Cozy and Critical
The Gamers Lounge is a video game news, review and opinion site run by gamers like you.
If you like life sims, if you like games you can sink hours into satisfyingly, if you like visual novels or weird stories or branching plots, I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is the game for you. Jump on board the Stratos when it finally launches, a new life awaits you in the offworld colonies.
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Sweet Transit, a new rail simulator/citybuilder currently in early access, is a deceptively frustrating game. From the start, it presents itself as something of a pleasant, relaxing, folksy builder game, with a bluesy americana soundtrack by Ely Robbins, a Western-style aesthetic with its laborers and “beginning of the rail era” atmosphere, and soon you’re set loose on a gorgeous map to build your first centers of industry, and, from there, slowly conquer the New World by connecting it up with trains. However, somewhere around building your first train you find yourself somewhat in error, and this was the point that I began to have flashbacks to when I used to try programming in Python.
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From the start, Thy Creature has a lot going for it. A gothic atmosphere, lovely music, a plot full of mysteries, and a rather unique art style and control scheme. It feels like a scaled-up RPG Maker game - one of those ones with a lot of places to explore, people to meet, and a story to gradually uncover as you do. It has all the makings of an interesting game with a lot of heart behind it, but frustratingly so.
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I wish this game was better.
There’s a power fantasy everyone’s had at some point in their lives of just destroying things. Stomping over buildings, squishing people you don’t like, roaring at the top of your lungs, and just straight-up destroying whole cities. It’s an excellent fantasy, a perfect way to release tension and get your feelings out on some tiny pixelated villagers. That’s what this game promises— a large, cathartic brawl through a medieval fantasy world as a huge, lumbering giant. You stomping your way through a cast of horrid villains and destroying siege machinery. While the promise of such a game is in there, Giants Uprising fails to deliver on a meaningful level. Not just with its laundry list of bugs, but with some fundamental issues that might not be solved. And that is possibly the most disappointing part.
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In short? This could be a really good game, a solid entry in the genre pioneered by Disco Elysium that’s just starting to take off (see also Murder Mystery Machine and to a more failed extent, The Sunken City) but dear god is Gamedec in a rough state.
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Hell Architect is a standout among survival games. With its relaxed pace, wicked humor, and unusual setting, the game draws you in, and then its forgiving attitude towards death and relatively easy to understand supply chains and production lines make it one of the few welcoming entries to the genre.
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By all accounts, I should like Cloudpunk. The vast neon-swathed cityscape evokes the best moments of Blade Runner, complete with the murmur of dystopian advertisements in the background. The flight controls are simple and smooth, allowing you to change height and swing through the city with ease, trailing twin neon contrails as you swerve around Asian-inspired buildings and avoid cars. It’s actually kind of relaxing, even at its most tense, sending you through gorgeous neighborhoods and actually letting you get out to explore them, having conversations that serve to deepen the world and helping various people with their problems. And lastly, it’s the kind of everyday-job noir-flavored experience that I’ve always loved, tasking you with doing a relatively low-level job as the plots around you darken further and further, as seen in such games as VA-11 hall-A and Night Call, among others.
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World of Horror, recently released on Steam Early Access, is incredibly addictive.
You wouldn’t expect this at first glance. It’s a brutally difficult roguelike, rendered in one or two-bit graphics that make it look and play like someone emulated their favorite Japanese horror RPG from the ‘80s, with all the retro interface and design that entails. It looks, upon opening it up, like a game made for a very specific audience who will “get” it and fiercely defend it. But once you actually start to play the game and make it through the difficulty barrier of those early deaths (and there will be early deaths), it opens up immensely, turning it into a gruesome and tough but incredibly rewarding experience that only deepens the more you play.
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Sometimes you just need something quick to play. Something addictive and engrossing enough that you can get deep into it, but just light enough that you can disengage if need be. Something that can be played a little casually, but has a lot of depth and action. And directly in that sweet spot is Dead End Job. It’s a roguelike shooter with a ton of style, a good sense of humor, and easy enough controls to learn. But between the variety of enemies, the arcade-style combat, and the large number of perks and items strewn across its levels, it’s far from a basic experience. It’s something fantastic for if you want to get lost for a little while busting ghosts, or if you just need something for a quick burst of gaming.
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At first glance, Infliction looks like any other game in the stealth/horror-adventure genre. You wander around dark corridors, dodge attacks from a malicious ghost and other monsters, attempt to complete tasks and progress the story all while trying not to get killed, and occasionally solve environmental puzzles with the help of your in-game Polaroid camera. It has all the hallmarks of a good stealth/horror game: It’s tense, the plot is interesting, the story breadcrumbs are easy enough to find but not all laid out in front of the player. It even has an element of exploration, with setting elements changing between areas and levels of the plot and rewarding careful looking through things. It’s all incredibly impressive, especially having been created by a very small team funded through Kickstarter. But at the same time, it marks a possible new route for the spooky corridors genre, one that future game designers would be wise to explore, one where perhaps the main draw is the setting and not the monsters wandering its halls.
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Disgaea is a series that’s been around for a while, an absolute tactical-strategy juggernaut that’s made its bones on unique gameplay, a vast array of characters, and an absolutely wicked sense of humor. The fifth numbered sequel (Sixth game if you count D2) in the series delivers on all of that, with two snarky morally ambiguous heroes taking on the threat of a massive army poised to take over the Netherworlds and rule the afterlife entire. But while you can certainly expect all the usual hallmarks of Disgaea— Fourth wall breaks, snarky heroes, wacky humor, talking penguins— the game introduces some interesting new systems and classes while still giving you all the power to take the fight to the Netherworlds and conquer the lands of the dead in the name of revenge.
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When I first saw First Strike: Final Hour in the Steam store, I was intrigued. I've been a fan of the nearest relatives to it, Introversion's Defcon and Team Jolly Roger's Interplanetary, for a while now, and the idea of cleansing the Earth in pixelated fire has never not sounded like a fun time. It's the ultimate expression of kicking over a block castle when you're done with it, only the block castle is the entire planet. There's a cathartic thrill to just knocking something over, and especially when that thing is the entirety of the planet Earth. In theory, anyway. In reality, the game is a little more...complex.
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Bounty Train is a curious game. It's a sandbox trading sim/adventure game/railway enthusiast entertainment piece that, while the positions are static and the routes are fixed, still manages to give the player a great deal of movement. It's a genre bending game with multiple story routes and an excellent way to generate micronarratives as you go. And it's also one of the few games where you can lose during the tutorial levels, thus causing the game to shrug and go "Well, the game's over, but here, keep playing after the game over screen." But unlike other genre-bending sandbox sims, Bounty Train keeps a focus on fixed points instead of free exploration of the map, allowing the player to focus on things like the complex economy, resource management, and the interplay between various factions and characters, opening up in a way few games of its type do, and creating an entirely unique experience.
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With the resurgence of many of those franchises (as well as Tim Schaefer trying to relive the days when he did something other than design failed business plans and games that sound better on paper,) Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick reunited again to bring us a perfectly encapsulated blast of old-school gaming, a pixelated wedge of surreality that brings back the days when puzzles were kind of obtuse and games were dialogue-heavy, and none of that was in any way a bad thing.
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Monster Monpiece, the latest game from Compile Heart, is something of a departure for them. There's no obvious grind, no weirdly implemented combo system, and it feels significantly different from most of their other games. All in all, it's new territory, and at first, it felt like they'd learned something from the process. Maybe, I thought to myself, maybe I've just suffered burnout from too many samey anime-style JRPGs. Maybe this time I'm wrong.
Read MoreIt's been almost a week since FunCom released their fantasy sandbox survival sim, Conan Exiles. And the prognosis is...better than initial launch. The game looks great, and the loop of scavenging and survival is well worth it, sure. It's also the only game with (and this is obligatory since it's been the only news coming out about this game other than the lag info,) an endowment slider so you can choose the size of your character's breasts, or, if you are so inclined, pendulous lower extremities. But while the game has a lot of interesting systems and some absolutely gorgeous graphics, the extreme lack of balance, lag and rubberbanding issues, and just downright uncooperative AI mean that this game will have a lot of polish to deliver before its final release.
Read MoreThere can be such a thing as too much of a good thing with games. Trillion: God of Destruction is a good example of that.
The game is packed with systems, subsystems, and various synergies, all of which Compile Heart does fairly well when they can. It's also packed with grinding, obtuse onscreen tutorials, and wonky controls. It's like someone took all the best parts of Compile Heart games and mashed them all together, and then also somehow the worst parts got in there, too. It's a phenomenal mess, and unpacking just how much of one will probably take the rest of this review.
Read MoreAll my life, I've wanted nothing more than a proper successor to System Shock 2. Bioshock was always way too easy, even on the hardest setting. Dead Space relied on jump scares and didn't create the necessary level of existential dread. Hell, even Amnesia was just Myst on a very bad drug trip. There hasn't been a game that blends claustrophobia, outright horror, desperate combat, and the feeling that something is terribly, terribly wrong in the same way as Looking Glass Games' classic first person horror/RPG/Adventure. When I saw Syndrome, though, I had hope. The claustrophobic corridors, non-working lights, and twisted imagery made me think of my old standby for any list of horror games. I had a lot of hope.
Read MoreImagine someone took the simplicity and design philosophy of SUPERHOT and applied it to a platformer, and you'd get Clustertruck, the latest by Landfall Games. A platformer that finds you playing "the floor is lava" on the back of featureless trucks, where one bad bounce leads to a hilarious demise and making your way through the level is about as much luck as it is skill, Clustertruck is one of those few games like the aforementioned SUPERHOT or Nidhogg where adding anything more to it would be stupid. It only has to be what it is. And it's fun like that.
Read MoreA few months ago, I reviewed an ambitious early-access game known as Zombasite. I was quite impressed with it back then, a title with staggering depth and a very low learning curve, where you could participate however you liked. It had an interesting mechanic with warring clans and an impending zombie apocalypse, and it was a lot of fun. It also had a lot of problems, some serious UI issues, and a definite problem with being overwhelmingly huge. It also couldn't quite make up its mind as to what kind of game it wanted to be, instead deciding to be all of them at once.
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