Recent reviews by nom.ssh

An excellent optimization strategy game of finding synergies between the environment and the the life that makes it its home. An improvement on its predecessor in basically every way.

A top-notch game. The writing and immersion are great, and the gameplay with its blend of both various challenges and ways to approach is engaging. The best hacking game since Uplink.

I was very excited for this game, but ultimately also very disappointed.
The characters are flat and uninteresting with everyone 'secretly' having a heart of gold. With so much of the game's story pushing how bleak and hard your life as part of Erlin's Eye's struggling underclass supposedly is, your being met with kindness wherever you turn causes quite a bit of dissonance. This is not helped by a difficulty which, after a very brief introduction in which you struggle a bit, lets you breeze through the game, with your 'struggle for survival' being only so much busy work.
The dice based mechanics are ultimately not very interesting, and becomes even less so once you unlock the upgrade that lets you see the possible outcomes of an action, removing all sense of exploration.
Some of the story points are interesting, but the whole is ultimately unsatisfying and empty, with the stories leaving no lasting impact on your or the game's world.

Vault of the Void is a new entrant into the roguelite deckbuilding genre, founded by Dream Quest, popularized by Slay the Spire and now also Monster Train. Vault of the Void hews close to Slay the Spire, but brings enough new material and twists to the formula to make it interesting and worth while. Notably, most changes seem to lie in the direction of giving the player more choice, and rewarding planning. For example, you can see what card rewards every encounter will give, letting you lay a plan for your deck and path somewhat in advance, your deck is always 20 cards, but you can pick and choose from all the cards in your posession before every fight. Once in a fight, the theme continues, with a system of discarding cards from your hand to gain energy to play other cards, which will either give you hard choices, or at least a use for any chump draws, and makes the decicion to hold onto a card for the next turn much harder, since you might have discarded it for energy.

Still in early access, and with most of the work being done by a single person, Vault of the Void is already a great experience with frequent updates and plentiful content.

This game quickly lost my interest. The gameplay is very repetitive, doubly so since there is not much choice in how to upgrade your facilities - the bottleneck is your max power storage, which only increases as the days pass, and so you end up just upgrading all of them to the same level. The random events can change things up a bit, but since you have no way of knowing what the different choices will do, you will get randomly screwed over until you have "learned" what the different responses do. While I do think the theme is interesting, the writing was not very engaging.

This odd little gem manages to turn card-crafting and time-management into a narrative exploration game, where you are not just experimenting with what cards go together in what way, you are unlocking the secrets of the occult, piercing behind the veil. I've spent some fun hours with it, and am looking forward to extra content over the coming months.

Hollow Knight is an absolute master piece, and I completely adore it.

SpaceChem has the most marvelously difficult puzzles where you don't so much find a solution as build it. The difficulty rises steeply, and you may yourself stumped, only to wake up in the middle of the night thinking "Eureka! I've got it!" (true story.)
And once the atoms and molecules are whizzing around, doing their perfectly orchestrated dance that you yourself choreographed, you feel a wonderful sense of ownership of the solution, since it is in a very real sense yours.

No knowledge of chemistry required, though people with programming experience may have an edge.