Recent reviews by Arkku

This is a nice, relatively short old school point'n'click adventure. The retro graphics are good, save for a couple of cutscenes/close-ups that don't really fit the rest of the game (but, to be fair, the same was true of many classic adventure games). The soundtrack is minimalistic and not very memorable, but ok. The voice acting is very good.

The puzzles are generally ok, but not particularly memorable, and many of them solve themselves if you just go around talking to everyone about everything. In the very end there are some puzzles that try to be a bit too "occult" and feel like they don't fit with the rest of the game, but if you don't understand all of the clues, the remaining occult puzzles are easily brute forced.

Now, the biggest problem with this game is that your choices don't matter at all. Again, to be fair, this was of course true in almost all the classic adventure games in the 80's and 90's: the plot was linear and you just needed to solve puzzles to advance it. However, what makes it particularly annoying in Hob's barrow is that the game forces several obviously Really Bad Ideas™ on the player, despite almost every character in the game outright saying that these are bad ideas, and in the end even revealing why they are really bad ideas… In the beginning it feels like there are some dialogue choices to make, but none of them make any difference at all to the story. Not sure if there was originally a plan to have multiple endings.

Anyway, if you can accept that this, Hob's barrow is still an enjoyable game, so I will recommend it to fans of classic point'n'click adventures. Out of modern horror/mystery adventure games I would recommend Oxenfree (with multiple endings and choices that actually matter) over this, if you haven't played it already, though.

(Technical notes: plays great on the Steam Deck. Remember to save manually to different slots since there is only one autosave slot. Beware that there is no conversation history so if you miss a line, e.g., by accidentally clicking, you pretty much have to load the game to get it again – except for puzzle-critical info that you can usually ask again or see in the To Do -list. The user interface is also old school, and not in a good way.)

Wonderful pixel graphics, lots of horses (and other mounts), simple gameplay but surprisingly addictive. Great game for the Steam Deck.

I thought I would like this game since it plays great on the Steam deck, has nice pixel graphics, and feels similar to Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV, which I both like. Unfortunately, I just don't. In particular, after several maps of puzzle platforming "alone" (as in, without enemies), there are maps where you get chased by an increasing number of ghosts. This felt like a fundamental change in gameplay, and one which I didn't like. After about half an hour of suffering through "just one more map, maybe it will go back to how it was", I decided it's just not fun _for me_ and quit.

(The plot seems wholesome, and I considered using the assist mode to skip these levels, but I don't really like that idea either, and there are too many games to play anyway.)

Obviously this game is inspired by Vampire Survivors (there is even a playable character called Vampire Survivor). I love Vampire Survivors, especially on the Steam Deck (where I can sniff the exhaust vent while the game plays itself), and no other game will ever fully equal the same sheer craziness and fun of the original. I have about 60 hours in Vampire Survivors, and I had 100% achievements at version 1.0 (haven't done all the DLC ones since).

That being said, I think this is technically a better game: the game never seems to become so trivial that you could just let go of the controls, and there are many, many more combinations of minions, relics and characters to play with. Runs great on Steam Deck, so, highly recommended if you like this type of game. If you are not sure, try Vampire Survivors first; it is simpler and easier to get into.

Don't fear the reaper.

It's hard to rate this game since I played it all the way through in one sitting, which suggests that it was good for its (short) duration. However, at the same time the actual gameplay didn't really build up to anything, just more of the same puzzles. There was even a line in the game itself saying that the difficulty curve is all over the place, which is true – the last puzzle was one of the easiest in the entire game. Also, there's only about 1 hour of puzzles in the game, the rest is dialogue and cutscenes.

As for the story, without spoiling anything, if you think you saw what was coming in the end, you probably didn't. That's a good thing in itself, but I think most people won't feel particularly satisfied with the ending, so I'm hesitant to recommend this game for sake of just the story. I also don't think the characters were particularly believable or deep, and especially Vanille seems annoyingly like yet another dreamgirl character written by a man.

In summary: if you have this from a bundle or such, it may be worth playing (or, rather, reading since it is more a visual novel than a game), but I would skip buying it at full price.

Meh, got this from some bundle. The idea sounds more fun than the actual game is. The dev spreading harmful propaganda in patch notes is another matter – I admit it inspired me to write this review, but honestly I wouldn't recommend the game even without that (look at playtime, that's about as long as it held my interest).

The WH40K setting, in particular Adeptus Mechanicus, is great and the writing is surprisingly good (albeit very cheesy, but that kind of goes with Warhammer).

The main gameplay is in X-Com style turn-based tactical battles, although with an interesting shared action (cognition) point pool that carries over to the next round, which means one character can sometimes do an entire team's worth of actions in a single turn and other times the entire team may just spend the turn doing basic moves and gathering more points.

Outside of the battles the missions have the team walking around the map where you can either gain or lose resources by choosing (usually one out of three options) how you react to various situations. The correct answers quite arbitrary but after a while it becomes easier to guess which is the good one. The choices don't really matter very much, however: either you get some minor additional rewards/advantages or the enemy does.

The biggest problem with the game is that it is absolutely trivial: even at maximum difficulty the enemy does not stand a chance against the OP tech priests. I even accidentally nerfed myself by not realising the mission selector has more than one mission available per NPC offering it, and thus locked myself out some powerful upgrades. In particular, the last mission was ridiculously easy, even compared to some of the other boss missions. To make things worse, the difficulty curve is inverted: you keep gaining new abilities and weapons all the way to the end, but there are no new enemies or enemy abilities revealed after about half way through, just marginally more durable or better armoured versions of the same.

Still, despite the game being easy, I did enjoy the puzzle-y nature of coming up with powerful builds and combos, and trying to win the battles as quickly as possible. So, a cautious recommendation for fans of the genre and/or WH40K, but play X-Com 1 & 2 first.

Brum brum *crash* Brrrrruuum bruu*CRASH* Brrrrum bruuum *flip* brruuum

The single-player campaign was mostly enjoyable. Did have to restart from checkpoint quite a lot (played on hardest difficulty, i.e., veteran), which was occasionally frustrating when the autosave decided to save at a spot in direct view of enemy machine guns. The tank and plane sequences also suffered from awful mouse controls. Friendly AI soldiers are also useless, so you need to be the supersoldier who carries the entire platoon. Anyway, got this from some bundle and it was good enough for one playthrough - would never buy at full price. Also didn't try multiplayer, since there are newer alternatives.