Gunpoint

Gunpoint is hella good. It's a quick play at 3-4 hours. It has interesting mechanics where you rely on stealth and rewiring things like a lightswitch to a door, for instance, allowing you to KO guards with a swift door to the face as they patrol. You're a spy guy, and this spy guy got himself in a bit of a pickle where he looked like the prime suspect for a murder. The story starts with you needing to break into multiple buildings real quiet like and wipe the camera footage that puts you at the scene.

The gameplay consists of these building break-ins which are part face punch/pew pew, part puzzle. The story is told between missions via texts between you and clients. I really liked the story telling vehicle. It made them more than a cut scene. You had some agency. You could be a smarmy ass, a lying liar face, or a more standard brand of human. It was also a clever way to avoid having to do a bunch of additional art or animation to service the story.

Speaking of story, I really liked the writing. It was very humorous. There were even jokes sprinkled throughout the achievements and tutorial text. So do yourself a favor and actually read stuff.

Anyway, I dug it. If you like pixel-art sneaky, puzzle games of trickery, you will too.

Mini Metro

Mini Metro is a simple looking game in which you have to plan out a metro system with limited resources. As the game progresses, you get more and more stations that you need to connect, and more and more passengers which you have to account for.

The stations are indicated by various shapes, starting with circles, squares, and triangles. Each station will pop up riders indicated via the same shapes. A circle rider wants to get to a circle station, so based on how you set up your lines, it will take the appropriate train to get there. This gets more and more complicated as the stations invariably do not line up nicely, multiples of the same station type are clustered together, it randomly puts one station way out in BFE, and soon your poorly thought out lines look more and more like spaghetti.

There are many different levels which you can unlock by doing well in prior levels. Well, meaning you lasted many days and delivered more than 500 passengers, generally. Each level comes with their own challenges, like some cities have a lot of waterways and your limited number of tunnels or bridges available will make it a mad scramble just to keep things going once you run out. As more and more passengers get added, the possibility of any one station overcrowding is something you have to manage, either by adding new lines, more cars to your train, additional trains, or building an interchange which will speed up the loading of passengers.

The game runs on a weekly cycle, and at the end of every week, you'll get two options to pick between of these kinds of options. (An extra line, more tunnels, etc.)

Lots of times, I found myself moving trains and readjusting lines to alleviate problem areas just to live to see the weekend and possibly get saved by an extra rail line.

Overall, I've enjoyed it. It's kind of a soothing game to play. As there's no endgame, per se, I once again have to set my own parameters. I unlocked all the available levels, and that was enough for me. I came, I played, I got my $1 worth. Onto the next thing.