==================================== Reviews of STEAMroll Subtember Games ==================================== ============ Metroidvania ============ Haiku the Robot (A) Review: Literally, plays out like a shorter version of Hollow Knight. Platforming and combat were both fun. Pixel art design was cute, but not much variance in either the bosses or the areas; they mostly looked the same, with only the background color changed. The game was good enough that I completed 100% of Steam achievements off-stream. Guacamelee (B) Review: Very colorful game with a unique art style. Incredible to have a Metroidvania game with seamless local multiplayer included. Feels a little more like a Beat 'Em Up / Brawler at times. Matching colors to moves can get a bit confusing. A few interesting moves acquired, but not many. Good sense of humor. Fun boss fights. Ori and the Blind Forest (D) Review: Sold to me as a Metroidvania; was essentially just a platformer with an annoying map. Useless skill tree added nothing of value to the game. Combat involves mashing a button, and HOPING your weapon auto-targets correctly. People say online "well where it really shines is platforming", but I hated the platforming too. Didn't care about the story. Axiom Verge (B) Review: Really felt like a continuation of Super Metroid. Platforming and combat both feel very fluid. Great pixel art HR Giger aesthetic. WAY too many buttons and power-ups to remember right off the start: drill, disruptor, and multiple weapons. Unintuitive controls -- CONSTANTLY pressed down on the right stick while firing, causing me to open my gun selection menu. Headlander (A) Review: Fresh and innovative take on the Metroidvania genre. Very fun to pop your head off, and attach it to another body or random machines. Slightly unfortunate choices in using colors as the main indicator for progression, as it limits accessibility -- however, slightly offset as the game outright tells you in the bottom-right corner what suit color you're wearing, and tells you what color door you're in front of. Storyline started to get a bit non-sensical about 3 hours in. ================== Weird and Off-Beat ================== WHAT THE GOLF? (A) Review: Funny, creative take on golf. Just the right amount of weirdness. Holes are nice and short, so the game constantly feels new when you get to the next set of holes to see what the latest gimmick is. Fun way to spend an afternoon beating the game, with good replayability by adding in extra challenges for each hole gimmick. Epistory: Typing Chronicles (C) Review: Great paper craft graphics. Fun gimmick. Nice that they're able to continue telling a story without pausing the gameplay, but the story was incredibly generic. Game does a GOD-AWFUL job at helping you navigate where to go next, leaving you in an almost constant state of frustration; either because you don't know where to go, or because you end up in an area you shouldn't be in yet. Chuchel (C) Review: Didn't need to be turned into a game. Felt more like a Pinkfog-style video, like Baby Shark. Very possible that I'm just not the target demographic, and it actually is meant to be aimed towards younger kids. Pool Panic (C) Review: Game has the weirdness factor down, and a fun cartoony atmosphere. Unfortunately, the controls let the game down, and add frustration where there doesn't need to be any. You will OFTEN shoot your ball where you don't mean to, or walk into a hole when you swear you didn't touch your control stick. Many of the shots and puzzles would work better in a 3-D space, but the game is 2-D set across multiple layers, so there's a bit of a conflict. We Love Katamari + Royal Reverie (S) Review: Everything that is right and good about gaming. Simple to learn mechanics. Cosmetics are unlockable in the game without paying extra. Satisfying mechanics of rolling your ball around and making it bigger and bigger. Cutscenes are skippable, and you don't feel like you've missed anything by skipping them. Has the ability for you to skip annoying levels by choosing to go to other ones. Great music, aside from one classical piece that doesn't match the tone of the game, and gets used in a 12-minute level. Just an all-around fun game. ============ Escape Rooms ============ Escape from Mystwood Mansion (A) Review: High quality, well made game with intuitive controls. Felt like doing an actual escape room. Perfect length if you just wanted to do one escape room (one section of the mansion) at a time. All the puzzles seemed perfectly fair with good clues given. Escape First Alchemist (C) Review: Decent as an escape room; magic element felt tacked-on, and having to remake some of the potions a billion times quickly becomes tedious. Random relics placed around for achievements are dumb, and take away from the game. Some puzzles, especially the gem one, did not give clear indicators whether you should do them right away, or over the course of the game. Book that talks to you throughout the game is INCREDIBLY irritating. Doors: Paradox (S) Review: Contained a few simple and familiar puzzles, but packaged in a way that was easy to play through. Perfect balance of difficulty vs time. You could easily and happily choose to do however many levels you were comfortable playing in an afternoon. Game itself was high quality, and navigation was fairly easy. We Were Here (A) Review: Fun take on a cooperative escape room. Puzzles are well thought out, and make for a good 2-person team building exercise in communication. Walkie talkies don't seem to add anything of value, since you could use a third-party program like Discord to provide the same functionality. Unfortunately, the Explorer often gets trapped in situations where there's not much to look at, and the Librarian is constantly stuck looking roughly at the same room throughout the game. It may have been nicer to essentially have two Explorers, where both sides go into new rooms at the same time. ====== Rhythm ====== Rhythm Doctor (S) Review: One of the most creative new games I've seen in a LONG time. Simple mechanics, hard to master. I wish that they took a page from what Doki Doki Literature Club did when ported to console, and adjusted some of their Windows-based gimmicks so that they would work on console as well as PC. This would also make it so you don't have to change the mode when you're streaming from "game capture" to "display capture", and changing a bunch of settings mid-stream. Just Shapes & Beats (S) Review: Incredibly fun take on bullet-hell-meets-rhythm-game. Controls are easy to understand but the game is challenging to master. Music in the game is upbeat and a great listen. The storyline they've added in feels a bit tacked on, but it's simple and cute. Nice to play a rhythm game that isn't on rails like Guitar Hero, etc. Hi-Fi Rush (D) Review: Great looking cel-shaded graphics. Humor tries to be edgy, but falls completely flat. Game is mostly just a Beat 'Em Up / Brawler but with a rhythm game gimmick tacked onto it after-the-fact. Brawlers allow for quick action by just mashing buttons, but the rhythm gimmick SLOWS THE ACTION DOWN. I don't like playing board games because I can't be bothered to sit around listening to a hundred rules before the game even starts. This game not only has that in the form of an annoying robot character; but the devs seem to KNOW it's annoying and yet they FORCE the robot character's instructions on you anyways. I don't like playing fighting games because I don't like having to memorize long strings of move sets. This game has that, then has the audacity to make most of those moves unlockable; when they could have just GIVEN you all the different moves from the start, letting you spend your money on things like health upgrades. Thumper (B) Review: Gorgeous other-worldly dark aesthetic. Atmospheric drum music can get a bit repetitive, but otherwise feels like you're at a long Japanese taiko drum performance. Unfortunately, at least the first half of the game can be cheesed by just holding down the main button throughout the levels. No method of correcting for visual or audio latency in a rhythm game within the settings is also unfortunate. ========================= Rogue-Like and Rogue-Lite ========================= Dead Cells (S) Review: Great graphics, music and dark atmosphere. Controls felt very fluid. Fun selection of weapons that leaves you wanting to discover more and see what each one does. Game is very challenging without feeling unfair. Immediately looked forward to starting up another run after I ended the previous one. Going Under (D) Review: Cute graphics with bright colors. Presents itself as a Beat 'Em Up / Brawler game. Weapons all break after roughly 3 uses; the problem is, it's a rogue-like. NOBODY wants to play a rogue-like where your weapon breaks after 3 uses, and you have to find a new one. You spend more time searching for weapons in each room, than you do actually playing the game and beating up on enemies. The weapons aren't even that different or interesting like a normal rogue-like. You also can't go in all guns a-blazing like an actual beat em up game, because your character moves so slowly that you'll instantly take multiple hits. Dicey Dungeons (A) Review: Somehow, the game designers took things I hate (drafting games, card games and dice-based games of chance) and made an incredibly fun dungeon crawler. Great music by Chipzel. Creative differences when using each of the different classes. Battles feel a little bit like solving a math puzzle, which in my case is a good thing as someone who loves number puzzles. Super House of Dead Ninjas (B) Review: Fun and quick rogue-lite. Gameplay is very frantic with the speed you run through each level. Graphics and music were mostly forgettable. Most enemies feel fair and balanced, except for the ones with red eyes that seem to appear out of nowhere. Nice selection of weapons to choose from, but it's unfortunate that some weapons are unlocked by completing missions using other weapons; it means a portion of your time unlocking new items will involve playing runs using weapons you don't really want to use. ======================== Platformer and Adventure ======================== Sir Lovelot (C) Review: Very cute pixel art aesthetics. Platforming feels mostly fluid, except for some questionable choices -- you can either double jump, OR dash, but not both. Also, to pull off an air dash you MUST jump first: you can't just fall from a platform and then dash. The game is both too short, and far too repetitive. It starts simple, but never adds in anything new (mechanics, items, abilities or environments) to keep the game interesting by the last few levels. The Messenger (S) Review: Great pixel art graphics. Humor that constantly breaks the 4th wall really works well. Both the platforming and the boss battles are really fun. Really gives you the feel and sense of playing an unheard of hidden gem on the NES. Toodee and Topdee (B) Review: Very creative puzzle game with a cute aesthetic, and good humor. Puzzle elements feel fair and challenging. Particularly interesting to have boss fights in a game that is, at its core, a puzzle game. The only glaring problem is that the game was initially created by the developer as a single-player experience and co-op was added on later in the development process. As a result, if you play with a friend, you sit around with not much to do for long periods of time. Frogun (D) Review: Graphics immediately evoke the feeling of an unfound and unplayed PlayStation 1 game. Good idea for a gimmick, executed incredibly poorly; not even an original gimmick either .... it's been done by Bionic Commando, amongst others. Issues arise from your character having limitless movement, when all enemies and platforms move on fixed lines. You end up constantly fighting with the games mechanics, where aiming even slightly off from your target has dire consequences. Game feels exactly the same between the first level and 20th level. No way to skip levels like other games. The entire game feels like it was never tested for quality control. ====== Puzzle ====== Stephen's Sausage Roll (B) Review: Very, VERY challenging puzzle game. Over the span of a single stream, I only managed to make it past the first world. Very unique: doesn't feel like any other puzzle game I've played before. Controls can be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, even after a couple hours of playing. I like that there was no tutorial -- you just pick up the game and play. The lack of variety between level aesthetics, and the ambient music, can make you a bit loopy over time. Superliminal (B) Review: Really neat perspective-based puzzle game. They did a good job in taking a note from Portal, and constantly having something in the game talk to you to break from the monotony of what is otherwise essentially a strange escape room. Solutions to some of the puzzles, especially in the late game, begin to get incredibly esoteric. Taiji (A) Review: The designer set out to make a puzzle game that was an homage to The Witness, and they did a great job at that. Really feels like a 2-D version of The Witness, but missing a little bit of the charm. The art style falls a bit flat, and in some cases the shapes of surfaces and lack of proper shading make navigating environments a bit of a hassle. Puzzle games are about using information you have (whether acquired previously in life, or within the game itself), and applying that information to solve problems. Some of the puzzles don't actually provide enough of this information to properly discover the intended solution, so at times a small amount of guessing may be required. FRAMED Collection (B) Review: Fun way to spend an afternoon; each of the two included games can be done in 1.5 hours, or 3 hours total. Creative puzzler with mechanics I haven't seen in other games. Screens that have only 2 panels on them are pointless. Fun music, colors and animations. Amusing ways to die in the game. Actual storyline is silly, yet somehow compelling -- you do feel like you're actually pulling off an intricate heist. Puzzle balance is a bit off; 95% the game can be figured out within a minute, with the occasional puzzle taking possible 10 minutes to figure out, and difficulty isn't progressive through each of the games. ===== Stats ===== Average across all games: B Widest variance between low (D) and high (S) rankings: Rhythm Best Average Ranking: Escape Room Worst Average Ranking: Platformer & Adventure Most S Ranks: Rhythm