This is one of the more interesting games I've played lately. In a world where I can't finish any games because they've become bloated messes, this is a tight, fun linear story FPS. The Half-Life and Bioshock influence is very apparent, but with it's own unique dystopian Euro twist. For a game developed by only a few people, it doesn't show it most of the time. Sure, there are a lot of common indie bugs like messy textures, some borked lights, missed sounds, and a good bit of missing optimization, but it's otherwise an incredibly impressive package.

The storytelling is great (the classic two people talking on a radio trope), backed up by some wonderful voice acting. Seriously, I never expect particularly good writing in an indie title like this, but the dialogue is actually good, engaging, and has at least a few spots of emotional impact. "Parallel dimension" is in the store description and that comes with everything you might imagine from a game inspired by Half-Life, including some truly horrifying stuff.

Seriously hoping someone sees this game, gives these devs some cash, and lets them go hog wild with a sequel. There's a real base here for an awesome one (particularly considering the exposition dump/cliffhanger ending).

For what amounts to a glorified development essay, this is one of the most well put together and interesting essays I've ever read. There's so much packed in this. It took me several hours to read all of it. So much love and care was put into this project. If you're at all interested in development at Valve, Half-Life, or Alyx, it's worth every penny.

An absolute experience of a game. Not only is it a modern Half-Life experience, which is straight freakin' magical in its own right, it's ridiculous levels of self-indulgence on Valve's part. The level of balance between all the individual features make for one of the smoothest VR experiences I've ever seen in every aspect of that, be it gameplay, story, audio, or visuals.

This is also one of the most frightening titles I've ever played, and not because it's a horror game. While it does have horror elements, just as the series always has (HL1 and to even more extent, Black Mesa, take the cake on making me want to chuck my computer across the room, especially when I fall into water), it just has this eerie tone and atmosphere that keeps you on edge quite a lot of the time. And that's not just when headcrabs are jumping at your face, like you'd expect, even the combat you feel a little scared. Alyx isn't Gordon, she's a bit more fragile and you're not this godlike scientist in an HEV suit flying through the level and loading shells into Combine soldiers. You're Alyx, and everything that comes with that, which is absolute genius. And when the game slows down and you meet the characters, you're reminded of what made the series so special.

If you don't have a VR headset, go find one, it's worth it for this one game alone. There's nothing quite like it in a regular game or VR, it's literally the culmination of everything that makes gaming so wonderful. To miss this or somehow play it in non-VR would be a disservice to yourself.

A spiritual successor to There's Poop In My Soup, this game is yet another silly game involving poop humor. While the gameplay of Soup was very simple, easy, and you take it at your own pace, this game is much faster, and actually much for difficult (I actually couldn't finish it). Most of the game involves you eating food by hitting the corresponding key quickly enough, which honestly wasn't that fun of a mechanic because there's such a huge margin for error. This kind of control would actually work really well on a mobile version of this game though, and I would hope that this and Soup get ported to mobile eventually. After "creating" the poop, then you fling it at a group of partygoers. Pretty simple, and there's actually less to do in this than Soup (Soup had a list of goals, this one is to just get a high score). This and Soup are easily just joke games and YouTuber bait, but at the base level it's a fun game to kill 20 minutes with...maybe even get a laugh or two as you smack some poor fellow in the face with a turd.

It should be noted that most people won't realize that you can add your own music to this game. So instead of listening to the royalty free tracks (I actually noticed a song with a "PremiumBeat.com" in the background, even made a joke about it, saying that I thought it said "PremiumMeat.com"), you can shove in your own tracks. Obviously you won't seen that on YouTube, as you'll get copyright problems.

Is this obviously a cash-in on the success of Soup? Totally. Does that necessarily make this game bad? No. Would I recommend for you to buy it? Sure, it's only $1. Heck, if it was on sale I'd say "what do you have to lose? $.50?" Would I recommend that you buy Soup over this game? Yeah. What about both? Sure. Rudder Game has proven that they just like making stupid humor games and they don't make crappy games. Or wait...they kind of do, don't they?

If you'd like to see some gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9vFj7FqXOA

Concrete and Steel is a sandbox game where, you guessed it, build stuff. Now, while I love creative games, this one fell short for me. I'm not sure if it's because of the pretty early state that the game is in, but I think really what did it for me was how frustrating the controls were. And in the end, it really didn't do much more than what other games already do. I kind of don't see a point in playing this when there are so many games that are exactly like this and actually perform better. So maybe you can build really cool big structures with this, but I couldn't see myself continuing to be frustrated by the controls any longer.

I generally do hope that the developers find fun ways to differentiate this game from others, because right now it doesn't feel like an improvement over games I already play.

If you want to check out some gameplay of this game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsxpFwcK7mA