Recent reviews by Conqueror Worm

Only once in a generation does a first-person tactical assassination and stock/organ/fish trading sim like this come along. Truly a marvel to experience and behold. If you can avoid it, don't look up anything. Just try all the game modes, click all the buttons, fiddle with the settings. When you find new ways to play and explore, retrace your steps. Really fantastic interlocking design. Brutally hard. The 640x480 resolution is a gift to you from god.

Everything you'd want from a first-person spelunky

If you're into build-and-survives or souls-like rpgs with skill progression and lots of crafting, I've sunk a shameful amount of time into the early access of Valheim so far. It gets rid of a lot of the boring parts of normal build and survives like starving to death and having to get more resources to fix things over and over and just lets you constantly expand over mountains and vales and huge golden plains in search of cooler sights and new challenges in an amazing-looking little 1gb package. There's an astonishing amount of content in this tiny indie game already, and there's a lot of great room for it to grow. Check it out!

There are so many things that Noita does incredibly well and in unique ways that it's hard to pick a place to start this review. The particle physics are fantastic -- it's possible to construct elaborate chain reactions and environmental traps everywhere you look, from cave-ins to massive fires and explosions, to even dousing foes in polymorph potion and gleefully blasting them to bits as they hop around in sheep form. The spell construction system you use for combat is intuitive and interesting to play around with, allowing you to modify the sort of arcane circuitry of your wands between stages to change how and what spells they cast. Couple that with dozens of different enemy types, even more spells and spell modifiers, and a delightful variety of fully-destructible environments packed with interesting secrets to find, and you've got a rogue-lite I personally could play for days.

Everything Chivalry was and more. Fluid, punishing hand-to-hand combat. Finicky bows and traps. Crude bombs. Beautiful arcing spears and tumbling hammers and whistling billhooks and a hundred different sets of armor and emblems. Pitchforks and peasants and pillaging, oh my. Get it and join and the crusade today.

As I write this, in the early stages of Beta access on Steam, SoR has about ten fantastic hours of roguelike action and exploration to unlock all the content for the game, and then another endless amount of gametime for you and your friends to play with every piece of tech and each character's unique playstyles... There's a lot to do here, and there's only more to come in the future. Buy the game now for a potential opportunityto help shape its development, with suggestions for new items, perks, random events and characters.

Do you love Earthbound, but yearn for a more adult-oriented storyline and setting, packed with violence, gore, trauma, drug addiction, mutilation, and dark sexual undertones? Probably not, but after playing LISA, you'll realize that a part of you always longed for the joy of this experience, deep down in your heart. It's hilarious, poignant, and chilling post-apocalyptic adventure at its finest, taking you on a brutally unforgiving journey across a desert wasteland to save the future of all mankind for all the wrong reasons. Despite how utterly horrifying things will get for you and your ragtag party of warped compatriots, LISA never stops being a truly incredible game to play, and an unforgettable narrative to unfold. You just need to have the perseverance to do what it takes.

It took me a while to understand this game. It seemed clunky, weird, too based on random chance and the luck of finding an opening as I charged blindly forward. I didn't get what I was doing wrong. Then, on my third run through the wilds level, my opponent and I both disarmed one another simultaneously. I didn't have a weapon, and neither did he. So I did what seemed sane: I tried to stab him anyways. And we started boxing. Then he punched me backwards into the crop fields, where I had seen my weapon land. Frantically, I searched the stalks of wheat, looking for the familiar silver glint of my weapon. Behind me, he leapt into the air, ready to land upon me where I lay and smash my face into the dirt that would be my unceremonius grave. And at the last possible moment, my hand met the cold steel of my blade, and I spun, holding my weapon high —

He landed squarely on the tip of sword, violently impaled by his own momentum. And in that moment, I understood. This game was exactly as frantic, exactly as crazy and snap-reflex-based as a real fencing match, between real swordsmen. The controls might not have the finesse of an actual human arm holding an epee, but the mechanics, the pacing; these are pitch-perfect, and evoke the same thrilling adrenaline rush that whipping an actual rapier around in a clumsy attempt at defense gave me in my teenage fencing lessons (my local community center offered some pretty rad summer programs). The key is to treat combat in Nidhogg with the same sort of gravity you would in real life. Take small, inching steps toward your enemy. Change stances freely, and attack opportunistically, when given a wide opening. And only throw your sword at the oppenent when it's the only move you've got left.

It's possible to beat Nidhogg without really knowing how to play it. The game is pretty forgiving, and you have an unlimited number of attempts for each stage, meaning you can essentially grind your way towards victory if you're really determined. But it's immensely satisfying to clear a level without losing a life by trouncing the bevy of foes that stand in your way one-by-one. So practice up, and prove you've got what it takes to be a winner.

A friend of mine once remarked that there's no way to describe this game that still makes it sound fun once you've explained it. By all reason, Papers Please shouldn't be as much of a good time as it is. You serve as an unnamed male citizen of the Arstozkan Empire, employed by lottery to rigorously scan and verify documents at the newest border crossing station in your dystopian, communist nation circa the 1980s. The names are all changed, but you essentially control Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall, and it's your job to make sure illegal immigration in your sector grinds to a halt. If you fail, your impoverished family will starve and freeze even worse than they already do.

But in spite of all its Cold War doom and gloom, Papers Please is a wonderfully intricate and engaging experience. The charm and humor of its characters, such as the permanently cheerful Jorgi Costava or the irascible Dimitri (Your supervisor, who stops by to inform you how bad you're doing each week) draws you in with each passport you process. Soon, you're reading your employee handbook to pass the time, determined to serve your country well and provide for your family. Or maybe you begin working undercover with the resistance, smuggling revolutionaries into the country with falsified papers. Or maybe you set up a smuggling business with a few regular border-crossers, and plan to flee the country yourself.

With 20 different endings to unlock and hundreds of stories to hear, Papers Please is unique kind of game; one that defies the genres of the medium and forces us to think differently about our entertainment. I highly recommend you pick it up. And remember! Always read the daily bulletin!

Glory to Arstotzka!

Brothers is one of the most beautiful and elegant games I've played in a long time. The gameworld's stunning, expansive vistas hold equal measures of breathtaking views and clever puzzles, along with a dozen charming little moments of storytelling in each of the game's hidden achievements. The controls are a fascinatingly simple yet challenging ambidextrous controller configuration which manages to keep you strikingly engaged with what both of your characters are doing at any given moment. The story is short, sweet, and wonderfully crafted. The ending made me cry real human tears. This is a marvellous videogame, and it only takes about three hours out of your day to clear it. Pick it up when you've got the chance.