Recent reviews by Wok

Too many crashes to desktop. Aside from this technical issue, levels are:
- hard to read: everything looks the same, there is a lack of landmarks to help with the exploration,
- too long: it is especially annoying for short play-sessions for which you want to be able to save & quit.

I have enjoyed the start of the game with a character looking for her roots, and the atmosphere of the town. The story started bringing forth tropes about modern activism (eco-terrorism, police brutality, etc.), which were a bit too much in your face, but still bearable. Then, it turned into a messy blend of mystic pseudo-mythology about werewolves (Wyrm, Weaver, Wyld, Gaïa, etc.), which made the last two chapters a complete boredom.

tl;dr: do yourself a favour and stop playing at the end of chapter 4.

Spelunky was the perfect game: simple yet deep, punishing yet fair, it would quickly become your daily routine yet never feel bland, etc. How could it ever fall from its pedestal as the best game of all-time? Well, Derek Yu had some ideas, and he managed to carve from the mud a game which would play the exact same, look better and have a richer environment, fauna, etc. This game would be called Spelunky 2, but that would actually be Spelunky too, and it would bolt at Spelunky and push it from the top place in a sight which we could never have foreseen. Great job, Derek, you did it again!

I tend to like rogue-like deck-builders, like Dream Quest or Slay the Spire. There are plenty of them these days, to a point that I might feel saturated, but this one caught my eye due to its pleasant visuals. You will notice that it looks even better in action, with animations and sounds bringing a significant polish to good foundations.

After a bit of research, I noticed that the game was developed by an indie studio which had previously released a game (Meteorfall: Journeys) only for mobile devices! So I was a bit wary about this one (Meteorfall: Krumit's Tale), and maybe you are too: I have been burnt by games which are designed for mobile and released in a bad shape on PC. Well, rest assured that this game was developed for PC first, during 9 months of Early Access (November 2019 - July 2020). The mobile versions only appeared after the PC game version 1.0 was released.

Maybe you did not notice, but there is a demo, and this is what sold me on the game. I have played the demo for 2-3 hours, to the point that I was styling on the monsters with the two characters available. I wanted to challenge myself with the harder levels and to discover the signature of the three other characters. I could also acknowledge that the gameplay had me hooked. It is a mix of deck-building and puzzle solving, which is quite unique.

If you are interested in the game, give the demo a go! You can skip the tutorial in the in-game settings of the demo.

The chessboard is hard to read due to the 3D camera view and light reflections. Camera is reset after a few seconds, so moving the camera with the mouse is not useful. User interface is unintuitive.

You can improve your quality of life by:
- pressing "C" to change camera view (there is one 3D which is the default, one very zoomed-in for screenshot only, and one much better almost 2D with a top-down view),
- pressing "R" to see the history of moves and then undo your last move if you have made a mistake,
- exporting your games to PGN format (it is hidden in the pause menu) to analyze them on lichess.org.

NB: the "L" keyboard shortcut, which is supposed to lock the view, actually resets the view instead.

It used to be an amazing game, it is still okay, even though the reward system has become quite complex and less generous.

Edit: It is December 5, 2022. Press F to pay respects:
https://steamproxy.net/app/1284410/discussions/0/3711558744940347869/

Vingt-trois ans se sont écoulés depuis la sortie du jeu, et ça n'a pas mal vieilli du tout !

This game was released more than 3 years ago and has about 200 Steam reviews. Given the amount of polished content (overworld, puzzles, boss fights, writing, etc.), I believe this is what we call a "hidden gem".

Download size is about 30 GB, because there is no option to choose what to download: you have to download 1080p, 2k, 4k textures and cut-scenes, even if you want to play at 1080p. This is an unacceptable practice, which does not make use of Steam's features.

Remember Li Wenliang[en.wikipedia.org].

Li Wenliang (李文亮; 12 October 1986 – 7 February 2020) was a Chinese ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital who on 30 December 2019 warned fellow colleagues about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), later acknowledged as COVID-19 on WeChat. He became a whistleblower when his warnings were later shared publicly. On 3 January 2020, Wuhan police summoned and admonished him for "making false comments on the Internet". Li returned to work, later contracted the virus from an infected patient and died from the disease on 7 February 2020, aged 33.

Meanwhile, this game is banned by the Chinese government, because what is the real issue for them? Controlling the narrative.

https://steamproxy.net/games/plagueincevolved/announcements/detail/1723128189771746868

Here is the timeline of the outbreak[en.wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia.