Skigill

Honestly pretty terrible, Skigill is vampire survivors if the develop didn't want you to know what any of the upgrades, stats or even icons on the menu do. You'll spend a lot of time guessing what everything does, it's not a surprise if you never figure out what some of them do either. The artstyle looked lovely from the trailers, but actually playing the game makes you want to rip your eyes out, everything is yellow so it's extremely painful to play through after 10-15 minutes and a smaller windowed mode is required to prevent the pixel art from getting too distorted.

I had a lot of fun playing Skigill. The presentation and method of progression is unique. Many people complain about the lack of help and text since this game uses only simple icons to give you clues. It isn't some mind-bending puzzle to figure out though. A few hours and a little patience and possibly a small bit of trial and error is all it takes to understand.

One of the most interesting and fun bullet heavens I've played. Fun to decipher, incredibly satisfying to do well at, and overall just incredibly unique

Its a drug for first several hours, wildly innovative for vampire survivor genre, but at some point you hit a wall. There are like 4 types of enemy that differenciate only by speed, hp and spawn direction, and eventually theyll just choke you out, like this game is being chocked by dedication to its gimmicks. You can decipher what some special nodes do through trial and error, but most of the stuff is an unnoticeable stat upgrade. One color pallete is hard to read at times. Theorethically you should be planning path and trying risky builds, but you mostly just get owerwhelmed by horde running in circles. I wish abilities were stronger and had bigger hitboxes, because it always feels like enemies are getting past you and surround you.

A fine survivor-like from Achromi.

I'm not 100% sold on the minutae, but "Survivors" game where the runs are mostly deterministic in nature, and your position on the map matters are great mutators to the standard formula. One of the things that you might see in various reviews is a lack of understanding of what things do, and I think that's entirely intentional. You might consider it meaningless or annoying, since you could ultimately look up a guide to spoil all the details, but I think you're intended to puzzle out things, as exploring the "skill tree" to figure out paths and locations for things you enjoy are part of it. Some of it is a bit less clear than I'd like, but I've puzzled out basically every symbol except for one, and I am pretty sure I understand the about 1/4 of the entire tree I've traversed so far. My primary concern at the moment is more going to be related to viability of various builds, how much strict synergy is required to get something functional, or how attack speed might be predominant. There might be some emergent things that people could discover and that might make the game really interesting, but, thus far, it feels like there's going to be a bit of friction in the exploration in determining effective skills and synergies that I'm not sure everyone is going to enjoy. Might be some bias coming off of the endgame of Vampire Survivors where you can basically do anything and it'll work, and pre final release VS where there was a specific build theory around how to maximize gold farming, and I might just be reacting negatively to how this feels a bit more of a wall, but it's still a much more interesting take than most other survivors games, and most other "Path of X" skill tree games.

I know the lack of tooltips/tutorials/anything instructional at all is part of the magic of this game (kind of like Brotato pre-codex days), but I feel the eventual addition of a codex made that game so much better. Just a bit of description (can even be vague and leave things out) would go a long way to make this really good game a great game ^_^

I bought this because I was a fan of Master Key. I've never played a bullet hell type of game before but found this very enjoyable. The music is so good! Pay close attention to how upgrades affect stats and abilities to better figure out what the symbols mean. Some symbols I couldn't figure out and had to Google lol I've only unlocked two characters so far! Despite so much yellow, I have only lost sight of my character once. Thought I'd add his here since the yellow scheme seems to bother some people but personally, no real issue.

A little slow, but decent gameplay loop, meta progression, and aesthetics for a pixel game.

This is very good, especially considering the price. A classic survivor with a twist, as the concept of unlocking zones to get power-ups has been stretched to the maximum since unlocking zones is literally how you make your build, with the powerups layed out on the map as in a skill tree. The game is honestly pretty nice-looking, musics are a good notch above what I expected in terms of quality for a little game of that size and prize. Is it the best game in its genre that will ever have been made? Definitely no. But it's a nice concept, well executed, definitely well worth its price. Playing it on linux mint on an oldish (around 10yo model) laptop, works flawlessly out of the box.