HIGH An extremely satisfying gameplay loop.

LOW It’s not very obvious on how to “win” a run.

WTF Body horror… in my roguelite?

We’ve done it, folks. We’ve made a slot-machine roguelite. I think we can pack it up for the rest of time because we’ve made the single most addicting videogame known to man.

In all honesty, CloverPit somehow works as a videogame on a level that I didn’t know was possible. Instead of sticking to a source material’s roots and then adding endless customization like poker in Balatro, or weaving in story to build a larger world as seen in Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers, CloverPit takes slot machines in a more horrifying direction.

Here, the player is trapped in the “CloverPit,” a 5×5 box of a room with a slot machine, a coin depository, an item shop, and not much else. It’s here where the player must play a slot machine and deposit enough coins by each deadline, or else risk the floor opening up and falling to their death. There are ways to rig the machine and items to save the player in times of distress, but ultimately, they’re at the mercy of Lady Luck.

So much of what makes a videogame great is atmosphere, but atmosphere isn’t limited to just music or the art direction. It’s ultimately a collection of small choices that make the experience enjoyable or memorable — sound effects, lighting, and small programming quirks. 

CloverPit has all of these and more. It’s filled with a kind of alchemy that I can barely explain in words, but it has that special sauce where every mechanic is designed to to keep people playing for as long as they can. Each set of spins sounds off with a garbled, electronic announcer saying “Let’s go gambling!” followed by satisfying sounds whenever the machine scores a pattern, and dissatisfying ones whenever they come up short. 

…But the horror is where CloverPit starts to get interesting.

See, the player is “promised” a way out of the pit if they score enough points on the slot machine – but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Each time they pass a scoring threshold, they’re forced to play again but just reach a higher point total. Eventually, they’re asked to get enough points to unlock a key that seems like a way out, but…

These evil undertones are even more exaggerated by CloverPit‘s dark, hard polygonal art style – which actually did make me feel like I was trapped in a pit with no escape. I felt compelled to play the slots, not just to beat the game, but to get the hell out of the pit. 

Unlike similar roguelites such as Balatro, it’s not obvious how to build a winning run in CloverPit. A slot machine seems like the most luck-of-the-draw machine out there, but CloverPit teaches the player how to win through various trials by fire. Since each round is a gamble, the player had better capitalize on every opportunity by knowing what they want to get out of it.

Each round starts with a choice — spin three times and get two tickets to buy items, or spin seven times and only get one ticket. Rounds pass with more and more choices, where players need to balance keeping enough coins to pass a deadline against buying items that will ultimately increase that coin total. Sometimes a spin will produce enough coins to pass a deadline early, granting the player an extra bonus of coins and tickets to splurge in the item shop. Yet maybe passing that deadline early isn’t the best idea – maybe they want to keep spinning in order to to bank coins for future rounds if they find their winning strategy is petering out. 

This decision-making in CloverPit feels also more weighty than other roguelikes because of the chances that I would be stopped in my tracks due to bad luck. Many runs become dead-on-arrival if the player doesn’t get items that either increase the score from each successful spin, or items that rig the slot machine to make certain symbols appear more often — and don’t forget about the chance to spin a 666, which causes the player to lose all money earned in that round! 

…But when I put things together correctly, avoided the 666 and I did win – ooh boy, that was the best feeling ever.

I haven’t even scratched the surface of what the slot machine has to offer in terms of winning strategies or clever tricks, as there are countless items to unlock, game modifiers to equip, and just more to play. In a decade where certain titles toe the line between gambling and games, CloverPit performs that dance beautifully and produces an unforgettable roguelite experience as a result — it’s a delight, and one of the most delightfully frustrating things I’ve played this year. 

Score: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Panik Arcade and published by Future Friends Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is rated T for Teen on the ESRB. The game does have a small amount of gore and blood. Players must equip bloody human bones to get past certain portions of the game and there is blood lining the shelves within the cell the main character is trapped in.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game’s story is text-only but the subtitles cannot be resized. The game is not fully accessible. There are no audio cues needed for successful play.\

Remappable Controls: CloverPit is mouse and keyboard only, and there are a few different layouts for keyboards included beyond QWERTY. There are no remap options besides those.

The post CloverPit Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Absolutely breathtaking vistas and art style.

LOW The amount of backtracking.

WTF Jesus Christ that’s a LOT of blood.

Every videogame teased in 2025 with a sword-wielding protagonist, believe it or not, is actually Dark Souls. To call the third-person action-adventure subgenre overplayed is an understatement — and few recent titles do enough to differentiate themselves from their medium-defining forefathers.

Hell is Us is the first time I’ve played a new title that takes notes from the soulslike genre, but instead of lurking under its shadow, walks in a different direction proudly. 

The player assumes the role of Remi, a career soldier who was shipped away from the civil-war-ridden country of Hadea as a young boy. Now, his personal mission is to get back into Hadea, find his family, and uncover the mystery of a society-altering calamity that sent demon-like creatures to prey on Hadeans on both sides of their civil war.

These creatures are the single plot device that keeps the story moving forward and leave the player asking all kinds of questions — what are they? Why do these beings move so weirdly? Why are they all white with a gaping hole where a face should be? The player must untangle this puzzle by talking to Hadean residents, picking up clues, and solving puzzles that take Remi across the country. 

Instead of going the typical soulslike route and focusing on combat, Hell is Us lives and dies by committing to the soulslike form of quest design. This means other than the opening dialogue sequce and talking to characters about what they need, it’s up to Remi and the player’s intuition alone to find quest items or the way forward. Puzzles require a little extra brainpower, whether it’s for a main quest, side content called “good deeds” to help civilians around Hadea, or when solving puzzles to get items. 

I can understand that this type of quest design may not work for everyone. Sometimes I’d go for entire hours of gameplay before I’d find an item and try to think “Who does this go to? Was it that person asking for ID cards? But I’m also not sure this is the right item?” It can feel like a mental balancing act at times. But other than a few sections prone to lots of backtracking as I got used to the quest design, like the beginning Acasa Marsha area and the hills where Remi learns more about his father, Hell is Us sold me with less handholding.

It’s established early on that everything in Hell is Us’ map pulls on mystical and religious lore to set the backdrop for the country’s conflict — entire towns were set ablaze, gigantic temples worshipping false gods were constructed, and civilians were ruled by hatred. The world of Hadea is broken beyond repair, and it’s easy to see why Remi was sent away by his parents.

Easily the strongest point of Rogue Factor’s design philosophy was putting the carnage of Hadea’s civil war on full display. Corpses line the streets of towns, blood runs through buildings, countless bodies hang limp from the little remaining vegetation that was left between bombings and flamethrower attacks. 

Among all of these depictions of carnage are smaller, more intimate moments — things like a vista looking across a mountain lake next to a field of azure flowers, or a massive statue of a creature and its gaping maw where a mouth should be. A burning town in the distance creating a nearly perfect sunset was haunting. 

Among the civilians, soldiers, and religious iconographies shrouded in smoke are the bright contrasts of Hadea — the creatures. Violently thrashing about like drunkenly-controlled marionettes painted white, they are so inhuman in nearly every way, and fighting these creatures highlights Hell is Us’ inspired combat system. I’m not leaving it for last because of any quality knock. It can easily stand on its own and is a treat to engage with in its own right.

Like a typical soulslike, there’s a strike, dodge, and block button, but every encounter has an added wrinkle. Every time Remi deals damage to an enemy, he can heal some of that damage back if the player times a button press correctly. Other dimensions include a drone that allows Remi to attack from above or spin in a whirlwind of blows, and “elemental” imbued attacks from enhanced weapons make combat encounters more engaging than a simple hack-and-slash. 

The mystical enemies come in all shapes and sizes. Some shoot projectiles, some disable Remi’s drone, some spawn enemies attached to them via an umbilical cord of sorts, making the player prioritize them before killing their host.

A note I will make on Hell is Us’ combat — if players experienced with soulslikes want to get the most out of the mechanics and consumables, play it on Hard Mode. While many combat encounters inspired me to think creatively, by the end of Hell is Us, I felt like I was mowing down enemies easily on Normal Mode while filling up a bag of consumables I never used once. 

Ultimately, the thing about Hell is Us that ties it all together is the title. The combat and exploration are merely a distraction from the real conflict happening in front of the player’s eyes — humans on both sides of the civil war (and those manipulating the war from behind the scenes) have committed far worse atrocities than the creatures ever have. 

Score: 8 out of 10

Buy Hell is Us – PC – XB – PS

Disclosures: This game is developed by Rogue Factor and published by Nacon. It is currently available on PC, XBX/S, and PS5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 19 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is rated M for Strong Language, Violence, Blood, Drug References, and Suggestive Themes. It is a very visceral depiction of a civil war with modern technology, so this game is not meant for kids whatsoever, including bodies hanging from trees, staircases lined with blood and human remains, and a colossal pile of human skeletons.

Colorblind Modes: There are colorblind modes available, including a setting to toggle color deficiency type and a slider with color deficiency compensation.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game’s story has subtitles which can be resized. Some puzzles do have audio cues to make it easier for players to find quests, but Hell is Us compensates with visual directional audio cues. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.

The post Hell Is Us Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH It’s Tail Time.

LOW It’s Tail Time.

WTF It’s Tail Time.

When I asked to review the remastered Gex Trilogy, I knew it would be a massive undertaking, the likes of which no one has seen before — and it is not possible to overstate how sarcastic I am being here.

Debuting back in 1994, Gex is a ‘beloved’ character mascot that the big bosses at Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix wheeled out for four years despite owning the IP for nearly two decades overall, and neither studio doing much of anything with it in all that time. 

After playing through this trilogy, it’s not surprising why.

Gex is not a compelling character, and the titles where he is featured are equally uninteresting. It’s clear that he was meant to compete with the plethora of 3D platforming mascots that came out in the late ’90s, such as Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot. However, comparing Gex to the brighter stars of the time is like pitting a toddler against a bulldozer. 

Gex’s whole personality is that he’s an anthropomorphic gecko obsessed with television. It’s a shoddy connection at best, but his whole mission across the three games is that he must tackle various villains in the Media Dimension, where he gets sucked into a TV and plays through levels based on TV show tropes and genres.

This is also, for better or worse, where he gets his humor. Gex is not the typical naive protagonist, working to save his home world from an evil threat. Instead, he behaves like a friend of a friend that you don’t really hang out with.

He’s jaded. He makes half-jokes that never land about movie stars that are no longer on the silver screen. Perhaps the most annoying part of the entire character is that every other sentence is either “It’s Tail Time” or “That’s what I call getting some tail.” The tail ‘jokes’, if one could even call them that, never stopped. It was agonizing. Maybe it was funny at one point, but I don’t think that point exists in the present day.

For this review, I played through portions of the original Gex (1995) and Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (1999), and played through all of Gex: Enter the Gecko (1998).

The 1995 title is a fairly standard 2D platformer. The action, as is the level design and visuals. However, it’s difficult to focus on those when Gex’s story is devoid of purpose — his mission lacks a driving force to keep him going other than the fact that he’s just stuck in the Media Dimension.

It’s common with all the Gex games, but the main villain of all three titles, Rez, shows up at the beginning of each adventure, only to disappear until the very end. Therefore, none of the enemies seem connected with the overall plot, and are just there to be dealt with. There are TV remotes to collect in each level, but it never felt like I was progressing to an ending of any kind. 

The 3D platformers weren’t much better. Enter the Gecko (1998) was the title I spent the most time with, and it felt devoid of any life or spirit.

The same can be said for Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (1999). A part of the reason for this was the overall TV-theming — when a title like Gex chooses to use TV as the through-line between every world and also chooses to license no recognizable properties, it feels generic. I played through a bland, yet borderline racist ninja level. I played through a generic Jurassic Park-esque dinosaur level. Even the “Circuit” levels, which seemed like something straight out of Tron, were just not memorable. 

Story and bad character design aside, the 3D games are serviceable in terms of mechanics. The 3D platforming is solid, and the setpieces are interesting enough. Frankly, it’s remarkable that the Limited Run team could bring these games back from the ’90s and make them playable today in the 2020s. 

At the end of the day, I think the main lesson to take away from the Gex Trilogy is that just because a title has a serviceable design foundation and decent gameplay mechanics, it doesn’t mean that’s enough. If the experience relies on a mascot character to stand out from the pack and that character is annoying as all hell, it’s doomed from the start.

Out of all of the nearly-forgotten games to bring forward into the 2020s, I’m not sure why Limited Run chose Gex — it’s such an absurdist concept that I have to laugh at it now, but while playing Gex in the moment, I despised it. 

Rating: 3 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Limited Run Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 11 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is rated T by the ESRB for Blood, Crude Humor, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language and Sexual Themes. Gex will make crude, sometimes sexual jokes like “Don’t drink the punch at Jerry Garcia’s,” and “I’m lost in Dick Dale’s colon.” The extent of the crude language is a statement like “Damn this pesky gravity to hell!” when Gex falls into a pit. The combat is fairly cartoony but there are a few sections with animated blood such as in the ninja levels.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no subtitles for dialogue. This game is not accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.

The post Gex Trilogy Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Tight city-building controls and lots of customization.

LOW Each experience ends abruptly.

WTF Why am I able to infinitely stack bushes into the sky?

Tranquil Isle is all about building a tiny island village far away from everything, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

The objective of Tranquil Isle, if you can even call it an objective, is to place buildings around an archipelago’s town center and slowly expand the population by building houses, artisan buildings, and other fixtures, while also expanding to other islands. Each building the player can place also has a point total assigned to it, with certain buildings buffing and debuffing others.

As the points add up, Tranquil Isle presents the player with two options for buildings to populate their village with after certain point thresholds, like a choice between one group of an altar and five houses, or another group comprising a farm and some stables. It’s an effort to give players more control over their end score, which tallies up all the points for every building placed across their village, after which the player can move on to a new project.

A player can experience Tranquil Isle in two different styles — the first being a purely numbers-based experience where they attempt to stack as many buildings as close to each other as possible, while combining certain groups of buildings and their buffs to get the highest score possible. The other is to create an aesthetically pleasing paradise to look at.

Mechanically, the first style is a complex puzzle to solve, but placing certain buildings next to each other makes intuitive sense. Forager buildings work better when they’re not in contact with any other nearby buildings. The mills with big windmills get buffed by nearby farms, but are debuffed by other mills within a certain distance. Houses buff the town center, as well as altars and town halls where people who live in these houses certainly congregate.

The best part of this buff and debuff system is that it naturally lends itself to creating towns that look aesthetically pleasing, so it rarely compromises any part of itself. I don’t play builder-adjacent games like The Sims or Frostpunk because I feel like my poor design choices would ruin whatever architectural layouts make a well-run city look the part, but Tranquil Isle takes that out of the equation, and makes me feel like a somewhat capable city planner.

Aesthetically, designing my islands to make them look more lived-in came secondary to placing down buildings — but that doesn’t mean I still didn’t try to dress them up.

While each building has spacial requirements that prevent them from being too close to one another, there’s no limit to the amount of decorations the player can put on every building and empty inch of grass in town. I found the limits of customization in Tranquil Isle when I found out I could infinitely stack decoration objects like rocks and shrubs on top of each other. Naturally, I made infinitely tall stacks of these objects and just laughed to myself that I was permitted me to do that.

Getting to create a beautiful island utopia is most evident in Tranquil Isle’s Sandbox Mode, which lifts the limits of building space requirements and allows players to run free. I could put ten town halls on one island, or make an island that’s full of taverns and theatres, surrounded by houses so the townspeople could access them. There’s a world full of combinations of buildings, decorations, and terrain forms that can make Sandbox mode a joy to explore.

My only issue with Tranquil Isle come from the eventual end to these building experiences. While I can begin lots of new islands to create lots of different potential towns, it always feels like the building process ends too abruptly.

For example, a “medium” sized town will have three different islands to populate and build upon, but once the player runs out of buildings to build, the game forces them to end. Every time I’d place my last building, I was given the option to build a bridge to a new island… that didn’t exist.

I wish Tranquil Isle would give players a greater sense of closure when they were clearly finished with the space at hand, or build out some objectives for the player to complete when they were actually done. However, with tons of combinations of buildings, decorations, and island constructions, players can get nearly infinite replayability out of this title’s solid foundation, chill vibes, and potential.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Buy Tranquil Isle – PC

Disclosures: This game is developed by Tom Daly and published by Future Friends Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 2.5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB, but it contains no violence, graphic imagery or language.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no dialogue, and the only bits of text are in pop-ups on the screen. The text can be resized by a “UI Slider” in the game’s settings. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.

The post Tranquil Isle Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Great use of Remedy’s Control aesthetic for a team shooter.

LOW Little interaction between the different weapon classes.

WTF Don’t ask about Sticky Ricky…

I don’t play many first-person shooters. However, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited at the prospect of a multiplayer shooter taking place in the Remedy connected universe (notable residents: Alan Wake and Control). It’s a universe that I love playing single-player titles in, so my interest was high. 

Unfortunately, the reality is that FBC: Firebreak fell far short of my expectations. It’s a weird experience like almost every Remedy title is, but its mechanics and gameplay quirks fall flat instead of standing out. 

Firebreak’s ask of players is to team up in a squad of three people and clock in for their shift at the Federal Bureau of Control, a fictional government agency that deals with all things ghostly and “paranatural.” In a new initiative called the Firebreak Protocol, FBC management sends teams out into the depths of FBC HQ to tackle the zombified masses of people known as the Hiss, as well as ghosts and strange happenings that have spiraled out of control. 

These missions vary in scope, but nearly all of them replicate the Control aesthetic to a T. The soulless, corporate interiors of various office floors were our playground, but more often they felt like killing floors. Each level is oppressive, contrasting most other titles in the genre that take a fantastical or slightly horrifying approach.

In this way, Firebreak takes a different path towards putting players on edge in a zombie shooter, and it’s the game’s biggest success. Rather than being the super-powered heroine of Control, Firebreak puts the player in the shoes of a regular guy with a gun and a home repair kit. The anxiety of going up against a threat that’s normally taken care of by an extraordinary individual is what kept me going. At its best, Firebreak offers the fast-paced excitement of a great Call of Duty: Zombies level, but it can’t maintain that tone. When it wanes, the material feels like the corporate exercises the title is trying to mock.

Each of the five selectable missions are different threats that teams need to clear in the Oldest House, an enigmatic building first shown in Control. Between destroying endlessly multiplying sticky notes to collecting larva from an alien in an office basement, the mission variety is theoretically there. However, these tasks start to get stale after replays of each mission, which are required to progress in the rewards system. These replays are also a great time to practice teamwork with other players, but so many of the roles and tasks that each player on a given team “should complete” often feel disconnected and superfluous.

Starting on the mission design, the way a mission begins is with all three players needing to complete a few tasks toward the overall goal. Sometimes that’s destroying haunted sticky notes, fixing panels on a giant furnace, or exorcising ghosts from the FBC. All the while, a crowd of Hiss zombies is attempting to kill every player while they’re trying to do their jobs.

The problem here is that these tasks often felt like filler to me. Sure, I had to go fix a few panels or load some alien specimens into a cart, but the best parts of the missions are killing the Hiss en masse. It makes the goals feel like hoops to jump through to unlock better gear, instead of being the “meat” of Firebreak. There are standout portions of each mission, sure, like the giant sticky note Sticky Ricky acting as a final boss, or the frantic sprint to load barrels and stop a giant furnace from going supernova. Sadly, there are few of these tremendous moments, and more tasks that boil down to clicking a sequence of buttons in a row to get to the next room.

The “roles” of Firebreak also don’t have implications for gameplay outside of doing the random tasks in each level. Each player is assigned one of three “Crisis Kits” before they play — a Fix Kit, complete with a wrench that can fix electrical panels, a Jump Kit, fitted with an electrical shocker that can charge up powered devices and electrify water, and the Splash Kit, a super soaker on a player’s back that can cleanse players of ailments like poison or burn. Theoretically, all three also have in-game combat uses, but they aren’t as strong as a player’s secondary gun. 

If you didn’t guess, the Splash Kit is about the only one that consistently pays off. I would consistently play using the Fix Kit and stick to it, but I wish I had used the Splash Kit more since it could heal damaged players. The problem is none of these kits seemed to matter when it came to deciding the ends of matches, and all of them should be reworked to have greater effects in combat.

Ultimately, Firebreak’s gameplay problem is that the gunplay in this supernatural team-based jaunt is the best portion of the experience — it isn’t a terrible problem to have, but it’s a sign that the missions and classes need design boosts to make them more relevant and compelling. 

Firebreak is a new direction in expanding Remedy’s connected universe, but the art direction and aesthetics can only do so much of the heavy lifting when the other aspects aren’t bringing as much to the table. The end result doesn’t stack up to the source material that inspired it, and to this Remedy fan, it could and should be so much better. 

Rating: 5.5 out of 10

Buy FBC: Firebreak – PC – XB- PS

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Remedy Entertainment. It is currently available on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the multiplayer mode, and each mission was completed at least once. There are no single-player modes.

Parents: This game is rated on the ESRB as T for violence, blood, and language. It contains gun violence killing non-human creatures.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are subtitles in the game that can be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.

The post FBC: Firebreak Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The combat system is responsive.

LOW Repeating enemies and sometimes easy-to-dodge bosses.

WTF Why is there an enemy that eats a fish raw mid-attack.

If I had to think of a word to describe current trends in game development, it would most likely be fusion.

Most developers, at least in my opinion, have never been better at genre-bending and blending two or more subsets of games that work together well. Think Neon White combining a deckbuilder and a time-attack shooter, or the developers of Nine Sols making a Metroidvania soulslike.

Tyrant’s Realm mixes it up and it just makes sense — it’s a mix of roguelike and soulslike, and with art seemingly transported from the PS1 era, it straddles both genres to great effect.

The player begins in a dank dungeon as a decrepit-looking prisoner, trapped in a cell which they eventually escape. Armed with nothing but a long stick and a sorry excuse for a shield, I had to travel through this dungeon full of mazelike rooms while looking for an exit. I then journeyed through five different dungeons with a boss at the end of each across tenor so attempts before beating my first run, and collected new weapons and armor while doing it — all while possessed soldiers and enemy fighters tried to kill me.

The combat of Tyrant’s Realm is a strong point. Fairly standard for a third-person soulslike, it has a clear emphasis on attacking at the right time during an enemy’s attack pattern, and dodging, parrying, or blocking in all other instances. My character had a stamina meter and a health meter that I could refill with a set number of healing flasks.

It might not sound like I’m praising Tyrant’s Realm by writing that the combat is “fairly standard,” but for a title in this genre, the perfect combat loop would be one copied from Dark Souls and its sequels, and Tyrant’s Realm executes its own version of this system to a T. Dodges are responsive, blocks are effective, and I never felt like the game was cheating me.

It also visually molds with the character animations — it would seem like it’s a graphically wonky roguelike, but it runs smoothly. Even when combat was a bit repetitive towards the end areas, it still clicked.

Yet even within combat systems as tight as soulslikes, there will be some problems. The only two minor knocks that I will give Tyrant’s Realm’s combat both come with the lock-on system — making the camera spin out of control when locking on to a group of enemies, and trivializing boss combat by allowing the player to infinitely walk in one direction around the boss.

The story? It mainly takes a backseat in the overall experience. My job was to try to make it to the final room in the entire “realm” ruled by an evil wizardly tyrant. After beating him, I was returned back to the start to try to beat the tyrant on a harder difficulty.

Forgetting combat and story for a moment, there’s one more portion to Tyrant’s Realm — the roguelike. Nothing exemplifies this genre’s inclusion so much as the physical layout of the dungeons. There are distinct regions all over the map that I went to, but each one was a randomization of room layouts, enemy placements, and loot chests. It provided a new-ish experience to each area, but nothing groundbreaking by any means.

Similar to the room layouts, each larger area would have around two chests in each room filled with a random assortment of weapons, armor, and shields. The weapon variety was a major reason why I wanted to keep playing once I’d beaten my first run. Outside of the typical sword, axe, and spear lineup, there were hidden gems like the trident, the Wolverine claws, and the gigantic wooden mallet. To be expected, the shields and the armor yield less eye-catching items, but some had immense buffs compared to others.

Apart from item variety, Tyrant’s Realm also offers a decent amount of replayability. After beating the final boss, players can up the difficulty on each subsequent run. Level II includes “elite” enemies on each level that do more damage and move faster. Level III makes all enemies elite enemies, but with this increased difficulty comes increased rewards.

Unfortunately, the roguelike aspect of Tyrant’s Realm suffers a bit from lack of options, consequence-less randomizations for shields and armor that only express themselves in how fast the character moves, and a difficult means of progressively unlocking new gear on the lowest difficulty — collecting coins from defeating enemies.

On the lowest difficulty, every dungeon results in about 50 coins collected, and bosses give 100. Some of the cooler gear costs up to 400 coins, and more significant upgrades like additional healing flasks cost even more. Granted, these are minor complaints from someone who beat the lowest difficulty quite easily within a few tries, but the pace of unlocking might be significantly slower for players who have a tougher time with the content.

Ultimately, Tyrant’s Realm executes a gameplay loop that’s rewarding enough to render its minor inconveniences just that — minor inconveniences. It’s another successful, joyful genre-mashup that anyone looking for a retro-inspired soulslike will have a good time with.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Buy Tyrant’s Realm – PC

Disclosures: This game is developed by Team Tyrant and published by Skystone Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB, but this game is not made for kids. It involves slashing, stabbing, and killing with digital weapons and there is blood visibly represented as well.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no dialogue in this game, and the only “story” bits are told through pop-up text on the screen. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.

The post Tyrant’s Realm Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH All-time ’90s internet vibes.

LOW Some of the platforming sections weren’t super responsive.

WTF Is it possible to feel nostalgia for something I wasn’t even alive for?

As someone who was born just before 2000, I never got to experience the earlier, jankier versions of the Internet. It often made me wonder how people came to love something so antiquated compared to what we have now.

It’s that janky charm that MainFrames, a new 2D platformer from developer Assoupi, tries to capture in its adventure. The title is an entertaining dive into the past, and it executes on those ’90s themes in every possible way.

Playing as the astutely-named Floppy (yes, he’s a disk) I spent the journey finding this mascot’s function in a complex computer. See, Floppy, despite how cute they are, is a daemon, which back in ’90s computer-speak means an errant program or function not connected to anything particular. In a normal world, this would mean nothing, but in this world, it means that the computer’s security will try to “erase” Floppy without a trace.

As Floppy, my task was to explore the rest of the internal network, rescuing daemons like me. Floppy does this by collecting fellow daemons from the far reaches of the computer and brings them back to the “break room” hub world. These characters are animated into lively and real computer buddies, all trying to save themselves from eventual “deletion.” Among these misfits, Floppy fits right in.

If MainFrames has nothing else, it possesses an immaculate and refined sense of style. Every aspect of this game is pulled straight out of an old PC running Windows XP. Jumping through each stage in the seven major levels was a challenging-yet-enjoyable way to explore an artistic wonderland visualizing an old computer ecosystem.

These vibes are most obviously expressed in the art style of MainFrames. Many times I’d be trying to assess where I was supposed to go with Floppy and pick which platforms to jump on, and instead I’d just be staring at the brilliantly-constructed backgrounds that backlit each stage. Level after level is decorated with beautiful pixel art that pops. Each level also screened personal anecdotes that the developers left behind in the style of instant messaging apps like AOL. The graphics are stellar, yet look intentionally dated enough that it could be running on an old machine.

While the visuals are on point, the ’90s style came through most clearly in the actual mechanics of each level.

2D platformers have been around for decades, so it takes smart developers to take these tried-and-true mechanics and rework them in engaging ways., and MainFrames does both exceptionally well.

They play the classics, of course — jumping pads, variable gravity, and switchable platforms, and each of these 2D platforming mainstays fits like a glove in each level, and there are visual representations. Sometimes an element might look like a browser window. Sometimes elements disappear, phasing out of reality like a computer glitch. There’s a mouse clicker that allows the player to activate certain windows over others, and certain windows can expand depending on the direction that Floppy is running.

All of these things and how they present on screen allowed for some pretty wild experimentation that often made me feel like I was beating MainFrames at its own game, and the best levels in MainFrames come when these elements are combined. Since each mechanic is integrated well in the overall ecosystem of each level, remixing them together feels organic.

Though MainFrames is marketed as a “cozy” platformer, these levels are not cakewalks. A few throw together a ton of different mechanics at the player in quick succession, and it can feel overwhelming at times. There were certain levels that took me multiple tries to beat.

Despite the challenge of certain sections, I only spent around 3.5 hours playing MainFrames, and the relatively quick respawn time didn’t feel like the levels were punishing me for trying them over and over again. The few issues that I did have were that sometimes it felt like the placement of a platform or jump pad was slightly off from a normal player’s jump trajectory, but these errors were few and far between.

MainFrames is a delightful romp set in an era of technology that took place before my time, but thanks to its charm and solid gameplay, I felt nostalgic for that world despite having never lived in it.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Assoupi and published by The Arcade Crew. It is currently available on PC and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 3.5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not yet rated on the ESRB, but this game contains fantasy “violence.” It consists of certain “digital friends” being “deleted” from the game, but there is no explicit death or violence depicted.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no dialogue in this game, and the only “story” bits are told through pop-up text on the screen. there are no necessary audio cues. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.

The post Mainframes Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Actual live-action video conversations with the developers

LOW Sometimes the music can be too loud in the golf sections

WTF This entire game is a WTF moment.

Mini Mini Golf Golf is the first time I’ve ever played a game that felt like the developers were talking directly to me. It’s an experimental title that bleeds the boundaries between player and developer in a beautiful digital symphony that’s disguised as a mini golf game.

The player starts as a worker at an environmental company, Axonia. I began in a dimly-lit room in front of two monitors — one playing a recycled, staticky video feed, and one blank with some tape with the word “data” written on it.

As a “resonant” at Axonia, the player must investigate a breakthrough solution for the world’s rapidly-rising sea levels developed by a rival company, Obrist. A secret project seemingly went up in flames, and the reason why is located in the data extracted from Obrist’s video feed.

The catch? The “data” is a mini golf game. Adjusting a dial on the first monitor plays a video of the Obrist project, a facility located deep within the Earth’s mantle that manually feeds artificial tectonic plates into the sea. The project’s “data” on the second screen is portrayed like something out of a putt-putt course, similar to something one might play with friends on a weekend.

I could go through the courses by manipulating a cursor to hit the ball while shooting for a low score on each hole, and it all seemed fairly standard… until I found that the valuable data that I was supposed to be looking for was locked behind the game.

“Locked behind” is perhaps not the right phrase. The data is physically intertwined with the architecture of each golf course, comprised of fragments of a larger network of memories left behind by a single worker at Obrist, named Vanya. The only way to tell Vanya’s story, and the story of what happened to the tectonic plate station, is held behind each of the eight holes.

The golf courses in Mini Mini Golf Golf are plain, visually designed like something out of a late ’90s computer title that my parents might’ve played on Windows XP. Just a few simple hills, obstacles like windmills here and there, but none pose any challenge.

Yet this sparse gameplay in Mini Mini Golf Golf presents an interesting puzzle — find a way to glitch out the course to access a memory from Vanya.

Each solution is in the video feeds, told directly through conversations with hosts of a makeshift talk show called “Mini Mini Talk Talk” that plays on the left monitor. A few solutions would be to get a hole-in-one, shoot the ball out of the course, or barely miss the hole exactly three times. Afterwards, the level breaks down in a digital cacophony.

Behind each glitched out level is a golf course stripped bare, with only multicolored skeletons of courses and grid patterns to point the way. Each shot towards the hole reveals a letter, and these letters spell out messages from Vanya that explain their work in the tectonic plate station.

Each golf level successfully glitched “unlocks” a chapter of their life, whether it be relationships, work or early childhood. However, by only obtaining it by glitching out of each level, it felt like information that I wasn’t supposed to see. Every victory felt like I was physically breaking the system down, with the sounds of shattering behind each message from Vanya that I had found. It felt like I was an unwelcome guest in Vanya’s mind.

Without spoilers, Vanya’s life was full of heartbreak and contradiction, yet their personal issues have to take a backseat to the world-saving potential of their work. Another portion of these memories tell the story of the tectonic plate station, and how the project gradually became unstable.

Ultimately, Mini Mini Golf Golf is about deciding whether saving the world is a human goal or a capitalistic one — or both. Various news clips play on the video monitor claiming companies like Axonia and Obrist are failing at their jobs to save the environment, yet Vanya believes there needs to be a human component in the solution to the rapidly-deteriorating climate.

Impossibly, somehow, all of this plot took a backseat to the real gem of Mini Mini Golf Golf — the “Mini Mini Talk Talk” talk show. Instead of hiring actors to tell the player solutions through hidden messages on the feed, the actual developers from 3 More Years are the ones talking to the player.

The meat of the talk show is about these devs using games as a time capsule for different points in their lives and how they’re currently using Mini Mini Golf Golf as a medium for disobedience. It’s easily the most direct example that I could find of a developer telling the player directly what the content is about, so that no amount of subjectivity obscures the Mini Mini Golf Golf’s true message. Mini Mini Golf Golf is about environmentalism and capitalism and how their combination might spell the end of the earth.

This title is a message of why ultimately this conflict will strip humanity from everyone, and why collective action is needed for real change.

Mini Mini Golf Golf is the most experimental gaming experience I’ve played in the past decade — and its message made every level worth savoring. It’s also an open conversation to the player from its developers, and it’s a conversation worth listening to.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10

— Jack Dunn

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by 3 More Years. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 3 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB, but it does include mature themes of death and environmental destruction. However, there are no explicit visual depictions of death in the game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles and text (see examples above.) They cannot be resized. There are no significant auditory cues. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls involve only a mouse, and there is no remap option of any kind in the menus.

The post Mini Mini Golf Golf Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Charming art style and characters.

LOW Clunky controls make complicated repairs impossible to complete quickly.

WTF Why do random customers keep deciding to kill me?

With the amount of roguelikes I’ve played this year, I often wonder if developers will ever run out of content to push into procedurally-generated problems.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop proves once again that limit is nowhere close to being reached as it dares to ask the question — what if we turned a simple mechanic’s job into a life-or-death scenario?

The player starts out as Wilbur, a fox/human hybrid forced into a job at Uncle Chop’s, a repair center for spaceships of all kinds, as well as being a pit stop for priests, criminals, and everyday people passing through the galaxy. It’s an incredibly detailed hub full of witty characters drawn in a simple, yet expressive 2D style.

However, life at Chop’s isn’t an intergalactic easy street. Wilbur’s life is a life of servitude — the player must fix ships in less than ~8 realtime minutes, with each ship presenting a different problem for players to solve.

This problem-solving is the crux of the moment-to-moment gameplay of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. Wake up, solve puzzles to repair ships, earn money, pay Wilbur’s R.E.N.T. payments, or else face bankruptcy and death. Yet every time Wilbur fails, he’s thrust right back into the fray like nothing ever happened, called back from the afterlife by some cruel capitalist god.

Each day in Uncle Chop’s, the boss gives Wilbur a set of tasks to complete for the ships that dock at the repair shop. He start out with simple jobs like refueling a ship’s fuel tanks, adjusting oil levels, and replacing missing parts. The gameplay for each job is hands-on — the player must unscrew every bolt, manually adjust sliders and switches, and replace missing or malfunctioning parts by themselves. It’s fairly forgiving the first few times, but the skill floor soon rises to an entirely new level because once Wilbur starts projects that are outside of the typical refueling and replacing fuel cells, it’s almost impossible to get them done on the first try.

Puzzling work orders like fixing a ship’s virtual reality port, changing a rebreather module by creating breathable gas on a miniature planet, or coddling a ship’s AI companion to make it feel better offer an ever-increasing level of challenge.

Don’t get me wrong, these are interesting puzzles to solve, but it becomes more stressful than enjoyable after a certain point because every task Wilbur is forced to complete requires a deep understanding of how every single ship’s system works.

Thankfully, there’s a manual, but using it is extremely unwieldy, with the player having to read the information and fix the problem on the fly because Wilbur can’t stop doing a job once he’s started, otherwise he’ll lose precious money that could be going towards his rent payments. Even for jobs that I thought I’d memorized, every panel left open or errant part left astray would mean pay docked from my overall compensation.

All of these factors combined mean that every time I was presented with a brand new problem that I was unfamiliar with, I would either spend all of my time trying to figure it out and losing other income opportunities or fail it instantly and be set so far back that I wouldn’t be able to make my next rent payment.

Of course, once I figured out the refueling, oil, and rebreather modules, I’d challenge myself to complete these jobs as fast as possible. It takes a while, but eventually overcame them, but let’s not forget that Uncle Chop‘s also offers a roguelike structure that is incredibly repetitive. I’m aware that roguelikes are repetitive by nature, but Uncle Chop’s is a different beast.

When the player begins a ‘run’ in Uncle Chop’s, most things remains the same — on every second day of a run, a ship crashes into the repair zone, and Wilbur has to begin putting out the fire and changing the oil. Every third day starts with a job that requires the same four modules to fix and takes nearly the whole day to complete. Every fourth day, a meteor shower starts raining debris on the workstation, and so on.

It’s the same exact cycle, over and over and over again. This repetitiveness combined with the time limits, certain missions with finicky controls, and a random chance for customers to hold Wilbur up for money at gunpoint and then kill him if you answer their questions incorrectly (yes, he can get shot by customers!) makes for an incredibly frustrating experience. In the nearly 10 hours I played, I only made it to the first boss once and was flummoxed on how to beat it.

Maybe it’s a slow burn and I need more time with it, but Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is so unrelenting in its first act, it left me hanging my head in defeat. It’s a title with a lot of potential, but ultimately, the punishing, repetitive foundation it sits on isn’t enough for me to support continued playthroughs.

Rating: 6 out of 10

— Jack Dunn

Disclosures: This game is developed by Beard Envy and published by Kasedo Games. It is currently available on PC, Switch, XBX/S, and PS5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 8 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M for Blood, Strong Language, and Violence. This is not a game for kids. The NPCs in this game use curse words a fair amount, and those NPCs can also kill the protagonist with guns and blades if a job isn’t completed correctly or their rent payments aren’t made on time, often with lots of blood involved.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. They cannot be resized. The game offers full subtitle support, but some puzzles require audio cues, like a reactor puzzle that starts beeping faster and faster the closer it gets to blowing up. This game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Seamlessly interweaving high art with toilet humor.

LOW Unclear point-and-click limitations.

WTF The protagonist’s matchmaking skills should put him in jail.

How far will someone go to receive their inheritance? Can the promise of millions turn someone from a lowlife into a stand-up guy? And would all that effort be worth it? Death of the Reprobate does its best to answer that question, stringing together an adventure full of misfortune and crass humor animated with a virtual flipbook made from thousands of Renaissance-era paintings.

In the latest entry of Joe Richardson’s artsy point-and-click titles, the plot is simple. The story begins with the tyrannical protagonist Malcolm the Shit administering cruel and unusual punishments to his subjects. Suddenly he finds out his father, Immortal John, is on his deathbed — but the player has no interest in him, just his inheritance.

Upon their meeting, John finds his son so ungrateful and miserable that he commands him to do seven good deeds before he can receive his inheritance. From this point, the rest of the experience asks the player to solve puzzles, talk to chatty NPCs, and travel the painted world of Death of the Reprobate.

As one can tell from just a glance, the main selling point in Death is the art style. Quite literally, every single scene is taken from of an existing Renaissance-era painting and animated to fit in with its characters, which move in a vaguely puppet-like manner.

Death’s gameplay consists of solving problems for the residents of the hamlet where the protagonist’s father is living, which usually involved me finding items and giving them to certain NPCs. These “good deeds” ranged from breaking up a couple to match them with other partners, helping a tired maid turn her well into a hot tub, and scouting for a hunter as he killed the entire population of birds in the area. But, while it’s interesting to see how the art interacts with the puzzling in clever ways, some of the solutions won’t be obvious to average players.

In one example, there’s a small house that contains a father with four screaming children. I had to grab a bucket, put it under a cow, give the cow strawberries, then it excreted “strawberry milkshake” from its behind, after which I gave it to the kids. It’s not like I don’t understand the humor here — because it is objectively very funny — but not in a million years would I think up a solution like that on my own.

This frustration goes hand in hand with the limitations of the point-and-click genre. There are tons of items that Malcolm has to pick up and use in unfamiliar ways, such as putting a pumpkin on top of a chimney to smoke out a conclave of wizards. Even when I did solve a puzzle correctly, I never felt smarter for it — it was more like luck. The player is  allowed open access to hints in the form of a Turkish man smoking a hookah next to the tavern, but using hints made me feel guilty for not giving it my all and toughing it out. That said, it was often a struggle between knowing when I had truly exhausted my options and when I had simply given up too early.

Despite being frustrated at times, those issues were minor compared to the art style and Death of the Reprobate’s other selling point — the humor.

The world “reprobate” is defined in the Calvinist religious tradition as “someone destined for damnation,” and Malcolm embodies this in almost all of his interactions. He tries to help the people out of the predicaments that they’re in so he’ll contribute to his good deed count, but he ultimately knows that no amount of goodwill he gives will help. These caricatures are so comically abhorrent and stuck-up it’s hard not to laugh with most dialogue options. For example, Malcolm tries to play matchmaker with the men in the town and his client is so picky that she chooses her ex. Another is when a dad fakes a fishing trip with his kids with Malcolm’s help, only to have his kids call him a deadbeat (among other things.)

Those were just two examples, but every character is just a testament to how strong the writing in Death of the Reprobate is. Richardson somehow interweaves physical comedy, dumb gimmicks, and clever wordplay together to create an intricate (and crass) world full of weirdos. This perspective seems to suggest that while the Renaissance was a time full of artistic revival and scientific ingenuity, people were also really stupid and gross.

Death of the Reprobate offers both artistic complexity and simple humor. It’s a journey full of laughs, jeers, and disgust — and at the end of the day, isn’t that all someone could want from a trip to an art museum?

Rating: 7 out of 10

— Jack Dunn

Disclosures: This game was developed and published by Joe Richardson. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 3 hours of play was devoted to the game. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game has not been rated by the ESRB, but it contains Nudity, Blood and Gore, Violence, and Strong Language. This is not a game for kids.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available for this game.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no audio cues that will affect gameplay, as the game is entirely text-based. The subtitles cannot be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are not remappable, as it only uses a mouse in the point-and-click style of play. There is no controller map.

The post Death Of The Reprobate Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.