Recent reviews by Laulajatar

There are so many reviews already, I don't think there's much left for me to say.
I can hug the cat and play catch with glowy pill bugs. 10/10.

It's super short and super cute. The (few) choices don't really matter and barely differ, but the art is pretty and the voice acting is outstanding. It reads more as a short story that wants to be told with minimal gameplay invovlvement, so I treated it as a charming little bedtime story. Skipping already seen dialogue, it took me 40 min to get all achievements.

I didn't get any crashes, but I also played it on the steam deck. Controller controls were a bit iffy. I couldn't get to everything in the menu with the joystick, and it was annoying having to up up up down down down between the skip button and the choice selection.
On my desktop PC (linux), I couldn't get it to fullscreen on the screen I needed.

Fine. After finishing it, I give it a thumbs up, but only because it ended up working fine through Proton. On the native Linux version, it started to crash whenever I wanted to change settings. The savegame transferred fine between both.

The game itself was ok. The stories keep getting worse, but I'm not playing them for the stories. The puzzles and scenes were all right. The art is pretty. No missable achievements except for the collectibles. Again, the bonus chapter is needed to 100% it, and this one was so hilariously bad, it was funny again.
Let me dress up my pink fluffy cloud sheep with sunglasses, tennis racket, and a bucket of paint to look like a wasp.

It's an all right game if you can grab it for cheap or in a bundle, and if you like these kinds of games.

Was all right as far as those games go. Possible to get all achievements in one run, none are missable except for the usual hidden/morphing objects ones. The bonus chapter is mandatory to get 100%, and while it's a bit silly, at least it's short. As for the story... well. I don't really play those games for the story, and that's probably for the better.

Unfortunately, the other reviw is right: The game is just broken.
Unlike the first part, no explanation of controls when starting, so I pressed every single button on my keyboard. Looking at the steam screenshots, the game should be starting The Dark Cell, but the first tile is labeled Port of Willow City and you cannot navigate away from it.

Don't get it until it's fixed.

I'm sorry, but no. Not even for the ~3€ I got it for.
Yes, it sounds cute, and yes, it looks nice on paper, but it's just lacking in every single aspect.

Little kitty is tired of city life, buys property on an overgrown island and is greeted with a pile of 6 tools - we've all been there. The island is small, but you can (for 250g) travel to procedurally generated other islands (which you cannot revisit, only 4 different biomes) to gather resources and sometimes find a random merchant. After a few days, kitty sees falling stars, remembers the legend of a star fruit, and wants to build a seed maker (huge resource dump) to share the star fruit with everyone.
That's it. That's the story. No other persistent locations. No noteworthy interactions (unless you count a single npc with the same 5 recycled lines each day.) Gather hundreds upon hundreds of stone and wood (or buy them, I guess). You don't even need to actually put starfruit into the machine to get seeds. Spend the last few hours running from stove to stove to stove to stove to stove to grind out the million earned.

I was looking for a mindlessly grindy game, so I finished it, but boy did it feel pointless. All the achievements are purely grind related, not even one for finishing the story or anything fun. There is zero reason to touch any of the seeds you don't need for the seed maker (and carrots, because they're the quickest growing crop with a 160 sell price food item), just like there is no point in putting up a barn with cows. I'm so glad fish traps count for fishing, or I would have lost my mind.

Worse, the technical aspects:
The basics are explained, which is nice - but other things aren't. There is this "sticker" system which allows you to place admittedly pretty decals all over the place, and I had to check reddit to find out how to remove them again. Crops don't say how long they need to grow, items have no descriptions. Some items sell at a loss if processed (fish drying rack seems to be the worst offender, but honey in the oven is also bad.) There is a slot for chest cosmetics, but in my 18h of playing, I haven't seen one. Descriptions on items in the crafting menu are misleading, most actually have no function, and some with function are hidden in the decoration tab.

And it's so buggy! Tool special skill is on B, so on every menu close if I have a tool equipped, I destroy stuff. Scrolling down an inventory page, half of the time half my slots aren't shown. Pressing tool normal skill ever so often uses the special one, also destroying stuff I didn't want to destroy. I had to rebind RB and LB to [ and ] because it was impossible to use the crafting interface. Sometimes after using an oven, I suddenly hold a placeable in my hand. The tooltips for items I look at at a merchant are bugged and keep popping up half a minute later after I'm halfway across the island. The hat is on the wrong layer half of the time, visible over some objects, buildings, and even menu elements.

And lastly, while most of the game was created with an asset pack (which is why you might find others with the same art around on steam), the icons of a few later additions are uncomfortably close to another popular game in this genre.

Just. No. I played through it so I could be sure there isn't more to it. And there isn't.
If you decide to play it anyway, be aware that achievements will trigger on steam only after going on a trip and returning to the island, so don't freak out if they don't show up immediately.

A chill, minimal, sound based planed exploration game. It’s definitely not for everyone, but it was scraching an itch I didn’t even know I had. I got it out of curiosity, and then I couldn’t stop playing. Just a few more glowy dots to collect, just a few more dunes to drive over, just one more mountain to climb. The sound leading me to the next landmark might be my favorite one, I just want to follow it forever.

At the moment of writing this, the game contains three worlds, with two more in development. All three worlds have distinct looks and distinct physics. At the start, movement speed is rather slow, but with the different unlocks I found preferred ways to traverse each of the worlds.

I “finished” the game in around 15 hours, by which I mean discovering all of the story as well as getting all the upgrades and all but the two grindy achievements. Can’t wait to return eventually to discover a new world.

After a while, the sound will start popping and crackling, depending on how powerful the pc it’s running on is. A quick restart of the game fixes it. On the steam deck, that seemed to be every 15-30 minutes for me, probably depending how busy the sound was. My hope that I would take this as a hint, turn off the game and go to bed, did not work out. Just another landmark.

I got this one in a bundle for cheap, and for that, it was quite nice. In puzzle mode, there are 50 levels, and every few ones a new mechanic gets introduced in an easy one which then gets gradually harder, so quite a few of those 50 levels are easy. I spent around two evenings on it, which is fine for the price I paid for it.

The other mode is adventure mode, in which you get randomly generated tiles and try to achieve the needed amount of coins with them so you can progress into the next level and gradually unlock a few more things.

If I am honest, I wouldn't buy it for full price, as I can't see myself play adventure mode much past getting the achievements for which you don't need much time. It's fun for a bit, but too random and not rewarding enough to enjoy it long term.

It's nice for around 2-4 hours I would say, depending on the interest in adventure mode, so adjust your price expectations accordingly. And btw, the game played perfectly out of the box on the deck. Steam's complaints about "native resolution" are a joke with pixel art games.

I enjoy picross very casually, and this was on sale, so I thought why not.

Well. First of all, I dislike that this has the verified badge. On every launch, there is a settings window which you can't get past with controller. Sure, you only have to hold down the steam button and click on OK, but that's not verified for me when other games don't get it for lesser transgressions. Anyway. The game.

It started out fun enough. Walk along a line, each node is a picross. Once it's solved, there's a cute animation of the picture, which is by far the best part. There are more or less three types of nodes:

Enemies where you're on a timer and lose health every time they attack or you make a mistake.
Treasure chests, no timer, but you lose gold every time you make a mistake.
Quests, which is a puzzle you already did but with a twist, like doing no mistakes, on a short timer, etc. They sometimes reward items you can pick up in a shop.

To hit an enemy, you need to solve a full row or column. There's minimal strategy involved when fighting more than one enemy, as you can swap to the one closest to hitting you and hit it instead, resetting its hit timer. That's about it.

After barely the halfway mark, the game overstayed its welcome by far. You can win upgrades during puzzles, but you only have a 5 slot inventory, so it's a constant back and forth between the shop to sell and the next puzzle. There is no way to save a puzzle and resume later, which can get annoying at the 20x20 ones. The story exists only on paper, and I am pretty sure sound settings didn't stick between reboots, so I ended up turning off the sound on my device.

At least the achievements are straightforward, but sadly, this game put all efforts into a halfway cute presentation and zero into gameplay, so I can't recommend it.

It's Stardew Valley, what more is there to say? This is the third time I bought it, because I was too lazy to install outside Steam on the deck.