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Realms Revolutions is an unfinished game that will just peter out when you hit a wall weaved of tediousness and Aleksandr Golovkin's signature overreliance on clicking too much.

It's a good game to take a look and see what's going on with the desing for a few days, but it's not a game that you should attempt to beat.

SteamWorld Quest is a rock solid example of a middling not-bad-but-not-great game. Its main story provided me with solid 28 hours spent in both main story (completed) and an optional challenge mode (about 80% through), but I'm leaving it with no desire to play it further at all.


Usually I can't stand early-JRPG-style combat where two sides of 3-to-5 characters take turns wacking each other with no restrictions. However, SWQ's manaless combat system makes it work - between managing cards that generate and consume steam, trying to trigger single-character chain cards or two-character combos, and unpredictable hand, there's always an interesting decision to be made. The system is original, intutive, and rather well-explored through achievements and challenge mode.
It carries the entire game on its back.

And I guess the arc of the canary-piloted mech is pretty funny, too.


Story is definitely the worst part of the game, and its construction is frankly bizzare - as if several completely different rewrite drafts got merged into one. There are several moments that seem like emotianal payoffs that fall flat due to not being planted earlier. There's the whole framing of the plot as a bed-time story being told to a child, which turns out be completely pointless, as it's only ever used for a voice-over reading chapter titles. It doesn't provide a single word of commentary during any pivotal story moments, and it doesn't even get a single line of acknowledgment during the ending.

But the worst of it is a MASSIVE tonal dissonance. On the one hand, SWQ has that framing device of a bed-time story; one of the main characters, a college-age-adult, bases her entire sense of self on a children's colouring book; and a lot of early dialogue has this sense of infantile earnestness. On the other hand, early in the plot someone is asked if getting cage is his fetish, while a late story beat has: systemic culling of the undesirables, dismemberment, soylent green cannibalism, and ritual sacrifice, and plays it completely straight. Who is the target audience for this?! Tumblr stans of cartoons for children?!

Card unlocks are tied to the progression of the story as expected, but their order is extremely unfortunate several times. I remember unlocking a powerful Water-based card just in time for a lengthy section where enemies were immune to Water-based attacks; and before the section was over, I got even more Water-based cards kept for a Water-only build.

Card and equipment options are mostly good, but there are several cards and trinkets that feel like cruft or seem unusuable (like the berserk trinket, which greatly reduces your tactical options, completely cuts you off from a power chain card mechanic, and makes a character a dead weight during fights with ghosts - all for a very measly attack boost).

Also, due to my preference for sustainable builds, I managed to lock myself in a Copernica+Galleo defensive team structure that made most of the game manageable, but turned the final boss into a horrid chore.

SteamWorld Quest is a good, original game if you have a hankering for a linear RPG, but it's nothing to write home about.

...you could skip this one, and buy either The Room 1 or The Room 4: Old Sins instead.

The Room 3 is NOT a bad game. But it is an almost perfect game, that horribly fumbles near the end, which sours the whole experience. It's a well-made cake with a melting goat turd on top.

The puzzles are pretty great(!)...
...but there was a smidge too much moon logic in places, and some bits that weren't as intuitive as they should have been.

The multiple locations are handled well: one-off puzzle sequences are properly introduced and discarded, while the hub area offers a lot of character, a sense of progress, and an exciting secret(!)...
...but to unlock 3 out of 4 endings, you need to enter 2 sublocations that somehow are so vague, I couldn't find them without a guide after a half-an-hour search of the whole hub area.

The story almost manages to have it all: it tidies up the plots of #1 and #2 while working as a standalone, has good writing, its characters posses charisma despite limited resources. And one of the endings is great(!)...
...but out of 3 remaining endings, 1 is an anti-climax and 2 are sequel hooks that weren't pulled. And a pair of them are almost copy-pasted.

You need to decide for yourself if you're okay with an otherwise-great experience topped by a great annoyance.

...skip this one, and buy either The Room 1 or The Room 4: Old Sins.

The Room 2 is the worst game in the series. While most of the puzzles are still great, they are horribly marred by:

• reintroduction of the pixel-hunt problem, like "vague grey shape on detailed grey background"" or "tiny detail in the poorly lit area of the location",
  
• poor handling of multiple locations, giving you too much area to search through,
  
• thread-bare story that feels unsatisfying (and like a tepid mopping up of the cliffhanger from #1).

Play it only for completeness' sake if you're going through the whole series.

...buy The Room 4 (ie. this one) if you want:

• maximalistic feel,
  
• some feeling of going location-to-location in your puzzle-box design,
  
• something with a touching story,

or The Room 1 if you want the opposite.

...buy The Room 1 (ie. this one) if you want:

• minimalistic feel,
  
• fully puzzle-box-focused experience (like GNOG),
  
• something with a thread-bare story,

or The Room 4 if you want the opposite.

Patrick's Parabox is an extremely well-designed puzzler with a great learning curve, and puzzles that intrigue and delight instead of stumping and frustrating. It has super audio design and cute aesthetics. But most importantly...


Problem with puzzle games deriving from Sokoban is that way too often turn up the difficult at latter puzzles by just making the space intricate. For example, Baba Is You eventually turns from a delightful game about manipulating rules (where the main difficulty is figuring out the sequence of rule changes) into a boring game of complicated box pushing (where the main difficulty is distinguishing zigzagzagzagzigzagzigzagzagzagzagzig from zigzigzagzagzigzagzigzigzagzagzagzig).

Patrick's Parabox avoids this completely. It always gives you enough room to focus on the high-level stuff, has an Undo and Redo(!) buttons, and its levels have a grokkable size.

If your spatial imagination is bad enough that Antichamber is intuitive to walk through but you keep getting lost in Half-Life 2, this game is for you.

(Also, I bought the game immediately after finishing the demo. Demos work!)

Even though I like Hydra Slayer's core gameplay loop and how Zeno Rogue managed to keep the gameplay both simple and deep, I cannot recommend it due to


(At least on Windows 10?)

• Default window size is too small, but maximizing the window somehow... offsets every tile's mouseover area? So when you want to get description of, say, a hydra, you can't simply right click on it, you need to right click on a 1/5th tile-wide strip on its right.
  
• In one game, I couldn't even do that - the game would identify me trying to hover over a hydra as either "an empty tile" or "Powder of Growth". Later it turned out that the hydra was, indeed, standing over Powder of Growth, but I genuinely can't tell whether that's an odd design decision (show info card of an object that's completely obscured by an enemy, instead of far more pressing info about the enemy, like in virtually all other roguelikes), or yet another bug.
  
• In another game, right clicking stopped working - it would bring up description screen, and then immediately close it. That is game-breaking in a roguelike.

All small things, but together they were so disruptive, they gradually overwhelmed my threshold for annoyance. I'm extremely surprised how a game by the celebrated Zeno Rogue could be in such a poor state.

I've liked DOOM (2016) campaign very much.

And since I've liked it so much and only ever heard good things about the sequel, I've bought DOOM Eternal for the full price.

This was a big mistake.

With a bizzare sense of deja vu, I found myself reliving the experience of going from Stories: The Path of Destinies to Omensight. In both cases, a fantastic game that shows very obvious budget constraints gets a high-budget sequel that fixes all the original's issues and expands on the gameplay... but also does away with the very experience that I enjoyed.


The big first shock was how everything was suddenly goofy. The lighting looked flatter, Mancubi and zombies looked goofier, my very first Glory Kill of the game was downright cartoony, and the world became completely arcadey.

DOOM (2016) managed to keep the inherent absurdity of pickups and little collectible figurines on the down low. Ammo pickups were immersively composed into the level layout as often as they could be, little Doomguys were kept out of sight, and new weapons were physical objects placed down in sensible places. For contrast, DOOM Eternal has health potions, all secrets are presented by giant floating question marks, and new weapons are introduced as floating half-translucent green pickups, merrily rotating in the middle of the path. Not to mention that campaign's hub area is 42% fourth wall break by weight, and the third level has a lot of giant Dopefish.

This is made worse by how the campaign is this dimension-spanning epic with tragic characters and somber godlike beings; Doom Slayer no longer engages in subtle slapstick and sarcastic pantomime(1), but poses somberly in 3rd person cutscenes, and there's a running theme of people treating him as a messianic figure, complete with a scientist "coming to light" of his divinity.

The contrast between the game world and the story is jarring, and the latter...


...is not told very well.

The story starts with a cold open, that is also a total non sequitur coming from the first game (Doom Slayer has a whole freaking space base now, and somehow has VEGA back from the dead and running it). Doom Slayer pretty much immediately kills a Very Important Just-Introduced Some Priest Dude by destroying his Just-Introduced Some Sort of Soul Protection with Just-Introduced Some Evaporating Coin. We get told in a single sentence that this somehow immediately reduced the effectiveness of Hell's invasion of Earth by 1/3rd, and we need to kill two more Some Priest Dudes. Soon after we have a one-sided chat with the "two more Some Priest Dudes" and Just-Introduced Some Goddess that doesn't really feel like a solid character introduction and conveys little information. We leave, and then... well...

The most admirable thing about 2016 was that events followed nicely from one to another, forming a logical and seamless flow of action.Eternal feels less like that, and more like what Shamus Young called "Super Friend Storytelling"[www.shamusyoung.com]: after we leave a location, Mission Control Guy tells us that X happened, so we need to get/do/kill Y in location Z, then we go there, and we're done and we leave, it happens again. Something is just broken, and the magic is gone.

Then again, right before the final sequence of every mission we get a flashing prompt that we can use fast travel now to traverse the level and get the collectibles or finish challenges we missed.
So maybe the devs put the story on the backseat, and I should just enjoy the combat, right? Right...?


Something was wrong. I've beaten 2016 on normal difficulty with relish. Here, my weapons were mostly the same, my mobility was enhanced, and the codex showed me the clear lock-and-key/demon-and-weapon design.

I liked that they took chainsaw from an awkward excuse for fuel-hoarding into something that finally worked as both ammo refiller and threat removal. I liked that they made cooldown-based "equipment" worth using. I loved how they expanded "Armor on Glory Kills" Rune into an entire mechanic of Flame Belch.

And yet, despite all that, playing the game felt deeply wrong. I was staggering horribly through the encounters. By 5th level (Super Gore Nest), I bled through all Extra Lives (pickups that revive you instead of forcing you to reload your save). I set the game to easy, and... still struggled. Subconscious tactics that I learned from 2016 were fizzing out, conscious tactics that game told me to use only helped in the most straightforward cases. I felt like my weapons were made out of cardboard, and my armour out of tissues. I couldn't improve on my own.

In the meantime, I happened to watch some YouTube videos mentioning "combos" and how important they are in Eternal. Combos were something that I completely failed to learn on my own, so I looked them up (mostly YouTube channel Under the Mayo), and... my enthusiasm sputtered. It seems they are counted off sequences of attacks from three weapons that are guaranteed to kill a specific enemy. Which would mean the meta way to play would be basically Zeno Rogue's Hydra Slayer, except you don't see enemy health and don't know damage numbers. And that sounds horrible.

When I finished 7th level (Mars Core), I took a break. And, with me torn between my gameplay where I suffered and meta gameplay that sounded horrible, that break never ended.


There's one part of the game to which all of my previous complaints don't matter: Versus mode. Tone is - as in most PvP modes - ignored by player and dev alike; there's no story; and you can play as a big Demon in a two-Demon team trying to kill a single Doom Slayer. Plus, since it's asymmetrical PvP, it's an interesting case for game design nerds.

I've played a single match as Pain Elemental; I've won it, and it even seemed like I contributed to the victory, because I last-hitted Doom Slayer when my allied Dreadknight went down.

Despite my luck, I don't think I will ever play another match. I haven't seen or felt anything enticing enough to overcome my dislike of PvP, and queues are long enough in the middle of 2022 that I'm afraid by the time I'm good at Versus, I'll be spending more time waiting for a match than playing it.


DOOM Eternal is both more and less serious than DOOM (20016), and it's bad on both counts. The story has more budget, scope, and variety, but less quality. The combat is improved, but also changed in a way that completely invalidates all your skill.

And somehow everyone's raving on how good it is, and nobody else is feeling like me.

I hate it when I get bamboozled me like that.

---

(1) There are two brief sections during where the old humour is present (during ARC Complex, and Mars Core). Unlike the rest of the game, these bits have cutscenes in 1st person like in 2016; I have no idea whether they were deliberate callbacks, or leftovers from early development, before the style changed from the one in 2016 to Eternal's current one.

Instead of saying any of the deserved praise (it's a perfectly well made and beautiful storyless puzzle game), I'll issue a

(about the alternate ending)

The alternate ending is of the kind that requires a month of community-wide effort to crack, or the kind that would require of you to extensively map the whole world...

...and the most popular guide on Steam (Getting "The Game is Not Enough" achievement [SPOILERS] by The Sojourner) leaves you hanging in step 7 out of 8, allowing you to screw up your 2-hour save.