Hand of Doom

Very disappointing. Went in expecting to do cool wizard stuff, turns out its a horrible fetch-fest. a "do THIS x amounts of time" or "fetch x amounts of THIS" kind of game. On top of that, its easy to get lost and not know where to go, as well as it is easy to softlock yourself.

banger

Looked really cool in the trailer, but in practice the game looks... really ugly. Like hard to look at ugly. Just as ugly as the voice acting, which I'm sure is SUPPOSED to sound cheesy and unprofessional to ape old indy games with a limited budget, but it's just cringy bad and/or boring bad, not fun bad like dialog in Resident Evil 1 or The Room. I didn't grow up with these kinds of FMV games, except The 7th Guest which was much too complicated with its puzzles and creepy for little young me, so nostalgia is not a factor for me either. But the biggest problem is it had me yawning and bored in it's first 30 minutes, which is probably the worst a video game can have. At the end of the day, it just really isn't the game for me, so it gets a thumbs down from me. Maybe it is for you.

It's just a walking simulator with terrible controls, terrible combat, and a quest system softlocks you if you only half way complete a quest. The mouse is buggy too.

A magic mechanic that outstays its cool gimmick, not really evolving, just adding more to your list of chants. Would be nice to have hotkeys I could bind spells to as there are many that have frequent uses in puzzles with long chants. The forest area was fine, with the games best moments being there, but I found the other areas to be either boring or tedious. There's lots of long aimless wandering in between and uninsteresting combat, mostly being pointless with how much you can avoid it. I had a few glitches, most notably being quest items not leaving my inventory, and my mouse being locked to the screen, only being able to force quit or return to the main menu. While I didn't have any softlocks, it's discouraging so many of the reviews and forum posts mention it, so I advise caution. I had fun at the start, but its biggest mercy was that it was short.

Pretty good game. Short; only 5-10 hours long, and most of that is from exploring to make sure I didn't miss anything. Some glitches here and there, did have to quit out once because I casted mage armor and it prevented me from interacting with anything. Perhaps the perfect use case for the steam deck/steam controller: use the left stick to move around, right stick to control the camera, and the trackpads to move the mouse around.