Recent reviews by Jimbly

A streamlined factory game that's all about the logistics. Building your resource extractors and factories and transport network all cost no resources, so you're free to concentrate on building and optimizing your logistics, and not waiting around for resources to accumulate. A lot of elegant game design with minimal visuals that I enjoyed quite a bit. I played through all of the v0.1 early access content and got all of the (interesting) achievements in about 25 hours. Looking forward to coming back to this game once it leaves early access, but it feels like a pretty solid and complete game already.

[Early access review]
I enjoy the feel and nostalgia of this old-school, first-person, grid-based dungeon crawler. It's pretty hard-core, lots of mistakes can be made during party creation or otherwise to get you into trouble. I played through the "prelude" (took me about 4-5 hours, though probably half of that was deaths and reloading or similar) available in Early Access, and will probably enjoy coming back to this when it has a full release (and unless you're really excited about early access, I'd probably recommend waiting until then). Friendly developer, active on the DungeonCrawlers .org Discord.

Great game with a friendly developer.

This game does one mechanic amazingly well - a large portion of the progression in this game is purely informational: you learn more about what fish are in a lake and what might be required to catch them, as and you fill out your in-game log about the fish, your ability as a player to catch them increases, but only due to what you now know, not due to any statistical changes (e.g. you learn a specific fish likes blue lures, so you start using those to catch that fish more efficiently).

The lakes come in two forms - story lakes with pre-set fish (in theory you could look up somewhere what these fish prefer...) and scripted missions and characters you'll encounter, and purely procedurally generated lakes, which provide additional variety and challenge.

I had great fun with this game for 5-10 hours. Then pretty relaxing fun (usually playing with something else streaming in the background) for another 40 or so until I 100%'d the achievements (some are a bit grindy).

Fun little retro game, made by a nice and responsive developer.

Advertised as "100% party games", but it appears that almost all content is locked behind single player progression. We played for 10 minutes, and ran out of things to do (and, admittedly, the players were also getting bored after about that much playing, maybe different game modes / maps would have spiced things up, we'll never know).

Minmalistic town simulator, with a goal and a deadline. Can play through in less than 4 hours, and is a pretty satisfying experience once you figure out the (albeit minimal) mechanics. I played through it another 2 times to go for the interesting achievements that pretty drastically changed the play style and enjoyed it quite a lot.

The combat system is brilliant, and not like anything I've played. It's turned based, and super simple (enemies go through simple, visible, sequences of actions while you choose to order the actions of you and your partner) providing a ton of strategic and tactical depth, still having turns where things happen that surprise me (until I think back on what exactly each character did).

The game itself is super short, and not particularly difficult once you have some good skills equipped and know how to use them. Took me about 2-3 hours to fail one run and win on my second. That length was good for me. By the time I got to the end I had decided I liked the powers my primary partner and I had and wasn't going to be changing anything up, so it was a good point to naturally end the game.

Art, sound, and theme are all quite cute.

Strong recommend if you want to play something with a unique, puzzle-like combat system, with the caveat that it's a fairly short game, and, perhaps, thoroughly explores said combat system in that time, so maybe not so deep after all? ^_^

Great little simulation game, especially for the cost ($1 on sale), but just good in general. You place down facilities and draw connections between them specifying what goods flow where. If you want, you can also tweak the internals of facilities (basically a minigame) to slightly improve productivity or reduce waste. It has some clever mechanics limiting stockpiling (of resources or money) so you really focus on keeping your supply lines flowing, avoiding the pitfall in many similar games where you over produce early, get a big stockpile, and then everything comes to a screeching halt when your stockpiles are rapidly drained. Only takes about 10-12 hours to 100% (go through the included scenarios), but I highly recommend at least playing the Weapon Shop scenario from the workshop, it's even better than any of the included ones.

A pretty good colony sim game, with a lot of style. Compared to most games in the genre I like, this one is a bit punishing, and really bogs down as the game progresses. Some of that is technical - game starts going cripplingly slow as your colony expands - and some is by design, where you have a lot of resources you might have a shortage (or dangerous abundance) of, as opposed to the more traditional sim-game end-game where you've got resources to spare all around. I really only recommend like the first half of the game - I found it much more fun to start a new colony than to deal with the slow growth (and slow framerates) of an end-game colony.

This is a fantastic rogue-lite deck-building RPG.

The various classes are almost all very interesting, and often lead to varying play styles. The rogue-lite progress allows you to upgrade both individual classes in interesting ways (e.g. replace some crappy cards in the starting deck with one or another set of replacements), and generally upgrade all characters (e.g. make it more likely to get better loot at the end of combat).

The moment-to-moment gameplay is very solid. It's got a good set of mechanics that allow for some strategy and making interesting choices during combat, and the enemies you face are playing by exaclty the same rules (albeit with very different decks).

The main game of running a character through 3 dungeons to try and beat the final boss is also very solid with a ton of interesting choices to make, some stemming from the non-linear map letting you make some risk vs reward choices on who to fight next, and others from the myriad of shops and upgrade events which you will encounter, almost all of which let you revisit them at a later time if you're not yet sure what card you want to delete / upgrade / etc. Also, events like the Healer always provide a hard choice between "delete a card" and "fully restore HP", one of which is often the best long-term route to a better deck, and the other of which might help you survive the next fight.

Comparing this to Slay the Spire, which is another good deck-building RPG, I find this game more fun (and less randomly annoying), mostly due to the more plentiful interesting choices, the seemingly more strategic card-playing caused by the fact you always keep your non-discarded cards (by default), and the rogue-lite progression that both has interesting choices and always gives you some progress (until you've unlocked everything, which won't be for many 10s of hours). Being able to earn retries (if you beat the first two dungeons, and die on the third, you can retry it, (from the beginning with a new random seed), twice, if you die) is also a great feature which means (once you've mastered it) way less time playing the relatively risk-free early dungeons, more time playing the challenging content, and a slight defense against completely losing a character to getting really unlucky (which will still happen, of course).

My only gripe is that there are two very, very hard (or very, very grindy) achievements that I'll never get - though completing the game once on Legendary Mode (where you lose any equipment you're using if you die, which is part of the rogue-lite progress) was a stressful and rewarding challenging, doing so with every class is infeasible. I'll not be getting 100% on this game ^_^.