Recent reviews by Act

Cute animals, charming villagers, and the power of friendship -- pretty much the essence of the farm sim boiled down into its core appeal. And while it's nothing complex, it works really well.

The brightly colored models and environment give the game a cheery quality that's honestly really nice in a genre that has taken a weird turn toward minmaxing and grimdark. This is a game that sits squarely in the cozy side of the genre, and sometimes, man, you just need something about cute bunnies and flowers and people being nice to each other.

The gameplay is simplified but clean and clever, and I found that it really did pick out the elements of the genre that are the most key to making the games fun.

I encountered no bugs and found the game to be very complete, so that's worth taking into account as well.

It's not going to win any awards for depth of writing, but sometimes you just need a game to play on the couch with the TV on after a long workday, and this is A++ on that front. And I don't think it's trying to be anything else.

Also I really want that watermelon patterened fabric IRL??

Before the Green Moon is an excellent game for anyone interested in games as a form of storytelling.

This game is a masterpiece of character writing, a throwback to old BokuMono games like Harvest Moon 64, where the experience was about immersing yourself in the mundane lives of people you came to know and care about.

The vibe of the game is interesting, an odd mix of SaGa Frontier's grungey cyberpunk and Disco Elysium's existential anticapitalism. Finally, I've found the game I wanted Innocent Life to be 15 years ago!

You play as the Farmer, a member of the civil service Junior Farmers who enrolls in a program that provides farmers on Our Earth with a pathway to residency on the Moon. It's clear from the beginning that Earthlings are a second-class citizenry. The rich and well-connected have fled the devastated planet for state-of-the-art moon colonies, leaving only the stubborn or disadvantaged behind. The Moon Elevator will occasionally bring tourists to your small town; the tourists cover the place in trash no matter how many times you tidy up, and no one seems to care. When you arrive, the residents are frustrated, isolated, and listless, stuck with a world torn by warring and dominated by company towns stuck in servitude to the all-powerful Moon Corp.

Of course, in true BokuMono fashion, you can form connections with the few permanent residents, helping them to begin to connect with each other, forming a community out of the world-weary.

I can't overemphasize the quality of the character writing; the small cast feels so alive and warm that the town really does start to feel alive as your relationships progress. The Farmer so clearly has become attached to this place and these people that the question naturally becomes -- will they really leave? Is what the moon promises so great that risking losing these people is worth it? Can we trust the Corp to make good on anything the Moon offers?

I found myself looking for a way out, a way to stay. To live the same days over and over with these people. But that's exactly the question the game wants us to face: would that be worth it? Do you have to leave to move forward? Can the same daily drudgery be worthwhile if it comes with relationships that matter? Or is that a just a form of cowardice, a refusal to move on? Is staying just treading water, refusing the take a risk? Or is it refusing to live the life the Moon Corp demands they live?

The game gives no clear answers. You can, of course, choose to stay indefinitely, never see the "ending," run out of things to do, and live that life of sameness -- or you can have the Farmer take the risk, never knowing if it was worthwhile.

What does it mean to be happy, to be adventurous, to be free, when everything around you seems to be falling apart?

The game asks important questions about the human condition in brilliant and meaningful ways, using simple, repetitive gameplay as a vehicle to examine life under poverty, under capitalism, under the constant threat of your own obsolescence.

Brilliantly written, brilliant use of the genre conventions.

Really, really wish Steam would allow "Neutral" or "Informational" reviews.

Verdant Skies is a really interesting game that’s actually not that good but I put 30 hours into it anyway for a few reasons. The gameplay is really pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ but it has some wonderful ideas and mechanisms and perhaps most importantly for my typical reader, it’s really committed to making a farm sim that goes above and beyond in terms of race and gender. If those things are important to you this is definitely worth checking out, but if you need high polish and deep gameplay first and foremost it’s probably not for you.

Pulling back a bit though, this is a futuristic space colony farm sim.


If you are a longtime fan of Bokujo Monogatari, you may remember what Marvelous did for its tenth anniversary. They wanted to do something wild and crazy for the series, so they came up with two concepts: Harvest Moon but in a fantasy world, and Harvest Moon in a far future sci-fi world. The former was released as Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, which as we know became a huge hit. The latter was Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon, which no one liked and no one remembers.

Innocent Life was not a good game. I played it once, briefly, in college, and could not get through it. Part of the issue was that romance and marriage were removed because you played as like, a farming robot, and this meant a lot of the character-driven activity that is so vital to HM games was gone. It was also very ugly.

But I always hated that it squandered such an interesting premise: what would a futuristic Harvest Moon look like? What could they do to take the mechanisms we know and love to the next level? When I played Verdant Skies, I finally got a peek at what Innocent Life could have looked like.

In Verdant Skies, you are the Colonist, one of just a few people sent out to start making habitable a new, lush planet. It’s quickly clear from the colony’s administrator, Jade, that no one expects much from this particular colony, as Jade is young and not taken particularly seriously. Jade puts a ton of pressure on you the make the colony THE GREATEST, and makes it clear that if you don’t work your ass off, everyone fails.

The art in VS is all over the place. It seems to be another game where all of the attention was given to character portraits and no one gave a ♥♥♥♥ about anything else. The ingame spritework is… let’s call it “2007 dollmaker chic.” It’s ugly and clunky and just damn awkward. But the portraits really are lovely, and they capture something that I think arguments about representation miss out on a lot, which is that when everyone doesn’t have to be white and pretty, people can actually look interesting. I talked about this a lot in my post for Dreamfall Chapters as well; when you free yourself from all white all the time, you suddenly have all this color and line and style to play with, and the character designs themselves in this game are just eye candy because they’re so unique and so distinct. It also isn’t nothing that this is, mercifully, a future that everyone gets to take part of. Characters are Asian, Black, Latin@, Scottish, space alien, etc. etc.

The game’s other pet issue was gender. It does make the weird choice of not letting you choose your pronouns, instead opting to awkwardly write around pronouns or refer to you as “they” regardless of how you want to identify, which is not ideal, but that there’s no constriction on how you look and even a nonbinary love interest is really wonderful. This is a world populated by all kinds of people. Imagine that.

I thought the character backstories were solid, though doled out too quickly in huge infodumps. This was part of a larger problem with relationship progression being way way too fast. They opted to remove gift giving (for reasons that, I’m sure, absolutely have nothing to do with not wanting to code it), but don’t seem to quite get why gift systems are there in the first place. That is, they give the player some control over relationship progression. To make up for the lack of gift giving the heart meter fills up stupidly fast, and it functionally means that no matter how much you hate and ignore a character, they’re going to fall madly in love with you. There’s no way to be aggressive enough with someone to stop their hearts from filling up; they are going to ask you out whether you want them to or not.

This brings us to the biggest issue: this game feels rushed, unfinished, and at times, very half-assed.

There were so many systems here that hinted at wonderful ideas that were just squandered. A foreign planet wouldn’t have normal seasons! So this one has 30 days of summer and 5 days of winter a year, and that’s it. Why not ten seasons of differing length with weird weather? Why not two suns at different angles so crops in some areas grow faster than others? Why not magic purple foam that falls from the sky?

This pattern — the game identifies an opportunity and then goes about it in the laziest way possible — is all over, and it’s very frustrating. One of your resources is collecting scrap metal from your crashed ship… but there’s no resource management involved because your ship apparently endlessly spawns scrap metal all over the world. You can clone animals from wild ones to breed farm animals… except breeding traits are all RNG and you should just aim for “give lots of rare drops” AND you can’t crossbreed animals AND there’s only like 4 of them. There are strange ponds you can fish in… but they’re all fish that looks just like earth creatures. Sheep give wool. Cows give milk. Chickens give eggs. But there’s like a rock monster too I guess?

At every. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Turn. the game spits on its own ideas. While this game is so much more than Innocent Life, its reliance on RNG, barely-implemented systems, and buggy interfaces make it so much less than it could be. I think so much of my playtime was honestly just the desire for there to be more than there was. I wanted to see what it had to offer, because I felt like it had to be something, because the implications were that something great was coming, but I kept being disappointed. Like Innocent Life, it left me wishing someone would make this game as it could be instead of what it is.

Yet, I think I fall on the side of rec with this. Its gameplay was serviceable enough to be playable, it had enough character backstory to be interesting, and the setting had so much promise. Plus, I loved its racial and gender diversity; it was really nice to see someone in this genre tackle those things. I mean, I put 30 hours into it. There’s something there.

I’m just not sure how much.

This is a very punishing clicker game that forces you through like 20 hours of clicking with no way to automate tasks. What it offers in exchange is an interesting premise and evocative minimalist art style. What it can’t give enough of to compensate for the mind-numbing gameplay is story.

The basic premise is really wonderful. You’re an apprentice at an alchemical shop where the shop owner, Irene, grows organs using magic trees. The organs come with souls, and when inserted into inanimate objects, the organs give them life. Pickling the organs removes the souls, and pickled organs can be used in translplants. But the organs cannot be used to bring back a dead person or animal, because they impart a new soul — the body will live again, but it will not be the same person.

The art is really unique and lovely. The people are drawn in high-contrast, solid colors, while the organs are bright, sparkling rainbows. The style implies world is lifeless, and the organs bring life to it.

Between the premise and the art, I was really excited for this game, but… there’s just not enough there. The mind-numbing clicker quests, which require constant attention, take huge amounts of time, and story content is doling out only a few sentences at a time, so it just never feels like your efforts are being rewarded. Things progress so slowly, and the gameplay never changes or gets more interesting, it just needs increasing amounts of attention.

To make things worse, there’s a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ “true ending” thing, so after you complete the game, there’s another eight hours of clicker gameplay to see the actual conclusion.

There’s absolutely no reason to play this game instead of just watching a cutscene compilation on YouTube. There’s just not. But I do actually think the hour-and-a-half cutscene compilation is worth watching. The stories of the people who buy the magic organs are complex and well-told, and the final revelation is very heartwarming. I just wish they’d gone in a more interesting direction with this whole idea.

First of all, the developer for this game doggedly insists on selling it as a roguelike. They seem to believe that because the maps can be randomly generated and (like most arcade games) you can get game overs, that makes it a roguelike, which, that is not how genre works. You don’t just say it’s part of the genre and then it magically is.

What this actually is is a very traditional precision arcade game. It’s literally that old game where you had a wood box with a maze and had to tilt it to roll a marble through it without falling into holes. And as an adaptation of that game, it’s quite good, and I had fun with it. Like many arcade games, though, its problem is that it only has one thing to offer, and at a certain point you just move on. I enjoyed the old wooden marble maze thing as a kid, but I wasn’t going to do it nonstop for 25 hours, and I’m not going to play this game for that long either. I’ll pick it up intermittently when I have time to kill and am in the mood, but I’m not going to buckle down and play it like an RPG, because that’s just not what arcade games are meant for.

The game itself doesn’t really seem to understand this. The first release apparently had no save point, requiring you the beat the entire game in one fell swoop as it threw increasingly more holes, traps, and enemies at you, which honestly seems like a specific kind of torture. The dev was shocked, just shocked, when people didn’t want to spend $15 to die over and over for an hour before getting bored and frustrated, and begrudgingly added in small maps with save points while insisting that everyone just didn’t understaaaaaand. Whininess about not making enough $$$ off the game aside,* this move made it actually playable.

(Games refusing to respect player’s time is one of my least favorite things. Yeah, it was probably technically possible to get good enough to beat it the way is was. No, people are not filthy casuals for having lives outside this one game and wanting to do something with themselves other than master the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ marble maze for 100 hours, the most useful of all skills. In writing my mantra is “Assume your audience is smart”; in gaming it has become “Assume your audience has other things to do with their lives.” If you want to make a superhard game for a very niche audience, fine, but then don’t whine about how the game isn’t reaching a wide enough audience. This is not complex.)

Anyway, if you love arcade games, this one has very high production values, and it’s central mechanic is fun, and with the discrete level options it’s actually a playable game for a regular person. But $15 is still insane; it’s still just one thing, over and over. I paid $5 and that was honestly the absolute top end of what you should pay. I enjoyed my time with it, but after 2 hours I really don’t see myself going back to it in any meaningful way. I have other things to do.

*The dev apparently used Kickstarter funds to go on a $25,000 (TWEN TY FIVE THOU SAND DOLL AR) media blitz for this game, which is equal parts hilarious and sad.

This series is just so fun! It has such lovely graphics, sense of humor, music, and gameplay. This is also the rare game here that I’d pay the $15 full price for, especially if you’re into completionist runs. I got it for $4 on sale and that was honestly a steal, it was great and at least 15 – 20 hours of gameplay without even going for all the achievements. Love love loved it.

Oh, what was it about? This game takes place chronologically after SteamWorld Dig 2, so the story will make more sense if you’ve played the SWD games (which you should), but you don’t have to. It follows a band of space ruffians as they first try to deal with bandits in the space frontier and then as they almost accidentally the universe.

The gameplay is really interesting; I’m not sure if this is an established genre, but it was basically somewhere in between a roguelike and a tRPG, which the procedurally-generated loot-getting appeal of a roguelike and the party/equipment/map-position management of a tRPG. It was really interesting gameplay and the dev integrated the two genres seamlessly. It was loads of fun, and I couldn’t put it down.

I honestly liked it so much I’m not sure what to say about it, so check it out! I will say I got it for PC and wish I’d gotten in for Switch, so my rec would be to nab it there if you can.

I really loved this game. It was gorgeous, unique, interesting, and fun. You play as a young shapeshifter on a pilgrimage through a ruined world in the sky. She can turn into a bird, allowing you to soar from island to island, and the experience is an impressive as it is relaxing. Along the way, you begin to understand the fall of the old society, and the role of an evil that threatens to return.

I don’t want to spoil to much — because really, you should go play it — but I will say I thought there needed to be one more scene at the end. Not because we needed to know what happened to the protagonist (I actually like that ambiguous) but because I feel like we need to see the effect of what happens on the world. It cuts out just a smidge too early, too close to the climax.

I 100%ed this game in about 5 hours, and for a price of $3, I feel like I got an absolute steal. Normally a game this short would feel like to little for $15, but my memories of it are so fond I feel like it might be worth even that, so if you don’t mind giving a little extra $$ to a promising dev this could be one to splurge on. Though if it drops down below $5 again definitely get it, it’s worth every penny.

Equilinox is a bit too complex to be a mobile game, but I really hope it gets a Switch port, because it’s another one that demands to be played in bursts as you’re doing other things instead of glueing you to a computer. Equilinox is also exactly what I was hoping Niche would be: a relaxing game about growing and managing a semi-autonomous ecosystem via evolution.

In equilinox, you start with a simple blade of grass and slowly grow and evolve into forests, deserts, marshes, and snowcapped mountains. You’ll also unlock animals that can be similarly evolved in a variety of ways. Everything in the environment meaningfully interacts with each other: foxes eat chickens, boars dig up root vegetables, and some plants can spread too far, affecting nearby biomes and causing habitat shifts that cause problems for resident organisms.

I thought the game struck a very good balance between simulating wild growth and not letting things be so out of the player’s control that you could lose an entire game to an invasive species. Species will spread, but they won’t take over, and you’ll generally get notified that something problematic is happening far enough in advance. This isn’t an idle game where you leave it and come back 6 hours later to see what happens; it very much is meant to have you guiding growth, planting new trees, and introducing new animals. Encouraging this is a quest system that allows you to earn what are basically DNA money you can use to speed up evolution (though mutations happened randomly and can be manually selected for as well), as well as letting you unlock new organisms that can evolve in wild new directions. The whole thing is balanced exceptionally well, enough that I kind of want to give the devs some kind of award for it. The precise balancing a game like this needs is so hard to do right.

I definitely think this game is worth $10, but it does go on sale so if you’re iffy hang on.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Islanders needs to be a mobile game.

Islanders (stylized ISLANDERS) is a relaxing minimalist citybuilder. The basic gameplay is: every building you can place has a radius, and the buildings in that radius either add or subtract points. The idea is to place buildings such that you can keep earning points which grant more buildings, or give you enough points to move on to a new island. That may sound restrictive, but the game design is absolutely brilliant, and the way buildings connect allows you to design cities with more freedom than the traditional puzzle game might offer. The art design is also excellent, with saturated colors and unique buildings. The end result is that as you fill the islands, you do end up creating gorgeous cityscapes. It’s a cathartic game that seeks to provide an experience that doesn’t drain you, which I really appreciated.

I really loved it, but it’s the kind of game you need to be able to take with you — it’s just not the kind of game designed for long PC play sessions (it would also be great on the Switch). I actually enjoyed it a lot, enough that I’d rec buying it at full price, but man I wish I could take it with me. If they port it to mobile or even better, Switch, I’d buy it again in a heartbeat.

The biggest problems with this game were: it was very, very small and the end was just a big sequel hook. I paid $3 for it and would probably go as high as $5; the sticker of $10 is pretty ballsy. But! If you want a fun, lighthearted, game and don’t mind something short, this is a solid pick.

SWD follows the story of steambot Rusty on what, it’s implied, is a post-human earth. He shows up at an old mining town at the behest of his uncle only to find his uncle has died (permanently deactivated?) and sets off to figure out why his uncle was so obsessed with the mines that did him in. The game sees you excavating downward, creating pathways for yourself through solid rock while collecting as many minerals and gems as you can to make money to buy better equipment and revive the ghost town. It’s not a complex game, but it was the right kind of repetitive for me. The puzzles were good and I liked the level design. From a gameplay perspective I think my biggest complaint was that there weren’t enough town sim elements — I really would have liked to see townbuilding sidequests and more NPCs joining as time went on. On the other hand “more townbuilding plz” is a feeling I have about literally every game so YMMV.

Despite its limited content, I enjoyed it enough to add the sequel my wishlist, so stay tuned! Update: LOVED the sequel, 100% rec!