Absolutely great stuff. What a fascinating game.

The core mechanics are exceptionally fun. Simplifying decisions to a randomly generated set of dice is just smart game design. And because there are so many options, I never felt limited by the dice I had. Obviously you usually benefit from having a nice, fat 6 available to ace a check; however, some actions necessitate a 1 or a 2, so having a low die available never felt painful or annoying. And even then, if you were stuck with a low die, failing a check was rarely so impactful.

But this is a narrative RPG, so hopefully these unique mechanics balance with unique stories. And they do! As a sci-fi and a cyberpunk story, this is a homerun. Everything always feels bleak, capitalist, sleazy, and gross. And yet there is just so much warmth in this game. All the characters do their best to look out for each other. Everyone is interesting, or has passions you want to learn more about, and the only frustration was that there never felt like enough time to help everyone. By the time you wrap up the game, you have so many friends, so many memories shared, and the space station changes so much (and yet not at all). It's all about everyone eking out a living, doing their best to scrape by, just like you.

The writing is also generally great. Despite a few typos here and there (inevitable with a script this large), everything was solid and immersive. Everyone felt unique and I was engaged with everyone's stories and arcs throughout. The dialogue choices felt a bit limiting at times, but as they're basically just tools to advance the script, it wasn't a big deal. There were also a few times where I felt like my character was way more invested in a situation or plot than I was. On the same note, at least one of the arcs was... a bit much. But for what it was worth, the story remained immersive throughout. It also did a particular good job of exploring the digital world (something I feel many sci-fi stories struggle with). Not to mention the commentary on "entities," sentience, and what makes a life. All good stuff that was ruminated over from a unique perspective.

There are some minor flaws. Firstly, the UI leaves something to be desired. The quest log is just bad. It does the bare minimum of tracking quests. But I really wish that it gave a summary of quests that was longer than 10 words, as sometimes between sessions I forgot what the main task was. The hacking mechanic also feels hidden away, and I felt annoyed that I hadn't seen the system for a long time in the early game. Finally, as much as I like scrolling my middle-mouse to move around the space station (a nice choice), by the end of the game, it can feel exhausting moving up and down the space station over and over. And with several sections of the space station separated by cutscenes, it just took a lot of extra button clicks that weren't necessary. It would have been nice if there were fast travel buttons once you unlocked new sections of the station, so you could get to where you wanted to go without scrolling and clicking around everywhere.

But these are nitpicking at an otherwise tremendously well made game. The game feels dense, and there seem to be quite a number of endings. I'm only upset I can't experience them all in one playthrough.

This game expertly scratches an itch that is so niche and unique that I can't even appropriately express what that niche is, something that only a very few games have been able to do effectively. Dystopic cyberpunk slice-of-life in space? Sign me up. Lem and Mina are the best, and I got a big tearjerker in the finale. Also The Stray is best boy/girl and my head-cannon is I took them with us when the game ended.

Starting out, I thought the dice system was cool, and the cyberpunk setting was neat. The resource/time management aspects I liked and I thought they could do a lot with those concepts.

But at a certain point, you figure out the gameplay pretty well and then there is no challenge anymore. No struggle for money, no struggle for good dice rolls, no struggle for time. At this point, the game slows down and you are left waiting for side-quests to be available, doing nothing truly important each day. At a certain point, I was trying to figure out how to end the game because I felt like I should be done after becoming this powerful.

One thing that could make this game incredible would be if the writing was amazing. But in reality, it's... just good? The story of the game feels very disconnected. Stuff happens all over the place, but none of it is really related to each other. The game has a bunch of cool story points and choices you make, but they all seem to come out of the blue and seem like they've been forced in there for no real reason. I felt a lack of engagement with the events happening in the game. The whole time I simply did not really care. I didn't care for any of the characters really, (emphis was cool) especially the protagonist.

The main character of this game is intentionally made a blank slate so that you can - I don't know: "forge your own path in this lawless world" or whatever. But I felt no attachment to them at all. I hate to do the obvious and compare this to that other game, but having just played Disco Elysium recently, the disparity in the writing was inherently obvious to me. In that game, I was 100% invested in every character, including the protagonist. In Citizen Sleeper I didn't care what happened. My character felt like the Dragonborn in Skyrim, joining all of these different factions around the whole region, living several lives all at once. Being able to do all of these things at the same time with them not being connected at all or having any consequences was weird. It felt so disjointed and you can't truly get a grasp on the protagonists personality, stuff just happens and you do other stuff to move the game along. Also, it felt like none of my choices mattered. Things move along whether you want them to or not. The writing isn't bad but it just wasn't at a high enough level to enthrall me. I was never fully captivated.

I got 2 different endings and they both felt abrupt and meh. Like the story in the rest of the game, I didn't really care what happened. In the late-game, I felt it was dragging on as I had only like 1 quest going at a time and I just wanted to get it done so I could finish the game. So the pacing was a bit weird too.

I'm just a bit disappointed I guess. The game could've been amazing but it had some issues that just seemed weird to me. And a lot of my issues became much more prominent in the last few hours of gameplay, which sadly had the game leaving a sour taste in my mouth. I'm not sure anymore if I am going to play the DLC episodes. Maybe later I will play those and if they're super good I might update my review.

Another crack game for me. Maybe it's just early meta game, but towns can be very slow, and being cucked out of the exact buildings you need is really really painful much too often, but as someone who really loves to play town builders for the first 20 hours at most and then leave, this is absolutely perfect for me. It's very easy to hop into and deep dive just from what the game teaches you, even if the tutorial missions are kinda dooky. Big comfy kinda game. Never streaming it again if I can help myself but will probably play on my own time.

So I needed something to cleanse the palate after 100,000 hands of Balatro and this did the trick nicely. Beat the game in 10 hours-ish and now going back to find all manual pages.

Stuff I really liked: The manual of course. Its so goddam cute, and a nice way to give hints and maps to the player. The music is superb, with some absolutely gorgeous tracks (between this and Cocoon, we're in a great era for indie soundtracks). I like how it rewards the player for exploring every inch of the maps, as secret rooms are often out of sight and obscured.

Stuff that was ok: graphics are nice, but not jaw dropping. Combat is basically Dark Souls-Lite, you got attack, dodge and then items and magic to use. Pretty basic, but serviceable. The game is pretty hard, and you will get more than a few very cheap deaths because the combat is not refined enough, and also the camera is too pulled back for really precise combat. Level design is ok, and the way the maps all connect is cool (and once again very Souls).

Stuff that got old, fast: cheap combat deaths, annoying enemies. Bosses are pretty hard, but mostly because of how spongy they are and how easy it is to get hit because of the imprecise controls and camera not being close enough to the action. Backtracking and not knowing where to go next. The manual gives you just enough hints, but man there is so much random wandering around and backtracking through areas, over and over again. Constantly pulling up the manual to check the maps to see where to go, just to get to the fast travel nexus area, to get to another area, just on the off chance there is some treasure or some room that wasn't accessible the first time through, but now with new abilities might be.....yeah that aspect of the game is tedious and boring.

With its Zelda inspired aesthetic and Dark Souls mechanics, this was a lot of fun. I like how getting the manual pages are so important, because without them you are basically wandering blindly through this world. Cute graphics, great music. Really good game, and with a few tweaks could have been a classic.

Edit: an extra 5 or so hours to get the Plat. The puzzles you need to decipher to get the secret treasures and fairies, not to mention getting all the manual pages and opening that friggin' mountain door tho.....ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS. Took me about 5 hours using online guides, without those it would have been about 50 hours, if I could have done it at all. Really obscure crazy "how the fuck did anyone work this out?" kind of logic. That input to open the mountain door is just bananas on its own. I kinda respect it, but at the same time, I don't wanna have to use guides to work this shit out. If anyone got the Plat without using a guide or getting any help, I call bullshit.

I played this back in 2023.

I've been a fan of the souls-like genre since dark souls, but this game was pretty hard for me to get the hang of. Especially since I was hoping to really speed through this game since I got it on gamepass and wanted to play other games in the month that I had the subscription. Because of that I felt pretty humbled by the difficulty of the bosses in this game. I never really fully mastered the parry window for this game, I think its a pretty tight window that depends more on trial and error with the bosses and knowing their timing. Especially since I was playing this in the mindset almost of Sekiro where I was spamming the parry button more or less hoping to get lucky.

Either way I needed to summon the NPC helper for pretty much every boss fight in this game, save a few like the final boss and a couple of the beginning bosses. I am sure if I really hunkered down and put in the hours I could have got the satisfaction of doing it solo, but I just wasn't in the right mindset. Either because I wasn't really loving the game that much. Or maybe I wasn't loving my slow strength build that I couldn't get myself out of. This was also due to limited resources and not wanting to spend time grinding materials to get a "dex" build up to the same level as my current strength build.

Overall I enjoyed the game but I think I shot myself in the foot by wanting to just speed through it, but it is also a little telling that the game didn't hook me in and make me want to invest more time in it beyond what it took to beat it. It is definitely something I need to replay at some point down the road.

I wouldn't put it in the same league of love that I have for Bloodborne or maybe some of my other favorite souls games, but it is definitely in league as one of the best souls-likes.

I'm unsure whether to give this a very strong 4 or a weak 4.5. I may change the rating at some point.

Lies of P is a souls-like that's REALLY good at mimicking the formula. If you told me that FromSoft developed this I would believe you! The vibes and feel are all there.

I had a really fun time playing the game so none of my issues are massive, just nitpicks. A lot of the areas blended together and fell into a "Streets of London" theme. None of them stand out too much, apart from the last area which I really liked. The same goes for the bosses. When I compare them to the bosses in FromSoft games that I've played, the bosses in Lies of P just aren't as memorable.

The game does add new stuff to the Souls-Like formula that's interesting enough. The Legion Arm and the ability to build weapons are both fun additions to gameplay. But the whole story being about Pinocchio is kinda irrelevant. If you renamed a couple of the characters, then there would be no correlation to Pinocchio and like idk the lying part of the game really didn't have any effect.

I think that if you try to mimic something perfectly, you can't surpass it you'll only be able to make something that's just slightly worse. The combat here just doesn't have the same game feel to it y'know. The dodge just feels a bit strange and I can't really explain it any more than that.

Overall, all of my issues are small but there is a lot of fun to be had with Lies of P. If you are looking for a great souls-like then you owe it to yourself to try this game.

Loop Hero is a very different experience from anything I've ever played before. Allowing the game to fight and move for you is something I had never imagined. The experience of placing mountains, rivers, deserts, forests, villages... and assembling the board in a way that favors your deck and playstyle is a lot of fun.

But this game, even with its innovative and fun mechanics, has its problems. The fact that obtaining resources to improve the base is limited to specific areas can be quite annoying. Accumulating certain items can become repetitive and tiresome, especially if your deck doesn't provide these resources (for example, I finished the game without collecting a certain item even once), or if it does, it's in small quantities. Another thing I missed is the importance of certain structures like the forest and the lumberjack's hut (for instance, I completed the game without building one of the structures and felt like I could have finished without building others).

The story is interesting, with a plot twist that I didn't foresee. The dialogue in encounters with bosses and monsters is well-written and intriguing. Overall, this aspect pleased me a lot.

The sound effects are very good, especially when placing cards on the board, and the music as a whole is cozy and pleasant.

Overall, Loop Hero is a great experience, an innovative game that can become repetitive in some aspects (more than a rogue-like should be). However, it offers a good story, clean and responsive gameplay, and it kept me engaged enough to spend hours trying to defeat the bosses!