Recent reviews by Veskaida

The "Tales" expansion is a great addition to The Long Dark, which already is one of the best survival games of the last decade. TALES adds lots of new content to both the base gameworld as well as new DLC areas. Hinterlands has also been rolling out steady free updates (adding new content, quality of life changes, etc) to the base game, so even if you've not purchased TALES you'll be enjoying many of these changes (e.g. Acorns, Fire Hardened Arrows, Scurvy. updated Beachcombing).

I'd highly recommend this DLC even at full price. Hinterlands has always produced high quality content, even so far as to go back and "redux" old content. My only criticism of "Tales" is the slow development cycle (was supposed to be released over 1 year), but for a small studio producing Part 5 of Wintermute (Story Mode) at the same time, I can understand the delays. Give it a try, and don't forget to tell us how you died ;)

• "Tales part 1 and 2" basically a 'challenge' or narrative-driven adventure which can be completed in Survival Sandbox. Similar to the 'Challenges', but integrated with the sandbox world and with more narrative elements. ~5-10 hours of gameplay to complete each.
  
• 2 new major regions (Forsaken Airfield, Zone of Contamination)
  
• 2 new minor regions (Transfer Pass, Far Range Branch Line)
  
• 2 new mob: Ptarmigan, a huntable dove-like bird. Poisoned Wolf, a very aggressive predator with unique behavior.
  
• 12 new clothing/tools (e.g. Aviator's Cap, Down Bedroll)
  
• Multiple unique variants for all weapons (with unique skins and modifiers). E.g. "Barb's Rifle" which weighs more than a vanilla Hunting Rifle, but is more durable.
  
• 7 new cooking ingredients, dozens of recipes with unique buffs/debuffs. (e.g. Cooking Oil, Prepper's Pie)
  
• Glimmer Fog weather (causes Insomnia)
  
• Handheld Shortwave Radio: a tool used to find hidden bunkers, which contain a side story and loot/unique items.
  
• Respirator, Canisters: medical item used to bypass suffocating gas more safely.
  
• new music (one of the strengths of TLD, all of Cris Velasco and Sascha Dikiciyan's music is excellent)
  
• Travois: a primitive sled used for hauling items
  
• Insulated Flasks: container for storing drinks/soups, which keeps them hot for longer.

• "Tales" part 3 for Survival Sandbox. Narrative conclusion for the 3 part 'Tales from the Far Territory'.
  
• Cougar mob
  
• 1 new major region ("Mountain Pass" themed)
  
• "The Hunted: Part 3" challenge
  
• New clothing/tools/weapons/food
  
• Camera/Darkroom
  
• Safehouse Customization
  
• Trader NPC

Most morally unambiguous Rimworld expansion.

[ERRANT PILGRIM - December 2019]
Painterly graphics, a vast island to explore, and deep survival gameplay. Following massive aurora and trapped on the remote Canadian island of Great Bear, you must survive alone against the cold, hunger, illness, and predacious wildlife. The Long Dark focuses on article survival in a gamified but realistic setting, beautiful painted-like graphics, a gorgeous sound track, and thanks to 6+ years of regular updates: a colossal inter-connected island to explore. Hunt rabbits, get hunted by wolves, lose your fingers to frostbite, and watch the aurora as the last of your food dwindles away. If you love the thrill and reward of survivalism (and it's many 'close calls'), or just exploring gorgeous environments (check out the auroras) you would be remiss to not experience this game.

As of ERRANT PILGRIM The Long Dark features three modes gameplay: Survival, Story ("Wintermute"), and Challenges. TLD has long-since focused on quality over quantity, but being 6+ years in development it now has an abundance of both. All 3 modes take place in the same world: 10 massive maps interconnected by 5 'transition regions'. Survival is the 'bread and butter' and features 5 difficulty modes: "Pilgrim" (easy, great for learning/exploring), "Voyageur" ('normal'), "Stalker" (super aggressive wolves), and "Interloper" (good luck), as well as "Custom" where you can mix and match for every setting. Wintermute (story mode) is fully voiced (including Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale of "Mass Effect" fame (Male/Female Shepherd)) with numerous quests and cutscenes, and has 3 Episodes so far and multiple difficulty modes. Challenges are 7 specialized playthroughs, which tend to be quite difficult. Go pet Fluffy.

Dominions 3 is a fun and interesting turn-based strategy game where you play as a pre-made god or one of your creation. In spite of the primitive art there's a tremendous amount of depth to the gameplay, particularly in which age you start in, the map, your faction and their prefered biome and units, and your god. The art is serviceable and the game runs very smoothly, even late game with tens or even hundreds of thousands of units moving around in stacks.

Lots of inputs are bound to hotkeys, but there's no tutorial or guide (other than looking through the Options menu) to find this, such as "building units" (which you'll be doing a LOT). I'd recommend checking these out, as they'll save you a lot of clicking, especially over longer games/larger maps.

The biggest two detriments I found was: late game tedium of building units, especially mass-rallying units you're building at territories and advancing them up to a certain chokepoint. It sounds trite, but when you're managing 10 stacks of units being made each turn, at 10 different territories, every turn for each front, it gets really tedious. The other big issue is the water/land transition. Water empires tend to be inferior to land ones because, and frequently dominate their lakes/oceans but cannot expand aside from raiding the coasts. This leads to them building tens or even hundreds of thousands of units on every single inch of water, and being basically unconquorerable, by land armies trying to invade in spite of the "famine" mechanic making them lose unit HP for being too congested.

Another concern might be the similarities of Dominions 3 to "Dominions 4", which appears to be more an upgraded version of D3 than a full-on new game. If you're interested in this, I'd recommend checking out that instead, or perhaps even Dominions 5.

C'thon's main strength is it's strong visuals. For attempting 'old school' graphics it does a solid job visually without limiting itself with the clunkiness of many actual older titles. Don't be fooled by the Doom-like aesthetics, C'thon is more akin to the numerous procedural rogue-likes on Steam and elsewhere, with it's slower paced, more survival and exploration oriented gameplay than fast run-and-gun. Ambient audio and gun/enemy SFX are solid as well.

One mixed drawback is the game's weapon system: there 3 'classes', but only 3 weapons and each class gets the same weapons. Rifle, Grenade Launcher, and Melee. Each class has slightly different strengths to a particular weapon and each weapon can be upgraded with items you find, multiple times. The real strength of this is the visuals: each upgrade for your weapons and characterr changes the appearance of your gun or UI respectively, for each level of upgrade. The upgrade models for guns are quite complex and all are visually appealing. However not all upgrades are equal, and some play-styles are clearly much stronger than others.

The game is also brutally difficult, even on normal difficulty, with starting enemies able to kill you in just a few seconds, and enemies in the later levels being incredible strong bullet sponges and dishing out massive damage, even with multiple armor and health upgrades.

For it's very reasonable price I'd recommend picking it up and trying it out.

The main strength of Duskers is it's strong visual aesthetics. The sound design is solid too, as is the UI. You feel like a guy controlling autonomous drones. The story is largely open-ended, a fairly original idea for narrative: it leaves you unsure of what the actual cause of the disaster is, as you investigate different possible causes simultaneously.

Dusker's main flaw however it's repetitive gameplay, which is unfortunate since being a rogue-lite it seems designed to encourage replayability. While gameplay is bug-free (minus intentional 'bugs' and 'glitches' if drones take damage), customization options are limited and clearing each ship becomes a chore. The only element keeping Duskers as a rogue-lite, rather than a full-on rogue-like is it's narrative: learning small bits about the story by beating ships. This is nice, but the open-ended approach makes the gameplay more of a grind to the carrot-on-a-stick of an ending, which is unfortunate.

I like soda.

A very well made made stealth game, quite atmospheric too. Graphics are simple but appealing, music and sfx are solid. The normal playthrough consists of several different areas with different floors, each harder than the last. Lots of replayability with the randomly generated areas and different means to dispose of enemies.

Definitely a niche survival game. There's lots to do, but it's rather hard figuring out how to do it without a wiki. Gameplay is fairly interesting and semi-turn based, with different actions requiring different lengths of time to complete.

Learning how to play is probably the biggest challenge. The game offers some small guides and "help" text, but there is frequently a lot of text on screen, and the menus can be tricky to figure out. Doing simple commands like choping a tree or making something can be difficult. The game really doesn't hold your hand, so expect to starve repeatedly for your first few playthroughs.

I think the menu system could use an overhaul to make it simpler to use, but there are a lot of different actions a player can take, so I understand the difficulties there.

The inventory is another problem, specifically the "equipped items". It's just a single list of everything the player has on them and they're wearing are a different color. It would be nice if "worn items" was a separate list, or all worn items were at the top of the list, or there was some other overhaul to make it more visually appealing and transparent. Games like Diablo (1) with it's inventory system really shine.

Considering how old the game is and that it still is being developed so long after release, I think is commendable. But that isn't to say it doesn't still have problems, and for that reason I'd recommend watching some videos of people playing it before you decide to buy or not.

You play as a single spaceship (small fleet later) going around nebulas and black holes exploring, trading, and sometimes fighting. Feels inspired by Star Trek and Star Control II, so if you're a fan of those this might be more appealing.

Runs very well even on computers with low specs. Graphics are functional but simple, and flavor text is abundant and relatively interesting.

The main issue is there isn't much gameplay. There is a soft time limit (and even the longest setting is quiet short at about 45 minutes playtime if you play slow). Maps are quite small, and there don't seem to be many different encounters of objects you can find since there is a lot of redundancy between multiple playthroughs.

Combat isn't bad and the variety of weapons is interesting, but the tooltips are sparse for details on weapons other than "short range" and some other items (like shields) aren't clear which are mutually exclusive. Fights are very punishing even on the lower difficulties. You can gather a small fleets instead of just the starting ship, but this is mostly reliant on luck.

I'm on the fence about full price, even at just $5. It's decently made and there's lot of attention to detail, just there isn't much content or replayability.