Recent reviews by solifugyd

I first want to disclaim that personally, I haven't enjoyed this game much. This might not sound like I'm recommending it, but it's just a matter of personal taste; I'd still say it's a good game, just not as 'hardcore' a roguelike as NetHack or Dungeon Crawl, to name a couple of free ones, or Caves of Qud or Cogmind, to name some on Steam.

The graphics and especially the sound are tuned to provide an atmosphere similar to a 16-bit RPG. Very chill. Gameplay is pretty close to a Mystery Dungeon game like Shiren the Wanderer or the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon titles, but the combat and job systems are pretty singular. In fact, you can capture and recruit monsters, so that's cool.

Tangledeep hasn't clicked with me, but I'd still recommend it heartily to anyone interested in roguelikes or Mystery Dungeon type games.

Where to start? Runs all feel the same. Every level has the same shops, every time. About the most interesting thing you'll run into is the occasional dead end. Each castle has different colors, and the enemies... are different colors. There about nine enemies and five colors.. it's not exciting.

Lots of different spells all do the same thing. There are pits all over the place that you'll constantly be dashing into by mistake, dealing 1/20 of your very limited health and setting you up for getting stunlocked, which brings me to..

There's a total lack of i-frames for both enemies and player. Not sure I ever appreciated them so much as after trying to play this game. Boss fights seem like a quick race to stunlock them before they can lock you. It's boring and frustrating to set up a game this way.

It's a shame the game has these problems, as the spellcasting/fighter idea is solid, and their art and music put me in mind of classic 16-bit gems like Illusion of Gaia. Alas, you have to make the game fun, and have to make runs feel different or it isn't really even a roguelike.

Voidigo is the closest game I've played to Nuclear Throne, and believe me, that's a good thing. With many difficulties, looping, and a Final Challenge mode, it's got loads of content. Its dodging is based around jumping and sprinting, a refreshing change of pace from dodge-rolling. And the nice thing about its many, many guns is that very few of them are just totally useless. Co-op functions well with Steam Remote Play, which isn't always the case.

Only real minus I can think of is that the functions of various items are totally unclear, and the item descriptions are pure lore, no help at all. 100+ hours in, I still have no idea what the Orphan Ghost really does, or why it's good to get your opponents "wet" with the blue pepper. But hey, it's a pretty minor gripe.

Nuclear Throne's the best entry I ever seen in the twin-stick roguelite shooter genre, and any time I spend a-jawin' further on it is time we could both be spending on playing it.

Would Diablo 2 have been worth playing if it only contained the Blood Moor and the Rocky Waste? That's pretty much the situation here. Even if they've done a decent job blending survivors-like mechanics with hades-type boons, there just isn't much game here.

Almost more disappointing than the two levels is that your characters are capped out at 36 points of upgrades. This decision seems irrespective of Early Access, and is pretty much impossible to fathom for a single-player game that doesn't even have daily leaderboards. As fun as it might be to go hogwild and enable every capstone, that's about how much it sucks to realize you're already done when you reach the first one.

These problems could be addressed through continued development, but the pace thus far doesn't impress. There are better titles out there.

Notwithstanding its originality and excellent particle physics engine, Noita suffers from its opacity and obtuseness. The simplest hacks may require the average player, or even a clever one, to read spoilers or watch videos on wand construction and such. Furthermore, the twists and turns of the games are just bogglingly stupid sometime. Lucked out and got eight health spheres before the third area? Yep, you'll probably be instakilled by a tunneling worm, polymorphed into some fatal form by invisible liquid, or just ambushed to death.

Last problem is that, if you do seek spoilers as to the world that's out there, you'll see that it's truly massive and impressive, yet completely closed off to you in typical play. Too many games have mountains of content available only to the shimmering, immortal top tier of players, and Noita's a big offender in that regard, too. Tl,dr: for masochists (and the shimmering and immortal) only.

Boneraiser Minions is a solid entry in the survivors-like or bullet heaven genre, with the twist that the player has no weapons, and instead amasses hordes of undead creatures that attack on its behalf. Compared to others in the genre, it has less of a tendency for the player to reach infinite power after a point, remaining interesting throughout. Also, it's got a unique and quirky writing style that fans of the developer's other games will recognize and appreciate, even if its initialism, BM, is rather unfortunate.

My main problem with the game is that you're constantly being interrupted to choose minions, relics, and spells, and this can get a little invasive, especially since it doesn't always feel like the choice you're making is gonna change your performance much. But, this is a pretty minor grudge I developed only after having played it for a few dozen hours.

Lastly, just wanna boost another game by the developer, Spirits Abyss, as being worth a play if you enjoyed the style of BM and like roguelite platformers!

I've been playing Caves of Qud more than five years, and I finally decided to leave a review because of how regularly it's updated, and the quality of its updates as well. Muslims pray on Fridays; Quddites have Feature Friday!

Aside from the game's beautifully written and designed aesthetics, I must laud the wholly original world. It's no clone of Dune or somesuch, and certainly not more of the same Tolkien tripe you see so much of. It's got sultans and cybernetics, ape gods and farmers.

It's not for everyone, with an innately high difficulty, and the usual steep learning curve of trad roguelikes. But for anyone at all that likes the roguelike genre, it's a close to perfect game.

I really wanted to give this game a chance, because the idea of making a game on inventory management to be pretty brave. Managing items is usually one of the dreariest parts of any game that requires it, so surely one would have to be crazy to make it the cornerstone of a game?

I didn't think the problems with this game came from its inventory management aspects, though. Rather, it's more pedestrian problems, like difficulty. Never got any sense of danger from any encounter except the boss, for instance, and even then, not much.

Mostly though, I found the game to suffer from each run feeling the same, a big problem for any roguelike. Sure, the dungeons are procedurally generated, but each level felt to have exactly the same stuff in it, just located in slightly different places. And while there's a great variety of loot to be had after battles and in chests, I mostly saw myself taking the same stuff. For instance, the game includes mana and magic items, but I didn't ever see a point to utilizing them when backpack space is already so cramped.

Finally, I found the whole exercise of rebuilding the rodent town to be a pretty tedious way of meta-progressing and unlocking new items. Maybe it's just me, but if you want to play that kind of game, there's Stardew Valley, a few shelves over. If you did wanna try this game, I'd recommend just using the quick play, which gives you every item and character immediately, and lets you do full-length runs right off the bat.

What it lacks in map, music and visual diversity, it makes up for in mechanics and sheer stats, of which there are dozens. Also a very large amount of classes, which generally play very differently from each other, compared to say, VS. I'd recommend over most survivors-like, with the caveat that winning with some classes at the highest difficulty is gonna be prickly indeed.