Recent reviews by Soliloqui

I've been hooked on this one since completing the free demo a few days ago and so far I really love it.
It's Stardew but in space and you gradually terraform your inhospitable lonely little planet into a thriving colony community whilst discovering its mysteries along the way.
I also really love the minesweeper-esque mechanic of the dungeoneering/mining and the cute QWERTY bot companion (although he does get in the way of trying to plant seeds frequently!! >.< )
My only gripes really are mostly that some of the placement is fiddly (trying to mine rocks/plant seeds behind other objects can be a mission), that the timing seems a little off at the start though I suppose you do need *some* boredom time to appreciate that you're alone out there before things really kick off, and that so far with the mining there doesn't seem to be much sense of progression, but this is just an initial review and I'll really need longer with it yet. It's certainly not one I'm going to be putting down for a while yet!

Really fun, cute little game. Can get very clever and devious with spell combinations to solve puzzles.

Amazing.
Puzzle adventure with hard but very satisfying, totally optional, puzzles. Everything needed to solve them is somewhere for you to find and use to piece together fragments of the gripping storyline. By making the puzzles optional it outright dares your inner completionist to use your natural curiosity and intellect to explore further, to write things down, and to hoard everything that might be important!
I've not played a game this involving in a long time, and there are a lot of rightful favourable comparisons to Myst. Last night my brain actually tried to solve the mysteries and puzzles of Ether One in my dreams. I can't get it out of my head.
I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far despite being totally stuck for the third or fourth time, but I will solve all the puzzles damn it! I will!

Hm, I love classic point and click adventure games but after about 15 minutes of this one I'm feeling quite nauseated by it.

The controls are fiddly and annoying and you often have to do things several times before they register and you can progress. However I've played a good many of these kinds of games and I've dealt with worse for the sake of a fantastic storyline, so that in itself is not a deal-breaker for me.

The voice acting is terrible, there is no flow to dialogue and it sounds like each line was recorded separately with actors who've never seen the script and who do not understand the syntax of English.

The lead character is fundamentally oboxious and unpleasant. That's probably the point, and maybe they are planning on doing some amazing character building and turning it around, we shall see.

My real problem with it so far is the rampant sexism. I know they're trying to invoke the spirit of the 1930s but they're really massively overdoing it on the gender stereotypes. I'm literally on the 2nd scene of the game and have heard at least four negative statements about women. As if the world of gaming really needed any more kitchen jokes! I'd understand an undertone of it to set the scene of the game, but at the moment it just feels like being bashed over the head with the blunt, narrow-minded opinions of someone who doesn't usually get an outlet for them. Have a little subtlety and empathy for your burgeoning female fan-base before you alienate them entirely.

I plan on finishing the game and altering this review accordingly once completed, but as it stands at present I'm proceeding with extreme caution and not particularly high hopes that I'm not totally wasting my time.

SPAAAACCCCEEE!
Very short but I very much enjoyed pretending to be an astronaut on a Mars mission and rescuing someone and driving Rover Johnny 5 about the place.
Oh, and getting a badge for getting sums right!
And apparently there will be more badge-able Mars games soon followed by a big space MMO all brought to us by the lovely people at NASA.
Badgeablesbadgeablesbadgeables.