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chuckroMonument Valley was recommended to me by Wavilyem, and it was delightful. It’s a relatively easy puzzle game based on optical illusions, as you lead a mysterious princess in avoid the annoying crow-people and restoring the “sacred geometries.” It’s both pretty and clever, in that it mangaes to keep a decent amount of variety without much frustration. ARR noticed me playing it and helped me with a bunch of the levels (actually helped in a couple of places, spotting moves or switches before I did). I did the full game and all the add-on content in about three hours.
EGGLIA Offline - A weird board game / grinder-rpg fusion, clearly intended to be a online thing, but they also released a free offline version, presumably as a teaser. I tried it specifically because it was made by Brownie Brown and had Mana-series style artwork, and it looked like it might have action-rpg elements. It doesn’t—it’s a dungeon-crawl board game, and the play mechanics are needlessly complex and very slow.
Wizards of Brandel - A KEMCO/EXE-Create ad-supported game with their usual standards, the gimmick here being that everyone has a spirit or fairy companion who learns special abilities and attacks along with them. The story revolved around a wizard/pseudo-novelist who accidentally finds himself in the hospitality of the Dark Lord, who’s really rather a nice guy, and when a holy warrior comes to kill him, the wizard decides recruit her and get to the bottom of the whole “dark lord” thing. Overall, the plot didn’t win me, the mechanics were routine, and I bored of it.
Gems of War - I finally got tired of Cookie Jam after a few years, and decided I wanted something with a little more excuse for playing a zillion games of Bejeweled. This was made by the Puzzle Quest folks, and it fits the bill nicely. There are several dozen cities, each with 20-someodd quests and 35 challenges; there’s all the PvP you could want, guild events, challenge events, a treasure-finding minigame, etc. The battles are squad-based, with four characters/monsters collected from random chests and finishing quests, who you can then power up with multiple forms of vendortrash and no less than four in-game currencies. This is not a game that has real goals to it or that I expect to “finish” in any meaningful way, but it’s very entertaining for what it is.
EGGLIA Offline - A weird board game / grinder-rpg fusion, clearly intended to be a online thing, but they also released a free offline version, presumably as a teaser. I tried it specifically because it was made by Brownie Brown and had Mana-series style artwork, and it looked like it might have action-rpg elements. It doesn’t—it’s a dungeon-crawl board game, and the play mechanics are needlessly complex and very slow.
Wizards of Brandel - A KEMCO/EXE-Create ad-supported game with their usual standards, the gimmick here being that everyone has a spirit or fairy companion who learns special abilities and attacks along with them. The story revolved around a wizard/pseudo-novelist who accidentally finds himself in the hospitality of the Dark Lord, who’s really rather a nice guy, and when a holy warrior comes to kill him, the wizard decides recruit her and get to the bottom of the whole “dark lord” thing. Overall, the plot didn’t win me, the mechanics were routine, and I bored of it.
Gems of War - I finally got tired of Cookie Jam after a few years, and decided I wanted something with a little more excuse for playing a zillion games of Bejeweled. This was made by the Puzzle Quest folks, and it fits the bill nicely. There are several dozen cities, each with 20-someodd quests and 35 challenges; there’s all the PvP you could want, guild events, challenge events, a treasure-finding minigame, etc. The battles are squad-based, with four characters/monsters collected from random chests and finishing quests, who you can then power up with multiple forms of vendortrash and no less than four in-game currencies. This is not a game that has real goals to it or that I expect to “finish” in any meaningful way, but it’s very entertaining for what it is.
