Recent reviews by Monostatos

A cute game about helping serendipity along through altering various links in the chain of events.

The dead in this universe gather on a Pratchett-esque ship just before reincarnating, attended to by a supernatural crew not too dissimilar from a normal cruise line staff. All is not well however, as reluctant reincarnees butt heads with security, ambitious middle managers arrange crisis opportunities and slivers of a vaster world makes itself known through the politics of this wierd afterlife's factions.
Through a series of random events, key characters off a lost ship become embroiled in each other's stories and have to puzzle their way to as happy of an ending as the dead can expect!

So it's a bittersweet story about love!

And also a puzzle game!

Said puzzles mostly consist of playing it along until the characters reach unsurmountable impediments, after which point you can go back to a previous level to "rewrite" an event, item placement or the like, for use later on. While this at times is both intuitive and fun enough to really be engaging, it will rarely demand much more from players than a single change per puzzle. As such, especially in the beginning, most puzzles feel like they are mainly about trying to figure out the slightly convoluted interface. After that point it becomes curious fun rather than a challenge.
Sometimes you can feel how an interface is good enough to just define, or for that matter develop, a genre going forward.
The original System Shock's inventory system comes to mind.
The one here isn't that, but it is at the very least unique and fresh and there is value in that!

Stronger than the gameplay, I'd wager the story and artstyle will be the main things that keep people playing. Set during a period of two days, each time of day will coincide with a level to play. Sometimes character timelines occur simultaneously, with the opportunity to intersect storylines, while at other times levels are short intermissions to move the story forward. You can also collect little mementos to unlock backstory for some of the game's characters. There is more here than I expected, alluding to a sort of Culture Revolution-esque exodus event, as well as more personal tragedies in the tough lives led by the cast. Be aware that while all characters can collect these, an item is needed to do so that not all of them get their hands on until different points in the story.

The amount to do per level will vary from level to level from being pretty involved to being basically a little cutscene. You'll also often have to go back and alter an event to fit a character need later on. Much of your time will therefore be spent retracing your steps and replaying levels, which could easily have become incredibly tedious were it not for the game coming with a couple quality of life features to deal with this:
Fast forwarding is available for almost every conversation you've seen once, and levels with multiple objectives will start at junctions that require alterations to be made.
Thanks to this, you get to play time detective without having to feel like you're punished for exploring, or wasting your time, and a full playthrough where you see everything took me about 12 hours, most of which were new chapters.

The themes of memory and death is handled well, even if at times it feels a bit in media res what we are supposed to know, suss out or is to remain mystical in regards to world mythology. And the implications of having people go through memory scrubs before leaving -and said memories being an integral part of ship economy and engineering. This last one is not really analysed even as it is absolutely a major part of both what gets the plot going and how the ship operates, and in other titles it could easily have been the main driving question asked to characters, players or even devs to answer and ponder.
Even so, it is clear that the devs at StarryStarry has had a lot of time to think about this world and how it works, which is why it might not always have been clear to them what is and isn't explained or explored deeper. A bit like Stranger Things and it's 40-page off-screen lore repository, but there are worse media to be compared to :)

Translation from original Chinese to the English version I played is pretty good! As a non-native speaker I'm not about to give anybody crap for not going for perfect grammar, and having a sometimes strange inflection or word use shine through feels charming and genuine to me. In universe it fit the theme of this otherworld well (Who's to say that's not just how they talk onboard) and on a meta level made me feel cosmopolitan reading a translation of something written so far away. Good feeling. I should probably look for more games from The Middle K.


Rounding out, I left the experience feeling emotionally satisified. A little sad, a little happy, but not really overmuch in either direction. It never strays far from where you might expect the story to go, but executes it hitting all the notes.
I didn't however feel like I'd gotten my fill of puzzles, and as far as gameplay goes there is much to be improved if the devs want to go at it again; which they definitely should.

Not quite the gut-punch of Spiritfarer, that broke everybody's heart back in 20XX, and not a Lucasarts clicker classic, but absolutely a cute gem to play at least once and put in the memory bank!

I have no idea if the game is fun. I just listen to The Mountain Goats and map out island.

WH40K:Gladius is a semi-loreful warhammer experience with simple but solid game mechanics and an ok variety of experiences waiting for you.

It is currently free -where I got my copy- on the franchise promotional event "Skulls" here on Steam until June 1.

The core of the game is combat and base building using the Civilization V hexagonal tile formula. Campaign and skirmish are collected into one package where optional missions see your faction story progress. These take the form of about 6-7 scripted objectives of varying intensity, asking you to build certain buildings, defend areas from neutral mobs or move units to specific positions.
These can be completed at your leisure, even as you are free to pursue the straightforward domination victory. Killing everything in your path is however the only way to win aside from following the story, since famously there only being war in the far future.

Winning on normal difficulty with normal map size and 3 opponents will take a new player about 4-5 hours if you stop to smell the roses. Games with more factions will be longer, and so of course bigger maps. Everything is randomized, so no game will be exactly the same, but provided you play every faction once this will net you at least 16 hours of playtime for the base game, with more to come if you like it enough to go again. With six other factions available for purchase for between 7 and 12 money, playtime can be increased to 44 at a cost between 61 and 116 money, depending on sale. Your wallet will decide if this is good value.

As a Warhammer product it does an ok job of representing the factions and characters of the universe. Planet Gladius is a hot mess of everything from obscure creatures from early warhammer editions, and newer tidbits of established lore, all jumbled together in a way that feels both very shallow but undeniably enthusiastic. Rarities such as Enslavers stalk the landscape, and Old One relics litter the world despite the eons between the forty first millenium and the war in heaven. Meanwhile you'll run into random packs of Kroot hounds and Kastellan Robots just lumbering about. It is contrived, and I sometimes feel like I am doing a lightning tour through a 40K menagerie, but the game is better for the variety and so is warranted.

Worth mentioning is that for the price of the complete package, you could get a big box of actual warhammer minis, some hobby equipment and a book from the franchise publishing company. If you have this kind of money to spend on entertainment, and if you are like me, I'd say you'll have more fun getting that instead for your warhammer fix.

Granted, as a single purchase, the game will probably last longer than getting involved in the expensive model hobby. But you really gotta like the civ formula for your time spent here to feel worthwhile, and I am personally confident my life will not improve shelling up for the faction packs, as opposed to painting and rolling dice.

Cautious recommendation. There is a bit more Civilization: Beyond Earth to the scattered presentation than I would like and this is certainly a quantity rather than quality type of entertainment product. Even so, if you'd rather do this than anything else warhammer related with your money, you will be entertained.

VERY initial impressions (I have not at the time of writing won the game. It may well get better and if so please tell me in the comments. Some tips or pep to get through the slow parts would be nice)
The core game is fun, but it is so increadibly janky in so many ways.

Overwritten saves are renamed with generic placeholders, selecting different units to shoot at requires you to exit the shooting menu and select a new target (rather than just pressing tab), and on the whole navigating the menus regularly takes you two or even three clicks more than it's genre contemporaries.
There are small unskippable cutscenes both during combat and the ship traversal sequences, and on the whole player time bleeds away between them, and the lack of small quality of life updates to expedience. Goodness, even in the original Chaos Gate from the nineties you could move your units simultaneously.
Also it is hard, which can be a plus or a minus :). The amount of units you are expected to fight are not entirely dissimilar to the old game. But where you had around 15 marines running around helping out, here -as far as i can tell- you are locked to 4, mening that you are always one bad pull from being severely overwhelmed. This makes the game play somewhat similarly to the Xcom-enemy unknown remake, where slow and steady map traversal was paramount to not overextend. However, the maps in this game are huge, even for the genre at large, and with little variety in terms of enemy composition and layout, what was really exciting the first four hours, have now become a slog.

All of there things, and more, come together to make Chaos Gate 2 feels a lot older than it is. Kinda like if the devs had a long look at how other tactical combat games had done things, but not specifically WHY, ending up with something that mimics a lot of good ideas, but just never seem to stick the landing. Good intention I gotta say, but what seemed to work on paper, just don't here.
The same goes for the lore. At times it feels like the devs really took the time to read up on the whole 40-schebang, but at other times characters don't really act in ways that feel "in universe". That's hard to gauge, and this may vary a lot from person to person, but listening to the discussions, bickering among the crew, and even story beats, gives me almost like an uncanny valley sort of feel. A bit like Alien: Resurrection after having seen the first three.

Yea. That's it. Chaos Gate 2 is the Alien: Resurrection of turn based tacticals. Fun, but with asterisks attached all the way to the end..

Nothing against the devs, but I kinda wish I had my money back.

sorry for the rant. I didn't think I was this frustrated by the plastic men shooty turn game. I really wanted to like it, the first one was so much fun <:(

This is the most early tens game ever conceived, and to some extent I don't even understand why I am writing a review for it when there is nothing new to add about the formula the games industry itself hasn't added already.
The action adventure genre has both evolved and stagnated in such a shibbolethic fashion that they all look and play the same, all the while almost always developing one or two distinguishing mechanics that good or not, for some reason almost never stick.
Is it a sense of pride that stops other games from adopting good ideas? Or is it just the setting specific nature of many such developments or gimmicks that prevent proliferation? On the other side of the spectrum, UAV-Hawk and TacCom cavemen says Hi, so maybe I shouldn't complain :P

Why even bring this up? This is Tomb Raider!: Lara Croft! Akimbo guns! Tiger fights! Chest portrusions! You raid tombs to get rich and impress daddy. Nothing new under the sun, but a good time I've been told.
Except. None of it's here. The chest thing I can do without, but even for someone like me who only know the game series from second hand regurgitation of the buzzwords above, there is very little here that to my mind makes it stand out like a Tomb Raider game.
In part this has to do with us meeting Lara in her larval stage. She is going in green to a mysterious storm wracked island on her first forray, to find the remains of horrible queen Himiko and her cursed realm. As such, playing this out as an origin story, we can expect some falloff from the franchise mainstays. Lara hasn't held one gun, let alone two yet, and Tigers are in short supply as it is without them migrating off coast in stormy weather. Fine.
What does however grate me like a sewer outlet is the lackluster nature of the big T Tombs. There is one per area of the game (about eight in total), and they play more like short puzzle sequences or mid area distractions rather than anything close to resembling primary gameplay. Much more time and effort have instead seemingly gone into developing the different parts of the island and subsequently the main activity, combat.

For a girl the game keeps telling us is out of her leauge, Green Lara has no trouble whatsoever navigating shootouts or destroying wildlife in scenarios future self Big Lara would cough out on a sick day. Sure, she is absolutely devastated during cutscenes, shuddering and freezing, or fretting for her friends. But the second the game gives you control over her, she is jumping like an olympian and going through human lives like petrified butter smashed into rusted old knives.
And she is expected to. No subversive "Monster exists between chair and keyboard" message here! The game upgrade system is gleeful in giving you more and more kill, combat and survival moves to dominate nature and murderate the humans with. You are a walking old school arsenal at the end, with suped up super guns and a slew of dirty tricks that has the myrriad mooks outnumbered by way of prolific certainty if not numerics.
Speaking of mooks, the enemies are a generic flavor of the late 2000 contemptible evil dumbasses you've seen a million times before. So devoid of emotions or humanity that again, the game almost encourages the righteous eradication of all henchmankind on a moral level in addition to the realities of gameplay.
A common interaction with them goes something like this: Lara sneaks up through a bush and hears the following: H1 "Hurr hurr didja hear about whatshisname falling off a cliff by taking a piss blind drunk?" H2 "Durr yea, what an idiot. We're gonna divvy up his stuff tonight. Don't be late or the ciggs he stole from you are mine". H1 "Watch it or I'll shank you like imma do the broad when I find her". At this point you try to shoot one of them, the floaty controls makes you miss and they go "♥♥♥♥, it's her! Oh I'm gonna have fun with you"!
Then they die to your mud-karate and you loot the steaming corpses for a bullet each.

Having killed them, you look out over a small level consisting of either wildlands with a smattering of ancient ruins, or an ancient ruin overgrown with shanty town hench-nests. These levels, in addition to some hum drum platforming and more people to kill, will be filled with busy work challenges and collectibles. The former are mostly accessible in lists through your in game menus, or "secret" ones that you need to discover by mostly shooting or igniting anything that feels out of place. "Burn all effigys" "Light all the candles" and so on. The collectibles for their part come in the form of super tiny but thankfully shiny flash drives, small treasure chests of faux artefacts that you "discover" from tables or just out in the rain (It's called "Tomb Raider" after all, not "Detail-Brush Archaeologist". A true unsung hero).

On average this game will take about the averagely average time of 12 hours to complete. A couple more if you go for some of the collectibles that you thankfully can mark on your map by finding all their exact locations. They are all completely forgettable, either stringing a couple excerpts together into stories setting the stage for your journey (bad guy realizing "what he must do" and the origins of the curse most notably), or just knick knacks for Lara to muse over to demonstrate that she is not just a muder machine but also quite knowledgable about the stuff she nicks.

Something else? Oh right, the story! Blah Blah cursed island, Lara learn gun, no tigers boring boring. Only way to leave is to confront the curse and the bad guy is a culter who thinks he knows juuuust how..
It is not bad, and not good. Very contrived and set piece heavy, with a clear beginning middle and end that all depend on all the characters not figuring things out that you the player is going to realize the second they pick up a few collectibles or just reflexively breathe in and out oxygenating the greys'. Even so, I'm not about to spoil it if you want the experience for yourself.

There is fun to be had for sure. But nothing you won't find elsewhere. Action adventure feels at times like a amalgamation of other genres baked into one, for the person on the go. Want exploration but not too much? Want to shoot bad guys? Want a story (allegedly)? Something to collect?
You might just as well play a Batman game, some Terraria, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Zelda and get about the same boxes checked on your dopamine counter. And most of the games listed are old at this point. You just might not have time for all of them.

To summarise: If you've played any other action adventure game, you've Tomb Raided already in all but name. Everything here is as generic as it gets, almost textbook in terms of pacing content and gameplay mechanics. Sadly, it's not like this game was the prime genesis for any of these gameplay customs, which reduces the historical value of it, and with it much of the interest one would have in playing it today, with fresher fare on the market. At the very least originality would have given the onus of a playthrough the context of letting you experience a historical moment in game development. But alas. No System Shock 1 this. Almost not even a Tomb Raider game either, which I suppose for long time fans is the bigger tragedy. I am told the later games get better, so there is that, and everyone starts somewhere, even Tiger slayer supreme Lara Croft.

I may well have had good memories of this game if i'd played it when it came out. I did not, and must therefore judge it against all there is to compare it to within it's sphere of relevance, to see if it is worth the player's time. It's not really, but I am going to recommend the game, just barely. If nothing else then for the museum-like experience of basking in a most generic and template adhering game from a different time. 2013, briefly was back.

And now I can shelf it forever!! Muahaha!
That's what you get for selling all those artefacts Lara! Your game in a display case! On Steam with all the porn!

Metalhead strategy platformer with action gameplay featuring Jack Black and the rock legends of old sounds quirkily chequered enough to have been pieced together and read off of darkly morbid boxes of cereal. Even so your eyes do not deceive you because this is an actual thing that happened oh my god!

Do you like Strategy Games?
Do you like Action Games?

Well your answer does not matter because the mechanics in this hybrid does not do either any favours BUT DO YOU LIKE METAL??

if your answer is "HELL YEAH!" then keep reading!

Do you like living Rock legend JACK BLACK??
You better answer you bet, because the cuddliest culture ambassador of steel spikes and black fros' just got digitized! (again, but hey!) You now get to play as him! (also again, but as a not panda* this time)
I'll set the stage:

Waking up in a land of heavy metal rock, where guitar monuments stick out of the ground and the sky rains down thunder and rebars on a good day is more or less what Jack Black dreams about every time he goes to sleep. Here however were are invited to follow along as he stars Eddie Riggs, the bestest most metalest roadie/chosen one that has ever rocked! This, basically means that it's Jack Black metaphorically and literally playing himself as he dauntlessly keeps wingmanning for his music culture of choice with a story and character that more or less is just a new excuse for him to go "Metal music is the best thing in the world YEEAH!" for the 13 or so hours it will take you to finish the game.

Following his death and apparent rebirth at the hands of one of the three gods of metal, Eddie needs to unite his faction of
old school rockers against "The Tainted Coil"; a slew of latexed up demons hell bent on opressing humanity (thankfully with metal, they´re not complete monsters)!
As the story progresses it does so along lines where Jack and his crew need to make nice with representatives from various
subcultures of metal rock; everything from Hair to Shock-rockers, with some actual honest to goodness old legends starring as themselves thrown in for good measure like it's no big deal!

You fight against The Coil in three different, ambitious, clunky, kinda boring, not completely thought out modes of play:
Glorious meaty jank-combat with guitars and abilities!
Driving your big roadster hog all up in their grill (see what I did there), using car controls that feel older than diesel engines!
And finally by commanding your troops collecting "fans" from resource geysers in strategic (allegedly) RTS (allegedly) gameplay (allegedly).
The Jank-combat is okay and easily the most polished of the three gameplay modes. Just don't think about Bayonetta or anything else competent in the genre and you will be okay.
Driving around the world on the other hand is the most raw fun you'll have, and while it is generally pretty nice to burn rubber all over, the scripted driving sections are real bummers in terms of pacing, and demand a lot from controls that were not that good to begin with.
Finally, you have to do strategy sometimes, and the less we talk about these segments the better.. If nothing else the developers were supremely ambitious and there are few games I know of who has tried to combine so many different modes of play in such a comprehensive way. A for effort.
Too bad milk goues sour and the fizz goes out of beer whenever one of the many (*sob!*) RTS section starts.

There are a slew of collectibles and side missions too if you want to just drive around and play around. You could
do worse than listening to the game's score, given how most tracks are solid rock songs, but they stop when you get out of the car to gather stuff, soo..
Sigh..

I'll end on something nice.

Unless you are Jack Black injecting Jack Black straight into his veins, you'll never find anything more purely focused on capital L Loving Hard Rock and metal culture than this game outside of an actual music venue. The experience is worth it just for the devotion on display, if not for the gameplay itself.

It's a well realized fantasy, that at least is true**, and as far as homages goes it wears it's studded black heart proudly on it's sleeve! <3

*Don't worry! You can make his character black and white with corpse paint!

**And you want to be true right?? It's kinda important that you are.

The Beastmen brood in the nooks and crannies of the world, dreaming of upending the cities and holds of man and dwarf. Gathering at Fell herdstones to revel and assemble warbands to raid and pillage in the name of those cast out or unborn in the light of the green moon..

This is the first major DLC for what will be the Warhammer trilogy, available for both the Mortal Empires campaign of WH2 and as a playable faction with their own mini-campaign i WH1. While I personally love playing as the faction, quality wise it's early place in the content cycle definitely shows. There is less bang for your buck here than the 17.5 euro implies, with units from the tabletop roster missing, and faction mechanics being fewer and less involved than everything that came after. There are positives to the faction however, so let's start with those!

The Beastmen play as a horde faction, similar to Attila in the Rome II spinoff. As such (fitting with the lore) you will not spend your time building cities, but instead destroying those of others, building favor with the gods to upgrade your army with. Favor works basically like money, with the twin caveats of not being able to make it other than through razing settlements, and that since it is spent upgrading armies, any major defeat where you lose a warherd will more or less mean all resources put into it will disappear with it. On the plus side this leaves you with a comparatively tense campaign that stay challenging longer than they usually do in TW games. Where the 'civilized' factions can shrug of losses fairly easily as long as key cities remain, the cloven ones will be severely decimated no matter when and how you lose an army. As you can see, this brings with it issues of their own, and many players will not like the small scale of guerilla warfare you will be relegated to compared to the increasingly large conflicts you will be drawn into playing as someone that can reliably grow and support themselves.
Due to how growth currently works for hordes (all buildings raise growth requirements for the next), it will take longer to develop a diverse roster of higher tier troops, meaning that you will spend much of the campaign faffing about executing small strikes on undefended settlements. Loreful? YES! Tense? YES! Kinda boring after a while? Well, yes..
Due to changes in how resettling provinces work in WH2, what you raze do not stay destroyed for long. In the first game, you would more or less roll out the red carpet for Archaeon by eventually destroying everything in sight, while currently in WH2, you play more akin to a kingmaker, destroying one faction and inadvertedly making room for another one to pop in where they used to be (sometimes on the same turn if they feel like it). This is fun too, and keeps the map full of life, even as it undermines the fantasy of ruiner somewhat. In WH1 you need/needed to plan out your routes so as to make sure you can raze things continuously to stay in the green. You could crush your enemies Schwarzenegger style and still find yourself close to bankruptcy. In WH2 you don't have to worry as much about money, since there is always someone around to butcher for it, but again, it does take away from the fantasy somewhat which might be important to you if you like to be immersed in the flavor of the factions you play.
So: Guerilla style gameplay with raiding and razing as your main sources of income. Fun but slow buildup due to slow growth and "all eggs in one basket" organizational structure with armies as the only entity in the faction. Tense gameplay throughout, with the caveat of almost game-endingly crippling consequences should you make one too many bad calls. Availability in three campaigns, one of which a special scenario that is tailored to the faction experience.
Good stuff! If this sounds appealing I'd give it a shot, as I doubt you'll be dissapointed.

However I would be amiss not to mention the negatives as well. Keep in mind that they from my perspective aren't big enough deals to detract too much from the experience, but the same might not be said for you, hence why they are worth pointing out if you are on the fence.

The first thing really is a bummer, and that is the aforementioned ratio of content to price. You can buy any faction for Warhammer 2 and get a more complete experience than the Beastmen hands down. The devs pointed to the mini-campaigns as the resource sink responsible, and while fun, it is in no way a substitute for a more involved and complete experience had it been made. Consequently special mechanics are few and not as varied as other factions. To be fair most game 1 factions had very few to begin with, but the Beastmen had two; a repeating event every few turns where you could chose how to interpret star signs and the orc package of army spawns, underway travel and animosity.

On the battlefield side of things the Beastmen also sport one of the smallest unit rosters. Missing are mainly tabletop mainstays. Big monster units with complicated meshs are generally developed in bulk (see dragons all being alike, Saurus being smaller Fimir and units with similar weapons sometimes sharing animations) or sent out later when they are ready (like the Hydra-esque Kharibdyss). This is understandable, but still too bad, as the faction currently are sorely lacking many centerpiece models too unique to easily implement like the four armed Ghorgon.
The faction did receive a much needed update during the WH1 lifecycle, adding Razorgor pig monsters and Harpies, as well as another lord to play as. With the current slew of reworks and top ups many game 1 factions have gotten, this negative point may well change in the future.
Even so, the DLC currently remains comparatively feature incomplete, especially in the light of the much more fleshed out factions available in the second game.

Finally, and I put this last since it may well be a non-issue to you, some of the factions current features are locked behind a third party subscription. The Regiments of Renown bundle can only be added to the roster by linking your Steam account to the Total War Access service. This can be done free of charge through Creative Assembly's own website.
The issue one might have with an otherwise pretty nice deal is that there is little information about what such linking entails. CA has been very reluctant to disclose any specifics of what data is gathered and when. How permanent it is or how intrinsically embedded the service becomes to your account has never been officially stated either, and the only information available about the terms of service of Total War Access refers directly to SEGAS eula and privacy policy. I've added links below for those who are interested, but the general jist of it seems to be that any metadata SEGA gathers can and will be sent to regions where local jurisdiction no longer applies, meaning that whatever is gathered is decidedly out of the user's control.

CA trading some nifty knick-knacks for essentially giving the game cookie functionality is hardly the worst thing in the world, but the frugality of information and the very real cleanup of announcement threads where negative voices raised concern for the scope and above board nature of the thing raises some flags. Was it too much to ask for some clarification?

This type of thing always leaves the end user with little control of what metadata is gathered, even as most of the data is benign enough. If you are okay with this then that's cool. Twitch often hosts giveaways for partner companies through their prime service, so you can't fault CA for wanting to double whammy some visibility while making some extra cash selling data too. If you are a grumpy old-timer (like me) who values his supposed privacy a bit too much though, then your Beastmen will have to make do without RoR.

Despite it all, there is much fun to be had here and I really recommend it.

https://www.sega.com/EULA
https://www.sega.com/Privacy

I get ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ apocalyptic visions playing this.

Stardew Valley allows the player to enjoy the life of a farmer without the drudgery of actually comitting to all that a life of soil entails. It is the synthesized experience, just at the cost of all the heartfelt extrasensory stuff that would otherwise make said toil worth it. There is no fresh air for you the player, it is implied. The food you grow to enrich the community and pallate is processed and cooked instantly, but hardly of use to the player the same way as it would owning a real farm. Jean Baudrillard describes in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) how an emulated experience can and will supersede the reality of what it simulates, if said reality is good enough at filling the same needs/gaps in our hearts/souls/hours. In other words, there is/might not be any real loss loosing the dirt-under-the-nails authentic experience of farming, if we are provided with a simulation that properly pushes our buttons, and we were really into it not for the extra sensory rewards of, say, fresh produce in the first place. Synthetic experiences are by their very nature more pure and efficient, even as they remove and reduce the experience they simulate by removing sensational outliers, be they good or bad. Stardew Valley is in this way, perhaps better at fulfilling the fantasy of farming, than real farming could ever be. All the same however it is only a simulation and poor in lasting experiences "real" farming life would be rife with. With all this, the same question keeps rolling over in my head, on and on:
Why am I so satisfied with this?

You denominate and play as a person traveling to the countryside to enact change in their lives, to breathe clear air and to do something meaningful with with themselves. In the game you get your lot in order, begin farming and perhaps some light animal husbandry, while getting to know the locals and integrating yourself as part of the community. None of this actually put fresh air in the players lungs, allow them to befriend new people or even eat fresh produce. The sense of accomplishment for this is left however, perhaps stronger than it would be in real life, as the achievement of weeks or months are destilled into hours of playtime.
The simulated experience can take liberties with the less favorable parts of the lifestyle. Caring for animals is reduced to petting and harvesting. Cutting weeds is done in determined swoops.
Talking to your neighbors in the Jrpg fashion where listening to short snippets of their life removes any chance of the small social mishaps so common in reality. Is that enough? Is the context of video game simulation enough to settle for this over the real thing? This is what has me worried. Often today we are asked to make concessions of quality to manage to eke out enough catharsis to survive week to week, or even (for some people) day to day. Much of the way modern life is organized is directly harmful to both our physical and mental health, the enivronment, and long term survivability. If context is all it takes to become complacent then there is nothing stopping us from creating rationalizations for similar concessions of function or form. Part of Baudrillard's discussion of simulacra is specifically that a simulation can become reality if it is "good enough" enough. Settling for less, if the cut out bits are unwanted, is in fact more.
Robotics, similarly to the Stardew experience, allow the owner to keep the best parts of a labour force, while also cutting out the extraneous awkward aspects that makes for a less effective work environment. A robot does not want/need rights (currently) and does not complain about or demand better working conditions. In such an instance the ratio between human ingenuity, problem solving and flexibility, and effective uncomplaining perpetuity, becomes purely economic. Scaling away the human elements of a workforce is in fact good economy as it more effectively produces the dopamine of the economy, IE money. The goods quality is perhaps not inconsequential (similarly Stardew Valley is a good game) but again, quality needs to be weighed against the ratio that produces the most dopamine, meaning that trimming quality (real air, real fresh produce) can and will be the most effective alternative when or if the goal is to experience the most painless route to the goal.

Stardew Valley is perhaps better at farming than actual farming from a pure dopamine perspective. Just as cocaine is better at having fun than taking the time to do enjoyable things, and robots are better than humans at working and making money. And that scares the living ♥♥♥♥ out of me!

A crafting game with a linear story? Sign me up!

Your ship has crashed! oh no! Water all around you! Augh! Where are the others? Are you alone? How will you escape?

Im not gonna tell.. You gotta play the game to get the scoop!
It's a good thing then that the game in question is so very enjoyable.

From the first person perspective, based on the premise above, you are asked to get familiar and establish yourself on this oceanic world. Exploration is neccesary, and thanks to the hand crafted map, always a blast. Different depths and regions have very different feels to them, with variations in fish, resources, and plant life. Some har habitable right away, while others require some tinkering as they might contain challenging, if not outright hostile features. The story acts mostly as a vehicle for seeing the game. "Escape the planet!" It might not win any prizes, but does not need to, as it cleverly shackles itself almost entirely to the fantastic exploration, meaning that seeing more of the world, and opening more of it up almost always comes as a result of following objectives.
To thrive, tools, food and water need to be aquired, but as with most things in this game, the need never overtakes enjoyment or forces you to spend hours upon hours (eating can also be turned off if you so desire). You will also need a base or two, since mammals like air and tables, but again, participation does not demand you build anything more fancy than the most rudimentary stuff. The non-mandatory nature of the building does mean that options are comparatively fewer than on average, but it does not take away from the enjoyment. There is a story reason for it, and other games fulfill the fantasy of being a master builder better already. Better to let Subnautica be Subnautica.

Speaking of that. One thing that really stood out while playing is just how genre nebulous it is in terms of how it fulfills the functions of its fun. To a point it could almost be called gracious;
Crafting elements are there, but they are focused.
The adventure is palpable, but never outpaces the sense of exploration.
Neither is it a horror title, but you may want to change your mind about that when vast abysses of darkness open up around your sub and the objective tracker directs you down there..

Instead of one specific genre category, the game embraces it's identity fully as something that sets out to be exactly what it wants to be, and mixes in whatever is needed to fullfill this goal. It reminds me of the first System Shock, a game that tailor made a lot of mechanics we today take for granted. More or less because they thought the game needed them to be what it was supposed to. Today grafted on from S-S's old template, they are used everywhere.
Now, Subnautica did not invent an entire strew of mechanics to accomodate itself in or revolutionize the industry, but the feeling one gets from just floating between rpg, horror and exploration feel similarly smooth -Just that you are no-tt a P-p--pppp1TIful MEAT h4c´´å=´+ker t t t t 15 71)m3`?#.

So.
Between the designed map, sensible survival elements, and the thrill/horror of whatever lies beyond the next corner, Subnautica manages to pierce straight to the heart what it would feel like to be stranded alone on a planet made entirely out of water, without ever forgetting to be fun.

I honestly cannot wait to one day get to experience it in VR.

The theory of entropy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, mearly change shapes from ordered to less so. This means there are many ways for an object to unravel, but very few in comparison where they stay whole.
To put it another way, you can break an egg a million ways, but there was only the one whole egg.
The abbreviated theory of gas kinetics, by physicist Ludwig Bolzmann, as it relates to entropy.

I'm really kind of down in the dumps over how this review is going to portray the game. For all that will be said, let it be known that I admire a lot of what the game sets out (and succeeds) to do, can honestly without difficulty see why others will like it even as I quite don't get the yolk.

First of all this must be said:

No one does the mix of skill and rng like Darkest Dungeon. So many games have been awed and inspired by it, both art-wise and in terms of gameplay.

There are so many things the game does right, and I'm in awe of both artstyle and presentation. Dark and increadibly thick lined high-contrast comic art style sells the setting of dreary emanciated hamlet. The mood is staged perfectly with players being immediately immersed in all the decrepit derelict despair oozing from the game world. It's just so minimalist and slick I love it!

And the same goes for the characters it is poulated with. Just as the world is dark and dreadful, so too are the heroes you can recruit dismal and suspect. The story is conveyed through some very high context dialogue where your team admits small snippets of personal history -mostly during combat- that explain their motivations or reasons for being here. The snippets are random, but tied between "classes" implying in a sense that every Vestal is "The Vestal" for the sake of character development. As they die, those that take their place will have the same unresolved traumas seep through the cracks, only to spill out together with all the emotions and composure, exposing their psychological innards.

Characters can break in a variety of ways, from being outright killed by a monstrous foe, to ending themselves in a throbbing fit of fear. At other times heroes are rendered incapable of functioning as champions due to crippling afflictions to body or mind.
Curing them is possible, but it is both expensive and time consuming, and sometimes it is better not to rely on having too much invested in one basket, but instead let them go.

Speaking of investments, this is really the reason for why im so apprehensive about recommending the game. Aside from the in game gold that is earned through missions, there is another, more ephemeral resource fueling the experience.
This game demands of you your time. No game in the genre I've played demands as much time from it's players like Darkest Dungeon.
If you have some to spare, then perfect, take it and learn the important best ways to preserve your party. If you don't however, be warned this really is not one of those pick up and play kind of games.
There is a constant tug of war on the forums about whether or not Darkest Dungeon as a game is reliant on RNG. The arguments predates the ®, the launch and even the first patches. I know for I was there from the start. Patches that rewarded damage, patches that rewarded bleed, patches that made maggots nigh on impervious to damage, the game went through a slew of transitions to get where it is today. It's a brainy game, and one that'll be sure to put hair on your chest.
The issue people were debating was whether the game was fighting dirty or not. I'm on the side that claim it wasn't/Isn't, but Im also the guy telling you in a recommend-review why i don't enjoy the game enough to actually recommend it, so go figure. In either case, the arguments that has cropped up in regards to the difficulty -both for and against- are compelling, describing ratios of monster vs player ammounts to demonstrate the severity of bad rolls as more serious for the players, to exclaiming the handling of the RNG elements themselves a skill in their own right. The discussion is alive and well to this day.
Ultimately however, in the face of the time investment variable the points become moot as, since the game cannot be lost as much as less effectively won, there only really is having or not having the time to retread lost ground in case of disaster.
No matter if it is due to bad management or just really bad luck the consequenses are severe. A single death can set you back hours. Dungeons are filled to the brim with blight-expectorating spiders, brawny giants and scrawny cultists topped off with hideous bosses that will end you if they get the chance. It's not exactly a cake walk, but at least you'll die with your boots on.
Thing is, no matter where you land in the argument you will still sooner or later lose characters and progress.
It'l happen a lot more often if you just go stomping around witout a plan, but can still occur when you play well. And the end result is the same. Heroes lost this way equals time spent getting new heroes into shape to try again. Any boss killed is gone forever, but you still need to train new heroes on old tiers to have another go at those that remain. Changes to the game currently allows for heroes to be recruited on level 3 (about mid-way), but that is still about three runs a'la 20 min each per level, with the added caveat of having to level together with heroes of a similar level (heroes refuse to participate in content "below" them. No boosting here!) meaning that in the worst case, a hero of a specific class you need at level 6 to fit a specific party composition might need 3 leveling buddies just to get there going into upwards to 9 dungeon runs without a hitch. And if somebody dies -even if it is a hero you don't particularly care about, you might still need to level a replacement for them (with the same prequisite leveling buddies all over).
So it's like, Darkest Dungeon, but every time a character dies you have to spend some of your life getting back on track.
It is fun, since the gameplay is fundamentally good, but as it keeps going it starts to feel more and more as having Minesweeper as you computer password. It's quite intimidating really.
I dunno..
When i was a lad i had dozens of hour to play games basically from morning to night.
Now as roughly a grown man, it feels like i have boatloads of responsibilities preventing that time investment.

The embryonic genesis of the idea: "Hard rewarding game that does not pull punches" is well executed and achieved for all to see, and has been from the start. But to get the most out of it you need the time to both cope with the repeats and rehersals neccesary to develop the strategies that succeed.
If you got that time then GOOD! Get the game, there's nothing quite like it.

But if the tidings of time investments seem even slightly intimidating, It is probably prudent to check out some videos (or playlist lengths) to see what you are in for, and hold off for now. We are only ever alive once before we are dispersed into our myriad surroundings in the million ways possible to stop being just precisely us.

Again I am reminded of the Bolzmann enthropy-analogy. I know you need to break some to get an omelet, but in this case you just need SO MANY EGGS.