Source: Review Copy
Price: £15.49 (£21.28 for bundle with Supporter stuff, Supporter Bundle on its own £5.79)
Where to Get It: Steam

I do love me some anthro dark fantasy. A tale of revenge, the last members of a clan of animals making their way through the enemy’s city to claim their head… Yes, this is very much my jam.

And, despite some qualifications, Banners of Ruin is also my jam.

So, in case you hadn’t guessed, this is one of those games where you pick cards for events (out of three each time, although you won’t always get a choice), level up your characters, build up a deck of combat cards with which to beat down the enemy, and weapons and armour to help screw them up, recruit more characters (potentially), fight a variety of enemies, and… Well, most likely die on your run until you really get to know the game.

Just roguelike things, y’know?

Honestly, though, while this isn’t anything new, per se, it’s solidly built. Choices are relatively simple, and everything is clear… Well… See, this is where one of the qualifications comes in.

Accessibility wise, it’s fuckawful. Serif fonts, often tiny. Colourblindness unfriendly symbols which are also tiny… Would a white outline, or, y’know, a high contrast colour kill you, folks? I can tell it’s bleeding from the drops, I can tell it’s a wound from… I know what the symbols mean because of your tooltips… It does have some of the basic stuff, like windowed mode, removing motion blur or screen shake, so on so forth, but… Something this ubiquitous is something that really needs looking at.

So there’s that. I did, however, like the fact that fights that seemed extremely deadly at first were actually manageable… Well, until the first boss, who utterly ruined me… But that’s generally the case with this sort of roguelike. I liked the fact that moving a party member from their position flummoxes the direct attack enemies, but doesn’t work at all on archers, and has only limited use with pikemen. However, be warned, keeping weapons in your stash also means they’re cards in your deck. Cards you can’t use, or, more accurately, I couldn’t quite use. Similarly, switching equipment from the looting screen is… Awkward. Tiny icons again, folks… Tiny icons.

And visually, I love it. I’m a sucker for painted art, and the art is good. Soundwise, I don’t feel particularly strongly either way.

If the accessibility issues were fixed, I’d whole-heartedly recommend this one to folks more experienced with card-based roguelikes, but as it is, it comes with that heavy accessibility qualification.

The Mad Welshman wants all dark animal fantasy to be as accessible as possible. The only thing I’d say we need more than dark fantasy anthro games is lesbian otome villainess isekai games.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £3.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Words are great. I love words. Especially words that make sentences, then paragraphs, then pages, then books… Yup, I love words. I mean, they’re double edged swords, like the…

Wait, game, what do you mean Estoc isn’t a real word? Or Wales? (There was actually a better example, but we’ll leave that…) I’ve wielded the former, and lived in the latter, so…

Yes, Paperback, the digital edition, has the same flaw you’d find in, say, some versions of Scrabble online: The dictionary doesn’t accept some words you know damn well are real. There goes my dream of making a novel set in Wales about aliens and 50s sensibilities clashing with modern ones in a videogame!

Except not, because, essentially, Paperback is simply about making words with the letters you have in your hand (for lo, it is card based), and either buying better letters, or the wild cards that give you fame. Some letter cards have special effects, like giving you more money if it’s first or last in the word (Maybe the editors have a thing for Ts, or a hangup about Ss), or allowing you to trash cards, and making a word with 7 letters or more gives you props too. Run out of two wild card piles, tot up the fame points for your Great Welsh Novel, and the winner’s the one with the most fame!

So… Accessibility wise, it’s okay. It’s windowed, but it can be made a window that fills the whole screen, and you can click on a card to see what the hell it does if the text is a bit small (which it is when you’re not zoomed in.) Both of these are good points. Less good is that there is no volume slider, only on… Or off for sound and music. And while Paperback has a chill, elevator music style track to play to, it is… A track. Or if it’s multiple tracks, they blur together that well.

In any case, paperback has a hotseat mode (always a plus, I find) and an online mode with a signup and login (I can’t really speak as to how well that works), it plays alright, it’s okay, accessibility wise, and as a game? It ain’t bad. If you want a chill word game with friends, this is a solid pick.

Panty, toilet, dirty devil! Words are trouble, words are subtle…

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £7.19
Where To Get It: Steam

“So, Who wants to collect maids competitively with me so I can review this sucker?”

Firstly, this is emblematic of game reviewing, where, occasionally, you will say a sentence that not only makes no sense to the listener without context, but also gives you major side-eye if you say it in a public place.

But yes, Tanto Cuore is the digital adaptation of a card game in which you are hiring maids with Love, and either sending them to your Private Quarters for Victory Points or… STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT, I’M DESCRIBING THE GENERAL GOAL, DAMMIT..

It will not surprise the manga/anime fans to know that yes, this is a Japanese game. And musically, it shows. Bright, pumping beats full of cheer and the promise of shoujo storylines, equally bright visuals… Maids. Maids.

…Maids… There are, in fact, several different types of maids, and employing them either as general maids (in your deck), Chief Maids (on the top of your Private Quarters, with their own special abilities, and indeed Victory Points), Chamber-maids (placed into your private quarters for their Victory Points), or… Crap, I forget the name of the maids with the green outline on the card, but those stay in your deck and count for victory points at the end, at the cost of stuffing up your deck with maids you can’t play. And, indeed, there’s tactics here, because some maids will give you stuff for playing them as cards, not private maids, others give you victory points so long as there’s a certain number in your deck, you can set bad habits and illnesses upon your opponent, and even ending the game is a tactical decision, requiring you to completely clear two stacks of maids… Something I didn’t learn for a while because of one of the flaws of the game.

There are rules. You can look at the rules via the book icon, that’s about as obfuscatory as the UX goes, nice big letters, clear presentation, bright and cheerful… But you will only gain this information near the end of the rulebook.

And you will definitely gain no information (that I can find) about how far ahead or behind you are. Other flaws include that there is no hotseat (just versus AI, a single player “story” mode, with cheevos per battle against the maids of the house), and that there is one piece of music. And it plays a lot. And your brain is already melting from trying to calculate victory points, and…

Look, this is a gem. A flawed gem, but a gem nonetheless. And I would recommend this to people who want a light-hearted, simple once you understand what the heck you’re doing, and yet competitive game.

But trying to say this without sounding like a massive pervert is extremely difficult, okay?

I mean, The Mad Welshman IS a kinkster, but seriously, explaining this game without getting side eye is hard.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £7.19
Where To Get It: Steam

Content Warnings: Monsterfolk.

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £15.49 (Soundtrack £3.99)
Where To Get It: Steam

Hunting tabletop games are fun. One player against multiple, the one trying to stay hidden long enough to win, the others… Well, that’s where the “hunting” part comes in. But, obviously, friends are required.

So I called some in. And we had a great time, right up until timing out a combat led to a softlock. We’d almost taken out Dracula, too. 3 HP. 3. Stinkin’. HP.

Well, I was getting my ass handed to me by that vampire in the last fight anyway. But we were doing so well!

Anyway, yes, Fury of Dracula is, as you might have guessed, an adaptation of the board game of the same name, in which Lord Godalming, Mina Harker, Abraham Van Helsing, and Jonathan Harker attempt to hunt down… Dracula. Bleigh! On the upside, heroes have two turns each compared to Dracula’s one. On the other hand, if Dracula’s canny, he can obfuscate his trail enough that he wins through terror, because his trail runs cold after 6 cities worth of movement. He can also, y’know, leave traps, hoaxes, vampire ambushes, and other fun toys, and can see some of Mina’s cards, since she has an incurable vampire bite.

So, items, allies, and ingenuity versus stealth, trickery, and ambushes. If you’re playing Dracula well, you get to look smug as they hunt you elsewhere… Then less smug if you screw up. Playing as the hunters? It’s fun, discussing where he might be, where he might have escaped, why is he travelling by sea so much? And other fun (legitimately fun) discussions. With friends, it’s really fun.

And it’s faithful to the rules, with some cool artwork. Alas, that’s… Kind of where the charm runs out. Red… Why is red always involved whenever accessibility comes up?

Oh. Yeah. For obvious reasons. Anyway, yes, while rail routes are delineated clearly, carriage routes are not until you try moving, being a dull red that, in most places, is kind of hard to see. Test your games for colourblindness problems, folks, it’s not tough! Similarly, those of us who hadn’t played the game before didn’t quite know how sea travel worked, and the UX was… Less than clear in places, such as effects on combatants, clarification on certain specials (Hi, Mina!), using your hand, and hand limits… Look, we know they’re in the rulebook. Not everyone knows the game.

But, despite all of this (I have faith the devs will hunt down the combat bug, but in the meantime, escape on the 5^th turn if it seems like it’s dragging on), I cannot deny we had fun. I want the game to be more accessible precisely because it’s so fun. There is local (yay) and online (that’s dependent on how many players you can pick up, or whether you can all arrange a match, but that’s fine if you have friends), and you can play solo (although honestly, if you’re playing all humans, it’s not fun, because it’s not intended.) But, at the time of review, whether you’ll like it really depends on how the accessibility affects you.

The Mad Welshman is also a creature of the night who does not drink… Vine… But that’s just his screwed up sleep schedule.

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