Bought two copies of the game so I can play with my girlfriend who was a lot more interested in the game than I was.
It was pretty okay to pass the time, but it has nothing amazing beyond going through surfaces with the pressure gun, then raging when you don't find the 4 missing atoms of dirt for 10 minutes. Also, campaign progress and new tool selection only apply to the current host, the second player doesn't get progress achievements, gets about 1/10th the money - but at least can use the tools the host bought.

As to shock of nobody, it's a "game" as much as Viscera Cleanup or Euro/American Truck Simulator is a game. It's a work simulator, that goes really well with music or podcasts.
It had some story sprinkled between the levels and in some popup during the gameplay, but tbh I barely paid attention, this game doesn't need a story.
Overall it's fine. I don't regret the 20€? I paid for it considering the time spent in the game, but it's not really a quality-time game, it's a game to be mindlessly played while doing something on the side, and as such a "proper" game with the same 20€ tag can hold a lot more personal value. (Still, at least that WH40k DLC looks pretty good…. more on that later)

To be perfectly honest I was so pissed off this game - got to the 3rd world on Steam Deck, but on the go I noticed it doesn't unlock / progress my achievements. Turns out, despite the game being marked as Steam Deck Verified AND supporting Steam Cloud Saves, the achievements are not working on the Deck, and the saves aren't compatible between the platforms. Great start, 5 hours down the drain.

Now about the game proper: It has some story which is not important. As far as gameplay goes, it's almost like MegaMan: go through levels, fight the boss at the end, usually unlocking an ability at the end. But the real "twist"is that the abilities are linked to your robot's pieces - so you can have a weaker helmet that gives you the ability to teleport, or one with a higher armor but no ability.
This mix and match piece system works relatively well within the standard gameplay loop - each world has 3 levels that are fixed as far as I can remember, but the loot from enemies is randomized. Whatever piece you keep in your inventory at the end of a level will get removed, and added to your collection to be reused later - but that also means that you can't have backup weapons mid-run because the end of the level "eats them up". Honestly I'm not a fan of that, especially with the game having a few abilities that allows you healing.

The combat overall is a letdown, it's mostly buttonsmashing. You have a Super Smash Bros-like health system that I think works in a way that you need to hit enemies hard enough into environment, or out of the map. "Less health" means you fly away easier, and die easier. You need to guess the health the enemy have, because they also have different weight? My point is, it's quite weird, not being able to guess enemy health. Nor really what enemy can kill you - sometimes you just bounce for 10 seconds after a hit, other times die in one crashing impact. Boss arenas were a special hell, bosses progressively had more and more health, more lives to retry, and had 3-4-5 gapcloser abilities to dash or fly back to the level, as the arena's actual walls were so far out you couldn't hit enemies into it without racking up incredible amounts of damage.

Had the potential with moves like hitting somebody so hard they go through 3 platforms then explode, but the combat was generally off. Buttonsmashing, attacks not connecting, enemies hitting you behind themselves while you weirdly missing. The levels were basically differently recoloured general platformer levels, there were barely any level identity through mechanics.

It's a hard no from me.

Honestly I have little to say about En Garde!. It's as good as it looks - a lighthearted, comical swashbuckler adventure with the usual elements. Be witty when insulting enemies, use your environment, fight dirty - because you're fighting for the good cause to begin with!
Definitely a recommendation from me, with its recent pricing it may even appear in bundles. It'd be a great addition to any.

I really missed a target lock during the gameplay because the gameplay involves breaking the guard of enemies, then dealing damage. When the targeting flickers between the enemies, it's exceptionally hard to get anything done. Took me around the game's end to accidentally find the target locking option in the controls layout, so the game either didn't tell me it exist, or I just missed out on it. But anyways, it's there!

Its value most definitely depends on what you're looking for.
It has a very personal story told through memories and reflections of the protagonist, but it isn't really a groundbreaking one.
It has lots of water (one could say too much water), boat travel, swimming around - either towards a goal, or away from monsters.
There are collectible-hunting and building-climbing

I don't want to talk too much about Sea of Solitude, it's one of those "depressed young protagonist goes through a journey that reflects to their emotional changes through maturity / they realize what really was going on". It was very pleasant on the gameplay level with good challenge and exploration, and the level design / looks worked really well - especially the water and the weather elements.
Make sure if this game is what you're looking for when you want a new game, but if you like these kind of a games, it's a really solid piece, and it's 2-3€ during sales.

Carto is an amazing little game, you most definitely should play it at some point if you have it, if you like puzzles with a heart. Great for CJ's Monthly in a Month events :)
Carto's story start out simply - she gets separated from her grandmother, and has to find her. During her journey she'll find new friends who'll help her in some way, and people she can help out as well.

The gameplay sounds simple - you open your map, grab the little (mostly square) tiles, and place it so it creates a fit with another tile. While it sounds a bit boring, the game uses this as its only way of progress, and as such the developers tried to make it count. You can find new map pieces at certain locations that are essential for your progress, but the really fun part is when it comes to puzzles. You can cross a river by standing at a correct place, and by moving-rotating that map tile. When you're looking for a guy in "the forest near the house" then if you place the forest tile near the house tile, the game uncovers a new tile with the guy on it. It's a really interesting setting that you have to think with nears, betweens and to-froms instead of using the usual compass.

Not every level was created to be equal, not every mechanic to be the same fun. But overall the game uses its creative mechanic well through its runtime, only once or twice had to look up solutions - because knowing that you have to rearrange rocks is one thing, figuring out the correct way between rock placement, , symmetry, carving and tile form can be a bit challenging.

This game was one of the biggest surprises of the recent years for me.
It has all the clichés - young adults, in a very likely imagined, surreal environment, basic time control mechanics so you can call it a puzzle.
The story is simple as it is - basically just the two friends reliving their friendship, but it's presented in such a lovely way that perfectly mixes with the gameplay. You'll climb the couch, tip over the popcorn bowl, run past the television and the game console to show how they spent their afternoons. Fight the wild rivers of the sewers as they relive the day when the rain took the jacket of theirs. It's the little events of their life made into levels, with just a bit of a cutscene after the level is done.

But the gameplay was such a surprise! It uses three buttons only - action and move the time forward or backwards. This simplicity allows to an aspect of the game the developers were aware of and clearly capitalized on - handcrafted animations. The characters walk, run, gallop, trip. Stop and wait for the other, slower one. The two characters even have fundamentally different animations for even just jumping through a gap.

It's just a lovely, lovely game. The level design, the beautiful and unique animations make it a sight to behold, and the simple controls ease in the player, while there are still puzzles that require multiple back and forth "timeskips" to solve, with a few unique solutions on the way. It's a rarity how a great mix of looks, mechanics and puzzles work together in such balance.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of Sea Horizon. It IS a good game, but I'm not sure exactly what it wants to be.
It has two/three game modes: single hero mini-campaign, 3-hero campaign on the surface (exploration) or in dungeons. The party-based one seems to be the real deal after playing 4 or so campaigns, but it doesn't advertise itself at all as such, so idk.

The gameplay is genuinely good. You get your hero, and you get some abilities - you unlock more as you level up, or buy new abilities. The combat is turn-based, basically as Slay the Spire's system, with a few changes: you choose your abilities as fixed skills for a fight, this is not a deckbuilder. Instead you get equipment as loot, which give you different number of dices with different faces (plus extra skills and stats, but they are spelled out). In each round you roll your dices, and use the mana/resources you get from it to cast your abilities - some can be used once a turn, others multiple times, as long a you have enough mana.

Different characters focus on different types of mana, different bonuses and methods of attacking, even within a single class multiple gameplay types seem to be viable. Each character has heals, buffs, attacks and curses, and many of the buffs have a very clear synergy between classes and attack types.

With this in mind, I'm a bit unsure what the game wants to be. Its campaigns are "roguelike" ones, you always start from zero, but you keep the increased selection of items from previous runs, and characters level up between adventures that means a bigger skill pool to get a pick from when you level up in-campaign. You can also unlock coins by performing well in the personal campaigns, and use those coins to unlock alternate versions of the heroes with different (additional?) abilities.
The Party-based adventuring makes me think of Darkest Dungeon, but it doesn't have the narrative and the town-aspect, furthermore you have to beat individual mini-campaigns to unlock new heroes so you even have 3 for a bigger adventure.

So overall it's a really nicely made turn-based combat game with good ideas, but it weirdly misses meta-narrative that I think should be there, instead of just being options from the menu. It's worth picking up, even if it's a bit on the easier side.

The game is not available to purchase anymore, as far as I know, which is a pity for a few and most doesn't care, I think.

It's a Warhammer 40,000 game with mostly text-based game, and crude visualization of the enemies. In Warhammer 40k's world, humanity's solution for faster than light travel is to go through a dimension that is basically the dimension of emotions (also called Sea of Souls), or the Warp. It's basically hell, with demons who'd really like you not having an anti-demon shield around you. This Warp doesn't really care about time and space, and the unfortunate ships stuck in it can collide, and be mutated, melded, combined. With all the shinies and horrible things on them combined, you get a Space Hulk (also a Wh40k game's name) which then gets burped back to real space. With a group of the supersoldiers of humanity, an Adeptus Astartes, a Space Marine (also a Wh40k game's name), it's your command to destroy that unholy amalgamation of ships before things go awry.

The gameplay is super simple. You make choices as in many choose your own adventures games and books, and you progress through the game, get loot, upgrade your tools, get into fights or get horrendously murdered. The combat itself has a very slight tactical glaze, but it comes down to the luck of the roll, it's disappointing to be honest. At a point I missed a 44% to hit attack 7 times in a row - the chance of that series to happen is less than 2%. But as the reviews already told me that, so it wasn't a surprise. Finished a game with a proper (not so good) ending on the easy difficulty. But as it turned out activating the in-game cheats doesn't block any progression or achievements, and cuts out the slow, ugly and unfun combat, I could focus on exploration of the game - and it was both awesome and kind of bad, depending on who you ask.

You see, the game has 3 big sections - each section is a different ship, a different race and different enemy. Skeletal space Egyptians with incredible technology, good ol' merry orcs who just want to 'ave fun while tearing you apart, and basically Wh40k's Zergs (and the surprise final baddies, the BDSM elves who really, REALLY like the S part of it). So it's a smorgasbord of enemy factions - the game setting makes sense of it, but it's a confusing mess for somebody new to the setting, and at some points I think the game expects you to have some in-world knowledge.
It's even more confusing if we consider how MANY different enemy types appear, equipment gets mentioned, even some pretty obscure lore-elements such as the Pain Glove, a gauntlet your chapter uses as a training / punishing / meditative tool to build character.

Everything considered - the game has really good writing, and it shows that the writers took their time to prepare from the lore, and they expected it from their players to keep up. But it makes the game daunting for everybody else, and to be honest, without the health recharge in-game cheats the clunky combat is fun only for the most adamant and patient fans.

To be perfectly honest, I had trouble focusing on this game, it didn't really make the cut as a "game" for me, it was clunky, minimalist and simplistic. So as I usually do with games like this, I played it slowly, wandering off from the PC… but I got to its end.
And the story itself was pretty interesting, though I didn't understand some elements, but still, the game felt to be very… personal. So did some wikipedia delving, read the in-game artbook that included a lot of information about development, gathering stories, going out to the backlands and photographing locations, animals, plants, people - and then working these into the game.

The game is planned to be a trilogy, I hope that the second game will be a bit more than collecting resources and running from A to B, but it's still a really respectable first game with good intentions behind it.I'm not sure if it's a good game if I approach it from a game's angle, but rather an art project, where the creators choose that it will be presented as a game. But I genuinely, really hope that they'll drop the survival elements because I really don't feel like having to eat or drink every 15-20 minutes really mixes well with the personal story. It's just an annoyance to gamify something in a way that hurts it.