Friday, August 28, 2020

Braid

9.3/10

Braid is a puzzle-platformer with many different mechanics related to time travel. It's brilliant, original, clever and still very artistic. It showed many what indy games could be and more than 10 years later it's still a solid recommendation. Even if these days the indy games market has grown considerably I see very few approaching this level of quality. If you like puzzle games or if you want to be amazed by this game's time mechanics, I highly recommend it!



Wednesday, August 26, 2020

You Must Build A Boat

 

 7/10

 Nice little match 3 type game.Its pretty simple but there are a few subtleties. I like how the game is always positive: 

  • I never got tired of the joyful background tune.
  • You never lose rounds technically (every round rewards you with gold /resources, but you might not advance you quest).
  • The games humor is nonsensical

Go! Build a boat!




Saturday, August 8, 2020

Monster Train

 8/10

 Good strategy card game. Similar to Slay The Spire but with elements of a simple tower defense. Each turn you can add creatures to the levels of your train (it has 3 levels and "the core") or play spell with various effects. Your creatures trade blows with the enemy and the remaining enemies go up to the next level of the train. If they get to the core they can fight it (if they win you lose the game). At the end of each stage, a boss shows up. When this happens creatures on the boss's floor trade blows until either the boss dies or all your creature are wiped.

Between encounters there is phase where you get to make various choices to edit your deck. There is also often an option to make the next encounter harder by giving a specific bonus to enemies in exchange for better rewards.

There is a few things I did not understand immediately while playing the game, like which creature gets to eat morsels (some kind of buff). Its the creature at the front.

Finishing one game takes about 1 hours. You can choose 2 of 5 factions and one of 25 difficulty levels when you start. Cards are progressively unlocked for future games and there is a lot of randomness so its expected that every game will be different.

I made it to the 17th difficulty level I was starting to find that the way the difficulty in increased isn't always very fun. One example is that the game adds dead weight cards to your deck, this feels very random. It feels like many strategy which were valid at the beginning of the game are not valid anymore, unles you get a specific item. The quality of items vary greatly and most of them don't enable a specific strategy. You get a bunch of random cards at the very beginning of the games and sometimes it feels like you are getting a very bad start.

Otherwise the game is very original and kept surprising me many hours in. I recommend it to fans of games like Slay The Spire. Its very similar and surprisingly different at the same time.