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Archvale had the potential to be great, but it never will be. Despite the game's glaring flaws, the developer abandoned it, saying that updating it was not financially beneficial.

Technical and QoL issues:

• There's no option to sell loot, materials, or crafted items. I kept expecting to find a vendor to sell items to but finished my playthrough with a stash chest full of worthless gear and materials. The only way to get rid of items is to delete them via the trash bin in your inventory, but even then some items cannot be deleted for some odd reason and will stay on your character until the end of the game.
  
  
• The crafting interface is unintuitive and has no filters or search options. Once you've gathered a lot of materials, the interface will be cluttered with all the items you can craft and there's no option to find a particular item easily.
  
  
• The badge interface is unintuitive and inconvenient. You cannot change your badges until you activate a fountain (which is also not explained and must be learned by trial and error). There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to change your badges on the fly rather than run to the nearest checkpoint.
  
  
• A lot of tooltips on items or badges are vague and hard to evaluate in practice. This is especially true for the mage class as the magic shard buff is not properly displayed anywhere.
  
  
• Lack of tooltips overall. The map does not have any location names, NPCs are speech bubbles, and I only know the names of the bosses because of the Steam achievement pop-ups.
  
  
• Jarring unskippable cutscenes. When unlocking a new fountain, you are forced into two unskippable cutscenes. One for unlocking the fountain and one for picking up a "+1 DEF" stat boost. Exciting the first time, not so much the 50th time.

Balancing issues (and where the game ultimately falls flat):

• Completely unbalanced melee class. If the three classes in Archvale were a family, the mage class would be smoking a Cuban cigar in a crocodile leather armchair, the range class would be making business calls while working out, and the melee class would be eating crayons and banging their head against a wall in the basement. After finishing my first playthrough on easy difficulty, I started a new game on hard difficulty with a melee class. Even with a +3 sword, I could not get through the first slime miniboss before I switched to a +0 boomerang.
  
  
• No build variance whatsoever. There are four status effects in Archvale: Bleed, burn, slow, and poison. All four effects have no synergy, utilization, or practical function in making a build and are in the game just for the sake of it. What you will end up doing is stacking attack speed on your armor, and pretending you're having fun.
  
  
• Gear and materials. I finished my first playthrough skipping entire tiers of ores, gear, and weapons. The changes in stats between the tiers are so marginal that I couldn't be bothered crafting most of the weapons and armor in the game. I could not even sell them afterward so what's the point if I'll be on another tier of materials in five minutes? There are no rare exciting drops, most loot is plain and boring and only serves as clutter in the inventory. The variety of materials and gear feels superficial and lazily implemented.
  
  
• Pace. By the time you upgrade the best weapon available, and start clearing rooms with ease (a.k.a. having fun), there's no more incentive to farm enemies or grind towards a goal, because the game ends and there is no endgame. This is what people mean when they say this game is short.

In summary, the game can be fun for a bit, but in the end, feels shallow and abandoned. It's quite a shame.

About time I uninstalled the game so I figured I left a review sharing my thoughts.

I have a level 100, mastery level 1929 summoner with fully upgraded gear capable of zooming through all the dungeon anomalies (analogical to rifts and greater rifts for the Diablo 3 enthusiasts) with ease. I have also fully unlocked the Ancient Beasts DLC expedition tree. And to have any sort of endgame in Chronicon, you will want to get that DLC.

I want to touch on this DLC before moving on to the main issues I have with the game as I feel that this DLC is a must-have in any case. Apart from slightly different environments and enemies, the Ancient Beasts DLC was a disappointment for me. It introduces a massive power creep to the game, but other than that it felt shallow. For example, you can grow your own beasts from the eggs you find in the expedition tree - endless possibilities! Well, there are only four beasts you can grow and growing them is a huge grind and when you're on your way to hatch your second beast, you will come to a realization that all four beasts offer the exact same benefits while only having a different visual sprite. So then what is even the point of having more than one beast and wasting the time on this painful unnecessary grind? The answer is - there is absolutely no point. And this sort of artificial grind is seeped deeply into the endgame of chronicon. Grind 30 minutes for +5 flat stat boost of this and an hour for +10 flat stat boost of that. Stretch your legs and repeat, 'cause that's all you get.

Now to the main issues that I don't see many people talking about and that I think are a complete endgame deal-braker for this game:

1. Did someone say playable maps? Nah, not our vibe.
Procedural generation takes time and effort to get right and, unfortunately, this game enjoys being lazy. No matter how mobile your build is, you will get stuck on map tiles, edges, and corners constantly. Sometimes the color difference between traversable tiles and obstacles are completely indistinguishable and you will end up constantly getting stuck on what seems to be invisible walls rendering the map almost unplayable. It seems like the developers made a procedural generation model that spits out thousands of wild combinations for maps (more is better, right?) and without any quality control whatsoever just slapped it onto the game. Shame, really.

2. Enter the matrix.
Do you enjoy making strong builds capable of breezing through mobs and clearing maps in lightning speed? Slow down, partner! Our game can't handle everything on the screen, we'll need you to take it down a notch. No matter your movement speed and mobility, the whole game slows down while clearing endgame content as it can't handle the amount of pixels on the screen. For the record, Diablo 3, which is a way more demanding game, runs smooth like butter on my machine. Fix your sh*t, Chronicon, about time.

TL;DR
You might have some fun with this game for a bit, but you will most likely be disappointed if you're expecting any sort of meaningful or enjoyable endgame. Even though this game does a lot of things right, I cannot recommend it as the fundamentals are lazily done and it does not respect your time in the slightest.

I can't believe I haven't reviewed this game yet. When I was applying to Westminster university in London, I mentioned This War of Mine as one of the inspirations for my work. There's nothing else quite like this game in the market. When people say that video games can be art, this game is what they're talking about.

This War of Mine will immerse you into a world of ruin, where there's nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. You will struggle to find food and firewood during the cold winter blizzards. You will be living in fear, unable to sleep, knowing that tonight they might try to break in again. You will have to kill if that means you and your family gets to live. This War of Mine is a world that no human should ever have to experience. And yet, this game is inspired by real world events.

I cannot praise this game and its creators "11 bit studios" enough. They captured the essence and atmosphere of wartime phenomenally. I have over 300 games in my library, and this game is one of the few that I keep coming back to, eager to experience it once again.

Short and sweet

The game was alright when I first played it a few years ago. The graphics and music are quite well done, but the RNG in combat made this game feel shallow. I've had a few hours of fun, but after beating the game I had no desire to boot it up again. It just felt lacking.

I was recently going through my library checking on casual games and decided to reinstall Domina to see what has changed. The first thing I noticed was that 4 of the classes that have been available for players who bought the game some time ago, are now locked behind DLC packs.

Let me stress this, there are only 7 classes in the entire game (with quite stale RNG combat, if I'm honest), and more than half of them now require you to pay extra, even though they were available if you were one of the early supporters. That's just really unfortunate and disrespectful to the supporters of this game.

I also checked the patch notes and I'm not joking, this was one of the updates from the developer:

"TAKE OFF THE ♥♥♥♥ MASKS - Next time you're at the grocery store, try showing a woman your face. Be confident, unafraid of the LIES -- you might get a girlfriend. Women like confidence. Women don't like dudes who cover their faces in fear. What are you afraid of? Getting laid? Grow up."

Seems like the developer cares more about their ego than their supporters. Needless to say, I will never again support any title made by this developer. What a shame, really.

This game is just... Boring.

Don't get me wrong, the whole style is quite unique, I enjoyed the art and music in this game, but other than that, the experience was sometimes frustrating and for the most part just boring. I think the concept of this game is great, but it seriously lacks in the technical and storytelling departments.

• Difficulty. Random fine of 3000 dollars for something you did or did not do. Don't have money to pay? Game over. Chose a "wrong" dialogue option without any indication of it being wrong? Game over. Your wife is angry at you? Game over. You see where I'm getting at, this game is not difficult, it's frustrating.

• Importance of choice. Your choices barely matter in this game. You do what you are told or you have to reload your last save.

• Consequences for your actions. There are none. If you get caught in a tenant's room, they get angry for a second and forget it. Stealing and blackmailing also have no consequences at all, unless you steal 3 items instead of 2 in 24h span, then it's game over and you have to reload your last save.

• Story. While interesting in the beginning, it got boring quite fast. The dialogue with your wife and kids is especially shallow compared to other NPCs, which is a shame. I found myself skipping through dialogue entirely in the second half of the playthrough.

• Paperwork. We just don't get enough of that in real life, do we? The whole "report, profile, blackmail" gimmick was fun for the first ten minutes and then it became a monotonous chore with no good incentive to even do it. Might as well remove it from the game entirely.

• Quests. Most of the quests are the most lazy fetch quests you can think of. There's even one quest, where you had to get a bottle of booze that costs 1000$ for a 500$ reward. This game sure knows how to treat you well.

• Conclusion. Halfway the playthrough I stopped caring about the story, quests and the game in general. The story was too shallow and chaotic to grab my attention, the gameplay became a monotonous chore with no meaningful rewards, challenges or moral dilemmas. From how this game was advertised I honestly expected better.

Darkwood was made mainly by the team of three Polish developers and took five years to make. It is one of the most horrifying and authentic horror experiences you will have. This game is truly a gem in the survival horror genre.


The suspense
We all know that great horror experiences must have suspense and the fear of the unknown. This game captures those feelings flawlessly. Breaking branches, creaking floors in the dark, doors opening by themselves, unrecognizable mutters and whispers in the night. For the most part, you will hear creatures around you way before you see them, if you get to see them that is. The game is constantly giving you clues that something horrible is happening around you, but never blatantly reveals it.

Vulnerability
You are never safe in Darkwood. Never. In these plagued woods, You will constantly be on your toes; struggling to survive to live another day, strategizing your course of action and managing your supplies. After a long, gruelling night, clenching a makeshift shovel in your sweaty hands, crippled by paranoia and fear you finally see the red haze of the sunrise. You feel relief, joy even. The difficulty makes It feel that much more rewarding. This is what one of the developers had to say in the rockpapershotgun interview: “We do not like jump-scares, we do not like the clichés repeated in this genre, we do not like to implement brutality for mere brutality’s sake. What is more, we do not like to be scared. Horror can only interest us when it rewards us with the effort put into overcoming this fear; when there is some purpose to terror and it is not an end in itself.”

The story
Darkwood is a dark, unsettling folktale with many intriguing mysteries that are up to the protagonist (the player) to solve. And even then, it’s up to the player to draw their own conclusions. You will meet memorable characters along the way and will make choices that will deeply impact your story. Choose wisely.

The art
Meet Artur Kordas - the Polish mastermind behind the art, story, sound design and most of the game design of Darkwood. The game is an artwork in itself, meant to be admired by those who are brave enough. Explore the haunting surroundings of the nightmarish forest, delve deeper into the woods and experience the horrors that lurk in the dark. The visuals, sound design, music and animation fit together harmoniously to create a distinct art style. I would highly suggest checking out Artur’s portfolio and maybe even buying the Artbook DLC to support the developers.

The little things
While the forest is procedurally generated, changes in it are permanent. The resources are sparse and once harvested, do not replenish. The bodies of the creatures you kill stay on the map, helping you navigate. There are many disturbing objects laying around that help create an eerie atmosphere. There are many clues and secrets in the forest that require you to pay attention in order to understand the story and make the right choices. Although, arguably, there are no right choices in Darkwood.


The combat
While for the most part, the combat is satisfying and rewarding, there are some things that could be improved upon. The dodge mechanic is not as useful as it sounds. Since it drains stamina and does not provide a sufficient distance between the player and the enemy, it becomes more of a gimmick than a viable mechanic. In most situations you will be a lot better off just dodging enemies by sprinting and timing your attacks. The enemies are also able to stunlock you, which is never pleasant in any game and feels cheap.

The balance
I feel like the balancing issue is the most prominent in Darkwood and is one of the main reasons only 8% of players have reached the 2nd chapter. Once you reach The Old Woods hideout ( The last hideout of the 1st chapter), the game ramps up in difficulty dramatically both at night and in the daytime. It becomes frustrating and tedious. Your barricades become obsolete, since chompers chew right through them and repairing them each morning feels like a waste of time and resources. You get attacked by mobs of sugnificantly stronger enemies than before and are undergeared to deal with them. I‘ve had a few nights where I did everything right on my part and still got overwhelmed by banshees and chompers , who raided my hideout all at the same time. Your weapons at this stage are not powerful enough to deal with waves of enemies thrown at you and you have no other choice than to hope for luck, which does not seem to be the intended way of playing the game. Strangely enough, the 2nd chapter becomes a lot easier in my experience and I had no problems defending my hideout since I was able to gear myself appropriately. I think that rebalancing the stamina mechanic or giving players the ability to craft stronger weapons in the end of the 1st chapter would solve the issue and save players a lot of frustration. Maybe rebalancing the amount or timing of enemy attacks at night could also help. Rebalancing barricades would also give them more purpose and strategic value, since after Old Woods they become nothing more than a high maintenance decoration.

The Progression
While I enjoy the game not leading me by the hand and letting me figure most of the things out myself, I don’t think that one should have to search the game wiki in order to find out how to progress through the game. I got stuck on various occasions which led to confusion, frustration and time-waste. This is where the art style and the decision to give player the least information possible becomes counter intuitive. Rather than creating an immersive experience, it breaks the immersion and leads to frustrating gameplay, where the player ends up running in circles. It’s very easy to miss essential objects in this game (such as doors, crates or notes) that lead to progression. The journal is supposed to give hints of the direction, but even then, a lot of these specific objects are simply visually invisible ( such as the door to the compartments of the trainwreck ). A very easy solution would be to make these objects stand out more visually, or give the player more informative hints.


This game is definitely one of a kind and is worthwhile if you consider yourself a horror genre enthusiast. Focus. Be patient. And remember: all roads lead deeper into the woods.

Let me start by saying - I really wanted to like Delver.

At first, the game hooks you in, everything seems new and interesting. But quite soon you start to realise just how tedious the gameplay is and the flaws of the game rise to the surface. So let me explain exactly what I'm talking about.

PROS:
- pixel graphics
- music soundtrack
- secrets
- level design

CONS:
- lack of balance
- small weapon variety
- small enemy variety
- gamebreaking visuals
- dull combat
- false sense of difficulty
- Overall lack of content

In the game description the developers promise you challenging and tough gameplay that will test your skills. Well, let's just say, that is not the case. Unless you count an enemy attacking you from underneath water, where it's absolutely invisible - a fair and challenging gameplay. A lot of games nowadays are trying to be hard and challanging and that is respectable. Most of the time in these games, the permadeath is harsh and punishing, but fair and helpful. Not in this game. This game is a very easy game with bullsh*t mechanics to give a false sense of difficulty. What this means is that you are going to roll through this game with ease, but will sometimes still die to some absurd situations. This is a very lazy way to implement difficulty into a game and it gets boring fast.

In this game there are three main classes as in most RPG games - mage, range and melee. There is absolutely no reason to invest your level points into melee or range. The mage class overpowers the other two classes by far and is the most useful. That is just a very poorly thought-out levelling and combat system. What you will do is start with melee, invest your points into magic and health and when you have enough charges saved up on your staves, roll through the rest of the game mindlessly. This game will test your patience rather than anything else.

Also what is up with solid color water tiles? Is it really that hard to lower the opacity of these blocks? In water, the enemies, arrows and items are absolutely invisible. It's such an easy thing to fix, but you can tell the developer just doesn't care.

This game has almost no replayability whatsoever, is way too easy and unfair at the same time, unballanced and overall LACKING. Don't expect any updates soon, the developer doesn't care and seems to have forgotten the game a long time ago. You get very little of what you pay for and there are many way better rogue-lites out there that are cheaper.

Terraria, Stardew Valley and Don't Starve - all these games are priced below 15€, while this game costs 20€ on launch. Keep that in mind while reading this review.

Let me start by saying that I really appreciate HopFrog's effort and time that he put into his passion project that we now know as Forager, it was long three years of development and the game finally sees the light of day. It's always exciting to see a new game made by a single independent developer, this in itself is a big accomplishment. That said, the game is far from finished and should belong in the early access category with a much lower price tag.

Technical issues:
- Broken achievements. "Tool collector" achievement is triggered before a player upgrades every tool. "Waterproof" achievement is absolutelly broken. If you thought Dark Souls games are hard, think again. You might have to porposely glitch the game to get this achievement and it will require a lot of patience. Guide here: https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1720900376
- No option to disable screen shake. Best-case scenario you end your game session with a headache, worst-case scenario on the floor having a seizure.
- No option to zoom out. I honestly have no idea why the game screen is zoomed in so much by default and why there's no option to change it. I'm no developer, but CTRL+mousewheel shortcut doesn't seem to me to be very difficult to implement into a game.
- No quick heal/eat option. The menuing in this game is bad as it is, please give us something to work with.
- No map. I guess the developer went the realistic route.
- Sound settings might as well not exist. You'll have to use your sound mixer to control the volume of the game.
- Poor inventory management system. No option to move or split items in the inventory or the toolbar. Becomes mildly inconvenient in the midgame, when you can't split your resources to sell one half and use the other.
- Invisible mouse cursor. Seriously, where is it? Should be an option to use your default computer mouse cursor in-game, it's not fancy, but at least it gets the job done.
- Very poorly coded object hitbox. You will start to think this game wants to fight you.
- Droid AI constantly obstructs object hitboxes. This game definitely wants to fight you. You're essentially shooting yourself in the foot by progressing through the game, might as well avoid drones altogether.
- Item feed obstructs 1/5th of the whole game screen. Sure, take it. It's not like I need to see what's happening on the right side of the screen or anything.

QOL issues:
- Pulsating indicator of selected object or item. This game really favours style over function.
- No building description.
- No gear desciption in the toolbar.
- No stats on items or your character.
- No option to fast-forward time. We all know that this game is mostly an idle game, the option should be there.
- Building and destroying mechanics are wonky and inefficient.
- Electric cubes involved in puzzle solving are very poorly coded.

Overall issues:
- There's absolutely no challenge in the game whatsoever. The only challenge in the endgame is to be able to die.
- The game tries to do many things at once rather than doing one thing well.
- Dungeons are short, dull and unrewarding.
- Combat system feels cheap and shallow.
- Item and gear variety is laughable.
- Power creep is way too fast and unbalanced. You will be constantly asking yourself "Am I cheating or is this an intended way to play the game?"
- No meaningful end goal. You know something is wrong if your game's end goal is to cover the whole map with dirt. It's really a shame. Even some other good idle games have ascension systems in place for a player to have a sense of some sort of end goal.

Forager is objectively a bad game. In a clear conscience I cannot recommend this game at this stage and at this price. Hopefully, it can become a game that's worthwhile in the future, but for now, don't waste your money, especially when there's so many great games at lower prices on the market.



EDIT:

Thank you everyone for your feedback, I'd like to adress a few things. Yes, the price of the game did influence my overall opinion of the game, as it should. This review was meant to magnify the game's flaws and I did focus on the negative on purpose. 90% of the reviews here do a great job at explaining what the game does well. I did focus on the flaws, because I honestly want the game to suceed and become the game it claims to be. I did overexadurate a few of the issues, mainly for a comedic purpose. Many of you asked me to share what I enjoyed about the game. Well, let me compare this game to a bad movie for a brief moment. Let's say that you are watching a movie and you're really enjoying it. You like the plot, the dialog, the characters, the soundtrack, everything seems to be right up your alley. But after a while, you approach the ending of the movie, and it just doesn't make any sense. The plot takes a nonsensical twist, the actors break their character they've been building the whole time, the music does not match the emotion meant to be portrayed, and the whole universe of the movie collapses before your eyes. You just have this weird feeling that the ending of the movie was rushed and rushed so bad it ruined the whole experience. That was the feeling I got after my first 10 hours of gameplay. I felt that this game had so much potential to be more than it is and maybe it still has. After I unofficially beat the game, I tried to analyse what makes Forager a bad game of its genre and where it could be vastly improved. I'm relieved to know that HopFrog does listen to his playerbase and takes our concerns seriously. I'm informed that a few of the issues listed above in the review are being worked on as we speak. I really wish the best for the game and I hope that one day I'll be able to experience it in a different light. I might update the review in the future.

It's a decent board game simulation.

there's a lot of diversity on how to build your character and choose your path. Armello relies a lot on RNG as every board game does, but it doesn't get in your way, strategy is still a big part of the game. The only big downside is multiplayer. The timers are unbalanced and way too long when playing against other players and one player leaving the match pretty much ruins it for everyone. Other than that, the single player is pretty enjoyable. I would recommend buying this game on sale, doesn't seem to be worth the full price for me.