Ok, simple "wow" is enough. This game, even though is very simplistic, don't have any story and is basically a mind-bending puzzles compilation, could possibly be at the same level as both Portals, Fez, or other "greatest" puzzle games. At least in my ranking :)
The simplicity of mechanics that progressively get more complicated makes this games pretty easy to get into but really hard to complete. It's basically the game where you need to put cube in a specific spot. That's it. But at the same time, thanks to adding new techniques, function blocks and (as title says) paradoxes, this simple premise makes your brain melt… IN A GOOD WAY!
I don't know what to say more. This game is so simple, but so complex at the same time… The only thing I could add is that it upgraded from a game that I never heard of to one of the best puzzle games that I will recommend to anyone who love to think for a while before finishing a level.

At the start I need to clarify something - This month I didn't play any bad games. I don't know how it happened but yeah, every game I started was at least "ok". But, it doesn't mean that something wasn't the worst. And Etherborn was deffinitely the least impressive.
The premise of this one is simple to many others (and even to the last game I finished - Manifold Garden) finish puzzles by working with changing gravity. It's pretty popular mechanics now, but at the same time it's really efective, so I don't mind. But for me, it was just too easy…
Easy games are not necessarily bad, but if you boot up specifically a puzzle game, it would be nice if the difficulty level required at least some effort from you. My second issue is the "story". I have no idea where it comes from, but many minimalistic puzzle games need to have this super deep story that refer to the meaning of life and stuff like that. It is totally subjective, I know, but I'm just tired of this… It is so repetitive and boring now…

It's the second month in a row, where both of my biggest suprises are VNs! But first of all, let's begin with something nice.
For anyone who never heard of that one, it's a sequel to really short game that has pretty identical title (just replace "outside" with "inside"). On paper, the story that both of those games tell is not very engaging. There's a girl who needs to buy a milk and then comes home, and goes to sleep. You know, what I said is probably the biggest summary of both of these games that you can possibly come up with. But it's pretty much it. Apart from, of course, the strange, disturbing characters our heroine meets, her mental problems, how she deals with them, what traumas she has experienced, etc.
Both of those "Milk Games" are so much more than I expected. Most of the things we learn about our main character are just a façade. We either have to push it a little to find out what the truth is, or simply deduce where certain behaviors come from. Damn, it's a pity that both games only last about 3-4 hours (and the first one lasts about 20 minutes). I would like to know more about the main character, about her past, about how she dealt with problems before. And of course I would like to know what happened to her later… Well, maybe there will be one more game in this series. But what will it be called this time?

Ok, I know this game was created for some game jam. This is actually why I gave it around 6/10 :)
Pumpkin Eater is a short VN that is partly about family trauma, partly about psychological problems, and partly about psychopaths in general :) I found the game through my fellow friends at SteamGifts Magazine who mentioned it while they tried to recommend me something. It was cheap, short and felt a bit gruesome, so ideal for me… But yeah, after around an hour, I had a mixed feelings. Not because of the macabre content but because it could be so much better. Maybe this is a result of the short time in which the game had to be created. Or maybe the creator who wrote the script was simply not as talented a writer as I would have expected. After all, I felt like I had read some creepypasta on Reddit, and unfortunately not a good one. The idea itself was really appealing, but the execution made me feel like I was reading fanfic written by a middle schooler…

I actually played the whole series and I think all of the games were great, but I had to focus on one of them, so here we go. In my opinion, here's were it all peaked.
While playing and completing puzzles throughout first three parts of the series, I felt progress in pretty much every issue. This small indie team somehow managed to create really pretty game(s), with one of the best puzzles I've ever seen, and even added interesting story to all of it. I mean, I've beaten four games, back to back, and still, wanted more… I don't want to say anything more, because there's not much to add. I just want to recommend all of these games to puzzle lovers and people who love escape rooms :D

While I picked this game, I just wanted to get rid of another one of my forgotten games from some random bundle. It didn't look promising. Visual novel (that I never liked) with a bunch of animals (so immediately furry alert for me) and probably unoriginal, unimpressive noir story. I was wrong.
Yeah, my least liked video game genre is probably visual novels… Sorry… But, as I said in my introduction, I want to explore new grounds, even those that I'm not particularly fond of. And for my obvious suprise, the best VN I've ever played is a detective story with hyperrealistic chicken detectives, set in some alternate humanoid-animal world. Ok, this game still has the same issue I have with every other novel - the gameplay is mostly clicking to see another dialogue line. BUT. This time the whole story was just really good. As a person who is interested in cinema, I always pay attention to the script first (so the biggest thing that every VN has to offer). So, somehow, this absurd story had not only great and interesting characters, a believable world, but even plot twists that I didn't expect and moments where I really laughed to myself.
To everyone who is reading this - please recommend me the best VN that you've ever played. Maybe I won't play it next month, but I want to experience the best this genre has to offer (and as you can see, I think, I didn't start really lofty :D).

Ok, I just said I don't like VN, and now I say that this one is one of the worst games I played this month… Some of you will hate me for this, but hear me out.
This game is about really hard topics. There is no weird story about some random animal detectives, like before, but this time it's all about real life struggle for many people. I'm not, and never was in any similar position, but it shouldn't influence my perception of any video game, movie, etc. Of course, I won't "feel" what some of the people would, but I just can be analyzing every part of the work I'm just dealing with. So, I think there were a few good things about it, like the way of telling the whole story, many interesting characters, and more, but there were more things, that decided on the final reception of the entire game.. My biggest issue with this is that it didn't feel realistic for me. Don't get me wrong, I know many people could relate to this story, but for me, this story itself doesn't seem "believable". It is set in 1993, but everything and everyone looks, sounds and feels like they were today's teenagers from today's reality. Maybe I'm talking nonsense, but living in pretty similliar country when it comes to values (game is set in Ireland and I'm from Poland), I just felt more like reading someones fanfic about living in the 90s or some teenager's/young adult. present-day diary.

It was pretty hard decision for me to decide wich game is better - Donut County or Tacoma. Two very different, two pretty short, and finally, two suprisingly good. But in the end I picked this one, simply because I have a weakness for racoons…
Donut County is a short, simple game. It has easy to learn and not very challenging mechanics and you can beat it in around 2 hours. But even though I don't really like games that are that easy, this game captivated me :D Maybe it's because of the cheesy humour, maybe it was this cute art style, or maybe earlier mentioned raccoon… I don't know. The only thing I know is that I really enjoyed those 2 hours of gameplay I had. Especially in a time where I had not much free time…

Technically it was not the worst game I played this month… The worst one was something called Dolphin Hustle, but in reality it was a simple and unfinished project that's hard to even call a game. Windscape in the other hand in theory is full release…
In the last few months I started to fight with my backlog it's the first game that I actually didn't finished… I have all the achievements, so it's kinda completed, but it was so bad I didn't want to play it anymore… This game is an RPG, but really, really, REALLY simple one. It looks like somehting you make as your first game project (maybe it actually was, so I'm sorry then). Every quest is as basic as you can imagine, locations are totally empty, NPCs are often bugged or just in weird places and it's only the beggining. Playing this game was actually frustrating for me because I didn't feel any fun… and if you ask me, video games should probably provide at least some of it…

It didn't make it as the best game this month, but it's definitely a winner in this category.
It's story driven, walking simulator, so not my first pick when it comes to genre :) But, as you can see, I really liked it. It was really pretty, had really interesting story and the gameplay was not boring… and I associated those type of games with being boring. I think the way it managed to convice me to like it, was simply telling the story in some interesting way. It was not based on reading hundreds of notes, letters and files but it played in some way like an interactive movie. Because you could replay the same story but with different characters POV, it was more fun than just having everything reaveled to you part by part.

I guess it has become a tradition that every month I play some classic indie game, which turns out to be a great disappointment for me.
I always thought that Brothers was one of the best indie games of that time. I never played it, because well… I never had money for games, but seeing that it has so good reviews, I felt really hyped to finally beat it. And after those few hours I think it's only "ok". I don't get why so many people loved this game. The story is not that emotional (at least for me) and was pretty frustrating when it comes to progressing through it (simply because everything felt really random). To make matters worse, I encountered many graphic bugs that spoiled the game, which is focused on beautiful views. The best thing in my opinion was its mechanics that required us to control two characters at the same time. But even that sometimes was an issue…

This is probably a little bit of cheating beacause I play TBoI for years but this month I actually completed it! Theoretically I did it for the second time because back in 2020 I had 100%. And then new update came and added like 200 more achievement and ton of content.
But yeah, this is probably one of my favourite games of all time… I know some people could be mad because they think the best games ever are like Dark Souls, The Legend of Zelda games or Genshin Impact, but for me this is the game I spent the most time with and it never bored me. With 34 playable characters, hundrets of items and procedural generated levels this game was always fun for me. And don't get me started on mods that make this game even more interesting and replayable than it already is…
Yeah, maybe this is not a game with an amazing story, breathtaking graphics and over the top production value, but it is simply fun. And for me it is one of the biggest factors in gaming…

And from the most fun I had playing a game, to the game that was just boring and "not fun".
This game is mostly story driven, so I should be focusing more on a story than gameplay but either way this was just bad experience… This story was predictable and just not very interesting for me, puzzles was as simple as it could be and gameplay was frustrating… I mean, most of the time we just go from ghost to ghost and talk, from time to time we need to push some drawer or someting like that and then collect lots and lots of notes that tell us the story of the game. Maybe I'm just not a big fan of text games (because whole story was told in like 50-60 notes and diary pages) but encountering some new letter to read every 2-3 minutes and stopping everything that is happening to read it was just frustrating.
There are some clues that this game was supposed to be played on OUYA (if you even know what this little monster was)… If every game there was like this, I can see why it was such a failure…

This is the type of game that you probably could buy in bundle for like a 1,50$ and think that all of the games there are just bad and don't deserve any attention. And this one could be exeption…
I won this game in one of the SteamGifts giveaways. When I checked its Steam profile, I became a bit curious of it. And then I just decided to try it out. And I can say I am very sad that it is more like a 3h demo then a full game… Even though this game is really simple and was probably made really quickly (it kinda has a vibe of game jam production), it is still really cool concept. Most of the puzzles was very challenging, even sometimes too challenging for me… Design of the character and world is all right, music is also fine but it is just too short. Because there are only 40 levels it is maybe challenging but overall very short. Apart from this, you are put in some random dungeon and that is pretty much it… No story, no more characters, no replayability, easter eggs, nothing. Just play all of them and delete the game from your computer. Sad, because it has very big potential for a great puzzle game…

I knew Prison Architect before. Never played it but being interested mostly in indie games, I always knew that this game existed. And this month was finally a time that I could try it myself and sadly, my experience was not that good…
This game is pretty well known so it don't need no introduction. It has good ratings and is probably one of the most well known of its kind. So when I started to play it I was pretty exited. Maybe it was not really my "go to" type of a game but years ago I loved to play Tycoon games and it seemed similar. But after more than 20h of playing this I'm pretty sad… I expected well made game about building and managing a prison and I got it but with lots of bugs and things I just had to guess or use guides. Don't get me wrong. This is not a bad game. But in my opinion, it is not great either. Having campaign that acts as a tutorial (and still failing at it) and AI that is often dumb or broken made me more frustrated than I enjoyed gameplay…

This is one of the games I won on community train. Probably most of you already played it, or at least saw it somewhere.
From time to time I like to play some point'n'click games. So after looking what games I won recently I realised The Inner World could be pretty good for me. And after playing it for a few hours I can say it was not the best pont'n'click game I ever played but at the same time, it wasn't worst.
My biggest issue would probably be a character design. I don't mind world design (for me it was pretty cool) but pretty much all characters looked like crap… Maybe during gameplay it didn't show that much but at almost every cutscene this was really bad… And also a few times those cutscenes would glitch so yeah, this also didn't help…
But except that, this game was pretty ok. Story is pretty generic but not bad, puzzles also were pretty fun (except maybe for like one or two where I had totally no idea what to do) and music was fine too. In my opinion the best part was probably dialogues and humour in them. I genuinely laughed a few times when talking to some characters.
Overall was this the best game I played this year? Deffinitely not. Was it the best point'n'click I played this year? Also no. But was it a game that was pretty fun playing and I had a few laughs? Yes!