A rare balance of playfulness and genuine strategic depth, plucked from the margins of history.
Folkloric life sim Kynseed is like a gingerbread house with a witch inside: made up of excellent parts and unpleasant surprises. The pretty bits are delightful, but not nearly enough to hold it together.
Sluggish pacing and stripped-back character interactions dull the charm, but there are still scares to be found
An uncomfortable blend of vulnerability and brand consumption.
I wanted to like Punk Wars. Its promise to be a stylish 4X style game about warring punk factions intrigued me, and it only really needed to strongly hit one target for me. I'd have happily taken a vapid but immersive tactics game; a thoughtful exploration of post-apocalyptic punk with bland combat; an all-style-no-substance experience that carried the game on vibes alone. Instead, I got the worst of all worlds: a dull, poorly balanced game that doesn't commit to its ideas.
An atmospheric world with deep, absorbing puzzles, Bonfire Peaks is thoughtful and charming-but without establishing its tricks, it risks leaving less fluent puzzlers behind.
Embracing player motivations from start to finish, Humankind refreshes the 4X genre – even with a couple of technical kinks.