excellent art, tunes, dungeon crawling combat and base building

well impressed at how confidently it rolls credits on a 12ish hour experience, while learning you up on the many (many) mechanics in case you want to go Deep beyond them

cult management makes for pretty chuckle-worthy mechanics across the board. loved the character designs and the speed at which things move along

some quality of life quirks on base construction and proccing grated here and there but, really really fab time with this

played this through for the distinct locales and stylishly framed between-level-cutscenes

nails a couple of scenes relating to abusive relationships that could have easily whiffed entirely

ultimately, i'd much rather play stuff like this; that tries new stuff, even if it (imo) misses more than it lands

because gameplay is flat and fails to convince me that max payne / hotline miami (clear influences) works vs mainly melee enemies

a typical level (there are 50) consists of: enter room; slow down time; click enemy heads with pistols (rarely need to bother with anything else other than a few rifle shots) before it aggros/attacks; end level. something like this https://streamable.com/vjyhz5, with bosses also struggling to shake things up https://streamable.com/50g1lg

difficulty emerges in the form of placing enemies behind blind corners, where they'll chunk your health while you wrestle the janky reticle into working up close

i feel like there's a game half as long, taking itself half as seriously, that really gets at what made it's inspirations tick: each room is a puzzle, you have limited but meaningful tools - how will you solve this room?

Bzzzt is fuckin class

short and extremely sweet

it is gorgeous

tight platforming, great tunes, and the trophy time challenges are balanced just right

Bzzzt is fuckin class

The digging is why you are here

The digging is why you will stay

Does nowt else to shake up what is, as title states, unapologetically a Survivors game

Music and voice direction both uninspiring and immediately grating, respectively

Light routing strategy and mob control from the good part (digging) means you might miss the odd bit of chatter on that podcast you've got on

started this while Tekken 8 was installing and ended up playing the whole thing over a couple of days

really easygoing and charming journey

fun wee loop of dig, upgrade, dig better, repeat

meaningful upgrades make traversing previous areas a blast

loads of clever level design

a lovely wee time was had

this is the SHIT, man

rogue-like etc wait till you unlock this/that NAH; you can absolutely pop off in this game, right from the jump

phenomenal account of movement, weapon feel, and enemy/level design that absolutely slaps.

there is a proper skill ceiling in this thing i can't wait to see how freaky it gets

jetback is busted and kinda betrays a lot of movement and level design challenges

i hope more folks discover Robo Quest. RyseUp you made a banger if you're reading this i love you

very cool hacky game that feels that nails 1 player Overcooked-like experience

but where Overcooked creates tension by punishing badly cooked food, DROP allows you to serve burnt steaks all day.

sadly that means you can dirty hack through pretty much the entire game without any incentive to be stealthy. brute forced my way through this thing once i got a feel for it

far (FAR) too long and suffers greatly from pacing issues, with a few wild difficulty spikes thrown into the mix

chunky emails between missions supposedly deliver a cool scenario but, it's all way too bloated

which is a shame bc there's genuinely awesome gameplay in here, and i think there's a version of this is which is way shorter/ tighter, and all the more thrilling for it

still finished it bc it made my brain go brrr in a way i couldn't let go, despite all of the above. it really does nail 'hacking' on a pad.