Happy Grumps

Note about the "free product": I purchased this but refunded it because a bug made it unplayable for me. As a courtesy I notified the developer, and he offered a free copy in exchange for some help finding and fixing the bug, which he was able to do quickly. This review was not solicited. TLDR: It's good. It's unusual and a little confusing at first, but very much worth your time. Recommended. Happy Grumps confused me initially (even after we got the bug figured out). It may not be what you expect, especially if you were searching on the "roguelike" tag. I think I'd call it a "chesslike", since it's played on a square grid with "happy" units which are under your control, and "grumpy" ones which you need to remove. Each room of the dungeon is one of these chessboards, and the number of turns it takes to remove all the grumpies is deducted from your total, which is kind of like hit points, fuel, and money combined. Each room contains a reward chest that opens after you clear all the grumpies. Most chests give you some extra turns (typically fewer than you used up clearing the room), but sometimes you'll get a trinket, which gives you an ability or changes up something else about …

This is an incredibly cute game. Cute characters and cute writing. I just wanna make the clouds happy. Game play wise, your objective is to get a direct line of sight on the enemies in each room, or indirectly by using the newly happy units to make others happy. The units move like chess pieces, and there are walls and other barriers that prevent movement and line of sight. The caveat is that you only have a certain amount of turns per level to find a key and defeat the boss. This means that the strategy comes from trying to use as few turns as possible to complete each room. This to me makes it feel kind of similar to match 3 games. You are trying to set up combos so you dont waste time moving things around individually. I think its pretty unique and fun. It is an Early Access game and I ran into a couple of issues. My game did crash once, but loaded up right at the turn I left off at. However I did have a room, when using the diagonally moving character, was unable to move away from the door because of an indestructible object and impassable object in both of the possible movement directions. This meant that I lost the run unfortunately. It is a rougelike so each run is a …

Needs a better tutorial and clearer visualization of what's happening on the board, but it has the potential to be a pretty fun game.

This review is written right after I beat the game in 100%. (90 mins playtime) Nice game! I enjoyed all the time I spent in the game, except the self-teaching game mechanics part. (I spent so much time learning about why I sometimes get happy grumps after I kill an enemy but sometime I don't, but considering the current state the game is in, I'm not gonna complain much about that) I first bought the game because of the art style. (in steam shop and in-game) The cartoon style drawing is fantastic, the pixel art is clean and consistent, just overall well-done. The base game design is simple but powerful and addictive. (Hero spread happiness by moving around the chessboard) Nice philosophy! And the gameplay it leads to is also fun, requires some logical thinking, but still straightforward. (Random stuff: The trinket that allows happy grumps to destroy all blocks around the destination they are moving towards is super op, simply a run-saver. The hammer that allows you to destroy all rocks in the map is also super op, can save around 10 turns by clearing multiple rooms in 1-2 turns.) There are still some minor problems I encounter, although not destroying my experience with the game. …