Recent reviews by ilcornuto

I've been playing Desktop Dungeons since the days when it wasn't even on steam yet, and aesthetics aside - though I actually like the new graphics myself - this is the best the game has ever been. What I've seen of the balance changes are excellent, the UI changes - particularly the combat prediction - are welcome and help keep the game flowing smoothly, and the new writing keeps the tone of the original while feeling modern. The smart puzzley, tactical gameplay and short individual runs paired with persistent unlocks kept me playing for many, many hours with the original release and I can already tell this one will do the same. Highly recommended!

If you've ever played Super Crate Box, you'll know what to expect here. It's a kind of arena platformer, where enemies drop into the level and make their way to the bottom. You need to kill or avoid them in order to grab your actual objective, which here is the muffins that randomly spawn throughout level. Each time you touch a muffin, you transform into a new character, which effectively means you get a new attack. To begin with you'll cycle between the Knight, who shoots a bow, the Archer, who shoots two arrows at once (one either side of him), the Wizard, who shoots magic bolts and the Gnome, who has a very short ranged shotgun.

Grab enough muffins and you'll unlock new characters to randomly become - such as the unicorn, who drops deadly rainbow landmine poops - and new levels to play. You'll also earn XP by grabbing the muffins, which will earn you points to make the characters you've unlocked stronger.

The big problem here is it doesn't do anything better, or even as well, as the completely free Super Crate Box, unless you really want a generic fantasy setting and a badly acted old lady shouting out the names of the characters you're turning into. It's not terrible, but it just doesn't feel quite as good to play as SCB, and there are a bunch of minor flaws in the UI design. Where SCB was explosive arcade fun, Muffin Knight is just kind of plodding. Overall, it feels like a cheap clone of a much better, free game, so I really can't recommend this to anyone.

Fidel Dungeon Rescue is basically a puzzle roguelite that feels like it would work really well on phones, though it's PC only for now. You control a cute little dog heading through a randomly generated dungeon, I think to rescue your (human) Grandma, though there isn't much in the way of story here. Each level has you start on one set of stairs and challenges you to earn a certain amount of XP and then head down the other set. You gain XP by just walking into monsters, but each time you do so you lose a heart - walk into a monster with no hearts left and you die. Luckily, medikits are liberally sprinkled around the tile-based dungeon floor, and each one fully heals you. This would make things pretty easy, except you're trailing rope behind you so you can't cross over your own path, a bit like a turn-based Snake. On top of that, there are different enemy types who can't simply be walked into - for example, three headed turtles have to be approached from behind - traps that can be deactivated by switches and more.

As well as opening the level exit, getting enough XP will level you up, giving you an extra max heart. Levelling up before the boss levels is pretty important, so you'll want to try and get more than the minimum required XP on each level, and trying to figure out the best path is a pretty fun puzzle. You can also choose which stairway you start on, and there are coins to pick up that you can spend to instantly use a bomb or a health potion. Importantly, while you can't cross your path you can backtrack, which undoes the moves and restores your hearts/revives the monsters etc. Dying isn't immediately game over either, instead it spawns a ghost that starts at the entrance stairs and follows your path, finishing your run if it touches you. He also shows up if you take too long solving the levels, though the limit is pretty generous, at least as far as I've played - it just stops you spending forever trying every possible path. Each level is short enough that dying doesn't feel particularly punishing anyway, you can just jump straight back in.

The puzzles are all randomly generated in terms of monster and item placement, but there are a set number of level layouts that do start repeating pretty quickly. On the other hand there are also unlockables, and enough challenge that it seems to last most people about 15 hours from what I can see, and the random nature means you can always come back for more if you like it enough. The art is cute and the music is pretty good, although it doesn't do fullscreen very well. I prefer it in a window anyway, it makes a very good coffee break game. Simple to pick up and play but challenging enough to satisfy your milder puzzle cravings, Fidel Dungeon Rescue is a game I'd say is easily worth a look.

Lords of Waterdeep is a worker placement game in which you play one of the masked lords who rule the city of Waterdeep from the shadows, and compete against the other players to amass the most Victory Points by the end of the game's eighth round. At the start of the game you are secretly dealt a random Lord, which will give you an extra way to earn victory points at the end of the game, such as completing certain quest types or owning lots of buildings. Each player also gets a few Agents, and an additional one at the start of the fifth round. Starting with the first player, everyone places one of their Agents at a different location to gain a variety of benefits, until all the Agents have been placed at which point everyone picks their Agents up and the next round begins. Importantly, with two exceptions, only one Agent can be placed at each location, so prioritising your actions is extremely important, especially since other players can often work out what you might be trying to accomplish and try to block you.

The game uses five basic resources, four of which are adventurers - Fighters, Rogues, Clerics and Wizards - and the other is gold. Gold can be used to purchase one of the three randomly available buildings - which give you some VP and add a new location to send Agents too, and benefit the player who built it each time another player uses it - by sending an Agent to the Builder's Hall, and all five resources can be used to complete Quests. Every player gets two random quests at the start of the game, and throughout the game there are always four random quests avaialble to snag by sending an agent. Quests have a cost to complete, in the form of spending resources, and provide benefits that usually include some amount of Victory Points, but can also include resources, gaining an Intrigue card or even permanent benefits such as providing additional VP when you complete certain quest types or letting you place one Agent per round on a location that's already in use. There is a lot of variety in the quests, both in terms of the costs and rewards, and they are nicely themed with names and art evocative of classic fantasy.

There are also a few other wrinkles like Intrigue cards, which can be used to provide various benefits or to attack other players by forcing them to discard resources or even giving them a Mandatory Quest that they have to complete before they can do any others, but the game essentially is about carefully placing your Agents to complete Quests and rack up more Victory Points than anyone else. The fact that you don't know what the other players' secret identity's are means that you can never be certain who is going to win until the final reveal, and the game escapes the dryness and solitary nature that plagues many lesser worker placement games.

So the board game is good, but how is the digital version? Well, all the important stuff is good - the game''s UI is easy to read and provides all the information you need, there is a decent tutorial and a rulebook you can check in the menu at any time, the AI is solid and puts up a decent fight without having to cheat. The presentation is mostly good, since it just takes from the board game, though the city map is a little bland and it would have been nice to see it animated or spruced up for the digital version, since it loses the physical appeal of the original, but I have to note that the sound isn't great. The music is very generic fantasy music that you'll probably mute and replace with your own pretty quickly, but the sound effects sound quite cheap, especially some of the AI thinking effects that suddenly cut in with a background hubbub then cut out just as quickly, reminding me of the kind of clips you'd find in old shareware games. It's far from a dealbreaker though, and I'd rather have the AI and UI be the things they got right.

In terms of multiplayer, I haven't tried it myself but it offers both simultaneous and play by email, which is nice. It also has a hotseat option, which is a nice idea but since the game has hidden information, you need to play it properly hotseat, and as such it apparently replays everyone else's turn at the start of each player's go, which some reviews say slows the game down quite a bit. Single player doesn't offer any kind of campaign, just straight up games against the AI, but there's enough replay value here that if you like the game that shouldn't be too big a drawback.

Overall, it's not going to hook in anyone who doesn't like boardgames in general, but it's a solid port of a very good game that I can solidly recommend if you're interested, especially if you have some friends to play with, but even if you don't the AI should keep you happy long enough to get your money's worth.

Just finished playing this, I really liked it and will probably play it again soon to make some different choices. The plot itself is pretty good but not amazing, but the whole conceit of making choices by choosing what information to upload coupled with some really uncertain, tense scenarios made it very engaging. It's willingness to let you feel culpable for some seriously bad things made me really agonise over what I should and shouldn't upload at times. It also gave me a real battle of wits feel at time when I was starting to try and manoeuvre the government into certain actions. It only took me 4 hours to beat it (in just two sittings) so I'd say it's worth your time if you're intrigued.

They Bleed Pixels almost manages to be a good game at times, with combat that sometimes lets you pull off some cool moves and use hazards to finish your enemies, but suffers from controls that aren't quite tight enough for what they want you to do and some fairly boring level design. The knockback on getting hit makes dying feel even more annoying, and while you can't quite blame the game for your mistakes, the control issues combined with levels that get hard very quickly make this more frustrating than fun, even for someone who enjoys other hard platformers.

Endlessly replayable and extremely fun.