A review appears here only after the game has been finished and every branch we intend to claim has been played to its end. Games we abandoned are filed as dispatches instead.
9.1
Eleven loops, all mechanically distinct, and the game converts everything you learn into a shortcut. By the fourth loop a twenty-minute opening sequence takes ninety seconds, and nothing is ever repeated purely for its own sake.
8.4
One rewind, returning you to your last accusation, and no manual save anywhere. A single undo used sparingly does more for the pacing of a detective story than unlimited saving ever could.
7.7
A survival game that saves the world state perfectly and your current task not at all. Quit mid-construction and you return to find the materials gone and the structure unbuilt, which we lost twenty-two minutes to twice.
7.2
A roguelike that is entirely honest about what persists between runs, which we appreciated, and which then hides its unlock conditions behind figures it never shows you. Honest about the wrong half.
6.8
Nine endings claimed, three genuinely distinct. We played all nine and compared them line by line; six differ only in a closing paragraph, which is a choice the game is entitled to make and its marketing is not entitled to describe that way.
5.9
Autosaves every ninety seconds and records position without inventory. We lost forty minutes of gathering to a crash the game had saved through twenty-six times, which is worse than not saving at all because it teaches false confidence.
