Recent reviews by geggis

The Drifter feels like a long lost LucasArts point and click adventure, specifically from The Dig era, which is very high praise! Of course, with this being a modern adventure, everything feels well oiled and slick so you don't get stuck quite as often, or for as long. Nevertheless, there's some smart (and logical!) puzzling here with an intriguing and unpredictable story, stellar voice performances and characteristically good pixel art from Powerhoof. The lighting in particular is just so striking and dramatic throughout. I particularly liked the chapter structure, each one ending with 'continue' or 'save and quit'; great for digesting the experience in satisfying chunks. There's a neat log system too that keeps your leads updated so you're never really lost. It's just excellent.

Note: I had to turn the resolution down to 1280x720 to see the slight fuzz, softness and chromatic aberration. Much more fitting for the grimy 80s/90s VHS thriller aesthetic!

The first thing you need to know about 10S Forever is on the store page:

"TENNIS HELL ARCADE" and "games hard and im not kidding" - owch, the developer.

Listen to owch. Take bullet hell, but instead of spewing a hot fiery stream of death at your foes from your centre, you're having to anticipate the trajectory of the ball(s) in play to hit them back at your enemies, all while dodging said hell. Swing or dive: if you miss the ball, you lose the heat. Heat increases your damage and the radius of your smash area of effect. If you can get the heat up to 10, you'll be rewarded with a heart to heal up (you have four hearts in total) and the 'Unleash' ability which... spews a hot fiery stream of death at your foes, fully depleting your heat.

That's the core loop of 10S Forever. Aside from Breakout and Space Invaders, it reminds me of Jan Willem Nijman's minimalist TENNNES and particularly Witchball with its creative mashing up of genres, unsettling atmosphere and vivid visual style. There's so much personality in the pixel art here. You'll come to hate specific enemies for their attacks and swagger, and nothing can prepare you for The Natural. Bosses whisper and yell snatched lines at you which feed in to the mysterious letters that punctuate each enigmatic chapter. The music across the board is fantastic, ranging from dark ambient and 'chill beats' to high tempo drum and bass and jungle. Treat your ears to these:

https://owch.bandcamp.com/track/prince
https://owch.bandcamp.com/track/imp
https://owch.bandcamp.com/track/screen

The game doesn't explicitly tell you this but higher heat = higher enemy aggression so keeping a rally going is hard. In fact, getting a rally going is hard because another thing that isn't explained is how to aim, which is absolutely fundamental to controlling the ball. I think this is the most egregious oversight in the tutorial (a player hitbox, similar to the swing/dive hitbox indicator, might be nice too). I can't stress enough how learning to aim changed my game. Thanks Mu The Slime!

So, yes, 10S Forever is one of the hardest games I've played, even on normal, but I kept coming back because I didn't want the chapter 7 boss to beat me. Look, you should see the guy. With each fresh run I got sharper and more aggressive. I was reaching the third phase of the boss on almost every attempt. hes-beginning-to-belief.gif. Eventually I beat it and I just sat back and gasped. You can't beat that feeling. (If this sounds horrible and 10S Forever looks like your thing, there is an easy mode and various other switches that I didn't play about with.)

10S Forever is unique and fascinating, but it's also unflinching and not for the faint of heart. It's the kind of game that reminds me why I persevere sometimes! I'm really looking forward to checking out owch's other games now, and listening to the 10S Forever soundtrack some more.

Look, Öoo made me forget about my tea until it went cold.

It's one of those experiences where the clever design really sneaks up on you. The 'main path' is perfect with assorted biomes and unique twists on a deceptively simple core mechanic that never stops surprising you. There's also a bunch of secret puzzles which are so devious and satisfying to crack that I was left wondering why anybody would want to make them a secret! This isn't a Metroidvania because your progress isn't limited by abilities that have to be unlocked--this is about knowledge and discovery. Don't make me say Metroidbrainia! Ack, too late!

Öoo is a little marvel and a delight, and the soundtrack is söoo good (https://youtu.be/Xj9fLZbxj0I?si=OyGERPizIqByRX70). If you liked Babushka's Glitch Dungeon, Leap Year, Animal Well or even the old but gold VVVVVV, I think you'll love this.

Undoubtedly one of my favourite games of 2025.

I think the first thing you need to realise with Eriksholm is that it's a stealth puzzler, not a stealth sandbox. It's got specific solutions and instant fail-states. No, wait, come back!

Something a lot of folk miss with this is that the linearity affords the narrative design lots of specific opportunities to give your actions and their repercussions flavour. This is less apparent in the first couple of chapters, but later on there are some great moments that had me grinning and giggling to myself, quietly in the dark of course.

It's a relatively conservative game mechanically speaking but it's polished throughout. The lavish production, from the environmental design, lighting and character rendering, to the voice direction and hand-scribbled notes really are stellar--you know this if you've seen the store page! It's a pleasure to behold. But the subtle narrative ties with the gameplay were so satisfying and surprising and I think some of those will stay with me.

It's a short game and probably not something you'll be rushing to replay, and that's fine! I enjoyed my time with Eriksholm and it's made me want to dig into some of the more sandbox-y stealth games out there now...

This is a really slick and kinetic sci-fi combat game which features a fantastic versus mode and a surprisingly cool co-operative 'bounty' mode. The versus has your standard deathmatch and team deathmatch but there's also a 'cash grab' game type which my friend and I didn't get to play because... well, we just got too addicted to deathmatch. Cash grab sounds amazing though.

We tried the bounty mode and also got addicted to that. In bounty, you do missions to collect money which allows you to unlock new mission types, ships, levels and a mysterious but very expensive item called 'Revenge' for a cool $1,000,000. We didn't have time to get close to that figure but there was a nice variety of missions and the core loop of doing better to get more money to unlock more stuff kept us going. Some of these missions are tough and the enemies are distinct with certain attacks and behaviour that gives them more personality than I expected. One type hops backwards, shoots and then laughs when they get you.

But we loved the versus mode. The ship combat is so satisfying thanks to an assortment of specials like a melee drill dash, reflect, projectile warp (there are more ships to unlock too), while the platforming 'interior' combat is cut from the same cloth as Samurai Gunn and Duck Game. It's lethal.

This is NOT twin-stick by the way. With your ship you aim in the direction you're flying, and on foot your character aims in cardinal directions (up, down, left, right). However, the R button allows you to free-aim... using your movement stick. It's strange at first but I came to love the friction between the two because you can't aim while moving; you have to choose when best to go for those skill shots. Do you peek over a lip to aim at an opponent below and risk being completely stationary? Do you dash with your ship and aim while drifting? Do you try jumping and aiming mid-air, or while you're falling? I love twin-stick shooters, but this is just a really interesting and cool limitation.

The destructible scenery allows you to create openings using laser beams and rockets which mixes up how you approach the indoor spaces if an opponent has a space 'locked down'.

The real magic with the ship combat however, is if you get shot, your ship is destroyed and your pilot is left floating in space. You can still move about and use your weapons, but you're extremely vulnerable in this situation. If you can survive for a few seconds, your ship will rematerialise around you. The panic and frantic escapes are just hilarious and reversals are incredibly satifying.

To top all this off, there's a replay function which allows you to export GIFs so you can capture all kinds of awesome little moments like this:

https://imgur.com/a/astro-duel-2-KXy8xZH

I can only imagine how fun this is with even more players. Oh and there are bots too! What a great package.

I thought I was done with Metroid-style games after feeling pretty lukewarm about Metroid Dread but Zexion caught my eye and I'm glad I gave it a shot! It's obviously indebted to the original NES Metroid but it comes with various modern sensibilities (like stick aim, well placed boss checkpoints and plenty of assist options) in addition to some very cool twists on familiar abilities. I was really surprised how fresh this feels given its clear influences.

The movement tech is really slick and the bosses and set pieces in particular are fantastic. One thing it made me realise which may explain why I didn't click with Dread: it knows how to create unusual alien biomes. The 'traditional' water, ice and lava zones are integrated into deeper and weirder spaces like illuminescent abysses, tangled fungal hollows, underwater 'siltfalls', sky fortresses and jet black crystal caverns. It's all very cool and creative.

Be warned however, this is a tough game! I think my only real gripe with the difficulty is that certain enemy projectiles travel through the environment. It doesn't feel bad against smaller enemies while exploring, but nimble bosses can feel rough to fight when your shots are getting eaten by platforms and walls, while theirs don't, especially when they home in on you!

But Zexion really is excellent and very rewarding if you can overcome its challenges. This could very well end up as one of my games of the year.

Wow, well, this is magnificent.

Mosa Lina is a physics-based platformer for chaotic problem solvers and improvisers. You play a set of nine small handcrafted levels randomly picked from a pool of hundreds. In each level you simply have to collect or eliminate the fruit and then get back to the warp. Getting to the fruit is one thing, getting back is another. Each level you're given three (often wacky and chaotic) tools, randomly chosen from a pool of nine for the current set of levels, which is in turn taken from a broader pool of 48 across the whole game. There's loads here and they all interact with the environment and other tools in weird and wonderful ways.

Sometimes a given level and tool combo will literally be impossible. Other times you'll get a combo that makes the level a breeze and undermines everything. Most of the time, however, it'll be somewhere in between and you'll have to improvise. There's only one way to find out. As the store page says, there's no 'lock and key' design here as in most (all?) immersive sims, hence the 'hostile interpretation'. I love it.

Anyway, if you fail a level, you move on to another in the current set which you haven't completed yet, so eventually you get to try again with different tools. The ninth and final level, which unlocks after beating eight, is always bigger and really tests you. But once that's done... that's it, you're 'done'. That's the core loop. When you go to quit, the game says 'no saves, no progress, only random' which I really appreciate these days.

The magic in Mosa Lina though, is in how short play sessions are and how wildly and unpredictably they pan out based on the levels and tools you get. I laugh a lot playing this, whether I succeed or fail, but it's so exciting to get different tool combos and wondering what they do and how you can make them work together. One minute it's a perfect Mission Impossible heist, the next it's a Looney Tunes slapstick comedy of errors. Just brilliant.

I enjoyed GRIP a lot, and I’m a big fan of the old Twisted Metal-style vehicle combat games (including Vigilante 8 and Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012), but I love the focused team-based and objective-based play in Speed Freeks, in both ‘deff rally’ and ‘kill konvoy’.

Deff rally involves racing to hotspots then through surrounding checkpoints to score points, or you can try to destroy (or 'krump' as it's known in-game) enemy vehicles instead, which obviously slows them down but also scores your team points. It's fast, chaotic and thrilling.

Kill konvoy involves fighting over distant bombs which have to be driven into the enemy team's 'stompa', a giant ork robot, to slow it down. Meanwhile, you have to protect your own stompa. The first stompa over the finish line wins. This mode feels like rugby or American football where you and your team are trying to find angles and plays to get the bomb through a konvoy of dakka ork gitz. Some folk attack, some folk defend, but the different vehicles come equipped with all kinds of abilities which help, including mines, smoke screens, warps, vertical boosts and... well, a lot of dakka.

I really love the presentation, from the visuals, music and sound effects to the personality of the orks and vehicles themselves. It's really satisfying to see and hear in motion, especially when the whole lobby is a chorus of 'WAAAAAAGH!'. The maps are huge and nicely designed so there are always routes to cut folk off, intercept bombs and just do crazy boost jumps. The handling, while unusual, works well once you've got the hang of it and I feel like there's a lot of room here for skill expression (check out the developer's advanced movement guide: https://youtu.be/eZrD_dFJZC8?si=eDI0xYqNKOq0_4BA). Spinning your car around mid-chase to unload on your pursuer (especially after dropping black smoke so they can't see you but you can see them) never gets old.

The v1.0 update, which took the game from F2P to pay to play, has brought all kinds of great features including player hosted servers with custom settings, a server browser(!!), a solo and multiplayer free roam mode (public or private) where you can create custom races via checkpoints (similar to deff rally), lots of goodies that were once paywalled are now in the base game, new maps, a new vehicle and custom ork drivers. It seems like they're adding a warband/clan system soon too. I haven't tried all these yet but it's a refreshing and forward-thinking new direction.

Anyway, I'm relatively new to Speed Freeks but I've been having such a blast with this and I can't wait to play it with friends.

Babushka's Glitch Dungeon is a short but very sweet game with a 'fuzzy' structure. It feels like a metroidvania... but one where grandma can only remember two abilities at a time, and sometimes forgets them entirely which dramatically changes how you get about. You can 'sequence break' but... was there a sequence to begin with? Certain puzzles I feel like I leapfrogged but... perhaps that was intentional? There are some really cool abilities and moves here but I regrettably only discovered several of them after finishing the game!

It reminded me somewhat of Cave Story with its 'cosy' subterranean adventuring, lovely pixel art and tunes. It's also a real blessing that Babushka's Glitch Dungeon comes with plenty of welcome quality of life features for when you're trying to tie up loose ends including fast travel and convenient doorways, generous checkpoints, a nice little map that shows eggs and other bits you've missed (take that Animal Well!), and of course the late-game abilities/moves. I suppose my only real gripe is that I just wanted more, and specifically more puzzles to really test grandma's abilities!

Since I bought it the price has dropped down to £5 which is a nice price for something this cute and unusual!

Only 57 reviews for this cracker? Saturnalia came out around the time of Signalis and it's heartbreaking to see it so sorely overlooked, still.

I finished this before it came to Steam but just look at that trailer. Listen to it. Beyond its gorgeous and arresting sketchy giallo-infused visuals (and an absolute banger of a theme), Saturnalia is a unique, compact, intimate, mechanically mysterious, narratively intriguing and oppressive (bordering on hostile) investigative mystery horror game. It’s so investigative, in fact, that you get a clue board that records all your discoveries. I love a good clue board.

It took me a while to get into its peculiar rhythm and even then I rarely felt safe or truly got my bearings. You see, while there might be something stalking the Sardinian town of Gravoi, it’s Gravoi’s dark, match-lit and strangling passages that are the real monster. I don’t want to say any more because a large part of the game’s appeal for me was discovering its secrets and working out what the hell was going on... but I adored Saturnalia. It's a travesty that something this distinctive and unique didn't get more attention from horror fans.