Beautiful and engrossing, frustrating at times but never at the expense of the fun of it all. A perfect puzzle game in every sense: the main mechanics work perfectly and flow together seamlessly, and they aren't so obscure that you can't understand what you're looking at in a glance (once you know how it all works). The tutorial onboards the player with ease, but the moment the tether of guidance is ripped away, you freefall into a mind-melting web of paths and possibilities.

It all appears very mathematics-focused, and - I mean, sure it is, but only TECHNICALLY. Your goal in every puzzle is to solve an equation with the numbers on the board, but the cleverness of this game is that the arithmetic isn't the challenge. In the same way that the numbers on a sudoku puzzle can confuse a first-timer into thinking they need an aptitude for the numerical, Dawn of a Soul uses numbers in the same way it uses colours. These are all just symbols, and your optimal path through each maze of lines relies on your understanding of the sequence the symbols need to be encountered in.

There are opportunities for additional souls to be collected on puzzles that have multiple solutions, and sure it may help you in those moments to recognise how many multipliers you need to reach the highest possible score. Math is useful in these moments. But again, this is ultimately simple counting - I can't remember a time I got stuck aiming for an extra multiplier that required me to count higher than the fingers on my hands. This game fries your brain in the same way as an aforementioned sudoku can, taunting you with the knowledge that the answer is all there in front you of. You just can't see it until you manoeuvre your mind around it.

This would get a perfect score from me even if the presentation wasn't so beautiful. The ambient music and the blooming effects and the stellar pixal art and the sparse dialogue, it's all masterful.

Played this (partially) live on stream on the 15th of April (twitch.tv/sleepy_nice).

Absolute ripper, phenomenal stuff. Deeply engaging, perfect UX, all features and mechanics clearly telegraphed and able to be parsed. Bloody hell does it get hard - I literally couldn't finish the ice world when I first got to it, but luckily you can skip levels to continue proceeding. After completing everything I could I went back and locked down all the ice levels, as well as the bonus levels that I'd missed.

My first perfect score on a game from the Ukraine bundle, honestly there's nothing I can critique here without feeling like I'm looking for cheap faults. It sounds, looks, and plays perfectly. I'll be recommending this to anyone who will listen to me.

I’ve had a few cool little experiences up to now, but this is the first truly exciting game I’ve experienced thanks to the Ukraine Bundle.

Really solid concept and execution, great music, sequentially engaging. I particularly like the mastery system which reminds me of FFTA, where abilities are learned through equipment but once that ability has been mastered you don’t need to keep that piece of equipment on your team member to have them use it.

Also, the AI ripped me to pieces a few times when I tried to complete the bonus objectives, which was a nice way of balancing the incentive to try and do them every time. As a result I missed a few pieces of gear, so might go back and try and get them now that I’ve got end-game stats.

Loved a lot here that I haven’t mentioned yet - the character and team customisation is sick, the story is sparse but has a perfect minimalist shonen vibe to it. Also love that it was made by a solo Australian developer!

It’s a little rough around the edges in some aspects which keeps it from a perfect score for me. Some menuing is a bit unintuitive and occasionally the interface gets a bit cluttered with noise which made it hard to assess my best moves. Small quibbles, nothing that kept me from enjoying this for the few hours it took me to clock it.

Can’t wait to see what this dev does next!

Played this (partially) live on stream on the 23rd of March (twitch.tv/sleepy_nice, come thru).

I spent basically the first 5 hours of my time playing this alternating between saying "Ohhhh I get it" and "WOW". Kingdom Two Crowns has such purposeful and vivid execution that knowing absolutely nothing when I started, I felt like I was given everything I needed to comprehend what it was going for. I love this game, I think it's super special and really fun and I'd love to replay it in co-op because I think the very few problems I had with it would be completely sorted out in that environment.

I was truly compelled by the slowness of everything. You're forced to play at a speed dictated by the game for the first island or so, and judging from some other reviews I've seen that was a bit of an issue for some players. Not me though! I love that stuff. It made the escalation of your mobility feel really momentus, and the first time I was able to use a new mount I felt like I was flying across that island comparatively.

Sidenote, knowing now that the same developer who made Cloud Gardens (one of my favourite games of last year) also had a hand in Kingdom makes total sense. That guy really has a sense of pace and knows how to utilise it!

That said, I do really wish there was an auto-run button. I don't mind moving back and forth constantly but I played for a few hours last night and my thumb hurt from holding right and left (which you do uh, a lot of in this game). The only other issue I had was the difficulty in returning to islands you had been to in the past - you always have to recover your boat before you can leave again, and that felt a little annoying when there were moments that going back and forth between two islands was necessary for some unlocks.

Anyway yeah this is really great. Nearly perfect. Loved it

WOAH. This was great! This was about to be a 5-star review until I played the sequel and realised the series had more to give.

But yeah, game design wise this is a near-perfect exercise in Living Your Truth. It wears every influence on its sleeve and explores so many opportunities in the kinds of 3D platforming you can do given the constraints. For a game with no combat it does a really great job of making you forget that you're really just running and jumping. Level themes are varied and the structure of each level fits its respective theme, it joyfully expresses itself at every moment you're playing it. The music slaps too, it all feels ripped right from the era, it's all perfectly placed and incredibly varied.

There's also a really appealing and playfully sinister edge that immediately undermines itself with additional whimst upon the conclusion of the game. I don't want to spoil anything, the game takes around 30 minutes to beat so just check it out for yourself and see what I mean.

Also, yeah it only takes 30 minutes to beat, but that doesn't include getting A (or the elusive S) rank in every level and collecting every star, which is well worth doing. There's a couple of great bonus unlockables that I'm really glad I got.

Toree rocks! I would gladly play one or two of these games every month for the rest of my life and never get sick of it.

Woah! Snake's Tale really surprised me with its depth. Did the thing I really like in level-based puzzle games where just as I've gotten my head around one obtuse mechanic, another is added. That accumulation stopped this from being your standard sliding-tile game, I can see the vision here.

There was no hand-holding either, some of the earliest levels you can access had some of the wildest solutions that I needed to come back to after understanding the way the pieces fit together. I LOVED this.

A few things stop this from a perfect score. Firstly the absurd music - it had such a short loop that drove me crazy instantly. If this had some light ambience with occasional variation I could have chilled out in this game forever, but instead I had to find my own soundtrack. Secondly the presentation of the overworld felt a little thin. It's a minor thing, but I actually love how the snakes look in the level, but anytime I had to navigate to the next puzzle it felt like I was looking at an early 00s flash game (which doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing I guess, but in this case it was).

Definitely high on my recommendations for the Ukraine Bundle

This really warmed me up. Love the isometric spin on the classic Mario & Wario formula (also reminded me occasionally of Chu Chu Rocket, with the way Bob's paths were readable through his footprints). I'll forever be a big fan of games where you are controlling someone who is trying to control something else; I like the friction in the design of games that do it right, and I even love the ambition of the games that don't quite do it right. It's a great gimmick.

I appreciated the aesthetic of the game - it's really funny that, in spite of not very many games leaning heavily on archetypal surrealist imagery (Dali/Magritte/Chirico/Escher etc) I always have this weird feeling that it's a worn-out cliche. It's really not! Apart from a few noteworthy examples, there aren't a tonne of games explicitly referencing that art style. I think there's a nice combination of sincere love and more tongue-in-cheek reference in Back To Bed, especially with the use of the apple as the blockade. The character design is great too, more games with quadrupedal player characters!

Another thing I loved was the modularity of the solutions. I never felt like there was a "right" way to complete any level, and on several occasions I clutched my way into a success in a way that felt really satisfying in its messiness.

The music is perfectly ambient, something that I'm beginning to appreciate a lot more as I continue my dive into the puzzle games in the Ukraine bundle.

Four stars because a couple of minor interface issues were a bit of a pain to me, and while the short length kept me from getting sick of it, I felt like there was more ground to cover and I would have liked a couple more levels.

Really nice!

I started Circa Infinity pretty unimpressed with what seemed like too simple an idea to be interesting to me in 2022. However by level 2 I was thoroughly hooked into the vision of this game, which is in equal parts both compelling and utterly disorienting.

This is a twitch-platformer in the vein of VVVVVV or Love, but segmented out in digestible chunks in the same way a puzzle game might do it. I think that's where my initial impression may have faltered, because I assumed the challenge was cerebral rather than dextrous. Turns out, it's both! The response-time needed for some of these levels was preposterous, but progression was (for the most part) pretty forgiving. I really liked the way checkpoints were implemented organically as circle-layers, rather than through some obvious flag the way most games do them.

I also REALLY loved the bosses, and the first was where my feelings really started to shift. Rather than simply acting as a conclusive event, they function as a test of the skills developed in each level, which is - I think - the ideal of what a video game "boss" should be. The only thing I didn't love was that, upon taking damage, each boss fight starts again from the beginning. I totally understand why this was done, but it resulted in a frustration that eventually overtook me and prevented me from getting past the fourth level.

This is absolutely a game I intend to return to and complete one day, really good stuff.

A profoundly intimate and unsettling experience, cloaked and guarded, quietly beautiful and occasionally frightening. Sometimes it veers all the way past cryptic straight into nonsense. This is not necessarily a criticism, but it did make it difficult for me to find the patience to discover all endings (I ended up with 6 of them - I think there are 10).

Truly, I was a little blindsided by Fatum Betula. When I went in I was expecting more of an experimental walking simulator along the lines of LSD: Dream Emulator. That influence is still definitely felt on the way the parts fit together, but it's actually ultimately closer to a classic point-and-click adventure game in the way the puzzle-box endings are discovered. You follow obtuse clues and try combinations of objects until you find miraculous activation moments - some of these were disturbing and others benign (at least one of them was also hilarious), but they all felt significant, like there's a balance in the world that you're undoing just by being there.

Unfortunately a lot of the actions required to find the endings are repetitive, and without following a guide I wasn't sure where the best place to save would be when attempting certain combinations. This meant I was trying the same things a lot of the time to see if anything new would happen under different circumstances.

Overall Fatum Betula is incredibly unique and has an immense vibe. I would 1000% play a new game in this mould a few times a year if I knew where to find them.

"Every problem is solved but one.

Being alive."

Played this live on stream on the 23rd of March (twitch.tv/sleepy_nice, come thru).

This was really hard!! I don't like to resort to guides in puzzle games (and even if I do, I sure as hell don't like to admit it) but a couple of the puzzles in the last 2 chapters seemed literally impossible to me until I watched someone else do it. Apart from these hurdles, I had a great time with this game, super glad I checked this out. I've been writing an essay through the week and this was a great game to allow myself to play between moments of writing, good brain cleanser.

There are a LOT of moving parts in Swim Out, but the elements all fit together harmoniously. While I was streaming, someone called this "Into The Breach: Pool Edition)" which honestly rings pretty true - there's a rhythm to the game that telegraphs the next few turns, allowing for both tight planning as well as moments of last minute improvisation. The liminal ambience was a great accompaniment absent any background music, and the interstitial animations set a perfect mood (they also weirdly reminded me of Katamari Damacy?).

I gotta admit, while I completed every level I did not hit every optional achievement. I often tried, but as the maps got bigger and the unit-types were delivered in more complex configurations it became too much to juggle.

Only four stars because I REALLY wanted an undo button, even one that was single use. Far too often I'd make a wrong move 60-70 moves into a large map, and even if I didn't die straight away I would see it coming several moves in advance. I know this is supposed to be a challenging experience, but c'mon guys just lemme go back one move yeah?

I checked the developer page on itch and it turns out they've got another game in the Ukraine bundle called Rip Them Off, can't wait to play it. These guys know what's up!!

Butterflies Episode 1 pays perfect tribute to its influences and feels great to move around in. There's really nice sense of momentum with only a few camera issues keeping it from feeling super polished.

I really liked the mission structure in the open world, nice twist on the formula keeping it from being pure Jet Set Radio tribute hour. Unfortunately there's no map (or none that I could find) and the world does not have enough distinguishing landmarks to not continually get lost, and I wasn't able to find all graffiti spots and missions.

Episode 2 is in the bundle too, I'm excited to see what the developers learned and changed between instalments. Might revisit this and 100% it one day!

Nearly identical in every relevant way to the first episode, meaning I had a lot of the same problems with it: namely the open world level is too big to not have a map or more distinguishing landmarks, and the controls occasionally veer from "rough" into "irritating".

That said, I'm developing a massive taste for this series and enjoyed this thoroughly in spite of my critiques. The music is HOT, and the ability to pick up new tracks was a fun bonus that (I think?) was absent in the first episode. I like the new characters and I think over the two episodes I can see a real sense for scope in the design of the levels. I also continue to mostly love the way it feels to skate around in this game, I like the versatility of movement, and at it's best this game FEELS fucking fantastic.

I'm doing this review as a criticism sandwich, because I just remembered another specific thing I really disliked. I understand (and respect) the thematic need to have cops chase and grapple you, but sometimes its a bummer trying to nail a trick only to get grabbed and have the cop spawn with you when you restart your placement. There doesn't seem to be any way to lose them! Also there are too many of those security missile launchers, and they crowd sections that would be better experienced at full speed.

But yeah, I'll download and play every single one of these episodes man. It's good stuff! Just could be a bit better.

Played this (partially) live on stream on the 15th of April (twitch.tv/sleepy_nice).

God, I wanted to hate this game soooo badly. I didn't think I'd have much time in my heart for an indie action roguelite dungeon crawler with first-person perspective, 3D environments, 2D models and procedurally generated levels, but uh, this game is really good! Admittedly that combination of elements might not have been the slog of cliches that it is in 2022 when the original version was conceived of, back in 2013. Even in 2018, when Delver released officially, the landscape was only just becoming bloated with this type of exploratory action game with randomised levels.

Delver managed to keep me hooked for a solid 2 hour run by still managing to feel pretty authored and crafted in spite of its randomised design. I didn't get as deep as the levels go (I died in an admittedly pretty comedic way in what I now know is the second-to-lowest level) but everything escalates really nicely, and the biomes were distinct and atmospheric. There's a Spelunkiness here that was appealing - explosive item drops, potions with unforeseen effects, chaotic secret rooms - and I wonder if there was a similar attitude towards the randomised levels as Spelunky, using pre-built collections of map-parts rather than randomising everything completely.

Definitely going to try at least one more run to see if I can complete it, but even if I don't I was genuinely pleasantly surprised by Delver! Oh, also gorgeous music.

Played this live on stream on the 23rd of March (twitch.tv/sleepy_nice, come thru).

Total banger of a game, but might just be a little too hard for me to get much further through than what I've already seen. The dynamic of GoNNER rewards speed but punishes imprecision, and is a teensy bit too stressful for me - it's in my nature to try and rack up combos to collect the glyphs but I'm not able to balance that impulse with precise movement.

Loved the feel of everything, the jumps and the guns and the wall-jumping are all really finely tuned. Love the painterly style and the way the levels build around you as you traverse through them. I liked how little was communicated to you, letting you learn as a player what you're meant to be doing as you experiment. I would have appreciated a LITTLE bit more information when it came to certain masks or accessories, because the thrill of discovery was marred a little bit by the chance you had to take on a new item when you're already in the middle of a run.

There are still a couple mechanical mysteries to me. For instance, on my last run (where I managed to get the furthest I've been able to reach, just past the 2nd boss room and into level 3) I got such a good combo going that the colour scheme of the rooms changed to green. I'm not sure what that meant! It might have meant nothing.

But yeah, highly recommend giving this game a whirl but I'm still learning to be any good at it. Let's see if I ever get there.

Inbento is gorgeous and challenging and I desperately wanted to love it as much as Golf Peaks by the same developer, but it didn't reach the same heights for me.

Aesthetically there isn't really a flaw I can point to - beautifully drawn with charming animations, great music, thematically pretty strong. If you wanna chill out with something for a while there are plenty of way worse options, and the way it looks and feels to be in the game might be enough to keep you engaged all the way.

Unfortunately, while the mechanics were very unique and interesting the variety was low (at least as far as I saw), and some puzzle solutions were far too obtuse. I ended up giving up about halfway through after I spent 15 minutes on a puzzle with no solution in sight, and was not tempted to push through at all.

This game is still really great! I may have persisted if there wasn't such a huge number of puzzle games in this bundle - I've got plenty to move onto if I want to scratch some brain itches, so unfortunately I'm putting this one down (for now).

This was very cute! I saw a trailer for it years ago on release and completely forgot it existed, so I'm glad I got the chance to experience it finally.

Couple real brain-stumpers in here, found myself nearly brute-forcing a few of the later rooms until the solution always magically came into view. Really well crafted, perfect length (took me a little under an hour to clock it), and I love the post-game surprise too.

Charming puzzle-platformer with a lot of heart and a surprising amount of polish, clearly aimed at a younger audience, but it still compelled me enough to finish it. Essentially "Baby's First Braid".

Thankfully very short, the basic time manipulation couldn't be stretched much further than it was, but there were some really clever moments here and some unintuitively simple answers to seemingly complex roadblocks. I feel like with the right team and given the right amount of time and money, something really special could be built out of the bones of this game! As it stands, it's a cute curio worth looking into if you've got 45 minutes to spare and are a fan of the genre, or if you've got a younger kid who you want to entertain for probably a couple hours.

Couple additional little quibbles. Firstly, the name is so so so uninspired that I literally would have preferred anything else. Call it The Man & The Snail and I'm already more interested in it. Also the jump is very bad, fix that jump, gang. It's too slow and stilted.

Oh also one other thing and the main reason I wanted to check this out, I really liked that the protagonist is an older man. I think we could do with more games where you play a grumpy bastard worn down by years of disillusionment, being slowly won over by a plucky, optimistic, younger deuteragonist.

Hmmmm okay this one is really hard to rate - part of me wants to think much more highly of this, because I adore the ambition of the devs and I think Jotun is, overall, a pretty unique and fun experience. I'm conflicted because there are a lot of qualities that I appreciate here!

Unfortunately, for everything I really enjoyed I pendulum-swung back against points that kept me from loving this game. For all the abilities you pick up, combat is pretty repetitious. As gorgeous as all the character designs and animations are, the world feels too open and empty. As appealing as the structure is, by the 4th area I was beginning to lose steam with the core loop.

I am glad I finished the game because the final fight and cutscene were really spectacular. Honestly the characterisation was phenomenal, I was more hooked by the biographical snippets of the main character than I was by any of the boss fights. Also I LOVED the Icelandic dialogue, the effort put into everything is so palpable.

This is definitely worth playing, I'm glad it was recommended to me. It's imperfect but super interesting.

Played this (partially) live on stream on the 15th of April (twitch.tv/sleepy_nice).

Metal as all hell! There's a lot to love here, it's fast and hilarious and cruel and heavy. The soundtrack rips, the levels look phenomenal, the colours are perfect. Love the limited scope and the accessibility of everything - there's a set of levels and you can play through them for the score and the cred, but if you wanna just see them all, you can simply select each level from the menu. The character and enemy design is perfect, wouldn't change a single thing.

I have two main gripes that keep me from singing Penance's praises unconditionally - firstly, there doesn't seem to be a map view (which is probably intentional) and losing your bearings is frequent. If the corpses of enemies remained in place like they do in Doom this wouldn't matter, but a few of the levels require a lot of exploration to be able to parse fully and if you're not paying attention sometimes that can be troublesome.

Secondly, there isn't much grit when it comes to the feeling of everything, no feedback. Guns don't recoil, enemies have no weight, when you get hit you don't FEEL it. There's just a lot of fast-moving parts all flying around at once and none of it feels like I think it deserves to.

All of that said I really really like this, it's so much fun. It's a speedrunners DREAM, would love to see this at GDQ or something.

I've had Sokobond vaguely on my radar for nearly 10 years (!!!!) when I remember it getting featured in some PAX roundups around the time of release. I feel like I may have benefitted from playing it earlier, because unfortunately now the cool things that this game does aren't particularly novel - echoes of what it's doing can be found to greater effect in English Country Tune, Hexcells, heck even A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build (which I also played as part of my Ukraine Itch Bundle deep-dive).

All that said, this is for sure a Good Puzzle Time, and the theme of putting together compound molecules tickled me just right at a time when I'm relearning a lot of high school chemistry. The music is GORGEOUS, composed by Ryan Roth who also did the music for Starseed Pilgrim, Beginners Guide and A Good Snowman (what a fun coincidence). The whole presentation of it is still delicious, even if it's not super unique.

I wasn't able to finish it in a single sitting, but can tell that I got pretty darn close - I don't want to spoil it, but as the map expands out there's a pretty cute reveal that indicated to me how far through I was. Might pick it up later, but the queue is long so who knows !