After 70 hours into the game, and watching ParagusRants stream hundreds of it, I find that no review could really do this game justice besides encouraging individuals to download the demo and try for themselves. What may seem like a typical Tower of the Sorcerer game will instead become a rabbit hole in which you will never get out. This game is an investment of your time, your mental capacity, your sanity. You will spend hours making an attempt at one of the many highly difficult towers (levels) within the game, and may find that it was either all for naught or highly rewarding. Failure is expected in many first attempts, but as this is the dark souls of puzzle games, you will find it even more satisfying when you finally reach the end.

Sticking to the puzzle resource management style of DROD RPG and Tower of the Sorcerer, your currency in this game is essentially your health. You want to ensure you make moves that keep your health as high as possible, while considering large trades for stats and other items that may improve your run. While reaching a clear may be thought of as an end-goal, it is your score that will determine what medal and sunstone count you get from the Tower. As you complete one level to your satisfaction, you will find others beginning to open up to you due to a cross-level system called the "Nexus" in which you can spend your medals and sunstones to gain additional stats for every tower.

Not only though is Tactical Nexus an amazing game, but alongside it is a highly thoughtful and educated community. The developers of the game are always responsive on their respect social media, even doing so despite their lack of speaking English. You will find that most players of the game are more than happy to share tips and strategies regarding the game and individual towers, which you may at first consider cheating but will hopefully see in the long-run why the community effort makes it even more enjoyable. I'd highly recommended most players join the connected Discord which you can find within the posts by the developer.

As it stands, Tactical Nexus is the pinnacle of all puzzles on Steam, and you will without a doubt improve your rational thinking and mentality while playing it. I assure you, it is on a level of difficulty you will be surprised with, but it is entirely worth the struggle should you stick with it to the end.

Heard this was dropping today via some videos people keep linking me on Discord. I'm not entirely sure what Capcom is doing randomly dropping a game for my IBM piece of shit, but we'll take a looksie at their latest attempt and only hope it's better than Trojan or Street Fighter. I'm still paying off the hospital bills from breaking my hands playing the latter's torturous pressure-sensitive button layout.

The idea of a "Mega Man" feels like someone who should be a giant among their peers, instead we have a little guy who shoots tennis balls. Adorable. In the meantime, the villain of our story who goes by the name of "Dr. Wily" apparently hangs out in some government-funded army base that requires a toll of some kind to get in. I respect this Mega Person for at the very least taking the fight to corrupt institutes looking to take advantage of their citizens, even if he's still apparently pro-toll booths. Unfortunately, he seems to be having a lot of trouble dealing with Dr. Wily's rogues gallery of wild animals and loosened indoor plumbing. Apparently all it takes to stop Capcom's latest attempt at a lovable character is to simply hire an army of possums to roam about a bathroom in need of maintenance, because Dr. Right was in fact wrong over forgoing the idea of "bendable knees", allowing their weaponized tennis balls to uselessly fly right over some friendly dumpster diving marsupials.

It's not quite as funny as Trojan, but at least it's more playable than Street Fighter even if it lacks the silly attempt at voice acting while the person was eating toffee.

The future's not exactly looking bright for this upstart Capcom company, I like that they're giving struggling programmers a chance with one-person games like this, but it's lookin' pretty bleak I think.

Over-the-top Shmup/STG with mouse control for movement. Has a lot of similarities to Akashicverse by the same developer. The game defaults to mouse control but there is an option for gamepad. There's a shop system to unlock moves and increase stats.
I think the crazy speed potential of mouse control fits well with the kind of bosses and stage design in Endless Shirafu games. They tend to have fast paced and unique attacks which require memorization to deal with. Mouse control doesn't make those aspects redundant and potentially gives the player a higher 'power level' so it's interesting to test the concept here.
∀stralbringer can be really challenging if you try playing with base equipment and avoiding the shop. The skill ceiling with just the base tools seems really high. Mouse movement control has crazy potential & grazing/bullet absorb mechanics with this have some interesting synergy (seems similar to the Psyvariar mobile game).
If you want it to get easier you can power up over progress and gain access to additional Methods/Skills. The strange thing is you barely need to scratch the surface of the mechanics to clear the Early Access / non-DLC content. This personally made most of the mechanics seem underbaked because they just don't matter. The game felt 'cleaner' with access to only initial tools but once you expand to the full set of abilities this explodes out of hand and becomes kind of messy.

If you want endgame content or English language support wait for the game to exit Early Access. The base game is similar to if Akashicverse was missing 1-2 of the final stages. Pricing seems reasonable regardless.

note: the trial and current Early Access version appear to require you to set the Windows Region setting 'Language for non-Unicode programs' to Japanese to run properly. Otherwise it will crash at launch.