QuickPans: Extremely Quick Edition

  11/30/2025       Act      4 Comments

I play so many bad games, but the sins of the bad games I’ve played over the past 6 months are largely of the boring and bland variety and don’t seem any more interesting to review than they were to play. Nonetheless, here they are with a sentence or two about why I disliked them.

I originally thought this post would be far longer but it turns out there’s a good deal of games I marked as disliked that I just straight up don’t remember.

Inside: Little Wings Deliveries, Newt One, Planet of Lana, Bugtopia, Grapple Dog, Spells and Secrets, Flooded, Jusant, Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles, One Lonely Outpost, Kamaeru: Frog Refuge

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   Adventure, Deckbuilding, Farm Sim, Idler, Indie, Platformers, Precision Platformer, Puzzle Platformer, Roguelike, Sim, Video Games      , , , , , , , , , ,

Lisa: The Painful

  11/01/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      6 Comments

This is a sequel to LISA, which Farla reviewed a long time ago but which I’ve never played. It seems pretty self-contained though. The game follows Lisa’s brother Brad following an apocalypse that causes all women to disappear from the world. Brad stumbles across a baby girl and chooses to raise her as his daughter. She inevitably gets kidnapped, so Brad must go on a journey to rescue her.

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   RPGmaker, RPGs, Video Games     

Crashlands

  10/24/2025       Act      Add Comment

Boxart for the Butterscotch Shenanigans game Crashlands

I did not expect to like this game. I found the visuals ugly and usually find “topical” humor to be juvenile and an excuse to not write real jokes. At first the world felt open and empty, and I worried it was yet another survival crafter with no thought given to plot or gameplay.

Slowly but surely, Crashlands won me over. It visual design was consistent and thoughtful, clearly purposeful and tone-consistent. The writing was good and often quite entertaining, with a self-aware tongue-in-cheekiness. The scale of the plot slowly ramps up in a way that feels natural and engaging. And more than anything else, the attention and care it put into its worldbuilding and characters was above and beyond any game I’ve played in a while.

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   Recommendations, Survival      ,

QuickRecs: Surgery Edition: Part 1

  10/22/2025       Act      4 Comments

I had the fortune to have to undergo a bilateral masectomy in June, so I’ve spent months barely able to do anything at all. I’ve played a lot of video games. Enjoy the forthcoming waves of game recs. Not a lot of pans though — the bad ones I played were mostly just boring and bland, not really bad in a way that was interesting (with one notable exception, which I may get to later). I may put up blurbs on the curator page later just to remind myself what they were. Anyway.

Also these got long and aren’t really “quick” anymore but whatever I’m not splitting them now.

Inside: Unholy Heights, Deiland, Wavetale, A Monster’s Expedition

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   Adventure, Farm Sim, Indie, Platformers, Precision Platformer, Puzzle, Recommendations, Sim, Sokoban, Tower Defense, Video Games      , , , ,