Recent reviews by Cthulhu's Monocle

One that surprised me with how fun / addictive it ended up being is Drill Core - a mix of exploration, tower defence, and colony simulator. Operate a mining platform garrisoned by a team of workers / gatherers / guards, searching for resources to use during the op and to upgrade your team / platform. Time is divided into a day / night cycle (time being shown in the upper right), your crew being able to work during the day before the caverns fill with tunnelling man eating worms in the night. Nighttime is when the tunnel above the mining platform fills with a swarm of hostile insects looking to destroy your platform's core. The side of the tunnel is lined with blocks for placing defensive turrets, usually of the gun / energy / explosive type - all being upgradeable. Mining in Drill Core gives me that same satisfaction I got from mining in Dungeon Keeper 2[en.wikipedia.org]; select different tiles for clearing, selecting again to give it a priority for removal. Tiles will show what resource is inside, also the cracks / tunnelling of xenos creatures about to burst in to attack your workers. Much of the mine will be shrouded in a fog of war, being cleared out square by square or via structures you can unlock / build. The platform itself has a limited number of slots for structures to be built upon, additional layers to be built when the one below it is full. Structures come in quite the variety of flavours, adding to your max worker population, upgrades, producing resources, offensive / defensive structures, support structures to aid with mining, and more. Just about everything it seems can be upgraded / built upon, which is pretty cool. I honestly would have probably gone and purchased this if it was available during the last Fest. Give me more biomes, enemy types, turrets, etc… I just want more of this game. **Wishlisted**

Remember Me is a sci-fi action parkour title featuring the combat of the Batman Arkham Asylum titles with a dash of memory manipulation. Play as Nilin, a Memory Hunter trying to restore her memories while aiding a resistance group fighting a corporate entity that has ruined much of the world.

Most of your time in Remember Me will be spent either climbing the environments of the city or engaging in combat against security forces / brain damaged test subjects. Combat will remind many of Arkham Asylum right off the bat from its hit - dodge - hit system. Performing combos is a big deal, as you are able to assign different modifiers to each hit in a combo menu. As an example, your main combo is X, X, X, so you can assign a modifier (damage / healing / cooldown / chain) to two out of three buttons, the first always being neutral as a starter. A ranged attack plus different abilities become unlocked as you play, being a requirement for handling certain enemies / disabling a unit's unique ability. Combat isn't difficult at all, even on the highest difficulty, a casual time overall.

The neat concept going on in Remember Me is the ability to erase / steal / modify the memories of others; changing small things here and there in a memory in order to change the outcome / overall memory to suit your purpose. These are simple trial and error puzzles taking place during cutscene-like game play moments.

Honestly not a bad time overall, especially if you can get it on sale for a good price. Doesn't outstay its welcome either, being a rather short experience. Recommend checking it out casually.

I was looking forward to trying Elation For The Wonder Box 6000, a first person claymation adventure game, but what I think is a case of a poor demo has left me unsatisfied. You play as a man yearning for a video game from his childhood – Elation for the Wonder Box 6000 – that no one, anywhere, can seem to remember. The game is incredibly short, mostly being comprised of reading a forum post your character writes, getting banned, complaining to the man living inside your wall, then missing the bus to the city. I'm really not sure what to make of this one, since the whole experience was rather lacklustre. I'll be passing on this one. **Uninstalled**

Worshippers of Cthulhu is a Lovecraftian themed city builder that gives me slight Against the Storm vibes. Take the role of a cult leader, guiding the survivors of a shipwreck towards building a new settlement, and fulfilling your slumbering God's will. Workers can be used to disassemble the wreckage of your ship / long abandoned nearby structures for starting supplies to begin building your town. Houses transform the homeless into workers, each with their own specialty, to be assigned in economy related buildings for production. Assigning a worker to a job they are specialized in will help to generate faith used to purchase buildings / maintain their upkeep. Roads connect your buildings, allowing townsfolk to deliver supplies / collect manufactured goods. Carvings will generate Eldritch Favour for unlocking new structures, each carving having its own resource requirement (lumber / clams / blood / people) for completion – although this can be changed / juggled freely. Choices will pop up throughout the demo, giving you some flavour text, and the choice of three options; usually a mix of intensity from rip / kill / tear, more neutral town leader or to work against the interests of the cult by setting free captives / sacrifices. Pylons can be built to increase the cap on eldritch horrors / demons you can summon, used to attack the settlements of unbelievers. This is a pretty competent city builder, making a good use of the Lovecraft theme overall. I could see picking this one up at the right price, I'll be keeping an eye out to see how it ends up reviewing. **Wishlisted**

Gladio Mori is a physics based melee weapon combat title that I was hoping would hook me in the same addictive way Half Sword did in the previous Fest; sadly, it did not. This is a game that should absolutely be played with a controller, otherwise you are going to get a weird combination of keyboard only controls that throw up some red flags immediately. Left thumb stick move you about, the right controlling the camera, your face buttons (X,A,B,Y) controlling the direction of your swing / block (up, left, right, down). Holding down left trigger & using your face buttons will control the direction of your block, feels a little janky to the point I'm not all that sure of its intended effectiveness. Three weapon combinations are available in the demo, the bardiche, twin hatchets, or a sword n' board. Shields are pretty big, thankfully there is a special ability on your right bumper that just has you reach over the opponent's shield and stab them in the face – making me again wonder at the balancing of certain things. Weapon strikes are slow / methodical, needing to hold down the button to fully commit to the animation or end up ineffectively bouncing off one another. Damage is translated into muscles, veins, etc…, meaning you can cripple a limb or cause someone to bleed out. I really wanted to like Gladio Mori, I dig this kind of HEMA / medieval combat game, it just doesn't hit as good as Half Sword does at the end of the day. **Uninstalled**

A mix of fantasy meets Viscera Cleanup Detail, Goblin Cleanup feels quite similar without having that same hook that kept me going in Viscera. Play as an Elven waifu tasked with cleaning out the dungeons of your overlord; replacing furniture, feeding meat chunks to mimics, and mopping up blood with water slimes. Mimics can be picked up and moved to help gather up meat faster or to reposition so you don't get chomped yourself. Blood spills can be mopped up by going to the slime dispenser, pulling the handle, then spearing it on the end of your pitchfork. When your slime is full it will die, getting cartoon 'X's in the eyes, indicating it should be fed to the mimic chest. The dungeon itself is full of different traps to keep you on your toes as you gather up debris. For whatever reason the actual flow of game play just wasn't hooking me, I kept finding myself wanting to move faster and not have to keep returning for slimes. It didn't quite do it for me but might do it for big fans of the Viscera Cleanup gameplay loop seeking something similar. **Uninstalled**

An Arcade Full of Cats is another hidden object game revolving around cats brought to you by the fine folks at Devcats. Much like A Building Full of Cats, An Arcade Full of Cats has you finding X amount of hidden cats in a hand drawn arcade, with a hidden level and hidden cats to find. I have really enjoyed every demo I have played for these casual puzzle games and highly recommend them to anyone looking for a casual good time. Wishlisted

The Alters is a third-person sci-fi survival base management game that feels like it has a Netflix series sort of vibe, if that makes sense. Play as Jan Dolski, the sole survivor of a wrecked spacecraft, trapped on an environmentally unstable world containing Unobtainium Rapidium; a resource that speeds the growth of a living thing. Your time in The Alters will be spent mining / gathering resources around the terrain near your unicycle wheel of a base, building / organizing rooms within the interior of the wheel's structure, managing resources for survival, and keeping the alternates happy. Due to being the only survivor – in what I believe to be an intentional experiment by the company – you are made Captain, instructed to create alternate versions of yourself (to fill roles on the ship) from scanned memories, Rapidium, and clones. There is a window of safety during the day when you can work outside before nighttime radiation levels kick in. The thing that surprised me most is how well my 1070 managed to run The Alters. I'm digging the concept going on in this game, sci-fi being my jam[tenor.com], feels like this is more managing relationships focused than any kind of intensive base building / survival. I'd say check it out if you are into sci-fi / base building. **Wishlisted**

One demo that took a wee bit of getting used to is Blood Typers, a survival horror typing game with the feel of an old school Resident Evil knock off. Select from one of five characters before starting your run, each with their own stats in Health, Agility, Melee, and Ranged. Explore a cursed film studio using mainly the shift keys to rotate your camera, arrow keys to rotate your character, typing to interact with objects / move / attack, and the tab key to engage combat mode against the zombies inhabiting the studio. Items are plentiful, far more than your meagre inventory of seven spaces can ever handle, health items being in nearly every room, able to be combined into more powerful food items. I gave the demo a whirl as Ophelia on Normal / Normal difficulty (one for your words per minute, one for the difficulty of the creatures / survival horror elements), finding things to be pretty manageable once you get the hang of the camera / positioning the character for combat. Enemies are pretty easily dispatched in small numbers (one or two) using melee, anything higher needing to be thinned out with a pistol. Three correct words will drop an enemy, successful strikes causing an interrupt to the enemy attack. I didn't find my time with Blood Typers to be challenging, more-so hindered by having to grapple with the mechanics of camera / character positioning that take time to get used to. Supplies would often be left behind as I just didn't have the space to carry pretty much anything I came across; weapons, ammo, food items, and even key items to progress – including actual keys! Blood Typers didn't quite hook me in the same way as something like Cryptmaster did, but I can see it still having a niche audience. Recommend giving it a whirl if you think a Resident Evil-ish typing game might be your cup of tea. **Uninstalled**

Demoniac TV is a tiny arena action shooter, kind of like fighting Binding of Isaac trash mobs in a room over and over, getting an upgrade between rooms. Play as a wee television inside a tiny street, shooting other televisions that have been possessed by demons. Every time you wrap up a wave, you get to pick from one of three upgrades, usually changing / increasing the damage / speed of your gun or offering you healing. My biggest hurdle with Demoniac TV is that the damage I'm outputting, speed I'm moving at, and size of the space in which I move do not synergize well with one another at all. It doesn't help that it feels like my personal hit box is a wee bit bigger than it should be. This is one demo that just didn't do it for me at all, ending up tapping out on it. **Uninstalled**