I was excited to play another SaGa fan game after how much I enjoyed Hat World earlier this year. Unfortunately, The Genius of Sappheiros didn't resonate in quite the same way and I decided to drop it after 20 hours.

There's not much to offer here outside of JRPG-style combat. The plot is super thin, the characterizations are basic if fairly enjoyable, the music is just serviceable, and the environments are fairly bland. Unlike the SaGa inspiration, this is a very linear game, so there's not much sense of exploration.

Thus, combat is forced to bear the entire weight of the game. The combat is pretty good in a Romancing SaGa 2 or 3 sort of way. Even random battles can be difficult and you need to make use of your buffs, debuffs, status effects, etc. or you're going to have a bad time. Unlike the RS games, you have 10+ unique characters with their own abilities and skill trees to compliment weapon skills that are shared between characters. Add this to some systems inspired by RS3 -- formations, commanders, field element levels, and you have a good amount of customization. So, the games one pillar, combat, is pretty good. It's certainly not in the running for top 10 JRPG combat for my money, but it's well above average.

The problem is, you get all of these interesting characters, but they all start at level 1. Of course, only characters currently in your party get experience, so if you want to use them, you're gonna have to get grinding. I figured I'd only bother grinding out enough characters to field a solid party, and then I got hit with classic JRPG "make two parties", required me to use 10/11 characters I had at that point. I got all of my lowbies up to a serviceable stage, but doing so really burnt me out. I found myself wanting to start up the game less and less and then realized that I'm just not having fun any more.

While having to grind was what killed my motivation, I was starting to feel that the game was a bit tedious regardless at under 20 hours in. The main game is apparently 50-60 hours, so I doubt I would have finished regardless. This is another game that goes in my "too long for its own good" pile.

After really enjoying Immortality a while back, I'd been meaning to try Sam Barlow's other games. I finally got around to slotting in Her Story this afternoon and it was a good time.

Her Story doesn't have the scope or flashiness of Immortality, but it was a solid experience. Since the two games are so similar in structure and content, my thoughts about this game are largely in comparison to Immortality. That's a bit unfair and I can imagine I may have reviewed Her Story a bit higher if I'd played it at launch, but it is what it is.

Much like Immortality, Her Story is an FMV game where you search for clips to put together the story. In particular, you are piecing together sections of a police interview with a woman whose husband has died. Viva Seifert is the only actor in Her Story, and luckily she was up to the task, delivering strong performances throughout. She did a great job of capturing different moods and emotional states. I can't I can't really say everything I want about her acting without spoiling things, so I'll leave it at that.

You search for new clips to watch via key words in a databse. While this doesn't have the wow factor that the object matching in Immortality did, it was a bit more natural to use. Searching for a keyword only returns the 5 earliest results, so generic words usually only get you early pieces of the interview. It's structured well so that you are constantly getting little bits to move forward, but not too far forward. Well, except that I guessed a keyword based on a context clue that led to me solving the game much quicker than howlongtobeat suggests (1.5 hours vs 2.5), but that mostly just made me feel like a super sleuth haha.

The story itself was interesting and kept me focused until credits rolled. The twist was fun, though maybe not the most original. More than Immortality, this mostly felt like watching an experimental movie. That's cool and I had fun with it, so time well spent.

This year has been absolutely killer for indie titles, and Dream Tactics is no exception.

You play as Neru, a human who has been summoned to the dream world to protect it from the Dream Eater. You explore 4 regions of the dream world, fighting pillows and collecting dream fragments to become strong enough to face the dream eater. It's a simple set up, but the light-hearted writing and characters make it a lot of fun.

Combat plays out on a tactical grid, with you controlling 4 characters against much greater numbers of armed pillows. Each character has a deck of card that determines which moves are available each turn. All of the mechanics you would expect are present -- action point costs for each action, discard and redraw, etc. There's a lot of flexibility in how you build the decks, and a huge amount of equipment options to make some really cool builds. I used 5/7 characters over the course of my playthrough, and each one had multiple viable ways I could build them, and played quite differently from the others. I played on hard difficulty, but it was only challenging until I'd recruited a 4th party member to fill out a full team. After that, as long as I kept my builds up to date, I didn't particularly struggle in any of the battles, though a careless move could easily lead to losing a character. My only real complaint is that some of the battles lasted too long for my tastes -- there could be multiple waves of reinforcements to deal with in battles that probably should have just been left quick and easy.

The other pillar of gameplay is exploration. There are chests hidden throughout each of the worlds with items and cards to obtain. These chests can be guarded by little obstacle courses that felt reminiscent of trap rooms in the 2D Zelda games. Dying in the trap room just sends you back to the beginning, so it's low stakes. I enjoyed the change of pace the exploration elements offer, but it may not be for everyone.

The last thing to mention is the ending of the game. Without spoiling anything, the final fight was one of my favorite across any tactical RPG I've played. Very cool. Unfortunately, the game just cuts to credits as soon as the fight plays out -- no final dialogue or wrapping up what happens. Most of the emotional pay off happened just before the final fight, but there needed to be at least one scene there for finality. EDIT: The devs added an epilogue scene a couple days after writing this and the ending feels much better now!

All that said, I think the game is an easy recommendation for fans of tactical RPGs, so long as the light-heartedness and style isn't too unappealing.

It's always impressive when a solo dev is able to put together an open world RPG. That's an incredible feat.

Unfortunately, nothing ever really grabbed me in Gedonia, so I called it quits at about 8 hours in.

I'll start with the good. It seems like the character progression has a lot of cool options -- I made a bard/necromancer hybrid that was surprisingly powerful. You get a mount early and can call it with a single click. Between that and a waystone system, the game has convenient enough travel that there's no need for Skyrim style instant fast travel.

Unfortunately, everything else was just average or outright bad. The combat itself is serviceable, but not particularly inspiring. The world is fine, but it didn't offer anything particularly unique or appealing to me. The writing and plot is outright bad, even accounting for the game not being written by a native English speaker. The game would have done better to not have voice acting at all.

I don't regret buying Gedonia. I had a few hours of fun and threw a few bucks to an indie dev, but I don't think I'll be giving it another chance.