Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
Goblin Stone makes a wonderful first impression with playful and charming presentation, but that charm spell soon dissipates, revealing a sometimes stodgy, grindy, and unsatisfying tactics game with diminishing returns.
Bore Blasters is a very well-designed destructive roguelite that takes good bits from a lot of games to create a dwarfish cathart-'em up where you explode mud and goblins
In the moment, Broken Roads offers up creativity in spades, but the bigger picture story - combined with weak combat and a dry take on moral choice - never coalesces into anything especially entertaining.
Despite some frustrations, Children Of The Sun is an intense shooter-puzzler with bags of style and originality.
Botany Manor is a beautiful, focused and entirely peaceful game that creates an oasis where you solve puzzles and marvel at the world. It's wonderful stuff.
A potent blend of tactics and RPG possessed with raucous momentum, Sons of Valhalla is excellent. Then it's not for a bit. Then it's excellent again.
Stuffed with great ideas and visual pizazz, Pepper Grinder is a sparky little platformer that's over all too soon.
Horizon Forbidden West is a great open world adventure, especially as a sequel, with all the slow motion dino hunts you loved last time but bigger, all the noble questing but nobler, and all the high stakes raised even higher.
Open Roads is a well-observed, empathetic story about families and secrets, wrapped up in some lovely art and with barnstorming voice acting performances at the heart of it. It's short but bittersweet.
This Black Isle-style literary RPG puts player agency above aesthetics, with engrossing results.
Its foundations are sound, but Bulwark: Falonceer Chronicles is ultimately quite an aimless and exhausting kind of citybuilder, too fussy to be truly relaxing, and lacking the depth to compete with more ambitious management builders.
A Civ-like with neat ideas, but half-formed fundamentals and messy execution make your decisions feel less than impactful.
A repetitive dungeon dive with high stakes hand-to-hand.
A grand action RPG adventure where you'll make travel plans and have them disrupted by a vengeful griffin whose wing you'd whacked two hours earlier.
Returning to its interwar period roots, Alone in the Dark successfully reworks and expands the original game's scenario and characters, but its exploration, puzzle solving and combat largely stick to now familiar survival horror routines.
A tormented action fantasy that has heart, imagination and style in spades.
A satisfying daily loop turns into a speedy momentum in this open world farming game, but its early access release raises questions that need answers.
A poor (and bored) man's Avatar, Outcast: A New Beginning is a tedious open world shooter that simply doesn't have anything new to say.
A quick adventure with extremely easy puzzling, but it's nonetheless a joy to exist in.
Zoria is systems-heavy and a bit janky and undercooked in places, but it's a hearty RPG with a lot of spirit and great promise.