Full disclosure, this is my first and, as of the time of writing, only Paper Marion game to date.

The moment-to-moment experience of playing Origami King was intensely frustrating. The story feels like an endless series of roadblocks, needing to go to a different location to remove the obstacle blocking the path in the previous location. That combined with the truly just OK fights made any sort of progress feel agonising.

The game's saving grace - the League of Stationary. People apparently hate these guys for lacking "character design", but out of context problem scissors and hole punches and what not fucking rule, what a great concept. The ways they switch up the combat is great (way better than the elemental beast guys) and they have the best tracks in the OST.

Occasionally you'll come across a game where it's clear the creator is very good at what they do and they could make something genuinely special if they just had the funds and a couple extra team members to cover the blind spots.

Don't let the art fool you, this is a perfectly respectable deckbuilder roguelike, with a delightfully large number of different character styles to try out. I think mechanically where this is lacking is the "relic" equivalents didn't spark much joy.

It's free but I would have paid money for this!

80 Days was a very quick all-time favourite for me, so I was incredibly eager to check out the next original Inkle game.

Sadly while the core concept and language deciphering mechanics are fun the simple moment-to-moment experience of getting anywhere completely sucked the joy out of it for me. Getting around in the point and click bits is slow but fine, it's getting between areas that's harrowing. Not requiring enough involvement to be engaging, but requiring just enough to make it tedious. When I realised I'd hit a dead end and would probably need to check out a couple different locations to progress the sense of dread I felt at the prospect made me put this down and never want to pick it up again.

I adore how tight the design on this feels and yet how much variety there is in mechanical approaches. With these tools you have aggressive builds, defensive builds, movement builds, DOT builds, card draw builds, risk-reward builds, it's all here!

I thought at first that the story and characters were a bit too cutesy for my tastes, but they only grew on me the more I played. A lot of people understandably compare this to Slay the Spire and FTL, but in its structure I think this clearly draws from Hades, with a clear narrative conclusion. I think more roguelikes should do this! It's good to have a nice, tidy sending off, the culmination of the experience, as opposed to just dropping out of boredom.