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Hi everyone and welcome back to My Week Unwrapped, where I discuss all the games I’ve been playing over the last seven days. Once again, I’m a day late with this, but it’s for good reason. I took a much-needed break to spend some time with family over the holidays, and then I went into overtime writing several reviews in the past couple of days. So while I didn’t get to play that many games this week, I did spend a lot of time on a few specific games and have more for you to read than short blurbs. So let’s get to it!

Kingdom Rush Vengeance

Ironhide is back with their highly successful series, Kingdom Rush, and this time you play as the villains. It makes for some good fun, as you can control monsters like demons, skeletons and ghosts. There’s also a ton of variety to the enemies and environments so each level feels unique. I spend a lot of time this week playing the the main campaign and still want to go back to complete the harder challenges. I wrote a proper review, though, so I’ll just let you read that. I also made a walkthrough guide if anyone needs help.

A Mortician’s Tale

I had Laundry Bear’s A Mortician’s Tale a couple of weeks early, so I had already finished it before release. But I only just wrote my review today. It’s a game about death, in a way not often explored in games. And at the same time, it’s not so much a game as an interactive narrative piece of art. That said, it’s an important work of art. I’m glad it exists and I’m glad I got to experience it. But again, I’ll let you read my review instead of rehashing the whole thing here.

Humbug

Dunderbit’s Humbug got me ranting in a long review that in different circumstances would have been short and full of nothing but praise. I love everything about the game except its attempts at monetization. It has pop-up ads every couple of minutes, but you can pay $2.99 to remove them. That would great if things stopped there, but the developers threw almost every possible microtransaction in there to push players to spend more money. There’s an in-game currency you earn through play but can also buy with cash. And the game constantly tries to get you to spend those coins on things like the undo button, skips, hints, even extra moves. I still love the game itself, but all that extra garbage racked on marred my experience quite a bit. You can read my review linked above to see the full extent of it or just try it for yourself. It’s still a game worth playing, but I wish the developers would have just had faith in the quality of their product and just let people play it in peace. I also started a walkthrough guide here if you need help.

CHUCHEL

After a wait that seemed like forever, Amanita Design finally ported their latest surreal adventure game, CHUCHEL, over to iOS. I absolutely adored Samorost 3 and Botanicula, so I was very excited for this one. So far, it hasn’t disappointed with its playfulness and quirkiness. Chuchel is a little dust ball in an acorn hat who really likes cherries. He likes them so much he’ll chase a cherry halfway around the world. It reminds me a lot of the squirrel from Ice Age, eternally chasing an acorn. I’m sure I’m not the first one to say that, either. Anyway, I’m only about a quarter or a third through it, so I have a long way to go before I give my final thoughts and review it properly. But I am enjoying it so far. I could have maybe done without the Flappy Bird-esque section, but it wasn’t stressful enough to make me quit. Hopefully the rest of the game will be more relaxed than that. Anyway, I look forward to playing through it tomorrow, as I’m too tired to do much of anything tonight.

Meteorfall

I don’t know how Slothwerks does it, but they’re at it again with yet another content update for the fantastic card-based dungeon crawler, Meteorfall. This time, it’s a skin for Rose called Queen of Shadow. You unlock her using 2000 gems you earned playing the game and then you get to play with an entirely new deck centered around curses. The update brings with it 10 new cards and it’s a blast to play. It’s similar to Muldorf’s undead army, but there’s enough differences to make it feel fresh. So far, I’ve beat the second difficulty level of the dungeon with her and want to try to make it through all five levels. The update isn’t out yet, but you can watch my gameplay video below to see what you can look forward to.

ReversiQuest2

My initial reaction to ReversiQuest2 was a positive one, as I liked the mix of RPG dungeon crawling with Reversi/Othello turn-based battles. But I spent more time with it this week and it led to much confusion and frustration. Perhaps I missed some vital piece of information in the tutorial, but I can’t understand why sometimes my soldiers don’t damage the enemy at all. I finally noticed that there are gray spots and red spots where I can place my soldiers down, and that only the red ones will actually cause damage. But I don’t understand why. It led to a lot stress as I was choosing otherwise good moves, but they never did anything. Meanwhile, the AI was able to damage me just about every move. After all that frustration, I lost interest in the game. I may give it another chance sometime, but it’s not pulling me back in the way it initially was. You can see my gameplay below or just try the game for free yourself.

Solar Flux HD

Solar Flux HD is actually a fairly old game, having released five years ago. For some reason, I hadn’t heard about it until I got an email about the game coming to Switch. Since I don’t have a Switch, I asked for an iOS copy and the developers were nice enough to comply. Unfortunately, I only got to play for about 10 minutes before the game started crashing on me when I tried to open the next level. I don’t see any way to skip that level, so it appears I can’t play anymore. So until I find out more about that and whether it will be fixed, I can’t personally recommend the game.

And that’s everything I’ve been up to this week besides playing a ton of Slydris 2. I hope to finish CHUCHEL over the next day or two and review it, and I’d also like to finally review Barbearian before the end of the year. There are still a lot of notable games releasing in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out! Until next time, that’s My Week Unwrapped!