Recent reviews by seki

An absorbing terraforming game. My planet has gone from an icy, barren, airless wasteland to a lush ecosystem of plants and animals. Every step feels like a victory--liquid water, breathable air, algae, trees, microorganisms, fish--and more of the world opens up to explore as you go.

Points for letting me build a gravity-defying base where I can look out over the new world I made, bake cookies with ingredients from my farms (while getting drones to do the crop collection, of course), and morbidly display the spacesuits of dead astronauts who landed here before me.

Very compelling poker-adjacent game--no narrative, just good crunchy mechanics and goals. Can eat up hours of your life.

This is effectively a heavily randomised Sim Tower type game, with a magical school skinning. There is no downplaying how much RNG is involved. You may plan ahead a certain amount but if you don't draw the right items you'll have to change tack. As resource management goes, that's frustrating, but also means you'll never build the exact same school twice.

You will have to abandon schools and start over again anew in campaign mode; that's integral to the gameplay loop, but each new school will gain bonuses from previous ones.

I found it very addictive, and it's not a difficult game. You can luck into a perfect level, and you can luck out, but it's very hard to lose a level entirely. There are definitely some major UI issues--inability to zoom out using a keyboard, some info windows can't be closed, and I kept hitting bugs where cards would become tiny and unreadable. Sometimes it's hard to tell why you can't place rooms in some locations when identically-shaped rooms can be placed there without issue. And it would be nice to be able to move rooms around, or to get rid of houses (or to pick from more options for traits for them).

The minigame dungeon crawls are perfectly okay but not the point of the game--if you love those, there won't be enough of them to keep you satisfied.

Anyway, recommended while it's on sale (it's a bit too thin a game for me to recommend buying at full-price) but not if you hate RNG and want to be permitted to build your idealised school every time.

Just as everyone says, this is a dangerously absorbing game--I sank into it for 5 hours on my first attempt, and only emerged when a phone alarm went off. It's not without a few glitches (I had the camera suddenly spasm into new directions on me twice, and on several occasions the game thought a direction key was still being pressed when it wasn't) but the game's still in early access and looks like it's being hotfixed regularly, and I hit no critical bugs. The research trees are a bit unintuitive (mostly because you may need to scroll sideways to find the next node) but the tutorial is helpful without being too intrusive. You can move almost all your buildings to rearrange areas for optimising or aesthetics and I cannot overstate how much I approve of that, it reduces layout anxiety massively.

Recommended if you want to lose huge chunks of your life to building a town in the middle of the sea!

This is an excellent inverse murder mystery, with fun characters and interesting puzzles to figure out (and one of the best hint systems I've seen in a long time).

I tried this once based on reviews, bounced off it (even got a refund!) and then when the end-of-year games reviews staretd coming out I decided to give it a second go, and I'm glad I did. It's utterly absorbing, and the ability to continue play as your heir is a joy. So much depth, so much happening. Can't wait for DLCs to expand the maps...

A very enjoyable game, stylish and pretty. Has a very pleasing time-reset knowledge-gathering mechanism for puzzles, and it sticks the ending.

This game is so addictive that I find myself starting a new map again an hour after I've decided to STOP IT AND GO TO BED.

Gorgeous game, beautiful soundtrack, engaging story and characters. A good use of 4 or 5 hours of anyone's time.