• Lore / Story : You're playing as an assassin going for the king of a small realm. You're accompanied by an orphan that you save at the beginning of the game.
• Game mechanics : It's a stealth game. The goal is always to make you + the orphan go from scene to scene. The orphan goes from one hiding spot to another when ordered or when she feels like it.
  You control yourself. You have a grapple that can be used to interact with some stuff. A pretty neat thing is that time only flows when you move. So for example you can stop mid swing to aim your grapple somewhere else.
  If you check the achievements, there are two ways to plays the game. It's either full stealth (no kill and just distract the guards to have the orphan advance). Or stealthy killer where you go out of your way to kill everyone.
• Character progression : There isn't much in term of progression. You find some components that can be used to craft consumables. But I used none of them during all my play-through.
• Length : It's about 7 hours for one play-through, but more of that would start to feel really repetitive.
• Difficulty / Length : The game is fairly easy. I only experienced some difficulty at times because of janky controls/physics, but not really because of the level design.
• Conclusion : It's a neat stealth game. Not going to revolutionize the genre, but if you like them, I'd advise to get it on sale.

• Lore / Story : Very classical medieval fantastic setting. The world was plunged into darkness for plot reasons and is slowly waking up, you have to manage and make survive your village in this period.
  You'll end up doing some quests related to that darkness thing, but it's not the main part of the game.
• Game mechanics : You start off by choosing a god. That has little bearing on the game. Then there are three main aspect to the game-play.
  • Managing your town: You get only one town. It has some citizens. You have to defend it and you can use it to construct building, craft advanced food/equipment, gather the resources around it.
    One big consequence of having only one and not being able to move it is that your starting point is very important for the game. So start scumming can be a thing when playing with some difficulty.
  • Moving expeditions on the map: Be it for quests or to find specific resources, you have a world map in which you can move your expeditions. They consist of a bunch of villager with stuff.
    Important point is that they need food to survive. And if they have more type of food they can do more (hence the importance of crafting food in town).
    There are also a bunch of monster roaming the map (you can see their level above them), monster lairs to explore, ruins to explore and random events to complete.
    All that to find more resources/stuff and to get some xp.
    The monsters act in between your turn (so they can attack you on their own). And there is a day/night cycle that affect the visibility on the map.
  • Challenges: This is a little card game that handles every type of interaction with the outer world, be it fight or other aspects. Depending on the type of challenge you take on, different stats will act as your hp/offense/special capacities/shield. The goal is always to have your card survive and to kill the opponent cards.
    You can skip the challenge and have the AI auto resolve it for you if you think there is no risk.
• Character progression : The main evolution is done by changing the stuff equipped on your villagers. They gain a level every now and then, but it's a stat boost and you have no choice in that matter. You can either craft some stuff or find it during the world map encounters.
  There is also some tech tree, where you unlock the right to gather some resources/craft some type of object/unlock new buildings. The main way to advance in it is to either craft/construct stuff or to do events on the map.
• Difficulty / Length : Using the basic difficulty settings, the game is super easy. If you start using some more advanced difficulty (it's entirely customizable and the score will reflect that) it can start to get tricky at the start. Although it will be easy at the end. In my "difficult play-through", in the mid and late game, I did only one challenge, the final boss. All the rest was auto battled.
  A bit of difficulty can be faced against certain early events, because if you don't know them, you have no idea what difficulty you're going against and you might end up against a challenge that's not doable with your current party.
• Length : A complete game will take about 15hours. The start seems to always be a bit exciting/challenging, but it gets very repetitive by the end.
• Conclusion : I didn't expect much, but it was a really good experience. It lacks some polish here and there (most notably the starting place of your village and the weird save system), but it was very good at giving me that "one more turn" feeling.
  One weird thing was that you can unlock gods by doing a lot of play-through (it's supposed to be a rogue-like), but I don't see the value in doing more than 2 or 3 play-through. Especially when the play-through is 15+ hours.
  I'll see if they managed to improve in the second installment

• Lore / Story : Story wise it's a bit later. Gods / opponents are different
• Game mechanics : The start of the game is a bit different. You have a god to chose that'll give you a special trait + plenty of traits to chose from to complete the slot you have. Most traits are locked though.
  Town management is about the same. Big difference is that you can chose to not have one or you could have multiple and you can plant them wherever.
  Now you can research/craft outside of town. It's better, but it makes the whole camping thing way more tedious to use (every time you camp you gotta put back whatever cooking you want to do and such)
  World map is the same kind of stuff. They added some way to move over water and a faction system, but the difference is minimal.
  Challenges are different. This one has more strategy/depth to it (for me) it's a turn based battle where you can chose matchups/the kind of attack you're going to use and require a bit mor thinking.
  Stat wise it's also a bit easier to understand compared to the 1.
  The auto resolve is also way better. You can launch it, and if the result doesn't suits you, you're free to do it manually.
• Character progression : Equipment evolution is the same kind of stuff. Level up are actually better! Every level alternate between you picking one skill to upgrade (among 2) or 1 stat (among 3)
• Difficulty / Length : I'd say it's about the same experience for difficulty and a little bit longer.
• Conclusion : It's an improvement over the 1 (most notably for the challenges/village placement). But I still feel like it really lacks any sort of replay value despite having plenty of unlocks. (same as the 1, 15+ hours rogue-like is a weird idea).
  Choosing a different god/starting traits is going to make the early game a bit different. But you'll still end up with the same challenges / resources gathering loop

• Lore / Story : It's somewhere in the future. Not sure there is a lot more than that. No story to speak of
• Game mechanics/Character progression : You see slay the spire? Well same thing, but in the future and the combat scene is 3d instead of 2d.There are some differences:
  Only 3 characters (all fairly different play-style wise)
  There is no map. At the end of each combat, you can shop/upgrade. And you chose one of the three next combat.
  Each combat gives you a mission that you can complete in this combat or one of the followings. Each mission gives some reward.
  There are skill to buy with skill points. You get an assortment of skills at the start of the run. They are arranged in a 4+1 by 4+1 table. Getting 4 in a row/column unlocks the possibility to buy the 5th in that line.
• Length : A full run last between 1 and 2 hours.
• Difficulty : I found it easier compared to slay the spire (or maybe I was better at it?).
• Conclusion : It's an alright card battler. Not much more to say about it

• Lore / Story : You're going into a space station to discover why it malfunctioned. The rest is what you see in the game, so not gonna spoil it.
• Difficulty / Length : It's a walking simulator. So really not hard. And this one's also really short (2h30 to complete it with every achievement, needed to stay a bit more for the cards...)
• Conclusion : It's an alright game. The story is decent. But it's really short and the characters being represented by wire-frames really doesn't help with the immersion.

• Lore / Story : A human corporation lands on a new planet and start exploiting it. You're playing the aliens (human eating aliens, mind you), the corporation has all the cliché you can have about evil corporations.
• Game mechanics : Basically, a turn based game, kindda like XCom.
  Every level starts with you controlling the matriarch (and only her). You can kill humans, transform them in biomass and create your own grunts.
  They can be evolved in 3 different kind of aliens (each with different strengths).
• Character progression : After each level, you gain a bit of mutagen. It can be used to improve the different aliens or the matriarch
• Difficulty / Length : It's really short (less than 6h to beat the campaign) and rather easy. There is close to no replay value outside of achievement hunting (because you can't get the one you missed without restarting the campaign anyway)
• Conclusion : It's a nice game if you like the genre, although a bit short. I'd say only get it on sale and if you like the genre.

• Lore / Story : Not much to be said. It's a swat team.
• Game mechanics : On each map you control somewhere between 1 to 8 swat members. The goal may vary a bit, but basically it can always be solved by killing everyone.
  The game is in real time with pause. You can program some order to be executed only after a certain trigger is pressed.
  There is a weird sneak thing going on, when you kill people with a silencer and aren't seen, criminals don't always realize you're here.
• Character progression : Your character gain level over time. And this is mostly useless.
  But completing mission / campaign, give you stars that you can use to unlock new classes and new gear! They have a great impact on the way you can play.
• Difficulty / Length : The mission difficulty vary by a lot. Some are a walk in the park, others are a real pain in the ass (especially the ones with hostages).
  Made all the campaigns + a good third of the stand alone missions in about 20hours. It starts to feel samey after ~15hours and not worthwhile to do all the missions.
• Conclusion : It's an alright game, nothing spectacular. Might be worth grabbing on sale if you like this kind of game.

• Game mechanics : Like Unlock the king from the same dev, it's a puzzle game based upon chess pieces.
• Difficulty / Length : It's a bit harder than unlock the king, because some of the pieces you have to move will "kill" the tiles they leave, so back and forth is not always possible.
  Still, it's going to be relatively easy (some puzzles are tricky tho) if you know how to move knights. Took me about 3 hours to finish it.
• Conclusion : Good puzzle game. Knights are always good to wrack your mind.

So I'm not going to explain to anyone what the witcher is. If you don't know, I guess you've been living under a rock.
The game is good in terms of story. Every secondary quest is the same core (hunt monster, kill monster), but I still didn't find them repetitive because of the different wrappings.
It's a pretty good game. I mean I did sink almost 100 hours in it. But it as some big flaw and I'm going to list them here:

• Over leveling: If you go exploring a bit, you become over leveled way to fast. I did most of the 1st and second zone. And once I reached the 3rd/4th, I had to hurry up along the quests in order to avoid having too many quests that were way below my level. As a result, I almost didn't explore the 4th zone outside of what's needed.
• Leveling: So the leveling system is pretty underwhelming. You end up having to put a bunch of points in skills you don't need to unlock skills that interest you. And the most important part about leveling is that it's needed for some gear, the skill are mostly passives
• Crafting: It's almost useless. You can just craft your witcher gear sets, improve them when you reach the needed level and call it a day.
• (Not so)Fast travel: Crafting stations and stash are often not located really close to a travel point, so you have to fast travel close by, waste 1/2 minutes walking there, 1/2 minutes walking back then fast travel again.
  Oh and also Roach is freaking dumb and sometimes stops in the middle of a road. Also he can't jump.

A quick 3 game series (the bundle had the 1, 2 and 3) puzzle game that uses chess pieces. It gets a bit complicated when you have to start thinking with portals.
A thing that annoyed me a bit, were the part where they added height that just made the puzzle more complicated because it hampered your vision, not because the logic became harder.

• Lore / Story : Classic med fan world. You are the humans against a troll army.
• Game mechanics : As the name would suggest, it's a Tower Defense game. It has all the classical aspect of TD (build tower, upgrade towers, unlock more powerful towers when progressing in the campaign, cast some spells here and there).
  One interesting thing is that it does include all the kind of TD maps. You have some where you put your tower wherever and create your own maze, others with limited place where you can put them. And among those, you even have some where you have to handle attacking and defending at the same time.
  You also level up as time goes on, and you have plenty of choice in term of skill tree. You can focus on towers, spell, economy and anything in between.
• Difficulty / Length : the game is not overly difficult. I made all the missions in the 3rd difficulty mode out of 4. It tends to be a bit grindy toward the end
• Conclusion : As far as TD game goes, it's really good. Just the right level of difficulty and not too overbearing in term of tower type while still offering a lot of viable game-play alternatives (either in term of towers or skill build). Warning for achievment hunters, getting all of them seems to be really a grind (not going to try to get them all personally). Also you need DLC to get them all

• WoTC: The big one. Adds a lot of good content (soldier bonds, chosen, covert ops, 3 new soldier classes, fatigue mechanism...). Makes the early game a bit harder and the late game easier.
• Alien Hunter: Adds 3 new unique enemy that are totally OP. Also adds a lot of OP equipment. I think I'll disable it if I ever replay the campaign. The enemy are not fun to play against. And the OP equipment is too good (while it makes you dispatch resources on it, it's still way better)
• Shen's last gift: Adds the spark unit. Interesting new class that allow for a bit more variety in team comp. Strong, but not overly so.
• WoTC Tactical legacy: Add some content that's mainly outside of the campaign. Operations that are 7 maps, in iron man. Perfect for me because I can't bring myself to do a real campaign in iron man

• Lore / Story : The story is pretty run of the mill medfan story, with a cult intent on destroying the world and a bunch of people (you) brought together at random that will stop them.
  Notable point: one of the characters you play is a dog with magic powers (she can't speak tho).
  There are almost no side quests to speak of (just some basic kill/fetch).
• Game mechanics :
  • Overword So you can either be in the world at large or in an instance. But it's basically the same thing, you run around with one of your characters on the screen.
    Each character has a different ability, some of them being more or less useful.
    Monsters are roaming the world, and you can encounter them or try to run from them. If you start the combat, you have an advantage.
    The game pretends to be an open world, but in reality you're quite railroaded. For example at the start there are two instances. One for the story. And the other for the story, but later. If you go in it early, you'll get trounced.
  • Combat Out of your 6 characters, 4 are in combat. They are split into two pairs, each pair having specific perks/a common special bar.
    It's turn based (à la JRPG), and each character has a speed to get its turns faster. But it's not that relevant, given that most fight last for 3 or 4 round max (except boss battles).
    Most of your abilities have a cost in energy and you get one energy per turn. And also there are specials. Damage type and weakness to them. All in all pretty standard stuff.
    Notable point is that for some reasons AoE skills seem to have an overall damage and it's split among targets. Making it that they're also OP against solo target.
    And some status are close to impossible to counter (only counter is an item that you can craft in the last part of the game, when you don't face said status).
    Because of that, some fight take ages (looking at you phantoms) to finish for no other reason than that one status you can't counter.
  • Crafting This one is a bit of a bore. You can get ingredients by gardening. Each plant has 3 levels, but for some reason the next level of a plant unlocks at random and only if you have a recipe that uses the next tier of ingredient. So it gets kinda tedious when you want to get the achievement and that one plant doesn't mutate.
    And what you craft from them ain't that important. Ammo that are usable by only 2 characters. Potions that you rarely use.
• Character progression : There are 2 main ways of progressing
  • Bonds : Each pair of character has a bond that can go up to 5 star. Each star unlocks a new perks. It's good to vary the pairs in order to unlock interesting perks
  • Talents : Whenever you gain a level (or at some bond progress) you gain a talent point. You can then use them in a talent board to either gain more stats, unlock new capacity or unlock new passives. They're never set in stone, so you can try to change what each character does at your own liking.
  Outside of that, levels are capped to 20. There are small item change, but really not much, it's more side-grade than real upgrade (like each character has at most 3 weapons).
• Difficulty / Length : Took me a bit less than 30 hours to complete so it wasn't that long. The difficulty is alright. Some passage are a bit harder but nothing impossible (if you stay on the path).
  The last two big bosses (story/optional) are kind of hard if you go unprepared. Because they just launch a bunch of AoE at you non stop. Not really interesting skill wise, just "can you handle that amount of damage". And because the level is capped, you can't just grind to get stronger.
• UX : For a game released in 2018, god the UX is quite lacking.
  Abilities are never put into numbers. You have no clue if that one new ability does more damage than the other except by trial and error.
  Monsters stats are never put into numbers either. You can just see in the bestiary (not available in combat) if they have a weakness / resistance to some element, but that's about it.
  Also no way to check what a given status does. Like a monster will inflict you with something, you have to figure out exactly what it does on your own (what abilities it forbids to use, what damage it does...)
  For some reason when you're in an instance, the camera is locked. Good luck guessing where you have to go if its somewhere way out of your field of view (and it happens at least once).
• Conclusion : It's an average game. Nothing really good, nothing really bad (outside of the UX). I'd find it hard to recommend if not on sale.

• Lore / Story : Pretty basic med fan setting with ogres, skellies, barbarians, goblins and the like. Overall story is not that important (empire bad, go kill emperor). But each scenario has decent story telling.
• Game mechanics
  • Scenario preparation: A very interesting aspect of the game is that you have 3 deck to prepare before each scenario. One for potential events that you'll encounter, one for equipment you can get, and the last one for your starting supplies.
    Once you've met a card once, you can easily filter to get the needed info about a card (type of encounter, potential rewards) and create a deck that'll help you have an easier time in the scenario.
  • Scenario action: The cards you've prepared are shuffled with cards specific to the scenario. And all of them are laid face down in a specific pattern among one or multiple floors.
    You have to accomplish the scenario goal (each scenario of the campaign is quite different) while moving through the cards and resolving each card encounter (and not dying).
    There are 4 main resources in the scenario. Life (if you reach 0, you die), Food (1 food is needed to explore a new card, otherwise you lose 5 life), Gold (needed to buy stuff and food and some card effects), Fame (that allows you to equip the more powerful stuff)
  • Card resolution: Each card has a lot of fluff text and often starts with some dialogue where you have to make some choice. It'll be interspersed with either:
    • Gambits: One of 4 mini game. Some luck based, other skill based. You can have stuff that help for each kind of gambit
    • Combats: Combat in 3d in a little arena, with Arkham style combo/parry system.
    • Dungeon: A 3d dungeon with traps to avoid and chests to loot
• Rogue-like progression : The main way you'll be progressing in between scenario is by unlocking new cards. Either because you finished a scenario. Or you met the criteria of one of the encounter during a scenario. More cards means more option for each scenario. So you could go back to a previous scenario to get the "best" result (scenario often have two possible endings). Or come back to a scenario that you skipped because you found it a bit to hard at the time.
• Difficulty / Length : Took me about 30 hours to finish the game. It's sometimes a bit tedious.
  The difficulty is a bit all over the place. Some scenario you'll need a specific kind of deck to get the best outcome. For others you'll just bring a random deck with whatever cards you need to discover/unlock and manage it in gold on the first try.
  Bonus point, you can lower the combat difficulty (if, like me, you don't find that style of combat interesting).
• UX: A small gripe for me was that the camera is locked. For combats/dungeon, it can be a bit of a bore.
  A good point is the card filtering system + scenario presentation. You don't need to go to a wiki to know what you'll want/need for a scenario (looking at you darkest dungeon).
• Conclusion : All in all a real upgrade over the 1 and a really good game. Thanks for the gift!

• Lore / Story : You play inside the mind of iris. A little girl that seems really fearful of a lot of things. You learn a bit more about her during the story.
• Game mechanics : It's a turn based rogue-like. You have a hand of cards, each turn you play one and then the enemies act. Rinse and repeat until the end of each level appears.
  What's pretty neat is that most of your cards have only one use. So you have to manage your life and new cards you add in your deck.
  During the levels you kill opponents (that give you XP to get some skills), you find crystals (giving you new cards every now and then) as well as chests (giving you new card when you open them).
  There are also some bosses that give you a permanent effect for the run.
• Rogue-like progression : There are 3 main ways of progressing:
  • Whenever you finish a run, you gain some stuff that's just for the next run.
  • During a run, you'll find "memories". Each of them gives you one point you can spend on perks that are useful for every run
  • Imaginary friends are unlocked at the end of a run. You then need to meet a certain criteria in a run to unlock them for future runs. You can only bring a limited number of imaginary friends with you.
• UII haven't seen a way to highlight which path you've already followed, so it's a bit frustrating to keep track of that
• Difficulty / Length : That game is really really short (even by rogue-like standards). I neat the game in about 5 or 6 runs. And that took me around 3.5 hours. You can play more than that if you like it, because there are plenty of "hidden" paths.
• Conclusion : It's a really neat game. The mechanism of having cards that are one off is a great variation compared to other game of the genre. Also the visuals are nice. The game is definitely a bit to short for me.

• Lore / Story : Classic sci fi setting. This takes place in the endless universe (like every other endless game) so you find the usual suspects (food, industry, dust, science). Not much of a story in this one (there are some bits here and there, but it's meaningless).
• Game mechanics : It's a classic turn based 4X game. So nothing special for the most part.
  The mechanism that stand out from other 4X is the politics system. With your tech research/actions in game/choice during events, you influence the political parties within your realm. If you have a system that allow for multi party system, every round of election can change the composition of your senate and that can change the different law you can have in effect.
• Difficulty / Length : The game ain't that hard in solo. The AI is quite dumb in regards to victory conditions. The early middle game can be a bit challenging, but once you muster an alliance, it's smooth sailing. From the two games I've done, you have to expect something like 10 to 15 hours a game.
• Conclusion : It's a really good 4X game. Basics are solid, the extra stuff brings some variations. The different species play-style seems different enough

Not going to do a long review here because this is an old game. This is one of the first commando style game (well afaik, the second one after commando).
It holds up pretty well for its age. There are some UI/UX thing that are a bit finicky and it's not as beautiful as say Shadow Tactics, but I still enjoyed it.

• Lore / Story : Your ancestor made some eldritch shit and the familial estate has gone to shit. You have to explore it and try to fix whatever he did. The general ambiance of the game is supposed to be very dark and oppressing and that's very well done in that regard.
• Game mechanics : In case you didn't know the game, it's a roguelike dungeon crawler. The But you gather resources that allow to improve your heroes throughout the run. There are a bunch of thing to pay attention to (hunger , light , health, stress) and you have to manage them with different tools given to you.
  The fight are turn based, with a system of positioning that can change during the fight. Some skills of you/your opponents can only be used in some position/target some positions. It makes for interesting strategic choice/target prioritization and overall a very satisfying combat system.
  There are 4 or 5 different area in which dungeon are located, and each has different kind of opponents/environment properties. As such a party for one area, might not be optimal for another one.
• Base progression : Be it loot in the dungeon or rewards for runs, you'll gain some heirlooms. Those can be used to upgrade the different buildings in you hamlet.
  Upgrading those helps upgrading your heroes/keeping them fresh. It takes time to upgrade everything, so you'll have to chose wisely which one you're prioritizing first.
• Character progression : When you finish a dungeon the surviving heroes get some xp. You'll also get some gold. And some trinkets. Gold can be used to upgrade skills (very little change, only some numbers going up) or buy new skills. But you're limited to 4 skill, so it's a matter of unlocking/upgrading the ones you like.
  You can also use gold to upgrade your base equipment (same thing, it's just some numbers going up/down).
  And you win plenty of trinket during the game. A lot of those have positive and negative effect. Each hero can equip 2. You have to juggle between trinkets to equips the optimal trinkets for each character/dungeon, but they're the one thing that allow you to really customize a character.
  Also because some character will be unavailable for some runs (due to stress, illness, a level that's too high or others thing) you'll have to change your party composition often. Which is good, there are plenty of characters to chose from and they all are really different.
• Difficulty / Length : The game is hard. You will lose some heroes to bad RNG or bad preparation on your part. Or just because your party isn't made to fight the boss (presuming you don't use the wiki to spoil everything). The game is probably quite long as well (haven't finished it yet, but at the current pace, I expect 50 to 60 hours to "finish it")
• Conclusion : So I like the game. I'd recommend it if you like turn based games or roguelike dungeon crawlers. But at the same time there are some aspect that I don't like and find very frustrating making it hard to recommend to everyone.
  • There is no way in game to remind you of what happened in the previous runs (e.g. what opponents/curios you have already met at some place).
    So you're often drawn to the wiki (or you have to take your own notes, but that's just to bothersome when the wiki exists) just to get an overview of what you can expect in certain areas. I'm starting to remember it a bit after 40 hours of playtime.
    And that's needed because you'll want to do some optimization for high level dungeons.
  • I don't know why, but I can't bring myself to play the game for a long time in a row. I have to do something else after doing 1 or 2 runs.
  • That very frustrating feeling you'll get when you have to give up on a bunch of interesting loot just because your inventory is really small (and its size can't be improved).
  • The rewards for the highest levels runs feel a bit lackluster compared to easier runs. The only real difference is in the reward presented when you chose the missions, and it ain't much once you have a solid trinket base.
• End game edit : So I'm going to reach the end game soonish, and those last hours have forced me to lower the game note.
  • Some kind of ability are very class limited. There are plenty of tanks/dps, but there is only one AoE Heal, and one AoE stress relief.
  • The end game is tedious. Because of a certain mechanism (not going to spoil it here), the end game takes longer that it needs to be. And as such you end up doing a lot of run that feel samey.
  • Linked to that, it takes a lot of runs to unlock the latest bosses (at least 5 long run per location). As such you're not even enticed to get them all before going to the darkest dungeon because it takes so much time.
  • And during that end game your characters/hamlet evolution is close to none. You already have everything interesting maxed out and all the trinkets that interest you
  • The trinket merchant is a bit useless : At the start you have no gold for it but need trinkets -> you can't buy. At the end you have gold but already plenty of trinkets -> you won't buy.

• Lore / Story : So sci fi in space again. A new alien species arrive and decimate almost all the humans in you quadrant. Your base is the only surviving one, fight the invaders, see what happens with your neighbors, yada yada.
• Game mechanics : So there are 4 parts of the gameplay.
  1. Ship fight: The meat of the game. Fight are up to 3 ships vs up to 3 ships. You make a combination of Officers/ship on your side against whatever the ia uses. There is a whole system of status that you have to exploit to make the most damage. Some skill apply a status, some skills do more damage and remove a status if the target is affected by said status. So you have to equip the proper skills for your ship/officer to match well with one another. It works pretty well.
     The only real bad stuff is that for some reason a bunch of boss have a capped damage they can take per attack. As such using the status system feels useless because you'll be way over the cap.
  2. Overall map gameplay: Not that much to do. Go from your base to another point for a quest/fight. Build all the resource node you can, automate them and that's about it. You'll be crawling under resource in no time.
  3. Base management: Excavate the base and build stuff to be allowed to get more powerful ships. It's a bit lackluster because there isn't much to do in term of improving your ships. There are 2 research by ship. And that's it.
     You can build consumables at some point, but they take the place of a passive stat upgrade found on your opponent. So it's pretty hard to use them.
     And you'll end up having plenty of officer that have nothing better to do than stand in the productions rooms, making you get even more ressource.
  4. Ground fight: This one feels pretty useless. It's like the ship fights, but worse. There is no stuff for it, it'll sometimes be you officer + 2 green shirt (mostly useless fodder), no way to estimate the strength of your opponents beforehand. And they don't happen very often.
• Character progression : So as said before, you'll unlock ship tiers. In each tier 2 ships by base class exists, with different stats. There are 3 base class (how convenient with 3 spot in the fight) and they can fork into another at some point.
  There is a whole skill tree with branch/nodes to unlock/improve special abilities and get some passives boosts. This also includes power for ground combat that you're going to use like 3 or 4 times in the whole game.
  The character progression is nice in the early/mid game and becomes a bit stale at the end.
• Difficulty / Length : Played the game in the 3rd difficulty (out of 8) because it was indicated to be the one for experienced players. Was pretty easy up until the last encounter that was a bit harder (multiple fight in a row with damage cap). It's the only one that made me reload.
  Took me about 15 hours to finish the game. But the last 5 hours were pretty boring. The gameplay loop was figured out and nothing exciting to feel like you're making progress. Had to use the building made for speeding up the game and because of that (I suppose?) I didn't even get the Tier 5 ships.
• Conclusion : The game has some solid base but it lacks a little bit in polish in some aspects (ground combat and the base management feels lacking).
  The end game is very boring aside from the last fight (from a dev blog, lightspeed edition did remove 10 hours of grind compared to the base edition. I don't even want to try it).

• Lore / Story : So you play a grim reaper with fancy dancing skills. And he solves puzzle to kill people. Also he's in love with a sort of angel.
• Game mechanics : You run through different screens for each of your kills. In each there are two type of interraction:
  1/ you can move/interract with different objects on the scene.
  2/ you can switch the sun direction (between two presets direction).
  Because you can only move in the shadows, all the gameplay resolves around the different combinations you can do to change the shape of the shadows to accomplish your objective.
  There are also time trials levels. They exacerbate all the things I don't like about the game (timing + unresponsive controls)
• Difficulty / Length : It's taken me about 7 hours to do the main game. And 5 hours more to do the hardcore part + time trials. I ended up stuck only once or twice in all the levels.
  There is a bit of added difficulty if you want all the achievements, because you'll have to do an almost perfect run in each "normal" level.
  The hardcore versions of the levels seems a bit more fun to me because you don't have to optimize your every move for the achievements. Although you can end up in situation where you can't solve the level and have to restart it, so in that sense they're a bit harder :D .
• Conclusion : It's a good puzzle game, but it lacks depth, there was the potential do to a lot more with either the sun/shadows or the dance.
  I was a bit bothered by the fact that you had to optimize everything in the "normal" mode and as such it was less enjoyable than "hardcore" mode. And time trials sucks.
  The fact that the hero dancing skills have no use besides animations is also a bit of a letdown.