June

Yes, The Swords of Ditto is a crazy good-looking game and yes, overall, the gameplay is quite nice even though the fights are a bit slow for me and the puzzles really too easy to solve ; but after the first few hours into the game, you'll notice it suffers from way to many flaws to be enjoyable in the long term.

The two main issues IMO are the permadeath and other rogue-lite mechanics, and the limited amount of time you're given to reach the end of the game.

After your character wakes up, you have four game-days before you're forced to go and try to kill the main villain. Four days during which you're supposed to explore four specific dungeons to collects trinkets and destroy crystals in order to weaken the final boss before you encounter her. The timer is set to go on as you're exploring the outside world (but it pauses when you enter a dungeon) which tends to force the player to go from one dungeon to the other as fast as possible. A big flaw as you totally loose that experience of exploration and discoveries that you could find in a Zelda-game for example. The level-design is also quite poor, I think, and you can access every part of the world right at the beginning of the game : no mysterious mountain, no build-up set around a unapproachable area, not a lot of excitement...

Another issue: the permadeath. Every time you'll die, 100 years pass and a new champion emerges. And every time you're forced to watch and read through the same introduction and the same speech by your "mentor" and all this really adds to the frustration of dying just a few seconds before.

But the height of disappointment for this game comes from the procedural level-design: everything lacks diversity, everything is bland, you'll end-up looking for the same two trinkets every time you'll start with a new hero and basically I really felt like I was always doing the same thing...

The game is not really hard but permadeath makes it extremely frustrating to die near the end-game as a run can be quite long (about 2 hours I'd say) ; I pushed myself to complete at least one run (which I did) and now I'm done, I really don't care about exploring anymore or getting the true ending: it's a shame that such a nice game at first glance could have been wasted by so many bad game-design ideas...

What a nice game!

I never heard about Yoku's Island Express before I found it in the "New and Trending" steam-list and I bought it on a sudden impulse as the Soundtrack from the trailer and the graphic-design reminded me of Donkey Kong Country Returns ; turns out that Yoku's Island overall tone is a bit darker than what I expected but it really made a strong impression on me!

You play some kind of dung-beetle (always with it's dung ball), the new postman of Mokumana's Island ; soon, you'll learn that this island is not the paradise you were expected and you're going to have to fix that.

What make this game so interesting is its weird combination of a metroidvania and a pinball game using bumpers to send the dung-ball you're always carrying (and you with it) on higher or farther grounds. The game isn't really difficult and I suppose that hardcore-pinball-games-fans shouldn't consider Yoku's Island as a potential fix for their addiction, but it could really do it for those who'd like to explore an extremely enjoyable universe by unusual means

There's not so much more I can say about this game: I wasn't expecting anything and I was super pleased with what I discovered! This is by far the game of the month for me !

Pan-Pan is a puzzle game set in a tiny open-world where you'll be looking for a way to repair and relaunch your spaceship after you crashed. There's not a lot I can say about it even though I really enjoyed the game: it's beautiful, the soundtrack is great and the puzzles are good. I really recommend playing it but you should know that it's very short (about 90 minutes maybe) as you might want to wait a sale to get it. But get it at some point, I really enjoyed it!

Another beautiful game I've been willing to play for quite some time now.

I never played any WonderBoy game before (I grew up with Nintendo instead of Sega, haha !) but anyone can see at first glance that the team that remade the game did an amazing job! It's a pleasure to be able to switch so easily from new-graphics and soundtrack to old-school graphics and soundtrack and that's a good way to see what an improvement they made on the graphic design! There is new details everywhere, the world and characters are beautifully drawn and animated, everything looks great!

I must say that I'm not that sold gameplay-wise though... I don't think they changed anything in the remake compared to the original version and I wouldn't say the game is bad but the level-design felt a bit dull to me and the way that our character(s) jump just didn't feel exactly right.

The thing is I was expecting something more "plateformy" but the emphasis is more on exploration and fighting monsters. It's some kind of lite-metroidvania and now that I think of it, the way the game organized somewhat resemble the Shantae series (or rather the Shantae series resemble WonderBoy: The Dragon Trap, I guess). I still enjoyed playing WonderBoy and I guess that a lot of people would enjoy it even more than I did (as it's certainly hasn't been acclaimed for so long by mistake) but it's not exactly my kind of game.

Well, what can I say, I got CCCP CALLS! as a gift but it was obviously a joke as the game is really more of an achievement spam than an actual game. Well, it's a mach-3, a bad one, with a bad-taste USSR theme, bad coding and no credits at the end of the game (a proof of modesty from the devs ?)

One could ask "Is ISLANDS: Non-Places a game?" and I'm not sure I would say "yes", it's more of a series of peculiar scenes you can interact with. You're not exactly playing Islands but it is somehow bewitching, the atmosphere is really nice and I enjoyed unfolding every little part of the picture but you really have to be in a contemplating mood to enjoy the experience. At least I can say I enjoyed "playing" through Islands, it took me about an hour to see everything and it was just enough.