Recent reviews by sir_deadlock

It's a straightforward set of 4 adventures with with a total of 8 routes.
The developer was respectful of the player's time; after the first play through there is the option to skip the intro, skip to the alternative route choice in the adventure, and to skip the credits.
Before I started, I browsed the game options and made sure the text loaded instantly instead of appearing gradually. That helped move things along.
The mini games are short and satisfying. The puzzles with rotating pieces were the most difficult for me.
There are no failure or penalty conditions. So long as you keep playing you will see the end of the story.

I appreciated that the story was never mean to the player, and was always patient to move as fast as the player was ready for.
There were some parts of the story that weren't optional; this is definitely a game where you can pet the dog.
It was a cute game. Reminds me of an animated children's book. A short adventure for most, unless you're like me and have a habit of leaving games on while you're asleep.

I am nominating Maiden Cops for Steam Game of the Year 2024.
It has monster girls.
It has beat'em up action.
It has costumes to unlock.
It has a power up shop to encourage playing again.
It has custom controller options.
At full price it's only $10.
Is it really GOTY material? I can only speak for myself, but when I saw it come out and looked at the previews, I was sold. This is a short indie game that absolutely delivered on its promises and then some.
Control a monster girl, beat up other monster girls, save the city. It's pretty fun.

Oh man. This game is so much better than the old reviews made me think it would be. So glad I was able to grab it in a bundle at a price I couldn't pass up to complete my collection.
If I had to compare this to another game, it'd be One Finger Death Punch.
This level of challenge is perfect for me and I love that it's centered around preparing beautifully illustrated food. It's all arrow key combinations. The challenge is in trying to input the commands as fast as you can, as accurately as you can.

As always, Jonathan Greer made some great music for us.

I'm not much of a story person, but I can say that the pictures are pretty, some of the scenes are animated, the voice acting is pretty good and there are subtitles if you'd rather mute the VO (voice over?) volume to imagine whatever voices you like. The story content can also be skipped by pressing ESC and selecting to skip from the menu as soon as the scene starts, which is convenient if a player feels it gets in the way (which it can if a player has to start a location over).

If you can enjoy a straight-forward command input game, this will be some good fun.

Primarily this game seems like a narrative story with interactive elements.
The player will follow along a story about Maria (protagonist) as she visits a new town and meets a handful of characters who can make use of her repair services.
The story is fully voice acted with pleasant still images that help express the emotions of the characters during different scenes.
At the end of each chapter the player will be asked to restore an object which has sentimental value to the characters. The repairs are simple enough, though I had to check one of the player guides (which I'm glad were there to help) because I didn't realize I had a piece facing the wrong direction.

I'm not much of a story content person, to be honest. I got through it. I would have been fine playing a game where I repair things for the fun of the puzzle. The story is there for people who like stories, it does the job of tying all the objects together and providing reasons for why they need repairing. I appreciate that the game gives the option to skip the dialog and dive right into the interactive bits, which served me well when I closed the game a few times to change screen resolution.

In the discussions board someone mentioned how the framing of the game window can be resized in the Steam game properties window, putting something like -screen-height 720 -screen-width 1280 or whatever your preferred screen resolution may be, into the Advance users launch options box.

I purchased the game on sale, so the price-to-playtime ratio worked out nicely for me. Satisfied customer.

Very cozy game! It's probably a 1-day kind of game if you've got the time. I got the game on sale from a bundle website, so I'm very happy with the cost-to-enjoyment ratio.

The game supports Mouse and Keyboard, as well as game pads. The most unintuitive control is that you press Shift to walk, because running is on by default. Other than that it's got your standard WASD keys, with a double-jump and glide function. Lots of little parkour options with little trinkets hidden on top of things.

The music starts out a bit loud, but it can be turned down. Plenty of helpful choices in the options menu.

The gameplay is straight forward: meet the characters, complete fetch quests, find all the hidden objects, 100% the game.
No danger, nothing scary, no rage inducing things that keep you stuck in one area for hours. Just a cute slice of life platformer game with a simple story.
... Apart from the one thing, but you'll find that out after finishing Irene's quest line.

I had an issue where one of the achievements didn't unlock during gameplay, but by the end of the game credits, it had unlocked itself, so that worked out fine.

If the devs ever make a sequel, I'd be interested in seeing where the mushroom capped gnome goes next.

I was one of the original Kickstarters, so I paid for lifetime guardian access.
I love the fishing mechanic. Great way to pass the time.
Lots of fetch quests and cut scenes.
Good sense of humor with plenty of dad jokes.
Tons of cosmetics. Your functional equipment doesn't decide your cosmetic style.
Decent user interface with lots of quality of life features that emphasize how the player's supposed to be having fun, rather than slogging through a bunch of time gates.
Hours upon hours of content.
This is the kind of free-to-play that doesn't demand you pay money to be able to have a good time. You can play through the whole game up to new content and never spend anything. Paying for the permanent guardian account upgrade opens up a few useful extras and helps the devs. I'd say it's worth it if you like the style and play maybe 20 hours a month.
If you want something to do, it's a low risk investment.

I enjoyed putting the pixel landscapes together and then exploring them. That was a great idea!
I've never seen another game that works like this, where the play field is a jigsaw puzzle that needs assembling.

One downside is that the pieces don't snap together with each other; they only snap into their final places.
Apart from the borders, all the pieces are the same two shapes.

The High Quality Jigsaw Puzzle bundle is a good savings if you're happy to have the other games. It bring the individual price for this down to $2.50. Otherwise, $5 is cheaper than the bundle if it's all you want. The bundle dropped in price during the Steam sale, but this game didn't. If you just want this game, there's no point waiting for a sale. Just get it now.

It's a good little game. It really is just a short walk through a few outdoor classes. You can finish everything in less than two hours.
I wonder if there will be sequels in the future.

Rust is one of the definitive survival/crafting games. Very user friendly.
However: I hate PVP. Absolutely despise the occasionally toxic behavior that comes with that needlessly competitive and mean spirited or apathetic behavior. For that reason, I can only suggest playing the game on custom servers. As far as I've experienced, custom servers don't award achievements, but it's worth it to avoid the grief.
There's a handful of no-kill servers that are great for scratching that survival/crafting itch, which is quite enjoyable. The players in no-kill servers also tend to be much more friendly in open chat.

If you plan to buy this game, be aware that occasionally it goes on sale for like $30 if you can wait for the next Steam sale. But if you have a group of friends that want to play and you don't mind forgoing the discount, might as well pick it up. It's honestly a decent game to have available.

And if you actually like PVP or role playing, it's probably pretty good for that too. A wide enough assortment of weaponry and defensive items, with 3 levels of tech tree progression.

It's a good game. Not much too it, but not much needs to be going on.
Spawn and connect the pipes before the room fills with water.
Simple.
Oh, and sometimes the lights turn off. And sometimes you're dizzy from a gas leak. And sometimes there's steam from hot water. And sometimes the spawning panel malfunctions because of sewer water. And sometimes the pipes are behind movable objects. And sometimes you'll have everything connected, but you have to reset a leaky pipe.

The worst problem I've experienced with the game is that sometimes there are more green pipes than red pipes. There's a mechanic where one big pipe is worth two small pipes, but even accounting for that there will sometimes be one green pipe too many. It's frustrating, but there's no real penalty for failure, so just start over and the next set will probably be fine. It's possible I couldn't see where the next red pipe exit was because they can be hidden, but there's only so many places to check and it happened a number of times.
One of the products of my frustration was that I resolved to just connect everything together, which should work.

This is a non-stop side scrolling 2D platformer as viewed from a frankenstiened perspective of side viewed characters and 3/4 axonometric backgrounds.

The alligator is radical, the mobs are gnarly, the tracks are tubular, the music is righteous.
It's a relatively short game of 3 landscapes to visit with about 8 stages each.
You can only move or up and down, but you've got to be ready to go fast.
If you fall in the soup, you'll be given a quick "l8r g8r!" and the stage will start over.
The options menu will let you pick the screen size and whether the screen if windowed or full screened.

The game is simple, but not easy. I feel like I got my money's worth.
Also, it crashed Steam a few times for me. First time was after I beat the game and got to the credits. The other two times was after going for missed eggs and finish times. Not a big deal, just start Steam back up.