Displaying items by tag: Casual

The Office Quest is a laugh-out-loud point-and-click satire of office work culture that overstays its welcome in some aspects and stays too little in others.

With our latest Dev Talk series, Three For, developers make a case for their upcoming release, with gaming history and industry trends considered. Acknowledging the busy market that is Steam and today's abundance in options, our questions invite developers to make a case for why their labor of love is worth what's in your wallet.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

Conserve your single bullet for the shot that counts in Guilt Battle Arena, a small indie title that boasts frenzied couch co-op arena gameplay.

This Early Access train simulator serves as a great addition for fans of micromanagement titles that are easy to relax with. It’s fun, well-crafted, requires thought, and has a wonderfully casual feel. It has some minor flaws, but it’s still worth picking up.

The title offers a difficult and tedious challenge for those looking for one. Unfortunately, it isn’t founded on enough complexity to hold your interest for the long term. Lost In The Dungeon has shown its hand, and unfortunately, it doesn’t contain many strategy, polish, or uniqueness cards.

Apocalipsis’ art style complements its gloomy tale incredibly well. While the story is nothing to write home about and the puzzles range from boring and easy to interesting and difficult, the voice acting and visual aesthetic make this title stand out from other point-and-click games. If you’re a fan of games as visual art, check this one out.

Battery Jam is a competitive, local multiplayer title where you battle each other on a simple map to claim more tiles than your opponent(s). This is a great option in the genre. It’s simple, fun, and can be played in short periods of time. As long as you have controllers that are compatible with Battery Jam, it runs smoothly, without glitches.

The experience of The Norwood Suite is incredibly unique, each design choice, be it of the musical or visual arts, very much reflects Cosmo D's style. The world in which you play feels well developed and full, but not cluttered, keeping you on the path of the game, but not on rails. The Norwood Suite — along with their first release, Off-Peak — are two games worth the effort and confusion.

Devil Daggers is created by Matt “m4ttbush” Bush, under the company Sorath. I’m greeted with screenshots that depict a hand engulfed in embers, firing countless daggers from its fingertips at hordes of lovecraftian enemies. The room is dark: there are no walls or ceilings, only a dark void. The faint illumination from the main character reveals ancient stone floors beneath. The entire color scheme seems to stick with three, maybe four colors at once — all dusty reds or luminescent yellows. They are hugging vertices that I have not seen since Quake, and they look brilliant combined.

Once you figure out how to upgrade your heroes, customize your knights’ spells, spend gold and gems, and place puzzle pieces, Onion Knights is addicting. The Stage rounds (Easy and Hard) are short, so you can play a few rounds if you only have a small pocket of time for games. However, it’s easy to play round after round as you try to level yourself, earn enough gold for knight upgrades, and obtain the gems to buy more hero cards to upgrade your favorite hero, and progress far enough to beat the Hard Stage map. Gameplay is easy to understand but is more challenging as you progress through the map as Curry enemies get stronger and there are more waves to survive through — typical of the genre.

Another Lost Phone is truly a masterpiece in its kind, setting a bar in both creativity and meaning that will be hard for future installments in the genre to match. In addition to being one of the most innovative vehicles for a puzzle-based story to be released in a long time, the story is immensely engaging from the moment you unlock the phone. Accidental Queens have now issued a challenge to game designers everywhere: use your art to tell stories that need to be told.

Your quest to quench your thirst while maintaining good relations with every other student is bigly entertaining, though occasionally you’ll speed through some of the more monotonous parts. On the surface, there is a lot to look at and dive into. Between the bunch of boys, to the mall at which you can shop, to the jobs you can work, it seems like there would be more variety to each choice, but each decision feels trivial; the repetitive nature of some of the conversations exacerbated this and, over time, XOXO Droplets lose its shine. However, the jerk characters of XOXO Droplets promises to entertain.

Fighting through wave after wave of enemies may prove challenging, but the thrill of slowly beating down the big bad opposing force while doing away with its cronies is satisfying enough. To top it all off, it’s all wrapped together nice and tight through its characteristically stylized art style and sound design.

Idle Evolution takes a novel look at how one can develop an idle clickers, and implements the concept exceptionally well. This release also sets the stage for future idle titles, and sets the bar rather high; Idle Evolution arguably heralds the dawn of a new era for this genre.

Five Elements is an original, challenging, and solid real-time strategy game. Apart from those accolades, though, there’s not much else to wow the player. If you're a lover of strategy and puzzles for the sake of strategy and puzzles, you will most likely find it a worthy addition to your collection. If you aren't, then Five Elements may prove to be frustratingly challenging and lacking enough of a storyline to keep you going.

Lil Tanks is a solid title, providing four distinct game modes, twenty unique types of enemies, four tank variants, and multiple power-ups and weapon upgrades. The gameplay is uncomplicated and offers an enjoyable experience. However, it lacks any form of customization, and it might become repetitive after a few hours. Lil Tanks succeeds as a side-scrolling shooter, but there is a scarcity of originality in the game. That said, genre enthusiasts should certainly be entertained, especially at its current price point.

Bomb Squad Academy is more fun than it is challenging. Negative feedback to the player, other than the bomb blowing up (of course), is thin, but this results in an approachable, replayable atmosphere. This is a fantastic puzzler with complex and unique mechanics that are presented to the player in an easily digestible way.

Entangle is a great game. It costs ten bucks to go watch a two-hour-long movie in the theater. Entangle costs less than that for the same amount of entertainment (or potentially more). And you don’t have to put on pants for it. Seems like a deal to me.

Semispheres runs very smoothly. The controls are simple and intuitive, the design is beautiful, and the music only adds to the overall meditative aesthetic. However, Semispheres is over just as it begins, providing only a fleeting, though pleasant, challenge to the player.

Wacky Spores: The Chase is a strong showing from the one-man show Lorenzo Bellincampi. This endless runner ditches substance and opts for style: you won’t find plot or character development, but the popping visuals and sharp audio promise hours of fungal fun.