Recent reviews by David Holmes

The Ur-Quan Masters is the classic sci-fi adventure/RPG, packed with exploration, humor, an epic story and phenomenal music. In 30 years, many games have been influenced by it but none have successfully replicated it. For the low, low price of $0, everyone should play it.

Today I completed the last of the achievements, meaning I've finished basically everything in the game including all the challenge levels.

Stuff I liked:

- I like the variety of cards and their interactions, once I got to actually using them.
- I enjoyed actually playing through the levels more than most non-RPG tactics games I've played.
- Everything about the game was absolutely charming (art, characters, writing, music).
- Most of the challenge levels were a blast.

Stuff I'm a little unsure about:

- If you pick your decks well, the difficulty of the campaign was on the easy side, even when I wasn't being particularly cheesy. I did not really need to try new stuff much, once I'd settled into a good deck - my solo Bamboomer Grow+ deck can deal with nearly anything in the game as far as I can tell. I actually found the earlier half of the game to be harder at times than the second. I suspect this is is because I do actually engage heavily with the deck selection part of the game, which means you get more opportunities for very powerful decks later as you get more cards. I think people who spend less time crafting their deck, and people who use large decks, might have a different experience. I'm not a card game expert but I have played enough of them that optimal deckbuilder decision-making might come more easily to me than to the average player.
- Depending on your deck, getting a few really good hands early on and playing them right can dramatically change the difficulty of the level. I was pretty shameless about restarting if I got a useless hand, or if things started to go south, and I think this is probably necessary to beat some of the challenge levels at all.
- Since I've completed literally everything in the game as far as I know, I wouldn't mind if there was just more. It's still a good value, though.

Original review:

Eight levels in, Floppy Knights is an addictive, challenging, and fun tactics game/deckbuilder hybrid. In spite of the charming art and theme, it's complex enough for any serious tactics game fan.

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is my favorite RPGMaker game to date, and my favorite indie JRPG. Frankly, it's one of my favorite JRPGs of the past decade, after I've largely grown tired of the genre and its cliches.

Most of the appeal of Jimmy comes from the writing, and it's hard to discuss why without spoilers. All I'll say is that this game is _special_ for reasons that will not all be obvious at the beginning.

The gameplay is also extremely solid though. As the game progresses, Jimmy unlocks new classes, which not only function as a "job system" in battles but also unlock areas on the game map in a vaguely Metroidvania fashion. Battles against weaker enemies can be avoided with a button press. Combat is more interesting than most 16-bit JRPGs, there's a huge amount of optional content, and there are multiple optional mini-games of above-average quality.

The most common criticism I see of this game is that it requires "grinding". I really don't think this is true, or at the very least, it depends greatly on playstyle and the extent to which you embrace the game's systems and play efficiently and complete optional content and make good decisions with the game's job system. There is an incredible amount of non-linear side content in this game, with many optional dungeons and optional bosses and areas unlocked by abilities, many of which give powerful equipment which changes gameplay in ways other than raw stats, and bonuses. If you skip the side content, or make poor choices regarding which of Jimmy's classes to level, or don't use equipment effectively, then you're going to have a hard time and will have to grind to make up for it. I personally did not find the main game grindy at all and I even skipped many battles.

If you're not a completionist and you want to breeze through the game without exploring thoroughly, there's nothing wrong with that. There is an "easy mode" which will allow you to play in that way without grinding, and it sounds like many people enjoy it that way. That said, I know I personally hate the feeling of turning on any sort of "easy mode" in any game so I totally understand if you don't want to do that. In that case this game might just not be for you, and that's fine. Caveat emptor.

I played Garden Story mostly while lying in bed recuperating from hip surgery, and it was really the perfect game for that: a simple, cozy, adorable Zelda-like action adventure.

The best things about Garden Story are the things you can see in the screenshots and videos: the whole game is just charming and wholesome.

Another review described this game as having a "downward-sloping difficulty curve" and I found that extremely accurate. At the very beginning of the game you have access to very few upgrades, and the first boss might be moderately challenging if you don't have the few upgrades that are available. After that, you start getting memories (upgrades unlocked with a sort of in-game achievement system), character stat upgrades, and equipment upgrades, all of which decrease the difficulty considerably if you're inclined to play in a completionist way.

In a way, Garden Story's superficial inspirations from Stardew Valley really work against it: in Stardew Valley your various chores are a major part of the game and usually fairly engaging, and you'll want to keep doing them to advance through the game. This trained me to think I should try to complete them all in Garden Story as well. In Garden Story, however, the job board tasks are mostly tedious, and necessary if and only if you need to decrease the difficulty level from "easy" to "casual". Even a mediocre gamer like myself could probably get away with doing very few of them, just enough to access the majority of the character upgrades. Instead I ended up doing enough to upgrade the towns to mostly level 3 or 4, which is probably about 50% of the work to get _everything_ in the game, and this turned out to be way overkill: I found the second half of the game to be extremely easy with that many upgrades.

There are a few other mechanics that ended up falling a bit flat: the game has a system for building stuff, which had me excited for about two minutes but turned out to be largely useless, and a farming mechanic that's useful only to farm some of the items you need for the tool upgrades you don't need. These both ended up feeling superfluous. They don't hurt the game but they don't help it and the development time would probably have been better spent on other content.

So my recommendation is:
- Don't worry much about the more tedious aspects of the game like the job boards unless you get stuck. Just play the game to complete it and appreciate the cute characters and world. It'll be a somewhat shorter game, but probably a better one.
- This is a small game by a solo developer. It's a fun diversion for a weekend. Go into it expecting that and appreciate it for what it is, and don't expect it to be Stardew Valley, and don't expect it to have the scope or scale of a Zelda game.

Jupiter Hell does a fantastic job of making a turn-based roguelike feel fast, engaging, fun, and modern, while still being very much a "true roguelike".

I passed over Grandia II when I was growing up, but I remember it being highly regarded at the time. I went into this PC version with high expectations based on that and I was pretty underwhelmed.

First the good parts:
- The translation is pretty decent
- The PC port seems alright
- Being a Grandia game, the battles can at times be engaging
- Being a Grandia game, there's lots of dialogue and character interaction if you want it.

But now for the bad parts...
- The story is mostly generic and stupid in a very JRPG way. It's typical of JRPGs of its era. It's the sort of plot that I might have thought was good when I was a 12-year-old, but most adults would be embarrassed by it. The characters are mostly annoying most of the time. Their behavior is juvenile and tedious, which makes it hard to care about them. The dialog is good when the characters are just chatting, but awful when they're talking about anything related to the plot, especially towards the end. I've heard enough JRPG monologues about how the power of the heart will overcome any obstacle, thanks.
- The battle system had potential, but throws away nearly all of that potential by 1) making battles take too long by using any strategy except unleashing powerful AOE attacks over and over, and 2) making all the AOE attacks consist of 20-second-long low-budget CGI animations. Because there are save points where you can heal all over the place, the most rational course of action is to just use Sky Dragon Slash or "Zap All" or whatever every single battle. This means you spend 80% of the time in battles watching the same crappy 320x240 animations over and over again. There's no option to skip these animations. Not fun. This is not a game that respects the value of its players' time.

To be honest, I'm a little confused by other reviews seeming to praise the story. Maybe I'm just getting to old to enjoy this sort of thing.

They should have taken their CGI budget and spent it on writing instead.