Recent reviews by Chrisuu

The developer always gives away the new DLCs for free for a limited time, and they are loved for it. It's a great way to reward your most enthusiastic players and build community goodwill.

I really like this game.

It's a design-based puzzle, which means there is an infinite number of solutions to every puzzle. It has a lot in common with games that allow you to automate things, but the scale is much smaller and the context is breaking apart and fusing together chemical elements while moving them around the screen.

There is even a background story to this whole thing. You're a newly hired junior reaction engineer working for the Space Chem corporation. Your new career will bring you to distant planets where your task is to harvest and re-assemble valuable chemicals to send back home. But there have been rumors of accidents, and not everything is as it seems. I haven't uncovered the entire story, but I've found it interesting and mysterious so far. One caveat is that it's delivered solely through text and the occasional small illustration, which I personally don't mind, but others might.

I don't really get it. This game has very high acclaim from puzzle enthusiasts and puzzle designers alike, but I find the spiky difficulty curve and progression off-putting.

Sometimes when I solve a puzzle it feels like I do so by trial & error and I don't feel like I could do it again easily if I started from scratch.

Furthermore, many of the puzzles I initially have access to seem to vary in difficulty, and I find that the ones I unlock are actually easier.

I'll probably come back to it because I want to believe and I don't give up easily. If I change my mind I'll update the review.

Edit: I've played it a little more and it's growing on me. The game mechanics are very simple but they still allow for a lot of puzzle variation. I'm still not impressed with the difficulty progression. My tip for people who have yet to play it: as soon as a puzzle seems too difficult or frustrating, move on and try another. The difficulty of the available puzzles seems to vary a lot.

Super fun co-op restaurant management with rogue-like elements. Some of my friends were skeptical because of the simple graphics, but once they tried it (via remote play) they were hooked. "A way better Overcooked" was a common sentiment.

Replay value is high via random layouts and loading bay at startup, random daily rewards during play, kitchen customization, automation options, and franchising. And after more than 40 hours of playtime I'm still unlocking new types of main recipes, all of which have different quirks. Even the single-player mode is fairly fun. But the co-op multi-player mayhem is really where it's at.

One downside is that the early game of a new run can be a bit simple and repetitive, but it can be sped up or made more interesting via the booking desk, or by doing a franchise run (unlocked after reaching day 15), or with creative loading bay loadouts. The practice mode that can be launched at the beginning of every new day is a great way to make sure new layouts work the way you expect them to. But it would be even neater if it also simulated the number of customers, to let you practice your speed and cooking/serving efficiency with multiple tables. It's also unfortunate that you can only save the state of one game at a time.

But these tiny downsides can't detract from what is without a doubt a brilliant game. The developer has said he plans to continue working on and adding to the game, so it will likely just get better with time.

Edit: After more than 100 hours spent playing this amazing little game, I just wanted to point out the surprising amount of depth and replayability that can be achieved via infinitely tiered franchise runs, because I somehow managed to miss this until recently. The basic mechanic is that upon reaching day 15, the player can choose to franchise the restaurant, which means keeping 4 regular cards and 1 special golden franchise card. The golden card adds an unusually powerful or game-changing perk, usually at the cost of more customers. The brilliance of this system is that franchises also look to be infinitely upgradeable, meaning that once you get to day 15 with a franchise, you can pick a second set of 4 regular and 1 golden cards that stack on top of the old ones. This provides A LOT of variety and challenge. Aside from that, I'm still as addicted as ever, and having a blast playing this game. This game ticks so many boxes for me.

A highly polished indie game that offers a unique take on roguelikes. It's turn-based, but the rhythm mechanics force one to think fast, as each beat marks the end of one turn. The pixel art is super cool and timeless. I love that they really went all in on the Necrodancer concept. It isn't just an afterthought. Many enemies have some kind of musical theme, and most of them bob in rhythm with the music. And the music is great, of course. Each zone adds new enemy mechanics. Some of them are quite creative, and facing multiple enemies at the same time is often challenging as the player has to be aware of all their individual mechanics. The procedural level generation and randomly spawned items should give the game plenty of replayability. I enjoyed playing it and will probably come back to it.

Surprisingly fun, deep puzzle game with nice aesthetics, solid voice-acting, and relaxing music. If deck-building isn't your thing (it isn't mine) there is a classic mode which feeds you cards randomly. I've enjoyed that game mode more than the deck-building one. The campaign does an excellent job of introducing gameplay mechanics, but the indicated difficulty ratings are a bit off, especially when one considers them as an indication of achieving a perfect 3-star run. I've enjoyed this game a lot so far, and will definitely play some more in the future.

A point-and-click adventure game with minimal frustrations. Puzzles are fairly straightforward. I did get stuck a few times, but never for very long. Enjoyed the strong female lead. The story was interesting, though I usually prefer more realism. I'd play a sequel if there was one.

Pretty simple game, reminiscent of Flash games of yore.

The character follows your mouse cursor, and the goal is to pick up veggies while avoiding meats.

Nothing earth-shattering. I mainly liked it because the main character is a vegan bodybuilder.

Tip: You can click and hold the mouse button during boss fights.

I played this game on my old 2007 Windows XP PC without any issues.

Unfortunately when I tried to play the game on my new Windows 10 PC, assembled in 2017, it did not start up. I posted in the forums and found other people who experienced the same thing. There was no response from the developers. There are many unanswered complaints about other issues in the forum, such as controllers not working. The game doesn't seem to be supported anymore.

You've most likely played some variant of the tomb-raiding hero, the dragon-slaying warrior, or the stealthy rogue. You've most likely battled hordes of enemy soldiers, giant robots, mythical creatures, or some other, similarly overwhelming adversary. But have you ever been a small triangle restricted to a circular orbit of movement?

Okay, so the difference is mostly superficial. You're still the hero that the world revolves around (quite literally, in this case). You're still up against an overwhelming, antagonistic force (an endless array of geometric shapes intent to crush you via head-on collision). And while you don't quite face stronger and ever more fantastic beasts, you do face increasingly complex, obstacular patterns set to ever more fantastic beats B)

Speaking of the beats! They are composed by chiptune artist Chipzel and complement the frantic pace of the game perfectly. Super Hexagon is not a rhythm-game but it feels like it sometimes. Wanting to listen to these wonderful tunes without interruption was (and still is) a strong motivator for me to get through a level unscathed.

The graphics may seem a little strange at first. But in a video gaming era marked by graphical excess and flash that ages even faster than the computer hardware it runs on, these flat, minimalist, timeless shapes are a welcome change of pace. I suspect the game will age fairly well compared to some of its contemporaries, which rely on more sophisticated visuals.

If you have a few minutes to kill, Super Hexagon can be a great casual game to pick up and drop at your leisure. But once those minutes have accumulated, you may also learn something about surpassing your limits. I still remember how impossible it seemed to get through even the first stage. Now I can do it in my sleep! The specific skills I've learned playing Super Hexagon will likely never carry over to any other game or activity. But going through the process of acquiring those skills reinforced some concepts about the learning process itself, which will likely serve me well in other areas of life. You will learn (or re-learn) how a seemingly impossible task can be overcome, bit by by, over a series of multiple days, weeks, and months, until what seemed impossible becomes fairly trivial. I re-learned how important persistence is in the learning process. I'm sure other games teach those lessons too, but the lack of distractions and arbitrary complexity in Super Hexagon makes them so much more obvious.

This game also taught me something about perspective. One of the most common complaints about the game is that it's too hard. But one ought to keep in mind that the levels are also extremely short. All it takes to beat one stage is to survive for 60 seconds. Yes, few players will make it past 15 seconds on their first day of playing. But those 15 seconds represent a quarter of a stage, and there are only six stages to get through altogether. Completing the game will take most people between 20 to 40 hours, which is pretty close to the average for most video games. With that in mind, is it really that hard?

Game over? Begin! Your enjoyment, or pain (depending on your perspective) doesn't have to end when the game does! The patterns in the game aren't random, but the order in which they appear is. This keeps the game challenging and unpredictable, and adds a surprising amount of replay value. There is endless room for improvement, as reflected by the ever-increasing high scores on the world wide score board. Alternately, there is fun to be had by letting your friends try it, and watching them struggle as you did once.