an upper echelon "roguelike" that strikes me more as compact turn-based strategy With Roguelike Elements, although the more I play it the more apparent the roguelike aspects get. it functions best as a quick fix pick-up-and-play type of game that'll hook you for hours (or a streak of three weeks in my case) a la Slay the Spire, one of its main influences that I have yet to play. I can't really get into cards and deckbuilders, so this one pulls me in with its dice system. fantastic combat, the entire game is the combat system lol, and a solid handful of different game modes so something's bound to catch your interest. there's a surprising amount of strategizing and depth to really dig into. it's been out for years on itch.io (including a mobile version where it feels right at home!) but I'm glad it got another major update and a Steam release. it deserves more attention drawn to it, it's awesome!

I'm a real-time action enjoyer, at times borderline monkey brain button mash type stuff but I've been trying to move on past that. my preferred playstyle is calculated aggression. Slice & Dice manages to make tactical turn-based battles very appealing to my button mashing ass. thanks to the ingenious undo feature and the way turns play out, the best defense is often a good offense (as stated by the dev in the in-game tips) and I love it. being able to undo every action you make aside from rerolls is easily my favorite feature here, it's the perfect middle ground between trivialized difficulty and brutal punishment. this isn't a more complex traditional roguelike where you must commit to every decision you make to avoid death, so its inclusion is perfect. experimentation is encouraged and promotes learning its systems for you to make more informed decisions in the future; this is extended further with auto-healing between battles, another welcomed addition as always.

I'm also really fond of its "horizontal progression" as some refer to it as nowadays. instead of accumulating upgrades between runs i.e. vertical progression, knowledge is power and the only thing stopping you besides unlucky RNG and a lack of knowledge is your own mistakes. I want to play these kinds of games for different build choices -- randomized ones in this case -- and on the fly decision-making, and Slice & Dice has both in spades. I love how much thought goes into your items, heroes, dice rolls, everything. for a game that seems one-note the potential ceiling for min-maxing is crazy, not to mention the optimization involved in each turn down to every single action you take. as a friend pointed out to me while discussing meta-progression, content is only locked in this game to allow the additional layers of depth to slowly reveal themselves; for once I don't have any real qualms with the achievement-based unlock system and would in fact say it's implemented very very well.

if you took a combat system this refined and built around it with that same level of quality you'd have something truly incredible, but that's not to say I find it lacking in any meaningful regard. it's a fantastic game as is, the only thing Slice & Dice possibly does wrong is.. I guess the constraints of being a roguelike? the best way I can put it is that it's basically RNG: The Game. those who dislike an excess focus on luck and randomness might feel a lot differently about it, but to me it's one of its strengths. aside from achievements it's missing that special little something that motivates me to keep playing without starting to feel aimless and fatigued, a core issue of the condensed gameplay loop which seems to persist across every roguelike/lite I've played thus far. usually I won't get enough out of extensively repeating it beyond the initial interest, or through the incentive of achievements, but in this case it's not a mark against it. Slice & Dice manages to pull me back in every so often to remind me just how much there is to love about it. ...except the sheer number of enemies with dice sides that summon MORE enemies - those are the bane of my existence. screw you Hexia and Wendigo.

any game that taps into my wanderlust so heavily that I'm freestyling my own shortcuts, discovering hidden areas, and (almost) getting out of bounds is just about guaranteed to get a hearty plus from me. as an enjoyer of 3D games with open environments - including open worlds when they aren't suffering from being excessively long and padded collectathons or their other usual trappings - there's this deep internal satisfaction I get from it that not many other gaming moments can exceed. in fact very few games have ever managed to evoke that same explorative feeling, an important distinction to make when some of them are among my favorite games of all time, like Shadow of the Colossus and Elden Ring.

it goes without saying that the emergent exploration in this game was intuitive and really really good. no guides or maps or anything, just me experimenting with the mechanics until I found a way to get to the highest point of the largest room in Castle Sansa. sadly I was blocked by invisible walls so I couldn't get out of bounds but at least I could admire the view.

the lack of a map (at the time of reviewing) never bothered me until late into the game when I mistook the library for the keep and decided to look up entrances to the keep without wasting more time, and again after that to reenter the underbelly. interconnection is a neat concept, but the execution here usually felt like a lot of my effort resulted in just looping back around to somewhere I'd been before without even unlocking a useful shortcut. it was more and more underwhelming every time it kept happening because the awe would turn into "wait I've already been here" way too often.

I do kinda wish there was something more to Pseudoregalia, like some kind of a plot to add some depth and narrative purpose to our protagonist's adventure in this dream(?) world, anything really. yet part of its appeal is the fact that it almost feels like an incomplete idea. even without a fully realized combat system, which wasn't a problem to me as I wasn't playing it for that, it still manages to feel like something special through exploration, music, sound design, visual style and more. if you have any level of appreciation for Super Mario 64 or really any 3D platformers of old, it's a must play.

you walk over tiles on a grid, get stopped by battles on random tiles, leave to the next floor once you run over every tile, rinse and repeat. that's about it. battles are the ATB flavor of turn-based combat against what seems to be a randomly selected preset enemy formation. both parties have physical defense and magic defense to protect their HP, both defenses auto-regenerate after every battle, and magical attacks are free to cast rather than being tied to a resource. abilities are active and passive and use a resource by taking up a certain number of slots; you gain more slots by walking over as many tiles as possible. you have to start from 0 and make it all the way down to floor 99 with zero meaningful developments -- no dialogue, no overarching narrative, no characterization, nothing.

there's really not much to it and I still somehow found myself losing track of time as I played it. I'd say I enjoyed it to some extent, mainly as a change of pace from all the action games I've played, but after 4 hours I'm on floor 11 and I feel like it's just not worth my time or effort. I haven't had more than one party member die at a time so I've never truly felt challenged or pressured, particularly to the point of having to strategize whatsoever. I wouldn't be looking forward to a party wipe either, I've read that you have to find your downed party with your underleveled B squad so it's like pseudo-permadeath with tedious strings attached.

I can't be bothered grinding out the monotony just to find out if the game might get even remotely engaging. it's not gonna happen. at this point I play it a lot like I did with "survivor clones" where I mute the audio and listen to some of the many albums I've been meaning to get to... and I truly despise the idea of consuming several forms of media at once so that's not really saying much. I play video games to get absorbed in them and take in every element, mainly the music and sound in this case and the lack thereof, not to zone out and juggle my attention between the game and a TV show, movie, YouTube video, whatever it may be unless I'm grinding post-game content or an achievement in one of my favorite games or something. I just think that nonsense should be reserved for mundane chores and work, and games shouldn't be a chore to play like this one is.

in fact while I was playing it I couldn't help but draw vague similarities to Vampire Survivors. not as in it's another mindless stimulant; if I had to choose I'd pick this instead every time, although it is funny how different critical reception is between the two. what I mean is that it's another heavily distilled and barebones approach to genre conventions. where Vampire Survivors is like watching paint dry for ~30 minutes just to unlock other stuff and upgrade stats between runs, this game is all about the dungeon crawling without the theatrics, atmosphere, worldbuilding, narrative, etc etc. I know there's other dungeon crawlers with a similar design but nothing about this one managed to captivate me.

I don't outright dislike Dungeon Encounters but it's a hard sell even to someone that'd be into it. I kinda like how bold it is in its minimalism, I just can't justify the time investment given the shallowness. if I want to play a dungeon crawler I'll play a blobber or whatever. if I wanted to play a JRPG with less story and more gameplay I'd play something like SaGa, it's got plenty more mechanical depth. in a time where we're spoiled with so many great video games out there and plenty more to come, I fail to find a reason to see this one to the end.

I'm just shy of 4 hours into it (and hopefully not speaking too soon) but I'm already head over heels for this game. I can't believe it took me this long to play it for the first time, yet I'm glad it did; it wouldn't have nearly the same impact if things were any different.

I've burnt myself out on many roguelites and their offshoots over the years. I've always wanted to find the right one that favors skill development over meta-progression to overcome harsh challenges. I also tend to prefer action over turn-based combat so I haven't been able to get into a traditional roguelike yet. what I'd need is a game that can meet in the middle. enter Spelunky - it has the mentality of dying a lot to learn the game. not in the modern "roguelite" sense either where you'll die a bit and suddenly make huge strides of progress because lol permanent upgrades, so learning the game's quirks actually feels rewarding and worthwhile. trial and error is the name of the game here which may be a bother and a false indicator of difficulty to some people, but I liked it and found that the randomness kept it fresh. I have a tendency to be overaggressive in games, and Spelunky taught me not to rush it and force my way through. it's notoriously brutal and funny with just how many random ways you can die. one time I baited an arrow trap into hitting an explosive tile just for the arrow to bounce off and kill me anyways. or the several times I've seen a caveman charge into instant death and said "haha dumbass" to myself just for me to do the exact same not even ten seconds later. I love when a game can have me laughing at my own mistakes and eventual death... or deaths rather, tons of them. it gets frustrating but that frustration is good and I never find myself blaming the game for anything. it's quick and painless, in fact dying just motivates me to continue further. everything about the mechanics seems to be very well designed, it just comes down to utilizing my own skills and knowledge to do better in the situations it throws at me.

easily one of the greatest roguelikes I've ever played, and could very well be my new favorite. I'm really eager to get into Spelunky 2 after fully completing this but uh.. I have a feeling that's not gonna happen any time soon...

ETA: I did "beat" the game but won't mark it as completed since I didn't get the true ending, the path to get there seems convoluted anyways. I don't hold that against it and I still love it, it's just that my biggest holdup with these kinds of games is how I get too sucked into them to play anything else. I like to focus on one thing at a time and these kinds of games are at their strongest when played in moderation, like a side game or in phases. I don't want the repetition to wear me down and warp my perception of it so I'm happy to take a step back from it.

seemingly simple on the surface, Risk of Rain Returns presents a philosophical proposal—should one continue to reject modern times and live out their nostalgia for the past, or leave that behind and accept the ever-changing future?

Risk of Rain Returns is a renaissance of the game that got Hopoo Games started in 2013. for context I didn't get into the original Risk of Rain (RoR1) until the holiday season of 2015. a good friend told me about it back when I was a NEET and it was my first roguelike whatsoever. I loved it! once it had ran its course over a good 100+ hours and I realized that it was abandoned by the devs I moved on from it. then I found out a 3D sequel was in the works and my hype was off the charts. Risk of Rain 2 released in early access right when I got my first job, funny enough. I was there for the whole development cycle—from the days of pre-release Tumblr dev blogs, all the way to its first expansion—and here I am now with ~1450 hours in it. that's my background with this series.

after RoR2's tumultuous development cycle, time constraints and all, it seems like Hopoo kinda just.. gave up on it and handed the rights over to Gearbox. that's completely understandable given the fact that their core dev team used to be just three people getting help from Gearbox. the co-founders themselves had no experience with 3D game development nor the Unity engine. rather than pushing themselves through something they didn't enjoy anymore they decided to move on to other projects, with the first being a return to what got us all here in the first place.

I'm not here to dissect every little gameplay change/addition or whether or not it has """held up well""" a decade later or anything of the sort. the bottom line is that it's a classic that holds personal weight and sees nothing but improvements. what's important to me is the fact that it convinced me to critically reassess my thoughts on Risk of Rain 2, particularly its status as a favorite of mine that I put a ton of time into as my "time sink" game, and the series as a whole. RoR2 used to be one of my favorite games and one that I considered to be a direct upgrade over RoR1. why play 1 when 2 exists? while Returns might seem like more of a remaster of a game from 2013, in my eyes it is the best that the series has to offer. it's a culmination of Hopoo's best efforts after their dabble into 3D development and the expansion of their development team which has more than doubled in size, as well as additional help from some of the most prominent RoR1 modders.

the two new features that I find worth mentioning are the catch-up mechanic and the alternate game mode, Providence Trials. firstly, when you die in co-op you live out a second life as a measly gunner drone for the remainder of the stage. you can't interact with anything, but you can pick up items and fly wherever you like while drawing aggro off your friends. it's funny, it's fair and a very welcomed inclusion. as for Providence Trials I find them to be entertaining minigames that are a breath of fresh air as the main gameplay loop of runs can get rather stale after all these years. I don't see them as gimmicky, frustrating events that you have to force yourself through to unlock alternate skills. in fact I spent some number of hours getting gold ranks in every trial and never grew tired of it, not even the hardest wildly imbalanced ones. I'd argue that although many aren't applicable to regular gameplay, some do teach you lessons and build up habits or provide knowledge that can be utilized in your runs.

my only real complaints which are still pretty negligible would be balance concerns that'll probably be addressed in future patches, and the fact that so many item unlocks are gated behind hyper-specific challenges. the issue is that a handful of them are much more difficult and/or conditional than the rest. reach the third teleporter as Commando without getting hit, reach level 10 as Miner without getting hit more than once, kill x enemies simultaneously with a certain skill/equipment... these are all very tedious to unlock without using artifacts or the intensity sliders. yeah it's good that there's a variety of challenges here but they most likely won't happen naturally, so they felt like things I had to go out of my way to complete rather than just enjoying playing the game normally. that's on me for being so insistent on doing them the hard way, but it's annoying that I have to unlock more items to diversify the item pools.

aside from those minor concerns I'm enamored by this release.... or at least I would be if I wasn't so burnt out on Action Roguelites. it's a bittersweet feeling, but at least I'm not tempted to dump hundreds of hours into it until it overstays its welcome. every single change—from improving the flow of combat by allowing each survivor to attack and move at the same time, to the remastered tracks giving more detail and texture to an already incredible OST—seems well thought out and done for the better. I can't say the same for its sequel. simply put, it's basically the Remaster vs. Remake argument all over again. the original has its own charm that its sequel is sorely lacking, whereas this "remaster" keeps it intact and even amplifies it. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this so it doesn't need further explanation, Soul vs. Soulless and all that, but I have been steadily creating a list of all of my gripes with RoR2. you can find them in my other review for it if you'd like to divulge in its handful of flaws for more context.

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and so I loop back to that initial question: will you continue to reject the present and live out your nostalgia for the past... or will you leave that behind, escape this planet, and accept the ever-changing future?

there is no answer to that. neither, a mixture of both, it's all open to interpretation. in my case I found RoR1 during my not-so-fond NEET years and RoR2 dropped right as I got my first job. I put many, many hours into RoR2 and enjoyed it in the moment, but the more time that passes after breaking my obsession with it, the more its appeal wears off and the harder it gets to be willfully ignorant towards its flaws. I've finally realized that getting tons of playtime out of something doesn't automatically make it better or more valuable. RoR2 generally feels like a product of its time for me as I've lost that passion for roguelikes, which is rather ironic considering that one of the other games in this discussion is from 2013. the problem is that RoR2 feels like an overload of sensory stimulation that I just don't even want to go back to. in my eyes it tried way too hard to lean into being Fun for the player that it lost its identity in the process, possibly as a result of its explosive popularity and the intent of responding to player feedback. I used to consider it one of my favorite games and gaming experiences overall, but that's changed. and that's a good thing, personal growth is necessary to be able to discover and articulate my preferences. I'm sure RoR2 will be fine in Gearbox's hands too, but who knows. I'm mainly looking forward to whatever Hopoo Games will create next now that they're done with this roguelike series. as its final sendoff, Returns has been a blast. play it by yourself, with your friends, with or without artifacts, whatever. it's a great game!

while Risk of Rain 2 may have missed its mark and became its own thing entirely, I'm just glad we got this.. remaster? re-release? something like that. Risk of Rain Returns is a slight re-imagining of an influential title, a game that's important to me, and it's one of the best of its kind. it may not be some masterfully crafted experience (besides the community memes) but I love it all the same. it's one of my favorite roguelites for good reason; one that lets me turn a blind eye to the typical shortcomings that plague this subgenre and the fatigue that comes with it. it's an exception to the rule. I'll take a compact, essential experience above an oversaturated time waster any day.

...and so she left, her soul still remaining on the planet.

its age definitely shows with some dated features, the most obvious example being the questionable key system, but I personally didn't mind it. my pain point was frequently opening the inventory to swap accessories or skills depending on the situation, it was the one thing that got bothersome over time. another trivial concern was how I was playing on a controller and having to use a joystick for cursor movement got old fast. neither of these are much of a problem when it takes only 14 hours to complete as tracked in-game, including about one hour of grinding weapon proficiencies.

more importantly, I found the setbacks to be forgettable boss fights and a combat system that I just couldn't be bothered with fully engaging in anymore. the inventory and equipment management has its own charm to it, but after a certain point I got tired of running behind everything to capitalize on crits and just facetanked with potions half the time. it's a shame because it's cleverly designed, I just lost interest in it over the course of my playthrough.

none of that should understate its successes however. the soundtrack and ambience really set the tone, giving the game a strong sense of atmosphere, although it can get repetitive when you frequent an area for too long... especially that shrill flute in the Harlech Village theme. progression in general feels pretty good in terms of both leveling and the story. the plot is presented well, I found myself actually getting emotional at the ending which doubles as a testament to the game's overall charm. dungeons are intelligently designed and backtracking never feels like a slog, in part thanks to the shortcuts. puzzles are implemented well too; they make you think without taking too long to solve, they feel rewarding, and they're never too frequent.

with all things considered, this easily overlooked game really does deserve its flowers. I played Ys Origin way back in 2017 and loved it, yet I only just found out about Xanadu Next even existing. I'm pleasantly surprised everything came together in the way that it did, it's truly a hidden gem.

I've never played the original, in fact I had totally forgotten this game was even in development, but when I saw the sudden release I figured why not give it a go. I had to after my love-quickly-turned-to-hate relationship with the terrible roguelite Heroes of Hammerwatch. there's a lot that can be picked apart and criticized here as plenty others have done on Steam, but I'd say I had an experience that was just.. ok at best.

Hammerwatch II is a retro-inspired RPG set in an open world, all the way down to the obscurity, ambiguity and archaic design elements. one criticism is how you have to backtrack through every dungeon since fast travel is limited to warping between towns. another point of contention is the fact that your map cannot be dragged or moved around, which wasn't that big of a deal. the multiplayer integration supposedly has its issues as well, but they seem to be addressing that and I've only played solo anyways.

my main issues were the pacing, a plot that was... serviceable at best.. and the so-called open world. take Elden Ring as an obvious example - many who criticize its open world design feel that it has interesting legacy dungeons broken up by a repetitive and needlessly large open world. the exploring in this game was a lot of the same where I'd run into the same Mysterious Cave for the 20th time, but with none of the other working parts that were present in Elden Ring that make up for it there.

the story never matters nor does it lean into comic relief in an interesting way, so I had zero engagement and kinda just drifted through it. I tend to play games for gameplay rather than story mind you, but if I'm gonna be reading some exposition in a longer RPG for 30+ hours, please just give me something that isn't juvenile writing. the general pacing started off great but the more I played the more it declined into monotony and dullness. after a strong start with the particular excitement of learning an unknown game and exploring a new world, interest started waning when quests had me going back and forth with nothing keeping me interested. I was then given a few endgame quests at the same time out of nowhere, all of which were underwhelming aside from the confusingly optional quest to slay a dragon. the dungeon was unique and the boss fight was intense - why was that optional...? compare that to the final dungeon and its boss, both of which were pretty unremarkable, and I'm just left wondering what the whole point even was.

unfortunately it's just one of those games where you're better off bringing a friend or two along for the ride, maybe even three, which.. means nothing because friends can make anything more enjoyable. my point is that I'm a solo player so it's really disappointing when games turn out to be markedly better in co-op. it's also designed to contain future modded campaigns and maybe even DLC, so content feels lacking. I'm one to play games for an extensive vanilla experience and then move on to the next one so I'm not interested in seeing it through. if you like those things then maybe you'd get more out of this bite-sized RPG, but that wasn't the case for me. it's at least a cut above Heroes of Hammerwatch yet still so very bland.

a hellspawn amalgamation of a bunch of negative tropes of the modern Action Roguelite. it's a very front-loaded experience, designed to force you into grinding for the sake of nothing more than masochistic progression. I have my reservations when it comes to meta-progression, ultimately I get the appeal but I just don't like it. I'd much much MUCH rather play something that's not designed around it. like yeah it's cool to see and feel that you're making some type of progress but, beyond feeling rewarded for your time investment, it doesn't feel earned.

this game is the poster child of the rote process of a difficulty spike pushing you to spend permanent currencies on stat boosts, and I hate it. it trivializes the inherent difficulty and authenticity of the learning curve. these bonuses make the game incrementally easier every run, which is counteracted with yet another present design flaw: giving enemies bloated HP and damage.

you progress by restoring your hub, you level up your class(es) and put points in enough stats to finally get your first win, and then it just gets worse from there. barring DLC campaigns there is no proper ending past that point, you just continue grinding minuscule stat upgrades for an eternity while its systems are at odds with one another. "progressive taxation" (?????) has to be the worst thing I've ever seen in any of these games, maybe even in all of the video games I've played period. on higher NG+ cycles it was a necessity to do farming runs just to prepare yourself for your 1+ hour long slog. this is all without even mentioning combat that boils down to walking into a room of 891341 enemies and constantly backpedaling.

it's just a horribly designed game that even fails as a roguelite. in all honesty about 10 hours in I edited my town file for infinite gold and ore to cut down on farming/grinding, went for 100% completion years later while depressed or something, and that still took me ~300 hours in total. I hate that it's still one of my most played games on Steam lol, I should just reset my achievements and pretend those 346 hours never happened, but I digress. all in all, playing Heroes of Hammerwatch solo with a completionist mindset was a nightmare. I'd never recommend it, definitely not to someone with severe completionist tendencies. I find it hard to say anything positive about it. it's a shame too since I liked the initial gameplay, but it was overshadowed by the unpleasant experience I had when I was a NEET that was glued to this game lmao.