Recent reviews by NovaSquirrel

This is my favorite party game. It plays out differently every time, and there's a bunch of modifiers to mix things up on top of that, so it doesn't get old.

A very important positive aspect is how it's very easy to introduce people to this game; the rules are simple to explain, the game gives people an opportunity to get used to the controls in the lobby, and when you're picking a level part you can hold the cursor over it to get an animation explaining what it does. People I've played with have had a lot of fun even across different skill levels.

I was a beta tester for the game as a result of backing it on Kickstarter. I think Petal Crash is great! It stands out among lots of other action puzzle games because it's an original idea, as opposed to being a twist on something else.

While Petal Crash is definitely aimed at people who enjoyed action puzzle games from the 90s, I think it's approachable for people who don't have a lot of puzzle game experience too. It was still really fun for me back when I was mostly only good at matching colors together, and it only got more fun as I gradually started seeing opportunities for making chains.

Story mode has a mechanic where beating matches causes the difficulty to go up slightly, and losing matches will lower the difficulty slightly and let you try again as many times as you want until you win. This is nice since you should ideally never end up in a spot where you get stuck and can't finish the story, and the stories in this game are really good as opposed to the throwaway plots that puzzle games usually get. A few of the characters' stories were especially relatable for me, and I definitely recommend checking them all out.

Duck Game makes a really great party game and it's always been a blast with my friends. It's simple enough that anyone I introduce it to is able to figure it out pretty quickly (and it cleverly teaches you how to play in the game lobby) and it has just enough randomness so that while the best players do end up winning most of the time, something unexpected can easily happen and no one is in a situation where they're losing every single match.

I'm only up to level 47 so far but so far I feel like Chip's Challenge 2 is definitely worth it for people that like the original Chip's Challenge. It feels much more like the original game than Chuck's Challenge does, which I felt made it much more heavily focused on puzzles rather than the puzzle/action mix of Chip's Challenge.
Some puzzles don't really have very clear solutions, but so far there hasn't really been anything that can't be gotten through with enough trying. Some of the levels are really long though, with lots of opportunities for dying and because there are no checkpoints of any sort you have to try the whole level again and then get to the point you died at, which can be really frustrating.
Sound-wise, the sound effects are okay if just a bit too loud, though I would have preferred music more like the Microsoft version. I usually just turn the music off and play other things in the background.