Slime Rancher 2 felt like an immediate step backwards and the more I played the more this occurred to me.

I've been struggling to understand why, but I found myself very frequently lost and oftentimes bored when traversing the maps in this game compared to the original despite them being horizontally bigger. I think the map geometry in the first game was more interesting despite thematically being a bit more more generic.

In Slime Rancher 1 in most of the areas there were a fairly wide variety of slimes available, mostly dominated by a few dominant common ones and then rarely some others, which felt like a completely reasonable ratio. Within a large amount of Slime Rancher 2's regions I found that there was significantly less variety which also led to me having a lot less variety of slimes for the first hour of gameplay whereas in the original I definitely had way more slimes and was keeping them in cooler environments.

I found it especially bizarre that I kept getting the feeling that it'd be too risky to go too far into any unexplored territory because I'd get lost and struggle to find my way back in time to feed my slimes and they'd break out. This left me feeling forced into a gameplay loop where I was keeping up with the food for all of my slimes as much as I could and only then going out to travel, for very brief periods of time. I found parallels to the issues I encountered playing Stardew Valley with the game's energy system and day cycles, where I'd be almost done with something and then having to stressfully run back to make sure nothing bad happens.

During a number of sessions playing this game I found myself so much more bored of the grind than I was with the first game too, I think the layout of the ranch and maybe just the way some numbers are tweaked compared to the original game is why I'm finding difficulty there.

Overall I can't recommend this sequel in its current early access state unless these issues are addressed personally. I'd suggest picking up the first game if anything I've mentioned turned you off of this one and you're still interested.

Monolith grabbed my attention after my first hour playing which caught me by surprise as I hadn't played a game in the 'shmup' genre before and was, admittedly, intimidated by them. I found Monolith to be an increasingly enjoyable game that masterfully combined elements of both the roguelite and dungeon crawler genres to provide a tight-playing experience that was fun every time, in contrast to my experience with titles like The Binding of Isaac, which I struggled to reliably enjoy.

The gameplay of Monolith is split between decision making (with items, weapons, upgrades, etc.) that serves as downtime between the snappy shmup combat that doesn't go easy on the player. I've found that when you die, it's often clear and feels like it's your fault, partly due to stellar art direction providing contrast between bullets and the background but also in-part patterns and indicators.The 'feeling like it's your fault' thing might seem like a negative, but I found that it just makes me want to improve, due to how encouraging another part of the game is. Its soundtrack.

The game's soundtrack, composed by ArcOfDream, was often upbeat, and motivating in spite of the challenge in front of me, further helping keep me trying to improve despite my aforementioned complete lack of experience with the genre.

I can thoroughly recommend Monolith, especially with its Relics of the Past DLC.

Pretty fun, relatively short game with kinda generic and kinda boring writing. I'm pretty awful at rhythm games but I found Everhood reasonable to do on the intended hard difficulty. The most frustrating parts of the game I can recall aside from the double-tap-to-run mechanic were the encounters that were very late into the game that required few mistakes, though I never felt like the difficulty was a barrier rather than something reasonably overcome with a few retries. I found the game best played if you go into it wanting to experience as many battles as possible.