This one’s a keeper. As a long-time fan of business sim games like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Game Dev Tycoon, Tavern Keeper hits a sweet spot between micromanaging (you can tweak everything from staff shifts to the price of magazines), creative customization (functional furniture sticks to a grid while decorations can be put anywhere), and sitting back to watch the chaos (events are listed chronologically in a Civ-style, and important ones take you out of fast-forwarding). You can tell the devs have put a lot of time and thought into the systems and how they work, and it shows in a fun game overflowing with personality.

The core game is solid, and I’ve only scratched the surface so far, but as an early access game, it still needs a little polish. The UI can be unintuitive at times; I’ve found myself hunting for a button more than once, but they have an extensive tooltip and help system that hasn’t let me down yet. Once I know where a menu is and how to use it, they are pretty easy to get used to. Other early access oddities I’ve encountered are the occasional overlapping dialogue or events, but nothing has outright broken or crashed the game yet. It’s in an excellent state overall.

One aspect I haven’t seen explored to such depth before in other sandboxy games is the story and atmosphere. A lot of games give you themes to choose from to build and decorate as you wish, but Tavern Keeper leans hard into the stereotypical tavern and fantasy tropes in the best way, often making fun of itself, and always feeling cohesive no matter how bad your creative skills are. There is a fantastic narrator for all the campaigns, and story events regularly pop up to advance the plot, flesh out a named patron, or throw a wrench into your perfectly optimized tavern.

I’ve been waiting for Greenheart Games to release a follow-up to Game Dev Tycoon for so long, and the result is better than I could have hoped for. Highly recommended in its current state, and it’ll only get better as early access goes on.

As much as I wanted to love Ryza, I never fell in love with it as much as I did with previous Atelier games. It's unpolished gameplay suffers from a mishmash of systems that aren't well thought out and that don't complement each other well. The story is a fun romp with a mischievous protagonist and anime-standard side characters. Unfortunately I never felt engaged in the story and all of the characters were too stereotyped to be interesting.

Overall Ryza isn't a bad game, it just isn't good either.

Fun game with lots of charm. The silly and comical writing, combined with the cartoonish visuals and ridiculous gameplay combine to elevate the game above a silly indie game to a polished gem.

Let me start by saying that AI: The Somnium Files has its fair share of issues and isn't for everyone, yet I love it anyway. This review also isn't going to tell you weather you will like this game or not; I think if you read the description and skim a trailer or two, you will have a pretty good idea if the game is for you or not, so this review is instead instead to help those who are intrested but want a second opinion. Also there is no spoilers here.

The best part of the game are the amazing characters. Their over-the-top designs and zany personalities is on-par with the best Ace Attorney games. The simple conversations the characters have while they drive from one location to the next is more than enough to put a smile on my face, let alone when the drama starts heating up.

The Japanese voice acting is also top notch (I played the game with Japanese dub, so I can't vouch for the English voice actors). When I started the game, I was lukewarm towards the voice acting, but after I started getting familiar with the characters, I realized what I originally interpreted as a dull performance was just the voice actors leaving room to energize when the characters get excited.

I am of the opinion that highly stylized storytelling is far more compelling than trying to be realistic, and this game is the most over-the-top game I've played since Dark Dreams Don't Die. With dirty jokes flying left and right, totally unbelievable fight scenes, and the Sci-Fi turned up to anime, it's impressive that everything still feels cohesive and in-world. The world building is right up there along with the characters as a highlight of the game.

The worst part of the game is it's mediocre translation. It's not bad by any stretch, but the occasional spelling and grammar mistakes are noticeable. This game also has a lot of Japanese pop culture references that don't translate well, so most of them were glossed over in translation, turning many silly lines into confusing non sequiturs.

I don't think this spoils anything of consequence, but it is a spoiler. If you've played any of the Zero Escape games by the same director, than you may have guessed what this is about. Yes, there are parallel world lines shinanigens here as well, but unlike the Zero Escape games, there is no attempt to explain any of it. For such a critical plot point to be completely ignored, especially when they give and strike down a perfectly good hand-wavy explanation in-game, is lazy and insulting to the player.

One unforgivable technical oversight happens when during one climatic moment out of the whole game, the English voice acting is used when it's set to Japanese. I can't tell you how much it brought me out of the moment to sudinly hear different voice actors at a critical point in the game. To me this is another sign of a lazy translation, especially when I found out that setting the game to Japanese in Steam (but not in the game) lets you hear the original Japanese version.


There is a lot to this game. At about 30 hours to complete, this game has me torn between love and hate. But at the end of the day, I had a thoroughly good time in a silly whirlwind of a murder mystery that was unlike any game I've played before.

I came to this game as a fan of the director's previous work on the Zero Escape series, so I am probably more prone to bias towards liking this game than most. But to give you an idea of the sort of games I'm partial to, here is a short list of similar games I've played vaguely ordered from games I like the best to least.

• Ghost Trick (one of the best games ever made)
  
• VA-11 Hall-A (some of the best character writing in a VN)
  
• Ace Attorney Series (I love them all)
  
• Dark Dreams Don't Die (please finish the story, I'm begging you!)
  
• Zero Escape Series (I like the first two, but I'm really not fond of Zero Time Dilemma)
  
• Danganronpa Series (fun games, but not fantastic)
  
• Life is Strange (lots of potential, but mangled end)
  
• The Walking Dead Season 1 (ok, but zombie apocalypse isn't my cup of tea)

The Missing is an odd game, not just in its story, but in the overall presentation. Take the gameplay for example, the puzzle mechanics are unique and lead to some really cool and mind blowing puzzles that I really enjoyed, but at the same time some puzzles are just annoying or repetitive to complete and don't do anything new with the mechanics. The whole game is like this, with some parts being fantastic while others are barebones or tacked on.

If you want to play a unique and weird experience with some spectacular highs, and are willing to look past some rough edges, I wholeheartedly recommend The Missing. Just don't expect the levels of polish Limbo or Inside has.

If you like Ace Attorney, Aviary Attorney offers similar gameplay but with branching paths and a story that will make you ponder what the "right" choice is. Highly recommend for any Ace Attorney fan.

If you have no idea what Ace Attorney is or want more details, Aviary Attorney is primarily a visual novel style game where the story is portrayed through text (there is no voice overs). The story is fun but with a serious undertone that becomes more relevant in later cases. While I have some nitpicks about the story, overall it is strong and worth every minute of it.

Where Aviary Attorney differentiates itself from similar text-based games is in its branching narrative and management systems. Anything from how you interact with a possible witness to how you spend your in-game days can and does impact the outcome of the story in meaningful ways. The game doesn't hold back either, leaving the outcome of each trial in your hands and easy to mess up.

Being an avid Ace Attorney fan, I expected this game to be more of the same, but after playing it I came away impressed with Aviary Attorney in its own right. I fully recommend it to anyone who likes story-based games.

Everyone has at least one game that they love to death but that they know will never get the attention (or sequel) it deserves, well Dark Dreams Don't Die is added to my list along with masterpieces like Ghost Trick and VA-11 Hall-A. D4 is a strange and wonderful adventure that is unlike anything I have ever played.

If you like surreal stories that are fun and unique, you will like D4. My one caveat is the game is really both short and incomplete, so I recommend not buying the game for anything more than $5.

This is one of the best games I have played in a long time. It leaves me with a warm fluffy feeling in my heart, a feet that is increasingly rare in games today. Valhalla has such lovely characters and such a well made story that everything fits right into place to create a lovely game that will make you smile.

I was drawn to this game for two reasons: first I thoroughly enjoyed Nidhogg (developed by the same people), and second I love execution based gameplay like Dustforce or Trackmania where you replay a level over and over trying to perfect it, but unfortunately Flywrench lands far from the fun experience of hitting the retry button while telling yourself “I won’t mess up this time!”. Instead the “flywrench” you play as is hard to control, the smallest misstep leads to an unrecoverable death, and the levels become ruthlessly unforgivable at the end, but beyond any mechanical fault, the game simply wasn't fun for me in the same way as Dustforce or Trackmania is.

The basic goal of the game is to navigate small quick levels by flapping your flywrench to stay aloft while using the joystick to glide from side to side. The levels start off pretty simple but quickly expand with different mechanics, the most prominent being dodging purple barriers while pressing certain buttons to pass through colored barriers. But unfortunately not matter how much I played, I could never control the flywrench to the proficiency needed to precisely navigate stages without touching a barrier or the walls (which starts bouncing you all over the place and is nearly impossible to recover from before you hit something that will kill you), it feels like a precision platformer with terribly unresponsive controls.

When I first started playing, I didn’t mind the controls so much because the levels were really short and there wasn't much that could kill you, but about halfway through, the levels started getting longer and the path that you need to navigate smaller, but I still persevered hoping something would click and that I would eventually get better, but any improvement I showed was far outstripped by the ramp in difficulty of the levels until I gave up after completing every level up to 19/21 Mercury. And that was it, I couldn't win those last three levels and couldn't muster any interest to keep trying; I wasn't having any fun, so I quit.

Overall the game has some potential if you are into really hard and unforgiving games, but most of the time when I died, I didn’t feel it was my fault. Instead it felt like it was the the difficult controls and the unforgiving level design that was to blame, this made it frustrating to play. When I did manage to complete a level it felt like it was due to luck more than any skill on my part, sapping any sense of achievement from winning and not providing any incentive to continue on. So unless you really know you are the kind of person who loves throwing themselves at insurmountable challenges, I recommend passing this game bye. There are other games in the Steam, there is bound to be another that will love you back, beacause Flywatch sure won’t.