Recent reviews by TheSilencer

One of the best open world games in many years. It cuts out most of the bloat of the formula, while keeping what works, and remains fully dedicated to the Kurosawa inspiration throughout. The third act is a bit too long for its own good, but not enough to ruin the experience.

The belts... They never left me. Try as I might, they can never leave my mind again. They are always waiting behind my eyes, their impression carved into my very soul. The whir of the machines lurking behind every moment of silence.

And now, they have returned, in the flesh. They haunt my waking as they used to haunt my sleeping. And there are more this time- greater depths to plumb, the secrets of the universe seeming to lurk behind each new machine. Production now spans multiple planets, forcing my mind to fracture just to track the parallel worlds. Rockets and platforms now sit beside trains in my mind, each one more piece of the Puzzle.

The Old Ways are reshaped by quality, which distorts all it touches. One might resist the Call, yes... but the rewards are great, and ever beckon. Madness piles on madness, rewards and complication growing unbounded.

Dear reader, if I vanish, know that they have consumed me to the utmost. Do not send help. For to gaze upon them is to forfeit your life, and maybe your soul. They consume all. The Factory must grow, in space, in time, into the depths of the human heart and mind. Make no mistake, it will consume all in the end.

The belts call. Reality grows dim. My time is short. Even now, new and more esoteric constructions cry out to be built. And I must answer.

The factory must grow. The Factory will grow. It's too late to stop it.

An extremely promising hybrid of Vampire Survivors with elements of Hades and an equipment-based metaprogression system. Worth the price of entry for fans of the genre.

A rare innovation on retro-style design, with surprisingly compelling unfolding roguelite mechanics. Limiting the duration of a run makes bad rolls a fun challenge, instead of a wasting a lot of time. The weapons are balanced such that true bad runs are almost nonexistent. Not a terribly complex game, but well worth the price.

It's akin to 3D Factorio with a higher emphasis on exploration replacing the defensive portion. It has a high level of polish out of the gate and does a good job differentiating itself from other games of the genre.

A good Dwarf-Fortress-like game is designed with the recognition that complexity makes the game interesting, but only if that specific complexity both makes sense as a simulation and leads to interesting stories. This game is built around that concept, paring out complexity for its own sake while taking care to make sure that the systems that are in palce are intuitive and easy to use while also being deep enough to be interesting. You don't need a wiki to play this game well, although there's subtlety that you can choose to make use of- but you don't need to worry about details deeper than what you see in-game unless you enjoy it.

The real emphasis is story. As opposed to the Dwarf Fortress approach of leaving your fate up to the RNG and a larger world simulation, Rimworld is focused on making an interesting narrative. Sometimes it's a meeting with long-lost relatives (maybe on the other side of the field of battle), sometimes it's your best doctor suffering a mental break and wandering around naked when your colony's best shot is bleeding out, sometimes it's trouble in the power grid during a heat wave, and sometimes it's a colonist's pet monkey getting into the beer stash.

There's also a more gentle storyteller mode for when you want to just build a prosperous colony, and a more random one if you want a more chaotic experience. Each storyteller has a difficulty setting as well, allowing you to fine-tune the game to the experience you want.

The excellent mod support and mod community are worth mentioning as well- there are mods allowing you to fine-tune the experience any number of ways, from new storytellers or widespread rebalance to minor modifcations and cosmetic additions.

At its heart, Factorio is akin to the sort of freeform automation you find in modded Minecraft, taken into 2D and polished to an exceptional degree- striking a good balance between the simplicity of its core mechanics and the complexity of advanced use of these mechanics. Progression is quite good, with recent updates smoothing the progression curve and vastly improving the early phases of the game.

Despite being in early access, the stable versions play like a completed game at this point in its development, and have for years. Unstable versions, barring the window immediately following a major feature release, are still more refined and stable than many games

It also has a highly active mod community, which adds many hours of play time past the already impressive base game, some of it quite interesting to experienced players.