Category: Microposts
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Entropy Survivors (2024) - ★★★ The big differentiator here is that you have two weapons, a melee and a gun, and you can only fire one at a time. Since it’s a vampsurvalike, you get a bunch of subweapons linked to one or the other.
There’s also some really goofy fun powerups, like “roll em up” (make a katamari of enemies) and pinball (pinball into your enemies).
However, the early game is pretty stingy with powerup points, there is no refunds/respecing, and the weapon variety fries out pretty quick. So you get locked into the one thing you choose, power walls scale up, and you simply aren’t going to get anywhere without your Known Good Build.
Also, while it looks pretty, it definitely chugs on steamdeck even on low. A little bit of a strange choice for the genre imo.
Ascend to Zero (2026) - ★★★½ I like the timestop because it has two functions. it works as a room select, pausing enemies while you figure out your route and speeding through rooms you don’t want to bother with. it’s also your special combat move you trigger repeatedly, keying in bonuses, etc.
the synergies and weapons are good (although on some level you’re going to be timestopped so much the weapons don’t matter that much). However, the loot is a chore. You can’t sort by item type so your swords and spears get mixed together, making it hard to organize even after you buy out all the item storage and respec options. Figuring out what to keep and what to recycle after a run is like 10 min worth of work for a 30min run.
There’s also some other minor weirdness with polish and the controller scheme. Some things like upgrading your gadget don’t seem to recognize your button presses until they’re made multiple times. Sometimes RT is used to increase a substat, sometimes it’s left stick.
Overall, it has flavor. That counts. I just need to really be in the mood to juggle inventory screens to pick it up.
Ultros (2024) - ★★★★★ Played it again, it was just as incredible two years later. Much smoother coming back and remembering how the different rules interact. 100%ing this does seem like a bit of the fiddly nightmare others have referred to. But hey, take the bad ending and call it quits. And if you feel reluctance, maybe that’s the game doing its magic on you…
Raccoin: Coin Pusher Roguelike (2026) - ★★★½ 😃 “You can make powerful combos by stacking effects on top of each other”
🫥 “it’s random chance if you can set those combos up or not”
🥴 “You can improve your chances by playing over and over again to progress metagame elements”
i’ve been on this ride before, and much like an actual carnival game i felt like I had a good time but at maybe too high a cost. Instead of corn dogs and motion sickness, I was just left with a sense of 10 hours passing in a haze.
Emuurom (2026) - ★★★★ liked the scanning, knew i was going to hit a wall with fiddly platforming and timing, crashed out when i was trying to find the next area, glitched out, reset and got sent back to a boss fight i cleared an hour ago.
Grotto (2021) - ★★ i think putting it in 3d space was a mistake but i also think if it was in a VN format i wouldn’t have picked it up but also i don’t think this is a game for me so maybe the right signalling would have been appropriate.
first i was frustrated with the very slow daily drip of narrative and what looked like the streched-thin justification of my choices to meet predetermined plot points, then i got frustrated with the voiceover hitting me with the “ACTUALLY, this story is about” for the 4th time. then i thought about how many experiments i would need to do in order to collect all the star signs and figured if i cared about the story that much i would read the script raw.
cool art! interesting concept! deeply not for my adhd ass.
24 Killers (2023) - unrated up top: I didnt finish because of unclear progression, but it was really good and i’m upset that i can’t finish.
loved it right up until i hit a nasty progression issue where it was unclear how to proceed, dicked around for a few in-game days and made no progress, spent a few hours looking up walkthroughs and still nothin.
what i saw was really good in terms of weirdness, character and structure and i don’t think my experience should dissuade anyone from trying it out, except, well…. All the other people asking for answers and not receiving help on forums.
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic (2024) - unrated gave it two shots and while it seemed really cool, i was at first annoyed by not being able to build perfectly 90 degree aligned buildings and roads, and then completely defeated by trying to get my workers to a factory via a bus line. it seems like it would be really cool and detailed if you can get past the UI jank but there is a LOT of jank.
Dracomaton (2023) - ★★★★ yeah ok top down roguelike twin stick shooter, but i liked it. the weapons were weird, the weapon drain forces you to change things up, and the upgrade system does a good job shaping your build.
Moonlight Pulse (2024) - ★★★★½ theres a lot of really neat stuff here! the setting is a gigantic organism and you fast travel in its veins, and unlock new fast travel locations by unclogging its veins. every character has a special ability and you switch between them, lost vikings / trine style (sometimes in midair!) that said, theres absolutely some opaque stuff where i floundered for a bit trying to find the next place to go (its fine, i got some upgrades instead), or struggled with a boss or two, including the last boss who i’m probably not going to beat. regardless, great game.
Pseudoregalia (2023) - ★★★★ neat, fairly short metroid-ish platformer. the lack of a map is intentional (what exists was patched in well after the fact) and while its short enough i can respect it, the lack of a compass and fast travel also meant i’m probably not gonna finish it, but i enjoyed the mechanics of it.
Neyasnoe (2023) - ★★★★½ i really enjoyed stumbling around eastern European bloc architecture and finding weird stuff and listening to poetry!
i thought the end monologue was a bit heavy handed and went against my experience of the game. i wasn’t suffering a bleak existence, i was going clubbing and supporting my friends! get off my case, taxi driver!
The Gap (2023) - ★½ having your game start out with you screaming abuse at your wife as she leaves you sure is a choice. i poked around for a bit, failed a neurology test because i didn’t want to write down answers and then flip back into a memory, and decided that actually i didn’t care about this loser dickhead character and this explosively branching series of puzzles i was being handed.
Eliza (2019) - ★★★★★ a game that saw the future and positioned itself for a knockout blow.
a deep ambiguity about working in the tech industry washes over everything here. getting your little achievements for telling every client the same thing in their 15 minutes of therapy, leaving them totally unsatisfied and unable to solve their problems, while the people with power rave about the unstoppable power of AI to create poetry!!! and fix our own personal demons!!!! if we could only get one more sip of personal data, please!!!!, is a stark reminder that the world we live in was always something critics saw coming and warned us about well before anyone knew what a GPT or an LLM was. but the villains aren’t Marvel villains, the protagonists don’t smash the servers into pieces, and all we can do is seek out the connections that let us live with the world we made, some of us on accident and some of us (I mean…. not us, us) on purpose.
its also a nice and accurate portrait of seattle, as a little bonus. maybe a bit on the nose but i’ll take it.
Masters of Anima (2018) - ★★★½ i kind of liked it, but i could tell that even on easy it was going to badly challenge my ability to micromanage troops in another level or two. It wouldn’t run on my PC, only my steamdeck, so mouse and keyboard weren’t an option. i simply don’t care to be challenged in this way at this time.
City Limits (2022) - ★★ as much as i like small puzzle games about building cities, this one didn’t grab me. i like pixel art but the art here is kind of mushy and indistinct, the ruleset isn’t very interesting, and I just don’t really care to do score chasing.
To Be or Not to Be (2015) - ★★★★ very funny, but the bookmarking/checkpointing sucks, but also this game is very funny so whatever i just won’t see all of the endings.
Electrician Simulator (2022) - ★★ This is my fault for bouncing off Home Flipping Simulator and PC Repair Simulator and thinking maybe a change of subject matter would be enough for me this time. First, the game induces motion sickness in me. That sucks. Second, after spending more on parts repairing a carbon monoxide detector unit than it would cost to just buy a new carbon monoxide detector, I came back to find like 10 new jobs and I remembered that what overwhelmed me about the other games was the constant influx of meaningless progression gating, like, a slightly nicer screwdriver. Third, I was kind of hoping for a bit more education about identifying neutrals and leads on power sockets and instead that was the one thing the game abstracted away! (Plus it was European sockets, not American.)
The Signal State (2021) - ★★ “Make an XOR gate using OR, AND gates” No.
There’s a whisper of an interesting story here but “automated farming equipment repair” just becomes, uh, my comp sci degree as single-screen logic puzzle. My fault for picking up something without investigating it more thoroughly first.