Hand of Doom

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.

Unfortunately I have to give a negative review for the fact I was able to softlock myself several times. Well, really twice and one of those times I was able to get out by going back to the menu. However a third time was possible just by playing the game and failing to finish a task. If you go over a certain lava covered area and have no healing items to go back, congrats, you softlocked yourself if you touch the checkpoint. Due to no save/load system, this is unfixable without some kind of debug command. The worst part is that the checkpoint makes no sense since the area is just one corner of the islands area. Completely fixable by removing that checkpoint. But this softlock is the genuine deal and it basically removed all my progress up to that point. A lot of indie games like to 'be inspired by' games of the past, but the thing is that a lot of games of the past had better framework. Ya know, save/load systems or games built to where losing all your progress was built into it. This game though is relatively slower paced and feels like it's meant for you to be able to save and load, but no. You rely solely on checkpoints. As a result, the really shoddy bug testing and world se…

Fun AF! '90s feeling dungeon crawler, great FMV sequences/characters, retro yet modern keyboard/mouse first-person controls with zero retro jank, and just really cool all around. When you feel lost or potentially confused, just keep exploring and trying things - you'll likely discover what you need. Side note/help: for those having issues with the mouse cursor getting locked in the middle of the screen, just hit your center/scroll button and it unlocks it.

Very charming. I did not think I would like it as much as I did. FMV characters, cheesy voice acting, very outdated control scheme, less pixels then I've ever seen in a PC game and 25 FPS somehow come together to form an experience that made me nostalgic for an era I haven't even part of. Despite the strange controls it was surprisingly easy to adapt. It helps that this is more of an adventure than an action game. There are enemies but they are very forgiving. So there is enough time to fiddle with the spells. Dying is not a big punishment either. I am usually very sensitive to low framerates. Despite that, I did not feel any nausea here. I guess the low pixel count and relatively high FOV masked all the potential jitter. Either way: feels smoots despite being below 30. The world is genuinely interesting and atmospheric. The game is well paced, new spells and weapons are provided before the old one become stale. Highly recommended.