Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 3 - The evil wizard escapes into a new region and you need to chase him there, and also find a cure for your sick dragon buddy while you’re at it. Another point-and-click adventure in this series, though this one seems even more phoned-in than the last as it doesn’t seem to introduce anything particularly new or different. It opens up a lot of options early, but honestly there are too many of them and you waste a lot of time going back through potential options trying to figure out what you can actually achieve. Also, I’m not sure if you can softlock yourself, but I was much more concerned about it here than in some of the other games because there were so many open options at any time. (It turns out you can safely sell all of the treasures, trophies and valuable materials; you never need them for anything except to exchange for money.) Hopefully if they continue this series they’ll come up with a new quirk for the next one.

Garden Story – Clearly carrying some influence from Stardew Valley, this is more of an action-rpg with life sim framing. You play as a little grape, the new Guardian of the town, and have to deal with the fact the entire realm has been crumbling as the Rot encroach. Combat plays a major role, along with resource gathering (the latter made annoying by the fact that resources don’t stack in your inventory, and the limited “town inventory” takes the place of being able to craft chests). And the game cycle takes place in days, but doesn’t actually give you an in-game clock until you do a midgame sidequest. You unlock “crafting” relatively late, and it mostly involves making repair kits and dropping required items in them (though you can also put cosmetic furniture and drop-boxes in extra set areas). You unlock “farming” even later, but you only have four seeds to pick from (one grows properly in each seasonal area) and there are set farming spots you have to use. I have the feeling that in a world without Stardew Valley this would have been (even more of) a 2D Zeldalike, with longer dungeons and more puzzles, and without the day-cycle. Not bad, not amazing, worth the 10 hours of playtime.

CARRION – Nominally a metroidvania, with the twist that you’re playing a writhing mass of tentacles who smashes its way through a human military facility and eats people to regain biomass. (And you occasionally get to watch flashback sequences where you play as a human.) The controls aren’t my favorite; you need to “aim” your tentacles with the right stick and generally use the triggers to do things. (Also this really could have used a minimap.) But the difficulty isn’t bad and the save points are pretty frequent, and by the time you get into the really annoying military segments you’ve gotten pretty good at wrangling the controls (and in many cases, can play rooms either as stealth/puzzle areas or as combat areas). Entertaining and didn’t outstay its welcome.

Cryptmaster – A first-person exploration rpg with the gimmick that you constantly need to type words—your party’s battle skills, navigation, guessing the contents of chests, making conversation. You get clue letters for more skills from chests and battles, but you also have limited “souls” to fight those battles with, because each skill costs a soul per letter. (Souls are also currency for building potion recipes and bonus cards for the sidequest card game. And that sidequest card game is actually pretty fun!) Much of the gameplay is either choosing the right words to fight with or figuring out riddles. This is another game where the achievements tell a story, as almost 80% of players get the first story achievement, and roughly a third of them get the second one. The last two chapters are markedly shorter than the rest, though to be fair the gameplay is pretty tired by that point anyway because they don’t add new mechanics. It’s certainly 10 hours of entertainment. If you like riddles and brainteasers and don’t mind gimmick rpg elements, this might be for you.

Master of Magic (2022 Remake) – The official remake of the classic 4X game, as opposed to multiple unofficial mods and remakes I’ve played over the years. They one keeps very close to the original (including allowing you to take max Death books and start with Wraiths) but upgrades to a 3D map and adds a bunch of new variety and quality of life features (like your “familiar” who can fight battles for you, who gives a percentage chance of outcome that you can see before starting each battle; or a series of autosaves of previous turns). It does seem like cities are forced to be farther away from each other, which slows down your ability to settle areas. Lairs/caves/ruins are more interesting, with a better variety of prizes and sometimes the option to “explore further” for a potential second battle and more prizes. The enemy wizard towers fight in battle when you assault their home base, which makes those battles harder (I ended up with one enemy wizard squatting on a single town for half the game, because he couldn’t do anything but I didn’t have an army nearby that could actually survive assaulting his tower.) As with the original, the later game comes down to your heroes loaded down with awesome artifacts and roaming the map clearing everything out. This maintains the feel of the original while sanding some of the rough edges and making it prettier; I thought it was a pretty solid remake.

Planar Conquest – Whereas this was another off-brand Master of Magic remake, which was made by the same folks who did Worlds of Magic, with a similar setup (there are half a dozen planes instead of just two) and a similar jankiness. Also annoying with this version is that apparently they expect you to have an enormous monitor to play it on, because on my 16” laptop the building and unit descriptions are so small as to be barely legible. This switches around some of the setup, expands the magic types, and changes some units and buildings; and most noteworthy is that it changes the overland features to make it clearer what is just a prize to collect and what’s a challenge guarded by enemies. I suspect that, like Worlds of Magic, this was hobbled by bigger dreams than they could actually fulfill; and other reviews say it’s riddled with bugs and the AI is terrible. I think it says something that I played for half an hour and got 6 achievements, all of which were held by roughly 10% of players.

Littlewood – Another Stardew-like, and a relatively simple one with no combat. You’re the legendary hero, but you lost your memory in the final battle against the dark wizard, and now you’re settling down for a simple life of building a town with your friends. You have complete control of the town’s layout (including building the houses for your friends and furnishing them) and there are lots of skills for you to make the numbers go up. One of the big quirks is that the daily timer and your endurance are the same—time only passes when you do things, which is actually a cute abstraction. (Honestly, the game might be a little too abstracted; it’s almost into “tappy game” territory.) There are a number of mechanics that aren’t well-explained—you need to build everyone a desk so you can see what upgrades they want in their houses, and then they’ll give you special items that unlock other game features for doing them. You need to upgrade the balloon to unlock other areas, then upgrade those areas to unlock things like the bonus card game. When you fill out the right furniture in someone’s house you’ll get a watering can and can start breeding flowers by placing the correct ones near each other (and getting lucky), which is required for finishing both the museum and the visiting NPCs. The game officially ends when you get married (you need to date someone enough and also buy a very expensive wedding ring from the auction house; it took me 27 hours), but the achievements assume you’ll play for another 30 hours grinding items if you want 100% completion. It’s not immersive enough to scratch a Stardew itch for most people, I suspect; but it’s a reasonably entertaining “make the numbers go up and complete all the quests” peaceful game.

Splintered – Heavily influenced by the Dragon Quest randomizer scene, this plays like DQ1 (or Dragon Warrior, for us old folks) with the serial numbers filed off, but adds complexity to battles with equipment-specific bonus abilities. The first chapter plays it straight, but then you go through an increasingly random set of repetitions where the world is rearranged and item abilities change, but the quest is the same every time. You can also do general randomized runs and there are special “trial” chapters with special abilities and limitations. As there’s much less grinding than classic DQ1 (and you can beat the final boss at level 17-18 with many available builds), each run is only 1-2 hours, and that makes it entertaining to do a bunch of variations. I played 8 runs (all the story chapters and two trials), and I may revisit this at some point just to do another randomized run or two.

Overall: Except for Planar Conquest (which I didn’t expect much of), this was a pretty solid slate of games in a wide variety of genres. I had a lot of fun with pretty much all of them, even the ones with noteworthy shortcomings.