for Voxelgram adds 82 more puzzles for you to solve, many of which are more difficult to solve than those provided in the base game.

The majority of the puzzles are very well designed, and while some of them did feel a bit tedious to solve, I still feel like the puzzle design and overall amount of content added makes this DLC well worth the asking price.

I highly recommend this DLC for anyone who is a fan of the original base game.

Time to 100%: ~10-20 hours depending upon how good you are at this type of puzzle.

Proverbs is the second game in a series of games that feature one gigantic Fill-a-Pix puzzle for you to solve. This one gives you a 54,000 pixel puzzle, which is 13,500 pixels less than Mega Mosaic, the predecessor to this game.

As with the previous game, the grid is broken up into many different regions. however, unlike the previous game, Mega Mosaic, the edges of each region act like the border of the puzzle, or like a wall such that clues given cannot pertain to any other region but the region they are found in. This, I assume, was intended to create a more challenging puzzle, but in the end, I felt that this puzzle has been easier to solve than Mega Mosaic's puzzle was so far.

That being said, the puzzle design is really good, if not a little on the easy side. There are ~260 regions to solve in this puzzle, and because of the fact that there are more regions, this also means that a lot of them, when completed, have nothing happen but fill in a little bit more of the overall image. The ones that do have achievements related to them, when completed, give you a Dutch proverb (along with how to interpret it in our language), and these are the regions that I have enjoyed solving the most. All of the proverbs, so far, have been very intriguing to read, and provide a lot of insight into another culture.

I have two complaints about the game:
* The music
* The regions with no proverbs

About the music: With this type of game (puzzle games), a lot of people (myself included) either want no background music or soft background music such as ambiance and other things like that, as anything else is too distracting when solving this type of puzzle. That being said, I still took a listen to the music and have to say that it does fit the game pretty well, but as I already said, after listening to the music, I immediately turned it off because I knew it would be distracting.

About the regions with no proverbs: To me, completing these regions didn't provide the meaningfulness that the ones with proverbs did, and even though they contribute to the ending image in the end, when finishing them before you finish the puzzle, you don't get the same gratification as the ones with proverbs. I understand that it was probably really hard to find enough good proverbs to fill in some of the other empty regions, or by doing so would result in a worse ending image, but I still think that you could find other things to put in these regions, such as Dutch history, fun facts, etc.

In overview:

Pros:

*Solid puzzle design, if not a little on the easy side.
*Extremely interesting insight into Dutch culture via Dutch proverbs.
*Different and interesting solving rules for this puzzle.
*Fairly large puzzle to keep you entertained for a good amount of time.

Neutral:

*I wish the game was $1 or $2 cheaper. Even though I know that a lot of work went into creating this puzzle and finding all of those proverbs, I still think that it will end up taking me less time to solve this puzzle than Mega Mosaic's took me. (I'm currently 8.5 hours in with only 25% of the puzzle left to solve). I'm not going to ding you for this.
*This puzzle is easier than Mega Mosaic's puzzle was to solve. Not going to ding you for this.

Cons:
*The music, while fitting for this game, was too distracting for me to have on while solving this puzzle.
*The regions without anything in them felt somewhat meaningless to me, even though they end up contributing to the end image of the puzzle. I think if they had little fun facts about the Netherlands or history, it would be better.

I am slightly recommending this game to people who have not played this type of puzzle before, and highly recommending to try the demo first for that subset of people.

For puzzle fans, I am highly recommending this game, even though it has a few faults because the end result was still incredibly enjoyable to me.

Coloring Game 5 is the latest installment of L. Stotch's Coloring Game series. It features 15 images in the base game and another 25 images in the first DLC.

The game is free and it is exactly what you expect from an L. Stotch game. If you have played any of the past installments, then it is a no brainer to get this game.

The only thing I don't like about this particular version is that you have to buy all of the DLCs in order to get all of the achievements for this game. While I understand the reasoning behind this, it is one of my pet peeves, but I usually overlook it on certain games where the DLC prices aren't that high. This is one of those examples.

The art style is also classic L. Stotch, so expect more of the same from the previous Coloring Game games as well.

Definitely recommend the base version since it is free, will write a review about the DLC a bit later on when I finish more of the images.

This is free DLC that you literally get for buying the game.

The items it gives you are some of the most common that you can get, but getting these items right away can easily help you out in the beginning and is definitely worth picking up, even if you don't plan on using the items.

Time to beat: Roughly 10-15 hours for the bare minimum, and roughly 25-30 hours for 100%

NOTE: To get the most out of this game, it is recommended that you play the game without spoiling anything for yourself. With regards to this, I will try to spoiler everything that would could impact someone else's ability to get the most out of this game.

Taiji is a wonderful puzzle game that takes inspiration from a lot of other puzzle games, including The Witness among others and blends them together into a spectacular masterpiece of a puzzle game, with an amazing soundtrack to boot! Just remember to pay attention to your surroundings.....

Taiji drops you into a condensed island that has you solving puzzles using a simple principle: grids. When solving a puzzle, a grid will pop up, and in order to solve the puzzle, you must turn some cells white and leave the others black in order to solve the grid. The game starts you off with some really simple puzzles, but will quickly evolve into brain-bending puzzles that involve multiple mechanics from multiple areas of the game in order to solve them.

After you complete a tutorial area, the game brings you to an open world area where you can go to many different areas at the same time, like you can in The Witness, and leaves you to your own devices. The game is divided into nine major areas with several optional areas included. Each major area has its' own unique mechanic that it will teach you, however, some areas will require you to solve puzzles with mechanics from both the area you are in as well as other areas you may or may not have been to yet.

In each area, you will have to solve a series of puzzle grids that culminate in something similar to The Witness' Laser puzzles: Fire Puzzles or Campfire Puzzles (not sure what to call them, but they look like a campfire to me). When you solve that Fire/Campfire Puzzle, you have completed the area, and the corresponding symbol that matches up to the area you were in is illuminated in the center of the main hub area to get to the other areas.. Solve enough areas to unlock a new area in the main hub of the world.

Just like in The Witness, you can get yourself in trouble if you go to the wrong area first because you may not understand the rules of the area you go to. Unlike most puzzle games, this game leaves the discovery of the rules and mechanics of each areas' puzzles to you, the player, and I really do like this approach, especially when it is paired really well with good tutorial puzzles that help to teach you some of the mechanics first.

I also really appreciate that the fast travel system is itself a puzzle that you have to figure out in order to fast travel. Each area has a pedestal with a symbol on it that you can use with the pedestal it comes on to unlock the fast travel for that specific area. In order to do so, though, you must have found at least one other fast travel pedestal, and then remember the first pedestal's symbol that you went to and unlocked in order to unlock the second fast travel pedestal. You must do this for *almost* every pedestal you come across to unlock that fast travel point. While it not seem too intuitive, it really fits in with the rest of the game.

Every area in the game also has optional puzzles that you can solve to unlock shortcuts between the areas, or test your knowledge of puzzle mechanics with puzzles that require you to know mechanics from multiple areas in order to solve.

Keep your eyes on your surroundings as you solve puzzles, though, as this will come into play after you've solved every area in the game and see the first ending of the game. You might be surprised what may happen if you are observant enough!

Here's my list of pros and cons:

Pros:

The game has an amazing soundtrack, which seems to change as you progress in each area, as well as between areas, and in secret areas
There is an amazing assortment of puzzle grids for you to solve 445 in all! and puzzle mechanics for you to figure out.
Each area of the game is carefully thought out and very well designed, and every puzzle grid fits into each area surprisingly well.
I especially loved the bonus area behind the waterfall and the secret White ending. That really tugged at my heartstrings!
The puzzle difficulty was, for the most part, very well done. I only had gripes with the difficulty of a few select puzzles: The second puzzle in the sequence of puzzle grids behind the waterfall on the back of the stone head, the shortcut puzzle to connect the Ruins area to the Mine/Graveyard area, the Ruins White puzzle, the Mill White puzzle, and the Lake Tree puzzle.
The puzzle designs were also very well done, and there were many puzzles that will make you shout out Aha! when you solve them for the first time.

Cons:

For me, the price of this game is a little high for what you get. I would've put the price point at $19.99. This may not be the case for you, though.
For me, the game felt too short. I completed the entire game 100% in about 26 hours, which is rather short for a game like this. I was expecting to get at least 50 hours of playtime from this game.
Some of the puzzles in this game are very esoteric/cryptic to solve, mainly the White puzzles and the puzzle to get into the White area. In addition, some of the puzzles seem to go off the deep end in terms of difficulty (those are the ones that I said I had gripes with in the Pros section).

All in all, if you are a puzzle game lover, I highly recommend this game at either full price or slightly discount.

I commissioned some cats 11 is part of a series of hidden object games by Follow the Fun where he pays artists to create artwork for them to then hide different objects in them.

The main gameplay loop in this game is simple, yet effective, and you always feel a bit proud of yourself when you manage to finish an artwork. The artwork in the game is whimsical and sometimes a little odd, but overall, fits the game nicely. I cannot comment on the audio for this game since I usually play these types of games with either the sound and music muted, or without my headset, but I imagine that it took a lot of work to get 50 different pieces of music into this game.

Normally, for a game of this series, there are 15-25 different artworks that you can play, but in this installment, there are 50 artworks for you to choose from.

Herein comes the main problem that I have with this game: the price. While there are more levels than normal, the average level would take a player 5-10 minutes to solve, and even at the higher end of the spectrum, it would still only take 500 minutes to solve every artwork in this installment. That's just 9 hours, 40 minutes of content. The metric I always use when playing certain types of games is this: $1 per hour of game time spent in a game. This is, at least, the metric I use for most Indie games. This falls short of that metric by 3 hours. I would have felt better buying this game at $10.99 than its' current price.

Pros:
* Good artwork design
* Good level design
* Pretty enjoyable gameplay

Cons:
* Price point

If I could give this a thumbs-sideways review, I would, but the price point of this game is a big sticking point for me, so I cannot recommend this game at this time.

The sheer scope of the content added to this DLC is absolutely insane.

Here's a list of the content:

1,010 new items
96 new monsters
15 new pets
2 new skills

60 new abyssal levels for every skill but AoD content:

12 new Abyssal Combat Areas
14 new Abyssal Slayer Areas
8 new Abyssal Depths
2 new Abyssal Dungeons
4 new Abyssal Strongholds

12 new trees
18 new fish
30 new Cooking recipes
18 new ores/essences
8 new metal bars for Smithing
56 new Smithing recipes
16 new Thieving NPCs
12 new runes, 4 new combo runes
12 new staves/wands
60 new magic robes
12 new constellations
24 new marks/Summoning recipes
13 new Agility obstacles
20 new potions
73 new Crafting recipes
30 new Fletching recipes
31 new Farming crops
4 new Township Lands
At least 36 new Township Buildings (cannot see the buildings in the fourth land)
75 new Abyssal Township Tasks

There is a lot of new content, but it is going to take a while to get to. The very first Abyssal level requires 1,356,729XP, and I can only assume that this escalates very quickly. Given that some of the new content doesn't give the best XP right off the start, this can lead to some extremely grindy situations, even for an idle game.

That being said, I haven't done much in the new expansion yet, so I cannot say for certain if it gets faster, but I can only assume that it does.

EDIT 2:

#2: There is no way for non-combat skillers to access the new content.
#3: The new content is not balanced around any of the other game modes aside from standard. It is somewhat difficult for Hardcore to access, the new methods for Adventure Mode are absolutely abhorrent, and it doesn't play well with Relics Mode.

While there are the above two factors that are extremely detrimental to the way this expansion works, and the fact that some things are a bit too grindy, I am again recommending this expansion due to the fact that the Abyssal levels do indeed get a bit faster as you gain more levels.

Pieces of Beauty is a jigsaw puzzle game that includes seven puzzles to complete with three puzzle sizes for each puzzle.

The game itself is fairly stable, but a multitude of bugs have emerged over playing the game that has left me pretty much wanting to wash my hands of this game.

Pieces that get stuck on the edge of the screen, pieces that cannot be clicked on because they are in close proximity to the help button in the middle of the left side of the screen, and more have caused me to uninstall this game after giving it one last shot to get all of the achievements in this game.

Here's the pros and cons:

Pros:

+Images are pretty nice to look at.

Cons

-When you start a 285 piece puzzle, some of the pieces cover the area where you are supposed to put the jigsaw puzzle together.
-Instead of getting a picture to work off of that you can reference on a screen somewhere else, they literally overlay the entire image over the area where the jigsaw puzzle is put together, making for an extremely easy time putting the puzzle together. If you've played Pixel Puzzles Ultimate, it is the equivalent to the ghost hint.
-The puzzle must be completed in a single session. There is no quitting midway and having the game save your progress. This is frustrating, especially when you encounter one of the two bugs listed below:
-Sometimes, pieces get stuck underneath the help button, which cause you to literally have to exit the puzzle and restart it from the beginning.
-Sometimes, pieces get stuck on the edge of the screen, and cannot be dislodged with the reshuffle piece key. This also causes you to have to exit the puzzle and restart from the beginning.
-The UI for this game is extremely sloppy and clunky and have to deal with.

Overall, this game is not worth the time spent playing at any price, and I do not recommend this game.

Great option to help support the developer, but as others have said, would be great to be able to toggle the sparkle on/off.

I bought this because I love to support developers that make great indie games :)

Mega Mosaic is a puzzle game that functions the same as a Fill-a-Pix puzzle (from Conceptis' termonology), with the big caveat that it is 250x250 and there is only one puzzle included with this game.

Generally, Fill-a-Pix puzzles are solved by using the clues on the board to color in squares as either black or white (with the white squares denoting blank spaces and black squares indicating where the image is), and a lot of the logic from Minesweeper can be partially used to help solve your puzzles. There are lots of online guides that you can use to help you learn the different rules and techniques that you need to solve these kinds of puzzles. The main difference between typical Fill-a-Pix puzzles and this game is that in this game, the colors are reversed, which could cause you to have problems solving this puzzle.

The game has divided the grid into different regions and once you finish a region, it fills in with color and all of the numbers from that region are removed, with the exception of some of the outside numbers (the ones along the borders of the other regions). These are left to help you solve the rest of the puzzle. As of writing this guide, I've only finished three regions, and when those were filled in, I noticed some numbers on the very inside of each of the three regions didn't go away when the region was completed.

In addition, for all puzzles of this type, you are usually never given any squares that are colored in at the beginning of the puzzle (before you begin). This game has probably ~2000-2500 squares already filled in, somewhat diminishing the puzzle experience that you get from these types of puzzles.

The developer of this game has been very active and helpful in correcting erroneous behavior and providing fixes for issues that are reported by the players.

Here are the pros and cons:

Pros:

+Nice large Fill-a-Pix puzzle to solve, with some nice artwork when you finish a region.
+Pretty good graphics for this type of game, with a fairly easy to work with UI.
+Very proactive developer who provides patches quickly to help fix bugs and other erroneous behavior.

Neutral:

I put this into Neutral because it could swing either way depending upon the answer: Can you replay the puzzle after you've completed it? If the answer is yes, then this is a pro. If the answer is no, then this is a con.
Colors are swapped from the traditional coloring of White being empty spaces and black being part of the picture to the opposite, where black is the empty spaces and white is part of the image. I personally don't mind this too much, but a lot of other people might not be able to handle the switch.

Cons:
-You can only pan around the image using the WASD keys and not using your mouse. Being able to use your mouse to pan around the image, either by just moving the cursor off the edge of the visible part of the image to click+dragging would be a much better way of handling the panning.
-Parts of the puzzle start filled in. I don't like this, and in my opinion, the puzzle should be changed to be able to be solved without the need for any squares to have to begin colored in.
-The price point of the game is a bit high. I would have priced this at around $5.99-$6.49 myself.

I can now recommend this game, even if the price point is a little high, mainly thanks to the update that dropped today.

EDIT: Removed parts of the review that are outdated..