Blue Prince is a puzzle game where you play as the heir of a huge mansion, exploring its rooms that change every day. Your goal is to find room 46 within a limited time, as the villa’s shifting corridors and architecture turn each day into a unique spatial puzzle. Managing keys, exploring newly discovered rooms, and trying to anticipate the changes in the villa’s floorplan are part of the experience of Blue Prince, while you look for the 46th room of the mansion.

Starting with the good, the game has an undeniable charm: the mysterious villa, the graphical style and the possibility of finding new, unexplored rooms are all great aspects of the game. The main game loop revolves around you entering the villa each day, having to choose what room (out of 3 that you draft each time) lies behind each door that you will open. This means that the floorplan will change with each playthrough, creating a weird spatial puzzle where you have to control your chances and adopt strategies to not succumb to RNG (after all, one of Machiavelli's The Prince main topics is about controlling chances with skill, so this seems fitting in a game with a very similar title). Failing to do so will stop you from progressing, usually because you opened all doors and all your corridors and rooms are dead ends.

What I appreciated the most about the game is the great exploration, especially when it came to finding new rooms: every room in this game has a special effect, meaning that new rooms also unlock new strategies. Even better, some rooms interact with each other, unlocking powerful yet hard to obtain effects. All in all, i really, really enjoyed Blue Prince's main puzzle, which didn't get old at all.

Unfortunately, the game has terrible, terrible progression. Why? Because it is very much tied to RNG. The game requires you to reach the top of the mansion (a special room called the antechamber) to do a winning run, at least for the first ending. This can be difficult by itself, because room drafting is very RNG-dependent and you may draft no rooms going in the direction you want, even if re-drafting using items multiple times. This means that you can be one step away from your goal, drowning in keys, gems and gold, and the game can (and will) slap you in the face for only having 2 retries instead of, I don't know, 5. This can be frustrating by itself if it wasn't that reaching the first ending also requires you to complete a small set of goals that are very room dependent. You didn't draft the room you needed, or maybe you did but cannot find the necessary item? Too bad, failed run for you! Tying everything to chances (room drafting, room direction, item spawns in said rooms, etc) makes Blue Prince a very frustrating game. Especially because some rooms that can help you reach your goal are not easy to draft at all (yes, I'm looking at you Greenhouse!) In my 10th of playtime, I almost reached my goal two times, planning stuff very carefully and yet failing at the very end for stupid reasons. One time the game refused to give me a room connecting left, even though I re-drafted multiple times. All of this only for me to finally (and completely randomly) have a god run and finding everything I needed with very little effort. Finding room 46 didn't give me too much satisfaction, because it just felt like luck.

Another issue with the game is that it is very slow in a bunch of actions that are repeated over and over. You dig in an item spot? Fade to black. You use an elevator that you take almost every run? Long ass animation that fades to black. Picking up an item you saw countless times already? The game will open the description every time, just in case you forgot. These are small things, and they would be ok for interactions that do not happen that often (like speaking with THE GREAT ALZARA), but otherwise they just add to the frustration.

All in all, did I have fun with Blue Prince? Yes. Did I wish I had reached the first ending by careful planning instead of lucking out? Also yes. Did I close it multiple times because the villa was insulting me with its room options? Absolutely. All in all I will not be seeking the next ending and secrets, especially because I expect them to be even harder to find out and I, for once, do not have the patience to go through this again. If I could give a neutral rating here, I would. It would be nice to be able to write an informative review without the thumb. But I can't, so negative it is :\

The Thaumaturge is a supernatural detective RPG set in early 20th-century Warsaw, where you play as Wiktor Szulski, a mystical investigator who can command demon-like entities called Salutors. While the game attempts to mix investigation mechanics with turn-based combat in an atmospheric historical setting, it unfortunately suffers from overambitious design choices that exceed the developer's execution capabilities.

Investigation System
The core investigation gameplay is disappointingly linear. Despite being advertised as an investigative experience, there's no actual deduction involved: you simply walk around clicking on random items around the map until you've collected every clue. On top of that, the point-and-click movement feels clunky and outdated, turning exploration into a tedious exercise of item hunting rather than meaningful investigation.

The most frustrating aspect is that Wiktor can only reach conclusions after finding every single clue, even when the solution is obvious to the player. This artificial progression removes any sense to investigations. Worse still, the conclusions remain identical regardless of the order you discover clues or which NPCs you interact with, making the investigation feel scripted rather than dynamic.

Combat: Complexity
The turn-based combat system feels like it was designed to appear sophisticated rather than actually be engaging. While the game provides mechanics like focus management, Salutor switching, and status effects, these elements feel unnecessarily convoluted for the uninteresting enemies you fight like random Tsarist soldiers and drunkards.

Budget spending
A significant portion of the budget appears to have been allocated to fully dubbed cutscenes with facial animations (and there are a lot of them), but the execution quality is surprisingly poor. The facial expressions look stiff and unconvincing, while the voice acting feels sometimes amateurish. This makes me wonder why the developers didn't opt for text-based dialogue without cutscenes - the saved resources could have been invested in polishing the core gameplay mechanics that desperately needed refinement.

Technical Issues in Unreal Engine 5
Running on UE5 introduces several visual problems, particularly severe ghosting effects. During heavy snowfall scenes, every snowflake leaves ghosting trails across the screen, while shadow rendering is inconsistent throughout. The only workaround is forcing DLSS4 through NVIDIA drivers, but without this fix, outdoor environments look terrible and ruin the atmospheric experience the game is trying to create.

Final Verdict
While I'm confident the story has its merits and Warsaw appears to be authentically represented, the gameplay is such a slog that I couldn't force myself to continue. The Thaumaturge feels like a passion project where the developers' ambitions exceeded their technical and design capabilities. Instead of focusing on a few core elements and executing them well, they spread themselves too thin across multiple systems that all feel half-baked.

TL;DR Split Fiction is the latest coop game from the creators of It Takes Two and A Way Out. It is an very derivative game that doesn’t understand what made It Takes Two so good and just puts up a sequence of random ideas that ultimately bring nowhere. Gone are the interesting characters of the previous game, together with the carefully balanced difficulty level and interesting level design: now we just have an extremely linear sets of levels, with mostly uninspired designs. Split Fiction could’ve been decent if released before It Takes Two, but on a direct comparison with its predecessor, it just looks like a downgrade on almost all levels.

The story
In Split Fiction you play as a couple of storywriters that anxious of getting their stories published, get trapped in “The Machine” (yup, that’s the name they picked...), a contraption made to steal ideas from their minds. In The Machine, they somehow live their stories while they’re getting stolen, but our characters are different. Due to a fight with the staff while entering the machine, they ended up in the same pod, causing glitches in the system, which they now have to chase to tear The Machine apart.

The weakest part of the story however are not even the events themselves (even though nothing is interesting about them as they are just there as an excuse for the setting of the game), but the characters. The two protagonists of this game are as flat as any character could be. The first is a “let’s be friends” yapper and the second is the exact opposite. They are so boring, you could skip every single cutscene in the game and enjoy the game just the same. Which is a shame, because the previous game had engaging dialogues: characters were not extremely originals, but at least they would keep you interested. Here you can’t wait for them to stop talking.

Gameplay and level design
Level design also took a strong hit. With a game where the ideas of a fantasy and scifi writers come to reality, I was expecting so many great things. Instead what we’ve got are the most generic fantasy and scifi tropes ever. Seriously?? Super soldier attacking an enemy base? Cyber-ninjas looking for vengeance? ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ How to train your dragon?? In all of these basic stories, the only memorable ones are (some of ) the side-stories. Here the devs probably thought they could be more daring, since sides are short, optional content, but many of them still fall flat.

Another big absence is the sort of hubs that were placed in the previous game, where you could go around, explore and interact with the environment. Here there’s just a handful and it’s one of the aspects I miss the most, as in It Takes Two it was incredibly fun to go around and do crazy stuff. Unfortunately though, not only there are no hubs in Split Fiction, but exploration is almost non-existent, with the game feeling incredibly linear.

The design of levels in general is rather dull, the devs gave up trying to make it ‘make sense’ and just placed switches, activation panels and random level elements wherever they wanted, whether it made sense or not. In don’t expect every aspect of Split Fiction to make perfect sense, but it is clear that here the design was studied only with the coop aspect in mind, giving up all coherency and visual aspects of the levels themselves: because of this, the environments where the action takes place are easily forgettable.

Graphics
The game is solidly made in UE5, meaning that graphics are pretty good (but not fenomenal) without all the issue this engine usually brings. Sutters are at a minimum and the game runs generally well. Graphical styles vary a lot based on the level, with the main stories having a bland and uninspired kind-of-realistic style and side stories opening up to more levels of craziness. The latters can be very enjoyable, but in general the graphical style of It Takes Two was more inspired. Ghosting caused to TAA is sometimes visible but generally kept to a minimum.

Take a heaping cup of store-bought assets, mix with broken platforming mechanics, and bake at max frustration until the desync makes you question reality. Serve with a generous topping of bugs and a side of disappointment.

Overview
Legion TD 2 is a tower defense/MOBA game, coming from a Warcraft 3 mod called Legion TD that was made in 2009. Unlike many tower defense games, you won’t be recruiting turrets around a specific path that the enemies will follow. Instead, you’ll be recruiting fighters in your lane that will charge the enemy to protect your king. Oh, and you can also recruit mercenaries to attack the opponents’ lanes. And have I mentioned the fact that doing that also makes you earn more gold? Legion TD 2 is a pretty complex game, so let’s unveil it in this review.

Defend. Attack. Earn. Defend…
Legion TD 2 is one of those games where a tutorial is fundamental to start playing properly without having to do hours upon hours of trial and error: luckily the game has one that covers all aspects of the game in a bearable amount of time which, considering the amount of stuff it has to explain, is not the easiest of feats. This is a title with an extremely simple concept, that is instead very complex under the hood, thanks to its many different mechanics. The grand goal of a Legion TD 2 match is easy: protect your king and kill the enemies’ one. In order to do this, you have to hire fighters to protect your lane against increasingly harder hordes of enemies. In order to recruit them, you will use gold that is earned by killing the attacking enemies and by completing waves. Pretty easy right? This is where things get messy.

Besides defending, you can also attack your opponents. This is done by hiring mercenaries using mythium, another resource that, unlike gold, is earned in time by training miners. Mercenaries will attack one specific opponent (decided at the start of the game) and, once trained, will boost the gold you earn by completing waves for the rest of the game. This opens up a myriad of possibilities, since the game offers a lot of different mercenaries that can be used in very different scenarios: the snail is the very first mercenary you’ll hire in every game, offering basically no power but boosting your initial earnings. There are tank mercenaries, and some that give you reduced income but that are more powerful in terms of attack, hp pool or even special abilities. Basically, every match follows a loop: spend gold to train fighters, which defeat enemies and earn gold. Plus, spend gold to train miners, which earn mythium, which you can use to hire mercenaries that attack your opponent AND give you a permanent gold boost on each wave.

A common strategy is to keep spending mythium on weak mercenaries to build the economy in the early game. Then, when waves get tougher, you can start saving it to send multiple stronger mercenaries in the same wave as bosses or particularly strong enemies. This also creates a very interesting carry/support strategy, since training miners costs gold, one player can focus more on attacking, while the ally can spend more gold on fighters and protect the king.

The Teammate Leaked So I Became a Plumber
Another important concept in Legion TD 2 is leaking. This game heavily relies on coordination with your teammate(s), so much so that a slightly under-performing ally can doom your game: this is particularly true in the mastermind mode (the 2v2 ranked playlist), which at times can be very frustrating. Thus, before buying Legion TD 2, I would really think about convincing a friend to get it too. But let’s get back to leaking: we say that a lane leaks when the invaders destroy all defending forces. Your lane could leak, or your friend’s or your enemies’. The important aspect of leaking is that, if properly managed, it’s not a tragedy: the different lanes do in fact converge into a single one before getting to your team’s king. Here, all the fighters that cleared their lanes are gathered, so that they can make one last defense against the leaked waves. This opens up the strategy that I was talking about in the last chapter: one player can focus on attacking the opponent and making him leak. While he does this, he focuses less on defenses because the other teammate can catch leaks for him.

Speaking of defending and fighters, while the mercenaries roster stays the same every game, the roster of defending creatures will change every game, depending on the selected game mode: in 4v4 you get to decide which roster to pick out of 8 different legions, each one having a specific and balanced set of fighters that follow the legion’s theme. In Mastermind, Legion’s ranked mode, you will instead play 2v2 and get a randomized set of fighters, with the possibility of control that randomization at the start of the game. Again, the game opens up to very different strategies, allowing you to pick the path you think will be the best: you can either go for a full random approach and get more gold right from the start, or you could try to control the randomness and lock in a fighter and gets unit rerolls. This title offers a truly incredible amount of options, which is also why I liked it so much.

Technical Side
There’s not too much to say about Legion’s technical side: this is a competition-first title that thus doesn’t rely on incredible graphics or jaw-breaking RTX effects. The graphical models are instead made to be as light on the hardware as possible, making it a title with very simple graphics. Fighters’ models follow the same rule and have very few polygons, but most of the time you will be watching them from far away, so you won’t notice it so much.

Verdict
Legion TD 2 is an incredibly technical game: you might hate it or you might love it. All I can say is that mechanics are fresh, well-implemented and the game hardly gets boring even after hours of gameplay, due to its very competitive nature and the different line-ups at the start of each match. Just be sure to buy it with a friend: every game is funnier with a friend, but this title really shines when building strategies together.

Visit SaveOrQuit.com for detailed game reviews, posted daily!