Indie games can be difficult to review because they can ignite the imagination, get your head bobbin’, and make you fall in love with characters, but may also have a host of jarring problems. Do I love this game or do I hate it? Well, that depends on what part of the in-game week I’m in and how many bugs I run into. On its better days, Demonschool is easy to swoon over because of its sheer style and unique storytelling.

Faye is our bold, sincere, and intensely charming college student protagonist bound for Hemsk Island to study for the year. She meets a friend on the boat over, Namako, who is her foil, but also her platonic soulmate. The game pulls no punches as we almost immediately witness demons blowing students up into mists of blood. Gruesome though it may be, Demonschool celebrates the cheer of Italian gore horror, almost singularly accomplished through its artwork and music.

Studying isn’t in the syllabus as Faye realizes she and her growing group of friends were brought here to fend off a demon invasion. All is not so grim, though, because they still have a school, which means bonding over karaoke, cooking together, and going on dates. Classmates disintegrating before their very eyes will have to wait.

One might say, “Well, that’s macabre and inappropriate.” And that’s right! But Demonschool balances the urgency of the demon invasion with levity. Faye fascinates me because she is bizarrely and comically excited about murdering demons—and the artwork conveys this—yet cares deeply about innocent lives and standing up to authority. Flirty and occasionally unaware, Faye has so many layers that work phenomenally well together throughout the entire narrative, even as the tone gets a bit serious by the endgame.

Demonschool’s narrative flow begins on Mondays with three phases during each day: morning, evening, and night. Faye’s crew get an assignment or sniff out a mission early in the week, investigate it throughout the week, and have to nail the assignment or achieve the weekly MacGuffin by Friday. Then the weekend happens, and nothing bad ever happens on weekends. Rinse and repeat. Players explore various locations across Hemsk Island, typically clicking on people with white speech bubbles above their heads that turn grey after a brief exchange.

Eventually, the locations spider out into fifteen or so places, which can really slow down the experience, but I sorta didn’t mind because the NPCs almost always have something funny to say, especially in the first half of the game. The NPCs change up every week and sometimes have something new to say during the week, so if you’re like me and compulsively want to experience all of the content, be prepared to visit every location multiple times during the week to avoid missing this fantastic writing. Some quality-of-life features here would have been a real time save, but I’ll complain more substantively later.

Key mission targets and side quest opportunities are clearly indicated on the location menu, so if you don’t care about the NPC dialogue, you can breezily get to the meat. I couldn’t help myself, though, because Demonschool’s quippy conversations are core to enjoying the game’s tone. Almost every time, the NPC will have some silly name like “Heights Enjoyer” on the roof and will have something witty to say about heights—and enjoying them. The whole affair is addicting because it’s so on-the-nose, yet cleverly written. I chuckled throughout.

In terms of the flow and pacing, Demonschool can be a bit of a slog as the mid-week can feel like filler; it’s as if the developers rigidly decided that all segments of the core storyline need to fit into this Monday-to-Friday mold, and had to find ways to fill in each of the three phases of the five weekdays. The result can feel sluggish and irrelevant at times, though the writing commendably obscures the wild goose chase. To make matters worse, the number of battles can feel just as much like filler.

Demonschool’s battles are simple yet excellent. When Faye and friends run into a demon, the screen will shake a little as Faye ravenously charges the team into battle, as if fighting demons is the most exciting act imaginable (I love her enthusiasm every time). Faye’s team is launched into a nether realm, somewhere between the human and demon world, and fights on a square-based grid. Players decide which allies will join the team, usually four out of several choices. Enemy positioning varies, which can feel gimmicky at times (e.g., all enemies lined up neatly in three columns).

This is where I interpret Demonschool more as a puzzle game than a strategy RPG. Players have finite action points with which to move the heroes, typically three spaces orthogonally or diagonally. If an enemy lies in wait, most characters will stop movement and hit the enemy, occasionally pushing demons into other demons for added damage. At other times, characters will have some other added effect, or even zip through the entire line of enemies. In this way, battles are almost singularly about positioning.

Expect damage numbers to range from 1 to 2, with special abilities potentially rising to an excessive 8, as almost all demons have four or less health. The mechanics of Demonschool are rich: some support characters can buff or heal allies, debuff enemies, move enemies around, place obstacles on the field, and so on. When characters earn enough mana points by acting on enemies or allies, they can activate a special ability, which is unique to each character. Fundamentally, these often involve elemental effects and unique attack formations, and can substantially change the course of battle.

Every battle has an expected turn limit—think of it like par in golf. If you meet this goal and no ally dies, you get bonus currency. The reason Demonschool can feel like a puzzle is that every battle can easily meet these conditions supposing you outfit your characters with the right abilities and choose a good composition for that battle. I was able to meet these conditions for nearly every battle, though I sometimes chose the “restart battle” option.

What’s more, every time players plan their turn, they can undo movement swiftly and choose a different option. This is especially helpful when learning how the mechanics work together in the beginning, and also towards the end of the game when battles and abilities can become complicated and multi-step. Pressing the confirm button triggers an extraordinarily satisfying visual as characters act out the planning phase in smooth, stylistic fashion. Enemies then take their turn and pounce on the good’uns.

Demonschool bleeds style. In this day and age, we expect bold animations when characters speak, not still images. Still, Demonschool absolutely excels in its character artwork. Almost every emotion matches the script well, and characters frequently change poses—coupled with a tasteful shake of the image. In fact, one of Demonschool’s many minigames to build relationship status with an ally involves guessing what emotion their silhouetted pose is. The artwork unquestionably breathes life and style into the large cast’s personalities and accentuates the dramatic story woven between them.

The landscapes are no slouch, either, as most locations boast incredible detail, yet have a blocky, polygonal simplicity to them. Demonschool’s rich style is so hard to describe because on its surface it appears basic and elementary by today’s standards, but the whole composition comes together with such vibrancy that I absolutely fell in love with it instantly and throughout the 45-hour trek. With a game like Demonschool that seems almost entirely about the vibes, a good soundtrack is a necessity.

Lucky for us, Kurt Feldman composed an outstanding soundtrack. Expect heavy reliance on synthy, bassy keyboard with frenetic percussion. Harmonicas, too! As is essential, the themes match every instance in the game, making no track feels jammed in inappropriately. Given Demonschool’s many hours of gameplay, some recurrence is noticeable, but it never feels repetitive, likely because of the sheer quality of almost every single work. “Weekend” is my personal favorite.

With so much to love about Demonschool, all is not immaculate. As referenced earlier, Demonschool has a significant pacing problem and can feel longer than it needs to be. Although I enjoy the battle system, the simplistic nature of combat—despite its various mechanics—doesn’t warrant as many needless battles as the developers throw at us. Since victory and failure can sometimes feel like they’re on a knife’s edge, precision reigns supreme, which can make each affair feel a bit daunting, especially when there’s little story relevance to several encounters.

Expect to do some mundane exploration on Tuesday to Thursday throughout each of the three phases, and expect the team to run into some demons in a bathroom, at the harbor, in the alley, and so on. Though Faye dramatically thrusts the team into combat, the demons appear randomly and without cause. While, yes, the demons are invading and the chance encounter makes sense conceptually, from a narrative perspective it all feels like filler. I want the good stuff, and the good stuff isn’t a random battle after the team encounters a dead end on a poor lead.

I started reviewing this game back in August, and it has met several delays since the start of its development. At the time in August, it was rough around the edges—crashes, quest markers never disappearing, visual issues, etc. The team delayed the game again, and I hopped back in a couple months later after several patches. While most of the pre-release issues have been hammered out, I continue to run into crashes and visual anomalies in the post-release, though far less frequently. Although Demonschool continues to receive patches, the technical issues are an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise stellar experience.

Demonschool’s hard to score, because most titles—including the AAA variety—don’t have the bold vision and intense style of Demonschool. We play indies to witness new ideas with a healthy degree of polish, though they also come with their issues. All in all a memorable and pleasurable experience, Demonschool is at times a slog, at others food for the soul. If you have the time to enjoy a novel jaunt through early adulthood, settle in for an otherworldly experience.

From Baldur’s Gate 3 to Critical Role to Stranger Things, the resurgence of fantasy-horror rooted in the 1980s Dungeons & Dragons zeitgeist continues to deliver a mix of standout hits and inevitable misfires. Drawing inspiration from the Duffer Brothers’ Netflix phenomenon, Kingdom of Night blends a touch of cosmic horror with a heavy dose of Hawkins-style storytelling, wrapped around an action RPG core that demands precise dodging, stamina management, and frequent reliance on random consumables. Kingdom of Night proudly embraces its retro ARPG identity. It doesn’t shy away from the visceral gore that defines the genre’s grimmer entries, nor from their occasional rough edges. It’s dark out on the edges of this town—exactly where the game wants you to be.

The narrative takes place across one night in 1987, when the quiet town of Miami, Arizona erupts into chaos, including the abduction of your neighbour. As John, you plunge into the night, carving your way through demons, hunting down cult members, and racing to save your friends before the darkness consumes the town. Kingdom of Night signals its televisual inspirations right from the splash screen, and the setting quickly confirms the parallels. High-school-adjacent character tropes? A mysterious cosmic evil possibly tied to a shady corporation? Shadow-soaked environments, thick mist, and copious shredded viscera? They’re all here.

To its credit, Kingdom of Night maintains this tone consistently, but unlike stronger entries in the genre, its characters and story rarely develop beyond what’s needed to move you to the next plot beat or boss fight. Most characters feel like quick sketches—a foul-mouthed bartender, a scatterbrained old woman, stock jocks and nerds—and their interactions unfold exactly as you’d expect. The dialogue reflects this simplicity, and several typos and a few dated situations don’t help matters, sometimes making the writing feel stuck in a bygone era rather than cleverly riffing on it.

Kingdom of Night’s art design is evocative, and its vibrant pixel art feels right at home alongside other Dangen-published titles. Wandering through dark streets lit by magenta ground fires or navigating neon green fungal blooms in the sewers creates a surreal atmosphere, even though the game is very darkly lit throughout. Character portraits take the form of simple 16-bit-style headshots—there are plenty of them, though few are memorable. Lonely stretches of plains and rocky scree gain tension from the minimal soundscape, where only footsteps, ambient effects, or the occasional thunderclap break the silence. A brooding musical layer ties everything together, leaning into synths, slow orchestral swells, and gentle plucks common to the genre, with a few standout exceptions.

You’ll spend most of your time in Kingdom of Night roaming the bleak, shadow-drenched streets of Miami, moving between abandoned supermarkets, small town libraries, and everything in between. The sense of carnage and supernatural dread seeps through environmental details, character encounters, and quick sketches scattered across the world. Many of these moments lead to quests—some push the central mystery forward, while others send you hunting for item sets or tracking down missing high school friends. The quest structure feels genuinely open. After the initial setup, you’re free to explore wherever you like and tackle whatever catches your interest, limited only by your character’s level, abilities, and the strength of the enemies occupying each area. The overworld map and area mini-maps do a solid job of showing your location and highlighting enemies or points of interest. Before long, you unlock a fast travel system, which is a huge relief given the size of some zones and how slowly your character moves at the start.

Real-time combat in Kingdom of Night revolves around locking onto the nearest enemy with the left gamepad trigger (frankly, playing with a keyboard and mouse isn’t pleasant). From there, you rely on melee attacks, dodges, and parries with the other face buttons. Stamina management becomes essential—dodging and using abilities drain it—so strafing, retreating strategically, and kiting enemies around terrain features all become core tactics. Magic users gain additional area attack options that demand careful positioning and an awareness of cast times. You select spells through different combinations of the face buttons, and combat will pause if you need to review them. These classes take more practice to play precisely, but their ability to damage large groups of enemies offers a satisfying payoff. Overall, combat in Kingdom of Night feels enjoyable, and the controls are tight, even if your character moves painfully slowly at first, and selecting spells is not immediately intuitive. Once you get comfortable with lock-on targeting, spell selection, and well-timed parries, most frustrations fade away.

Enemies usually attack in swarming mobs, starting with slow-moving zombies and introducing variants with new attack patterns. These shifts force you to adapt your strategy—projectile-firing shades demand sharp dodges, while poisonous fungi can split on death and quickly overwhelm you with sheer numbers and lingering damage. The combat design leans into these synergies: shambling zombies aren’t hard to corral on their own, but they become far more dangerous when you’re also trying to stay clear of a shadow’s homing, missile-like attack. In the more chaotic encounters, the screen practically turns into a bullet hell. Flaming projectiles fill your view while you dodge charging mastiffs and hordes of zombies all at once.

Most of Kingdom of Night’s drawbacks come from its inventory and equipment interfaces. The Notebook tracks your basic stats and is where you equip a weapon and up to three accessories, but with no way to sort the flood of loot you collect—especially accessories—it quickly becomes tedious to stay organized. It’s easy to overlook items that could actually help you. Quest tracking poses similar issues. Kingdom of Night displays quests as a horizontally scrolling strip of reminders, each tied to an NPC portrait. If you’re juggling a dozen quests, you’ll have to cycle through all of them to recall their requirements—there’s no prioritization system or quest markers.

This leads to a broader issue. Although the main thrust of Kingdom of Night is simple—and the “save the damsel” premise is classic—the sheer number of quests constantly distracts you from it. The game leans heavily into its sandbox structure, encouraging you to fight, loot, and explore without much narrative funneling. With combat so frequent, Kingdom of Night may work best when played in smaller sessions, where you complete quests days after you pick them up, thanks to stumbling across the right NPC or item on the far side of the map. If that’s your style, you’ll feel right at home. If not, you may find yourself less inclined to plod on through the dark streets.

Early in Kingdom of Night, your main character selects a class that shapes their ability list and influences how their Muscle, Guts, and Willpower grow. You first choose between melee and magic, then pick a more specific subclass. Class abilities link to a “keychain,” a visual system to represent how skills strengthen and evolve; as a result, progression stays fairly linear until the later levels. Each character level boosts your core stats and grants new abilities. You can raise health, increase critical hit chance and damage, or improve defensive resistances. These stats interact closely with the equipment and accessories scattered across the world, and it’s satisfying to steer your build toward heavy crit damage or stack Fear resistance in areas where enemies—and bosses—can panic you into wandering helplessly. Your primary stats also determine bonus damage for different weapon types and critical chance. Because lighter weapons attack faster, you’ll need to consider how to balance speed, damage, and your preferred playstyle to get the most out of your journey.

Individual abilities reinforce these stat synergies. For example, one melee class can reflect damage back at an enemy after a successful parry, and the reflected amount scales with your Guts stat—making Guts a crucial attribute to monitor. A later ability in the same skill tree negates all damage from the first hit you take (with a lengthy cooldown), which created moments where I could charge in, parry confidently, deal damage through the reflection effect, and rely on the passive damage negation to keep me somewhat safe in crowded encounters.

Kingdom of Night supports both local and remote co-op. While I couldn’t test the remote option, local co-op significantly expands your strategic choices. With a second player, a mage can focus entirely on crowd control and ranged spells while a melee partner draws aggro. Having another set of hands also softens the game’s difficulty curve—Normal mode is challenging enough that you’ll burn through consumable food items regularly, and even then, some bosses are tough without precise mastery of each class’s core mechanics. Enemies respawn in most areas, and because zones often feel level-gated, you can farm them for XP if you’re willing to put in the time during the fairly lengthy campaign. Alongside the large maps and various collectibles, Kingdom of Night also hides a surprising amount of lore in scattered books and documents found in houses and other buildings. These articles go a long way toward fleshing out the world and reinforcing the game’s themes.

Kingdom of Night is a dark tale, steeped in nostalgia for its setting and story inspirations, as well as its action-oriented combat. While it won’t earn accolades for originality or deep character stories, the combat remains satisfying, capturing that “git gud” feeling of progress and mastery—especially when you combine abilities or play a class in ways its progression encourages. Kingdom of Night can be frustrating at times, particularly with inventory management and quest tracking, as the UI struggles to keep up with growing loot piles and multiple active quests. If you enjoy wandering through nightmare-infested small-town Americana at night, this is a realm worth visiting. If not, there are certainly stranger things to explore elsewhere.

Harken back to yesteryear with the Secret of Evermore-like Shrine’s Legacy. We’ve got 2.5D action RPG swords, staves, and spells slung about for 15 to 20 hours for your millennial enjoyment. Games’ve moved past the 16-bit era? Get off my lawn! Puzzles, exploration, collectibles, one spell in an arsenal of four that is completely busted, hidden walls, talking cats, adolescent dialogue, awkwardly forced swearing—Shrine’s Legacy has it all!

Rio, a teenage boy from a small village, dreams of saving a princess. Puh-lease. You’re dreaming small, bud. How about the whole world? Well, someone’s gotta get this sleepy country bumpkin out of his hamlet, and that someone is Aklor: armored, archetypal villain extraordinaire. This guy shows up and he’s after the Sword of Shrine. Wouldn’t you know it? Rio’s got the sword in a fancy glass case. And his last name is Shrine!

Our acne’d hero meets Reima, a mysterious girl who wants to help him, as she isn’t a big fan of Aklor herself. The two gallivant all over Ardemia (the world) in search of gems to power up the Sword of Shrine. Aklor wants those, too, but he also wants to kill the two upstarts. So, he does what all good villains do and sends his least capable general to thwart the progeny of an ancestor who already defeated Aklor once before.

Each of the eight crystals is guarded by a massive beast (boss) in a dungeon. These crystals grant spells to Rio and Reima, who can expend mana to assist them in battle. Nothing earth-shattering here: enhance their sword to heal, ignite enemies, freeze foes, etc. To get mana back, they have to smack enemies with sword or staff as if powering up a battery. Combat flows simply, as well, with players running around timing hits when enemies leave themselves exposed. Or you could do what I did and pop the healing buff to mindlessly beat enemies through their attacks. Surprisingly fun.

Ardemia’s full of hidden goodies, and the open world map design is one of Shrine’s Legacy’s best features. The world forks and hides paths tastefully, making it eye-catching and engrossing to explore. Spells can sometimes impact the world, so Shrine’s Legacy bleeds into the Metroidvania genre, as returning to old locations can grant passage to a goodie or secret shop. The world map doesn’t articulate exactly where players are unless they enter a dungeon, which provides a grid-based map to help players navigate the sometimes labyrinthine catacombs leading to a gem.

Functionally, exploring dungeons is the same as walking around the open world, but getting to the boss has a distinct feel to it. Most dungeons have a puzzle theme that uses a previous spell and can feel boxy in its design. Save points generously dot the map, which is consistent in tone with Shrine’s Legacy’s general difficulty. Aside from a couple bosses, the game’s fairly easy, but challenging enough to maintain one’s attention, and I played single-player.

For those flying solo, the inactive character follows the active one, and switching takes a single button press. I often did this when mana reserves got low or I needed to heal the ally because they were taking too much damage. As referenced earlier, the healing spell is kinda busted, but potions give players the opportunity to heal in a more traditional style for this kind of game. Crafting potions requires money and resources, which are somewhat challenging to accrue. Potions can also permanently grow stats with specific types of collectibles, though don’t expect any surprises here.

Sidequests keep the world feeling uniform as NPCs task Rio and Reima to lead them somewhere, meet them in a location, or hunt for a trinket. This gave me an excuse to revisit old locations with new powers, so while I was satisfying the quest, I also found new paths to tread; I imagine this is part of the intention of the sidequests: providing players purpose for backtracking and giving them plenty to do.

While the side quests are enjoyable from a gameplay perspective, the overall dialogue in Shrine’s Legacy is fine. Stylistically, I found conversations reminiscent of days of olde, but because the atmosphere matches a bygone era doesn’t necessarily make it good. Still, not every game needs sophistry or vocabulary-rich exchanges in an attempt at maturity. For a game that looks like Shrine’s Legacy, the young adult approach maintains consistency.

Distinctly 16-bit in appearance, Shrine’s Legacy was clearly crafted with care. Pixel art doesn’t have to be basic, and Shrine’s Legacy is evidence of that. Spells commit flair, locations are detailed in layout and unique imagery, hubs win the eye’s attention with varied decor, and enemies animate uniquely with no copycat foes. If this era is your thing, the visuals will win you over easily.

Similarly, the music capably carries the SNES (not Genesis) banner with playful, earnest beeps and boops. Ruins have a mysterious, eerie tone to them, while towns have the upbeat cheer one expects. Although the soundtrack doesn’t boast any standout hits or surprises, the music is expertly composed and complements the era’s feel with the use of modern hardware (again, not Genesis).

Unfortunately, Shrine’s Legacy isn’t a hidden gem or a sleeper hit for a few reasons. The chief reason is that games that lean heavily on nostalgia—like this one—have to be careful not to feel too much like old games. Old games aren’t made anymore for a reason. Most successful titles like this add elements that may not have even been possible thirty years ago; they feel retro while having modern sensibilities. If you’re a purist, Shrine’s Legacy’s going to scratch that itch just fine.

I also ran into a host of bugs and awkward graphical issues, such as walking into what should have been dense objects as my characters went completely under them. This has a cheap feel to it, and happened often enough to irk me a bit. I also occasionally got stuck in walls, the game crashed or froze, and quest progression was sometimes unclear. These happened infrequently enough for me to put them at the end of my review—and I have made grievances about this stuff at the start of some reviews—but still impacted my experience. We also hope developers will patch this stuff out, but not all devs will do that, sadly.

The other issue I have with Shrine’s Legacy is that the characters and world lack power. This part’s hard because making a truly impactful story that is worth people’s time and money is core to an RPG experience. I enjoyed the characters and world, but I know some will find these aspects largely forgettable. Rio and Reima grow together over the course of the journey and noticeable changes occur, but their personalities lack depth and unique voice.

Of the retro titles out there, Shrine’s Legacy is a cut above. Several games like this may feel like cheap-to-develop cash grabs, or like someone made them just to relive the old days but doesn’t know how to make a good game. I’m critical of this style of game. Despite its failings and mediocrity, I enjoyed my time with Shrine’s Legacy. A bit simple, a bit weak, a bit buggy, but full of outstanding map design, charm, and great ideas. I hope the developers find some success and make an even better game in the future. I’ll be waiting.

Once viewed as nothing more than a disposable pawn, a young man becomes a powerful force for inspiration in a fantasy realm that is quickly losing its hope. Can he and his comrades secure lasting peace, or will their sacrifices prove too much to bear? Indie-developed The Tale of Relm is an opening salvo into an engaging traditional RPG plot, albeit with a few bumps along the way.

The beginning of The Tale of Relm serves as an introduction to a faction of soldiers known as the Crudo. These specialized soldiers, created at a very young age through mysterious and arguably nefarious means, are known for their emotionless obedience. However, the latest batch of Crudo trainees isn’t living up to the kingdom’s standards, so it’s decided to sacrifice them instead. Things don’t go as planned when one Crudo trainee survives the ordeal, spared from that fate only for a planned execution later for showing emotion and conscious thought.

Known initially as Red Eyes, his deliverance from jail and the executioner’s blade soon becomes a sprawling epic, throwing the very fate of all three of the land’s governing nations into chaos as they try to survive a looming darkness arguably of their own making. Toss in otherworldly beings with their own agendas and things get immensely heated, with Red Eyes’ quest to find himself becoming so much more.

I won’t say much more about The Tale of Relm’s plot, given that the story takes some interesting narrative twists and directions. However, I will say that many of the central characters who officially join Red Eyes’ party are likable and interesting enough in their own right, though they unfortunately don’t often get the story exposure and narrative insight I would have loved to see. Red Eyes and the offensive magic-casting princess Celes are definitely the most plot-focused characters, given their later developments and overall central importance, with Celes’ journey and outlook in particular going in shocking and memorable directions later on.

Yet, there are several standout ally characters whom I’d have appreciated seeing featured more prominently due to their distinctive designs and the few scenes they appear in. The game offers an intriguing perspective on the moral complexities in political and war narratives. However, I wish the game had explored these observations in a more nuanced and detailed manner than was sometimes presented in the game itself.

The Tale of Relm is very much a traditional RPG in terms of gameplay, with players taking on the role of either Red Eyes or Celes, depending on what’s going on in the story. You control a party of up to four characters at a time, partaking in turn-based battles against up to four enemies once you encounter an enemy sprite on the field. Each party member has a specialized job class and skillset with unique weaponry and equipment sets available to them. As you gain experience and level up through combat, you also acquire job points, which you can use to learn new class skills for a specific character.

Both combat and equipment usage in The Tale of Relm are relatively easy to figure out if you’re at all familiar with other traditional RPG setups; however, there are a few unique notes regarding battle that can take some getting used to. For starters, each piece of armor you acquire in-game has an inherent weakness attached to it, such as an elemental weakness like fire or a weapon weakness like a dagger. These weaknesses mean that the damage inflicted upon a character with said specific attacks or spells breaks through a character’s shield points. Once their shield is effectively “broken,” the character is temporarily stunned and left open to double the damage.

Enemies also have inherent weaknesses and shield points to strategize around, meaning you’ll want to equip armor that won’t make you so susceptible to their offensive abilities. You also accumulate boost points every round that allow you to strengthen skills exponentially or even attack multiple times. Figuring out an enemy’s weaknesses and planning how to strike them multiple times to whittle down their shield points is vital to victory.

There are some cases where, depending on your party makeup, what gear you have equipped, and what skills you’ve yet learned, you might have a difficult time with fights until you discover an effective strategy, even if you use respawning enemies on maps to level grind. All of these factors combine to create a tactically engaging turn-based battle system.

While you can save anywhere when out on the world map, you have to utilize save points in dungeons, meaning that you should carefully plan your field traversing more. I found some of the dungeon and field maps to be confusing or tedious to navigate, but that often turned out in my favor, as it gave me an excuse to level up more while getting my bearings. Be prepared for a lot of backtracking, though, as there’s no fast travel component at play.

Graphically, The Tale of Relm features visually appealing, comic book-inspired CG illustrations for the more significant cutscenes. The pixel sprite work, backgrounds, and character art used during important dialogues are also quite eye-catching and pleasing to look at. The music, particularly the main theme, is quite atmospheric and fitting for the game’s fantastical setting. I also enjoyed the addition of partial voice acting, as the voiceover narrations for the beginning of chapters and one particular speech before a pivotal battle are both exceptionally well done. From a script-stance, the story’s presented well enough. However, while it’s easy to parse what’s said throughout, there are several noticeable typos and grammar issues to contend with.

The Tale of Relm is roughly twenty or so hours in length, but I feel I should note that it does carry the subtitle “The Awakening” in its save files. The reason for that becomes apparent when you reach the game’s “To Be Continued” ending. The cliffhanger is particularly upsetting since the story really begins to develop in interesting ways by that point, and I was eager to continue and find out what happens next, only to be met by the credits rolling. So, for those who want a self-contained tale, it’s worth taking note. I can only hope that whatever form the narrative continuation takes, it won’t be too long a wait.

The Tale of Relm is an enjoyable indie traditional RPG experience, provided you can get past its foibles and are okay with an ending that’s not yet conclusive. Developer EG Games consistently updates and patches the game, ensuring it plays smoothly. By the end of my playtime, I simply wanted to play more of The Tale of Relm, and I think that speaks to the title’s inherent strength of heart more than anything else. It’s a tale I wouldn’t mind diving into again.

The democratization of game development tools over the last decade has ushered in a wave of single-developer titles that have influenced the industry, offering a uniquely cohesive perspective of a single artist in contrast to enormous AAA games made by teams of hundreds or thousands. There are advantages to this, as evidenced by landmark solo-dev triumphs like Stardew Valley and ASTLIBRA, games where a dedicated artist nurtured a clear creative spark without interference. I was initially hopeful Artis Impact was the same; after all, developer Mas has lovingly crafted an incredible audiovisual experience with dramatic flair and creativity to rival any big-budget, full-team project. Unfortunately, there is a significant downside to the lone-wolf creative process: no one else can step in to steer the ship when it drifts off course. Artis Impact begins as a visual tour-de-force with an intriguing setup and world, but translation issues, strange tonal inconsistencies in the narrative, and overly simplistic gameplay mechanics mar what could have been the next solo-dev masterpiece.

Artis Impact is the story of Akane, a young woman newly recruited into an organization called Lith. Lith is a paramilitary group tasked with protecting the remnants of humanity from the threat of rogue AI in a postapocalyptic society. Their operatives are cloaked in black and wield massive swords known as R-blades, and Akane is accompanied by a friendly AI named Bot. If this sounds familiar to you, then you may have already drawn some comparisons between Artis Impact and NieR: Automata, an inspiration Artis Impact wears proudly on its sleeve. Yet, the games differ conceptually and in execution in terms of structure and presentation. Artis Impact has a traditional turn-based battle system and borrows from life-simulation titles like Rune Factory, offering a more slice-of-life take on the concept. This does enough to set the game apart from its inspiration, and it’s a unique blend of genres that left me intrigued and eager to see more. 

The most striking aspect of Artis Impact is the visual design. The game uses a nice mix of hand-drawn background elements with pixelated character sprites to create a cozy, lived-in world unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Many visual techniques are implemented to great effect, such as blurring and smearing the edges of environments to evoke a watercolor effect. Ccutscenes play out in a mix of manga-style panels and cutaways layered over filtered real-world photographs and concept sketches. This choice to blend conventional visual art techniques against tech-influenced details like the operating system window frame in battle sequences gives the game a truly unique visual identity.

In tense action scenes, the game often adopts a side-view silhouette effect, with characters composed of only a few of their brightest pixels (Akane’s long white hair, for example) against a sea of black, a clever way to suggest impressive animation flourishes without needing to painstakingly animate every detail of each sprite. Some of these animation flourishes and visual tricks are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a game, and Artis Impact surprised and delighted me visually throughout its relatively short eight-hour journey. The screenshots in this review, as inspired as they are, do not do the game’s visual design justice; you must see it in motion to get the full effect of what Mas was able to pull off here, and the effects are stunning.

Completing the impeccable aesthetic is the excellent music. The auditory experience is just as fluid and enjoyable as the visual one. The tracks that play in towns, dungeons, and the world map are suitably ambient and comforting or ominous, depending upon the environment, and the battle tracks are heart-pounding and full of intensity, befitting the impossible odds often stacked against Akane. It’s quite impressive how many unique tracks there are, and each one feels appropriate in context and could stand on its own as a composition outside of the game.

Unfortunately, the game falters in its storytelling and mechanics. There are moments when Artis Impact wants to tell an epic, bombastic tale, but the life-sim structure and strange tonal shifts impede this goal. Initially, it seems as though Lith spends its time doing odd jobs and mopping up rogue AIs that are more of a nuisance than a threat. The stakes ramp up without warning after the first few hours, with entire towns and villages being destroyed and humanity’s future at stake. Despite this, the game gives you frequent days off from Lith-duty to engage with NPCs, part-time jobs, and menial sidequests, even when massive threats loom large. 

This tonal inconsistency extends to the dialogue and characterization of the cast as well. Akane has a handful of compatriots in Lith who accompany her on missions and constitute most of the possible character interactions, but companions like Raven, Leni, and Billy are woefully underdeveloped by the time the credits roll. The game also has a habit of souring serious moments with attempts at humor that fall flat, often centered around various characters’ infatuation with Akane. I lost count of how many times a male character expressed romantic or sexual interest in Akane that went completely unreciprocated or unnoticed, and these moments are more jarring than they are humorous. Billy is a particularly frustrating character, as his defining characteristic is that he is a raging misogynist. While most of the game’s primarily female cast tend to brush him off or ignore him, his constant sexist remarks become incredibly grating, and there is little payoff or pathos by the end of the game for his character. 

Compounding the game’s strange plotting and ill-advised attempts at humor is the rough English translation. While the overall plot details are straightforward, the nuances of character personalities become lost in the strange diction and halting dialogue. Many scenes feel like the characters are just blabbing in non-sequiturs at one another rather than having a natural conversation, and their personality traits are wildly inconsistent. Akane’s robot companion, Bot, speaks in a typical robotic tone of rational analysis for most of the game, but then occasionally swears or drops colorful innuendos out of nowhere. This uneven translation also impeded sidequest completion, as it was difficult to follow who or what was necessary for progression from the stilted and confusing dialogue. 

The most disappointing aspect of Artis Impact by far is the gameplay. The game employs a traditional turn-based system akin to the early Final Fantasy titles, but offers nothing interesting or engaging outside of admittedly impressive battle animations. There are no party members other than Akane and Bot, and Bot’s actions are entirely automated; Bot defaults to healing Akane every turn unless you equip him with items that mildly influence his behavior towards the occasional attack or buff. Plenty of turn-based RPGs navigate the challenge of a single-party member battle system well (like Tsugunai Atonement or Parasite Eve), but Artis Impact feels exceedingly primitive, offering less complexity and fewer options than even the first Dragon Quest.

Akane herself begins the game with only a single skill, with other skills found through out-of-the-way exploration in dungeons. Finding new techniques could be a compelling and worthwhile diversion, adding variety to the barebones combat. However, Akane’s initial skill is one of the most powerful in the entire game, attacking multiple enemies at the cost of 50% of her current MP total. Since the damage output doesn’t fluctuate depending upon the amount of MP consumed, you can essentially spam this skill in every combat encounter and come away victorious without any thought or strategy, even in boss encounters. This lack of mechanical depth undercuts the otherwise stellar presentation and narrative stakes in most of Artis Impact’s intense moments with a battle system that is insultingly simple and perfunctory. I came away feeling as though Mas only included the battle system out of a sense of obligation to genre trappings. However, the game is primarily comprised of dungeons and combat encounters, so the entire experience ends up feeling like a chore by the end.

To add insult to injury, the game rushes to a ham-fisted and unsatisfying narrative conclusion that raises more questions than answers. The game attempts to encourage replays through optional sidequests that reveal more about the world, but I don’t think it would be worth trudging through the shoddy translation and mind-numbingly boring combat in the hopes of finding a more satisfying answer. I came away from Artis Impact with the distinct impression that the game could’ve used additional perspectives to address some of its most glaring inconsistencies. As it stands, Artis Impact is an audiovisual masterpiece that fails to convey a cohesive narrative or engage the player beyond its spectacular presentation.

The modern CRPG revival shows no sign of slowing down, and Spiderweb Software’s latest remaster keeps the momentum going. To mark the 25th anniversary of Avernum 4, founder and lead developer Jeff Vogel is revisiting the classic with an updated edition packed with new features and a refreshed interface built for modern systems. Unlike the Geneforge remaster from a year or so back, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory tells a more traditional, party-based fantasy tale. Yet it still thrives on the rich worldbuilding, vast exploration, and sharp writing that have defined Vogel’s work from the start. Avernum 4: Greed and Glory stands as another strong entry in the CRPG pantheon and a fine entry point for newcomers, though it will likely resonate most with those who fondly remember CRT monitors, late-night pizza runs, and the shrill whine of dial-up connections.

Avernum 4: Greed and Glory takes place almost entirely in a vast underground realm of caverns and hidden settlements. This sunless world was once a prison for the Empire’s criminals and exiles, but it has since grown into a thriving civilization of its own—the titular Avernum. Your party of four adventurers descends into this underworld in search of freedom, fortune, or whatever drives you onward. But Avernum is in turmoil. Powerful factions clash, bandits roam the tunnels, and ancient magics stir once more, leaving the government struggling to maintain order. Travel has become dangerous, and forbidden for most. For a group of hardy adventurers, though, such chaos is the perfect opportunity. Before long, you’ll find yourself at the center of uncovering what’s truly happening below.

The story feels carefully crafted, clearly developed over many years in the developer’s mind, and takes advantage of additional plot elements added in this remaster. Like Geneforge, it blends pastoral fantasy with technological influences and themes that echo the world we live in today. Avernum 4: Greed and Glory boldly examines the rights of a new civilization and questions whether past actions can truly be rewritten into new friendships. As you progress, you can choose sides among different factions and shape the story’s direction. The game’s structure stays open throughout, with few areas locked behind story progression. By the mid-game, the paths you take and the quests you pursue depend entirely on how far you want to explore.

The graphical assets and artwork closely resemble Spiderweb’s previous remasters, adding or changing little from those earlier efforts. There are, however, some striking flashes of detail—intricate crystal formations, humanoid-sized mushrooms, and sprawling city homes—that stand out. Still, this is a game that relies heavily on the player’s suspension of disbelief, or rather, the extension of their imagination. And, across many hours of adventure, it can be difficult to associate specific characters with a distinct image or voice. Similarly, spell and ability effects are understated, and high-level combat doesn’t always look or feel as powerful as it should.

The music and sound design are quite minimal, relying on simple movement noises and basic interaction effects. Audio cues are sparse, and while this fits the game’s atmosphere of deep isolation, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is the kind of experience where an external playlist becomes essential—perhaps something more uplifting or soul-enriching to balance the mood.

If you’ve played any Spiderweb Software game since 1994, the character and combat systems will feel instantly familiar. The core mechanics stay consistent across different settings and series, remaining solid and reliable. Combat and exploration both rely on a progression system divided into physical and magical skills, with a few technical ones like Tool Use or Cave Lore mixed in. You assign stat points at character creation and each time you level up, shaping your character’s strengths as you choose. Your initial class and ancestry choices add another layer of strategy, since each combination grants its own weight. The catlike Nephils excel as archers thanks to their natural bonuses with missile weapons, while humans’ ability to wear any robe or armor lets them adapt to many roles. Every class remains flexible, though—you can train a fragile mage in Pole Weapons just as easily as in Spellcraft if you want to defy expectations.

At certain levels, you can choose Traits that enhance your core stats—boosting strength, increasing critical hits, or adding extra damage against physically vulnerable enemies. As you progress into the late game, these Traits grow more powerful and diverse, turning build planning into a strategic system of its own.

Combat works in a straightforward, turn-based system that switches to a grid layout once you engage an enemy or mob on the world map. There’s no visible turn order, but each combatant acts according to their initiative. Abilities cover the familiar range, from melee and magical attacks to defensive buffs and debuffs. Enemies often arrive in waves once they detect you, so the game rewards clever use of area-of-effect spells and smart positioning in narrow passages or chambers. During battles, the AI proves capable, keeping ranged attackers at a safe distance while sending tougher melee foes to pin down your party.

Enemy variety remains fairly limited, consisting mainly of humanoids, underground vermin, and undead monstrosities. The game adds depth through resistances: even creatures that look similar may resist melee attacks but remain vulnerable to Poison or Curse damage. You don’t need to figure this out through trial and error, either—right-clicking an enemy in combat displays their vital statistics instantly.

Avernum 4: Greed and Glory has a vast story, sidequests, and environments that can easily consume dozens of hours to fully explore. Beyond the many hidden areas and secrets, the game features a deep crafting and trade system to keep players engaged. It doesn’t include mini-games or alternative side activities; instead, the focus remains on exploration and uncovering the world’s stories. The game’s attention to detail and devotion to its lore create a consistent, lived-in universe. Every structure and point of interest—from abandoned farmhouses to almighty castle keeps—has a purpose. While there is a critical path and marked key locations, it encourages players to deviate, explore, and spend time in its nooks and crannies. Visiting shops and interacting with the articulate inhabitants is part of the experience. Players who aren’t inclined to engage this way may find the game feels like a slow slog through verbose, similar-looking settlements.

There are a few minor frustrations. While the UI is much smoother than the original, zooming the map isn’t intuitive, and you can’t right-click to exit menus or dialogue options—so be ready to rely heavily on the keyboard and mouse. There is no gamepad support. Other niggles are common across the remaster series: combat still suffers fiddly target selection, often leading to misclicked targets or accidental movements. On the bright side, the game offers a very generous save/load system. Seamless world transitions and a fast-travel feature—which becomes available relatively early—help mitigate some of the quirks typical of classic CRPG design.

Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is akin to reading a good fantasy novel: it’s deeply engrossing at times, requiring a fair bit of imagination to bring the world to life, and likely not the most modern method of accessing such content. But in saying this, the subterranean stories of Avernum, and its many detailed factions and quests keep you moving forward and invested in what’s coming over the next hill cavern. The commitment to playing an open role and of exploring everything on your own terms and time is an element many modern games still cannot offer in the same way. For those with such a bent, and with a willingness to engage their imagination and forgive some older design elements, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory will suck you deep into its yawning, cavernous depths.

As a periodic PC player, I’ve always gravitated with great reverence toward the point-and-click adventure genre but felt that I’d missed the proverbial bus on them. Adventures from the likes of LucasArts and Sierra seized the hearts and desktops of fans and held them dearly from the late 80s through the entire 90s—no series more so than Monkey Island. This October marks the 35th anniversary of the 16-colour PC DOS EGA release of the series’ maiden voyage, The Secret of Monkey Island. To celebrate, I finally sat down to play through the 2009 rerelease, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, sticking primarily with the classic 256-colour aesthetic. It’s with great relief and confidence that I say this didn’t feel like video game homework. In fact, The Secret of Monkey Island is still smooth, fun, and more sharply written than almost any game written in the three and a half decades since.

In retrospect, The Secret of Monkey Island comes from a veritable adventure-gaming dream team of writers and designers at LucasArts: Ron Gilbert, creator of Maniac Mansion (1987) and its SCUMM engine (here again used); Dave Grossman, who would go on to write and design Day of the Tentacle (1993) and many TellTale Games in the late 2000s; and Tim Schafer, who headed Grim Fandango (1998) and later founded Double Fine Productions. Not only do they truly capture lightning in a bottle with The Secret of Monkey Island, but that lightning strikes again and again (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors) with subsequent LucasArts games in the 90s.

The design team has said The Secret of Monkey Island takes inspiration from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, though many story beats felt analogous to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Young protagonist Guybrush Threepwood wants to be a mighty pirate, and so he sets out on a series of trials across Mêlée Island^TM to prove himself. While honing the arts of thievery, sword fighting, and treasure huntery, Guybrush becomes enamored with the Governor of Mêlée Island^TM, Elaine Marley, who is spirited away by the wicked ghost pirate Captain LeChuck. Guybrush must acquire a (used but like-new!) ship and then crew that ship to pursue LeChuck to the mysterious Monkey Island^TM.

Danger is ever-present in such forms as piranha poodles and surprisingly health-conscious cannibals, though the way Guybrush goes about surmounting each obstacle is always lighthearted and subversive of what even adventure gamers might expect. To get into the Monkey Island mindset, it helps to think along the lines of Bugs Bunny and other cartoon characters. There’s logic to be found, but it’s silly, on-the-nose logic. Most impressive is the variety of puzzles. There’s a fair share of “verb + inventory” puzzles as you pick up everything from grog mugs to a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle. My favourite puzzles, though, were through the dialogue, including haggling down the price of your ship, coercing friends and foes (“Pretty please with sugar on top?”), and the iconic insult sword-fighting scenes. Let me stress that this was one of the funniest games I’ve ever played, with silly yet charming humour falling somewhere between Airplane! and The Princess Bride.

One of the things I liked most about The Secret of Monkey Island, aside from finally getting in on the countless in-jokes and quotable lines, was how it winks at the golden era of adventure gaming around it. There are jokes and references to past titles (the SCUMM Bar or talk of selling “fine leather jackets” in reference to Indiana Jones) and then-contemporary titles (the “Ask me about LOOM” pirate), all while dialogue and puzzle solutions poke fun at the genre’s tropes. Now, I look forward to seeing how the gags established here continue in the sequels.

The Special Edition contains two versions of the game, instantly swappable with the push of a button. The “classic” version is the 1992 DOS VGA version, and the new version features hand-drawn graphics, full voice acting, a remastered soundtrack, and a handy hint system. I preferred playing the classic version for its evergreen pixel aesthetics, though I bounced between the two styles to see how the new areas looked and to quickload/relisten to the voice acting on certain scenes. The old music holds up well in places and is effective compositionally, though those old synthy trumpets are rather farty. The new sound design is richer and full of more ambience (and less dead silence) than the original, but the new UI is updated with console players in mind, and strangely hides the verb and item bar. I liked the new cartoony character designs in certain scenes, though during gameplay, characters look wooden and dead-eyed. I should have liked the ability to mix the old visuals with the new sound, or some combo thereof.

While playing in the classic version of The Secret of Monkey Island, you still have access to the progressive hint system (sans the big yellow arrow in the new version), and try as I might to avoid hints, there were places where I broke down and begged for clues. Strangely, putting a pot on my head was one of the things I solved intuitively with little pause for thinking, though I’m not sure I like what that says about me.

It’s worth noting that many scenes benefit from the old UI, like the rare instances requiring quick clicks (namely, transporting acidic grog and launching yourself with a cannon), and the off-screen fight with Sheriff Fester Shinetop, in which you read the ridiculous items Guybrush uses and adds to his inventory. At a five to seven hour runtime, the game’s well worth playing in both styles.

Among my few complaints are the RNG nature of collecting insults and their respective comebacks for the sword fighting—the uncreative pirates kept hitting me with the classic “You fight like a dairy farmer!” line—and the way some interactive elements in the environment were hard to see, such as that accursed hatch on the ship deck. Thankfully, switching freely between graphic styles helps mitigate this issue.

Knowing the reputation a lot of point-and-click adventures have for obtuse puzzles, I was a little worried going into The Secret of Monkey Island. However, new players of any age need not worry: this is not only one of the best point-and-click adventures of all time, but it’s also player-friendly and holds up in nearly every regard. Above all, its wry yet good-natured sense of humour thoroughly charmed me for the entire adventure. Like watching a great comedy, I see myself returning to Monkey Island^TM here and through the sequels.

A blend of turn-based combat and point-and-click adventure is something I hadn’t encountered; not until Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken filled that gap with a thoughtful story, solid puzzles, and a surprisingly robust combat system. It’s all wrapped in a pixel-art style, steeped in dread, and rich with tension. Deep Sleep may cast you as a dream traveler, but it often feels more like a nightmare—and that’s a very good thing.

Labyrinth of the Forsaken is scriptwelder’s latest game in the Deep Sleep series’ setting. Although its story stands alone from that trilogy, there are obvious points of comparison thematically and in the construction of the adventure systems. There’re shared art assets and ideas, tying the adventure further into its history.  If you enjoyed the trilogy, then this latest offering will feel comfortable, even with the additional combat options.

The story follows the young protagonist, Amy, as she journeys through a world of dreams in search of her lost brother. Using a mysterious electronic device, she taps into fragments of his dreams, opening paths to new areas and uncovering clues as to her brother’s fate. This shared subconscious hosts not only other dreamers and travelers but also malignant forces that fuel much of the horror and combat. The writing is strong, with dialogue shaped by careful diction and grammar that give the characters real conviction. As the mystery unfolds, it reveals both the nature of the dream world and Amy’s own circumstances. How did she obtain the device that grants her access to dreams? Why are these specifically her brother’s dreams?

Deep Sleep leans into a retro-pixel art style, using large blocky assets to pack detail into just a few splashes of color. The simplicity doesn’t lessen the atmosphere’s impact. If anything, it sharpens the unease at the heart of the story and setting. Lighting plays a major role (the torch mechanic makes every bump in the night count), while sound design and subtle background movement build a remarkable sense of suspense. The developers clearly have an eye for atmosphere. Mannequins, spiders rustling in the undergrowth, and shifting shadows at the edge of vision are all placed with precision. Each new area had me scanning the screen, bracing for what might emerge. Music is used sparingly, elevating the general suspense. When it does appear, the keyboard-led synth tones place the setting further into its retro inspirations.

The game makes smart use of classic point-and-click conventions. Finding and collecting quest items to unlock new areas and combining items to forge new solutions is satisfying. This is layered with an extra twist: players can rotate inventory objects in pseudo-3D to uncover hidden details or highlight hotspots. Some hotspots trigger reactions, like revealing a key inside a cardboard box or activating a puzzle. Altogether, it’s a sharp evolution of familiar mechanics that keeps item discovery engaging, avoiding the trial-and-error grind of combining everything in the hope of progression.

Environmental puzzles support the item system, with clues woven into the writing and visuals of each scene. Paying close attention always rewards you, and the solutions strike that sweet spot—never unfair, but encouraging you to explore more deeply or reconsider what you already know. A few quirks stand out: items appear in a semi-random fashion due to map randomization, which can sometimes cause you to discard something essential. Since discarded items can’t be recovered, this wrinkle can be frustrating, especially as key objects aren’t marked or distinguished from the rest.

After the first few dreams in Deep Sleep, Amy gains more freedom in where she travels, and repeated dream-walking lets her collect Focus. Focus anchors her to her real self, allowing her to manifest abilities and items within the dream world. As she accrues it, she can spend Focus to unlock powers, boost health, and gain practical perks like larger inventory space (a lifesaver) or faster movement. It’s not the sprawling ability tree of a full RPG, but every upgrade feels meaningful and has immediate impact. Some, like extending her health bar or increasing available Focus, are practically essential.

Beyond stats and abilities, Focus also enables Amy to imprint item blueprints onto her dream self, which she can then summon in dreams. This system enables her to research weapons, shields, or restorative items and prepare strategically for upcoming challenges by creating them in the dream. With enough Focus, you can stockpile items tailored to different encounters like multi-target attacks for swarms, or single-target gear for tougher, isolated foes.

This brings us to combat. When Amy confronts the Shadows of the dream world, confrontations play out in a straightforward turn-based system. Each participant acts in order, marked by numbers beside their sprites, with health clearly tracked. Players choose actions from a simple menu, many of which depend on items carried in the inventory. Tools like wrenches or screwdrivers serve double duty—solving puzzles outside combat and inflicting damage or status effects in battle. Defensive items, such as bin lids or mannequin parts, block attacks for a turn or so.

Every item has a durability rating tied to the strength of its dream imprint or the Focus that Amy invested to create it. While the tactical approaches aren’t vast, the essentials are all here: damage-over-time effects, area attacks, turn delays, and healing abilities. Combat is punishing, largely because of item fragility. The right tool is often in hand, only to crumble before the fight is over. Groups of enemies are especially tough unless you’ve prepared weapons that hit multiple targets, and the challenge spikes once foes start manifesting healing powers of their own. Deep Sleep‘s developers have recently added multiple difficulty options, so this is much less of an issue now than it was at launch.

The end of a dream run (whether you’ve completed it or not) is where you collect Focus to upgrade Amy. There are other options she can take when she is back at her brother’s apartment, and she can choose how to use her free time during the day. These include spending time in the nearby city to build her health levels, or she can read through his book collection to generate additional Focus outside of dream missions.

Deep Sleep nails its story, setting, and the unusual blend of turn-based combat with item-driven adventuring. But a few frustrations hold the experience back, mostly tied to level progression and controlling Amy’s. Each dream can be revisited, yet puzzles, items, and enemies all reset if Amy leaves early. This works fine for combat, where returning stronger or better equipped feels like part of the challenge, but it undermines the point-and-click puzzles. Abandoning a dream means re-entering the same codes, re-discovering the same clues, and re-collecting the same quest items. On one hand, this repetition reflects the cyclical, inescapable nature of dreams. On the other, it slows story momentum and can become frustrating. Controls add to the friction as item selection feels clunkier than it should be, and Amy’s movement isn’t always precise. A gamepad improves traversal over a mouse, but fares poorly in menus, leaving no perfect option.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken builds a haunting world on that very idea. Its unsettling art direction, layered puzzles, and imaginative story capture both the wonder and confusion of Amy’s journey. The puzzles are smartly paced, and the turn-based combat adds more tactical depth than expected. My revels may now be ended, but this is a dream worth stepping into. Sleep well.

From screenshots and gameplay clips alone, Shuffle Tactics looks like an extremely sensible combination of Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, and Final Fantasy Tactics. The endless replayability of roguelite deckbuilding meshed with the added depth of turn-based combat on an isometric grid sounded like the easiest 200-hour time sink anyone could ask for. As a huge fan of both genres, Shuffle Tactics was too enticing a pitch for me to miss.

Unfortunately, Shuffle Tactics never manages to become a coherent sum of its parts. The story is little more than a vehicle for a single gameplay mechanic. The combat, while functionally fine, focuses more on paying homage to its inspirations than making those borrowed mechanics gel together in a way that makes sense. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement.

Perhaps the most egregious flaw of Shuffle Tactics is its atrocious gameplay clarity past the first level. The camera is angled such that enemy sprites block tiles directly behind them. Combined with the sheer volume of enemy units potentially on the map at a given time, you spend as much time trying to click on the correct tile as you do planning out which cards to play. Some bosses occupy multiple tiles at once, making precise play around their oversized sprites impossible. The well-crafted pixel artwork is squandered on these overcrowded battlefields, leaving it difficult to even locate your character.

Compounding the issue is the lack of a functional enemy intent system. Enemy movement and attack overlays blur together into a confusing mess, made even harder to parse on the isometric grid where sprites block tiles and perspective hides crucial information. Only a handful of attacks are clearly telegraphed in bright red, but these rare moments of clarity are more an exception than the rule. What should be careful tactical planning devolves into fighting not only the enemies but also the interface itself while trying to get a grip on what’s happening.

What about the gameplay from the player side, though? Surely, if the cards feel fun to play, they can cover for some of the weaknesses in encounter design? Unfortunately, I can’t give a positive answer here, either. Shuffle Tactics copies mechanics verbatim from its inspirations without nearly as much consideration for how they fit into the loop as a whole.

Let me indulge in some comparison with Slay the Spire‘s game design: drawing five cards and discarding your hand at the end of your turn is a clever way of ensuring players always have options while forcing them to adapt. You can’t sit on cards for the “perfect play,” and instead must do the best with what you’re given. Even with this chaotic player agency, there are two consistent rocks to anchor strategies around: enemy intent is always clear, and attacks are always in range. These simple guarantees not only curb the frustrations of the occasional poor draw order but also provide a stable foundation for long-term strategy.

Shuffle Tactics misses both anchors, leaving its strategic gameplay adrift. You’re subjected to all the turbulence of only having a fraction of your moves available at any given turn, with none of the baseline guarantees to support outlining a game plan. It’s little surprise that the least frustrating path to victory I found was abusing cards that return to your hand at the start of every turn, not because it was clever or particularly compelling, but because it offers the only semblance of consistency in a game that promises strategy yet rarely delivers it.

The sidekick system, meanwhile, only adds to this sense of imbalance. The recruitable sidekicks’ strength levels swing so wildly that some function as point-and-click powerhouses while others are barely worth picking up. You could argue that this variance is part of the roguelite or deckbuilding DNA, but this gulf in baseline usefulness feels less like intentional design and more like unfinished tuning. The scarcity of sidekick upgrades further affirms this feeling; picking a weak sidekick early can kill the pace of the game, turning what should be a meaningful addition to your arsenal into a predictably tedious babysitting sidequest.

Even when they are effective, sidekicks don’t necessarily improve the game’s flow. With a dozen or more enemies crowding the grid at once, their presence often seems like a stopgap solution to redirect aggro away from the player. As you can imagine, this only makes the already chaotic, overcrowded board state even harder to read.

The charm upgrading system remains stuck in a similar rut. Though the various effects provided by the charms are more interesting than generic stat boosts, a myriad of restrictions that make little sense in practice chain them down. Every debuff-inducing charm I found was locked to single-target applications only, and because charms apply their effects onto the tile that you select, any card that has you moving to the tile you selected has you debuffing your own unit. What should be a flexible, build-defining system instead feels like an oversight: a punishment for interacting with the game as intended, instead of the freeform experimentation charms are ostensibly designed to encourage.

Even charms with other effects that sound useful can become undermined by their implementation. With no restrictions on charm placement, it’s easy to attach one that interacts with game mechanics that have nothing to do with the card itself (i.e., movement-enhancing effects onto a card that has you standing in place to attack), resulting in a complete waste of an upgrade. While I don’t expect guardrails on most mechanics in a roguelite, this level of execution once again comes across less like intentional design and more like under-tested systems left for the player to sort out.

However, I do want to commend the sheer volume of content available in the game. With multiple heroes, each starting with their own deck, and hundreds of additional cards to unlock, Shuffle Tactics certainly doesn’t lack the breadth of a full-priced release. If the dopamine hit of steadily expanding an armory is your kind of reward loop, Shuffle Tactics has you well covered.

Yet for all that content, the foundation Shuffle Tactics ultimately rests on is shaky. The isometric grid muddies the waters instead of providing meaningful depth, the companion and charm systems feel several iterations short of being finished, and the core deck mechanics lack the consistency and design work that make its inspirations so enduring. Shuffle Tactics is brimming with things to unlock but starved for meaningful ways to enjoy them, leaving it less a cohesive “greatest hits album” of roguelite elements and more of a confused compilation of good ideas played out of tune.

One of my favorite book series growing up was E.W. Hildick’s McGurk mystery novels. Protagonist Jack McGurk and his friends were elementary school-aged detectives who solved kid-level crimes, such as kidnapped dolls or a missing baseball glove. Trifling matters that adults easily dismiss are big deals to kids, and McGurk took them seriously. Posh Cat Studio’s Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game also acknowledges the drama in the mundane, albeit through the eyes of a first-year college student named Mary.

Little Problems follows Mary as she problem-solves an array of college kid hiccups through a series of vignettes referred to as cases. The first case shows Mary needing to recreate her portion of an overdue group presentation because her cat chewed up the USB drive it was on. A later case features Mary and her friends figuring out how to deal with the academic fallout of the botched presentation. Another one has Mary’s cat absconding from the vet’s office, and Mary needs to figure out where the critter ran off to.

I particularly liked the visual novel cutscene whose branching pathway influences Little Problems’ narrative aspects, including the final ending. Pity that was the only one. Little Problems is a brief weekend romp that left me wanting more story-influencing choices, more character development, and more extensive plotlines involving Mary and company.

Little Problems’ vignettes are generally amusing, but have choppy narrative design. The time skips between story cutscenes and interactive cases are jarring; I felt like I missed a whole series of events between one and the other. Despite Little Problems requiring the literal gathering of plot-relevant context clues, some scenarios lacked context. I wanted more backstory into the setting and characters, smoother storytelling, and deeper motivation for why Mary does what she does.

For a game predicated on a detective theme, Mary feels more like a victim of circumstance than the problem-solving detective of her peer group. Speaking of peer groups, Little Problems also feels like being a new kid awkwardly trying to say hi to an already tight-knit friend circle. It’s as if I was thrust into the middle of a series where the characters and all their dynamics are already well established.

Little Problems is a graphic adventure with similar gameplay to The Case of the Golden Idol,where searching environments for clues/clue words and using deductive reasoning solves puzzles more than inventory manipulation. There is no need to turn a pool floatie, clamp, and clothesline into a fishing apparatus (as in The Longest Journey). Keywords are just as important as visual clues and items, so it is a good idea to hunt for those as well as traditional graphic adventure hotspots. Putting the right words together to solve cases is just as challenging and satisfying as putting the right items together in more traditional graphic adventures.

Puzzles increase in difficulty as Little Problems progresses; the latter half has some doozies. Puzzles are generally fun, if occasionally repetitive, but a few fall into the common traps of requiring pinpoint pixel hunting and/or large leaps of logic. There were even a couple where I brute-forced solutions using trial and error, hoping something would work out. Cases do not require 100% completion to advance the story, but 100%ing cases and discovering secrets unlocks additional goodies and achievements.

Little Problems utilizes basic point-and-click controls: point and click on a hotspot to find clues. Then, point and click on parts of those clues to uncover more information. Once all the information is in the inventory, the puzzle case can be solved. Control is natural and intuitive, except for needing to hold down the right mouse button and drag the mouse to scroll up and down in the main menu. I instinctively kept going for the mouse wheel until I saw the icon reminding me to use the right mouse button to drag. I also would have liked an option to speed up text during cutscenes.

Bright, whimsical music complements the bright, whimsical visuals. The cutscenes and puzzle screens feel like a manga with painterly coloring. Character designs are appealing, but the animals (like Mary’s golden retriever, Ben) steal the show. Pity I could not pet Ben and all the other dogs and cats. The music adds atmosphere to each scene, and the compositions are nice to listen to without being obtrusive. In a game like Little Problems, I must be able to hear myself think, and the music never gets in the way of that.   

Slice-of-life games like Little Problems remind us that life’s little mysteries are story-worthy. I liked the brief snapshots of Little Problems’ setting and the characters in it. I just wish Little Problems were a longer game with a more cohesive storyline, a smoother narrative, deeper character development, less repetitive puzzles, and a stronger detective theme. McGurk, this is not. Hopefully, DLC or a sequel will expand on what Little Problems started.

Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree feels as if playing an anime town builder with Hades-like combat on the side. While enjoying aesthetics, humor, and story beats similar to slice-of-life anime in parts, I find it difficult to know exactly where TGST’s central voice lands. That said, games don’t necessarily need a single gameplay mechanic, as we see with titles like Darkest Dungeon. At the same time, I’m not always sure what the core experience is supposed to be—or which I enjoy more.

TGST follows Towa and her guardians as they attempt to drive off a blight devastating their land. With little mana—the life force—left, civilization may be doomed. Worry not! This quirky entourage has the drive and extremely restrictive abilities to thwart the Magaori.

While that is the central plot, the way the town Towa and friends protect changes as Towa time leaps whenever her friends defeat Magatsu (boss Magaori) is even more compelling. It’s not a new concept, yet we get to witness townspeople grow old, have kids, people move in, people leave, die, and struggle to make their dreams a reality. Life happens, and this part of the storytelling has some genuinely emotional moments. Still, expect some silly anime-style humor and one-note characters with an intense interest often defining their entire personality.

Criticisms aside, the town is charming. I enjoyed seeing its expansion as I added buildings for customization and combat effects, watching stories unfold between and within characters, and taking in the beautiful artistry and detail of the mountain village. Strangely, the ever-encroaching Magaori threat doesn’t come up often in town and clearly spans generations. In this way, I never felt that the combat side of the game meshed well with the quasi-lifesim I witnessed in town because the threat never felt real, as if I was playing two different games.

As suggested, we customize the town by using one of several resources accrued on runs. The facelifts, while real, are subtle—not necessarily poor delivery, but don’t expect punchy changes. Those who enjoy seeing numbers go up and having a sense of progression may enjoy this aspect, but I always felt I was trying to keep my head above water as I maintained my strength and survivability against an ever-increasingly difficult foe. Improvements are safe in that they increase health by 10%, offer the opportunity to craft better swords, and sometimes add options for equippable spells on companions. Don’t expect a vast array of customization or fascinating skill trees to pore over.

Combat is styled as an isometric RPG; players dodge between enemy attacks forecasted with red lines or bars on the ground, and then counter with slashes determined by the character leading. Lead characters have two swords and their own style of attack; some blast enemies from afar, others dive in with spinning attacks, and most do standard slash attacks while standing in place. The twist, I suppose, is that players have a companion by their side that kinda follows them around and does one of two spells when the cooldown resets. Spells range from fireballs to spinning electrical barriers or a delayed smash attack. Enemy patterns aren’t anything to fawn over, either, as enemies offer ample opportunity to dodge ranged or melee attacks.

The most Hades-like element here is passive buffing by picking up different symbols. Unfortunately, the creativity remains lacking, as most offer passive number increases with little gameplay change. Backstabs may stun enemies now, have a higher chance to crit, or make enemies more susceptible to damage for a while. The same bonuses are available for spells and each sword stance. Similar buffs exist, but nothing that will excite players or change strategies meaningfully.

That said, TGST is addicting—for a short while. After about twenty hours, I lost interest in routine hacking and slashing. Without enemies that evolve tactically, gameplay changes, or surprises in general, TGST can feel repetitive after a while, depending on player tolerance. Aside from the passive buffs, players may pick up one of several different ores to use in town to construct buildings, smith better swords, equip passive buffs, etc. These upgrades top out fairly early, as if the developers ran out of steam. Simultaneously, TGST drags on too long and doesn’t end when it should. I get the sense that big ideas became too difficult to implement as the game got away from them, with many incompletely executed ideas.

Clearly, though, a great deal of effort went into the time-leaping aspect of the storytelling, as well as Towa and her friends’ interactions. Because players go into dungeons with two characters of their choosing, I was surprised to witness so much voice acting and unique dialogue, largely dependent on the one-note personalities of the characters. The flow of dialogue is, again, highly anime in that the two will sit beside a bonfire after fighting a boss and have a serious chat about a problem one has, while the other provides healthy perspective. Then one of them says something completely outrageous for humor’s sake, and the conversation ends. I was surprised how often the writers followed this formula, but I didn’t completely mind it. If I’m being honest, it’s because the voice acting and writing are decent.

TGST’s music largely falls into the background, though boss fight music complements the intensity of the clash well. Each voice actor does a commendable job reading from the significant script, and they never appear to fatigue, remaining consistent in quality throughout. The game’s aesthetic appears hand-drawn with no animation as characters speak, but the sketch-like quality is easy to appreciate. Watching the evolution of the town from beginning to end remains enjoyable, with the intricate detail suggesting significant care and effort in crafting the environment. If I’m being critical, though, nothing stands out as particularly awe-striking; rather, TGST maintains a practical, calming charm.

Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree has some big ideas that never feel fully fleshed out. This game screams “potential,” but the only aspect that really sticks the landing is the town and inhabitants changing as time moves on. I enjoyed witnessing growth, stagnation, and death. The writers have poignant stories to tell and that is TGST’s best quality. Unfortunately, a commendable combat design that runs out of ideas and creativity quickly languishes the entire experience as I, unfortunately, was eager for the developers to wrap things up.