Dordogne
This game is great and I love the water colour art aesthetics. It has the gameplay of a story through environment type game, with information and clues hidden around the room, and back story via phone, but without the difficult choices and heart breaking endings you usually getting from story focused games.
The other thing I loved about this game is that you alternate progression between the present day Mimi as an adult investigating her past through the use of memories. She can enter her memories attached strongly to items like letters and photographs. At the end of each chapter you get the chance to add any photos you've taken to the book, along with stickers you've found and you can write a 3 line poem.
I would say though that the ending is somewhat inconclusive and leaves more questions than answers. I won't spoil the story here, I'll just say that the ending felt incomplete, but I would still recommend this game as the journey along the way is still very good.
Catto’s Post Office
This game was quite fun and found it from the developers of Cozy Caravan, who are also Australian. (Catto is in this game as a cameo).
I would say to anyone wanting to play this game, that they should play it in the knowledge that the entire game exists of a single day and night cycle and that the game ends at the end of the first day. So don't rush through delivering all the parcels and explore the town and interact with all of the other cats and things to do before you complete the day.
Inbento
This game is cute and has a variety of puzzles all around the idea of arranging ingredients into a bento box. After each chapter you get an adorable animation with the cats. Each chapter has a different way to arrange the pieces and increases in difficulty quite quickly. After a few chapters they start to combine multiple type of puzzles to make it even harder. I haven't completed the whole game yet, but it's nice to have a go and solve a couple puzzle at a time.
Mika and the Witch’s Mountain
This is a pretty fun game which is also fairly simple and easy to play. The quests aren't very long, but at least you can go back and complete the extra items once you are done. Shame the game isn't a little longer, or there is more to do once you complete the main story, but still had a decent amount of fun playing this game.
Monument Valley
I love these puzzles. Most puzzle games have some kind of combination to solve, but this is the first one I've played where geometry is a major part of the design. Some of the designs make your head spin trying to figure out which face to walk on and very much in the style of M.C. Esher. I love these and slows you down a little, even though there are only a few puzzles in total.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure
I did genuinely enjoy this edition of the story of Max Caulfield, although I understand why it got much criticism compared to the other games in the series. For starts the lack of Chloe, who only exists in the form of text messages, is a big dampener of the game, so for the rest of the review I’m going to focus on the game itself.
I do like that they didn’t just reuse existing characters and decided to create a new cast of characters we’ve never seen before, each with their own troubled back story. The game focuses on Max, now a grad student, and her new best friend Safi. I won’t explain the nature of Safi’s powers, just that Max isn’t the only one with powers that can be either abused or used with caution. Safi is less than cautious with her powers which brings about the event at the beginning of the game. Max has lost the ability to rewind time, but has discovered she has a new power, that she must use to solve the mystery of what happened between her and Safi, and decide whether to forgive or reject her new best friend.
Cats and Cups
This cafe shop sim is good, but there are major flaws with the ecomony side of the game. The actual gameplay mechanics are fine and the making of the different types of drink and food are quite fun; I also like the croissant making mini game.
The problems start at the end of each day when you have finished serving your drinks, you have to go into the stores to buy new ingredients, otherwise you won’t have enough to sell the next day. The ingredients, particularly the fillings for the croissants, are really expensive compared to how much you make during the day part of the game, so you end up spending all of the money you’ve made on replenishing the ingredients. If you are lucky and have enough stock, you spend it anyway on the upgrades that don’t see to do much compared to how much they cost.
Cats in Time
This game has some really fun puzzles, although some are super easy because everything is glowing gold and others take a bit more thinking to solve, so there seems to be a decent mix of difficulty on each level.
Also with this game there are a decent mix of types of puzzles.
I love the fiddly spinny puzzles that are common in The Room game series and this game has a good number of these type, but also has a quite a few combination puzzles, which some games seem to only be able to do.
Lil Gator Game
Been exploring this game and so far everything I've found including the characters, places and even the music have been amazing and chill. If I had any minor thing, it would be there is a lot of dialog to read through, but this isn't in any way a problem.
Garden Witch Life
Game is certainly cute and I love the vibes and characters that live in this world, the only problem is that the world is very limited, even by most farm sim standards. There are only a handful of NPCs to talk to and buy things from and the story is also very short. The only way to level up your gear is to get them from the characters after raising their friendship level. Most life sim games have a friendship and gifting system, but most are something you can do at your own leisure, while in this game it is mandatory, basically blocking progress if you don’t want to gift NPCs repeatably.
The farming aspect is fine and until I played Tales of the Shire, the only farm sim I’ve played with different complimentary crop types that affect growth if you overlap the right or wrong type of plants. The crops age like you would expect, but they give you different produce depending on the which day you harvest, this means if you miss a day they go to seed and you have to start again, or if you pick the crops too early, you may miss out on something else.
As far as the economy of the game goes, it doesn’t. You can sell your crops, but they barely sell for anything, so you cannot grow and sell your way to upgrades like you can in almost every other farm sim I’ve played. Instead you have to put them in the community box and hope you sell in a random amount of days. The only quick way to make money in this game is to sell the weeds that grow everywhere on your farm as the start.
Witchy Business
For such a simple idle game, this is actually amazing. I played on cosy mode and it took a few hours to unlock most things except max rep with all witches, which will take a little longer. I love the choice of items and ways to get the various ingredients of different types and tiers. I love the music and the aesthetic of the sanctuary and the crafting room, even the coven.
I never actually figured out how to make mystery potions, so i was limited to selling the same starter potions. I know you can unlock it by trying different combinations of ingredients, but this always results in a dangerous experiment. Would probably be better if there is another way to unlock potion recipes.
The only feedback I would give is that on the steam deck, everything works well in touch screen mode, except the curses and poisons, which require drawing a line on the screen. This is almost impossible to do with a touch screen, maybe it is easier with a mouse. Making this easier would make the game more accessible. Luckily there's a way to bypass it once you reach max friendship with a few specific witches, but this take a little time.
Spirit City: Lofi Sessions
I love this. It's not really a game as such, but it's still nice to customise the character and decor while listening to some great lofi songs in the background.
Life is Strange: True Colors
I love this game. I mean it doesn't come anywhere near the emotional roller coaster than was the first game, but that 's not a bad thing. It's just a different game with different mechanics and new characters, with the exception of one of my favourites. Of course I mean Steph.
The different aura colours to show the characters' emotions worked very well and the overall story was great. I especially loved the LARP game, as that was incredibly fun and meant that I could be distracted from all the emotional stuff (both in game and IRL). I admit, I may have missed a few of the optional auras that could have been more obvious that there was a side story available. I guess I learned that from the recap screen at the end of each chapter.
I believe that Alex, like Max, was only trying to help those around her using her power, even if in some cases it may have made things worse for her friends or herself.
The Plucky Squire
This is an amazing game of popping in and out of a story book to solve puzzles and explore the world. I like that half of the game takes place in the real world and you get to explore the items on the desk and that you can interact and manipulate the book to change the story, I also like that you can change the words in the book to change the story.
Although the story mode is quite short, there is plenty of different activities to do along the way. The characters are fun and the art is well drawn.
Life is Strange (Remastered)
This game is truly remarkable. Despite half the game being in the form of cut scenes and dialog, I can't complain as it is almost perfect. I missed it when it first came out in 2016 as I didn't play this kind of game then, but I'm glad I found it while searching steam for something different.
This game had me crying for the first time in years, it's like it found all my repressed teenage memories I thought were locked away somewhere and brought them all flooding back to the surface. I'm not complaining, I just didn't know a video game could do that. I chose the save Chloe option for my first play through as after going through all the effort of bringing her back like 5 times, I just couldn't sacrifice her. Initially I tried to convince myself that the storm wasn't that bad, although the comics seem to suggest it did damage most of the town.
I believe it could be because as a teenager I experienced something very strange: I had a constant sense on deja vu between the ages of 16-18, so around the age of the characters in this game and the prequel. At the time it felt like I was stuck in a time loop and had to live these years over and over again. I felt sure that I had made a mistake in a previous life and now was a chance to redo things, only in real life we don't get an "unwind" ability like Max does. Eventually the "storm" stopped and I went to university, got a job and got on with my life,. Until I played this game and all those memories good and bad came back to me.
I also know several people in real life who lost family when they were of school age and it completely broke them like it did to Chloe. Luckily most of them ended up ok in the end, once they settled down. For this reason I can't hate Chloe for the things she does as a teenager, as I know given the time to heal, things would likely turn out ok eventually. This also seems to be the case in the comics, although I'm not sure how canon they are.
Life is Strange: Before the Storm (Remastered)
I played this game the day after I finished playing the first game (remastered) as I just got into these games so much. It's nice to play as Chloe instead of Max and get to see Rachel, even if she was fairly manipulative. I get the feeling towards the end that Rachel genuinely feels bad for getting Chloe into trouble at school and with her parents. Would Chloe have gotten expelled if she hadn't befriended Rachel? I don't know, but I get the feeling she was looking for someone who she could be herself with and not have to deal with all the crazy stuff going on at that time in her life.
I loved this game as much as I loved the first game, although this game didn't quite manage to bring me to tear like the first one did. I don't know if this was because I already knew Rachel's fate, and that the events of the prequel were certain to happen anyway, or I had already cried everything I had from the first game.
I like that Chloe spent the whole of the game keeping a journal for Max, even though she didn't know if she would see her again. I'm not sure if Max ever got to read all the messages she left for her. The bonus chapter was also great, it was not only cute to see them playing as pirates one last time, but it actually sets the context for the fact that Max had to leave the same day Chloe's dad gets into his crash. I mean I knew these events happened, but I didn't realise they happened with a day or two, so it really explains why Chloe was so upset when Max left.
Stardew Valley
I think I can honestly say this game got me into the whole cosy side of steam games. Before I played this game I had mainly played RPGs and before that shooting games, but I hadn't played anything coming close to this.
This game is almost perfect and really started a lot of the cosy farming games I've been playing this past year.
When I first saw this game I wasn't sure if I wanted to play a pixel game, since I hadn't played anything like this since my Pokemon days, but it didn't take long before I was completely taken in by the setting, characters and game design. There are so many things to do and you don't have to just grind the farming if you want to explore the town and other areas, meet the NPCs, dungeon delve or just waste some time while listening to some amazing music.
Once I made significant progress (year 3), I started to look up the wiki to see if I was missing anything and realised there were still more areas to unlock. The desert comes with a second dungeon and eventually the tropical island has a volcano and second farm to explore. Plus some awesome end game items to buy once you unlock the walnut room.
The Room
Bought this game for a heavy discount and having not played puzzle games for a long time wasn't sure if I would like it.
I did enjoy every part of this game and proceeded to buy the bundle of the first 4 games and spent a week playing them all.
I love the way how intricate the puzzles are didn't have too much of problem solving them, some took longer than others, but that's expected.
Definitely worth the price, even if I had bought it full price.
The Room Three
I played this game after one and two and as much as I enjoyed this game, I will say it took a lot longer for me to complete compared with the others. I did feel there was a bit more back and forth compared with the first two, but this just made the game feel more complete, so not really a complaint.
After completing the main game I did have to look up a guide for how to unlock the alternate endings, as it wasn't immediately obvious without the hints, but nice to have a little bit of extended content once you think you are done with the game.