Recent reviews by DRIFTER

✅ Eye catching pixel graphics
✅ Nice animations & overlays
✅ Controls are responsive

❌ One single stage
❌ Endless mode only
❌ Three enemies in total
❌ Waves differ only by length
❌ Level ups are meaningless
❌ No score, no ranking, no purpose to play for
❌ No replayability

In short, Castle Reborn falls strongly under the category of "looks good on the outside, but empty on the inside." The game doesn't have any actual content beyond a few minutes of button mashing, after which it devolves into a pointless exercise of how long you can last. Even if you like skill based endurance challenges, there wasn't any quality control done on the product.

How do I know? Here's the trick: Run all the way left, face right, spam Z, and fire X (giant wave) to clear the screen when your blue bar fills. Doing this you are literally unkillable. Enemies cannot spawn from beyond the border, nothing tempts you to turn around, and the hulking executioner can't even reach you with his swipes. Sprinkle on top the complete lack of enemy variety, additional stages, or story, and you have a product that jeers both the player and the store that allows it to be sold.

Too harsh? Sorry, not sorry. The issue is that these bare-minimum effort apps have a very specific footprint, and show up in the same places. Low cost bundles, giveaways for like-follow-subscribe, and grey market vendors selling them for pennies on the dollar. It's a seedy economy that has existed since the end of Greenlight, and continues to fester. Consider the game - and the developer catalog - at risk of removal if Valve ever realizes their mistake.

Achievement Hunters: Use the strategy posted above to complete all achievements in ~5 min.

This game is a carbon copy of the similarly-named "Berries Challenge," so the contents of my review are largely repeated here.

Mushroom represents one of the latest iterations of Steam shovelware, cobbled together with easily obtainable assets and little to no care for the user experience. The game's starting screen serves as both a flimsy tutorial and an upgrade menu, telling you each bloom's value and teasing you with things to buy to presumably make better gains. But, spoiler: They don't really do anything.

Upon clicking start, you'll be spawned in a dense woodlands, with nothing but a basket. You must click and hold this basket as you walk around in search of tiny little shrooms hidden among the grass. Clicking on one will pluck it, after which you can put it in the basket or eat it. Eating it is meant to serve the purpose of restoring stamina in hardcore mode. Of course, this comes at a cost: Getting high. These shrooms are poisonous (maybe)!

Returning to the truck is how to cash out your run, and with your newfound wealth you can buy a bigger basket, a knife (that does nothing but add a passive point multiplier), stones to create trails if you venture out too far, a horn, and a dog. The horn teases us about enemies in the game (wolves), but I couldn't find a single one. Your pet points you in the direction of more psychedelics... And that's about it. None of these are necessary.

While the game is playable, it's not fun. Other miscellaneous observations:

• The game loses focus each time you start, so your mouse desyncs. Try clicking over the black text box to continue.
  
• Clicking Menu after completing a run instead restarts a new run. You need to ESC and select Menu once more.
  
• You can clip or run off the map and get stuck in infinite freefall, there are no borders
  
• No objects (besides the truck) have collision. You can phase through the trees

TL;DR - Overpriced asset flip with easy achievements. Get it if you're a collector, but only if discounted all the way. Otherwise, pass. Consider all of the challenge games at risk of removal, if valve QC audits them.

Achievement Hunters: Pick one of each fungi. <1min to 100%, use easy mode to spawn butterflies, revealing their locations.

This game is a carbon copy of the similarly-named "Berries Challenge," so the contents of my review are largely repeated here.

Flower represents one of the latest iterations of Steam shovelware, cobbled together with easily obtainable assets and little to no care for the user experience. The game's starting screen serves as both a flimsy tutorial and an upgrade menu, telling you each bloom's value and teasing you with things to buy to presumably make better gains. But, spoiler: They don't really do anything.

Upon clicking start, you'll be spawned in a dense woodlands, with nothing but a basket. You must click and hold this basket as you walk around in search of tiny little flowers hidden among the foliage. Clicking on a flower will pluck it, after which you can put it in the basket or eat it. Eating it is meant to serve the purpose of restoring stamina in hardcore mode. Of course, this comes at a cost - blinding color filters which resemble psychedelics. These plants are actually drugs!

Returning to the truck is how to cash out your run, and with your newfound wealth you can buy a bigger basket, a knife (that does nothing but add a passive point multiplier), stones to create trails if you venture out too far, a horn, and a sheep. Sheep have a nose for flowers? TIL. The horn teases us about enemies in the game (wolves), but I couldn't find a single one. Your pet points you in the direction of more flowers... And that's about it. None of these are necessary.

While the game is playable, it's not fun. Other miscellaneous observations:

• The game loses focus each time you start, so your mouse desyncs. Try clicking over the black text box to continue.
  
• Clicking Menu after completing a run instead restarts a new run. You need to ESC and select Menu once more.
  
• You can clip or run off the map and get stuck in infinite freefall, there are no borders
  
• No objects (besides the truck) have collision. You can phase through the trees
  
• There is a draw distance on flowers, so you will see them pop in and out of view

TL;DR - Overpriced asset flip with easy achievements. Get it if you're a collector, but only if discounted all the way. Otherwise, pass. Consider all of the challenge games at risk of removal, if valve QC audits them.

Achievement Hunters: Pick one of each flower. <1min to 100%, use easy mode to spawn butterflies, revealing their locations.

I try to approach every game with an open mind, regardless of personal preferences, but The Life of One Dog is a true test of patience. From it lazy use of prepackaged RPG Maker assets, to recycled open source music, to less than 10 minutes of runtime from start to finish, it's clear how little effort was made to try to craft an enjoyable experience.

The "game" is a series of rapid-fire vignettes of a pup's encounters across its lifetime, from adoption, to abuse, to homelessness, to pit fighting, and finally to making the ultimate sacrifice. Perhaps there was an actual story behind this, but it's presented so quickly there's no time to form any emotional attachments with its inhabitants, no choices to make and feel the weight of the consequences from, no takeaway or life lesson to glean from it.

There are very few occasions you must click to move the dog from one screen to another, but the dramatization largely progresses with no input from you - it even continues playing when out of focus. There's a puzzling scene where the game has dogs attacking you in a fighting ring, displaying what looks like directional inputs, but no keys produce any response. Was this intentional? Was the dog trying to lose the fights? Dunno, it's too incoherent to decipher an overarching theme or purpose, and oh, we're already in another scene. Oops, we're already at the credits. OneDog.exe has closed.

You get an achievement for sitting through the entire thing, but even so, the game is profile restricted so it doesn't count for anything.

I have no issue with cheap games, easy achievement games, or RPG Maker games. But please, make a rewarding, emotionally compelling, or visually impressive experience that gives me something to justify dumping money into. This application feels like a test of just how low the bar goes for a game to earn a store page, which apparently, is not much.

Achievement Hunters: Complete the game. Self explanatory. <10 mins to 100%

The game spawns you into a preset map with roughly 6 rooms connected by two outer hallways, littered with garbage and hospital gurneys. Wait, I thought we were in a laundromat? So why are there desks, showers, and toilets? Best not to think about these things, and get to work. Your only direction is a fly by message to "collect 10 notes," which all say HELP (Because we all know that collecting pieces of paper is the key to save us from a madman).

What the game doesn't tell us is what any FPS gamer should already know: Shift to run, space to jump. I admit, I didn't know I could run for the first attempt, and wasted plenty of extra time kiting Mr. Clown. Another vital piece of information the game doesn't disclose is that there is a reason to turn off your flashlights. Apparently, the notes glow in the dark. Since they're the exact same color as everything else in the game, spotting them with the lights on can be tricky if you're in a rush not to get swatted.

Once you collect 'em all, run back to the starting point and be rewarded with... THE END. Yep, that's it. You'll then see a black screen with a RELOADING message, but the game keeps running behind it. I waited long enough to see what happens, and I could make out the sounds of the clown catching up and killing me. Gee, thanks game.

TL;DR - A lazy Unity asset flip that's worth maybe 5 minutes of playtime. You'll never touch it again once you finish it. Avoid.

Achievements: Idle 100 seconds for 100%. Doesn't matter if you die. Restricted, so doesn't add to profile stats.

These games are literal clones of each other, so my reviews for them will be largely repeated as well.

Knights' theme is armored cosplay, the very same that line castle corridors. Each level uses one image, first cut into 9 squares, then into 36. Rotate each square by clicking on it, until it's in the proper orientation, and rinse and repeat for 15 stages.

I take no issue with cheap puzzle games, as there are plenty on Steam, but this one is hideously priced for the content and quality. To add insult to injury, it's virtually indistinguishable from the other entries in the same series - could the developer not be bothered to vary the UI or mechanics?

Of course not: These games are part of a bizarre ecosystem that Steam has created, often featured as promotional giveaways for like, follow, and subscribe tasks. Whatever you do, don't pay for this one, search around and you can probably find it for free. Although it doesn't break any overt rules, I wouldn't be surprised if Steam finds reason to remove it, whether for review manipulation, achievement spam, or grey market key shop sales bypassing the platform. If you absolutely must buy it here, don't buy it outside the Portfolio bundle. Note this app is restricted, so it doesn't add to profile stats.

N.B.: This app has somehow added item drops. Apparently, playing it for a few hours can earn inventory drops from the badge store featured above, but I don't have the patience to test it. Beware that if you do try to roll for them, you may not be able to delete them, and be stuck with more inventory clutter. Better to check steam market (not the app's store) for dirt cheap copies if you really must collect 'em all.

Achievement Hunters: Launch the game. 1 min to 100%

These games are literal clones of each other, so my reviews for them will be largely repeated as well.

Elven Princess' theme is fantasy cosplay, your ordinary day at the Renaissance Fair. Each level uses one image, first cut into 9 squares, then into 36. Rotate each square by clicking on it, until it's in the proper orientation, and rinse and repeat for 15 stages.

I take no issue with cheap puzzle games, as there are plenty on Steam, but this one is hideously priced for the content and quality. To add insult to injury, it's virtually indistinguishable from the other entries in the same series - could the developer not be bothered to vary the UI or mechanics?

Of course not: These games are part of a bizarre ecosystem that Steam has created, often featured as promotional giveaways for like, follow, and subscribe tasks. Whatever you do, don't pay for this one, search around and you can probably find it for free. Although it doesn't break any overt rules, I wouldn't be surprised if Steam finds reason to remove it, whether for review manipulation, achievement spam, or grey market key shop sales bypassing the platform. If you absolutely must buy it here, don't buy it outside the Portfolio bundle. Note this app is restricted, so it doesn't add to profile stats.

Achievement Hunters: Launch the game. 1 min to 100%

After leaving his production company and trying to strike it out on his own, our nameless male lead finds himself down on his luck, ready to throw in the towel. That is until one day, for reasons never explained in the game, a character from within an adult novel materializes in the real world and demands he make her into the world's biggest star. Oh, and he has three years to do this before the miracle ends and she vanishes for good... unless you get the good ending, anyway.

Your actions are limited to training her core stats, buying items that also boost stats, working (such as ads, movies, or odd jobs), and "missions" that are basically the same thing but on a timer, granting better rewards and story progression. Basically, it's up to you to juggle what to do and when to do it, within the confines of a three year window. As is common in these genre of sim games, nothing is really spelled out, because it's up to you to learn as you go, deciphering what few things really matter to achieve that happy end.

As it turns out, try as you might, there's no actual way to get that route in the first playthrough. That is to say, the deck is stacked against you: Super Star isn't a game of strategy, it's a game of luck. Every action you take is governed by an invisible coinflip whose odds are kept hidden. The game tells you that to perform a certain task, you need a certain core stat, but should you aim higher that that? Don't know. No matter how high you drive that stat, you'll still meet with occasional failure. You can't lose the game, but you can fail to achieve certain tiers of popularity, affecting both the ending and the gems you receive on replay.

You see, completing the game awards you with game-breaking currency called gems, that buy permanent upgrades trivializing a lot of the unfair RNG the game throws at you. One upgrade halves the time it takes to finish jobs, and another halves the cash cost of all training and shopping. Without these, it's literally impossible to do everything in the time cap and achieve super stardom.

This is really where I find the most fault with the game. Management should be about strategy, making choices that matter, seeing your plans pay dividends. That's simply not the case here. The gameplay loop is to rush the ending, restart, buy out all the premium items, and then spam "golden touch," a third currency that insta-completes 100% success. It's a time sink to clickity click through as many menus as fast as possible until you trigger a series of cutscenes and deplete your time limit. There are other issues too, like a confusing machine translation that could have used a native proofreader, and general buggy-ness of event triggers that may waste precious time, but these would be easily forgivable if the core gameplay was strong.

It's not clear why it was removed from sale, but hopefully it serves as a stepping stone to better games from this developer. Compliments to the artist behind the backgrounds and characters, they were really well done.

Achievement Hunters: ~5hr min? to 100%. At least one playthrough is required to unlock the stopwatch and 1/2 cost upgrades, the others may not be necessary.

There's one unexplained secret to completing the game, which is this: Don't buy any shop items and avoid stat upgrades outside of training early on. Once you hit around 7500 of a stat, you can no longer manually boost it, which can lock you out of the >9000 needed for top tier tasks. Only focus on tasks that have presents, which are items that boost stats even further, and complete the last 2 of every ad, movie, and recording. Those should, in turn, trigger the final superstar tier needed for 100%. You can ignore the "tour" series of quests altogether, they are a time sink.

Since Steam forces a rating, choosing recommended on the basis of how much better this version is than the original, but this review is intended to be informational.

Woodle Deluxe is a souped-up version of the original Woodle Tree released some years ago. Tree was a functional game, but an unquestionably amateur one: Camera frustrations, slippery physics, flat shaders, lack of shadows, and odd default keybinds were just a few things that made the game sloppy, but all of it has been addressed in this revision. Graphically, it's night and day, as it now supports high res, fullscreen borderless, sharper shadows, and a gentle bloom filter that makes the colors pop. The controls feel tighter, fixing some platforming frustrations (with the exception of how ice levels handle momentum), and the keybinds more logical, with attack and camera bound to mouse, making it far easier to aim.

The core game is unchanged: A collectathon of magical water droplets scattered across 8 stages (+2 bonus), equipping you with just a jump and a melee attack that can be upgraded to ranged with an optional collectible currency. None of the enemies pose much challenge, being easily kited or ignored altogether, and there are no bosses to speak of. The game takes about an hour to finish, and a little more if you try the optional stages, or go for the game's 3k berry achievement.

Lack of difficulty aside, if I were to criticize anything about the game, it would be the level design. The bonus levels were far larger and more interesting than any of the original ones. I would have liked to see all of them as large as Bonus 2, with multiple routes, perhaps hidden collectibles and puzzles. It wouldn't have had to be complex puzzles with switches and levers, either - even simple mazes or weighted platforms would have been enough to incorporate within the current architecture. The bonus levels gave evidence that the developer is capable of greater things, so it's a shame all levels didn't receive the same treatment.

While overly simple, this is budget indie is hardly the worst Steam has to offer. It contains original character designs, logical level design, and no game breaking bugs or glitches. As it's hard enough to find wholesome entertainment for very young children, Deluxe is a perfect choice for picky parents, and for that reason I really can't find fault with it. Wait for a sale, or grab it as part of the platformer bundle for more kid-friendly games.

Achievement Hunters: Complete the game and collect 3k berries. Unlike the original there's no bonus berries for collecting water drops. I used the Bonus stage 2 since it has large lines of closely-packed collectibles. After running the central circuit, exit and restart the stage to save some time. ~1.5hr to 100%

This review has been modified from the original to reflect a few differences from the older apps.

What you see in the screenshots is exactly what you get: A single 4x4 grid with randomized pairs, repeated for (supposedly, I did not have the patience) 80 stages in total. Your score depends on how quickly you complete them. There's no penalty for time out or mistakes, other than a potentially negative score. Each of these series entries vary only by a couple of sprites, resulting in barely distinguishable clones.

Unlike its earlier installments, this one did not evade the restricted status and achievement limitations, so it will not count for library totals or completed games on your profile. So really, there's no actual benefit for owning it.

These games show up regularly in gleam giveaways and other "like, follow, subscribe" promos, as well as cheap keyshops outside of Steam. If you insist on buying it here, you'll overpay for an easy, invisible achievement completion. Consider that Valve has wiped the platform of similar games for lesser offenses, so if QC ever gets around to inspecting these, your investment could be for nothing.

Achievement Hunters: 1 min to 100%. Since it only has one achievement, it's quick and painless without any freezing seen in the 5K total games.