In the spirit of all the mini-reviews being posted lately, I'll post a few of my own. I was bored over the weekend, so I used
What Should I Steam? to pick some random Steam games from my library for me to try. I just tried a little bit of each, but enough to give some thoughts.
Intralism (Steam Page)
This is a rhythm game. The gimmick of this one is that the "notes" come as four parts of a circle (top, left, right, bottom), and you need to hit the WASD keys for the corresponding circle fragment(s) as they pass through a ring. Sounds simple enough, and at first I liked the idea of only needing to use the WASD keys, but this game was friggin hard. I'm pretty decent at rhythm games, but not at this one. Perhaps with more time and practice I could be, but that probably won't come to pass. I could literally only beat the very first (easiest) song, and that's it. The notes just come too fast, and often times come as multiple circle fragments at the same time, which was hard for me to pull off with just the WASD keys. Especially when you had to hit the top and bottom fragments at the same time. It's just awkward for me to try to simultaneously push the W and S keys (I have much more experience gaming with controllers than with keyboard and mouse). Otherwise though, the game looked the part. The presentation was good, and the songs that I tried/listened to were not bad.
Three Twenty One (Free)
(Steam Page)
Game wouldn't start on my computer. I'd get the initial startup window that asked for settings like resolution and stuff, but when I clicked OK, an icon for the game would appear in the taskbar for couple of seconds, then go away and the game would close. So I gave up.
Ninja Kiwi Archive (Free)
(Steam Page)
This is basically a launcher containing a compilation of various old Flash games. I was not previously familiar with the Ninja Kiwi site where the games (used to?) reside, but I did recognize a handful of the games in the launcher, such as some of the very old Bloons TD games. In the end, I tried some game with ghosts and zombies (I don't remember the name anymore

). It was a pretty basic turn-based strategy game of trying to have your ghosts defeat the zombies and break their tombstones. It was actually decently fun despite being pretty simple and clearly showing some age. Maybe these games are still available online - I'm not sure - but I'm all for this type of preservation, having these games in a collection on Steam. I even saw somewhere during the startup that if you had an account on their site, you could log in on the Steam version and carry over your account progress. That gets two thumbs up from me!

SYNCH (Free)
(Steam Page)
Another turn-based strategy game. A little too rough around the edges for my taste. Admittedly, I probably didn't give it enough time to learn the ins and outs of it, but I found it a tad hard to follow what was going on, and the game didn't really draw me in enough to motivate me to figure it out.
Paintball War (Free)
(Steam Page)
Game no longer works. Upon startup, you just get a message to go buy Paintball War 2. That game is not free and I don't own it, so... see ya!
CHKN (Free)
(Steam Page)
I think this game just became free fairly recently after previously being a paid game. From my very basic understanding of it, the devs were not confident that they could get it out of early access in a form that lived up to their vision, so they decided to just make it free and probably won't put too much more work into it. I could be wrong though. Anyway, the concept of this game was pretty interesting. It's very much like a Minecraft sort of game, but the extra gimmick is that you can also craft creatures. You can come across various creature body parts, and assemble them into all sorts of weird creations. I didn't get too far into it, so I only ended up crafting the titular chicken (which I of course named CHKN). You can ride your creations around, and they can also help you fight off wild mobs. The game was a bit rough, as you might expect a very indie early access title to be, but I could definitely see some promise in there. Alas, we probably won't get to see it fleshed out a bit more, but I think there could still be some fun to be had exploring this game world and creating some wonderful abominations. But don't expect it to be a totally smooth and intuitive experience.
Overall, I probably would have been better off just playing a more established game from my backlog, but sometimes it's worth a shot to just try some rando games. I'll probably do it again at some point!