Cuphead is a neat little platformer featuring creative and colorful boss fights that reminds me of Contra and other run-and-gun games of old. You go through a world map - that looks like the one in Commander Keen 4: Keen Dreams - and fight through stages and bosses, getting coins and buying powerups, getting new weapons and uncovering special moves in order to save your soul from the devil. I've played through most of the game in co-op, and even if it became a bit frustrating because of the difficulty, I would still recommend it. Just know what you're getting into!
Dawn Of Crafting is an interesting game where you craft your way through a tech tree by using various tools and combining elements to create different recipes. You need energy to do pretty much everything, so you have to gather food and craft it into better food items. It's a neat little game that I would've played way more than I did if it had been a full paid product and not a free to play game with hooks to make you spend money into figuring out what you need to do to progress through the main quest. It's a bit grindy but otherwise it was really fun!
FURI is an amazing boss rush game where you use a small but useful array of skills in order to defeat a varied array of bosses, each with their own gimmicks and patterns. The main drive of this game are the bosses themselves, with small tidbits of story being drip-fed between fights. I had a wonderful time with this game and I managed to beat most of it as intended - although I dropped the difficulty on the last boss after three hours of fighting seemed like too much.
Vignettes is a neat little puzzle experience where you rotate objects around and poke at them in order to find more objects, mainly by mimicking the shape of other things with them. Ultimately, the goal of the game is to find all objects and it doesn't wear out its welcome. I had a ton of fun going through the whole thing and I would recommend it wholeheartedly.
Else Heart.Break() is an adventure game where you... hack... stuff. I'm not sure. You play as a newcomer in a strange town, sent there on a job by a soda corporation, and you must... Do your job, I guess? If this intro couldn't convey it, I didn't get into the meat of EHB at all. After wandering for what seemed like hours in an interesting but aimless town, I managed to stumble into a very cool mechanic, then tried to see if I could get some manner of plot going on, without succeeding. I still think that the ideas in EHB are really cool and the style pretty nice, but I kinda wish it had been a puzzle game instead.
The Guides is an iOS puzzler that I haven't spent much time with. It was just too difficult and frustrating to use at times. While I appreciate the straightforwardness of the game's presentation and type of puzzle, I didn't have fun at all with it. Build around a series of logic puzzles, Vignettes has you try and decipher layer upon layer of mysteries in a series of screens that have only a vague link between them; Not letting you appreciate each mechanic of the puzzle long enough before moving on to something else.
Zombie Night Terror is a puzzle game somewhat alike to Lemmings where instead of harmless creatures stumbling around to their death you control a horde of zombies going through a rampage in a series of progressively more difficult missions. You start with a few zombie types and a lower number of actions you can do, but as things go forward you get more and more options that serve to solve puzzles - mostly getting zombies to some part of the map or killing a certain number of humans. I liked some of the ideas in ZNT but overall I found that the game was too difficult and didn't use it's own mechanics enough to create a feeling I would associate with leading a zombie apocalypse.
Splitter Critters is a neat puzzle game where you try to move aliens on a map so they get to their spaceships by avoiding hazards and moving around platforms. To do so, instead of controlling anything directly, you can just swipe around the screen to cut it and move the different pieces around, doing so makes characters follow various paths. It’s a really cool puzzler and it kept me engaged for most of the game.
Westerado: Double Barreled is an interesting game with a lot of style and charm but frustrating mechanic implemented weirdly. I wish I could've gotten into it more, but after about three hours I was ready to throw in the towel. You play a cowboy whose ranch was burned down and your family was murdered as you go along the west, helping people by doing various quests, shooting your way around and figuring out who did the horrible deed. I didn't manage to complete it, but I suppose I couldn't let it frustrate me any longer.
Taps To Riches is a neat little idle game where you buy businesses and tap on houses in order to generate money (in order to buy more businesses and upgrades in order to generate more money) filled with subsystems that make it interesting to come back to the game every day. Even without spending a single cent, I had fun with TTR and while all systems didn't work perfectly for me, I still wasted a few days tapping along.
Livelock is a neat Action RPG set in a destroyed world where you play one of three robots with a small range of skills and weapons in order to overthrow evil robots at the order of an AI overlord. I had fun with it, going through the whole thing almost with each class. I didn't try to go for high scores or find every collectible, but I still had a good time shooting tons of robots regardless.
Bounzy! is a neat iOS game where you shoot balls, breakout-style, at enemies coming toward your wall. If they make it, you lose health and eventually lose the map. In order to defeat increasingly powerful foes, you need to upgrade your projectiles and acquire new spells, like a poison effect or piercing shots. You also can use more powerful spells like meteors and electricity a few times per map. All of these systems are okay and the core gameplay of Bounzy! is actually really good, the problem is that you are drowned in ads, micro-transactions and gameplay balance obviously skewed towards taking forever if you don't spend money on the game.
Destiny 2 isn't a great game, I didn't have much hopes going into it - and the only reason I really did was because I got it for free and it was on PC - and I thought that at best it would get on some level similar to Borderlands. It's more like an MMORPG played in the first person view, with a sci-fi setting. The mission structure, lack of customization options and general gameplay loop turned me off from the game and I didn't put much time into it.
PUSH is a neat little puzzle game with a simple, clean aesthetic that follows a pattern I've seen with iOS puzzle games these days; Start with a very simple mechanic, get a few levels with that mechanic, then move on to another mechanic and repeat that pattern. Sometimes you overlap two mechanics together, but most of the time they are lost after you encounter them and go through what they mean. It's a nice way to make sure you don't repeat the same puzzles over and over, but at the same time you also need to come up with a bunch of puzzle mechanics. PUSH managed to do it pretty well!
Glittermitten Grove is a fairy forest management game where you accumulate food and other resources in other to maintain a thriving fairy population. You use these fairies to build more buildings and help you collect mana in order to cast spells to grow trees and do other things. It's a neat little game and I find that the act of managing how trees grow (if you stack too many buildings on one side, the tree will collapse) and the need for trees to get a lot of sun to be real interesting. It is not, however, the reason why I got Glittermitten Grove. I'm talking about Frog Fractions 2; Hidden inside this other game is a product following a classic misdirection entertainment product about a frog eating flies to teach kids about maths. It's pretty tough to do misdirection when people are expecting it, but Frog Fraction 2 manages it admirably.
Swipe Casters is barely a game; it is an okay core mechanic slapped around in-app purchases, weird systems and one-note gameplay. The idea to trace glyphs in order to deal damage to enemies is fine, but when that's all there is to it, when all the game does is pile on more difficulty on the glyph tracing and when the upgrades feel pointless and not fun, it feels more like a tech demo than an actual game. I tried to have fun with it, but I left sorely disappointed.
At first, I didn't think Darkest Dungeon was for me; It's way too oppressive and difficult, and the game wears that on its sleeve. I struggled a lot at the beginning, experiencing full party wipes with characters that I had already started to become attached to. Then I did something I almost never do; I installed a few mods. This simple tweak made the game much more palatable for me and I managed to get through a huge chunk of its content. Darkest Dungeon is a fantastic title and I wish I could've played the whole thing.
AdVenture Communist follows in the style and concept of Adventure Capitalist, a game I have reviewed a few years back. An idle game that's trying to do some things differently, I had some fun with it, but I lost interest quickly. It's a very pyramidal game; You have basic resources like potatoes and ore and you have production resources like farmers and miners. You need to spend farmers and miners in order to get other production resources that create farmers and miners automatically, which you then spend to get another layer of resource that produces more producers. It's a neat idea, but I hit a wall of not being able to upgrade fairly quickly, so I stopped.
Ladykiller In A Bind is a visual novel about lesbian sex taking place on a cruise ship. It's also a visual novel about consent and a various cast of characters living in an alternate universe where everyone can just be themselves without getting destroyed by the mockery of their peers. The concept of the game is interesting and you really want to see the story play out and the relationships are interesting. You also need to balance votes and suspicion and this allows for various objectives and multiple playthroughs. I really enjoyed it!
Cityglitch is a neat little puzzle game where you move around small grids of tiles in order to light up special panels while avoiding to lock yourself out of the puzzle or to be defeated by various enemies and bosses. It's pretty cool even if some of the later ones are quite fiendish and I couldn't finish the game. It's got style and its easy to control, so I'd recommend it to puzzle enthusiasts!