Recent reviews by Sunfall

I often get overwhelmed by the big automation/crafting games; the early parts are fun, but then you have to tear most of your base down and rebuild it because you need to plumb new resources in; lather, rinse, repeat. Never mind the monsters and robots attacking or whatever.

Assembly Planter is not that. It's a bite-sized chill-vibes automation game, and its big feature (miniaturization with no wire delays) means your complex machines actually take up less and less space, not more.

A less-obvious feature, but a key one for the mood it evokes, is that almost everything you build is net-positive. Many automation games have you scrambling to keep up with the resources you need. Not here. Often you just need a bit to kick-start the loop, and then it becomes self-sufficient.

I got to the end of the game in less than thirty hours, and a non-trivial amount of that time was just leaving it running in the background to accrue resources. For a game that has a regular price less than that of a fast-food hamburger, that feels like just the right amount of time. Yes, it could have a better UI; yes, the music loop is quickly annoying. But I had a really good time playing through it, and that time was almost completely stress-free.

That's just what I wanted. Maybe you want that too?

I'm not entirely sure that Tametsi needs yet another glowing review, but I finally 100%ed the game tonight after working on it off and on for the last six years, so I guess it's time...

Tametsi is very difficult, scrupulously fair, and the best puzzle game I've ever played.

There'll be more review below, but honestly? The game costs less than $ARBITRARY_BEVERAGE and it's fantastic. Just buy it already. The only critical advice I'll provide is this: in the launcher, before you actually start the game, go to the Settings tab and turn on literally every setting that isn't on by default. Together they dramatically improve the quality-of-life of playing the game, and I can't fathom why they're not on by default on new installs.

As for the game itself, it's a tooth-achingly hard take on Hexcells' expanded take on Simon Tatham's no-guessing take on Minesweeper. To unpack that a bit: it's a pure, zero-guessing-required puzzle game where you're finding mines in a grid. Besides the standard numbers in cleared cells you'd expect to find in such a game, it has several refinements. I won't spoil them here, but they're all nicely tutorialized over the first ten puzzles, and they all provide further opportunities for devious design.

Fundamentally, once you get past the easier puzzles, the game revolves around finding "the one loose thread." There'll be a place where no mine can go because it causes a deficit somewhere else, or where a mine must go or else the count will be wrong. To mix metaphors, finding that thread sometimes feels like looking for a needle in the world's most overwhelming haystack, but it's always there. The tutorial doesn't lie when it says you never have to guess. Some puzzles collapse neatly once you find one or two critical threads; others are a non-stop assault on your brain, each deduction leading to another one, hidden even more carefully than the last.

There are 100 puzzles in the core of the game, but--very mild spoilers that the developer themselves spoiled in their updates--there are quite a few more than that which will unlock as you progress. Every puzzle feels interesting, and just about every one taught me something new about how to look at a Minesweeper-like puzzle. By the end you will be a wizard at this type of puzzle, and it will come naturally through the act of playing the game. Or... you'll decide that it's just too much, as many of my friends have. Which is fine! It's cheap, and you can keep coming back to it as you decide to devote more time discovering its charms.

My 101 hours of playtime reflect two separate plays of the game. The first was of the main puzzle set and a few bonus puzzles, and relied heavily on Innocentive's wonderful walkthrough videos, which I'd turn to when I was stuck for more than five minutes or so. That took me probably something like 35 hours. The second started from scratch, and I refused to ever look up anything or ask for help. If I got stuck, I got stuck, and just had to figure out what I was missing. I got through the main 100 puzzles in something like half the time... and then proceeded to spend the bulk of the 65ish-hour playthrough on the bonus puzzles. Some of those took me multiple sessions, where I'd stare at it for thirty minutes, make one or two deductions, and then get stuck. I'd quit the game, come back a day (or week, or month) later, and make a little bit more progress, finding another thread or two to tug loose. I was stuck on one specific puzzle for literally months. I dreaded opening the game to stare at it again. But one day I decided that I was going to solve it, and I sat down and stared hard, and sure enough. There was the thread I had been missing, and another, and another...

I'm not ashamed to admit that, on the very last puzzle of the game, I spent something like forty minutes staring hard, 80+% of the way through, until I found the last thread that made it all unravel. It was awful, and then it was awesome, and then I had finished the game on my own terms.

Yes, I wish it had music. Yes, I wish it didn't punish you for misclicks in a way that led me to (shamelessly) make use of screenshots and Microsoft Paint. Yes, I wish it would remember my color choices for painting and then save my drawings between sessions. But those are nits. The core of the game is a flawless jewel, hard and unyielding and glittering brightly in the sun.

I played this game for six and a half years. What more can one truly ask for?

I don't generally play Early Access games, but a friend of mine was spending a lot of time on this one, and so I decided to give it a try.

38 hours later...

This is a delightful bullet-hell shmup slash roguelite. It has my favorite types of roguelite progression, where you can upgrade some things permanently (mostly capacity) but generally the difficulty of the game isn't changed dramatically by your unlocks. No, what makes your progress better is just playing the game and becoming more competent at it. Many of the bosses seemed impossible to me when I started, only to start falling consistently as I put more time into it.

I like that many of the bosses are available to fight across a wide variety of difficulty levels, which lets you get used to their behavior in a less-intense way, then ramp that understanding into tougher versions. I like that, after a little progress, you can unlock individual boss fights for your own practice. The game is nothing but boss battles, so the ability to poke at them one at a time and get better will make your runs last a bunch longer.

The story is... fine? Cute, even. Weird. I like the art and the music and the fourth-wall breaking that comes from the game not being finished. But the meat of the game is in the mechanics, and those mechanics are rock solid.

I do feel like the developer maybe played too much rRootage back in the day... but that's a good thing, not a bad thing, because I loved that game a lot too and am delighted to find a new game with a lot of that one's DNA.

There are still some EA rough edges and mild bugs, but I already feel like I got my money's worth many times over, and am not even close to being tired of fighting these bosses over and over, getting better and better. What more do you want?

Kill 'em with love.

(Edit: I've now played this for several hours.)

For context, I just finished the last normal puzzle in Tametsi today, and I've 100%ed all of the Hexcells games. I also regularly purchase Nikoli's puzzle books from Japan. In short, I'm a puzzle nerd.

hexceed is a puzzle game in the vein of Hexcells and Tametsi. It's a descendent of Minesweeper, played on a hexagonal grid; the starting clue type is exactly the same as Minesweeper's, although the game quickly introduces additional mechanics. I won't spoil any but the first: walls that block "visibility" from nearby cells.

As a puzzle type, this is well-worn territory, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I love Hexcells and Tametsi. So far the puzzles in hexceed are much easier, and that's also not necessarily a bad thing; I'm a pretty smart puzzler, but the last few in Tametsi were too difficult for me to find fun, and there's always room for "chill puzzle solving" in my life.

The interface is minimal but competent. I found myself sorely wishing for Tametsi's off-by-default features, though, like cells that count down when you mark mines and the ability to doodle on top of the grid while you work out deductions. Particularly the former. The game also seems to run surprisingly sluggishly despite being, well, a puzzle game; I was surprised to see a secondary loading screen, and the fact that there's a frame rate option implies to me that there's something a bit odd going on, CPU-wise. It all feels like a first, relatively polished attempt at a puzzle game by a team that hasn't done a bunch of puzzle stuff before, where customization and quality-of-life changes are pretty integral to the solving experience. And, hey! That's exactly what hexceed is. Hopefully it'll get there over time.

All of that said, there's no question in my mind that this is worth checking out, even here on day one when there are still bugs and interface issues to work out. It's free to play, and there are more than enough (possibly too many?) free puzzles to satisfy most folks even if they never put a penny into the game. The mechanics are tried and true, the interface works just fine, and the relaxing music is... well... relaxing.

Now if you don't mind me, it's time to solve some more of these...

This is a solid taste of (presumably) what will be coming with the full release of 1SP2.

There are some mild issues: I had some platform clipping problems, and the jump height and character width need to be tuned a bit. But I'm not going for a "1cc" run in this build anyway, so the fact that I had some stupid deaths that didn't feel like my fault was only temporarily salt-inducing.

I like the design of the new "screen," which feels a bit more cohesive than the one in the original 1SP. It actually reminds me more this time around of the better-designed levels in Castlevania: Harmony of Despair but, y'know, without the grindy jank that game is full of. Most of the challenges felt fair, and there was really only one blind-jump-into-possible-death that I recall, and I suspect it's actually not blind, I just wasn't paying enough attention. That sort of thing is important in a game like this that eventually expects 1cc runs.

Does this need a bit more work before it costs money? Yes, of course. Is it worth playing right now, as a free light-kaizo platforming challenge? Also yes, of course.