Game: Combolands
Developer: Crux Games
Where I found it: I don't remember

I bought this game because the main mechanic reminded me of ISLANDERS, a game I enjoyed. I was surprised to find it's like a mix of ISLANDERS and Balatro in a way. You place buildings, buildings give you points whenever their conditions are triggered, there are ways to add multipliers to buildings, and ways to force triggers. So the entire game is about creating triggers that give you points and other buildings mults, and then also trigger other triggers that will do this endlessly giving you huge combos.

I'm torn on it because I can see how it gets more fun the more I learn it, but I don't quite feel compelled to keep going. I played three runs, lost the first and won the next two. I found some kind of reliable combo with a building named "Effigy Pyre," which gave me a good idea of what the game is about, but I found it difficult to create combos with other buildings, something about the learning curve here, or the initial exploration, seems opaque to me in a way that's hard to parse. On top of that, when I did get my combos going, it felt a little satisfying, but not quite as satisfying as I'd hope.

I can't say it's a bad game, but I can't say it's a good game for me personally either. Something about the rules doesn't work for me, but I can't be more precise about why. I did feel similarly about Slipways when I first played it, to the point where I refunded it, couldn't stop thinking about it, bought it again and got addicted. The problem with games like this is that they feel more like puzzle games, and I just don't have the brain to work all day and then play games that need me to use my brain even more, I don't have any brain juice left, I just want to kind of chill mindlessly instead. Maybe I'll go back to Combolands in the future, but for now I've had my fill.

Claude's review of my post yielded an illuminating insight:

I'd guess at the thing you can't make precise: the payoff isn't legible before you commit. In ISLANDERS you see what a placement scores before you place it. In Balatro each joker states its rule in one line and you watch the score resolve in order. If Combolands' value comes from chains of triggers firing other triggers, the worth of a placement depends on a network you can't preview, so you can only evaluate it by simulating the whole graph in your head. That's your own Legibility axis sitting at opaque rather than computable, and it's the difference between a game you read by pattern and one you have to compute. It also explains the brain-juice complaint exactly: you're not objecting to difficulty, you're objecting to being made to simulate.