Your red eyes were what doomed you. Shunned by the rest of society you eventually found yourself on the wrong side of the law, although whether or not that was your fault is academic at this point. The fate that awaits you is thousands of days of service on on Luna, the strange mirror image of our own moon which hides within it all sorts of untold riches and horrors. Should you wish you could send your days in idle captivity, hoping that you’ll keep your sanity after 2 decades, or should you wish you can take up the offer of Aylin, you warden, to dive into the abyss and bring back tech for the betterment of humanity. In reality there wasn’t that much choice at all once you think about it.

I was about to write how Luna Abyss reminded me of Unreal games of yore, the ones that always that used the default lighting pack which always seemed to give everything this glossy, over done specular reflections that that engine was known for. Well it turns out this game has been in development for 7 years which firmly puts it back at the time when that exact aesthetic was running rampant through any game that cared to use the engine. The decision to stick on that engine likely speaks to a lot of the other quirks and oddities that show up in Luna Abyss as nearly any other dev would’ve made the switch to the more modern Unreal 5 engine given it released back in 2022.

The long winded genre word salad that describes Luna Abyss 5 is a first person bullet hell boomer shooter platformer which, like all good run on descriptions, tells you enough but not all of what this game is. The boomer shooter aspect is softened some what by the inclusion of a core auto-aim mechanic as well as some light RPG elements in the form of permanent upgrades that you can find scattered throughout the map. The platformer aspect starts off as your standard precision 3D jump puzzles style game but quickly evolves to include a number of other mechanics to make those sections more challenging. The bullet hell part takes direct inspiration from the games I mentioned previously, pitting you against an array of enemies that fire all sorts of slow moving projectiles at you which you have to dodge. This all comes together relatively well but the game feels littered with the remnants of ambition that was never fully realised.

Combat captures that boomer-shooter aesthetic well with everything being slick, fast paced and frenetic. It takes some time to build out your arsenal, each of the guns only being unlocked at specific points in the story, but once you’ve got more than one the game starts to get a lot more interesting. To be sure none of the guns are a power increase exactly, they’re usually introduced with a mechanic that directly needs them to solve, but having variety makes the combat sections less of a grind. It does start to get repetitive in the second half of the game however as there’s not a lot of variety in the enemy types. Bosses are definitely a highlight although they tend to be more combat styled puzzles more than they are your usual FPS boss affair.

The platforming is OK in that it works as you’d expect with I’d say about 50/50 chance of deaths being actually your fault. Whilst there were definitely times I got a bit ahead of myself, thinking I could one shot a platforming section blind, there were equally as many times when an ability wouldn’t fire, some interaction wouldn’t work or I was so firmly out of bounds that I’d fall to my death inadvertently. Thankfully the checkpoint system is pretty generous so you’re never losing that much progress but it can be rather frustrating to get through a platform section only to die because your dash didn’t get you through a barrier for whatever reason.

If anything speaks to the ambition the devs held for this game it’s the story. It definitely takes heavy inspiration in the way it’s presented from the FromSoftware games what with it’s eerie setting, aloof residents who speak in riddles and the numerous bits of story locked behind walls of text that are littered around the place. I can’t divine exactly what it is they wanted to do (although the small overworld section gives the impression there were more areas they wanted to add but didn’t have the time for) but there was so much build up and world building that I got the feeling this was going to be a game that was far longer than it eventually ended up being.

Not that it really needed to though as overall I think it got its main themes across well enough, as well as giving all the characters plenty of time to develop over my playthrough. What was missing for me was a reason to care for them as you’re kind of put in the middle of a narrative that’s already happened so you, as the protagonist, are playing catchup on everything. That certainly robs you of any kind of sense of agency for the main character who is effectively just used so others can tell their story. Maybe that’s the whole point and I’m missing something here but I certainly didn’t have much emotional resonance with any of the plot points that were going on.

Luna Abyss then sits that area of games that show that the devs are capable but haven’t yet found their groove as a team. The real shame here is though that immediately after releasing the game the whole studio was laid off so barring them reforming under another umbrella this is the first and last thing we’ll ever see from them. It’s a shame as whilst this wasn’t the most innovative, creating or even interesting game I’ve played of late it was enough to show me that, given another shot, they could probably focus in on what worked, what didn’t and build something really solid. Whether or not that will ever happen though we aren’t to know.

Rating: 7.0/10

Luna Abyss is available on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 5 right now for $43.95. Game was played on the PC with a total playtime of 7.1 hours and 66% of the achievements unlocked.

The premise is simple: this is a diorama game where you’ll build out your own forest using a set of premade assets and, along the way, you’ll be peppered with the sounds of nature, facts about the flora and fauna and serenaded by an incredible backing soundtrack. There’s a bunch of premade environments for you to choose from, each of which you’re free to much around with, tear down and remake it as your own as you see fit. You’re also given a bunch of tools to change the time of day, seasons and even the colour palette to some extend, opening up the options of making some truly surreal landscapes if that’s what you desire.

I won’t make any claims of being an inspired artist so whilst I definitely enjoyed the chill half hour or so I had with Treeplanter I can’t say I found much pulling me back once I’d closed it down. I can definitely see those who love playing around in say Wallpaper Engine or similar tools losing hours to this, creating all sorts of weird and wonderful landscapes that go far beyond the handful of nice looking but ultimately quite barren pieces I put together. That being said I don’t feel like I didn’t get my money’s worth though: I wanted a distraction and I got one. Plus a tree got planted somewhere because of it, I could it all as an absolute win.

I might not have spent much time with Treeplanter but it did exactly what it said it would. I got to plant trees, make some cool looking images and managed to get the dopamine fiend at bay for a short while. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake in keeping it to myself now that I think about it. My kids can lose hours on making all sorts of weird pieces of craft so I can imagine they’d lose similar amounts of time with something like this. In any case I count it as $6 well spent.

Rating: 7.0/10

Treeplanter is available on PC for $5.95. Total playtime was approximately 30 minutes.

Upload Labs harkens back to the days of the original clickers, giving you a somewhat crude representation of a business pipeline that you use to generate cashflow. For this game it’s files: you download them, parse them in some way and then upload them again and get rewarded for it. You keep doing this until you get enough cash to afford you one of the game’s upgrades which, you’ve guessed it, lets you do the same thing but faster. The ceiling on this game is something you’ll forever be out of reach of as once you crest a particular milestone the next one is another order of magnitude of effort to reach, trapping you in an endless cycle of chasing that next upgrade to unlock the next area of progress.

To Upload Labs’ credit it doesn’t dump the entirety of its mechanical depth on you right from the start. Instead you’re gradually introduced to the various mechanics that you can use to optimise your environment for the maximum amount of resources. Initially it’s just cash but you’ll quickly start running into other resources that have direct impacts on you’re ability to accelerate your progress. Indeed much of the game revolves around the core cashflow which is augmented by secondary systems that operate at their own pace. So, theoretically, you could get a fair way without having to engage with them too much but if you’re chasing the fastest way to maximum capital then you really ought to spend the time optimising those systems as well.

Like all good games in this genre much of the time you’ll spend in it will be figuring out the pressure points of your current setup, judging whether or not another route is optimal and then inevitably tearing everything down and rebuilding it again to test out those theories. Upload Labs includes a robust blueprinting/schematic system which ensures that any good pattern isn’t too far away from being replicated again should you not want to start from 0 again. That certainly comes in handy once you think you’ve struck gold with a particular setup although, if I’m honest, the optimal setup that I found was something that could be done in a handful of clicks.

Of course whilst this game is technically free it’s free in the same way it’s predecessors were. You don’t have to pay a single cent to see everything but it’s going to take you a while longer than someone who decides to shell out a few bucks to get some of the bonuses the game offers. Most directly this is related to the Tokens you can gather which unlock benefits that are either not available until much later in the game or are over and above what you can get normally. Now the game does include some tokens to keep you engaged but they’re few and far between, only enough to choose a reward every 30 mins or so. Pay a few dollars though and you’ll be swimming in them.

Which I’m not mad about at all really. It wasn’t until I was a couple hours deep in the game that I really started to feel the pinch of that progression treadmill I was on and even then it’s not like I couldn’t leave it running for a while whilst I watched a video or did something else until the next upgrade I wanted was within my reach. Certainly at later stages of the game (most of which I still have yet to unlock) there’s enough ancillary systems running that you can easily spend enough time in each of those individually, getting your micro-dopamine hits in quick enough succession that you’re never too far from an upgrade that gets you over the next hump.

I will say though that, after a good long innings with Upload Labs, I started to run out of steam. New progression mechanics are great, but they also bring with them the mental burden of optimising yet another system to ensure I’m getting maximum progression. Given that, at the end, most of them are really just the same kind of logic problem just constructed differently I found myself not being as invested in the next round of upgrades that were coming. To be sure there’s a lot more to be got from this game if you want it but for me, after almost 10 hours spent with it, I felt I’d seen enough.

Upload Labs hooked itself into a part of my brain that hadn’t been active since I played AdVenture Capitalist all those years ago. The optimisations, the tinkling of files uploading and the banging soundtrack were enough to send me into a flow state that had me trying out optimisations for hours on end. The progression system is well thought out, ensuring that you’re always on the cusp of another hill that you just need to spend a little longer in the game to crest. After a while though it started to feel repetitive so instead of burning myself out on I figured it was a good time to put it down. For a game that asks nothing of you upfront it’s hard not to recommend Upload Labs if the incremental itch ever takes you.

Rating: 8.0/10

Upload Labs is available on PC and Android right now for free. Game was played on the PC with a total of 9.4 hours playtime and 28% of the achievements unlocked.

Eliška is a young widow, left to care on her own for two children and the inn that her husband left to her. It’s not an easy life, especially with the constant din of the townsfolk saying she should just give it up, but she is determined to make it her own for both her and her children. However one day her children disappear, seemingly without reason, which sets her on a path to discovering the dark world that lies beneath the town. What follows is a tale of loss, greed and the supernatural as Eliška does everything she can to make sure her children are returned back to her safely.

Scarlett Deer Inn’s claim to fame is that much of the characters, NPCs and other items within the world are actually embroidered on fabric then translated across into the game engine. It’s certainly an impressive undertaking even considering that it’s not applied universally throughout the game. Something is definitely lost in the process however as the videos of the embroidery look absolutely incredible but the resulting textures in the game look much more like some intricate shader work more than they do actual embroidered work.

The game play is a relatively straightforward puzzle/platformer, sending you all over the place to gather items, dodge obstacles and generally do the things that your run of the mill game in this genre is want to do. I was a little worried at first that this was going to be another inventory management nightmare when I saw the size of the backpack that popped up but it turns out that’s just because every item in the game is represented on there, and you’ll end up carrying most of them around for the duration of the game. Indeed most of the puzzles are pretty self contained and straightforward, none of them requiring you to double back on you progress to continue on.

The platforming is probably the game’s weakest aspect though as it consists of 2 distinct modes: one where you’re left to explore and find a route forward and a second where you’ll be chasing a kind of goblin creature through a winding section of the map. The first is fine, if uninspired, but the second is an exercise in frustration as the game does its best to trick you into dead in routes that then spin you right back to the start. On a short section? Not an issue but they get increasingly longer as the game progresses and re-running the same scene numerous times over just isn’t fun. I get that the playtime metric is on every dev’s mind but there are better ways to do it than have us replay the same section 10 times over.

I got the distinct feeling that the story would have more impact on me if I was more up to speed with Slavic folklore which this game draws heavy inspiration from. There’s a lot of elements that seemingly come out of the blue, like a lord having someone’s body parts in their stores and being weirdly willing to trade for them, which I’m sure is a reference to something that I simply have zero idea about. The game gets its overall message across well enough but it just didn’t have the emotional resonance on me that I feel it might otherwise for someone else.

Scarlet Deer Inn is a wonderful expression of what it means to pursue a creative endeavor in the age of AI slop. Whilst the core visual aspect might not have translated perfectly to the digital world I still very much applaud the effort and hope that they continue to refine the process over time. Mechanically the game is decidedly middle of the road being mostly component but still needing some polish to make it transition from good to great. The story might’ve bounced off my forehead but I feel like that speaks more to me and my somewhat lacking cultural heritage (being a 5th generation Australian, for what it’s worth). All in all it’s something that I’d say you should play simply to support those who pursue these kinds of things just so they keep doing it.

Rating: 7.0/10

Scarlet Deer Inn is available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch right now for $8.50. Total playtime was 2.9 hours with 60% of the achievements unlocked.

It will come as little surprise as to what this particular game is about. You’re a lumberjack sent out to a remote idyllic island and set to work clearing out every tree so you can ship cut lumber back to the mainland. At the beginning you’re only given an axe and a hut with a basic sawmill, enough for you to start your deforestation quest at a very moderate pace. Each log you bring back will grant you a small amount of cash though and you’ll quickly be able to upgrade your kit making each trip back into the forest more profitable. So the core game loop goes until you’ve clear cut a particular forest at which point the next one will unlock.

The stylized realism of AGACT fits the bill perfectly as it allows sufficient visual detail without everything getting too busy or messy. It’s a tried and true art style that brings back memories of the early indie days when investing in more realistic models and texturing was an expense that most indie studios couldn’t afford. This simplicity extends to other things which you don’t really notice until you look for them like the lack of a day/night cycle, weather and other things that are usually commonplace. I don’t see this as a negative though, it’s a sign that the devs knew what they needed to focus on rather than trying to add in a bunch of things just because they “needed” to.

If you’re wired like me it doesn’t take long for this game to go from being a relaxing, incremental progress based simulation game to an optimisation puzzle that must be solved generally. Now I know that’s kind of running counter to my opening remarks about the cozy/casual genres and their raison d’être but it’s one of the activities that’s been proven to calm my monkey brain way the heck down. So each upgrade is compared against my current throughput, what’s stopping me from bringing back more logs per run and what the best farming pattern would be in order to clear a particular area the quickest. Whilst I’m happy to report that there seems to be a clear solution it’s by no means something you have to do. Just chopping trees until you can’t anymore and going back is just as valid of strategy.

What worked best for me was running to the farthest point of the forest, looking back towards the cart/shack and felling the trees in that direction. That meant it was easy enough to figure out where the logs should be when they fall and each successive run back became shorter and shorter. That last part was key in longer sessions as the walking back with logs was by far the most boring part for me so feeling that time get shorter with every successive run gave me that small dopamine hit to keep going. At one point you’ll start to be able to cut more logs than you can get back in one trip so you’ll usually end up making a big stack somewhere to come back and pilfer later which becomes incredibly satisfying when you can do a full load without any felling.

Progression comes at a good pace, enough that you don’t feel too far away from improving something but also not rapidly enough that you’re forever going back to the upgrade table for a barely noticeable upgrade. You’ll get a good feel for which upgrades are going to be best for you pretty quickly and all of them (bar one) are pretty noticeable when you get them. The Quality of Life upgrade was the only one I couldn’t really understand as most of the time the stack you’d acquired would be fully depleted by the time you got back for the next one. Of course if you’re optimising for throughput, like you could once you transition past just felling and start cultivating a forest you plant yourself, then maybe it makes more sense but for the way I played it wasn’t worth putting any money into.

I’ve yet to play AGACT with a friend but there’s little doubt in my mind that’s very well suited to it. The objectives, progression and mechanics all translate well to co-op play and my only gripe would be that it appears to be limited to 2 players and is online only. More players and a couch co-op mode would be an amazing addition and doesn’t seem to far of left field for what the devs have already implemented.

A Game About Chopping Trees is one of those rare gems that does exactly what it says on the tin without any extraneous fluff. The core game loop is as meditative or intense as you want it, being quite at home in the hands of either a ruthless optimiser or someone who simply wants to hear the rhythmic thud of an axe against a tree. Progression is steady and measured ensuring that you never feel like you’re stuck on the upgrade treadmill for too long. Really all that’s lacking is a bit more work on the co-op side to make it a staple couch game for the whole family.

Rating: 8.0/10

A Game About Chopping Tress is available on PC right now for $11.50. Total playtime was 2.8 hours with 50% of the achievements unlocked.

That being said there’s a whole lot more to Jump Space than just the co-op space sim aspect. The core game loop is a mixture of space exploration, FPS shootouts, ship management and a bunch of other things that make sure there’s always something for you to do, if you want it. This being an Early Access title, even one that’s been out for a year at this stage, means that it’s still not exactly a seamless experience with many of the mechanics lacking proper introductions and explanations but, given there’s quite a vibrant community around it, most of that is a Google search or two away. That being said though the core game loop, with all it’s various different pieces, is surprisingly seamless and is one of the reasons that my crew and I spent over 2 hours with it on the first night.

Visually Jump Space feels very similar feel to the original Subnautica, with some great visuals that also seem to have that distinct Unity feel to them. That’s also possibly the aesthetic they’ve chosen too as I’ve found that “Unity-vibe” seems to feel more present in games that choose a clean, sci-fi art style. Saying that though it’s clear that going in that direction has also enabled them to optimise the experience as even in our more…creative interactions with the game none of the crew experienced any lag, stutter or slowdowns. For a game that’ll be leaving Early Access sometime next year it’s a good sign that they’re on the right track.

The opening moments of Jump Space are spent in a mandatory tutorial to get your familiar with the base mechanics of both the ship and your character. It’s thankfully pretty short, meaning that you won’t be waiting long to get everyone ready to join up, but that does also mean that the complexities that come later can’t be included. For a game that’s absolutely designed as a co-op adventure (single is available, although the one person on our squad who did it said that it was nowhere near as enjoyable) it’s an easy thing to forgive. That is until half your ship is on fire and you don’t have enough material to make an extinguisher.

The core game loop is pretty straightforward: travel to a sector, explore the various areas with your ship until you find somewhere to dock/land, explore/shoot/loot on foot, jump back on the ship, do maintenance/upgrades, possibly engage in space combat then rinse and repeat. If that sounds like a long loop it is, but none of it really feels out of place. That’s also where having a crew to play this with makes the game shine as you can have 1 or 2 people off looting and shotting whilst others engage in space combat or explore, giving everyone something to do rather than having to sit around and wait.

Unlike similar games where our crew usually ends up falling into specific roles for the entire duration of the game we often found ourselves jumping in and out jobs more often than not. This is especially true when shit goes completely south on you and a single pair of hands can’t handle all the repairs on the ship or someone accidentally untethers themselves and ends up too far away to grapple back onto the ship. I think this is because most of the different “jobs” in the game are easy enough to understand so picking them up in a hurry isn’t hard and most of them are, most importantly, somewhat fun.

What finally killed the session for us was when we found ourselves in a mission that, unbeknownst to us, had infinitely spawning robots. Now in most games this is fine as there’s usually other mechanics there to make up for that fact, but Jump Space is a resource limited game and so after 15 or so minutes of figting wave after wave of robots, finding our reserves running on empty, we decided to call it. Now part of this is most definitely on us, we weren’t exactly reading the missions in-depth before kicking them off, but it never feels good to go up against an unlimited number of enemies when your own resources are finite. I’m sure this, and many of the other small issues will be fixed over the coming year.

Whilst Jump Space doesn’t sit with the other friendslop games the crew and I have been playing of late it’s certainly right up there as another one that’s much better with friends. The core game loop, with it’s multiple different mechanics to engage with, ensures that you never find yourself staring off into space wondering when it’ll be your turn to have some fun. Like most Early Access titles there’s still work to be done in things like introducing mechanics, balancing missions and the like but even in it’s current state it’s very much worth the cost of admission. It’s one I hope to go back to, hopefully before 1.0 given the steady pace the devs seem to be keeping with it.

Rating: 8/10

Jump Space is available on PC and Xbox Series X/S right now for $29.50. Game was played on the PC with 2.4 hours playtime and 6% of the achievements unlocked.

For those unaware Spiders and it’s publisher Nacon are unfortunately no more. Long time readers might be wondering why I’d be shedding a tear at that news, given that most of the games I’ve reviewed of theirs have well, never been particularly glowing. The reason is simple: even though I’d ironically play everything they put out, reveling in their objective awfulness, under that was a hope that one day they’d succeed. I saw a glimmer of hope there in the original Greedfall, the first of their games to inch above bad and firmly into OK. Steelrising was an unfortunate and ill-advised attempt to capitalise on the soulslike frenzy that was gripping everyone back then made only worse to be released in the same year as the great Elden Ring itself so even those who’d usually hunt those kinds of experiences down were much better served elsewhere.

So it was with an extremely heavy heart that I began my journey with Greedfall 2, knowing that it was to be their swan song. My hopes before all of that happening were somewhat high as the game had been in Early Access for some time and if there was anything that Spiders’ games needed it was polish. Unfortunately though it seems that history was doomed to repeat itself once again as Spiders’ last ever game makes the same mistakes as many of their previous titles have.

Flipping the script on the previous game Greedfall 2 has you playing one of the native inhabitants of Teer Fradee who’s beginning their quest to become a seer for their tribe. Your elders have set you to task to help the people of your tribe whilst also getting more in tune with the land that sustains you. These quests inevitably have you run into the foreigners who have come to your land and have started pillaging it for all it’s worth and you’re forced to make choices about how to deal with them. It is right at the end of your journey, just after you’ve ascended to the rank of seer, that you’re kidnapped and brought to the old world. It would seem that all you have left in front of you is life as a slave but the kindness of strangers has other plans for those like yourself.

Greedfall 2’s graphics are decidedly dated. To be sure they’re very much a step up from both the previous Greedfall and Steelrising, but it would seem that Spiders’ dedication to using their own in-house game engine Silk has come back to haunt them yet again. To be sure, I get it, there’s a lot of costs sunk into developing the tooling around an engine as much as the engine itself but given how quickly other proprietary engines have outstripped the capabilities of Silk it still boggles my mind that they didn’t make the switch 2 games ago. Couple that with the decidedly wooden animations, varying levels of jank (both mechanical and visual) and the distinct lack of optimisation in many places and it’s hard to have nice things to say about the visual aspects of the game.

Optimisation deserves it’s own section as this was one of the first games I played on my new rig which, to gloat a bit about, is a near top-of-the-line machine with a RTX5090, 64GB of RAM and a PCIE 5 SSD capable of speeds I’m not sure I can readily make use of. I say all that because even with a beast of a system driving it Greedfall 2 will still suffer from level of detail and texture pop-ins all the time, the below screenshot being just one example. I had countless times where NPCs simply didn’t render for upwards of 10 minutes, leaving brooms and other items floating wildly in mid air until the person hold them finally popped in. It doesn’t help that it seems like it renders up through the detail levels before getting to the last one which would do horrifying things like not render a characters teeth during dialogues and cutscenes. Given it spent just shy of 18 months in Early Access I expected better.

Once again Spiders fell into the same trap of simply doing too much, wanting Greedfall 2 to be something a lot bigger than what they had the capability to achieve. To be sure it’s nice to see all the trappings of a fully fledged RPG here: classes, talent trees, attributes, skills, party, real-time with pause combat, management, crafting, an (unfortunately very late in game) open world, the whole shebang. The trouble is though that many of these elements just don’t really work together cohesively, making the all feel like isolated mechanics that have little bearing on each other. This then flows directly into the core game loop which feels very much the same, disjointed and thoroughly unsatisfying at almost every turn. I absolutely, truly wanted to like Greedfall 2 enough so I’d play it through to the end but I simply couldn’t manage it, even after I went back after a couple week’s hiatus from it to play other things.

A big part of this, I feel, is how the progression system is just too damn slow and convoluted to make it feel like you’re really getting anywhere. To be sure, you and your party will level up a lot, but the system from the original Greedfall remains: one level gets you a skill point, the other attributes, another a talent point, etc. Spending these is then buried in multiple layers of menus, each of which you’ll have to navigate in and out of several times to spend all the points across your entire party. Even reaching some of the more meatier upgrades merits not much of anything in the grand scheme of things as I never felt that any of those keystone upgrades really made that much of a difference to anything.

It’s only after reading my previous reviews that I’ve figured out I may have done myself a disservice by choosing a non-melee class for the first time ever in one of Spiders’ games. They have routinely built out those classes as first class citizens with the rest of them seeming to get much less attention when the deadline starts to approach. To be sure that was my experience playing the supposedly damage focused caster class which was basically more utility than anything else. Even putting that to one side combat was slow, plodding and thoroughly unenjoyable just as a general rule anyway. In most encounters I wasn’t really doing much of anything save for wandering around, fighting the targeting system and just generally not having a great time with it. The lack of interactivity is just one issue among many for the combat system though which is not limited to lack of challenge (save for brick wall encounters that seem really out of place), abilities just seemingly not working as intended and the confused “choose your own adventure” of interactivity vs strategic combat modes all of which make little difference to how combat feels.

It also doesn’t help that the game takes a long, long time to get into gear before it’s even showing its full self to you. It takes almost 10 hours to get to the point when the world map is made available to you. Sure, I get that it’s tied to story beats, but there’s so, so many ways to integrate that mechanic earlier and make that extremely disjointed early parts of the game feel like they’re actually part of something greater. You get a sense of that through the first 3 areas you go through but it’s not until you finish the last one that they’re finally all pulled together. At that point though you will have already convinced yourself that they’re places you’ll never visit again.

Which finally brings us to the one thing that can make me forgive many sins: the story. Unfortunately I really have no idea what was trying to be said here that the original didn’t already touch on as much of it felt like “and then” style writing without a kind of driving purpose or narrative backing everything. Like, in a game that takes as long as it does to even get moving properly, there was plenty of time to setup a bigger narrative that could’ve pulled everything forward. But no all the moments that are supposed to be monumental feel completely unearned, happening just because they have to or the story simply couldn’t keep moving on. It was bad enough that I was thinking about deliberately failing everything I could to see if there really was any material consequences to doing so. I’m guessing there aren’t.

This all means that Greedfall 2 feels like it simultaneously has too much and not enough going on. As I said, time and time again in my reviews, if Spiders would only narrow their focus down to what would make their game great I’m sure they’d be able to do something amazing. But even in this, their final presentation to the world, they make the same mistakes they always have. Usually this would have me signing off with my usual schadenfreudian glee, remarking at how these guys seem to keep getting funded, but now it’s just all sadness. Truly I had hope that one day I’d be writing a review where I could say “I’d been with them since long before they were cool”, those hours and dollars I sent their way finally amounting to something. But alas, it is not to be, and instead I sit here, minting yet another middling review score at them, knowing it will be my last for them. Vale Spiders, I wish it could’ve ended better.

Rating: 6.0/10

Greedfall 2: The Dying World is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $83.50. Total play time was 9.7 hours with 18% of the achievements unlocked.

Taking a quick look at the original shapez shows how the basic concept has remained the same with the increased mechanical depth coming from the increase of dimensions from 2 to 3. The basic premise remains the same though: the portal demands shapes, you build said shapes from the various primitives you have access to, the portal accepts and you’re given access to a wider variety of tools with which to deliver more shapes. Rinse and repeat. Of course just getting the shapes to the portal is only the beginning of the challenge as whilst you could absolutely grind your way through all the levels by just figuring out the base pattern you’ll be stuck to your chair for hours. So the game then changes into one of optimisation and throughput which is a far more interesting and complex puzzle to solve.

I was immediately struck in the face by the art direction I hadn’t seen quite some time: the good old Unity asset store style. Now I’m sure none of the assets that are in shapez 2 are actually from the store but they certainly have that low-fidelity, basic texturing feeling to them that a lot of Unity store assets had back in the day. It’s also likely done very deliberately to keep the CPU/GPU load to a happy minimum as it doesn’t take long for your factory to get a bit hectic which can quickly drop performance. This was one of the last games I played on my old rig before upgrading and I can say that even with a 5+ year old machine shapez 2 didn’t skip a beat. Given that I wasn’t at the limit of all the platforms, tunnels and trains that I could possibly build there’s a very real possibility that things would’ve gotten choppy in the future.

The core loop is very satisfying as it’s pretty easy to figure out the steps you need to do something but there’s a whole lot of variations to get that to the point where it’s truly optimal. At the start your main constraint is going to be throughput as each miner, process and modification that you make has it’s own set of variables in order to make it run at full capacity. Thankfully there’s not many crazy unbounded edge cases to trace down here; everything is a perfectly divisible amount of the maximum capacity that a conveyor belt can handle. The real trick is figuring out how to make all the processes line up properly so you’re not inadvertently blocking one when another is at it’s ideal throughput.

Which, given that you have tools available to see whether or not something is running at ideal capacity, would sound like a straightforward challenge to solve. Trouble is that your factory isn’t a rigid system so changes propagate through it at the speed of a conveyor belt leading to intricate phantom traffic jam problems that’ll cascade throughout your factory. Sure, once you’ve got a validated pattern down this issue is usually easily resolved and you can just wait a handful of minutes to make sure everything is steady state but it’s a problem that only gets exponentially more vexing as your factory’s size increases.

Then you hit the second challenge: floorspace. Whilst certain things are unlimited space is most certainly not and this becomes quite the issue as the steps to create a particular shape become ever more involved. This makes solutions that were once working incredibly obsolete as things start to scale out which usually means tearing down your entire production line in order to optimise it once again. Yes, I hear the screaming crowd in the back saying “BLUEPRINTS” to make the whole process a lot easier and they’re right. However that only makes getting the optimised solution down quicker, it doesn’t solve the reengineering problem to connect it all back together again.

Some of the upgrades make this easier of course and being targeted with them will go a long way to alleviating some of the more frustrating things that you have to deal with early on. There’s also a ton of community built blueprints that you can leverage if you want to short-circuit some of the more fiddly layout challenges but be warned, a lot of them are from end-game players with upgrades that you likely won’t have. That being said the fundamentals they show there can readily translate to any stage of the game, if you know what to look for.

My only real gripe was with how the core progression takes a little bit too long between drinks. There were numerous times where I’d do the calculations on doubling the production capacity and coming up with a figure that looked about the same if I just did nothing (I.E. the build time for it was long enough to warrant not bothering) and once I got the trains mechanic layered on top I suddenly started to feel a bit overwhelmed with it all. Granted, this increase in complexity is the reason you’ll play it but after ~8 hours or so with it I felt it was probably time to leave it alone rather than plug on and burn myself out on it.

For incremental and factory game lovers alike shapez 2 has an awful lot going for it. Whilst the 1.0 release was earlier this year it’s been in Early Access for a good number of years, meaning there’s a solid community that’s sprouted up around it. So if you’re the kind of person to absolutely lose yourself in something like this you’re going to be among a good group of friends. For me, whilst it ticked many of the boxes initially, the complexity grew past the point where I was enjoying it. That’s more a comment on me than it is on the game itself, though.

Rating: 8.25/10

shapez 2 is available on PC right now for $14.50. Total playtime was 7.8 hours with 6% of the achievements unlocked.

Another plane trip, another number of hours stuck with countless strangers in a metal tube hurtling through the sky. So you try to find some way to keep yourself entertained, slapping your headphones on and jamming your favorite mixtape into your walkman to start passing the time. It’s at that moment something terrible happens: your plane explodes into countless pieces and you find yourself hurtling towards the ground at terminal velocity. Figuring you’ll make the most of it you do some sick tricks, raiding the falling drink cart and doing your best to avoid the falling limbs and other debris. The sweet embrace of the long sleep eludes you however as, upon hitting the ground, you find yourself back in the plane, headphones in hand.

The nostalgia is strong in Freefall ’95, the mid-90s inspired pixel-art taking me back to all those games I spent countless hours on as a youth. Unlike other games which would usually slap on a number of other, more modern graphical flairs on top of that Freefall ’95 keeps it true to form, never straying too far away from its roots with additional visual flair. This isn’t without some downsides though as, given the large number of items on screen at any one time, it’s easy for visual confusion to set in and everything just meld into a bunch of noise. Still the game gives you enough moments to recenter yourself and appreciate the art style for what it is.

The core game loop is a kind of Roguelite time loop adventure centered on busting out the sickest moves to get the biggest combos before you finally hit the ground at terminal velocity. You do this by well, doing tricks but also stacking numerous modifiers that you can get from items that are falling to the ground along with you. Get bitten by a snake, set on fire, chug some booze from the drinks cart, all of these things will up your multiplier so you can reach the higher score. This then feeds into the progress system that gives you access to new abilities, improvements to certain modifiers and drives the narrative forward by keeping additional levels locked until you reach a certain threshold. It’s a tight, well balanced package of mechanics that all serve the core game perfectly.

It’s one of those games that I feel would be amazing to play with friends, sitting on a couch as you each take turns trying to beat the last score. To be sure there’s a leaderboard which you can pit yourself against but honestly the numbers people are pulling in there are of the order that I can’t even understand. It’s also because the core loop does get repetitive pretty quickly and the game’s story, whilst cool, is pretty thin on the ground and didn’t provide me enough drive to play it for any longer than I did.

The narrative has me in two minds honestly. I do like the core premise of it, and each of the characters were certainly given enough personality for me to like them more than your usual run of the mill background NPC. However the story beats that you unlock are a mere handful of lines each and there’s not enough outside of that to want me to keep going. Sure, there’s the upgrades and the various story related challenges, but they just weren’t enough for me. That being said though that doesn’t mean it wont be enough for others as the core game play loop is solid enough that I feel that more…completionist orientated people would get numerous hours out of it.

Freefall ’95 is a competent if repetitive roguelike arcade game. The art work, setting and core game play loop are all great and not something I’d usually expect for a first time release. However there wasn’t enough there to glue me to my seat for long. The elements are there I just feel like there isn’t enough of them. To that end though I still feel like there’s a place for this in every 90s kid’s heart even if it is only for a short while.

Rating: 7/10

Freefall ’95 is available on PC right now for $15.95. Total playtime was 1.2 hours with 28% of the achievements unlocked.

Now I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m clued into Don’t Nod’s aspirations but, looking back over my past reviews of their games, I can see that most of them are hitting the level of good enough with none of them ever reaching the heights of something I’d call great. That isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed some of them, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage and Tell Me Why both stick out to me as ones that I have fond memories of, but the scores I gave them at the time tell the story. That’s when the pattern stuck out to me: there were a lot, and I mean a lot, of releases in a short time for what many would consider to be an indie studio.

Sure enough, checking their release schedule shows that the past 3 years has seen them pump out a total of 5 games all of which are new IPs. They had a similar spurt of creative output from 2018 to 2020, riding high on Life Is Strange no doubt, which is only when they decided to give themselves a break for 3 years. Part of this is likely due to Tencent taking a rather large stake in the company in 2021 which has driven a desire from them to see a return on said investment. As with all things like this that money may be the poisoned pill that kills the company as it’s slated to run out of cash in November this year.

I tell you all of this because when I begin my criticisms of what Aphelion is you have an idea of the circumstances that led to them happening. Because in its current state Aphelion feels like an unfinished husk of what it was meant to be.

On the box Aphelion is one of those linear narrative games, one that you can’t really call a walking simulator but it isn’t far off. The core game consists mainly of you walking from one place to another, using some basic mechanics to solve puzzles all whilst the characters narrate mostly to themselves about whatever happens to be going on. It’s a formula that can work well, even when parts of the whole aren’t exactly pulling their weight, but the trouble for Aphelion is that none of them do. What you have is a cobbled together experience where each part feels like it was rushed to meet a deadline and no part of the experience is better for it.

Like the game’s main mechanic, climbing, for instance. It’s clear that the devs wanted this to be a core part of the game but the experience is so utterly basic that there’s little separating it from the climbing sections that are tacked on in other adventure games. Worse still this game released in the same year as Cairn a game that showed that climbing mechanics can be deep and fun, something which Aphelion simply can’t hold a candle to. That’s not to say if it released say, 3 years ago it’d be much better but the comparison certainly isn’t doing Aphelion any favours.

That could be put to the side though if it was only a small part of the game but the walking/climbing/exploration mechanics are so repetitive that it’s hard to ignore just how bad they are. I caught myself audibly groaning when I saw the telltale marks of a climbing section coming up as I knew that it was simply another wall in the road, something for me to climb over in order to draw out the play time without adding any real value to the experience. Indeed in the 4 hours that I played the game I’d yet to see the point of making me go through so many climbing sections that were basically all the same.

Which brings me to probably the worst part about it all: the narrative and its presentation. There was obviously a lot that the game wanted to be said, with plenty of worldbuilding needing to be done, but it’s done in such a hamfisted way that it never feels organic to the story. All too often your characters will just start talking to themselves, spouting random facts or one liners completely out of the blue in order to explain what’s happening on screen. Worse still the game takes forever to even setup a proper premise for everything, to the point where I still have little idea as to where the story was actually going to go some 4 hours.

I’ve often chided developers for falling prey to their ambition; trying to do too much when a more focused experience would be all the better. Aphelion instead bears the same wounds of that kind of ambition, but the responsible party isn’t the creatives or those with a vision they want realised this time around. Instead it’s in the executives, in those who I feel have come into the industry seeking a quick return on their money only to end up shoveling dreck out the door and wondering why it isn’t working. Aphelion then, like another upcoming game review, might be the swan song of a studio who’s grasp exceeded their reach and we are all the worse off for it.

Rating: 5.0/10

Aphelion is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $45. Game was played on the PC with a total of 3.8 hours playtime and 40% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also available on Xbox Gamepass.