Doki Doki Literature Club
by LepcisMagna Author: LepcisMagna
SPAAAAAAAACE!
by LepcisMagna SimplePlanes
by LepcisMagna I can see why this game attracted my attention. You design a plane and then fly it. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough “simulator” to this plane simulator for my taste. It feels just a little too simple. Maybe that’s okay – but coming from X-Plane, it feels lacking, so it must go to Tier Three.
…oh. It’s a mobile game. Never mind – it would be great on a mobile device.
Semispheres
by LepcisMagna 
Though it looks like it’ll be on the short side, Semispheres is a fun little puzzle game based around two versions of the same map with different item and enemy placements. The brilliance is that each side can interact with the other, allowing for a back and forth that makes you think about each side simultaneously. It’s a fun game, and I’ll likely come back to it eventually – Tier Two.
Secrets of Rætikon
by LepcisMagna 
In Secrets of Rætikon, you play a bird. I’m not actually sure of the plot beyond that, other than you fly about collecting triangles. The trouble is, I’m just not sure what this game is supposed to accomplish – other than sounding suspiciously like “retcon”. I mean, it’s kinda pretty… but there’s no plot, no beautiful soundtrack, no difficult to master mechanics – just flying and triangle-collecting. It’s not bad (though the “you can’t fly above this point” line is annoying), it’s just entirely mediocre. Tier Three – play William and Sly or its sequel for free instead.
rymdkapsel
by LepcisMagna 
rymdkapsel is a strange cross between Tetris, tower defense, and a base building game. It’s a pretty simple game, but I think it was well worth the hour or so I played. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is and what it does, it does well.
You start out building a small station out of Tetris blocks to house your minions and defend against an onslaught of red floaty things. Inevitably, you find some strange monoliths which give you powers. That’s pretty much the entire game, so there isn’t much more to say. Still, I will be coming back for NG+ on some lazy Sunday afternoon, I think. Tier One.
Star Wolves
by LepcisMagna 
I’ve loved space games ever since Homeworld. Unfortunately, Homeworld is pretty much the only good 3D RTS space game (I could never get into Nexus: The Jupiter Incident). Don’t even try with Sins of a Solar Empire – if ships fly around in a plane, the game is space themed, not a space game. Star Wolves is somewhat in the middle – there is no definite, flat play area, but the levels seem to be designed without thinking in three dimensions. Homeworld had a bit of the same problem, so we’ll see if Star Wolves can hold up to the original 3D RTS in other ways.
Day of the Tentacle (Remastered)
by LepcisMagna I have an unfavorable impression of Double Fine studios. Their first game, Psychonauts, was fun. I haven’t finished it, but it was well put-together and seemed light-hearted and whimsical. Looking through their game catalog, however, I see very few other original games I recognize; exactly two, actually: Brütal Legend and Broken Age.
Apparently, they acquired the rights to remaster Tim Schafer’s previous work at LucasArts: Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. Both are point-and-click adventure games, and you would think that they would be the least resource-intense games possible. Somehow, however, the remaster of Day of the Tentacle stutters uncontrollably when using the “Remastered” graphics on either of my computers. If I switch between the classic and remastered graphics, it stutters on both modes. This is unacceptable.
Worse yet, the remastered graphics are actually worse than the classic graphics. The charm and very soul of the pixellated introduction playing on top of Ranz des Vaches during an unskippable cutscene has been ripped out and replaced with what can only be called soulless iOS-like graphics.
Not for the game but for the Remaster: Tier Four.
Battlefield 2
by LepcisMagna 
I’m in an awkward position – I’m reviewing a highly acclaimed first person shooter 12 years after it was first released. The trouble here is that there have been dozens of AAA games that have been trying to fill the exact same role every year since then. It’s a good concept – two teams trying to capture rally points and slowly take over the map. But genre saturation is a thing, and we’ve passed that point by about a decade.
I say all this because Battlefield 2 is a good game. But it is far from original, and there are any number of other, better games that will scratch the exact same itch with better graphics and without having to install Punkbuster and GameSpy Comrade (I’ve lost count how often I’ve uninstalled those programs). Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot to say about Battlefield 2 – it was successful enough that you see the same aspects repeated again and again in every other US Armed Forces FPS since then. My conclusion is this: when it came out, it was fantastic and it deserves its place in history. But there isn’t really a reason to play it now (especially since you’ll only be playing on LAN). To Tier Three it goes.
Rodina
by LepcisMagna 
Space is big. Really big. That’s a problem for open world, space-based games. In a book, you can write “and nothing interesting happened for the next three weeks,” and that’s all it takes. In a game, you still have three weeks ahead of you. There’s two solutions to this: make the world smaller or travel faster. Rodina takes the former option.
Steam Hidden Games
by LepcisMagna Did you know there are free games on Steam that don’t have Steam pages? In fact, the only way to get them is to enter the install links into your browser directly. So here’s a special 5-for-0 deal on hidden Steam games. First up: