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53 games released in 2017 and reviewed here, best first.
53 reviews
A menu-driven text adventure about a haunted movie theater and the five black-and-white B-movies inside it — the third entry in Storycentric Worlds' interactive-fiction series, well liked by the small audience that has reviewed it, with recurring complaints about a clunky interaction menu and old-school pixel-hunt puzzle logic.
7 / 10
Nine years, 60 DLC packs and 201,251 reviews — and unlike other DLC-heavy giants, here the store really is the complaint, because what's behind the paywall isn't extra content but the equipment you need.
7 / 10
A hand-drawn point-and-click comedy about a laid-off boar's quest to become Emperor of an alternate-history Austria-Hungary — genuinely funny and gorgeous to look at, undone for a vocal minority by one hated minigame and a grindy achievement list.
7 / 10
A solo German developer's Diablo-flavoured dwarf brawler — six to nine hours of hammer combos and procedurally reshuffled dungeons for about the price of a coffee, with no co-op and a combat system that occasionally fights the player as hard as the monsters do.
6.8 / 10
A melee combat system reviewers on both sides agree is genuinely one of a kind, still drawing thousand-plus-hour veterans back nine years after launch — but weighed down by a brutal learning curve, a community many reviewers call toxic, whiplash balance every time a new hero arrives, and real-money hero purchases on top of a full box price.
6.5 / 10
A fifteen-year-old browser empire-builder that finally came to Steam in 2017 and went fully free-to-play in 2021 — Illyriad's 400+ technologies and player-run economy reward the kind of patience most modern strategy games no longer ask for, but its Steam premium account duplicates what the original site gives away, and "Grand Strategy MMO" undersells just how much of this is Tribal Wars with a research tree bolted on.
6.5 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded tactical RPG that blends turn-based combat, kingdom management and a visual-novel-style social system, praised almost everywhere for its writing and cast -- and dragged down consistently, across nearly a decade of reviews, by crashes, harsh save limitations and RNG that a meaningful share of players call broken rather than merely unlucky.
6.5 / 10
A fantasy RTS/RPG hybrid that launched genuinely buggy and unbalanced in 2017, briefly carried a real, documented tracking-software controversy, and was rebuilt into a noticeably better game by a free 2020 overhaul most reviewers now treat as the definitive way to play it.
6.5 / 10
Deck13's sci-fi Souls-like introduced limb-targeting combat and an exosuit-crafting loop genuinely novel for the genre, and spent nine years being described in almost identical terms by its own fans -- a great first few hours undone by clunky combat and a back half that runs out of ideas.
6.5 / 10
East Side Games' 2017 licensed idle tycoon turns Sunnyvale Trailer Park into a business-management loop, wraps its prestige reset in the show's own running joke about jail, and is still getting seasonal updates on mobile nine years later — even after its Steam PC version was quietly abandoned and delisted.
6.5 / 10
A steampunk grid-based dungeon crawler built squarely in Legend of Grimrock's shadow, with atmosphere and a Bioshock-flavoured setting that reviewers consistently praise -- and one specific, repeatedly-named design decision, enemy level-scaling, that a large share of its own fans say ruins the back half.
6.5 / 10
MachineGames' sequel brings B.J. Blazkowicz's fight against a Nazi-occupied America to Steam with genuinely praised gunplay and presentation, sitting Very Positive across nearly 50,000 reviews — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent "step down from The New Order" complaint about cutscene-heavy pacing and underdeveloped new characters, and by a specific, dateable technical incident this review can confirm: an August 2018 patch that broke previously-working video memory handling, which the developer then hotfixed within roughly five days.
6.5 / 10
A twin-stick shooter welded to an idle tycoon, told through a space-capitalism gag that outlasts most of the systems built to support it.
6.3 / 10
Infamous for one of gaming's most viral bad launches — the animation bugs — Andromeda's own reviewers agree the real, lasting problem was never the glitches but a story they call the weakest in the series, now sold for NZ$9.99.
6 / 10
A Kickstarter-backed spiritual successor to Planescape Torment that inherited its predecessor's greatest weakness (combat) more than its strength — checked directly against Planescape's own current numbers, the gap between "spiritual successor" and "successor" is stark.
6 / 10
A deliberately combat-free, chore-and-exploration adventure that sold itself as a Zelda meets Stardew Valley hybrid -- reviewers who took that pitch literally have spent nine years saying the same thing, that the surface is genuinely lovely and almost every system underneath it is thinner than the comparison implies.
6 / 10
A busier, more mechanically ambitious sibling to Holyday City Reloaded, wrapped around a King Midas fantasy — but its optional events lean harder into gambling than its stablemate ever did, and its last patch predates that game's too.
5.8 / 10
A decade-old mobile mining clicker arrives on Steam mostly unchanged — a genuinely sticky biome-hopping loop wrapped in a shop that never stops interrupting it.
5.5 / 10
An isometric Norse action RPG that split its own audience almost exactly down the middle at launch, and nine years later carries a second, separate complaint that has nothing to do with balance -- the developer stopped supporting it within months, and online co-op has been reported broken for years.
5.5 / 10
A well-regarded VR escape room with genuinely clever puzzles, let down by real, specific motion-sickness reports from experienced VR players, a short three-room runtime, and a promised fourth room this review confirmed via the developer's own 2017 news post was never delivered.
5.4 / 10
A beloved, nostalgic third entry in a genuinely well-regarded hidden-object adventure series, undercut by a severe, independently corroborated bug that makes the mouse cursor disappear for a meaningful share of players — described by more than one reviewer as making the game nearly unplayable.
5.3 / 10
Read review of Awakening: The Goblin Kingdom Collector's Edition
An old Viking's only goal is to find a death glorious enough to earn Valhalla, and the tall-tale premise is genuinely funny when the pop-culture gags land. What undercuts it is how much of its 2017 Steam port still behaves like the touchscreen game it started life as, down to the mid-playthrough prompt to rate it five stars on an app marketplace.
5.3 / 10
A NZ$7.45 wave shooter spun off from Nightbinder's budget Masked Forces series, swapping the franchise's PvP arenas for zombie hordes. The core shooting loop still works nine years on, but Steam's own player-count API returns zero, so the PvP and co-op the store page advertises exist mostly on paper.
5.2 / 10
A solo developer's debut point-and-click, built in open homage to the LucasArts era — charming in its music and its sincerity, undone by a flat voice cast, a clumsy inventory and a runtime some players clock at well under an hour.
4.5 / 10
