Admittedly not much of a "game" yet, but still an incredibly original fever dream brimming with cool ideas and psychedelic, yet weirdly chill vibes. The whole world (er, galaxy) feels like splatterings of vividly colored blobs finger-painted by an ecstatic child lovingly brought to life by an older sibling game designer. The absurdist dialogue is hilariously matter-of-fact and what scant "plotlines" currently exist feel like the recordings of imaginary adventures collectively brainstormed between excitable kids on a playground. Even the combat system of manually flailing around your weapon with the mouse brilliantly invokes a kind of viscerally simplistic, childlike joy that only a game that isn't afraid to be dumb could afford to implement.

There's no music in the overworld, but when you've upgraded your character enough to properly fly, they sort of hum this calm little tune as they do so. Combining this with the surrounding scenery of mostly empty grayish rolling hills and foggy indigo skies gave me a sort of unexpected serenity akin to viewing an impressionist painting. The whole game even, seems to want to evoke some kind of impressionist feeling, but it's also not afraid to punctuate the viewings with dumb humor and pop references. The idiocy of the game's humor and its exploding creativity somehow kind of end up working pretty well together, though. I'll admit, aside from these personal takeaways, I don't really know what the "point" of the game is so far, but it's a definitely a vibe.

Amplitude Studios' Endless series of 4X games, to me, have always been characterized by visually striking, high concept civilizations and incredibly evocative lore writing. Big picture world building has always been the series' strength, but I've always found the smaller details and character writing to be just a bit lacking. This is, of course, completely fine in a 4X game, where you're managing entire armies and building massive superstructures. But in a more intimate setting like a dungeon crawler, where individuals are the focus, I couldn't help but want a bit more out of the heroes' colorful personalities. While the between-level elevator conversations are fantastic and give a tiny glimpse into who these people actually are, the more interesting ones are unfortunately relatively sparse as unique dialogues aren't even guaranteed to happen unless you happen to have a specific combination of characters. Even then there's only so many elevator rides before a run's over.

I understand if the focus is on the gameplay, but to be honest, while the series' games do fulfill a niche of providing fun, unique spins on 4X archetypes, they never quite reach the same level of depth and replayability that classics in the genre, such as the Civilization games, are known for. I find the same problem to be true for this particular foray into the tower defense/dungeon crawler genres. And while there's definitely a lot of polish and some pretty interesting interpretations of the mainline games' 4X mechanics, for some reason I just never found Dungeon of the Endless to be as addictive as the many other roguelike dungeon crawlers on the market. A lot of cool ideas here though, so hopefully they'll improve upon them in Endless Dungeon, the slightly confusingly-named spiritual sequel.

Chinese porn game. It's fine. Gameplay is just simplified QTE punch-out. Not much going on there, really. Story's marginally funny. Thankfully it leans more towards slapstick rather than male vindictiveness, as I assumed it would from the description. You play as incel Ryu, fighting off against five fighting game girl parodies (just five, it's pretty short). Throughout the fights, their clothes get torn off, as you would expect. There's a couple of CG sex scenes each; full mandarin voice acting too, which is nice. Art's actually pretty good. It's probably the best thing about the game honestly, and I'd love to see more of it, perhaps in an actual video game next time.

Currently imagining a world in which all mobile games were like this - simple, elegant fun prioritizing the player’s enjoyment instead of their wallets. Games that seek to provide a new, unique experience to players on the mobile platform instead of cynically trying to deceive them with skinner box monetization tricks. Take me back to the dawn of smartphones, when touch screens were seen as a visionary input innovation brimming with countless game design possibilities and not just a place to put an ugly, unresponsive virtual gamepad to the utter displeasure of handheld gamers everywhere. Why are there so few mobile games where moving around actually feels good and has a genuine tactileness to it, rather than just being a constant annoying battle with your fat thumbs for visibility? Was gosh-darn Fruit Ninja really the apex of mobile games that actually feel good to play?

...Mobile game diatribes aside, the central idea of this mobile game, Ordia, is pretty simple - you take a ball-like character that has to be flicked around like an Angry Bird to move but put it into an upwards scaling precision platformer like Celeste. The result is a short, polished 30+ level experience that feels absolutely smooth and buttery to the touch, thanks in no small part to the LocoRoco-esque minimalist art style and similarly bouncy, responsive animations. The level design in particular feels meticulously crafted. Every tunnel, peg, and wall bounce lands your little green dude pretty much exactly where it needs to go a lot of the time, owing probably to several level iterations and playtesting to ensure a smooth and guided user experience free of any major annoyances, much like an iphone’s UX philosophy. The game mechanics themselves are introduced gradually and deliberately, and build upon each other in fun ways. I wasn’t kidding with the Celeste comparison. There are even multiple mechanics that I swear are directly lifted from the dang thing such as: collectibles that only count after you land, midair nodes that give you an extra dash (or flick, rather) and are often chained together, differently colored evil clones of the protagonist that follow your movements to add time pressure, the list goes on. And while the game can be a bit frustrating at times, especially in the bonus levels, the wonderfully soothing electronic soundtrack and ambient Pikmin-esque nature-inspired sound design keeps the head relatively cool and the overall vibes chill.

I do wish there was a bit more to it though. Precision platformers like Mario, Celeste, and Meatboy thrive due to the sheer amount of ideas the developers cram into their games. 30 or so levels is just not quite enough time to layer and develop all of its mechanics to the same extent. And while the game certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, it also doesn’t give itself enough room to reach its full potential, in my opinion. That being said, this little game was certainly a nice surprise that wanted nothing more than to provide a fun, pleasant experience, and I honestly wish more mobile games followed this design philosophy.

Very cool single player mobile card game with a surprising amount of depth and some really fun risk/reward mechanics. The game seems to be heavily inspired by the Thief series, with a similar aesthetic and time period, and familiar thief tools like a variety of arrows, potions, the trusty blackjack, etc. Much more interesting, however, is the way these stealth mechanics are translated into a card game.

The game is played on a 3x3 card grid in which you, the player, must move around your thief card, dealing with obstacles until eventually reaching the end of the deck, pilfering the chest card and making a swift exit. The two main mechanics that provide the majority of interesting interplay are managing your stealth points, which decrease after dispatching enemies and are restored after gathering sneak cards, and dealing with light, which are provided by torches and make sneaking past obstacles much more difficult. This rather simple conflict is made more interesting via a pretty solid variety of enemies, obstacles, and thieving tools at your disposal. The tools are unlocked and upgraded by performing specific tasks, some of which actually do force you to play much more differently than usual, which I always really appreciate especially in card games, where it can be really easy to just meta-deck your way through 90% of the time.

The game has a variety of risk-reward mechanics which allows the player to naturally take a gradient of risky actions for a much larger score. Perhaps my favorite example of this is the path difficulty mechanic. Every so often, certain cards will randomly gain a path difficulty modifier, which will basically multiply the numbers of every subsequent card in the current path, i.e. the current 3x3 card grid. Bigger numbers mean tougher enemies, but it also means larger stealth restoration and more jewels. Managing the multiplier to maximize reward and minimize loss becomes a supremely interesting game of careful forward planning and clever tool use to craft the perfect path through, which can feel genuinely satisfying.

As fun as the game is, there's unfortunately not that much content. There's only like three areas and after completing the second area I honestly felt like I "got" the game. This honestly isn't the worst thing, as the design pretty much feels about as tight and focused as it could be for a game like this.

Overall though, it’s a well-designed, smallish card game perfect for your 10-15 minute breaks when you just want to feel like a smart little thief for a bit. Pretty good!

Pretty solid deck-builder with a quirky Adventure Time-esque art style and a laid-back vibe. If you're familiar with Slay the Spire, it plays very much like that game (though it actually came out a year before, which is neat). I like that the interface is more simplified for mobile devices so that all decisions are either a swipe left or swipe right, feels nice and intuitive. Though I might be calling it a more simplified Slay the Spire-like due to it being on mobile, the game actually manages to retain a lot of the same amount of depth and challenge as other games in the genre which was a pleasant surprise. Pretty good choice if you're looking for a deck-builder on the go.

One of the better western erotic indie rpgs I've played, though it seems like hardly anyone's heard of it. I even had to add it to IGDB myself, first time I've done that. This thing was made by one guy over two years and it's obvious he put a lot of love into it, especially regarding the retro aesthetic.

When you boot up the game, it shows a floppy disk being inserted and plays some vintage Amiga boot up sounds. You then hear this heavenly synthwave overture as the title screen steadily flies through space. As a first impression it made me go "Wow! I'm playing a video game someone actually cared about and put effort into!" which is unfortunately more than I can say for most of the shitty porn games I've played.

Most of the pixel art's just okay, but when I got to the sex scenes I was like "yo what that's hilarious," because it's this really fluid 3D Blender animation but put through a shit ton of filters to make it look like some kind of impossibly smooth, vibrantly colored Commodore 64 porn. All the while, this dreamy synth ballad plays and it's like, actually pretty good. Most of the music, even, is surprisingly great and it weirdly bums me out that the guy only released the first of the planned two volumes of the soundtrack.

As a game though, it's honestly a little rough around the edges. The controls are confusing and a little finicky, the interface is unclear and annoying to navigate, and I also experienced a fair amount of minor inventory bugs. The idea of the turn-based combat is kinda cool in that I think it's supposed to encourage you to improvise and use weapons you find around in the environment. But I don't think the combat design's quite there as most of the environmental weapons kind of suck and a lot of the battles just end up being repetitive and annoying with not that much strategy actually happening.

The writing's also not exactly up my alley, tbh. It tries really hard to be funny but a lot of the jokes just don't hit for me. The main character's supposed to be this captain-kirk type guy that all the ladies comedically all fall for, but the quality of writing just isn't enough to make the self-aware cheese that tasty for me. And the space orcs are all doing this Warhammer-esque bri'ish thing that I really wasn't fond of. I was also hoping it'd be more of a space adventure given the short prelude chapter, but no, it all mostly just takes place on a single space station, ah well.

I still think it's pretty neat, though. It's definitely one of the more unique porn games I've seen from a western developer.

Yo, so the hidden stuff in this game's actually pretty neat! It's been a year since I last played this back in early access and just when I was starting to get bored of the game loop again, the game out of nowhere managed to surprise me with all kinds of fun secrets and interesting unlocks. The amount of content in this game now is actually pretty respectable and the developer isn't afraid at all to hide a lot of it away via obscure mechanisms, which is something I gotta respect. Also, when did they add so many bangers to the soundtrack?