Hell Architect
Hells Architect is my first ever review, and one of the reasons why I decided to leave a review for this game is because I am surprised by the mixed reviews the game is currently at (day 2 of release). In my opinion, the producer and developer of Hells Architect launched this game correctly; they ran a successful campaign by keeping the customer in the loop during development, they released a playable demo, they sought feedback from testers, are continuing to listen to feedback, and perhaps most importantly – they delayed launch by several months until they had a viable product ready to go that they were proud of!
– Real player with 116.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Dark Humor Sandbox Games.
I feel awful posting this review, but I’m hoping that the dev team will fix the issues that I have with the game over time. It’s not that I don’t recommend the game, I just don’t recommend it right now and at the price I paid for it (more than $20 in case someone is reading this later after a price change). I’ve completed every stage with the exception of the final mission as of this writing (and I intend to complete that stage), as well as played some of the sandbox mode. My actual playtime is a bit lower than what the review will have listed, since I had to leave the game open while I wasn’t actively playing it (more on that below).
– Real player with 28.7 hrs in game
Gnomepunk
If you ever see a pointed red hat while picking mushrooms - run!
Somewhere deep in the woods, creatures no bigger than a rabbit have their home, yet they are formidable among much larger human brethren. They are gnomes. Legendary race of halflings, spreading fear and ruling in wooded areas since the dawn of time.
Create an army, train builders, gather resources, develop technology and lead your mini-people to take total control of the forest.
On your way, you will be faced with dangerous external factors such as wild animals, hostile terrain, carnivorous plants, hostile gangs, as well as internal factors, such as alcoholism, idleness, and defeatism spreading among the society.
On the way to the top, make alliances or develop your army and declare wars.
Set traps for animals, and learn to catch and use people for your purposes.
If they turn out to be unproductive, you have no choice but to resort to torture.
As a ruler, you must not forget to entertain your people. Arena should solve this problem.
A well-thought-out economy leads to prosperity, but a ruler that is too gentle may lose his respect. Use a strict tax system to your advantage and keep society in check.
The day is for work, but it is at night that real life begins.
It is a tradition among the gnomes to come up with a dope party every night, where there is plenty of alcohol, stimulants, crazy contests, and prostitution. As the king, you should have fun and enjoy what the night has to offer.
Read More: Best Dark Humor 3D Games.
Unholy Heights
An apartment management tower-defense game about your resident monsters against humans.
While the idea of being a landlord is enticing the tower-defense part can get incredibly tedious & repetitious since there’s not a whole lot of strategy to use here from beginning to end.
The idea of the tower-defense is just to stop humans from stealing your money and if they get away with it you only lose your highly expendable tenant should they have died defending the money taken so there’s no real fail state. You try and stop the humans by knocking on the room doors of the monsters of your choosing and IF they’re home (which most usually are) they’ll do their tower-defense thing and help kill the intruders.
– Real player with 59.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Dark Humor Tower Defense Games.
Let me tell you about Popan.
Popan was the first baby ever born in my apartments. She was a Cheepy so I didn’t have high expectations. Popan was probably 3 days old when her parents died in an unfortunate ambush on my complex. I had a ton of other tenants, so I didn’t see the harm in waiting for her to grow up. Somehow, she never became in debt. This fucking baby was paying the rent. She grew up to be a total badass. She would single-handedly wipe out entire waves of enemies without breaking a sweat.
– Real player with 34.2 hrs in game
Unnatural Disaster
sandbox mode is the best
– Real player with 8.0 hrs in game
good game
– Real player with 6.9 hrs in game
Empires in Ruins
Edit: The developer is super chill, and is looking to patch out the bugs soon. This is still a hard game with hit-or-miss writing and an imperfect UI, but serious props to anyone who can indie dev something this complex. Check it out if there isn’t something in the review that’s a dealbreaker for you.
This is a very “yes, but…” recommendation.
Empires In Ruins is a thing I should like. It’s a tower defense with a 4x strategy layer, and where you can econ yourself into an easier TD situation, or TD yourself out of a bad economy.
– Real player with 27.9 hrs in game
**This is a short excerpt of my longer analysis and review (available in English and German). I would recommend reading the full text or watching the YouTube Video (German Voiceover, many subtitles)
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Empires in Ruins Test / Review
Empires in Ruins Review – Conclusion and opinion**
For an indie game of a small team just entering early access, the game is already surprisingly polished. The campaign includes a very entertaining story and for strategy fans an appealing game depth.
– Real player with 13.4 hrs in game
Buoyancy
Buoyancy has something special going for it for sure, you know this within the few hours playing it.
However at the 6hr mark (at least for me) I felt like I had already experienced all of the game mechanics and all of the challenge was gone. Population was easy to maintain (even passed 150 pop) and everything else started to repeat itself. The pirates towards the end really weren’t a threat nor were fires and extreme weather threats.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this, especially because it’s a early access title and the low price point still provides decent value. I can’t say this enough, but games like this is exactly why I love early access. Buoyancy is a gem!
– Real player with 33.4 hrs in game
Its still in development but and I have high hopes for it in the future but right now its pretty dumb. For a full explanation continue reading.
Its virtually impossible to set up steady food production because the villagers you have working on water, wheat, bread, beer (yes beer) all the necessary things to keep the colony going just randomly quit there jobs and wonder off. Once your population reaches a couple or three hundred you are pretty much guaranteed to have one of these situation which results in running out of food faster than you can get all the villagers back to work and as a result dozens or hundreds die. Now to get to this point you had to build a large raft. You need a lot of villagers to row the raft around to collect supplies from the ocean. Once you lose a sizable chunk due to one of these wandering abandonments of duties you don’t even have enough people left to row the raft and are basically done.
– Real player with 32.4 hrs in game
Archeo: Shinar
This game has surprised me. At first, it’s a simple economic strategy with very simple mechanics, or at least I thought so. You go on expeditions, pick good explorers and try to match them to events on the expedition. Easy enough. But the game is focused on the other side of archeology. The player spends more time preparing and planning the next expedition than being on that expedition. There’s a lot of hidden stuff and you can get overwhelmed, but it’s probably the early access thing. The more you play the more you learn. There’s a lot of little gameplay secrets like you can find out the consequences of your choices one hour later or even later. It’s a well-made game with a lot going on in the background. At first, it looks simple but behind those visuals, you may find that it’s actually not that simple. It’s definitely not a game for everyone, but if you are into strategy and management, then you will have a lot of fun. And when in tutorial Cuppy says “you should experiment more with the mechanics for yourself” or something like that, it’s actually true. This game won’t give you everything on a plate, you have to figure out some things, like for example the results on the expeditions aren’t RNG, it works in a more subtle way and you will need some time to get familiar with it.
– Real player with 22.0 hrs in game
This game is in early access, this review is based on version 0.75c.
Pros
✓︎ Interesting and complex gameplay, full of unique features.
✓︎ Wonderfully written story, with meaningful random events.
✓︎ Well balanced difficulty levels.
✓︎ Minimalist, playful and clean artstyle.
✓︎ Local multiplayer transforms the game into a fun society game.
Cons
✕︎ A long learning curve.
✕︎ As an early access it requires some polishing, including the addition of the “career” mode, yet to implement in the game.
– Real player with 13.0 hrs in game
Ruinarch
A fun game that is definitely in early access.
Edited: 7/30/2021. The game has been significantly changed since I posted my first review, and its' unfortunately not all for the better.
The Good:
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Villagers have been overhauled significantly, and their interactions with each other and the world are much more interesting. They earn money to buy resources, have more robust individual trades, craft items, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
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The way monsters are used has been vastly improved. Rather than just spawning them next to a villager and letting them have at it, they are formed into parties, led by one of your demons, to accomplish a specific purpose. Marauder parties from the marauder building break stuff and attack villagers to sow chaos, snatching parties kidnap villagers or monsters for imprisonment, and defense parties protect your base full-time. It’s a bit monotonous to reform the parties repeatedly if you make heavy use of them, but this alone has made Ravager a lot more fun.
– Real player with 36.0 hrs in game
UPDATE: hot damn, that’s one hell of an update. 10/10 guys, very cool.
At first, I thought this was the “Devil Simulator” I’ve always wanted. But the longer I played, the more frustrated I became with this game. I’ll start with the Good things, follow up with the Bad, and leave you with my suggestions for improvement.
The Good
-The AI is tremendously well made, just as advertised. Each NPC has different traits, different relationships with other NPC’s, and adjusts it’s behavior over time as it interacts with the other NPC’s. The level of care and attention that went into this facet of the game is dumbfounding, considering this is, at it’s core, “God Simulator meets Sim City”. As an example, if you turn enough villagers into vampires or cultists, they can split off and form their own societies.
– Real player with 23.7 hrs in game
Empires of the Undergrowth
One of my favorite indie games. While only in early access, it easily has several hours worth of content already.
Four colony types are available as of posting, with more to be released in the future, each with its own unique features. The ereptor, gene thief ants, a fictional species that allows the player to mix in other ant species and their abilities; the fusca, black ants, which act as an introductory species with basic worker and soldier roles; the rufa, wood ants, which split their soldiers between defensive and offensive roles; the atta, leaf cutter ants, which have a unique resource system involving gathering, food production, and waste disposal, as well as four castes to make resources and combat more dynamic.
– Real player with 683.7 hrs in game
This game is great and is most likely to be enjoyed by fans of the real time strategy genre. Currently there are 4 levels each with a challenge mode and many difficulty settings which you will tackle as you control two different species of ant colony. The ants must collect food to grow their colony which can in itself have various different methods applied such as the strategic placement of tiles for upgrading purposes to the ratio of worker ants to warrior ants so that they can defeat the many hungry predators around them which seek to devour their queen! For those who like a challenge you will get quite a bit of enjoyment and playtime from tackling the hardest versions of these levels as for others this will be a shorter 2-3 hour experience which will be enjoyable nonetheless. inbetween these levels you will visit your formicariam (ANT TANK) where your success in these levels provides resources for your main colony which is a species of ant that can take the genes from other ant species and have their queen produce them within the colony. This formicarium colony itself has two challenges to face which are kind of like a hoard mode. If you finish all of this content and are still eager for more there are a handfull of other modes which may entertain for awhile such as the demo levels (earlier levels with a more basic concept), arena mode (a mode where you can pit various creatures found in the game against each other) and Freeplay mode (where you start a colony on one of two maps with many options for you to tweak for a customised experience which is scored upon the defeat of your colony) and finally the hungry spider level which sees you take control of the one of the ants most deadly predators THE WOLF SPIDER! (This is a slight genre flip as you control the one spider which grows and levels as you defeat enemies working your way up to bringing down other huge predators.) I very highly reccomend this game and support the development team who are constantly keeping the community around the game informed on what they are working on next.
– Real player with 281.9 hrs in game
Hotel Afterlife
BUILD YOUR HOTEL 
Manage your dream hotel from the ground up and in any way you want - raise torture rooms, corridors, staff rooms, and guest rooms. You can use professionally made furniture, various attractions and torture devices, which will surely satisfy even the most demanding of customers.
There is also a store at your disposal, where you can buy further improvements and ornaments for the building. Money? In hell, nobody has heard of money. The sins of your customers are the currency around here!
TAKE CARE OF YOUR GUESTS 
At Hotel Afterlife, guests don’t just show up – YOU must reach out to them first! Recruit and send your reapers after lost souls, and when they seize them – purify them of sin by adjusting the attractions offered by the hotel to their unique preferences.
Surely, you would prescribe a different purification treatment for the soul of an emo-pessimist (solitary full of fluffy cats works quite well) and a greedy politician (How many times will he need to starve to achieve the peace of mind? Find out!).
Make sure that your guests are always taken care of by a well-chosen staff, maintain high standards of torture and remember that each purified soul leaves its sins with your wallet – it is in your best interest to develop the greatest resort in your corner of hell!
DEVELOP 
You have been selected to manage Afterlife hotels! You will start small, in the first circle of hell, but your goals are ambitious. Conquer the entire underworld; maintain the prestigious status of your hotel by enhancing its appearance, making sure the service never gets tired and guests leave purified and happy.
Discover more and more ingenious ways of torturing your guests, buy more advanced improvements to your buildings - reach the ninth circle of hell to wallow in luxury and host the underworld’s big shots.
Upgrade your equipment, train your staff and use available statistics to make your hotel as recognizable as possible!
YOU’VE GOT MAIL! 
Dear Candidate,
We are happy to inform you that your “I could use a good job” thought the application has been approved. We have been following your life closely for a long time, and three seconds ago it was decided at the highest level of our company that You posses unique qualities and excellent qualifications to manage the Advanced Soul Purification Centre on our behalf. I present to you Hotel Afterlife – expand it and design as you see fit. We trust that your guests will suffer like they have never before! The offer includes attractive salary paid in sins, satisfaction, multifat card and no-necktie Fridays (also known as “hanged man’s Fridays”).
We look forward to seeing you down below!
Afterlife Corporate
PS
The transfer to hell will take place immediately after reading this message.