Eastern Exorcist reminds me of a 2-D, side-scrolling Sekiro (except rooted in Chinese folklore). The game is defined by intuitive, fluid controls and an absurdly steep difficulty curve. Actually, at first, I was rather disappointed by how easy the game was, until I hit about the 3rd or 4th boss and was repeatedly humbled. This is where the comparison to Sekiro becomes most apt. Both of these games are characterized by more or less playing on cruise control until you hit a boss, where you then wish you had three hands rather than two.

You begin the game as Lu Yunchuan, an exorcist tasked with destroying and dispelling evil spirits. After a few battles meant to introduce the controls of Eastern Exorcist, you come across a band of your disciples. Predictably, they are killed, and you begin to seek out revenge on the evil spirits who committed this atrocity. The story flows forth from there (with bold twists and turns). You travel from place to place and encounter scores of interesting characters and quests along the way. The overarching narrative is nothing to write home about, but the people you meet feel quirky and alive. The usual suspects are all there: the typical hero-turned-town-drunk, the wise old council member, and many more tried and true archetypes.

But, really, the story plays second fiddle to the combat in Eastern Exorcist. The developers clearly put in work to keep the game feeling tight and responsive the entire time. They managed to strike a beautiful balance between the mechanics and the difficulty. If the game was too easy, a player could simply hack his way through with basic attacks and minimal effort. Here, though, you better cuddle up close to those parry and dodge buttons, or else you’re in for a world of hurt. They could have given us a brainless hack-and-slash, but they didn’t. You truly have to stay engaged in this game, especially during boss fights. You won’t get far by simply mashing your way through the game; you’ll eventually hit a wall where you will be forced to brush up on your skills.

Speaking of skills, the game presents a skill tree in the form of Exorcism Arts. These are abilities that you slowly accrue throughout the game. Within each of these arts, is a skill tree that offers upgrades. For example, under the Shadow Spell ability, which summons a clone to fight alongside you, the skill tree offers bonuses such as an attack boost while the clone is active. It’s a fairly simplistic system that most gamers will be familiar with, but it’s also integral to progressing through the game. You’re going to want to carefully invest every skill point you can find. These arts are your only reprieve against the difficulty of the boss fights.

The soundtrack is an oft overlooked aspect of a game, but Eastern Exorcist does it right. The main theme—which accompanies most of the downtime in the game—is a simple, plodding, piece that is beautifully done. It’s encapsulates the mysterious, spooky vibe of the setting. In addition, the combat music is perfectly engaging without being over the top. It’s a true testament to the sound designer’s skill when you barely notice the music, but when you do, you enjoy it. Here, it’s unobtrusive yet oh so enjoyable.

If there is one member on the team who receives even less praise than the sound designer, it is the translator. But it has to be said for Eastern Exorcist, that whoever translated this game did a tremendous job. The writing is tight. Though you see it occasionally—especially in the skills and menu navigation—there are very few mistakes. I know this seems almost ridiculous to throw so much praise at, but it was key to keeping me immersed in the narrative.

By way of improvement, I’d like to see a greater diversity in the enemies you encounter. I’ve actually pulled up the in-game log, and there appears to be 47 different types of monsters (including bosses), but I’ve only encountered maybe a third of that and I’m fairly deep in. There are lots of repetitive encounters early on. It’s a shame because the monsters are so interesting and distinctive. There are plenty of concepts here that I’ve never seen in another game. A particular favourite of mine is the “Hair Feeder,” which is a horrifying blueish ghoul that apparently prefers to feed on human hair. It’s not necessarily that Eastern Exorcist lacks a diversity in their enemies, but they take too long to introduce them to you. It would be nice to see them spread throughout your playthrough.

Eastern Exorcist is a game that continues to surprise you. When I thought it was easy, it humbled me. When I felt the story was growing stale, I was thrown for a loop. I was constantly changing my perception of the game. But, be warned before you buy: this game is hard. And, in that regard, it makes no apologies. You will constantly be challenged. The reward is that you get to progress through a game that is fun, imaginative, and couched in a setting that has not already been done to death.

I’m late to the party. But, in the spirit of CD Projekt Red (CDPR), I had to delay this review for a couple of weeks. What is there to be said about Cyberpunk 2077 that hasn’t already been said? The game was groundbreaking in a lot ways, and not many of them positive. Cyberpunk 2077 set a new precedent when Sony pulled it from the Playstation store and began offering refunds. And, as of this morning, a class action lawsuit has been filed by investors against CDPR for the poorly timed release of the game. Oddly enough, the game is actually fairly good at times, even occasionally great, but this wave of justified backlash is in response to what should be viewed as one of the most poorly polished AAA releases that the gaming community has seen in recent memory.

I’m inclined to believe that the launch was so poorly released that the pendulum has actually swung the other way. Fans are coming out in droves to defend the game. It seems that most of these positive reviews center around the story. The defenders have lauded the narrative to the point of overlooking the technical issues plaguing the game’s launch. The basic premise of Cyberpunk 2077 is simple. You start the game as “V.” You pick from one of three life paths: Corpo, Nomad, or Street Kid, and you’re dumped into a bleak, futuristic world. This life choice doesn’t feel very impactful, but acts more as a choice for the starting location of your character, and dictates small ways in which NPCs will interact with you. Ultimately, you will visit the other starting locations that you didn’t choose and play through the story there anyways. V’s programming inevitably becomes integrated with a chip containing Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves), a cyber terrorist who once tried to take down a massive corporation, and the story really kicks off.

Call me cynical, but I’m not buying the endorsement of this story as groundbreakingly original. To me, it feels a little derivative of one of the most famous roleplaying games ever made, Final Fantasy 7. The main protagonist struggles with identity while battling a exploitative, evil company. Sound familiar? Along the way, you explore the dystopian though distinctly technologically stunted future. Cyberpunk 2077 presents that all too familiar, Blade Runner-esque vision of the future that feels vaguely 1980s. Seriously, why does every car driving around look like a Lamborghini Countach or a Honda Prelude? I digress. The story isn’t terrible, and in some ways it is original, but it’s certainly not the gold standard of roleplaying game story-telling that defenders like to prop it up as. Personally, I enjoyed the Nomad storyline best. It takes place out of Night City in a sort of Mad Max setting. But even that story draws heavily from Final Fantasy 7, culminating with the bombing of a distinctly Shinra-looking power station.

A real defense of Cyberpunk 2077 should start with its main city, Night City. It is truly breathtaking at times. It feels simultaneously like Tokyo and Los Angeles. At its core, it’s every major city in the world melted together into one in the best way possible. The walls are plastered with gigantic neon signs and eccentric advertisements. The buildings are complex and quirky (as if they have slowly developed over time). It’s dirty, gritty, and dark. On a purely aesthetic level, Night City looks absolutely lived in. I could spend hours driving the streets and exploring its forgotten alleyways.

The issues begin when you look a little deeper. For me, the inhabitants of Night City are one of the biggest flaws in the game. They feel totally lifeless. You can stand in front of a car, for instance, and the driver will never make an effort to go around you. You could wait there in perpetuum just staring at one another. I just jumped back into the game to check, and you can take out a gun and shoot at their windshield and they don’t react in any meaningful way. Even as you run down the street, bumping into people, they just sort of shrug it off every single time. They never turn to fight you or give you a piece of their mind. It really starts to grate on you when you notice that the AI inhabitants of Night City follows a specific routine. It was not at all uncommon for me to see the exact same cars following a loop while I left my apartment.

That’s not even where the real mess of Cyberpunk 2077 begins. The world feels absurdly unfinished. At release, you commonly could see cars driving through objects and barricades. You would often encounter multiple of the same character walking the street, frequently side-by-side (apparently Night City has an absurdly high occurrence of identical twins). If you get in a fist fight with a random passerby, everyone will duck as though in a bank robbery. I even found traffic at a complete gridlock with no discernible reason; everyone had simply just stopped driving. Even when you commit a crime, you had better believe that a cop will spawn out of thin air. Seriously, go give it a try. Look around yourself in a full 360 degree view, and then commit a crime. You can literally watch them appear like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

It’s jarring. My experience in Cyberpunk 2077 was a constant tug-of-war of immersion. At times, I would find myself lost in the majesty of the design of Night City, and then I’d be completely pulled out by some ridiculous AI behaviour or lack thereof. If these issues were infrequent or easily ignored, that would be one thing, but it’s nearly impossible not to take notice of the issues. The terrible, unfinished nature of Cyberpunk 2077 followed me through my entire playthrough. In the final cutscene, my character was inexplicably naked. The culmination of all my hours of play ruined by seeing the protagonist going full monty.

I’ve got to address one more aspect before I stop beating up on Cyberpunk 2077: the combat system. The combat system is relatively standard. You are presented with a skill tree where you can specialize your character. You can choose from Body, Intelligence, Reflexes, Cool, and Technical Ability. Within these attributes, you have a perk tree. For instance, within Cool, you have Stealth and Cold Blood perk trees. Investing attributes will broadly develop your character, and choosing perks within these attributes will have more niche effects. The problem is that the bonuses awarded from attributes and perks are simply overpowered.

I chose to develop Body and Reflexes and then went down the Blades tree within Reflexes. This left me with an ample amount of health and a ridiculous amount of damage. As I was nearing endgame, there wasn’t an enemy I couldn’t one shot. Even the bosses melted in a matter of seconds. To make matters worse, I never once consulted a guide to craft this build, I just flippantly put points wherever seemed acceptable. If you were to attempt to truly min/max your build, I’m sure you could cruise through the game even easier than I did. The entire main story took me less than 16 hours even including game crashes, glitches, and the like.

Cyberpunk 2077 was doomed to fail. It’s not an unplayably bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but it could never live up to the hype that surrounded its release. Don’t get me wrong, you could play Cyberpunk 2077 and have an absolute blast, but it’s more likely that you won’t. I could almost feel the game constantly oscillating between an incredible experience and shockingly bad. The hard truth is that CDPR should have delayed the release even further. Sure, people grew tired of waiting, but the product we received on launch was an insult. It’s not that the glitches and bugs are impossible to ignore; you just shouldn’t have to. As it stands, Cyberpunk 2077 still has ridiculous potential, but CDPR has a lot of work to do to get there.

Two words come to mind: playability and replayability. Get-A-Grip Chip is a cute and simplistic platformer from Redstart Interactive with a ton of heart. Perhaps more important than its charm is the its execution. The smooth controls and clever design make it so that you can dump hours into this game before even noticing. Unfortunately, if you do exactly that, you’ll get to the end a bit quicker than you’d ever want to.

You begin the game as the titular character, Chip, a manufacturing robot who swings and battles his way through a nightmarish factory. Here’s something that dawned on me about halfway through my playthrough: this is a platformer without a jump button. Odd, isn’t it? You can move left and right, but the rest of your movement is controlled by the hook on Chip’s head. Redstart made sure to build the game entirely around Chip’s abilities and his limitations. As a result, the level design is a thing of beauty. As you progress through the stages, you’ll come across a myriad of inventive ways that Redstart played with Chip’s unique movement abilities. It kept the game fresh the entire time. By way of example, as a gust of air pushes you up, you must take advantage of Chip’s momentum as you slingshot him around an object using your hook.

That’s the true beauty of Get-A-Grip Chip. It’s polished. I never once found myself stuck in a spot I couldn’t escape from. I never once encountered a problem with the platforming or the level design. This is hugely important because the replayability of Get-A-Grip Chip is couched in the leaderboards that are presented to you at the end of each stage. The game needs to be smooth so that you can do each level as quickly as possible. I generally ranked near the top 20 or so on most stages, but those above me were completing the levels in about half the time I was. The full range of players’ completion times is a testament to how well designed this game is. If you are quick enough, you could feasibly complete some levels in just over a minute, but it might take another player up to five minutes. As you go, this fact sort of gnaws at you. I found myself sitting there trying to imagine the perfect route through each stage. How could I beat each stage as quickly as those above me?

One of the primary goals in the game is to collect Battery Bots from each stage. These are trapped robots that Chip has to rescue. There are 8 in each level, and I only found all 8 in a couple of the stages. A few of them I searched quite thoroughly for to no avail. If you find the Battery Bots, you must deposit them into a escape tube, where they are ferried to safety (these escape tubes also double as your checkpoints in the stage). The Battery Bots are lost on death, but not ones that are deposited. If you are lucky enough to find one near a previous checkpoint, you can double back and drop them in a previous checkpoint. Since Battery Bots are required to unlock subsequent levels, you will find yourself chasing them even when they are found it the most perilous of situations.

Another way in which Get-A-Grip Chip deviates from a conventional platformer is that you can skip levels. If you have gathered enough Battery Bots and completed enough total levels, you may be able to skip ahead a level. I found myself enjoying the game enough to have no desire to do so, but this is an interesting aspect for those interested in speedrunning the game. It also offers a greater reward for those diligently hunting Battery Bots. An extra minute or two spent searching may actually pay off by allowing you to skip a future stage.

I’m really nitpicking here, but one of the few problems with Get-A-Grip Chip might be the length of the game. There are 6 stages per level and 5 levels total. At about 3-4 minutes per stage, and accounting for a few failed attempts here and there, the average player should be able to beat Get-A-Grip Chip in around 3 hours or so. Even when you take into account the leaderboards which add that aspect of replayability, I found myself wanting more from the game. This is hardly a negative. I liked the game so much that I was disappointed when I found myself burning through it so quickly.

The final stage of each level is where I found myself having the most fun. These final stages reminded me of the levels in Super Mario where the screen pushes you forward constantly. These levels can be polarizing. For the relaxed gamer, these are an anxiety inducing nightmare, but for those who enjoy a bit of a challenge, these sorts of stages can force you to play at your best. Get-A-Grip Chip manages to find a nice groove of difficulty. The intro stages on each level are usually fairly easy; a warmup more than anything. But, the final stages can be fairly difficult.

Get-A-Grip Chip is the sort of game that arises from a well-focused development team. It is beautifully smooth and playable. It stays true to its base mechanics yet pushes the boundaries whenever possible. The art style is quirky and unique. I felt like I was playing a game made by people who truly understood what they had made. They always had their finger on the pulse. The only issue is when you make a game this enjoyable, I want to play it for much longer than I was able to here.

It’s Christmas Eve. If ever there was a fitting day to play a game based around a crafting workshop, this is it. Instead of creating “toys and goodies,” I’m hocking a broadsword to every traveller that meanders into my store. Craftlands Workshoppe beautifully captures how it would feel to run a busy workshop. The game is essentially a feverishly paced blend of micromanagement and craftsmanship. You are either delegating tasks to your workers or doing the job yourself, all while droves of customers begin to pile up at your store counter.

The beauty of Craftlands Workshoppe is that you set the pace. While there is always a surplus of tasks to accomplish, the player is always in control. Want to spend an entire day gathering resources? Go ahead. If you instead want to leisure around and explore the town, there are no drawbacks to doing so. I found my groove gathering resources for several days in a row, crafting items the next couple of days, and then focusing solely on selling them, but you could mix it up however you want. It’s possible to gather the resources, craft the items, and sell them all on the same day, if you have the gumption to do so.

There are three possible options for crafting: alchemy, blacksmithing, and cooking. The goal of the game is to perfect all three professions and solve the mystery of what happened to your old master, Allcraft. I picked blacksmithing, and I found my daily routine seemed focused on a very small area of the map. I’d go up into the nearby forest to mine iron or gather wood, and then I’d travel to “He who smelt it,” the local blacksmithing supplies store. It was in this monotonous routine that the game began to feel like a bit of a grind. Especially since the vast majority of my customers seemed hellbent on buying only one item. I found myself crafting hundreds of swords in the first couple in-game days of play.

I’m no stranger to grinding. I understand that it is an essential part of games like Craftlands Workshoppe. The issue is that when you are forced to do the same menial tasks over and over, there needs to be some variety built into the way it is performed. In Craftlands Workshoppe, the test is always to time your click for when your cursor coincides with a green bar. This gets repetitive extremely fast. By my hundredth sword, I basically never missed the bar, and it began to feel automated in a weird way. There definitely needs to be variety added in terms of these mini-games.

Luckily, after a while, you unlock the Worker’s Basement, where you can, unsurprisingly, hire workers to automate these tasks for you. Once you master a certain item (by selling a certain amount of them), you can delegate this item to be made by your workers. The only issue I found with this is that at first it is prohibitively expensive and requires hours of in-game grinding to simply get the system rolling. But, it is nice to see a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of your own endless grinding of the mini-game. Instead, you are able to delegate the workers in the basement to the damning fate of endless toil.

Unfortunately, I encountered one of the few game breaking glitches I could imagine. My store was stuck closed. The game displayed my store as permanently open, yet no customers would enter no matter how long I stood at the counter. No amount of toggling would change the status of my store, and I tried restarting the game several times to no avail. This meant that I was left with no ability to generate income, and my journey in Craftsman Workshoppe had essentially ended. I don’t hold this too strongly against the developers, it’s early days for the game, and these things happen, but losing all your progress after hours of grinding is disheartening to say the least. The only other glitch I encountered was that my anvil got stuck on a single recipe. I could only create nails. A simple restart of the game fixed this bug, however.

Glitches aside, the real problem is that you never feel as if you’re ahead. The first couple hours are spend diligently grinding to be able to master your first item. Then, you immediately have to grind further to unlock the Worker’s Basement. But even when you’ve achieved that, the workers become another expense you can’t possibly float. You’re always behind the eight ball. I have no doubts that when you get to the point when everything is up and running the game will feel different, but getting to that point is an arduous journey to put it lightly. There needs to be a greater feeling of reward built into the early game.

For a passive gamer, the kind of person who likes to relax and sink hours into a game, Craftlands Workshoppe could actually be perfect. There is plenty to like. The setting of a sleepy town juxtaposed with eccentric inhabitants is reminiscent of the Legend of Zelda franchise. The gameplay, barring the one glitch I experienced, was smooth and well-thought out. I believe they designed the game with a dedicated player in mind rather than someone who wants instant satisfaction. Even the minimalistic story was intriguing enough. For me, though, the game in its current state is too repetitive and you’re seemingly at a perpetual disadvantage. I definitely see potential here, but we aren’t there yet.

Slay the Spire. There, I said it. It’s nearly impossible to talk about Neoverse (or any roguelike deck builder) without mentioning the cream of the crop. Seriously, go ahead and filter through the discussion surrounding Neoverse online and you’ll find that nearly every mention of the game is accompanied by a mention of Slay the Spire. There’s a good reason for this. Neoverse is essentially a reskin of Slay the Spire with added sex appeal. Is this a bad thing? It sort of depends at where you’re looking from. In a way, Neoverse is actually fairly successful as far as clones go. It’s fundamentally as playable as Slay the Spire, and to some subset of the population, could be even more entertaining due to its small deviations.

Neoverse runs in a fairly typical manner. You start with a deck of cards that have certain abilities. The goal is to move through a dungeon, fighting monsters of increasing power while improving your own deck in tandem. Your cards run the gamut from attack cards, defense cards, and status effect cards. The key, in Neoverse, is to maximize the effectiveness your deck. That’s where the enjoyment springs from in deck builders. You are going to experience moments where you play a card and immediately notice a better alternative. Eventually, you’ll get into a rhythm and begin to roll through the dungeon. I can personally get a feel for a successful (or unsuccessful) run about halfway through. This is because there is a fair amount of RNG baked into deck builders. If you are lucky enough to get a certain card or skill upgrade in Neoverse, it can change the entire playthrough.

Since comparisons are inevitable, it’s worth looking at where Neoverse deviates from Slay the Spire. To begin with, Neoverse has a fairly integral combo mechanic (called “Battle Tech”). If you play cards in a certain order (e.g., attack, defense, attack, attack), you will get a buff to your next attack. This is a nice addition, but in my early runs of the game, this feature was so important that I could not possibly afford to stray from the suggested combo. Your first couple of runs through the game will ultimately be dictated by this mechanic. The critical hit reward is simply too useful to pass up.

Another way in which Neoverse separates itself is the lack of defense decay. The armor gained from a defense card will persist until it is destroyed by any enemy. It will not decay in between turns. This ultimately makes defensive decks not just viable but super effective. Unless you run into the rare encounter where a monster has the ability to remove all your armor, you can make yourself virtually untouchable. Not just that, but it is not imperative to separate your deck between either offense and defense, since an offensive build can still remain relatively protected due to this persistent armor mechanic. This mechanic was one of my main gripes while playing Neoverse. It gives the player too much power. It’s an obvious point to exploit while crafting certain builds.

A skill tree replaces relics in Neoverse. You earn skill points through encounters and by completing missions. Missions in Neoverse are a set of parameters to be fulfilled in battle. For example, if you complete a battle without taking damage, it may earn you extra skill points. The problem is that the skill tree is populated purely by positive buffs with essentially no drawbacks. Luckily, the skill tree you are presented with is random through each playthrough, so you cannot follow the exact same build as your last run. But for the most part, the randomly generated buffs are overpowered. I began to employ a strategy of just accruing as many skills as possible. If you follow this strategy, you become so laden with passive effects that it makes it difficult to lose.

Here’s one more balancing issue that arises from missions: they aren’t automatically redeemed and they aren’t specific to a single encounter. Let me explain. If I take a fight and the mission I’m given is to “deal more than 20 damage in a single turn.” I now have this as a mission permanently until I fulfill that requirement. This means that if I happen to complete that requirement 5 encounters down the road, I’m still rewarded. Also, once I complete that mission, I can redeem the reward at a time of my choosing. So, if that same reward happens to heal me for 30% of my health, I can wait to use it until I need it most. If the reward is to evolve one of my cards, I can save it until I get a card that is worth evolving. This mechanic is also far too forgiving.

The store operates in basically the same manner as Slay the Spire, except that it can be accessed at any time, and refreshed multiple times in a single visit. It’s worth noting that you can also purchase skill points for relatively cheap while visiting the shop, so that you could feasibly fill out an entire skill tree within a single run. The cards offered in the shop are usually fairly affordable and the ones that are discounted are almost laughably cheap. If you are lucky enough to find a card on sale that is essential to your build, you’re set. You can also buy items (up to 3) that have instantaneous effects in battle that are similar to the ones in Slay the Spire.

If it sounds like I didn’t enjoy Neoverse, I actually did. It’s a clone, sure, but it’s a well made clone of an already great game. Beyond some balancing issues, there really isn’t much wrong with Neoverse. It’s just that the successful aspects of Neoverse (and there are plenty) have already been discussed ad nauseam when Slay the Spire released; they aren’t worth mentioning. As it is, Neoverse stands as a solid alternative with a bit of balancing issues and a different art style. It’s simple as that.