Recent reviews by Sammy 🦋

Controller support is so bad that I think it is misleading to say that it's supported at all. I bought this game to play on the steam deck but it's basically unbearable to play without a keyboard and mouse.

After being somewhat dissapointed by Rise and the first DLC pack, I thoroughly enjoyed this one! The challenge level was a lot better, difficult without being overly obtuse. Looking forward to the next DLC release!

I loved this game. It's a mashup of network engineering and horror, but if you're not interested in the horror stuff, it can be disabled so you can focus on perfecting your network.

Assuming no prior knowledge, the starting point of "I have no idea what i'm doing", to puzzling out how things work over time is very satisfying if you're interested in computer sciencey stuff, and going from that eventually having some competency over the systems given to you and just knowing how everything glues together is great fun. You also get given a number for the effective speed of your network which is very fun to see rise as you connect more stuff and clean up all the mistakes you made while you were learning.

Engineering your network is very satisfying and I found myself ignoring objectives in favour of just making more network stuff. Probably 10 hours or so of my playtime was just me optimizing my network for the joy of it.

There's a couple of janky bits, the controls for connecting things together can be a bit confusing at first (As a new player, keep an eye on those tooltips at the bottom left of the screen while you're holding different objects, as it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize I could connect things manually by holding nothing and clicking stuff!), and the start can be a little slow while you are waiting for some cash to flow in, but if you can get over that stuff there's a really good time to be have connecting everything together

If you can put up with a steep, but incredibly satisfying learning curve, this game is a great purchase, especially for the low price. For the right kind of person, this game is a real gem

A bit sad to not reccomend this one. Looked really fun, and I was really enjoying whenever I got a new page for the instruction booklet to try to figure out what to do with it, but the combat and controls are awful and hamstring what would be a really fun game.

If you're thinking about picking this one up, be aware that combat wise, it's a bad dark souls clone, and is quite challenging. The controls don't work very well and it copies a lot of things from other games without thinking about how they will work together. For example, changing equipment does not pause the game - which would be fine on its own, however, you can only have 3 items equipped at one time, and one of them is obviously going to be your sword, so two items. Add to that the fact that many enemies basically require certain items to be defeated and you end up in a frustrating situation where you have to go into a menu to defeat a foe that is essentially no threat to you. That wouldn't be that big of a deal either, annoying perhaps, but then there's also an estus flask system from dark souls, so mistakes are heavily punished!

There's also a lot of directionless wandering you're going to have to do to figure out where to go next, and an overreliance on using geometry to hide paths forward which puts a damper on solving the next puzzle (the thing I was most excited to do)

I really wish I could enjoy this game more. There's options to turn off incoming damage in the options, which I tried turning off after deciding it was that or quit and never come back after getting stuck in an area that I wasn't really strong enough to fight in, but unsurprisingly it just makes the game boring, and I gave up playing shortly after.

I think if this game had committed more to being a dark souls style game I could have enjoyed it more. Or even better if it committed more to being a puzzle game I would have loved it, but mixing the two and not doing either particularly well just leaves me wanting to play something else.

If you've got the patience to learn some complex systems, this game is super fun - It's sort of like a mix of Oxygen Not Included's engineering depth with Minecraft's fun creative side. I'd strongly reccomend this game to anyone who likes a really complex simulation to dive into and master

If you've got a programming background, the game is even more fun, as you can do a bunch of stuff better by writing custom code for your machines - though this is not strictly necessary as you can also download scripts from the workshop or ignore the coding side completely and just use logic chips which work sort of like a more fully featured version of minecraft's redstone.

This game scratches an itch no other has ever managed to - Can't recommend it enough, at least if you're willing to learn a pretty complex game!

Big fan of this! It's sort of a mix between a puzzle board game and a colony builder. Most missions operate on a strict timer so the skill in the game is about adapting to the terraforming 'cards' you're dealt and going as quickly as possible. The balance is really finely tuned in that it will often feel like you're just barely surviving, but without feeling like you're stuck following exactly the path the game expects you to. It's also deep enough that it does feel like eventually you can express mastery over the game systems and really start taking off and thriving rather than surviving.

There's also a sandbox mode, which although the game's tech tree is quite short due to its more puzzley / racing nature, holds up quite well, especially if you're going for the metropolis achievement.

I'd compare this pretty strongly to frostpunk, but I think it's a lot more fun despite the simpler presentation. The turn based nature works much better for this kind of game in my opinion and it feels like you have a lot more room for expression, where frostpunk felt very much railroaded to one specific path.

Reading some of the reviews here, I feel like I was playing an entirely different game to everyone here.

I went into this game with really high hopes, looking forward to an interesting point and click experience (one of my favourite genres!) - but I got very sick of the writing very quickly. I didn't connect with any of the characters, the worldbuilding was boring. Halfway through the game I was really bored and started skipping through dialogue because I didn't care, and the last 20% I was just trying to check the game off. I should have stopped playing earlier really.

There's also a bizarre inclusion of a combat mechanic that really makes the world feel extremely fake. One of the first events you come to is some big guy who's a bit of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and says you can't go into a shop so you just beat the snot out of him. Then shortly after you're trying to break into a facility to retrieve a cardboard box of gubbins that you don't know the contents of, because it was stolen from you. You have to do this by beating up two robots with rifles, who shoot you repeatedly but it's fine I guess? You can just lose the fight where you get shot like 5 times and there's no penalty, which just makes the world feel like there's absolutely no stakes

Maybe there's some hidden meaning that I just didn't 'get' that makes this game a beautiful piece of art, but I guess I got too bored to get anything out of it. Really couldn't recommend it at all. If you want something along these lines, the Bithell Circular games are enjoyable text adventures (Subsurface Circular and Quarantine Circular), or Disco Elysium is a fantastic pick, but if you're reading a review for NORCO, you probably already know about it.

Really enjoyed my time! Strong Night in the Woods vibes!

Awful. The premise is you watch movie clips in a random order and click faces and objects which will whisk you away to the next clip. Most clips are uninteresting. There is a moment when you think that the game will go in an interesting direction, but you then rapidly realize that you just have another set of clips to watch which are somehow even less engaging than the movie clips.
There is very little story to be found here. having played for 3 hours hoping it would come to some actual narrative, it never came and spoiling myself online made me very glad i didn't continue. Avoid

Funny, smart, and great puzzle design. Absolutely brilliant adventure game. I finished it twice!