Recent reviews by Dr. Alan Grant

Roguelike Deckbuilding is easily my favorite genre and I have played a lot. StS is still the GOAT but there are some fantastic games that sit on the top of the mountain with it at this point. Wildfrost is one of those. I don't know if this has the legs of Slay the Spire but I would argue it's about as well designed and maybe even more fun to play. Tons of build options and useful combos while having a fresh feel to the gameplay. I only started playing since 1.2 so maybe its in peak form right now vs. the past, but I have no idea how this isn't an Overwhelmingly Positive aggregate on Steam. If you are a fan of deckbuilders, this is a must buy. Maybe some recency bias but here is my ranked list for the best of the bests so you can weigh my opinion against your own:

1. Slay the Spire
2. Wildfrost
3. Balatro
4. Backpack Hero
5. Monster Train

Broken and greedy re-release. Somehow they have managed to make this game worse that it was in its (good) beta state.

Space Poker Crack. A perfect game.

The first in the genre and still the best. Nothing really compares with StS to this day despite a sea of clones and good attempts. A perfect game.

Another Ben Brode Joint. Like Hearthstone before it, Snap is a great/fun simple design with good depth plagued by horrendously overpriced mtx and obfuscated in-game currencies to irl currency conversions. I understand that I have over 500 hours logged as of this review (a lot of that is idle time leaving game open) and will likely keep playing for some time but that's my problem, don't let it be yours... I am haunted by digital card games and stay in the toxic cycle through some mixture of sunk cost fallacy, FOMO and undiagnosed mental illness... I beg you, don't be like me. If you want to play a great, deep and most of all REASONABLY PRICED digital card game, just go play Legends of Runeterra where a F2P player can eventually gain all game pieces or a marginal spender can buy into the game for a reasonable price (like a whole top tier meta deck would be <40 dollars at the most if you wanted to direct purchase vs the literal THOUSANDS you can spend in mobile cancer like Marvel Snap to not even have a full collection).

Review bombing this game is really sad and not fair to the dev. Ignore the Paid Battlepass Outrage Andys. It's a 7.50 usd cosmetic only, largely pointless battle pass that nets 10 dollars of the in game currency back at completion. So if you give them a tip, you can have every battle pass forever if you really want it... It's also endgame centric, so if you just want to beat the campaign, complete the Tempedia (Pokedex) and dabble in endgame casually... I don't know, don't buy the battlepass? People with a thousand+ hours in this game complaining that the dev asks for live servicing fees in an very fairly priced and entirely optional way are totally bent.

Temtem is what modern Pokemon should be at the bare minimum. Everything that hardcore Pokefans have wanted Gamefreak to do in that classic gamestyle for years is on display here. Pokemon obviously has an infinite budget and better monster designs (although a lot of this roster is pretty sweet) but everything else in Temtem blows mainline Pokemon out of the water in terms of depth, challenge and playability. I haven't been able to stomach finishing a Pokemon campaign since the DS, giving up on nearly every entry since Diamond/Pearl but Temtem has brought me back.

If you are somone who wants to still enjoy Pokemon but finds Gamefreak's games to be stuck in the 90s and with campaign difficulty tuned to braindead overleveling, mash A to win monotony, Temtem is what you want.

Absolutely insane what this dev has done with a 550 mb download. Probably the best survival game ever made.

A masterpiece. Only downside is you can only have it once...

Secret Hitler, sort of..

It's diablo 2 with layers upon layers upon years of content. Grind forever. Waste your life away.