Tales from the Borderlands is easily my favorite Telltale game. It's got everything! A compelling story, heartwarming moments, hilarious skits, and a cast of unlikely companions who synergize incredibly well. If you're a fan of the Borderlands series, there are several cameo appearances and the lore of Pandora is further explored so I would so it's a must play for fans. Compared to previous Telltale titles, I generally found that I had more autonomy and that my decisions were actually meaningful.

Rhys and Fiona's back and forth bickering and retelling of events is done well. When one character embellishes some minor detail, the other is quick to call it out. Story reveals were unexpected, but often welcome, and because of the constant subversions, I was always on my toes.

I had some minor problems with the Quick Time Event sensitivity, and I found the detective portions a bit too slow paced compared to the rest of the game, but the game spaces these out well, so once you get past them, you won't see another one for some time.

The game ends on a high note with an epic final boss battle, that I'd rather not spoil, but I will say that all loose ends are tied up in a very satisfying conclusion.

Dust: An Elysian Tail is a fantastic hand drawn metroidvania with brawler mechanics. The animations are beautiful, really capturing the spirit of anime, in video game format. You can play the game however you wish, with your companion Fidget, even joking early on, to just mash the buttons, but if you can pull off combos, mobs will fall faster. The main story has you traversing 7 unique maps, each of which are hand painted.

The storyline is good, but felt a bit too restrained, considering it's about mass genocide of another race. You play as a Dust, your typical amnesiac protagonist who's trying to figure out who he really is. When you reach Aurora Village, you discover that General Gaius, the game's main antagonist, has been waging a campaign to exterminate the Moonblood race, and such to prevent further atrocities you set your targets on him.

Dust is incredibly nimble to control. Being able to fly across the map while auto targeting enemies made Dust untouchable in the sky. Once on the ground you have access to combo attacks and parries to quickly eliminate anything standing in your path. Single-handedly taking out an entire map of monsters in a single combo feels so satisfying.

Prototype 2 is an open world action adventure that plays most like GTA, but with mutants. The game is the sequel to 2009's Prototype. Set in a post-apocalyptic New York City after it's been ravaged by the Mercer virus, you play as the world's angriest man James Heller right as he is infected by the original prototype, Alex Mercer. He is then entangled in the ongoing war between Blackwatch - an organization dedicated to eradicating the virus, and Alex Mercer who is trying to spread it.

The game's three zones (yellow, green, and red) let you have a more varied playstyle depending on the area you're currently in. In the green zone, you will typically want to stay shapeshifted as security is tight and alerts will summon multiple attack choppers to chase you down, while the red zone is so far gone, most of Blackwatch will ignore you as they're too busy with other infected. There's a plethora of interesting side missions with story and upgrades unlocked for each discovery.

The game excels in game feel. In battle, your arms can shapeshift into various weapons and whether your pouncing with the claws, netting opponents with tendrils, or smashing tanks with the hammerfist, they all feel fantastic. Despite his mass, James Heller is surprisingly nimble and easy to control. Chaining together wall runs and glides to make your way across the map is fun. In the early game, getting exposed leads to some amazing chase sequences, where you must escape from helicopters before shapeshifting to blend into a crowd. This is no longer necessary late game as you can just use the Whipfist to hookshot yourself onto the chasing helicopters and take them out from the sky, but that's also pretty fun.

Playing with a controller is highly recommended, most of the time you will want to be sprinting, but constantly holding down the Shift key caused me some RSI issues, these went away when I switched to controller.

Overall Prototype 2 is a fantastic game, definitely worth checking out.

Mushroom Quest is a cute puzzle game of the Sokoban genre, where you push boxes around to navigate a maze. The puzzles utilize simple concepts in interesting ways, with some stages really training the analytical side of your brain. The design of the final stage alone is enough for me to recommend it, as it has so many different mechanics at play, all densely packed into a single 11 × 8 map. After a lot of trial and error when I finally got the solution, I felt like I was navigating a piece of art, every step that I made was deliberate and often served multiple purposes. Getting that final end screen felt incredibly satisfying.

My only minor gripe would be that level difficulty was a bit all over the place. Typically, level difficulty should increase over time, but many of the easiest stages were towards the end. I know this is going to vary from person to person and perhaps I just got lucky, but some of the later stages felt as if they should have been much earlier.

Overall Mushroom Quest is a fantastic Sokoban puzzler, and worth checking out.

Faerie Solitaire lets you play Spider Solitaire with power ups. For what it advertises, Faerie Solitaire delivers 100%. I'm just not convinced that there's any need for this game however. What does Faerie Solitaire have over the classic Spider Solitaire preinstalled on most Windows machines? The answer is Grind, the core game loop of Faerie Solitaire revolves around grinding hand after hand.

Story Mode is boring and artificially stretched out, slowly drip feeding you bits of dialogue every 9 hands. The story isn't even good, the protagonist is annoying and incredibly unlikeable, constantly crying or running away.

Upgrades are expensive, you'll probably have to get through about 70% of story mode before earning enough money to buy all the upgrades. Considering the length of the campaign it's a pretty significant grind. Aura Ring is probably the most useful upgrade and synergizes well with extra undos once you figure out the trick to trigger a charge.

Challenge mode is difficult, but not because of anything interesting, rather the game just ramps up the level objectives presented in a typical game. For example, instead of filling the purple bar in three minutes, you must do it in one. You can cheese some of these stages by switching to Story mode to collect more Wild cards, but I think this was intended.

Getting 100% Achievements will force you to evolve all the pets (pets do nothing BTW), which is heavily RNG dependent as you need roughly equal amounts of the three droppable resources (Wood, Stone, and Magic). Variance was the killer for me, by the time I finally got the last Stone I needed, I had in the excess of 33 Wood and 39 Magic. Thanks to the statistics page, I was able to see I played through 625 hands of Faerie Solitaire before getting to 100%.

If you are looking for a casual Solitaire game, then Faerie Solitaire will offer you hours of consistent, if a bit boring gameplay. Does it really innovate much over Spider Solitaire? Not really.

Franky Lettuce is a simple puzzle platformer where you collect three drops sprinkled in a level before heading to the exit. You can get stuck a bit early on because of some badly colored platforms (grey platform on black background), but after that, the game is easy. All the levels fit on a single screen, so you can easily plan your route beforehand. There are no enemies, the only thing that can kill you is terrain. There's no real interaction with the world, most puzzles revolve around jumping to and from a new platform type.

Achievements are a bit interesting requiring you to perform an additional task (for instance not stepping on certain platforms), but you are only given a hint at what that task is. You get a notification at the exact moment when you fail the task, so even if you don't understand the clue right away you can figure it out through repeated failure. These are a bit hit and miss, with some later levels just giving you the achievement for completing the stage.

Franky Lettuce is a short mediocre puzzle platformer. While it does have some interesting mechanics in how it handles achievements, the game itself is incredibly safe and boring. With so many great options for the puzzle platformer genre (FEZ, Braid, Thomas Was Alone, Toki Tori), there's little point in playing this.

Destiny Warriors is an RPG maker game with a Ninja Academy theme. It's essentially trying to emulate the Naruto universe without infringing on the IP. Everything from the emo rival to the spirits residing inside each character is blatantly ripped off, but this is clearly intentional.

The writing starts off passable (as the game is just borrowing the storyline from Naruto), but it falls apart midway through the game, with the main character J.C. becoming so dumb, that they can only communicate by swearing. Towards the end I'm impressed that the game felt both too long and rushed at the same time.

The game does initially talk about missions and a ranking system, but this was never mentioned again which felt like a huge missed opportunity to have some side quests and do some world building. Instead the game is fairly linear, giving you small windows to interact with a limited overworld, but once a mission is started, that access is cut off.

Enemy level's scale with your party's average, so grinding doesn't really help, although having a few low-level characters to bring down your party's average level can let you sweep certain encounters.

As someone use to RPG grind, the encounter rate in story missions felt noticeably high. The actual battles themselves, are fun, once you figure out which spells/skills to use as there's a bit of resource management when dealing with HP, MP, and TP. There are just way too many encounters though.

What I enjoyed most was creating overpowered characters, as the game has consumables available in stores that permanently increase your stats invalidating any need to level up, and eventually the need for any equipment, as you can just buy your stats from vendors. Having maxed out stats and doing 10k+ damage to the final boss was awesome.

Overall Destiny Warriors RPG is nothing special. It's using stock RPG maker assets, consists of linear gameplay that drags on. It has the complete opposite of a unique storyline, and even accepting that, the writing degenerates over time.

Ballistic Protection is a tower defense game that failed to balance their weapons. Napalms are easily the best gun as they have splash damage. Enemy mobs don't have any resistances which creates a dominant strategy of just building napalms everywhere. Even with this strategy certain stages (Level 6 in particular) are still incredibly difficult, but without any satisfaction after finally clearing it. If your looking for a tower defense game play Defender's Quest or Bloons TD5 instead.

Kimi ga Shine (Your Turn to Die) is a free logic-driven psychological horror adventure game created by Nankidai and unofficially translated by vgperson. The story revolves around a series of death games where kidnapped players are forced to play a voting game where the losers die.

Content warning: The game deals with mature content and contains many graphic scenes of people being killed (some in extremely gruesome ways). After playing through the current version, I would say those scenes are generally required for the story and in general are done in a tasteful fashion, but they can be very shocking in the moment.

Kimi ga Shine is a point and click adventure game that plays like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. You spend most of your time gathering items and clues to help you survive until the next majority vote game. During the majority voting game, each character is assigned a hidden role and the player has to use logic to deduce each person's role. This vote is where the games main crux comes into play, in the best case scenario two people die, in the worst case, everyone does.

Nankidai has done some amazing character and world building. Despite there being 12 main characters, each character has substantial time to be fleshed out. Some of this is even done posthumously. I think it's a right of passage for players to try and protect their favorite character. There is a lot of lore about the death game, its organizer, and how the participants are all connected that is slowly trickled out as you go through each chapter.

Characters generally play the majority voting game strategically; lying, cheating, and stealing at times to ensure they live during the next vote. Reaching a turnabout, despite all of this, feels amazing.

Got an invite into the Ghost Recon Breakpoint beta earlier this month. The genre of looter shooter has appealed to me less over the years, due to microtransactions becomng the dominant revenue model.

The game is visually stunning; I am shocked at how far graphics have come in 2019. The world felt lush and vibrant, all characters have amazing detailing that make each of them feel unique. I found it really cool that character customizations persist even in cutscenes, which now feel like part of the game rather than something prerendered.

The games emphasis on exploration was great for me. Despite being restricted to only three areas on the world map, there was a lot to see. From mountains, to heleports, to cold war bunkers, the map was litered with interesting locations to search for loot. Optional quests also emphasize exploring the world, interacting with certain quest NPCs will give the player three fuzzy clues about a treasures location, for example "Southeast of the Behemoth Defense Zone". Using the clues and the world map, players need to triangulate possible locations to search.

There were no microtransactions in the beta, but it's looming presence was felt constantly. From the mediocre drops despite hours of playing, to the amount of grinding necessary to reach the next step on the progression tree, you do quickly notice that "time-savers" will be available for purchase on the game's full release.

Overall for a AAA title, I would say Ghost Recon Breakpoint is solid. The microtransactions based model is not for me, so I will not continue beyond the beta, but I enjoyed my time and don't have any major gripes beyond those tied to required grinding.

Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again is a dungeon crawling platformer rogue-lite. It's got vast amount of loot and artifacts to collect and is fairly generous at letting you stack effects if you manage to survive all the monsters defending it. Each of the seven classes are fairly unique having their own pros and cons. This game is heavily inspired by the Binding of Issac, even going as far as having a cameo.

The drawback to this is that I constantly compare it to the far more polished Binding of Issac. The games needs a healthy amount of rebalancing. Deals with the devil rarely make you substantially stronger and bosses are far too meaty to give up health. The Binding of Issac solves this by making unique Devil only artifacts that are incredibly powerful, but Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again in contrast draws from the global pool.

Hitboxes need fixing, the Berserker's giant battle axe doesn't hit further than a Ninja's dagger, clipping right through enemies at time.

Finally the completely random generation of rewards disincentives anymore than the shallowest exploration. In one run, I blasted through some rubble to access a locked room that contained two more locked doors with a locked chests behind them, I was "rewarded" for all this resource consumption with some gold and health.

Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again does have that one more run addictiveness. I recently ended a run where I finished just 50 gold short of the "Line one's pockets" achievement and one friend short of the "Friends!" achievement, but the next day I was back at it, trying again. Would recommend for masochists.

Cally's Cave 4 is a run and gun action adventure platformer. It's got many interesting mechanics like evolving weapons, weapon parrying to reflect enemy bullets, and a radar system that rewards players for clearing a map. Personally I feel the developers overdid it and the combination of all these systems takes away any challenge of playing the game.

The game is great for those looking to get a bit of a power trip as Cally is super overpowered compared to anything you'll ever face, but it gets stale once you realize that, even the final boss will fall in seconds against certain maxed out guns. Even if you do manage to keep your weapons underleveled, because enemy damage never scales, you would need to take 15 ~ 30 hits to exhaust your health by the end of the game, not even considering that you have 8 backpack slots to hold Chicken Fingers which full heal on death.

I found the story very generic and constantly references the previous games which I didn't play. Overall I think this game is more directed to children with it's incredibly forgiving nature, but it's got a lot of interesting mechanics which are worth checking out.

In Forest Harvester Simulator you drive around in a tree-cutting machine felling trees and turning them into lumber.

Pros

• Tree cutting machine feels nice to drive.
• Game has such terrible physics that it becomes comical at times watching my machine fly into the sky when tripping over a log.

Cons

• No variety in level design, a single map for all 9 levels.
• Extremely grindy with some levels taking more than 20 minutes of the same task (It's also possible to get stuck in certain objects which concerns me for the longer stages).
• Invisible walls with trees that you think you can cut beyond those walls.
• Level rewards scale badly, it's more worthwhile to grind level 1 than play other stages if you are trying to get gold to unlock base upgrades.
• The base upgrades are useless, which you quickly figure out after the first unlock. The base system has secondary resources that quickly invalidate all previous resources as you just convert everything to gold. Not having lumber requirements for buildings seems like a missed opportunity. Having gold has no actual effect on gameplay, just achievement unlocking.

Overall, I would say the game is strange and interesting, but shallow and not worth playing for more than 10 minutes. I am more disappointed than anything else, as the concept is novel and I feel like all the cons could have been hashed out with a bit of extra polish.

Last Word is an amazing take on a role playing game without combat elements. Conflicts in the Last Word are resolved through discourse which is a clever puzzle game that I would describe as a more tactics based rock paper scissors. Without going too much into detail each move has a counter, but playing counters constantly is sub-optimal as positioning is just as important.

My favorite part of the game was not the discourse mechanic, but the discovery system. The heroine Whitty must reach a certain level of knowledge in a given subject to progress at certain points. You gain this knowledge by talking to people, there's a lot of interesting dialogue so even dead ends reveal a lot of interesting facts and lore. The ability to change discussion topics is probably the coolest feature of the game and makes reading everything even more enjoyable.

Last Word is not perfect however, it can be grindy if you are bad at the discourse combat system and the game contains missable content that forces a second playthrough if you are trying for 100%. That said there is a New Game+ mode that tries to alleviate the worst of these issues, as well as let you see what would happen if you manage to win the hopeless boss fights from your original playthrough.

Overall I loved my time with the game. It's got innovative mechanics, beautiful art, masterful storytelling, and is extremely polished overall. Highly Recommended

Pony Island is a fantastic metagame in the same sense as Frog Fractions. You play as yourself, playing a video game against a vindictive developer. The game is rigged against you, so cheat and hack your way to victory. The game is deeper than it looks so make sure to collect all the tickets and unlock the secret ending. It will totally be worth it.

Once upon a death is a necromancy themed resource management clicker.

The idea is innovative and I love the art style, but the gameplay is terrible. You're essentially just idling as you create zombies and then smashing them into castle after castle. I can't tell if the game wants to be a clicker or an idler, but it does both terribly, the zombie summon rate is incredibly slow with no way to increase it, but it has no window mode and will pause if you minimize the game.

Upgrades to zombies take time, you can only upgrade one and a time, and there's no queue system so you have to be watching it constantly. There's no audio cue when a new batch of zombies are created so you need to check that regularly too. This means you are essentially clicking a few times, then waiting 10~20 seconds and repeating the process a few thousand times. Ridiculously repetitive as you will need at least 100 level 3 zombies for the final castle.

There's also no point in defending your castle from counterattacks (besides the achievement) as you only lose soldiers if you lose (with an upgraded ditch you actually come ahead sending all your units on the initial attack), not that losing resources would matter.

The game is poorly balanced, the only resource you will need initially is Metal and by the time you reach half way through the map you will likely have millions of resources and nothing left to upgrade.

AR-K is an indie point and click adventure game with a great story, but falls flat with its point and click component.

The game excels in it's rich story telling, funny characters, and very interactive world. If you liked Monkey Island games, AR-K has similar humor.

The puzzles however are badly designed and will cause most players to look for a walkthrough. Upon finding the solutions I was constantly thinking "Well that's a roundabout way to solve this problem". Episode 1 lacks the guidance to even tell you what your current goal is, so you'll be stuck quite often. This coupled with the large map size and no acknowledgement that you have all the necessary items make the game frustrating without a FAQ. The second episode fixes a lot of these issues with the introduction of the narrator, but by then you are so used to using a FAQ that you might have read every solution already.

Dear RED - Extended is a short indie RPG visual novel where you uncover more of the story each playthrough. You play as Red, a girl seeking revenge on the person who killed her mother. The game lets you go about this revenge through truth or deception. There's very little gameplay, most of it just dialogue trees, but I found the concept interesting and the customized art charming.

Bardbarian puts a unique twist on the top down shooter, in that you can't shoot. You play as Brad the Barbarian who has become sick of fighting all the time, and decide to put some skill points into the bard class. Playing as a bard is no easy feat though, Brad has no offensive capabilities and must rely on recruiting others to do the fighting. His party will stay nearby targeting any foolish enemy that comes within range. If the town is to be saved though, Brad must keep his party alive by providing buffs and keeping them out of enemy fire.

Plantera is an addicting farming themed clicker. The games simplicity is it's strongest point, click on produce to convert it to gold. Use gold to buy more plants, bushes, trees, and animals. Buy land expansions to get farm workers who will pick up produce for you. You can easily lose hours to this game trying to build a gold farm empire. The Loot Hero cameo is pretty awesome too since he drops a boat load of gold on each appearance.