Recent reviews by Ragnar

Simply the best deck building game I've ever played.

You climb the tower one floor at a time, fight increasingly stronger enemies and bosses, and may add a card to your deck after every encounter (as well as run into stores, campfires to heal or upgrade, or special events).

From this simple premise you have a huge variety of possible combinations which means that each trip through the Spire is unique. Just with the Ironclad class you could have an offensive deck that just attacks all the time, a defensive deck that can't get hurt, a strength deck that makes you more and more powerful as the fight goes on, an infinite deck, or some combination of the above, and all are viable. And then you have two (soon three) additional classes with their own decks that play completely differently.

But the most fun part of StS is not building towards an archetype (which doesn't work all that well, to be honest) but instead building a solid deck that combines everything that's available to you and builds on what you already have. One runs I might fight every Elite I could to get more cards and relics, and the next run I may avoid Elites because I am too weak or low on health, and both runs can be successful if I build my deck right.

Every run is different, every run is interesting, every run is challenging, and every run is fun. There's a huge skill ceiling, and lots of room for improvement. There are cards that I thought were terrible that I learned were actually amazing, and cards I thought were amazing that I rarely take now as I realized there are better alternatives.

I didn't believe the hype around this game, but I was wrong - it's every bit as good as everyone said it was, and now I can't stop playing.

Some unfortunate design decisions keep this from being a good game. Not only does this game not respect your time, it is designed to waste it.

On the positive, I love the art style - the character and enemy designs are simply gorgeous, and the backgrounds are often very pretty as well. The premise is interesting, and I like the gameplay structure of exploring labyrinths, finding bosses, and defeating those bosses to progress and level up. The class system is very versatile, and the turn-based combat can be pretty fun.

On the downside, the game is punishing - not hard, just punishing. When a character gets knocked out in battle, they die and lose a life point. You can resurrect them back in town, but this takes about an hour of in-game dungeon exploring during which the character will be unavailable - when creating characters at the beginning, you better make a second copy of each character because you'll need it. Of course your secondary backup character will be lower level, but it's better than nothing. But when the character is finally resurrected, they'll still be down a life point, and characters only have 1-3 life points - when they lose their last life point, they're dead for good and cannot be brought back. You can recover a life point, but this takes about 4-7 hours of in game dungeon exploring, during which time that character is unavailable. So when a character gets knocked out, not only do you need to bring them back to town, but then you have to do without them for the next 5-7 hours of combat. If multiple characters get knocked out, you're then facing the choice of re-loading and losing however much progress you've made since then or spending 5-7 hours with a weak backup party grinding for loot and levels.

You'd figure that you could just play defensively and avoid character death, but the game doesn't work that way. The fight difficulty is like an EKG - flat lines followed by huge spikes. Standard enemy encounters will be trivially easy, with you beating several enemies without taking any damage. Then you encounter a boss, and the boss attacks 2-3 times a turn and can 2-shot any of your characters - if the boss hits the same character twice in one turn, they're dead. Later in the game enemies and bosses get one-hit-kills which will one-shot any character if the attack connects, and even party-wide auto-kill attacks.

Even among the standard enemy encounters, the game loves to occasionally throw enemies at you that are twice the level of everything else and will destroy you. A dungeon will be full of level 10-14 enemies that are trivial to defeat - the game features a "repeat last attack orders" button and a "fast forward to end of combat" button for a reason - but occasionally you'll encounter level 20 enemies. Sometimes these enemies look different, so that you'll notice, and other times they'll look exactly the same - the same exact Orcs that you've been killing without a second thought, except these will instead kill you. Better check the level of the enemy in each and every combat before you begin.

Unfortunately, levels sometimes mean nothing. As level 4-5 characters you will be killing level 10-14 enemies without taking a scratch. Then you'll come across a level 11 enemy in that same dungeon that has 10 times the armor and deals 10 times the damage of the other level 10 enemies. Only trial and error will tell you if this new level 11 enemy is as weak as all the other level 11 enemies or as strong as a boss and will 2-shot any of your characters or AoE the whole party for 1/3 of their health.

The class system is backwards, in that once you change out of a class you stop earning levels in that class, so a character you want to end up as a wizard should start as a cleric (or even a knight or dancer).

You'll want to min-max your characters from the very beginning, making your party 40 years old and your main character 60 years old for 3 and 6 extra stat points from the start (equivalent to 3-6 extra levels), and hitting the re-roll button over and over and over again to get 2-3 extra stat points. But even doing that, and putting points into Vitality for extra health, you characters will die to bosses, and you'll end up having to grind while they recover or grind to out-level and out-gear the content. And this was on the "Beginner" difficulty - I don't even want to know what "Normal" is like.

And the gear - your main way of increasing your strength - is random. It's random both in terms of what equipment you get - a ton of thrown weapons and magic wands when you want melee weapons, cloth armor when you want plate mail - and what quality - will that chest of swords contain broadswords or broken knives? And getting gear requires going into a dungeon, going to specific ambush sites, ambushing enemies to get loot, then leaving the dungeon and repeating. To get stronger, you have to grind for gear and hope to get lucky.

Etrian Odyssey handles these systems in a much better way. Knocked out characters have to be carried back to town leaving the party weak and vulnerable, but then you can revive them without having to waste hours grinding while they recover. When you multi-class, you can gain new skills in either class at each new level, without having to leave your original class behind. Enemies scale linearly without huge spikes - you know when you go to a new level that enemies will be harder, but they won't be impossibly hard. Every fight is challenging, you don't just auto-pilot your way through standard enemy encounters until you've progressed well beyond them. The bosses and mini-bosses are clearly marked so there's no surprise like one on-level enemy in a dungeon being 10 times stronger than all the others. And each new enemy you slay gives you materials to craft new equipment, taking the randomness out of character progression and getting new loot.

So unless you enjoy spending hours grinding for gear while your characters recover, pass on this game - as gorgeous as the character designs are - and play something else that isn't designed to waste your time.

A delightful visual novel with some RPG elements and tons of choices.

Magical Diary: Horse Halls has you beginning magical school as someone who just learned about magic and that they've got it. It does feel a lot like Harry Potter the visual novel, if Harry was female and had a lot of romance options.

As a student, you get to make lots of choices. This could be what to do with your time - such as which of the five schools of magic you will study - or it could be who you want to romance. There are lots of smaller interesting choices, such as running for class office, joining a secret society, etc. You plan your schedule every week, and encounter events as they appear.

The magic you learn may give you additional options during events, and will be the key for solving the game's tests - where you're thrown into a first-person dungeon and must use your magical prowess and smarts to get out again. The tests are the game at some of its most creative, as your school of magic absolutely influences your approach - red magic may have to brute force its way out by burning everything down with fire, while a sufficiently capable blue magic could just teleport herself out of the dungeon.

When you're not learning magic, you may chose to be out romancing people. Your romance options are pretty vast. You may romance girls, boys, professors, demons... You have some options.

What most surprised me is how much branching there is in the game. One playthrough saw me join a secret society, another saw me run for class office and get elected, a third had me making out with a fairy, and a fourth had me expelled from the school. The game absolutely warrants multiple playthroughs, and even playing it four times I feel like I'm just scratching the surface of what content is hidden away in the game.

A delightful choose-your-own-adventure movie.

Good writing, good editing, and great acting combine to make a very enjoyable thriller, where your choices determine the story and outcome and the plot branches and interweaves in myriads of ways. The interactive aspects are seamlessly integrated with perfectly smooth transitions which make it feel like the movie anticipates your choices and keeps playing as if you never made a choice, and only on subsequent playthroughs with different choices do you realize how much you're actually changing.

A single playthrough will take about 75-90 minutes, though you'll likely want to play again. My first attempt ended in being framed for murder, which certainly wasn't ideal.

The main downside is that, due to the myriad of choices and the way they shape the narrative going forward, you have to start each playthrough from the beginning, and thus sit through the same content you've seen before. There are often several ways to get to the same point, but it does make replaying 75-minute-long the game seem a bit of a chore without a convenient way to skip to the next decision point as you have in visual novels. Also, one particular section of one possible route seemed to have some editing issues where the sequence wasn't as smooth as everything else, and it was a non-interactive sequence, so I'm not sure where the issue came from, but it was limited to that brief 2 minute section.

Euro Truck Simulator is a slow burn, but once it hooks you, it doesn't let go.

A game about driving a truck sounds boring, and I was dubious myself, but the game's pacing is well done to make it both relaxing and engaging. At first there's so much stuff to consider while driving a truck and towing a trailer - turning radius, trailer width, guard rails, other traffic, etc - it's almost overwhelming. But then it becomes second nature, and it becomes relaxing. You alternate between the relaxing bliss of driving along the road and soaking in the scenery and the chaos of navigating cities, construction sites, accidents, etc.

Once you have the basics down, it becomes a pure joy. Every new delivery could mean a beautiful new sight along the way, and combined with the progression mechanics it makes for a very addictive "just one more" experience. ETS 2 is the game I fire up to relax and unwind, and it's the game I can't put down once I start.

I played on a Logitech G29 wheel and shifter, and I highly recommend it for a better, more immersive experience. If you're using a Logitech wheel, I highly recommend getting the Logitech FFB plugin for ETS 2 - it greatly improves the feedback.

Fun and creative RTS with a good campaign and a bizzare difficulty curve.

Halo Wars is lighthearted and fun, and constantly creative. Instead of the same missions over and over again, it constantly changes things up to keep the game fresh and the gameplay interesting. You have base building missions, escort missions, boss battles, etc. Every mission feels different, fresh, and exciting. I can't think of an RTS campaign that has a higher variety of missions, settings, and objectives.

Halo Wars feels best played with a controller, which is a weird thing to say about an RTS. This largely comes down to it being designed around a controller, and having a poor mouse implementation (aiming specials with the mouse is an excersize in frustration).

The difficulty curve, however, is very strange. It starts out really easy in the first few missions, then it immediately gets challenging and hard for the next several missions, and then it gets easier again, and the last 1/3 of the campaign is as easy as the beginning. The final mission is challenging mostly in how unclear it is about what you're supposed to do and how to actually do it. I failed it my first time through because I couldn't figure out what it wanted me to do. Once I figured that out, I was able to easily beat it in half the alloted time.

The campaign took me about 7.5 hours to play through, but it was a fun and engaging time from start to finish.

If you're looking for a single-player RTS campaign, I recommend Halo Wars. You just may want to have a controller at the ready.

A middling to decent visual novel buried beneath an overly long, repetitive, and grindy stat management game.

How repetitive is the stat management game? Just look at the achievements:
"Visit a place 400 times."
"Raise a stat, 2 at a time, to 1000."

The stat management part tells you about upcoming challenges, but doesn't tell you how high each stat needs to be to pass, sometimes doesn't even tell you which stat is being tested, and there's an added element of randomness to passing the stat checks.

I commend the developers for including 5 different difficulties - ranging from almost impossible to fail to almost impossible to succeed - but the stat management part feels 3-4 longer than it should be. Some of the routes only have 3-4 visual novel scenes in a month, and a month here is 50 days. Once you've seen those few scenes, it's just a lot of clicking to get to the next interesting bit. If something exciting happens in the story, the stat management portion will kill any excitement through terrible pacing.

The visual novel portion is best during the common route, where it's often amusing if not outright funny. About a third of the way through the game you can pick a route, assuming you've met the requirements, and the routes range from pretty good to cringeworthy. As mentioned before, the visual novel portions are spread out across the remaining 6 months with 3-12 events a month. Given that each month is 50 days, the pacing is glacially slow. You may also miss an event by not visting the right place during the right time window, or by not having enough reputation with a character or characters.

Once you complete a route, you unlock the ability to skip the common route on repeat playthroughs and can open up the developer console to cheat - which enables you to get the achievements without horribly monotonous repetition.

I would only recommend this game to die hard fans of stat management games. Everyone else should look elsewhere.

Crystal City is a kinetic adult visual novel, meaning that there is a fixed story with no choices but many sex scenes.

I enjoyed the art, with new and appropriate (if low detail) backgrounds and very nice character models.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this based on the writing. I appreciated that the novel tried to create a new and unusual world, with some interesting sci-fi trappings, but it never did anything interesting with the setting or really explored it, and seemed to trip over itself at the end in a rush to throw out some surprises and reach a conclusion as the structure and logic seemed to collapse under the burden of reaching the conclusion. It felt like it was written by a teenage boy.

I actively disliked the main character, initially presented as a nerd stereotype, who was unsympathetic throughout and whose actions often seemed to come out of nowhere. Every female is presented as the eroge cliche of being there solely to be saved by the main character (and for sex), but without anything interesting to show for it or your interactions (as you might find in a better VN such as Katawa Shoujo).

This VN was also filled with spelling and grammatical errors that greatly increased as the novel went on, such that by the end almost every line contained some kind of error.

There is also a brief room-escape scene, which involves (mostly) randomly clicking on parts of the background in hopes of clicking on something useful, then combining the few inventory objects to then click those on the background. I didn't feel it added anything to the VN.

I completely dismissed this game when it showed up in my recommended Steam feed - a free, cutesy, VN dating sim? No thanks. I only played it when I read a recommendation for it on RPS, and I am very glad I did. Doki Doki is one of the best VNs I’ve ever played.

Doki Doki is a game that surprises in delightful ways. But much like other things that rely on surprise - like Memento or Pony Island - to talk or read too much about it only serves to spoil the surprises and mar your experience. It’s a game that benefits from going in as blind as possible.

But I can say that I was repeatedly delighted by the game. It was clever, entertaining, and really amusing. There’s only a handful of games that have ever made me laugh, and Doki Doki did so repeatedly. I highly recommend it, even to people that don’t like VNs. At 4 hours to complete the different routes, it’s a pretty short time commitment. You do have to pretend to be a teenage boy infatuated with four anime-styled girls, which may be a harder ask for some people than others, but it’s so worth it for the experience. The game was so good that I decided to replay it to get the hidden ending, and I’m surprised with how good the game is on a second playthrough, and all the details that I’m picking up on that I didn’t pay attention to the first time around.

The original Full Throttle came out in 1995. I think that's worth keeping in mind, because Full Throttle Remastered often feels like a very dated adventure game with modern graphics and audio.

Overall, it was alright. Recommended with reservations. I wish I could give it a better recommendation, but I'm honestly torn on it. I enjoyed it overall, but not as much as I expected.

The remade art and audio is lovely, the setting and characters are interesting, the voice acting is great. Playing as the leader of a biker gang in a post-apocalyptic setting is certainly refreshing. While there's the threat of death, particularly towards the end, the game will automatically rewind with a "Hmm, that's now hot it happened". Some of the game sequences were pretty funny, and a couple put a grin on my face.

And yet the game clearly shows it's age in certain regards. Navigating the environment is sometimes difficult as exits are vague. Puzzles - while easy for '95 - had me stumped several times. While the audio sounded great overall, the scene transitions during and around cutscenes were often abrupt with ragged cuts. And worst of all, the action sequences, possibly novel at the time, were clunky and tedious - particularly the lengthy and repetitive Mine Road section, and really brought down the otherwise enjoyable game. I also encountered a couple bugs during the Mine Road section - at one point a defeat resulted in a black screen rather than restarting the ride, and at another all the enemy motorists disappeared and I was unable to take any exits and had to reload.

If you like point and click adventure games and want to experience a bit of the 90's golden age, it's worth a playthrough. Otherwise, I'd much sooner point you towards Kathy Rain or the many great games by Wadjet Eye (or even Telltale, for a modern take).