Recent reviews by jonlevir

Coral Island is a great game for anyone who enjoys farming sims, slice of life games, and relationship sims. The art style and character design is amazing, and you can easily lose track of time while exploring all the different things the game has to offer. At the same time, the option to adjust the flow of time made it so I never felt rushed or like I had to scramble to get everything done that I needed to. Overall, probably the best game I've played in the genre, and I'm looking forward to continued improvements from the devs.

This is a great take on Minesweeper. Different mechanics for the different heroes make each one a slightly different experience and encourage different playstyles. It's easy to get back into the game after a failed run. Highly recommend.

This is a game that I think would have benefited greatly from an Early Access period. I've encountered numerous crashes, progress breaking bugs, and horribly long loading times, and that's just the technical problems with the game.

TL;DR : The game has a lot of promise, and can be quite fun, but that is completely overshadowed by the technical issues, mediocre writing, questionable design choices, poor pacing, and strange conception of what constitutes morality. If the devs stick with the game and make a concerted effort to fix the problems, I'll come back and change the recommendation. If they don't, don't waste your time and money. Also, spoilers.

******SERIOUSLY, I'M NOT HOLDING BACK ON SPOILERS. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED************

The wide angle view of this game is quite promising. Being able to build up a kingdom, choose how you rule and see how that shapes the kingdom while still adventuring and taking a hands on approach to problem solving. As a PnP module, with a good GM, this would be amazing. As a CRPG, with a good design team, and a good writing team, this would be one for the top ten lists. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details to muck up that wide angle shot.

The nuts and bolts of the combat and adventuring are pretty well done. Lots of fighting, tactics, looting, planning, leveling, and optimizing to be done. The difficulty is very adjustable, so while the devs took the lazy approach to difficulty of "Just give them higher stats" and didn't bother with the CR recommendations, combat can easily be managed if you are a fan of story more than tactical nuts and bolts.

The nuts and bolts of kingdom management are pretty much awful. Everything is timed, and there was no forethought given to when they would pop up. You will encounter numerous times where an event will pop up 3-5 days before the end of the month that will require a particular advisor to solve, who is already tied up with the last event that required them, and the event will fail when the new month rolls around, dinging you anywhere from 2-5 points on your kingdom stats, more if it's a main quest related event.

Leveling up your stat tiers so that your advisors have better rolls on these events requires dedicating 2 weeks of time to that, during which time advances automatically with no chance to stop, check other events that have come in, or do anything else. I decided to do a level up with 40 days left on the main quest timer, figuring I would be safe with 26 days left to go before failure. Nope. 3 main quest related events fired and failed in that 2 week period, taking 18 stat points from my kingdom and dropping it from doing well to crumbling - one step above destroyed. So rather than netting a +1 to rolls for that advisor, I ended up with -2 to all my advisor rolls because apparently once the hero starts a task, no one wants to interrupt him to let him know, "Hey, the kingdom is kind of falling into ruin around your ears while you're discussing how to make more money with your treasurer." Extremely poor design choice.

Speaking of the main quest, again, in the wide angle view, it looks really good. You've got a main antagonist that reveals themselves fairly early on and some really well done writing for them and the main story beats. But again, the details are where the game trips and falls on its face. Some of the characters are nuanced and interesting, while others are simply flat class example characters.

Literally, Amiri, one of the main companions seems to have been drawn straight from the class example of a barbarian, and while I really wanted her to be interesting and have a lot of character development, she just stays as the barbarian that hits things with big pieces of metal. She has some interesting story beats involving her tribe and why she left, but they don't change anything about her attitude towards the world, her morality, or much of anything. They're just there. And they mean nothing.

That's the worst part about the characters. Nothing really changes them. They go through story events that should fundamentally change their outlook on life and their way of interacting with others and the world, but they stay immovably the same as when you first met them. Other than choosing whether to banish them or keep them around, nothing you say really changes the characters, at least in my experience. I contrast that with classic RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Planescape, or KOTOR, and it just makes me sad. The characters in those games seemed to have a life of their own, where they went through events and it fundamentally changed who they were, especially based on how the PC chose to deal with the events. While you have a few "choices" of how to deal with companion quests, it doesn't really change much about how things play out.

That leads me to my next, and possibly biggest problem with this game. To me, RPGs live or die by their reactivity and responsiveness to player choice. In PnP that's one of the biggest separations between a good GM and a bad GM, and while there will always be limits simply based on the medium, a good CRPG is reactive and shows how your choices do or don't matter. For all the crap the ending deservedly gets, Mass Effect did a mostly stellar job of reacting to player choice, and showing how the effect of those choices came back to reward or haunt you, even choices that seemed insignificant at the time.

In this game, player choice is really an illusion, and one that fails to deceive. Aside from the banish/not banish choice and setting some romance flags, nothing you say matters until the game gives you an obvious [Diplomacy/Intimidate/Etc] choice which can solve a quest with or without fighting. That's really all the reactivity it allows you; sometimes your choices allow you to get through this quest without fighting a final climactic battle, or allow you to get a little help along the way. That's it. So with that in mind, let's discuss railroading.

In PnP parlance, railroading is when a GM has a certain way they want a quest to go, and that is the way it will go, no matter what the players want or try to do. GMs generally do this by cutting off all player choices until they player submit and do what the GM is obviously telegraphing is the preferred solution. In this game, railroading is just how the devs designed.

Two examples: In one main quest, the only way to progress is to have Amiri walk into a barbarian encampment alone to try to challenge the warlord to single combat. After a little bit of walking around, she is thrown into a scripted combat where her stats, skills, and equipment doesn't matter, as she will simply stand still and let the barbarian warlord wail on her until she falls and then tie her up. Sucks to be you if she was your main tank or melee damage dealer. You then have to fight your way across a battlefield through a decent portion of the barbarian horde to rescue her. You cannot sneak your party closer to the camp, you cannot buff her up with spells and potions, you have no other option than this one. It wouldn't be quite so bad, except that you have a conversation before hand where your character asks about sneaking in with her, and you're told "No, none of you would pass for barbarians." No allowance for illusions, stealth, invisibility, bluffs, or any other options that other games have given in similar situations. Choo-choo.

The second example is the one that made me put down the game 60 some hours in. At this point, my Neutral Good character is a king. He has taken down a bandit band, a troll king and kobold chieftan, a cyclopean lich with the backing of a demon prince, and numerous monsters and fey. He has a powerful army, a strong guard force including a militia in each town, two mercenary bands, the remainder of the barbarian horde with their chief as his blood brother, a goblin tribe, iron golems, numerous priests, and mages at his command.

*Continued in Comments*

Recettear is an incredibly fun game that puts you in control of the local adventuring shop. You determine prices, haggle with buyers, and hire adventurers to go dungeon crawling with you for rare items to sell. And you have to keep hitting sales goals every week because you're in horrific debt to the fairy mafia. Whimsical, fun, with a level of brutal difficulty if you don't take the time to learn the mechanics, Recettear is a game I come back to again and again.

Oh, and don't mind my short Steam time on the game, I've put in hundreds of hours into the game outside of Steam.

I can't recommend HoPiKo, mainly because of several contradictions in genre and execution. Allow me to explain.

HoPiKo is a timing based puzzle platformer that punishes you for sitting still or trying to time your movements. Try to plan out your path through the insta-death filled level? Don't take longer than five seconds, or you'll be killed. Missed a timing sequence and have to wait for it to change? Better hope you're on the platform less than five seconds, or it will dissolve and you will die.

I would actually describe HoPiKo as a twitch based platformer, as often you are forced to simply throw your character in the direction of the next platform as quickly and precisely as possible and hope for the best. It then becomes very frustrating when you reach the end of the run - each run is a series of five levels, and failure on any one of them resets you back to the beginning of the run - and find that since you didn't take the path the developer decided was the "right" way, you are missing a checkmark. The checkmarks do nothing for gameplay, but if you are a completionist, the fact that there is only one path in this frenetic, twitchy mess that will bestow them on you is frustrating as hell.

TL;DR: If you enjoy puzzle platformers, you probably won't enjoy this. If you enjoy twitch based gaming - multiplayer shooters, some forms of speedrunning, etc - and are interested in a puzzle platformer, this may be the game for you. Caveat Emptor.

I highly recommend Tabletop Simulator. It gives the ability to play all the boardgames cluttering up the attic/closet/shelves with family and friends that wouldn't be able to come over for a game night. While there are boardgame adaptations on Steam, some of which are quite good, the integration of the Workshop and the robust multiplayer setup lets you play dozens of games across the country without having to lug around the actual game.

Intricate, addictive gameplay with just enough paced rewards to keep you playing for hour on end. One of the few Real Time with Pause games that have given me the "Just one more turn" syndrome I associate with Civ, HoMM, and other great TBS games.