I played some games. Several of them were very similar.
BIT.TRIP CORE
A sort of shitty rhythm/timing game where you shoot dots for points. Looks like arse and is not fun. And it took me a moment to even figure out how to start it because you have to "play" the menu screen. You're the cross in the middle and you have to aim the grey beam in one of four directions and then hit the fire button when the yellow square crosses the beam. Which is basically the actual gameplay except there are more squares.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
It's not immediately clear from the beginning but this seems to be mostly a skating game? But also with really annoying combat. I found judging distances (especially with flying enemies) extremely difficult and was basically just button mashing. Immediately put me in mind of Mirror's Edge and how the combat in that dragged the game down. But also in the way that there seemed to be particular ways to go about things but it wasn't always obvious what they were.
The game starts really slowly and with a lot of dialogue, and the default controls assume you have a mouse with all the extra buttons and are generally awkward. Probably better on controller but I didn't bother trying. It also seems to be entirely story-based but also gives you points for your skate tricks. I don't know what the points are for. I didn't get far so maybe that would have been made clear.
Castle Crashers
Arcade beat-em-up with a cartoony style. Probably fine if you like that sort of thing?
Cat Quest III
Sort of an arcade beat-em-up style RPG? Extremely sacharine. A little difficult to tell whether you're lined up with enemies. I died very quickly.
Children of Morta
A really annoying narrator who won't shut up, hideous art, utterly generic story, awkward gameplay; you can't do anything else while attacking and attacking overrules anything else so you have to stop attacking and wait for the animation to end before you can block or move. Made the it feel very awkward, slow and unresponsive. Seems like mostly the correct option is to stand still and wait for enemies to approach then hit them. I played very little of it.
CrossCode
Another of these top-down action RPGs but with maybe some kind of puzzle elements? I got super bored during the (very long) tutorial. I'd mostly been playing games from Riversol's Steam library and it was at this point that I began to wonder just how many of his games were basically the same game with a slightly different theme.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits
Looks neat and could be quite fun once you get the hang of it, but I'll definitely need to fix the controls. Using R, E, Shift and Ctrl in combat, as well as WASD to move, is not great. Definitely one to come back to after I finish some of the games I've already played part way through.
Lumines
A Tetris variant where you have to make 4x4 squares instead of rows. It's fine. Kind of difficult to play though because I keep trying to play it like it's one of those colour-match games. I'd have to put some time and effort into retraining myself, and the question is why bother? Do I really need another version of Tetris? Does anyone? We already have Tetris.
Symphony
I'm a sucker for these "uses your music collection" games (Audiosurf is one I keep going back to) but this one I'm not sure I'm sold on. It's a perfectly fine Space Invaders, I guess, but I don't really feel like the music element does a lot and it's frequently quite difficult to tell what's going on. It's visually noisy and chaotic all the time so I kind of just hold the fire buttons and hope for the best, and I tried a few different songs and didn't feel that the game was adjusting itself to the music in any meaningful sense.
I also tried setting it to play random tracks and, out of the half a dozen artists I'd loaded in, it picked three Miley Cyrus songs in a row. Seems sus. It could happen, but the chances aren't high. So the randomiser might be broken, and one thing that I don't like about Audiosurf is picking the songs. I'd like it to pick randomly for me (with the option to veto its choice).
That said, I might play this game in the same sort of situations in which I play Audiosurf; ie. when I want to listen to some music and have something going on that takes my attention but doesn't really require any thought.
Undertale
I don't understand this game. Everything seems entirely arbitrary. You just try stuff until something happens and you can proceed and the game seems to give no indication as to why the thing you did worked or how to generalise that to get better at the game. When you bump into a monster you can talk or fight, and talking sometimes means you can skip the fight, but I could see no indication of what would work or why. And the dialogue isn't interesting or useful. I heard there's supposed to be good characters and stuff but mostly it just seems to be endless, repetitive mini-games.
Also it wouldn't let me screenshot it.
Wargroove
Turn-based strategy structured into missions like an RTS. Sporadically (and irritatingly) voice acted. Generic fantasy story, very little depth. Nothing I could see to recommend it. The combat didn't even seem to have much depth (although I didn't get much further than the tutorial).
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