aquova's 2025 video game rankings

Another year, another review. In 2025 I completed 75 new games, slightly below my previous totals of 80 and 76, but still a very healthy (or possibly unhealthy) amount.

I have continued to post these reviews as I finish them on my Backloggd account, this page simply has the aggregate collection for the entire 2025 calendar year.

To explain my rating system again, I consider a 3.5 to be a middle of the road game. Every half step above and below that is a change in quality, with a 3/5 being average, but I didn't care for it, a 2.5/5 being a bad game, a 2/5 being a dreadful game, and a 1.5/5 being amongst the worst I've played. Likewise, a 4/5 is a good game, a 4.5/5 is an excellent game, and the coveted 5/5 is among my absolute favorites.

1.5 / 5

Sonic Rivals (PSP)

I've played a lot of Sonic games in my life, but quite honestly ran out of good ones to play years ago. Instead, I've been scraping the bottom of the barrel, playing through the dregs that I still have left. On a completely unrelated note, I played Sonic Rivals for the PSP. This game is incredibly bland. You'll hear the criticism that Sonic games are "hold right to win", which I think is overblown for many titles, but not Sonic Rivals. The gimmick here is that every stage is a race between two of the main characters — Sonic, Knuckles, Shadow, or Silver. The goal isn't just to reach the end, but to win the race. On paper, it's not the worst idea I've ever heard. Sonic had indeed fostered a number of rivals by this point. However, the level design is so incredibly boring, it really is just a matter of holding right and jumping at the right time. You'll constantly run into random junk you couldn't see coming, but don't worry, due to the game's heavy rubber banding, it'll always be a rather close finish right at the end. The story is really barebones, and told via ugly text boxes at the start of every stage. Honestly, if this were to be made today, it would be on par with the sloppiest mobile games, which is why it boggles the mind that this was a physical commercial release — and still sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Even worse is that while there are four characters to play as, their levels are all exactly the same. There's no difference in the stages whatsoever, just how the story is presented. Playing through all four campaigns also doesn't give you any special true ending or anything, the credits just roll. I will admit that it's less annoying to play compared to the DS titles of the day, simply due to a more forgiving death system, but these were dark days for the series. This was of course when I was most obsessed with the franchise, so thank goodness I didn't have a PSP at the time.

2 / 5

Alundra (PS1)

This one is quite a mixed bag. Alundra is what many people would probably call a Zelda-clone, complete with action adventure combat, world exploration, dungeons, upgradable equipment, the whole lot. I'm a big fan of Zelda games, and a few hours in, I was really enjoying this game as an unknown gem. However, the more I played, the more I came to really despise this game, and was celebrating when I finally finished it. To this game's credit though, there's a lot to like here. The 2D pixel art is legitimately some of the best on the PlayStation, rivaling only Symphony of the Night. Alundra, our playable character, actually controls rather well, both in his Zelda-like combat, but also in the platforming (more on that in a moment though). There's an incredible depth of secrets in the world map, lots of dungeons, this game should be a slam dunk.

Where it all falls apart, in my opinion, is in the level design, in multiple ways. The only map in the game is in the sole town, meaning you'll often be lost in the overworld or in dungeons. The pixel art might be excellent, but the perspective and style means it's often hard to gauge what elements are in front, or how high/far they are, making that platforming much more difficult than you'd think. The dungeons are labyrinthine to say the least, with the final few being so confusing, I imagine anyone without a guide getting through them would take hours upon hours. The plot is desperately close to being interesting, but mainly centers on a town of a dwindling number of townsfolk. They're constantly falling ill or dying off one by one, which makes any single instance rather forgettable. The most memorable moments of the game — and it does have its moments — are those that deviate greatly from the usual plot. The game balance is really out of wack too. The enemies take an absurd number of hits — the basic, right outside of town jelly takes six with the normal sword for example — and bosses can take quite literally dozens of hits to defeat. It makes most encounters incredibly tedious, although the game gives surprisingly easy access to the best weapon in the game... but it's so overpowered that it reduces most boss fights down to two or three hits, swinging wildly the other way (don't worry though, the last few bosses rescale the weapons, meaning even with the OP sword, fights become tedious again).

The game's economy is just as screwy, with Alundra only able to hold one of all but the most basic of consumables. These are often the rewards for tricky dungeon puzzles, but are few enough that it's not worth using your consumables except in dire circumstances, so when you do find another, you likely can't carry it because you already have one. It's such a shame too, this game could've been an all-time classic, but poor enemy scaling and tiresome level design makes everything past the first third or so a complete slog. I keep comparing it to A Link to the Past, and how its designers knew well enough not to do some of its patterns. I can't recall a single instance in any Zelda game where you might get stuck in a puzzle and have to re-enter the room to reset it, but that's almost a conscious design decision in Alundra. They often design puzzles so that you're tricked into a no-solution state, forcing you to restart from the beginning. I really, truly wanted to like it, and it has so much to offer, but in the end, I think this should be held up in courses to teach what not to do compared to Zelda.

Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U)

About a month ago, I played Kirby: Planet Robobot and really enjoyed it, so much so that it got me wondering about other Kirby games of this era I may have overlooked. One that I always had my eye on was this title, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, which I've always noted as it's more or less the one game in the Wii U's library I was interested in but hadn't played yet. The claymation visuals really left their mark on me, and even after finishing the game they're its strongest feature. If they ever make an EarthBound remake, I always thought this would be a great style, and it fits the Kirby series as well. Everything looks as if it's made of clay, down to careful playing with character framerates and general "wibblyness" to really sell the effect. I really wish they'd used it for a traditional Kirby game, instead of this. To be fair, Kirby has always been a series which likes to experiment with play styles, and this is a spiritual successor to the DS's Kirby and the Canvas Curse (which I admittedly haven't played), but I really just don't think the gameplay works for me. Kirby perpetually rolls forward, and so it is up to the player to draw lines for Kirby to roll along, tapping him to do an attack. Between the control scheme and heavy focus on auto-scrolling stages, the game constantly goes between rather dull waiting for things to happen, until you draw a line slightly off from where you expect, sending Kirby plummeting into danger, franticly trying to correct. It just feels incredibly clumsy, like I was never really in control at all. Good luck if you want to 100% this game, that must be actual hell.

Rhythm Heaven (DS)

This is Rhythm Heaven, one of the most beloved and celebrated games on the Nintendo DS. A game that has gone on to spawn a series, with a recently announced Switch 2 entry being met with cheers and excitement. A game that I found to be pure agony every second I played it. Let's get this out of the way first. I have no rhythm. I thought I knew this going in, but it was clearly much worse than I ever imagined. This game comprises a large number of rhythm-based microgames, with cute accompanying visuals to assist with timing. Unlike most DS titles though, you hold the entire system sideways, so the game is in a portrait view. Given that you then can't easily hit the buttons, all of the interaction is done via the stylus — as a press, hold, or flick motion. This control scheme I found quickly taxing and uncomfortable, with the flick motion in particular giving me constant issues. Even on the title screen, they have you flick a little ball to enter the main menu. I don't think I ever got that flick on the first try, it either didn't quite register or was "too slow" and I had to try it again. This set the tone for the rest of the gameplay. I actually switched from playing on an original DS to a 3DS to see if that would help, but I found the 3DS's metal, telescoping stylus even worse to use, so I eventually went back to the DS. The game itself is very cute, I will give it credit, with games about singing as a group or dancing in step, with fun and expressive characters. At least they're sometimes fun, they tend to glare at you as you're terribly out of rhythm. I'm always torn on whether to rate a game based on how good it is, or how much I like it. This game is much better than I'm implying here, but at the same time, if there is a hell, and I get sent to it, I suspect they'll have me playing Rhythm Heaven for an eternity.

Thor (DS)

Despite being a well-regarded and well-known studio, the more Wayforward games I play the more I think they're just not very good at making them. For reasons unknown even to myself, I decided to play the Thor tie-in movie game for the DS. Let's start with its one good attribute — it has pretty good pixel art. The backgrounds are really well made, the player and enemy sprites are well defined, and the occasional character portraits that appear do have a good likeness for their movie actors. Here, I'm afraid, my praise ends. Firstly, this game has very little resemblance to the Marvel film. They use Chris Hemsworth and Co.'s likenesses, but aside from that this plot is completely made up. He doesn't even go to Earth, instead each level takes place in a different realm of Norse mythology. The plot is pretty typical as well. Loki is pulling a prank to get back at his brother Thor, but it quickly escalates out of hand. Thor is actually an incredible jackass in this game, constantly berating Loki and insulting him. Loki would be well within his rights to try and murder his dickhead brother once and for all, but unlike the film he instead chooses to help Thor in the final levels as repentance for his "mistakes". All of this is pretty fine so far, but it's the gameplay that lets the game down. At first, it's not so bad. It's a pretty basic beat-em-up where you defeat various troll or demon-like enemies, with Thor having quite a few different moves at his disposal. You'll quickly discover that the game offers very little in the way of variety, each level is just the same sort of design where you fight against perhaps 6-8 different enemy types the entire game. The enemies are pretty spongy as well, not the worst I've seen in my life (nor the worst I've seen in a Wayforward title) but enough to where it becomes annoying to progress through a level. Perhaps worst is that Thor famously wields his mighty hammer. A mighty hammer does not have very far reach, and the developers took this literally, so you either have to be very close to enemies or run the risk of constantly whiffing attacks. There are hidden "runes" throughout the game that can be equipped to buff your character, but I never really found any of them to be all that useful, in fact many of them seem designed intentionally to not break the game. In the end, not a great title. Good to look at, which is why it caught my eye, but a completely uninteresting experience.

Time Gal (SCD)

For reasons unknown even to myself, I occasionally find myself in the mood to play an early 90s FMV game, and there's no better system to do so than on the trusty Sega CD. Today's godawful adventure is Time Gal. Originally an interactive LaserDisc release of all things, it was later ported (and dithered to hell) onto the Sega CD. You play as a green-haired anime girl with no pants as she travels throughout time and space, always finding herself in mortal peril. I'd love to tell you more about her, but the game provides absolutely no context as to what is happening. No opening cutscene, no text, absolutely nothing. You are just lil miss anime trying to not get crushed by dinosaurs or whatnot.

If you're unfamiliar with your typical FMV game, they're basically just interactive movies where you react entirely by quick-time events. In the moments before Anime-chan finally bites it, a section of the environment will blink yellow, indicating that you should hit the D-pad in that direction. I think this is a holdover from the original LaserDisc release, as the Sega CD also includes a blinking orb in the direction you should press, or blinks all four directions if you should press a button. This actually is a much better visual indicator than the often hard-to-miss yellow coloring, and gives a flimsy excuse to justify the large border around the video (it's totally not because the system can only handle a smaller resolution, we swear). The problem with the QTEs, and really the main problem with the whole game, is that they're incredibly unforgiving. Good luck beating this without save states. It's not a terribly long game, and you do get a fair number of lives and continues, but given how short your window is to identify the direction to press and then actually hit it, you're going to be dying a lot. It doesn't help that I want to watch what's going on on screen, but instead have to be focusing on the periphery instead. This is another example of a game that would be much better to watch than actually play.

Yet, despite this game being objectively awful, I found it strangely charming. I really wish there was some plot to explain what was going on, but I did find the different settings interesting. You visit about a dozen or so different time periods, ranging from ye olde dinosaure times to 2000 years into the future. I'm a big sucker for time travel pieces, and while some of their speculative futures are really wild (I must have missed all the meteors crashing to earth in 2010), I like it when media swings big like that. I think this game is pretty awful, and I certainly wouldn't recommend playing it without save states, it's also not the worst way to spend 30 minutes or so of your time. I'm still going to give it a bad score though.

2.5 / 5

Chrono Trigger: Prophet's Guile (SNES)

I'm going to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of game mods. I really like the methodology behind making mods, but for whatever reason I tend to just play vanilla games as they were originally released, then move on to the next thing. This seems to be a somewhat unpopular opinion, as I know many people who will gladly install dozens or even hundreds of mods for their favorite games, just so they can play them over again with a fresh coat of paint. Never say never though, as I do occasionally try some out, such as Prophet's Guile a side story mod for Chrono Trigger. This mod is a short "what-if" story showing what Magus, one of the secondary villains of the game, got up to in between two of his appearances in the main plotline. Here, he is transported back to his homeland of Zeal, disguises himself as the mysterious Prophet, and shapes his own history to exact revenge. I personally hold Chrono Trigger as one of, if not the best, game ever made. This portion of the main plot is an interesting one, where you are wowed by the sudden appearance of Zeal, witness its downfall, and learn about Magus' past. Unfortunately, the groundwork laid out by the original game does a lot of the heavy lifting here, and I must admit that most of the new content just isn't that good. It alternates between exploring the (largely pre-existing) cities of Zeal, talking to its denizens, and being sent out for short sections of combat. The Zeal portions are pretty solid. From what I can recall, all but one room is from the original game, but most of the people have been given new dialogue fitting that point in the story. There's a little bit of awkward "fan game" dialogue sprinkled throughout, but overall it's not too bad. It's the combat sections that let the game down, as they are largely badly designed affairs. You have a short section where if you stand still too long you're sent back to the beginning. An escort mission where you have to know which enemies to fight, which to avoid, and if you're wrong three times you get a game over. This all culminates in a boss fight just taken from the original game, but instead of having three party members you have one, so it just takes three times as long to beat it. All of this for a narrative which seems like a cool idea on paper, but honestly didn't include anything that my imagination hadn't already assumed had happened anyway. I should also mention that this is an old romhack, from 2007. I think that makes this effort even more impressive, but due to the state of emulator accuracy back then, this game freezes halfway through on most modern emulators and on physical hardware (which is how I played it). Fortunately, someone has made another patch for the game that fixes this bug, but honestly this felt a bit like the death blow in an already uneven experience. If you're a massive CT fan, give it a try, it's only about an hour long, but I can safely say most people can avoid this one.

Viewtiful Joe (GC)

Growing up, I spent a fair bit of time with my next door neighbor, who had similar interests to me. We were both into Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh, but unlike me he had a Gamecube. One game that he was a big fan of, and that I honestly still associate with him, is Viewtiful Joe, an action beat 'em up game from Capcom. Despite positive feelings going into this game, I have to admit that I largely had a miserable time playing this one. For its positives, it is very stylish. I imagine that was a primary, stated goal of development as Joe has a pretty iconic look and movement to him. The cel-shaded graphics were very fashionable at the time, but they serve the themes of the game very well. On paper, the combat should be really fun. Joe can dodge attacks, punch or kick rapidly, and spend a recharging bar to slow or speed down time, or even zoom in the camera for some special moves. While it does have its moments of real fun, I found myself growing more and more frustrated with the game as I progressed. Simply put, this is one of those games where the developer hates you. Repetitive enemies, annoying level hazards, spongy bosses — by the end I was really ready to be done with this game. Joe controls well enough, but his reach often felt just slightly too short, and some of his moves are clearly much better than others. You'll likely spend the vast majority of the game playing in slow motion, as it does more damage and lets you dodge attacks (some only can be dodged while in slow motion as well), but means gameplay is drawn out. There's only seven levels in total, and I like the level variety, but overall this was a really big swing and a really big miss for me.

REPLAY - Lego Star Wars (GBA)

I grew up only having handheld systems, so there are many classic titles where I'm more familiar with their... lesser handheld counterparts. Lego Star Wars for Game Boy Advance is one of those games. I was a big fan of this game, 100% completing it back in the day, and viewing it as one of my favorite games on the system. More recently though, I've been getting into RetroAchievements, giving me a good excuse to go back to some of my favorites from my youth. While some of the achievements are quite challenging, I saw that Lego Star Wars had a very lax set of achievements, so I decided to dust it off. The game is, quite frankly, not nearly as good as I remember. Levels are much shorter than I recall, the game is much plainer, and the level design isn't as interesting. That being said, it's still an interesting title. The isometric, pre-rendered graphics have a charm to them, and for a GBA game, the Lego minifig characters actually look pretty good. My most vivid memory of this game was that it actually came out before Episode III did, so my neighbor and I sat in his garage beating the game, in an attempt to understand what the plot of the upcoming film was going to be. Safe to say, the game doesn't exact convey its secrets. Overall, it's both exactly what I expected but also a bit of a disappointment. Check it out if you're into interesting 2D graphics, but otherwise you're better off playing the main console versions.

A Plumber for All Seasons (SNES)

At the most recent SGQD event, a Super Mario World romhack was shown off on stream. Unlike most SMW hacks that are shown though, it wasn't an extremely difficult Kaizo-style hack, but a normal, approachable mod. What really makes this hack in particular stand out are its excellent custom graphics. To put it simply, this game is gorgeous, even more so than the original SMW. Levels are themed off of the four seasons, and this includes weather effects on some stages to the background environments. They even reskinned some of the common enemies, such as goombas, to be more aesthetically pleasing. The music is custom made as well, and really fits with the game. From an artistic standpoint, this hack is great, easily standing alongside titles like Yoshi's Island for some of the best looking on the system. By being a romhack, they're able to rely on the physics and gameplay of the original game, leaving just the level design as the final wildcard. Unfortunately, this is where I think the game lets itself down. My issue with the level design I think can boil down to a simple fact — the levels are just too long. Not super long compared to many games, but compared to a normal Mario level, the levels stretch on far too long and include checkpoints far too infrequently. In a world populated with Super Mario Maker levels, I can see them feeling that they were being very generous with their stages, but this was one of those games that the more and more I played it, the less and less I liked it. It's a shame too, everything is there to make this a fun time, but I found myself wishing it was over by the end.

Huniepop (PC)

Okay. So. Earlier this week, GoG decided to give away a dozen games in solidarity with the other gaming storefronts who are dealing with credit card companies pressuring them to remove adult games. I'll save you the details of those events, but as I was looking through the list of my newly acquired erotica, one of them caught my eye — Huniepop. Now, I'll be honest with you, I knew nothing about this game. I had heard the title, and vaguely knew it had some sort of risque reputation, but I wasn't even sure what type of game it was. Turns out, it's a Match 3-style game — think Bejeweled or Candy Crush — where the goal is to earn enough points via matches in a finite number of turns. There are seven different tile types — four simply provide points, another builds up your score multiplier, another builds up a meter which you can spend on special abilities, and the final is a hazard, where you lose a great deal of points if it's matched. All-in-all, a pretty fair puzzle game.

The overarching premise, however, is that the act of playing a Match 3 game is akin to going on a date with a young lady and attempting to impressing her. Successfully go out with her four times and then you can end the night by taking her back to your apartment and have awkward, Match 3-inspired sex. Yessir, this is a sex game, and an cumbersome one that at. The premise is that a magical sex fairy (no I'm not joking) shows up to your lonely existence, gives you a magic smart phone which collects a concerning amount of information about the single ladies in your area, and then you're off to the races trying to bag as many of them as you can. There's a bit of a social, visual novel dynamic going on, where you can give the girls gifts or food to gain currency, which you can then use to buy upgrades for the Match 3 game. You can also ask them a series of pre-written questions, ranging from what they do for a living, to the sorts of questions that real women would walk away from, but these girls will answer gleefully like their weight and bust size.

This is meant to be the main draw of the game, I guess, wooing these chicks so you can simulate awkward sex with them. There's about a dozen options in all, each personifying various stereotypes like the jock, the shy girl, the rude drug addict, etc. As a whole they're... trying. Some are fun to talk to, but a number of them are really just abrasive, even up to the moments before heading to bed. This sort of encapsulates my problem with the game as a whole. As a Match 3 game it's fine, but there are others very similar out there just like it. Instead, the appeal here is the sex stuff, but I found the women quite shallow and grating, the puzzle game distracting from the "sexy stuff" happening off to the side, and frankly the whole premise just sort of... odd. It's like the whole game is an elaborate captcha blocking me from a somewhat uninteresting, risque Google image search.

Jet Set Radio Future (XB)

It really pains me to give this game a low review. I've played the first Jet Set Radio and spiritual successor Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, and enjoyed them both. But I always heard that JSRF was the best of the bunch, where they really figured out the formula. I do really like the vibe and atmosphere, the music is (largely) excellent, but boy... I just had a miserable time playing this.

Let's start from the beginning. Jet Set Radio Future is the sequel — and quite frankly a reboot — of the first Jet Set Radio game for Dreamcast. The Dreamcast left us too soon, so it fell to the mighty original Xbox to continue the franchise forward. This is a title that has never been ported to anything aside from Xbox backwards compatibility, which even though I'm about to tear into the game, is a bit of a shame. You play as various members of a teenage not-Tokyo street gang, the GGs. They just want to go around dancing, roller blading, painting graffiti, and sticking it to the man and the other gangs. All of this works so well for me on paper. There's about a dozen different sandbox locations for you to ride and grind around in, completing missions like spraying over all rival's graffiti, outracing opponents, and spray paint battles.

Where it all falls apart for me, first and foremost, is the level design. Some of the beginning stages aren't too bad, but most of the later ones are just absolute slogs. One way sections in levels, labyrinthine areas, and a shocking reliance on platforming. This is only made worse by the physics, which isn't too bad at first, but I found it overly floaty in the air, and surprisingly rigid on the ground. For how often you have to grind on rails, you would hope there would be someway to just... stop grinding. Or turn around. Or really do anything aside from just continue going in whatever direction you happened to have entered the rail on. Making the level design worse is the strange over-reliance on the map. There's next to no indicator in-game as to what your current objective is, instead you have to rely on vague map indicators to determine where, vaguely, you need to go. This map is one of the worst 3D maps I've ever had to use, doing nothing to differentiate between map markers that are stacked vertically. You'll spend a lot of time in this map, repeatedly rechecking if you're headed in the right direction towards your 50th spray paint spot, so you'll quickly learn its shortcomings.

With the gameplay itself quickly becoming frustrating to me, I never found any other aspect of the game that improved my feelings. The plot isn't really meant to be a big focus of the game, I think, which is good because it's an exact copy of the first game. I really mean exact, this is basically a re-telling of the first game's events. You don't get to follow the victory of the GGs after the first title, you just... do it again. One of the first missions is actually to recruit "your" character from JSR, which felt a bit odd to me. Even the music, while largely quite good, let me down at times. There's a solid number of tracks in the game, but in any given play session, the game seems to only want to play the same 5 or 6 over and over again. It's very strange, I would go quite a long time not hearing, say, The Concept of Love, then the next time I played I would hear it three times out of the five most recent tracks.

While I'm ragging on the music, I'm going to go all out. Perhaps my favorite track from the first JSR is a song called Sneakman. It's a great song, and they included a remix of it in JSRF, and it might be the worst remix I've ever heard. It's basically just the intro repeated for about three minutes. It sounds like one of those meme song edits designed to make you feel anxiety, the beat just refuses to ever drop. I don't know why anyone thought it was a good track, it just gets your hopes up for a few minutes of a great song, only to torture you with just the intro to it. Awful.

These are the experiences that are the most frustrating. I went into this game predisposed to want to like it. I really wanted to give it another chance in ways I probably wouldn't have for other titles, but in the end... I did not enjoy my time with it. Fortunately, we live in a post-Bomb Rush Cyberfunk world, so I can have the experience that I hoped this would be. They did massively scale down the amount of combat sections, which was my biggest complaint about the first JSR game. SEGA has said they're working on a new entry in the series, so we'll see if it can be what this game was not.

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley (PC)

Alright, time for a game with some controversy. This is a game about ritualistic demon summoning, murder and cannibalism, and — most infamously — incest. Welcome to The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, a game starring siblings Andrew and Ashley (the titular "Andy" and "Leyley") who are quarantined in their apartment under suspicious circumstances. In order to make their escape, they engage in utmost debauchery to preserve their own lives, only for the game to peel back their childhood and their relationship to each other. I'm not entirely sure why I decided to play this. From the outside, it seemed like a dark comedy. A "Bonnie and Clyde"-type situation where two siblings commit crimes to escape from comical situations, with the aforementioned incest being the result of a possible ending or something. For the first chapter or two, that's honestly not too far off. The situation they're in has a bit of a goofy premise, and their mix of bubbly and deadpan delivery lends itself well to some comedic moments. However, this is one of those games where the farther you get into it, the absolute worse it becomes. Some minor spoilers here, but about 2/3rds of the way through the second chapter, you're given some minor looking dialogue options that result in very different story routes down the line. This is one thing I will commend the game for though, your decisions do matter in this game, with very dramatic changes in the story as a result. In fact, while the first two chapters are relatively straight-forward, your decisions up to that point will result in completely different chapter 3's to play through. As this is a game in early access though, there is only one complete chapter 3 at the moment (where their relationship goes from bad to worse). Chapter 3B — henceforth referred to as "The Incest Chapter" — is still in development.

Alright, enough beating around the bush. Incest? Cannibalism? What the hell is going on? The relationship portrayed in Andy and Leyley is honestly one of the most toxic I've ever seen. The younger sister Ashley is sociopathic to the extreme, emotionally manipulating her brother from a young age in a pseudo-romantic way. She actively sabotages his relationships with just about everyone to keep him all to herself. Andrew, on the other hand, is incredibly co-dependent on her, likewise sabotaging his own relationships for the sake of Ashley. Combine this with their weak and neglectful father and emotionally abusive mother, and you've got a stew going. I'm able to quantify their shortcomings very well, as we get to learn a lot about the siblings and their entire childhood. This honestly goes hand in hand with my dissatisfaction with the game. Whenever the game was infused with wacky murder adventures, I found it rather charming, but as the story goes on — and especially once you reach chapter 3 — pretty much all of the whimsy is gone, and you're just left with a hard tragedy with an absurd amount of flashbacks. At some point, it just became too much, and the game began to over-explain itself. I understood that their mother contributed to their dysfunction after the first or second flashback, but we continued to get more of it for the next 10 or 12.

I think the writing of the story really boils down to the developers wanting to make you feel as uncomfortable as humanly possible. The abuse, both physically and emotionally, just goes on and on, over and over, to the point where I just waiting for the game to conclude. You would think that the cannibalism would feature rather heavily in the story, but it surprisingly isn't that much of a growing concern for our characters. It feels like it's there just to show some (cartoonish) entrails on screen in an attempt to make some players feel uncomfortable. Then there's the incestuous undertones. To be clear, they're never actually banging, but by god do them come close. I had heard vague things about this game having it, but I had just assumed it would be in one of the bad endings or something. Nope. Even if you go out of your way to avoid it, it's always there lurking, as it turns out it's a major, foundational part of their troubled relationship even from their youth. Of course, you also have the choice to lean into it as well, which is heavily implied to be the basic of the upcoming chapter release.

As for the gameplay itself, it's okay. If you're a fan of RPG Maker games, I think you'll feel right at home here. You move around a 2D environment interacting with objects and solving puzzles. As the wacky adventures began to wane, they were replaced with more and more environmental puzzles; the back chapter is really quite loaded with them. The highlight of the game is definitely the visuals, both in the character portraits as well as the environments. This game has had episodic releases, so you can see how the abilities of the developers have increased with each release. I was pretty impressed with some of the environments of the most recent chapter, they incorporate surrealism in a tasteful way. The character designs and portraits steal the show though. Andrew, Ashley, and the others are really well designed and very emotive. I honestly think if their artwork wasn't as good this game would have been completely forgotten, it really performs a lot of the heavy lifting in the story.

Thus, I've ended up with really mixed opinions about this game. On the one hand, it's quite well made — the artwork especially — and I think the developers really succeeded at what they wanted to do. It's a masterful work at establishing and examining an incredibly toxic relationship between two siblings. I expected the writing to be a bit... cringe at times, and while it sometimes leans that way, I think the awkwardness of it only adds to the discomfort that they're trying to portray. But their success at creating an uncomfortable game is a double-edged sword. By making it uncomfortable to play, I found it uncomfortable to play. The latter chapter especially, once the wacky whimsy had really started to fade, just became a slog to get through. By the nature of unlocking that chapter, the siblings are at each others' throats constantly, fighting and threatening each other, only for those moments to be broken up by all too many flashbacks of their awful childhood. There were several moments where I just leaned back and groaned. I got the message, please let's just move on. So overall, a difficult game to recommend. To a certain sort of person, I think this could be a very interesting game. I'm almost that sort of person, but they went too far for me to really give this a positive review. I doubt I'll pick it up again while they're still releasing chapters piecemeal, although I might come back 10 years from now when it's all said and finished, and see how I feel about the other chapters and overall conclusion.

Star Ocean: Second Story R (NS)

I've long lamented that there aren't enough science fiction JRPGs. Now, that isn't to say that there aren't any. Most of the Final Fantasy games are more sci-fi than fantasy these days, and games like Nier Automata have expanded the genre into the modern age. But most JRPGs fall into the high fantasy realm of things, with maybe some sneaky sci-fi elements introduced into the third act to spice things up a bit. It's very rare to see a title that is science fiction through and through, featuring futuristic elements, space travel, the whole lot. The old Phantasy Star games might be your best contenders, at least until I heard about the recent remakes of the earliest Star Ocean titles. Or so I thought.

Second Story R is the remake of Star Ocean 2, originally on the PlayStation. From the cover and introductory cutscene, I had really high hopes that this was going to be a star-hopping adventure. You play as a party led by Claude C. Kenny, basically a Star Trek ensign stuck on a fantasy planet, and Rena, a small town mage girl. The game gives you the option of which character you wanted to play as, which I assumed would indicate which chapter you wanted to start with. This was a mistake, as this would be the character whose story you would more closely follow. I foolishly chose Rena as my main character, meaning that I would follow her during events where she would split from Claude, and learn more about her backstory. I assume this was done in some vague attempt to add replay value to the game, but all it result in was me not getting any of the sci-fi plot at all. As far as my playthrough was concerned, Claude was introduced as being from another planet 2/3rds of the way through the story, and then it was never mentioned again. This really bummed me out, as it was probably the most interesting aspect of what ended up being a pretty uninteresting plot. Although there's an inter-galactic spaceship in orbit above, you instead focus on a very cliched monster plot on the planet below. It's a plot with pretty weak characters, weak villains, and I honestly won't dive into it too much as it'll probably vanish from my mind within a few days, it really didn't offer much.

Alright, I didn't care for the plot or world building. How about the combat? It's... also not terribly interesting. Shadowy figures litter the open world, making it not quite random encounters (which I prefer), but once you interact with one, you engage into battle in a small area. The combat is honestly a bit of a button mashing affair. The CPU controls three of your four party members at a time, although you can freely switch between them. You can attack, perform a dodge, use items, or one of two assigned special moves. The bindings always felt a bit odd, with four of the special moves assigned to two buttons, meaning you had to cast one before cancelling to use the other, which is an odd system. Combined with a dodge system that I honestly never used after the first few hours, and an item system that feels a bit like an after thought and the combat comes across as both somewhat complex but also too simplistic. I worried I was going to grow really frustrated with it, which fortunately didn't really happen, but it also never really engaged me.

That isn't to say this game has really shallow mechanics. In fact, I would almost say this game has too many mechanics. There's a whole item crafting system where you can make food, weapons, items, poetry, art, all sorts of things. There's a surprisingly large number of mechanics like that... and none of them feel all that useful. I'm very cynical about crafting mechanics added into games, and this is another example of a title where they were added in without much benefit to the story or even the gameplay.

The highlight of this game then is its visuals. Although this game came out of Square Enix and utilizes 2D sprites in a 3D environment, it's not from the same development team who make the HD-2D titles, like Octopath Traveler and the recent Dragon Quest remakes. I think it's heavily inspired by that style, but I actually think developer Gemdrops does a better job with the visual style here. Octopath Traveler always felt like you were limited to a grid, where the camera always faces everything exactly head on. Second Story R plays more with different camera angles, giving more life to the environment.

I was very torn on how to rank this game. I honestly didn't really hate anything about it, but I also found it, as a whole, incredibly bland. To the game's credit though, all the stuff I really liked were items that were introduced through this remake, such as the graphical style, character portraits, and UI. It's the stuff that was inherited from the original title that I found dull. If you're a fan of the original Star Ocean 2, then by all means, I would imagine you'd love this version. For the rest of us... it's right on the cusp of being worthwhile. Given how this has a reputation for being one of the best in its series, I think I'm done with Star Ocean for a long while, as this had the great potential for a cool science fiction premise, then had no interest at all in even approaching it. For some people that's fine, but for me, I was left really lacking.

Ultimate NES Remix (3DS)

Ultimate NES Remix is a collection of mini-games based on a set of 16 classic NES games. Here, you complete a series of quick challenges such as beating the first level in Super Mario Bros., defeating a boss in Kirby's Adventure, or knocking down an opponent in Punch-Out!!. There's a variable number of challenges available per game, in addition to a set of "remix" challenges which combine elements from various games together. And... that's kinda it. That's the whole game. It's not a bad title by any means, and I honestly ended up enjoying it more than I thought it would, but even at its best it comes off as somewhat superficial. The games included are a solid set of NES titles, although they are all Nintendo-developed games, so you won't be seeing things like Castlevania or Final Fantasy. Nor can you actually play through the games they include, you only get access to snippets of each game. With the exception of Super Mario Bros., where they do give you a mode to play it at a fast-forwarded speed, for some reason. Including 16 full NES games would've really helped with the value of this game, but that sort of generosity isn't exactly something Nintendo is known for. Honestly, I would really only recommend this game if you have a nostalgia for the NES. I do for certain titles, so I really enjoyed the challenges focusing on Kirby's Adventure or Punch-Out!!, but I don't think I've played Kid Icarus in my life. So not only were its challenges somewhat uninteresting, but I also didn't have some of the knowledge to immediately surpass them. Perhaps the craziest thing about this game — and this series — is how they proceeded to not branch out at all. They made three of these, two on Wii U and one on 3DS. Meanwhile, something like a "Game Boy Remix" or "SNES Remix" seems like an obvious progression, but they instead tripled down on NES titles. This does feel like a very early 2010s Nintendo move, focusing more on vague nostalgia than substance. If you can pick this up for $5 or less, I think it's worth your time, otherwise there are other things to try in the world.

3 / 5

The Plucky Squire (PC)

The Plucky Squire is an incredibly charming indie game about a storybook character who uncovers the ability to exit his own storybook. The game is largely an action adventure game split between top-down 2D sections inside the storybook, and adventuring around the 3D world of the desk that the book is resting upon. You play as the titular Plucky Squire, Jot, who along with his friends attempts to thwart the evil wizard Humgrump, who too has learned he resides in a storybook, and is attempting to rewrite the ending so he is victorious. It's a simple but cute story, with very appealing graphics and serviceable gameplay. Despite the charm though, I found this game to be very average. I don't really have anything bad to say about it (although it did run strangely hard on my Steam Deck), but I also didn't feel that it stood out too much either. The world is charming but somewhat superficial, the level design is interesting but a bit straight-forward. Overall, a perfectly fine game, but not one that I think will stand out in my memory.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS)

I'm going to be honest, I found this game to be much less than the sum of its parts. On paper, there's a lot I really want to like. Layton and his ward Luke are charming characters, the village and its mysteries are an interesting setting, and I enjoy a good brainteaser. Unfortunately, I went away feeling that none of these parts were terribly well integrated. I was looking forward to an intriguing overall mystery, but found the main plot to take a backseat for most of the game, only for Layton to explain the entire plot right at the end. I had largely figured it out myself, but was disappointed in the lack of intrigue which many of its DS brethren at the time were doing better (Hotel Dusk, Ace Attorney, Ghost Trick, etc). The art style was quite charming though, and I enjoyed the occasional animated cutscenes. They really felt that this game would be a hit though, as quite a few mysteries are left completely unsolved, most notably what the deal was with the main villain. Granted, they were right to have faith, as this game ended up being a successful hit. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, were the puzzles themselves. I said I enjoyed a good brainteaser, but that's really all these puzzles are, just brainteasers. A lot of logic puzzles, puzzles with tricky wording, and even a few that are really contrived. A playthrough is filled with so many puzzles I would say this is actually a puzzle game and not a point-and-click. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but the puzzles don't fit into the rest of the game at all, they're just unrelated brain teasers. I found this a bit disappointing, as it really splits the game into "the dialog bits" and "the puzzle bits" with only a few examples where the puzzles apply to a situation the characters are actually facing (and most of those are at the beginning or the end). I feel like I'm ragging on this game a bit, but that's because I thought I was certainly going to like it and left a bit unfulfilled. They did make several sequels though, and some day I do plan on returning to the series to see what they learned from this one.

Animal Crossing (GC)

The original Animal Crossing deserves a lot of credit for immediately establishing the groundwork for the whole series. It's a game really unlike anything else on the system, with no combat or traditional levels, where players are encouraged to log in daily and at different times of day to simply work towards improving their village. You can befriend other NPC villagers, improve and decorate a house, and work on populating the local museum. It's perhaps the ultimate cozy game. Why did I give it such a low score then? Even without taking into account the highs the series will eventually reach, there's some pretty deep flaws with this game. Perhaps foremost are the villagers themselves. A major part of the series is befriending your animal neighbors, but in this game, they're honestly rather unpleasant. I've seen some insult the player, calling them fat or lazy, growing frustrated with you, all sorts. It's fair to say that the villager personalities got a bit bland in later titles, but I ended up finding many of them rather contemptible. This then leads into the second problem, where the villagers are surprisingly willing to just up and move away with no notice. I ended up with a revolving door of villagers moving in and out of my town, which only incentivized not actually getting to know any of them. You would have to be really actively communicating with every villager to keep them all around, and when they're just going to insult you half the time, I ended up mainly focusing on the home improvement. This really is where the game shines, although once you get settled in, the game loop becomes a bit simplistic. Check the store for anything interesting, collect and sell your fruit, look around for fossils and mail them, and then do a sweep to see if there's any unique events or things in the dump. Once in a blue moon there will be some really unique event, but unless you're working on the museum... that's kinda it. Again, this is the first entry, so they deserve more credit than criticism, but I imagine many players of this game just forgot to log in 15 years ago, and that was the end of it. One final item, I played this on a real Gamecube, and boy those character faces are low-res, even compared to everything else in the game.

Wheelsprung (PD)

Next up on the Playdate season is Wheelsprung, a game heavily inspired by the Trials series, with light elements of Line Rider thrown in for good measure. You play as a squirrel riding a motorcycle, attempting to collect nuts throughout the 2D stage to reach the end. It really is like playing a Trials game, you need to use the momentum of the motorcycle to reach the goal, while having to control your own torque. These sorts of games are entirely reliant on how good their physics are, and in this case it's... fine. An impressive feat on the Playdate, but still not quite as tight as one would hope, which can cause some frustration. I'll admit there were two or three levels that have a bit of bullshit, but fortunately none of them are longer than a minute or two to complete. Overall, a good enough game, but the first of the new Playdate season that didn't wow me.

The Whiteout (PD)

The Whiteout is a sort of point-and-click story for the Playdate, featuring a nameless man as he wanders a frozen, post-apocalyptic world. The way this game controls is similar to Saturday Edition, one of the Season One Playdate titles, where the character is only able to walk directly left or right, interacting and picking up items in the background. Saturday Edition was my personal favorite of the first season's games, but I'm afraid The Whiteout doesn't quite reach those heights, although I think I generally enjoyed the game. There isn't a huge amount of story here, simply a man wandering through a small town in Georgia, trying to scrounge for supplies to survive and evade roving gangs. You learn a little bit about this world through found notes and character thoughts; how it simply began snowing one day across the planet, and never stopped. It reminded me heavily of the winter sections in The Last of Us. There aren't necessarily puzzles to solve in this game, you're more searching for single objects to progress through various obstacles your character encounters. This can be a bit frustrating, as the character will often only notice or pick up an object when it's apparent it will have value, meaning you will spend a good deal of time backtracking to previous areas, which now contain an object to progress where none was before. That's perhaps more realistic in a sense (many point-and-click games will have you picking up random junk that happens to be useful later), but does devolve the game into simply wandering around to progress. Still, it was a good enough game with interesting enough characters.

Long Puppy (PD)

Much to my great shame, I have not kept up with the second Playdate season. In my defense, I had a great deal of real-world events get in the way, such as moving, but due to this I missed the excitement of the weekly releases. Fear not though, as I'm back on the bandwagon and planning on playing through the rest of the titles. First on the list is Long Puppy, a strange combination of Snake and Katamari Damacy. You are the eponymous Long Puppy, and your owner is a complete klutz, and keeps throwing your tennis ball into difficult to reach locations. Fortunately for you, as you eat the various food scattered around the level, you continue to grow in length, allowing you to reach more and more food and eventually the ball. The main control scheme is the crank, which allows for 360 degree of aiming the dog. The up and down buttons on the D-pad then extend or retract your body respectively. Honestly, it's a cute idea for a game, and executed well. I suppose it's more of a puzzle game than anything else, but once you start getting to real extreme lengths, the levels really open up and allow for some fun movement. There's about a dozen levels in total, with the final mechanic being that every level is timed. Now, this countdown timer is much too short to finish most of the levels, and fortunately running out of time does not kill you. Instead, the ghost of your owner's previous dog (whom the owner is very cruel in his opinion of) appears, and begins antagonizing you. The ghost will chase you around the stage, even passing through walls. Fortunately again though, being hit by the ghost doesn't kill you, it just stuns you for a few seconds, and if you were holding the ball, it will steal it and try to return it to its original location. This ghost mechanic I think is the largest flaw in the game. Getting hit has very few negative consequences, and mainly serves in just being annoying. The fun of this game is growing to longer lengths and being able to explore the level more thoroughly. By adding an enemy, you instead spend all of the post-countdown time just evading the stupid thing and hoping to finish the level quickly. Once I finished the game, I did notice there is an option to turn off the ghost entirely in settings, which is... nice I suppose. But it begs the question of why it exists at all then. Overall though, a fun and quirky concept that I had a fun time with. It doesn't overstay its welcome, and stands as one of the highlights of this season thus far.

Insaniquarium! Deluxe (PC)

Insaniquarium Deluxe is the Steam version of one of those old Popcap games from an age past. I'll admit I never played or even heard of this game back in its glory days, but it seems to have been a popular title, given the response I've seen to it. It's more of a clicker game than anything, you start off with a simple fishtank with one or two fish. By occasionally feeding them, they continue to grow larger, eventually beginning to ahem produce money. This money can then be invested into more fish, better or more feeding pellets, or a handful of other perks. The goal is simply to raise enough money to purchase three parts of an egg, which also has the benefit of unlocking a new buddy for you to include in the tank, which provides extra perks regular fish do not. This sounds like a pretty simple, relaxing affair, but it quickly can become quite chaotic. For one, monsters will occasionally spawn in the tank, and must be defeated quickly before they consume all of your fish. Each of the tanks are also structured so that for the best money making set up, it's often required to have fish that either rely on or consume cheaper fish, creating a bit of a food chain you must maintain for optimum currency. Honestly, it's a pretty simple game, but a well designed one. Once you figure out how to work a tank effectively, the later stages tend to not be too challenging, as it really just requires you to rack up more money by playing longer before you can move on. Still, it's a fun and simple game, and pretty cleverly designed for what it is.

Castlevania: Dracula Chronicles X (PSP)

While I'm a big fan of the later Metroidvania Castlevania titles, I've actually played very few of the original classic entries. I think up until this point, Super Castlevania IV was the only one I've ever finished, quite frankly because it's the one I find the most fun. Its physics — and particularly its eight-way whip — are easily my favorite in the series. I've tried getting into Bloodlines, the Sega Genesis entry, several times, but have never been able to finish it out. However, while Super Castlevania IV is well regarded, the classic entry that gets the most praise is the slightly obscure Castlevania: Rondo of Blood for the PC Engine CD. The title is probably most famous these days for introducing Richter Belmont, that character in Smash who was added as an unlockable mode to every future Castlevania game. I've always heard it get the highest amount of praise, but never actually sat down to play it.

That is not this game. Instead, this is Dracula Chronicles X, the remake of Rondo of Blood for the PSP. The game has been remade in the 2.5D style popular of the time which has aged... not super well, if we're being honest. That was a period where pixel art was largely looked down upon, but these days that sentiment has largely reversed. Still, even with its low-poly assets, I didn't think it was that hideous of a game, and it seems to be a fairly well-realized remake of the original. You begin by playing as Richter Belmont, the latest in the illustrious line of vampire hunters, as you attempt to once again defeat the sinister Count Dracula and his undead horde, including the humorously named Dark Priest Shaft. Early on, you can find a slightly hidden room and unlock a second playable character, Maria. She's probably best recognized as the adult side character in Symphony of the Night, but here she is a young child, and despite her somewhat cliched and annoying personality, is much faster, nimble, and frankly better than Richter himself.

Aside from Maria, there are a few additions this game has over previous entries in the series. Richter's moveset is largely the same as previous Belmonts, with a whip and various sub-weapons to use. He has a new backflip move, which I'll admit I didn't find terribly useful. You can only engage it very early in your jump, and I found it both too stiff and too hard to predict to use effectively. Richter also has the ability to use an "Item Crash", where at the cost of more heart points, he can do a much stronger move with the various sub-weapons. It's a neat mechanic, and one that would make a regular reappearance in later games. As for Maria, she has a double jump rather than a backflip, with the jump being much, much better of the two. She throws dove projectiles rather than a whip, which can be fired at a much greater speed. She also has her own sub-weapons and Item Crashes, making her really feel like a unique character. I was a bit surprised to find that Richter didn't have a number of moves that are closely associated with him, such as sliding and uppercuts. These apparently were added for his appearance in Symphony of the Night, with only the backflip being original to his own game.

As I said, I find the controls of Super Castlevania IV to be superior to this title's, leaving the level layout as the other highly praised aspect of this game. While the stages are largely fairly linear affairs, some of them do have secret paths than will lead to a secondary boss followed by a completely different stage. I think there are four or five alternate stages in all, and I must admit that I am a sucker for when games do this. It's a small touch, but it adds a dimension of replayability and exploration over just having a single linear path. I will say that some of these secret levels are very difficult to find, basically requiring you to jump down pits that you would assume would be deadly, only to find there was additional level after all. It's the sort of thing you'll likely only find if you're really lucky, bored, or look up online, which does take some points away from its exploration.

Overall though... I have to admit I'm a bit let down. I've heard for years that Rondo of Blood was a phenomenal game, the gem of the series and the great swan song of the classic Castlevania style. Even putting personal preferences aside, I'm really surprised it has that reputation. For one, the game is short. Even if you include the alternate stages, which you have to go back and replay to get anyway, it's a much shorter game than Super Castlevania IV. I found Richter to be just as stiff and unyielding as most other Belmonts, and I've honestly found his repeated inclusion in later games somewhat surprising and/or annoying, as I don't find him the most fun to play as. Perhaps it's due to Maria then, who has a much more graceful moveset, but that doesn't help my feeling that the levels themselves were a bit plain. So, after years of hearing about it, I honestly found this game to just be okay. I will say the PSP remake is well done though, and actually includes both the original Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night as unlockable extras. I believe SotN even added adult Maria as a playable character, but I haven't made time to unlock her yet in there. It's hard to beat 2 1/2 games in one collection, but this game certainly isn't cracking my top five Castlevania games.

Fatal Frame II (PS2)

Back in the PS2 days, it seemed like every company wanted to get into the survival horror craze. Capcom of course had its Resident Evil games, Konami's Silent Hill series was hitting its hayday, and even Square tried throwing its hat into the ring with Parasite Eve. Developer Tecmo would not be left out, and introduced several games into the Fatal Frame series onto the PS2, with the second game, The Crimson Butterflies, being perhaps the best received. With the Halloween season upon us, and the announcement that they're remaking this title, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to play through the best regarded game in the series. I think I had played through the first chapter of this game before, as it felt familiar, and I even played the demo of the fifth game on Wii U, but aside from that, I knew very little of what Fatal Frame II was to offer.

To cut to the chase, this game is all atmosphere. You play as teenager Mio, accompanied by her twin sister Mayu, as the two of them become trapped in a cursed, abandoned Japanese village. Mayu has a habit of vanishing and acting all spooky-like, so it's up to Mio to use a paranomal-sensing camera to defeat the spirits of the town, discover its dark secrets, and escape with Mayu in hand. The vibes here are immaculate, as they say. The dilapidated town is a great setting for a horror title. Broken down areas, the abandoned belongings of those who lived there, it sets up a great sense of dread and claustrophobia as you navigate the various buildings. The cutscenes too use imagery to its fullest advantage. The characters will see visions of some of the horrors that have taken place in the town, and the developers did an excellent job of using shocking angles and intercutting footage to create a sense of horror, without practically any gore at all.

However, I think that's where my praise for the game ends. As a film, this would've been an effect horror piece, but as a game it leaves a lot to be desired. The level design isn't too bad, although you'll be relying on the map to navigate its labyrinthine buildings on occasion. I wished there was more a variety in the buildings that you visited. I suppose that makes logical sense, as it's just an abandoned Japanese village, but you'd be hard pressed to identify which building you were in from just a screenshot. The interiors themselves have some interesting rooms, but for the most part, they're very similar to each other, not helped that it's often difficult to figure out precisely where the doors are without consulting the map. These are minor complaints though, as I think my main annoyance is with the combat mechanics and plot.

The plot isn't bad. Learning about this town's obsession with twins and the fates of those who came before is interesting enough. However, once you figure out what happened here, there isn't really much to it, and the game spends much of the latter half rehashing the same things over and over again. I also felt that our protagonists had a lot to be desired. The player character Mio is much better than her sister — who, to be fair, is probably being possessed — but both of them have a habit of just standing doe-eyed and slack-jawed anytime something happens to them. There's no sense of urgency, there's no sense of a plan being made, they really don't have much going on up there. It made it hard for me to sympathize with either character when the writers wanted to make them feel demure or whatever, rather than have any agency.

The combat too gave some frustration. The camera mechanic is used to get a first-person view of the world, as well as to interact with some ghostly apparitions, but after encountering a hostile spirit, you use it to take photographs of it to lower its health. It's a clever enough mechanic, and fairly straight-forward. There are a few ways to upgrade the efficiency of the camera, as well as give it some new abilities, although with the exception of one, I didn't feel as if the new abilities were all that useful. My issue with using the camera is it's rather clunky, as some enemies are just annoying to defeat with it. The enemies just largely stumble towards you, and the best way to defeat them is to bait them into attacking, at which point you can do maximum damage. There are some enemies that have a habit of strafing around you — or god forbid, having a partner that comes up on you from behind — that are very difficult to catch, either requiring you slowly pivot as fast as you can to catch them, or leave first-person view to swing around, then re-enter it. It's not the worst system in the world, but it's clunky, and the enemies encounters aren't all that varied nor really all that interesting.

Overall, I wanted to really enjoy this game, and I see why people praise it as much as they do, but I found that it fell far short of the other survival horror games of this era. Perhaps the remake would improve on much that I had issues with (or maybe even the first remake for Wii did), but I doubt the characters would've been made more engaged. Still, I don't regret playing the game, as I found it an interesting experience at least, but with how rich the genre was on the PS2, it's not one I would immediately recommend.

Final Fantasy (PC)

About a decade ago, I set a goal for myself to eventually play all of the mainline, numbered Final Fantasy game. With my playthrough of FFXIII earlier this year, I accomplished that goal (except for FFXI, the PS2 MMO, sorry). With that noble goal behind me, and with it being nearly a decade since I played some of the earlier titles, I've set a new goal for myself — to get all the achievements in the recent "Pixel Remaster" versions of Final Fantasy I through VI.

I originally played the GBA version of the first FF game (along with FFII), and I remember enjoying it for the most part, and thinking it actually held up fairly well. My replaythrough now was enjoyable as well, although I will admit it's more barebones and obtuse than I recalled. Fights are pretty limited affairs, with party members mainly just attacking or, if they can, casting a limited amount of magic. Like D&D, mages have a set number of spells per "level" that they can use, meaning you can only cast Cure a max of nine times before needing to hit an inn. That's a pretty limited amount, so while magic isn't half bad in the game, my mages were largely relegated to doing pitiful physical damage instead.

Getting all of the achievements in this game actually was pretty easy and straight-forward, and I imagine will be a better experience than the other five for one simple reason — there were no missable items. You have to both complete the bestiary as well as open every chest in the game, but unlike later titles, you can still do so even after finishing the game, nothing is ever locked out. Combine that with the extra "boost" options they give you — such as 4x XP gain and turning off encounters at will — and I breeze through the game as a complete powerhouse. Which was fun! I'm not the type of person who revels in difficulty, I'm perfectly happy to walk in and bulldoze a boss, and this let me live out that life.

So this game will be the baseline for my replay of the first six Final Fantasy titles. So far, pretty milquetoast I have to admit, but a pretty simple experience if you're thinking of getting the platinum in this game as well.

Final Fantasy II (PC)

My new-found goal of getting all of the Final Fantasy achievements continues with the oft-hated black sheep of the series, Final Fantasy II. I've always had mixed feelings about this game. On the one hand, I think its combat mechanics are actually incredibly clever. Rather than use the traditional leveling system that just about every other RPG defaults to, FFII instead breaks all the levels down into individual weapons and spells. If you want to become stronger when wielding a sword, then the character must level up their sword stat by using the sword. Every weapon type and spell has their own dedicated level, which I honestly think is a really neat idea. It adds a level of "realism" that was very uncommon for a game of that era. However, this led to some infamous problems with the game, such as incentivizing your party to attack each other to better optimize offensive and defensive level grinding. However, you really get the freedom to create any build you could want, with this perhaps being the most customizable game in the series.

Unlike the first title, FFII also has distinct, named characters with their own personalities. You learn very little about your own party members, but they do have more of a role than the blank faced party of the predecessor. Sadly, I found the plot here about on par with the first title, which is to say not terribly interesting. There's a soon-to-be typical rebels vs empire plot here, but a lot of the story consists of the party just reacting to strange things that pop up. Granted, the story is from an NES game, so perhaps it's not quite fair to be too critical of it.

To acquire all of the achievements, I again heavily leveraged the extra "Boost" options present in the Pixel Remaster version of the game. These are a bit more detailed than in the first FF game, allowing not only to toggle enemy encounters and boost money drops, but also to increase the XP you gain from weapons and magic separately. This was very useful for unlocking everything in a speedy manner, but also highlights some problems with this game's leveling scheme, namely that if the game feels you're too high leveled for your encounter, you'll simply not receive any XP at all. With the boost mode on, this happens rather quickly, so I spent most of the game fighting encounters without any stat benefits, only HP boosts and bestiary data, meaning they were still required. It remains an odd, experimental system, one that while I admire for the effort I must admit is riddled with faults.

Little Rocket Lab (PC)

In the popular "cozy game" genre, Stardew Valley stands as one of its giants. The player arrives in a small but somewhat struggling town, takes over a plot of land just outside city limits, and begins developing their farm while also building relationships with the local villagers. Little Rocket Lab is the latest game to try and build upon that premise, where their player also arrives in a small but struggling town and takes over a plot of land, but instead of diving into agriculture, you instead begin building a Factorio-esque network of industry. It's an interesting idea, taking the mechanics of one game and applying it to the vibes of another, and I think Little Rocket Lab does a good job laying foundations for such a mix, although with some work still to be done.

Unlike the silent protagonists of Stardew Valley and Factorio, Little Rocket Lab features Morgan, a young engineer who has returned to her aunt's house after a long period away, following the death of her mother. She decides to pick up where her family left off... by building a rocketship for some reason. Like Factorio, you will mine the local resources to develop machinery and mechanisms which in turn will allow for even more advanced contraptions to be created. It clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Factorio and games like it, down to the heavy use of conveyor belts, mechanical arms, and so forth. There's also a collection of a dozen or so townspeople who will assist you in your journey, some by providing the means to unlock new technologies (at the cost of a massive amount of fabricated parts) while others are there mainly for their own sidequests. It's a pleasant, sleepy town whose atmosphere really adds to the aesthetic vibe the game is going for. The artwork in particular is really charming, and it's actually how I discovered the game — I randomly discovered the lead artist on Bluesky and was surprised when they announced they had assisted with a game right up my alley.

For all its charm though, the game does have some notable faults. For one, the game leans way heavier into the Factorio side of things than the Stardew Valley. You get to learn a bit about the characters, and many have their own sidequest, but that's about it, a single sidequest. There's really no mechanism to build deep friendships with any of them (although there is a SDV-esque friendship heart gauge). I suspect the developers plan to build upon this in future updates — and it sounds like they had a successful enough launch to warrant this — but for now it's fairly barebones.

If you've played a lot of Factorio and wonder how the game handles the often spaghetti nature of its gameplay while navigating around village buildings and roads... well it doesn't really. Space really is at a premium here, and a lot of effort ends up going to managing certain choke points trying to get resources back to your main factory space. It does harsh up the cozy vibe then when the roads are littered with conveyor belts, especially since the NPC pathfinding is pretty awful. The villagers will casually make their way around town, until they encounter pretty much anything in their way, after which they'll just... stand there. Forever. Within a few hours of playing the local populace was basically reduced to just standing around in the streets all day, even though there was amble room for them to navigate around — after all, I was able to get through.

Like other games of this genre, you unlock better technologies by meeting research requirements, but in this game that always takes the form of several manufactured items, and usually an obscene amount of them. It often made the upgrades feel a bit silly — to improve the efficiency of one type of machine, it would require hundreds of the items it produced, taking so long that it almost makes the upgrade worthless. You also don't get a nice tech tree like other titles, you are typically only given a choice of one or two upgrades to work towards, and not in parallel. The final few objectives in particular required such a comically large number of items to be built, that I just left the game running by itself while it crunched away, as there wasn't really anything else for me to do but wait. Well, aside from having to rush home every evening. They kept that mechanic from Stardew Valley, even though the day-night cycle felt more of a hindrance than anything, especially since many manufacturing events wouldn't happen until several in-game hours after the beginning of the day.

I'm a little bit torn on the game. I'm not entirely sure if I would really recommend it, but yet I quite enjoyed my time with it. It's been nice to have a cozy game to play, and I've been spending many evenings by putting on a podcast and playing this for a few hours. It's the perfect level of concentration to be interesting, but low stakes enough that I can enjoy whatever else I'm listening to. There's some design choices I think they may have to rethink — namely how the NPCs interact with your sprawling creations, both physically and narratively — but other than that I think they've built a fine foundation for a game, and one that I could see really becoming an interesting hit if they continue to develop and enhance it.

Z.A.T.O.: I Love the World and Everything in it (PC)

Another free game on Steam, Z.A.T.O. is a visual novel set in late Soviet-era Russia mainly following a teenage girl, Asya, as she interacts with her classmates and the world around her. Given the overwhelmingly positive reception this game has received, I appear to be somewhat in the minority, but I found Asya to be a very strange protagonist, and I found it quite difficult to relate to her. She is a very shy, introverted schoolgirl, fond of writing poetry and essays, and is often ridiculed by her classmates because of this. Following the departure of her only friend several years earlier, she essentially has no close friends of her own, and thus becomes incredibly smitten when the town delinquent, Ira, stands up for her one day in class. Much of the early plot is then devoted to Asya's thoughts as she roams the town after school, vaguely hoping to run into Ira again so that she might have the chance to spark a conversation, which then leads in other directions once Ira goes missing.

I'll refrain from giving away too many of the twists, but my main issue with Asya lies in how she views herself and her classmates. She is clearly being hazed and bullied by them on a daily basis — they play games to embarrass her, hiding her items or locking her outside with the promise of romantic overtures — while also stealing her homework and making her feel guilty for wanting to refuse. Rather than resent them though, she goes through a series of mental hoops to justify their actions, often presenting herself as worthless or saying it's part of the natural order of the world that they have these roles. Her true friends often express their frustration with this mindset, yet Asya spends the entire game reinforcing her beliefs, even going so far as to create a worldview of pure optimism, almost naiveté.

This sort of character mentality is not a bad thing by any means, and in many cases would be a great basis of a story, but Asya never moves on from this mindset. She never re-evaluates her toxic relationship with the bullies in her class, nor her poor mental outlook, nor do we learn much about her homelife which might explain all of this. Instead, Asya doesn't really develop as a character, and it's the other classmates who we learn more about. The second half of the narrative also begins to undergo a series of sci-fi twists which, while interesting in their own right, felt a bit disconnected from the 'missing classmate' narrative in the first half of the game. I could see players growing attached to the characters, only to be somewhat let down by it's sudden twist ending, although I actually thought it made the game more interesting.

As for the gameplay aspects itself, it's a pretty traditional visual novel. There are no choices or branching paths at all, it is a purely visual story, which I actually found somewhat refreshing. You don't need to spend any time wonder about the true ending or anything like that, this is just a short novel with audiovisual components. These elements are quite well done. I liked the character art quite a bit — the style reminded me a lot of Omori's character designs — and the background music is really fitting. That's all the more surprising as it's just a carefully chosen set of royalty-free music, not composed for this game in particular.

Overall, mixed feelings about the game. I find the setting interesting, I like the characters, and I like the twist at the end, but I had a hard time sympathizing with the main protagonist, and I found the lack of focus on her development to be a let down. I try to review games simply on their merit and not on their price tag, but given that this one is free, it's hard to not recommend that everyone who finds the concept interesting to give it a try. It's certainly well written and crafted, and you might find more value out of it than I did.

3.5 / 5

Alan Wake II: Night Springs (PS5)

The first of two expansions made for Alan Wake II, Night Springs is a collection of three short episodes featuring characters related to the Alan Wake universe. These are presented to the player as literal episodes of a Twilight Zone-esque television show. This anthology format allows the developers to create scenarios that don't actually fit into the main events of the game, while also subtly introducing the concept of a multiverse into the story (and also allowing them to reuse nearly every game asset). The first features the Alan Wake obsessed waitress from the diner. She lives in a reality where she is still an Alan Wake obsessed waitress, but is also widely admired by the community for her every move. Upon hearing Alan is in danger, she grabs a shotgun and rifle from the back room and sets off to help him. This episode is a pretty straight-forward run and gun adventure, with few puzzles or detours. I think it does attempt to fit Alan Wake's American Nightmare into the larger story, although I've never actually played that game. The second episode features Jesse Faden from Control — or a version of her at least — as she attempts to gain access to a building near the fairgrounds. This was by far my least favorite of the three, as I struggled acclimating to the Alan Wake II combat, and also wasn't terribly engaged with the plot or puzzles. It does manage to get interesting right at the end, before abruptly ending. The third features versions of the reality jumping Sheriff Iceman — introducing a multiverse element to the story and potentially connecting with Quantum Break, in which I'm told the actor plays the main character. He meets various versions of himself and Jesse as they set up what I assume will be the Big Bad for the shared series going forward. Overall, this expansion was alright. It's much shorter than I was expecting, and while the first and third episodes are rather interesting, I found the second more frustrating. It doesn't help that I never really enjoyed the combat of Alan Wake II, and having to jump back in cold turkey was a bit of a struggle. I think this expansion mainly serves to set up elements for Control II rather than be a supplement for Alan Wake II, but we'll have to see how it all plays out.

Sunset Overdrive (PC)

I think if I had played Sunset Overdrive when it was released, I would've been really into it. A really spacious open world, fluid movement, and colorful graphics, it's the type of game I was really on the look out for back in the early 2010s (and being a Wii U owner, not one I ended up finding). However, a lot of what made Sunset Overdrive fun and unique has also passed it by. For one, it has an early 2010s type of humor. Lots of fourth wall breaking, nerd chic characters where everyone feels like they're running on energy drinks — which is ironic given the plot of the game. A pretty bog-standard zombie plotline makes the story not really worth writing home about, although I did enjoy the main character by the end, as they finally went so over the top that it began to leave an impression. The level objectives are the game's weakest element, as they all just devolve into "beat all the enemies in this area, then move on". The latter set pieces do set themselves apart, and once you get enough movement options the open world really begins to shine. However, the first two thirds of the game has just blends itself together in my head. It does win me over by having a complete fuckton of clothing options, as I do like a game that will allow me to play dress-up. I think this game's biggest legacy will be as the proto-Spider-Man game. You can see why Marvel chose Insomniac to create Spider-Man, as this game really sets the blueprints for that one. Many of the animations are even eerily similar to Peter Parker's, such as flipping yourself over ledges and running along walls. The web swinging adds a fluidity to the movement that this game doesn't quite have, but it still would've been revolutionary at the time. I knew nothing about this game going in, other than it being one of the big Xbox One titles. Despite being a little disappointed at it being a zombie game, it's a solid title and one I would recommend to all the Hi-Fi Rush fans today.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (DS)

The fourth and final Ace Attorney game on the DS; Apollo Justice tries its best to set itself apart from its predecessors. The first three games make up a nice trilogy around Phoenix Wright, and rather than tack on another game's worth of cases with Phoenix, Capcom instead decided to try something new. There is a time skip since the end of the third game, during which Phoenix himself has be disgraced and debarred. You instead play as the even more ridiculously named Apollo Justice as he fills Phoenix's shoes. They really do their best to convey the passage of time. For one, many of the familiar faces of the original trilogy are gone. Phoenix has a decently large role, as does the Judge, but aside from them there's only a handful of returning characters, usually as small cameos. Maya Fey is the most obviously absent, along with Miles Edgeworth. Instead, Phoenix's newly introduced adopted daughter Trucy joins Apollo as his sidekick, and new prosecutor Gavin serves as your rival. I quite liked Apollo and Trucy, but their dynamic is pretty much exactly the same as Phoenix and Maya's. This feeling of vague similarities is both the game's biggest strength but also its biggest fault. I commend them for trying something new and really going all in on the time skip idea, but in the end they end up with more or less the same vibes as if they hadn't. The cases aren't half bad, but I don't think they quite compare to the end of the third game, which was able to capitalize on three games' worth of character dynamics. In fact, this game's final case really makes it clear that this is Phoenix Wright's series after all, and Apollo is just a player in it. Still, they took a big swing with this game, and while it's not quite a major innovation in the series, I prefer to see them attempt it than just release a fourth game of Phoenix and Maya's adventures. From what I understand, the developers do return to more familiar faces in the future games, meaning I'm a big conflicted on whether I'll end up continuing with the series. In conclusion, not the strongest game in the series, but a worthy entry that really does its best to avoid getting stuck in a rut.

Final Fantasy XIII (PC)

There's a few games in the Final Fantasy series that are considered black sheep. Final Fantasy II. Final Fantasy VIII. But perhaps none more so than Final Fantasy XIII, and after finally having played it, I completely understand a lot of the criticism of the game. In some ways it is an incredibly ambitious game, fitting with the pedigree of its series, and in other ways it feels very limited and missing a great deal of features common to essentially every other game in the series. There are two things really going for this game though, the combat system and its setting. The combat is sort of a mix between the dressphere system from X-2 and a simplified version of XII's combat. Rather than controlling your party directly, you set up several combinations of party jobs, called "paradigms", that you can freely swap between during battle. There's only six jobs total in the game — physical, magic, defense, buffing, debuffing, and healing — with each party member having access to three (by default).

The paradigm system allows you to swap all of your party's jobs, allowing you to focus more on offense when you want, switching to healing or buffing, or what not. It's a fun system, and keeps a sense of tacticality and still being turn-based-ish while being much more fast-paced than its predecessors. I did find the system somewhat tiresome in long-winded boss fights though, as they really just boil down to cycling through the same patterns over and over again, with some bosses not being terribly difficult, but just taking a long time. The setting too deserves praise. Many Final Fantasy games are secretly science fiction titles, particularly in the final acts, but FFXIII is by far the most sci-fi the series has ever been, even from the start.

You live in "Cocoon", a floating sphere with advanced technology whose government and populous are incredibly paranoid about the land below, "Gran Pulse". It's a neat premise, exploring ideas of government control and censorship while showcasing a level of technological advancement perhaps only rivaled by FFX's Zanarkand. However, while the game creates this interesting world, it really fumbles actually exploring it. The story in this game is terribly told, mainly due to the presentation. Grandiose things are happening to our characters, but they only give the player 30% of the context as to what's happening. My litmus test is always "based on what the characters know, do their current actions make sense", and the answer is almost always no. They say lots of grand things about saving the world or their loved ones, but they never articulate a solid plan. The twists and turns in the game just largely come off as confused and fuddled, it's really sloppy. You can tell this game had troubled development.

To make matters worse, the loading screen includes a synopsis about the current situation, and it's largely informative and insightful. On several occasions I only understood plots in the game because those blurbs told me something the cutscenes didn't. All those blurbs are available in the game's "database" menu, which I think is probably mandatory if you want to understand the plot. Finally, there's the big criticism of the game, and the only thing I knew about it going in — Final Hallway XIII. I don't mind a linear game. The open world of the Final Fantasy titles I think are largely overblown, and games like Final Fantasy X do a good job of being more enclosed in scope but still maintaining the grand feeling through clever level design. FFXIII, on the other hand, is shockingly linear. With the exception of literally one area towards the end of the game, this game is just a series of turning hallways. No NPCs, no towns, just hallways. I said I don't mind a linear adventure, and I stand by that, but even I was surprised at how enclosed it felt.

I think the best way I can describe this game is that it has intense tunnel vision, both in how it presents its story, its setting, and its characters. That being said, I did like it, it's not my least favorite in the series by any means, but my enthusiasm did wane as the game went on. I do look forward to playing the next two in the trilogy... after some time has passed.

Gone Home (PC)

Gone Home is a short and sweet graphic adventure game (some might refer to it as a "walking simulator") where you play as Katie, a young woman who has suddenly returned from a trip abroad to her family's newly inherited mansion. You wander around in the middle of the night, exploring the new space while discovering notes written by your younger sister, Sam. Through these notes you learn about Sam's friendship with a fellow girl at her school, as well as hints towards where Sam and your parents have gotten off to. I quite enjoyed this game. The gameplay isn't really the focus of the story, it's mainly a vehicle to explore the house and learn more about your family. You actually don't learn too much about your own character, it focuses mainly on your sister and her struggles with being a spoilers gay teenager in the 1990s. She is voice acted rather well, and while the writing might seem a bit rigid at times, I think they did a good job conveying the pure melodrama that is a teenager's life. It reminded me of Life is Strange, in more ways than one. I was able to finish the game in a single sitting, after about an hour, but the developers use the time well, getting across the message they want to without overstaying their welcome or feeling rushed. If you can get it for cheap, I'd highly recommend sitting down with it.

Klonoa: Moonlight Museum (WS)

Continuing with my WonderSwan adventure is Klonoa: Moonlight Museum. I must admit that this is the first Klonoa game I've ever played. From what I understand the 3D games are more action adventure titles while the 2D games, including this and the later GBA titles, are more puzzle platformers. Overall, this is a fun game. To finish each level, you must find three gems required to open the exist. These gems are placed behind platforming challenges, locked doors requiring keys, timed gates, etc. To assist with movement, Klonoa can pick up enemies and either throw them forward or use them to double jump. The physics are very tight and satisfying, and although the game is in monochrome, it's not a bad looking game. The sprites are nice and clear and there are some interesting background effects. There's 30 levels to play through, and while they can be a tad repetitive, I never found myself bored with the game. The only downsides are the rather bland background music and the story, which consists of only a few lines of dialogue after each 6 levels or so — it's pretty forgettable.

Pokemon Snap (N64)

This is one of those games that the more I played it, the more I started to really like it. I'm pretty sure I had friends who had Pokemon Snap when I was young, but the premise never appealed to me at the time. You play as Tracy, a character who I think was in the show for a season just to promote the game? Maybe? As he rides a buggy on a pre-determined path taking pictures of Pokemon. The only gameplay to take the best pictures of the different Pokemon that cross your path, with a few ways to interact with the scenery being unlocked later in the game. That's it, that's the whole game. They manage to spice it up by having a series of secret "unlock" criteria to coax various Pokemon out of hiding, allowing you to complete your photographic Pokedex once you learn the various secrets of the level (although sadly, I don't believe all 151 Pokemon make an appearance). Learning these secrets incentivizes you to continually replay the levels until you've mastered everything it has to offer. Most of all though, this game just reminds me of my early experience playing Pokemon. It has a level of quirk, charm — and to a small degree — mystery about the world that I find later games don't inspire in me. This is Pokemon at the height of its powers being a little weird and experimental, while giving players a greater look into this world. It's a solid title, if rather short, but one that I would wholeheartedly recommend. I do wish they had maybe two more stages, just to allow for every Pokemon to show up somewhere in the game.

Sega Ages: Phantasy Star (NS)

I've always really liked the idea of the original Phantasy Star series. A group of games set a millennium apart, each dealing with the cyclical return of a great evil presence. Of the four games though, Phantasy Star IV on Genesis was previously the only one I had actually finished. Entries II through IV were all on the Genesis, but the first game in the series actually debuted on the Master System, making it one of the console's most notable games. This is the Switch port of that game, released under the "Sega Ages" line by M2. The game itself is — as far as I know — completely unchanged, just an emulated version of the Master System title. The game plays within a window in the center of the screen, with a border showing a number of status HUDs, such as character HP and MP, your currency, and by far the most useful, a map of whatever dungeon you are currently in. This dungeon map might sound like a small QoL improvement, but it makes this version a must-have if you're wanting to play this game. The dungeons, particularly the last few, are incredibly labyrinthian. If you didn't have a map, you could easily get lost for hours retreading old ground. However, even in the original title those dungeons are of neat design. The overworld is a typical top-down RPG viewpoint, but inside the dungeons it switches to a first-person view. As you move through the halls, a walking animation plays, which would have been some of the best graphics ever seen at the time. The whole game feels very advanced in that way, telling a (somewhat convoluted) narrative where you travel between three different planets in the same stellar system. This fantasy x science fiction setting is really interesting to me, and I find it's a bit of a shame that few other series offer this sort of setting, even to this day. It's certainly a bit rough around the edges these days, but I think this game stands as one of the finest RPGs of its generation, and really shines even compared to its contemporaries like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. This game, and this port in particular, gets a recommendation from me, and one of these days I'll return to finally play the second and third titles.

Otto's Galactic Groove (PD)

Next up on the Playdate train is a rhythm game — Otto's Galactic Groove. It uses the traditional rhythm game format of "things scroll across the screen and you need to be there to catch them in time with the music", ala Guitar Hero or DDR. Unlike those games, which utilize multiple buttons to add an extra challenge aside from just pressing buttons in time, Otto's Galactic Groove has just a single target to watch out for, controlled by the crank. The angle of the crank determines the vertical position of the target, and you simply need to line it up and press any button to succeed. There's a few extra mechanics, such as holding for longer notes, but that's the gist of the gameplay. It might be a simpler system than DDR, but I think it lends itself well for the Playdate, and I found myself really enjoying this game, so much so I actually turned up the difficulty from "casual" to "hard" (which was a noticeable jump, but I wouldn't even then say it was terribly hard). Given the intentionally limited graphical capabilities of the Playdate, it's easy to forget that it's a modern system, and is capable of playing modern sounding music, with lyrics and all. I really enjoyed the selection, ranging from punk rock to chip-tunes to what's best described as Jet Set Radio music. The song choice fits in with the story of a small... creature traveling the stars to find the hottest jams. As you land on various planets, you encounter the musicians who live there (shown in a charming comic book style scrolling montage). The art is stylized, but quite good, and adds to the simplistic vibes of the game. I really enjoyed this one. I have had mixed experiences with rhythm games as a whole, but I thought this one was perfectly suited to the Playdate's sensibilities. I also liked how they offer a number of bonus tracks outside of the main campaign to play, which includes songs from other Playdate titles. This has actually been one of my favorites of the season so far, it's short and sweet, but well designed.

Off (PC)

I'll admit that a few weeks ago, I had never heard of Off. With the recent release of its remaster though, people seem to be coming out of the woodwork to sing its praises and discuss how it was a big influence on the indie scene back in the day. Having gone back and played the original (because it was free and I am cheap), I can definitely appreciate that sentiment. Off is in many ways the forerunner of the "weird dreamlike RPG where enemies have too many teeth" subgenre, such as Undertale, Omori, and Lisa. I'll admit I have mixed feelings about games of this style, as they tend to rely much more on vibes and lore than actually explaining what's going on.

Off too falls into that boat, you play as... well, yourself kinda, but not-you is in control of a character known only as "The Batter". He is on a holy quest to rid the various Zones in the game of ghost-like entities. These Zones have a general air of dystopia about them. They're occupied by largely docile and downtrodden denizens who spend their lives engaging in repetitive, somewhat morbid tasks such as harvesting plastic from the ocean or metal from cows. Typical stuff. It's a very surreal experience, but not one that the game is interested in explaining in detail. You're just meant to take the game at face value.

You're aided in your quest by a strange talking cat and a party comprised of circles. I'm being a bit facetious here, but this is the sort of vibe the game goes for, and it does a great job creating the atmosphere. The puzzles too aren't half bad, and while I don't really have any complaints about its turn-based combat, I wouldn't say it's terribly engaging. It's a pretty basic RPG system. I debated ranking this game higher, but decided against it for two reasons. The first is that I felt Omori goes for a lot of similar notes as this game, perhaps not accidentally, but was a much more effective game. I felt an emotional connection to the Omori cast which I didn't here, so I didn't feel it right to give Off the same rating. Secondly, I'm still unclear on who some of the major players in the game actually were or what the hidden meaning behind it all was. I completed two of the endings, and I found both to be very anti-climatic. Perhaps intentionally, but anti-climatic nonetheless. Still, I don't regret playing it, as it's both an interesting experience on its own, as well as serving as a fascinating predecessor to many games that followed in its wake.

Fire Emblem Awakening (3DS)

If you only knew of video games from playing Super Smash Bros., you would believe that the Fire Emblem franchise was one of Nintendo's oldest and most storied. The truth is somewhat less majestic than that, but it up until recently, Fire Emblem was probably Nintendos' most prolific franchise that I had never played, at least based on its recent release schedule. Enter Fire Emblem Awakening, the first release of the series onto the 3DS, and the one credited for popularizing it to an entirely new level. Like most people, my knowledge of Fire Emblem prior to the 3DS was solely through Smash, but I recall hearing a great deal about Awakening upon its release. Many of my friends who were fellow 3DS fans raved about the game, due to its story, combat, and romantic pairings. I've always had a desire to someday see what all the hype was about, but it took over a decade for me to follow through.

To be honest, my main trepidation towards starting Awakening is simply because I am awful at strategy RPGs. If I recall correctly, the only game of this type I've ever actually finished was the original Advance Wars game. I got a dozen hours into Unicorn Overlord before growing frustrated and giving up, I've tried to start Final Fantasy Tactics many times (and am planning on trying again), and I even gave the Tactics Ogre remaster a shot, all of which I ended up having a miserable time with. Awakening is often cited as a great game to get into the strategy genre, and I decided to leverage that, going so far as to force myself to play on the permadeath mode. Here, if any of your units are killed, they stay dead for the rest of the campaign, meaning you not only lose out on their story contribution, but also their combat expertise. I did my best to stick with this mantra, and I'll admit I had to reset some levels several times before I was able to clear them, although I never thought the game was unfair in the situations where a unit died. It was almost always due to me leaving a support unit in a vulnerable place, where they were able to be ganged up on.

As stated, the game is a strategy RPG, where you control your handful of units on a 2D grid, moving next to enemies in order to attack them. There is a bit of a rock-paper-scissors mechanic to which weapon type (axes, swords, or spears) is strong or weak against each other. Add to this ranged magic and bow wielders, healing magic, and mounted riders, and the combat system is actually rather fleshed out, without being convoluted to the point where I couldn't recall the various type match-ups (cough Unicorn Overlord). I quickly learned that this is a game that rewards good strategy, with defensive play in particular being a worthwhile tactic. To offset the perils of permadeath, the game actually gives you quite a few advantages over the computer enemies, such as the ability to "pair up" two units onto the same square, which gives combat advantages as well as a way to shield vulnerable units.

Off the battlefield, the game doesn't hold up quite as well. I'll admit that I found the plot of Awakening to be incredibly stereotypical. This is one of the most generic fantasy plots I've ever seen, complete with amnesia, time travel, and the power of friendship. The romantic elements, which I had always heard of as a great strength of this game, are actually one of the most superficial elements. By having two units support each other during battles, they begin to build affinity for each other. Once they grow enough of a connection, you can view a quick "Support" scene between the two, which averages about 15-20 lines, usually of a comedic nature. The breadth of these are rather impressive, given that every possible pairing has either three or four support scenes each, but I found them by and large to be rather superficial. For compatible opposite sex pairings, reaching the final "S" rank affinity scene will lead one of them to profess their undying love and desire to be wed, to which the partner always agrees. I found every single one of these proposals to be shockingly rushed, where most of my affinity for the pairings simply came from using them effectively together in combat.

That isn't to say the relationships are a waste of time, as there is a half-assed time travel plot, allowing the future children of the happy couples to travel back and be recruited. This is a pretty neat mechanic, as some of the more interesting dialogue is between parent and future child, not to mention you can customize the children's stats based on who you selected as the father to each mother. The children only appear about halfway through the game, and are almost always optional, but even with that limited screentime some of them stand out as the most interesting of the gang. While they are a bit stereotypical, I did sympathize greatly with the main trio of the game — Robin, Chrom, and Lucina. Robin is the customizable player character, to the point where you even have the option to make a female Robin be a potential marriage candidate for Chrom; a choice that I made, and found their relationship to be really heightened because of it. Lucina in particular stole the show for me, and it's no wonder that she has gained a popularity beyond the others. I will admit though, I had no idea that all three of them arose from Awakening, I think this makes it one of the games to introduce the most Smash characters.

Overall, I think this game is actually better than the sum of its parts, although that's somewhat damning praise. The plot I thought was rather one-note, the relationships cliched and superficial, and while I enjoyed the gameplay, I think some of the levels started to overstay their welcome a bit. There are about 25 campaign missions, and about as many optional sidequests, but by about campaign mission 20 or so, I was ready to start wrapping things up. A lot of the fights end up being rather similar, with just more gimmicks added into later stages to compensate for that. Still, when it all came together into a final package, I found myself rather liking this game. As a whole, I found it a charming title and I understand its reputation as one of the jewels of the 3DS, even if it's not one of my personal favorites. Despite my occasional reset, this was one of the most positive experiences I've had playing a strategy RPG, and I hope the longest lasting impact will be my introduction into actually enjoying that genre. Perhaps now I'll have the confidence to finally see if FFT is worth all of its hype.

Night in the Woods (PC)

Night in the Woods is a graphic adventure game set in Possum Springs, a town of anthropomorphic animals which has recently fallen on hard times. Amidst themes of small town America, coming of age, and dealing with the hardships of life is Mae Borowski, a college dropout who has returned home under mysterious circumstances. Mae is essentially a ball of pure millennial ADHD, talking mainly about dinosaurs and pizza as she becomes reacquainted with some of her childhood friends who still live in their hometown. I'll admit I ended up with mixed feelings about this game. The majority of the title is dedicated to wacky hijinx with her friends, which serve as a vehicle to explore their lives and to flesh out some of the continuing trauma that Mae herself is undergoing. The game does a really solid job illustrating what it is to find your life not going the way you expected, and finding yourself trapped in your dying small town and falling into the same pattern the generations before you did (although, having spent quite a bit of time in dying small towns, this one seems almost too lively). I've seen this game compared with Life is Strange, which I think is very apt in a number of ways. They both deal with 20-somethings dealing with their various demons, and they both end up taking a much darker turn in the latter portions of the game. For Night in the Woods, I have to admit that while these plot twists — which I'll try and keep vague — did intrigue me, I thought they came out of left field. There are some hints throughout the game that something weird is afoot, but the eventual reveal feels very rushed and bizarre. It loses the realistic grounded nature of the rest of the game, and finally comes to a close on a rather nihilistic and abrupt closure. I wonder if this game would've hit harder for me when it released, but as it is, I'll admit I found Mae a bit too grating for my liking and some of the character dynamics a bit too inconsistent.

Jamestown+ (PC)

Shmups and fighting games are probably the two genres with the biggest disparity of "how much I think the games are cool" vs "how good at them I actually am". I don't think it's a coincidence that both genres have a rather steep learning curve, which requires a great deal of practice to master, in comparison to most other games. The time might come when I finally sit down and really dive into a fighting game, but I figured I would have a more enjoyable time working on my shmup skill. Jamestown+ is a title that regularly comes up as one that's good for players looking to improve their skill, a sentiment I would agree with.

There's a few clever ways Jamestown+ goes about being approachable to beginners, but still interesting for veterans of the genre. For one, there are quite a lot of ship types to choose from. Each only has three moves, a primary bullet attack (whose pattern can be changed by unlocking new options from the shop), about a dozen secondary weapons to choose from, and a brief shield ability which charges up. This itself isn't terribly groundbreaking, but it increases the amount of experimentation and replayability offered from the game. Unlike most shmups, the game also doesn't have a linear campaign, instead being broken up into individual levels. This allows players to better practice any level they choose, rather than being forced to replay the introductory stages over and over again. Each stage also offers several difficulty levels, however in order to advance further into the game, you must beat all of the preceding stages on higher and higher difficulties, requiring a greater mastery of the game. It's a series of mechanics that goes a long way into warming up new players to its mechanics and level designs.

There are some faults with the game though. For one the levels feel rather short, and there aren't that many of them. It took me several hours to make my way through them, but I imagine a veteran shmup player would cruise through this game very quickly. Shmups aren't known for their plots, but this one does have a bit of a light one and it's... weird. As the title would suggest, it's inspired by the early Colonial period, featuring your English settlements squaring off against the Spanish. However, in an attempt to — I assume — justify why you can fly around shooting space lasers, it's set on a weird Martian version of events. It's very tongue in cheek, but admittedly a bit bizarre.

I don't think Jamestown+ will crack my list of favorite shmups, but it was one that I enjoyed, and I think it's pretty well designed. I'm not sure if an expert would enjoy it much, but if you are in the same position I am, I would recommend giving it a try.

4 / 5

Alan Wake II: The Lake House (PS5)

The second of the Alan Wake II DLCs stars Federal Bureau of Control Agent Estevez as she checks in on a FBC outpost located near the setting of the main game. Naturally, shit has completely hit the fan here as well, and she is left to delve into what its administrators had been getting up to and what their fate was. While the first DLC made roundabout multiverse allusions to Control, The Lake House explicitly calls upon it, and in many ways is more of a Control DLC with Alan Wake II gameplay than the other way around. I'm a big fan of Control, much more than I'm a fan of Alan Wake, so on the whole I enjoyed this DLC. It's a separate location than the one in Control, but the environmental design and visual themes are much more in line with that game. This DLC also touches more on what happens if this mysterious federal agency abuses its authority, which was a theme surprisingly absent from Control itself, but works well here. I'm going to sound like a broken record, given I've said it for every Alan Wake entry, but I still dislike its combat. The enemies are rather sparse in this episode, but they make up for it by being incredibly spongy. Under no circumstances should you design a regular enemy type that takes seven shotgun hits to kill, especially when the shotgun only holds six, that's just being rude. Being back in a Control-like setting also made me miss the free-flying, wall-throwing combat of that game more than I previously had. Still, I quite enjoyed this DLC, and probably liked the plot of this more than the base game. Finally, as much as I've been doting upon it, I actually think the Alan Wake II DLCs are better than Control's, to be honest.

Steins;Gate (PSV)

I'm a big fan of science fiction, but as acclaimed as it is, I'll admit it took me a few tries to get into Steins;Gate. I made it a few hours into the game before losing interest, then about a year later decided to watch the anime adaptation, but lost interest at about the same point. Finally, I returned to the original visual novel and managed to finish it, and I'm glad I did. Steins;Gate is a visual novel mainly starring Okabe Rintaro aka "Okarin" aka "Hououin Kyouma", a college student who spends most of his time daydreaming about conspiracies and inventing various "gadgets" with his friends, whom together form the "Future Gadget Club". The story kicks off when they accidentally invent a time machine from an old microwave, giving them the ability to send messages to themselves in the past. It's an interesting premise, and while I'll admit it took me a while, I grew to really like the cast of characters. On the surface, they're a collection of the anime tropes I hate the most. Overly dramatic. Overly cute and kawaii. Overly perverted. Overly tsundere. However, as the story goes on, the game does a good job encouraging you to emphasize with these characters as you see them at their most vulnerable points. It's rather well done, and the game spares no expense in giving these characters time to develop. The storylines, how time travel intersects and affects them, are interesting as well. Due to dicking around with the time machine too much, Okabe ends up in a dire situation where his only recourse is to undo his previous actions. They focus a lot on his faults and growth throughout the game, as he has to make sacrifices for what's best for himself and those around him. It's neat. The game does have some faults though. Even though I did power through, the first half or so is really quite slow. It's a science fiction story where there really isn't much sci-fi until the halfway mark, almost a dozen hours in. There's just a lot of daily life stuff to a slightly frustrating degree. However, once it gets going it really does get going, even if it's a bit predictable once you figure out the story patterns. Overall though, I appreciate the hype this game has. Solid story, really interesting world building, and solid characters (even if everything involving Nae was absurd). I enjoyed it enough I think I'll give the anime another shot.

Lufia: The Legend Returns (GBC)

While the idea of a 25 hour turn-based GBC game might fill some with dread, I was really pleasantly surprised with Lufia. It has rather charming visuals and music, I enjoyed the combat system, and even the randomly generated dungeons were designed well enough to keep my attention the entire time. In traditional JRPG fashion you play as a steadily growing ragtag group of adventurers who set out to rid the world of evil-doers and also find treasure if they can. The combat system is somewhat unique in that you have a party of nine, organized into a 3x3 grid. Only one character per column can act per round though, meaning the organization of your party members is important for who can act when, and also affects the cost of using abilities. It's a neat system, although by the time you're getting your ninth (and beyond) character, I started to find I didn't really have a use for them. I think I really only used the first eight effectively. As mentioned, while the overworld is predetermined, the game uses randomly generated dungeons where 4-6 rooms or so per floor are generated, with hallways in-between. Here, you can see enemies wandering around and can break the vegetation to reveal traps or discover secret chests. I pretty quickly caught on to how the dungeon generation worked, and when you could discover hidden items, but only at the very end of the game did I feel fatigued. The plot is pretty barebones, with a lot of "power of friendship" type speeches, but I found the characters rather charming, and they have some legitimately amusing lines. This is honestly a bit of an underrated gem on the system in my opinion, and does a good job of scratching that Final Fantasy itch. I was also really shocked to receive an (apparently) rare weapon drop near the beginning of the game, which even by the end I never found anything better. That certainly made the game more enjoyable.

Sonic Origins Plus (PC)

I have played my fair share of the classic Sonic games in my time. Sonic Origins is the latest collection of these games, now all remade using the Retro Engine, the same engine used in Sonic Mania. Three of these games, Sonic 1, Sonic 2, and Sonic CD were remade in the Retro Engine many years ago, but this is the first time Sonic 3 & Knuckles has received that treatment. The most noticeable change is that Sonic 3&K can now be played in widescreen alongside the others. This compilation also adds extra missions, animated opening and closing scenes, and a greater mix of playable characters. It's a fine way to play these games in the modern age. However, this release isn't without controversy, some of which matters more to the average player than others. The pre-existing Steam releases of these games were taken down to make room for this release, which I somewhat understand, but also do find frustrating. The Michael Jackson-based songs in Sonic 3 are also removed due to copyright issues, instead having (largely inferior) alternatives. The Plus version of the game, which I played, is also not worth your money. It adds playable Amy, who, at least in Sonic 3&K plays similarly to Sonic but without access to the elemental shields, making her somewhat inferior. You also get a bundle of Sonic Game Gear games for your trouble. Unless you want a complete Steam library, I think the DLC can be safely ignored. I did get all the achievements for this one, which was surprisingly easy, they went out of their way to make them easy to get; there are a number of "obvious" harder achievements they chose not to include, even ones that had existed in prior releases. It gets harder and harder to justify releases like this to the average consumer when fan-make alternatives like Sonic 3 Complete or Sonic 3 AIR exist, giving players a greater level of customizability than what is seen here. Personally, for many people who just want to play old Sonic without any fuss, I think this is a fine way to do it, but I would encourage others to check out those other two projects as well.

Kirby: Planet Robobot (3DS)

I'm a big fan of the Kirby series, but I was always under the impression that after Sakurai left during the GBA days, the series became very bland. The GBA's Nightmare in Dream Land and Amazing Mirror, games with rich level design and gameplay, gave away to Squeak Squad which I found... just dull. For that reason, I haven't paid much attention to the other DS or 3DS titles, even though I had vaguely heard good things about them. I have now remedied this with the 3DS's Planet Robobot, a game that I felt was quite a return to form. The game is usual Kirby fare, eat enemies to gain abilities, finish the levels, and try and find all of the hidden objects to get the better ending. What's new in this game is the addition of the Robobots, a mechanized suit "upgrade" that can be found on some levels (think Mega Man X, where the suit can be ridden, but it's only designed to be used in certain sections of certain stages). The suit has its own variations on the Kirby abilities. It's enjoyable to use, but not something that vastly reinvents the series. To my surprise, the plot of a Kirby game is actually rather interesting. It's a somewhat a critique of capitalism, as the main villain is the CEO of a space-faring technology firm, along with his Kool-Aid drinking secretary, Susie. It's a fun vibe, and the semi-mechanized landscape is an interesting twist on the Kirby locales. This is a simple, enjoyable game, and definitely one of the highlights of the series in recent years. That being said, I did think the level design was a bit bland. Amazing Mirror may have gone way overboard with the complex levels, but here they're overly horizontal and flat. The hidden unlockables also are pretty easy to spot, and largely only require the ability of an enemy on that level, a deviation from older games, which often would require you to return with a specific ability to find the secret. It's a lot less tedious this way, but I could also see a fairly interested player 100%ing the campaign on the first playthrough. Still, I think this has revitalized my interest in the series, and I'll be sure to take a look at the other games from this generation in the near future.

Star Trek: Resurgence (PC)

Let's get this out of the way — I love Star Trek. I have watched all the shows more times than I can count, and know more about the franchise than is probably healthy. However, with only one or two exceptions, I haven't really gotten into the games. The franchise is a bit of an oddity where developers really don't know what to do with it. It has its action moments which would lend itself well to gameplay, but a core part of the series is also the slower, more thoughtful aspects, which games tend to largely ignore. Thus, when Resurgence was announced, a graphic adventure, Telltale-esque game, I was interested. Here, you play as two characters — the new first officer of the USS Resolute, Commander Jara Rydek and Petty Officer Carter Diaz, a lowly engineering grunt. This narrative split works really well, as you get to see some of the command level decisions and go on away missions with Rydek, and then perform investigation and maintenance tasks with Diaz. Both characters I found charming and interesting, and they both have a core part to play in the narrative while not making it feel like its focusing on them. Speaking of the story, I really enjoyed it. The writers did an excellent job of creating the familiar Star Trek structure, managing to fill a nine hour game with it, while not making it feel dragged out. It was engaging, had some interesting twists and moral ideas, and yet was still action packed. I typically don't care for franchise callbacks, but they managed to include some direct references to the series — including featuring Spock and Captain Riker — without making it feel forced. Actually, the main enemy species is taken from a particularly bad first season episode of The Next Generation. Not the Borg, not the Klingons, but an extinct species from an episode whose only notable quality was it was the introduction of the Ferengi (who don't appear at all in this). If you're a Star Trek fan, I can safely recommend this game to you, it's rather well written. That being said though, it's not without faults. Some people are very sensitive to poor game performance, the types who wait for Digital Foundry reviews before buying a game. That sort of thing typically doesn't bother me too much, but even I had an issue here. This game is extremely poorly optimized. It regularly utilized 100% of my GPU and even then fell sub-30 FPS. At its worst point, I saw it fall to 9 FPS. This game isn't a looker either, honestly not much really happens on screen, and even when it's two characters in an empty room the game manages to struggle. There are other technical issues too — the subtitles are regularly just wrong, and I had an really amusing glitch right at the end of the game where several characters from possible player choices were all loaded on top of each other. None of it was devastating to me, even the poor performance, but I did want to note it. The game also relies on a lot of rather simple interactions for things like engineering work or player exploration. These can be a tad annoying at times, but again, not a gamebreaker. Honestly though, I really enjoyed myself and I would easily recommend this to fans of shows like The Next Generation.

Policenauts (SS)

Following the success of the original Metal Gear games, but prior to being forced to make Metal Gear Solid games for the rest of his career, Hideo Kojima branched out and made a number of cinematic, point-and-click games. The first of which is Snatcher, which I played a number of years ago, but just now got around to playing the English fan translation of its somewhat spiritual successor — Policenauts. Like Snatcher before it, Policenauts is a near future science fiction story, in this case mostly taking place on the first large-scale human space colony, named "Beyond". You play as Jonathan Ingram, a former member of the first spacebound police unit, the Policenauts. Jonathan was trapped in cryostasis for nearly 30 years following an accident, and although he hasn't aged a day, he is returning to Beyond to discover what has become of his former teammates following the death of his ex-wife. It's a really engaging narrative, and this game has an exceptional amount of worldbuilding and carefully thought out lore, as is standard for Kojima. What immediately stands out is how the narrative doesn't attempt to dumb itself down for the audience. They characters regularly discuss rather technical concepts, both real and presently theoretical, and freely use medical or scientific jargon. I honestly found it really refreshing to see a game not try and simplify things for the audience. Not everyone will understand all the elements they're describing, I doubt I did, but they do it in a way that you can still easily follow along while feeling that these characters legitimately know what they're talking about, and if you do understand the concepts, you can just follow along with an increased level of clarity. The game is a point and click adventure, so you'll be moving around an on-screen cursor with a gamepad, which can sometimes be a bit fiddly. The locations often have a lot of areas of interest, with many lines of dialogue, and that can occasionally make finding the region you need to focus on somewhat difficult. I didn't have too much trouble though, although the occasional shooting sections — which could be played with an optional light gun — are a bit overly sensitive with a gamepad. As a whole, I enjoyed the characters quite a bit, with many of them being charming and interesting. Of special note is the appearance of Meryl Silverburgh of Metal Gear Solid fame. This is actually her first appearance, with Kojima reusing the character's appearance and voice actress in MGS after liking her in this game. Some fans will try and use this to create some sort of shared Kojima universe, but while she does have some Metal Gear references, the events of this game clearly aren't compatible with Metal Gear as a whole. Honestly, a really solid point-and-click game, I can recommend it wholeheartedly. It does use some of Kojima's favorite tropes, particularly towards the end, that I personally find detrimental to the MGS series, but they weren't bad here, in limited quantities. If you have a chance, give it a try, it's interesting, well animated, and engaging.

Pokemon LeafGreen (GBA)

Despite being obsessed both with Pokemon Red and Pokemon Emerald as a kid, it dawned on me recently that I never actually played through the Gen 1 remake games. I assume my reasoning at the time was that I already had played through Kanto, why would I waste my hard earned money on that adventure again when I could have a shiny new Hoenn game (granted, I later bought both Sapphire and Emerald, but don't recall ever regretting it). It's been many years since I've played through my beloved childhood Pokemon Red so I thought this was a good time to finally complete the copy of LeafGreen I had lying around. All-in-all, it's a fine remake, a refresh to the original adventure in full color with some of the extra qualities of life that had been introduced into the series. I probably don't need to explain to you what Pokemon is, but having spent so much time playing it as a child, there are some things that I did find somewhat surprising. For one, I recall the towns being much, much farther apart. I assume this is because I was terrible at the game back then and would completely lose on a frequent basis. Now that I actually progress through the game at a reasonable pace, the world isn't quite as large as I remembered, but I actually don't think that's a bad thing. Kanto feels almost metropolitan in that way, with its biggest cities within a short walk from each other. It's less the expansive world I thought as a kid, but instead a more connected one. The other main thing that surprised me were the battle animations, or lack thereof. Pokemon Red had animations showing beams or slashing claws or whatnot. LeafGreen has none of that, which really makes the game feel emptier. The new island content as well is... fine. It's nice to have some extra content both pre- and post-game, but there's not a whole lot to it. Overall, a fine jaunt down memory lane. I still think this is one of the series's finest, even if it's missing some of the bells and whistles that will come in the late GBA and DS eras.

Cardinal Sins (WSC)

In recent years I've really started to appreciate relatively unknown or esoteric game systems. I love playing around with systems that are relatively unknown these days, just to see what their strengths and weaknesses are and what unique things they tried. Unfortunately, due to being obscure failures, many of these systems are rather expensive to find and even more expensive to support. A pleasantly strange exception to this trend is Bandai's "WonderSwan" line of consoles, which was a Game Boy competitor in the late 90s/early 00s and did fairly well in Japan. Due to this, importing WonderSwan systems and games is actually feasible, and I've been picking up a number of titles for mine recently. The model I have, a WonderSwan Color, resembles a Game Boy Color in many ways, although it has a wider aspect ratio and a whopping 10 face buttons. This allows the system to be held horizontally (where you have a D-pad on the left and A/B buttons on the right) or vertically (where each thumb covers a D-pad) depending on the game. One of the first titles I picked up — Cardinal Sins — is held vertically, as it's a traditional shmup game. This is a really short yet sweet game, featuring just seven levels each themed after one of the Seven Deadly Sins. These levels only last a few minutes each, but all have a different objective, ranging from racking up combos, gathering 1-ups, baiting as many enemy moves as you can, etc. You receive a rating depending on how well you do, and do well enough you get to fight a final boss stage. It's a fast, fun, and clever game, on that I really enjoyed. It's actually the spiritual successor to another WonderSwan Color game — Judgement Silversword — itself the winner of a Bandai-sponsored indie development content back in the day. Both games can be found together on Steam these days, but I really enjoyed playing it on its original hardware. It's not super in-depth, but I would recommend you to give it a try if you have the chance.

Dredge (PC)

The single most important element of a Lovecraftian-inspired game is for there to be people obsessed with fish. Most I've played have been adventure games, but Dredge wisely takes a different route: why not just cut out the middleman and make it a fishing game? You play as an unnammed captain of a small fishing boat, sailing around a series of islands catching fish, upgrading your vessel, and collecting mysterious artifacts so that an unknown figure can complete some sort of accursed ritual. Compared to some of the other Lovecraftian games I've played — such as Call of the Sea or Call of Cthulhu — this game both doesn't have "Call of" in the title, but it's also somewhat lighter on the horror influences. As you sail around, you will find strange dangers lurking in the deep, but they typically only appear at night, creating a risk/reward between braving these dangers and collecting materials you require to advance. I'll admit I'm not the craziest about fishing in games, mainly because it tends to be shoehorned into random games as optional side quests. Here though, they're front and center, and I think the game is pretty enjoyable. The fishing mechanics themselves are simple, yet engaging, and the various upgrades you can put your money towards have tangible benefits. The game does toe the line on being repetitive, and I think if you focus simply on upgrading your ship you can largely out-level any dangers the game might throw at you, but for a casual playthrough I found the various regions of the map to be unique and interesting enough. I honestly don't have any negative things to say about the game, it's my own apathy towards fishing games that keeps this game from getting a higher score. However, if you are a fan of the genre, I can wholeheartedly recommend checking it out. At the very least, you'll be able to interact with characters as enthusiastic about fish as you.

Dig! Dig! Dino! (PD)

Rejoice one and all, for the second Playdate season is among us! For those who don't know, the Playdate is a Game Boy-esque handheld console that came out a few years ago. It's most notable for being bright yellow and having a crank on the side. Baked into the price of purchase of the system are 24 free games that, rather than being downloaded one at a time, are given to you twice a week. That might sound annoying, but it was legitimately exciting to see what new games I'd get each week, and both kept me coming back to the system as well as not getting burnt out by too many new titles. These initial 24 games have been referred to as "Season 1", and while many developers have since made games you can purchase through the normal marketplace, there was never a Season 2 in the same fashion... until now. Starting a few days ago, the Season 2 pass was made available and sure enough, not two but three new games appeared on my system. The first of which was Dig! Dig! Dino! a surprisingly fun paleontology game where you are digging up a plot of land to discover ancient artifacts and dinosaur bones. There isn't really a fail state here, you just use a handful of tools to find objects while managing your stamina. These include shovels to dig, drills to remove rocks, scanners to identify spots of interest, etc. The more you play, the more various types of currency you collect to further acquire or upgrade your equipment. It might not seem like much at first glance, but I really enjoyed played this game, enough to completely collect every dinosaur skeleton and artifact, earning me the true ending. There isn't much of a story here, but the game does sprinkle in some light Lovecraftian elements, particularly as you learn what befell dino society. Playdate Season 1, as much as I liked it, was a bit of a mixed bag, but this is an excellent start to the next chapter in the system.

Blippo+ (PD)

What we have here is a real weird one. Included in the first week of Playdate Season 2's expected games was a third "game" entitled Blippo+. If you're even vaguely familiar with modern media, a title ending in '+' immediately invokes thoughts of a streaming service, and in this case you would be correct. Blippo+ isn't so much a game as it is a parody of old television stations. Upon starting the game, you are met with a TV Guide Channel-esque array of currently playing and upcoming shows, and selecting one begins playback of video clips, each with the premise of being part of a regular television broadcast. Each of the channels has four or five "shows" which air on repeat, with each show being 30 seconds or so long. As a rule, these shows are all pretty avant-garde, and are of a wide variety of genres, including interview shows, news programs, educational, hospital dramas, and more. Remember that episode of Rick & Morty where they watch intergalactic TV? It's exactly the same premise as that, but the shows included here are far weirder than what they came up with. On a technical level, this entire experience is incredible. A Playdate cannot display shades of gray like a traditional television, and instead is only capable of purely black or white pixels. The developers use a copious amount of dithering to achieve a monochrome appearance, and while there are certain clips that can be difficult to make out, as a whole it's very effective. To top it off, they manage to compress both video and audio down to a level that it can fit within a Playdate game without terribly noticeable loss, although there are some clips where you can see the compression artifacts more than others. This entire game is only 30 MB in size, which I think is a marvel. As for the content itself, I had a great time watching it. A large part of that is because I was familiar with what its parodying, having grown up with the TV experience they're riffing off of. I'm not sure how it would land if you were born after the year 2000, and didn't know about the wonders of local TV programming, but I'm also not sure how many people of that demographic are also interested in the Playdate at all. I should also say that at the time of writing this, we're still in the first week of the Playdate season. There are rumors that the available programming will change week after week, potentially providing a larger narrative as it goes on. I think that would be a really interesting idea, and it would explain why the game was additionally included week one. If so, I'll report back in a few weeks with an amended review, but even if it's not the case, the sheer uniqueness of this title has made it one of the system's most memorable.

Fulcrum Defender (PD)

The final game of Playdate Season's first week proves that all three have been certified bangers. From the studio that made FTL and Into the Breach (no really) comes Fulcrum Defender, a radial shooter game. Think Space Invaders, but instead of moving strictly to the left and right, you are a turret at the center of the screen, able to move your aim in 360 degrees, shooting enemies floating in from all directions. Maneuvering the gun is done via the Playdate crank, the only game from this week that uses it, but it's perhaps one of the best uses of the crank I've seen thus far on the whole system. With your right hand thus occupied, firing your turret is done via the D-pad, where pressing up fires a single shot, holding down rapid fires, and as the game progresses you can unlock additional weapons which are used via left and right. Enemies are simple geometric shapes — circles, squares, diamonds, etc — each with their own patterns. After defeating enough enemies, you will level up, which allows you to choose between one of two upgrades to permanently acquire. It's a simple yet effective game, and one that I think is really quite fun. On Normal mode, victory is achieved after only 10 minutes, although it allows you to go further for high scores. This quick in-and-out gameplay means that I will likely pick this one up for a round or two every so often.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (PS5)

As a kid, I really loved the Indiana Jones movies. I think I'm just a sucker for archaeologist adventures. The history, the mystery, the swashbuckling, what's not to like? I'll admit I haven't played any of the games in the franchise, with the exception of a few hours of Fate of Atlantis a few years back. Many of those titles are quite dated these days, so it's about time a modern title was made. Enter Machine Games, a studio with Nazi-hunting experience in their modern Wolfenstein titles, games that I... admittedly really don't like. Fortunately, I did enjoy this title much more than those, although I still felt it had some flaws.

For its positives, it's a really great looking game. This game got a lot of attention in being one of the first AAA games to mandate that PCs support raytracing to play it, one of the reasons I chose to get it on PS5 instead. A history piece, you travel to several different famous sites around the world, each really well crafted. The human models look great as well, with Indiana in particular really standing out. I'll admit at being annoyed in the sheer number of roles Troy Baker seems to be cast in, but he did a shockingly good Harrison Ford impression. There are definitely some lines where you can tell it's an impersonation, but for the most part he got the vocal inflections and mannerisms down really well, credit where credit is due. The plot is a well-crafted affair befitting the style of the movies, although it does feel a little stretched out, simply due to requiring a video game length worth of content.

As for the gameplay, it's where my enthusiasm wanes a little bit. The game is effectively broken up into puzzle, combat, or stealth sections, with some NPC areas thrown in. The puzzles are pretty enjoyable, and require both brains and brawn as Indiana leaps across pits or climbs up ledges. I'm well-documented as disliking stealth sections as a rule, and I'll admit these didn't really do anything for me. It is fun to watch Indiana "knock out" a guard by caving his skull in with a sledgehammer, but stealth ends up entirely boiling down into just finding a melee weapon to hit a guard with. If you get spotted though, the combat initiates, a system which I didn't care for at all. Indiana can give enemies the ole one-two hook as well as dodging and guarding, but it always just felt really clunky. Pretty much every enemy has way more health than you'd expect, with some bosses going on for far too long. I just found it tedious, and once you're spotted by a guard it's more or less a death sentence by mobbing anyway.

Overall, not too bad. It was essentially the game I expected it to be, although I don't think it'll quite make my lists for my favorites of the year.

Logic Bombs (PC)

This month has apparently had the theme of "homebrew games for retro consoles, but distributed on Steam". First was the Genesis title Earthion, and now Logic Bombs, a Game Boy Color puzzle game I played on PC. Logic Bombs is a very classic sort of old-school puzzle game, one that you could imagine being printed in the back of a newspaper. It's a bit like a combination of Picross and Bomberman.

Like Picross, you are given a grid of cells to either fill in or leave blank, which you determine according to the numbers displayed along the rows and columns. Unlike Picross though, there are objects pre-placed in some of the puzzles, either labelled bombs, monsters to destroy, or a chao-like icon which must be kept safe. This is where the Bomberman analogy comes in, as these bombs must destroy exactly the number of monsters as signified on their label. Filling in a cell on the grid blocks the bomb, which makes solving a puzzle a mixture of reference grid numbers, bomb labels, and a few other explained rulesets — such as guaranteeing that every chao is in the same bordered area of at least one monster, and not in the same area as any others — among other rules. These puzzles can get quite complex, with additional rules introduced every 16 levels or so. Near the end, it wasn't uncommon for me to spend upwards of an hour on a single puzzle, but I surprisingly really enjoyed the experience.

The game's limited text heavily emphasizes that every puzzle can be solved purely with deduction, and while that is true, some of the logical reasonings require really keen observation. I'll admit near the end, I groaned when loading some puzzles, as a reliance on one mechanic in particular really made some tedious for me. Still, I'm pleased to say I finished all 160 puzzles, and I would heartily recommend this game to anyone who loves Picross-style games. I do wish I got at least one achievement for my troubles though.

Mega Man: The Sequel Wars: Episode Red (MD)

Mega Man: The Sequel Wars, and even its predecessor Mega Man: The Wily Wars, might be one of the hidden secrets on the Genesis. In the early 90s, Capcom had decided to buddy up with Sega after years of partnering with Nintendo, and elected to begin this relationship by remaking the first three NES Mega Man games for the Genesis. The collection, Mega Man: The Wily Wars, isn't terribly well known in North America, as it was only released as part of the "Sega Channel" download cable service (yes, they had a streaming service in the 90s). The Wily Wars did get a physical cartridge release in Japan and Europe, but North America actually wouldn't get a release until the Sega Genesis Mini came out a few decades later. Wily Wars is a really excellent remake of the first three games, but that raises an interesting point — there are six Mega Man games on NES... Well, intrepid fans have decided to remedy that problem and are remaking the other three titles as well, with Episode Red being an honest-to-God Genesis remake of Mega Man IV. Focusing on the fan remake itself, it's phenomenal. While it is able to draw a lot on the visual and gameplay styles that Capcom went with for The Wily Wars, there is still a huge amount of effort needed to create a remake of this scale. New sprites and background need to be made, the engine needs to be recreated or decompiled from the original, Genesis-style music needs to written, and on every single front they did a standout job. If you're a fan of Mega Man IV, I think you'll have zero complaints about this version.

Now, this is actually my first time playing Mega Man IV, and like all Mega Man titles, the first playthrough is a bit of a miserable experience. The game controls well, with Mega Man slowly evolving his skill set across the series such as sliding and charging his weapon. The new Robot Masters are interesting enough, although I have to admit that MMIV isn't really pushing any envelopes compared to its predecessors. I think the main frustration I had with the game is some of (perhaps many of) the level design choices. Capcom really hated its customers back in the day, and wished to do them harm. The enemies that jump up, then float back down into pits I found particularly infuriating. However, now that I know the tricks of the game, I'm actually more inclined to go back and do additional runs, if my experience with the other NES titles are any indication. The Sequel Wars team has been teasing an "Episode Blue" remake of Mega Man V for some time now, and there's even placeholder menus for it and Mega Man VI in this game. I'm definitely excited to try that out when it releases, as well as the final, completed Sequel Wars cartridge even further down the line. If Episode Red is any indication, it will make a excellent companion to The Wily Wars.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound (PC)

Between this and the new Shinobi game, this is apparently a new age for ninjas. I'll admit that of the two franchises, I'm much less familiar with Ninja Gaiden, to the point where this is the first game in the series that I've completed. However, I was quite dazzled by the visuals of its demo, and decided to give it a try. Ragebound comes from the same studio that made the Blasphemous games, and their style of gorgeous pixel art carries over here. You'll sometimes hear studios cite the complexity of pixel art for why they decide to use 3D models in their games, but the developers of this title clearly weren't fazed by that, and their hard work has definitely paid off, and probably made my sale.

As for the gameplay, it's the sort of half Hack-and-Slash, half 2D platformer that you would expect. Your ninja has both sword and shuriken at his disposal, as well as the spirit of a rival whose abilities complement your own. The gameplay is very fluid, and you have a surprisingly large number of moves. The setting is also a contemporary piece, so while you do visit mountain villages and dark caves, there are also levels set in modern cities or riding atop trains. Stylistically it works very well, but I must admit I found the game to be almost bland at times. I think that's partially due to the enemy variety. There are a healthy number of enemy types, but in the end they tend to fall into the two camps of "really easy to kill" or "slightly annoying, but still quick to kill". The levels might visually be great to look at, but their level design tends to be a bit one note, lots of largely horizontal levels with some light climbing to switch things up. I don't really have any suggestions here, on paper I think the developers did really well, but upon actually playing the game I found myself slowly growing disinterested.

Despite this, I was actually surprised by the length of the game. I think many people familiar with modern storytelling can get a sense for when a plot is beginning to reach its climax, and I honestly thought there was going to be another act. It's not exactly a bad length — especially since I said I was growing bored — but it also might be a bit short for anyone looking for a real meaty game.Overall, a game where I don't really have any negatives which agitated me, but also not one that I think will necessarily stand out in my memory.

Victory Heat Rally (PC)

I feel like I'm not alone in occasionally wishing that my Mario Kart matches were a bit less... chaotic. The inclusion of items can make races dynamic and arguably more balanced, but sometimes you just want to have a solid, clean race to see which of your friends is truly the best. If that sort of mentality appeals to you, if you're the sort of racer who wants high-speed action while keeping a bit of cartoonish whimsy, then perhaps look no further than Victory Heat Rally. While I mention Mario Kart, I actually think this game reminds me more of Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart with its 2D sprites on 3D courses, the high amount of drifting around corners, and suspended levels with banking turns. There isn't too much to dive into with this one, VHR is a stylish racing game, with everything that entails. The campaign mode has you compete through a variety of different levels, ranging from traditional Grand Prix or rally stages, to challenge courses like changing drift boosts and hitting obstacles. It's got a bright, colorful style with lots of "indie game flair" that I find enjoyable. It's honestly a fun time. There are a few minor complaints though. The lack of items can make levels a bit repetitive, although there level design keeps things dynamic. The drift/boost mechanic also operates in a bit of an odd fashion compared to other racing games. There's a notable delay between releasing the drift and the boost engaging, basically until you straighten out the car. This does allow you chain drifts together in a neat fashion, but it takes some getting used to. Overall, an interesting title, one that perhaps doesn't blow me away but it was a fun experience.

Super Mario Bros. Remastered (PC)

While many people will point to Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World as their favorite 2D plumber's outing, I've always had a soft spot for the very first SMB game. I imagine a large part of it is it was the one I had the most exposure to at a young age. It's quite possibly the first game I ever played, on a relative's NES. I played a great deal of Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on the GBC, until finally getting a copy of the original for myself when it came out on Wii Virtual Console. There's something about the simplicity of its levels and its blocky art that has always appealed to me. It's been remixed and built upon to death of course, with the latest entry being a fan remake for its 40th anniversary this week — Super Mario Bros. Remastered.

As the "Remastered" would imply, the game has a higher graphical fidelity than the original. For one, it's in widescreen, giving a greater view of the level than typical (and don't forget, I'm somewhat used to playing the cropped version on Game Boy). They also slightly improve upon its graphics. All of the level elements now have a slight shadow — a simple, yet clever effect that Nintendo themselves have used — and the music and backgrounds have been enhanced. They also offer the ability to load graphics packs, such as making the game look like Super Mario All-Stars, although I wasn't able to figure out how to load any, or if they're even available yet, so close to launch.

However, there's more content than just the first Mario game. For one, all of The Lost Levels has been remade as well (which unlike SMB, I have very few fond feelings towards). It also includes the bonus challenges from Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, as well as content from two titles I wasn't familiar with — Super Mario Bros. Special and All Night Nipon: Super Mario Bros.. From what I understand, the first was a licensed port to PC-88 machines, while the second was a special promotional tie-in to a Japanese radio show. Not content I would've missed, but a welcome addition nonetheless.

Honestly, this is a fun way to replay these original games, although this is not an emulated or reverse engineered port of the game, it's remade from the ground up with the Godot engine. The developer has done an excellent job recreating the original physics and feel of the game, but I'll admit there were a few things I noted that weren't quite the same. For example, there's a hidden 1up mushroom at the top of the 1-2 stage. You can usually punch a single hole to the right of it to fall down to you, but in this version it hits the side of that hole and instead falls to the left. I've only ever seen it fall to the right in the original, and I've only seen it fall to the left here. It's small things like that that aren't quite right, but if that's the level of nitpicking I have, you can tell it's pretty faithful. I loved seeing the extra Deluxe challenges here too, it's been close to 20 years since I last played them, and they're simple yet fun.

Overall, this is a recommend from me. It's a free, fan-made homage to one of (if not the) most influential games of all time. Just don't let Nintendo know you're playing it.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A (NS)

Despite the Pokemon franchise's continued popularity, I've largely soured on its mainline series. I have a few that I do mean to get to some day, but I believe the last main Pokemon game I finished was Alpha Sapphire back when it first released. However, my feelings of apathy don't always extend to some of the more experimental spin-off games such as the Pokemon Trading Card smart phone game or this, their newer Pokemon Legends sub-series. I played the first Pokemon Legends: Arceus when it released, and went away largely enjoying it. The action combat of Pokemon catching was fun, as was the more open environments. However, that game did make some odd choices, such as taking place in the far past with few areas of civilization. The newest game in this sub-series (although I'd hardly call it a sequel) has completely swung the other way, taking place entirely inside of Lumiose City, the large not-Paris metropolis from Pokemon X and Y. This game serves more as a sequel to X and Y than Legends, following up on some of the characters, events, and mechanics from those games.

The plot of this game is pretty standard Pokemon faire, although I have to admit it is a bit odd. You are the self-insert protagonist with no backstory or goals of your own, arriving in Lumiose City for the first time. There, you encounter a group of do-gooders called Team MZ who recruit you into their ranks to assist them with preventing Pokemon from entering "Rogue Mega Evolution", a phenomenon that has been increasing across the city. In your spare time, you also compete in the nightly "Z-A Royale", a city-wide competition to determine the best trainers by ganging up on each other in alleyways at night. Don't worry though, these Purge regions are limited to a few blocks every night, you just have to hope your apartment isn't inside one of them. What doesn't change every night though are the growing number of "Wild Zones" — regions of the city completely abandoned by the government to serve as a sort of urban nature reserve to the Pokemon that occupied it in large enough numbers. Between these two, I was expecting the increasing collapse of Lumiose's infrastructure to be a main part of the plot, but in the end it only gets mentioned occasionally by unnamed NPCs, and is quickly brushed aside by your rival character and their benefactor, the CEO of a major corporation. I had them pegged as evil the entire time, and was honestly shocked when nothing came of it.

We aren't playing Pokemon for its story though, and I'm pleased to say that I really enjoyed its gameplay as a whole. Returning from Arceus is the ability to just throw Pokeballs at anything that moves, combined with a new Action RPG combat style that really fits with this game. You can pop in and out of battles naturally, and it really adds to the freeform style. The battles with wild Pokemon and random trainers are supplemented by the aforementioned Z-A Royale, a nightly event where you sneak around a designated zone attempting to defeat as many trainers as you can. Depending on their respective "rank" you get points, which can also be earned by completing various minor challenges, such as landing X number of super-effective moves or beating enemies with specific types. These challenge points are needed to participate in a promotional match — substituting in for the usual gym leader battles — which allows the player to advance to the next rank upon victory. The general goal of the game is to go from Rank Z to Rank A, hence the title of the game. Battling itself is no longer a turn-based affair, instead you simply target an enemy, choose between your four moves, and then wait for that move to cooldown before it can be used again. It can feel like a bit chaotic at times, and does remove some of the strategy from battles, but in general I really enjoyed the system, as I felt it was a really slick way to convert the traditional Pokemon mechanics into an action RPG scheme.

I must also call out one mechanic that I found myself particularly enjoying, and that's playing dress-up. In the last few years it's become apparently that I really enjoy customizing my character, and I imagine many Pokemon players feel the same way, which Game Freak is really capitalizing on. Much of my early funds went to expanding my wardrobe. There's actually quite a variety of various clothing stores around Lumiose, catering towards many different styles and patterns. There's been a bit of (IMO, slightly undeserved) criticism regarding the graphical fidelity of this game, but I think the player models actually look really good, and the different clothing options goes a long way to showing that off. However, I will say that there are some odd omissions in the styles they have on offer. With only a few exceptions, nearly everything for sale is either long-sleeved or a jacket, no T-shirts for you. In addition, while the clothing modeling team knocked it out of the park, I can't say the same about the group designing the hair styles. I was surprised how few there were, with no unlockables, and how many were frankly pretty hideous. If you look at screenshots online, you'll notice you'll largely see the same three or so hairstyles, and there's a reason for that. If you're also hoping to make a masculine character, I think you'll also have a hard time, simply due to the greater abundance of more feminine-leading clothing.

Overall though, I really liked the game, and I think I now much prefer it over Arceus. Yes, you do spent literally the entire game inside of Lumiose City, which while it didn't bother me in general, I do think they could've come up with a few more notable landmarks to break up the scenery. The gameplay loop also gets really repetitive in the final act or so, where you're largely repeating the same general events on a loop until the final climax. Still, I would recommend this game to the lapsed Pokemon fan like myself. These Legends games have been a good way for the developers to experiment with different mechanics and structure. I may not be crazy about the mainline games these days, but it goes to show that there's still interesting things that can be done with the series.

Lumines Arise (PC)

I played Tetris Effect a few years ago, and went away with mixed feelings about it. I really enjoyed the "Effect" part of the game, but I'll admit that I have never been very good at Tetris, and ended up feeling like I was missing out on the awe and splendor of the visuals because I was so tunnel-focused on perpetually not losing. If only the same studio would give the same treatment to a falling block puzzle game that I actually like... Well after years of waiting, I got my wish with Lumines Arise. I missed out on Lumines in its PSP heyday, but have come to really enjoy the game in recent years. Something about it clicks better for me than Tetris, and even the earlier entries have a great history of killer music and visuals. Arise builds upon that, bringingthe gorgeous 3D effects to this style of game, which I think compliments each other incredibly well.

Like Tetris Effect, the gameplay itself is exactly what you'd expect from earlier games — with one addition of a 'burst mode', allowing you to combo many moves quickly. They did change the main gameplay mode though. Most Lumines games are simply a 2 hour long continuous gameplay session, with skins swapping out as you get enough points. Here, rather than set you into the single session mode with all the possible skins, they broke them up into about 10 levels of four or five skins. It's much more approachable than regular Lumines, which has some skins that I've still never seen.

I will admit I did feel that the game was a little sparse on new modes. It has the level-based and full session modes as I mentioned, as well as the typical mission modes, but other than that, there wasn't really anything new. They do give you a little avatar to customize, where you gain new cosmetics via in-game achievements or by spending points you accumulate. However — and maybe this is because I played this game on my Linux-based Steam Deck — the avatar shop was just... broken. I don't think any of the multiplayer modes worked at all, as I always got a message saying online features didn't log in correctly. That was a bit of a bummer, as it meant that half of the items on the main menu just didn't function at all for me.

If you've never tried Lumines, I think this would be an excellent game to do so. I went back and tried Lumines Remastered again, just to get a sense of the differences, and the quality of everything was so much higher here. Just the level of visual interest and animation quality is really a step above. Whether or not those visuals are too distracting, or if the music is any better in this edition will come down to personal taste, but I'm very excited they gave Lumines the Tetris Effect treatment, and they did a solid job doing so.

Sonic Racing Crossworlds (PC)

Continuing to ignore the question of "why does Sonic need a car", the latest in the very loose Sonic racing franchise is among us. I never actually got around to playing Team Sonic Racing, the prior most recent entry, and given the lack of discussion surrounding it, I'm not sure if many other people did either. I was a big fan of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed though, which I have considered their best effort thus far. It was a great combination of fun mechanics, cool characters and courses, and had a number of elements that Mario Kart would have done well to adapt.

How has this new entry faired? Pretty well I thought, although it has some advantages and disadvantages over its older cousin. I really did miss the other Sega characters fleshing out the roster. I know that I'm in the vast majority of players who even knew who half those characters were, a list that is probably shrinking every year, but just having a collection of 23 Sonic characters isn't quite as exciting. It's a fine roster for the most part — with the except of Sonic Lost World fringe villain Zazz, one of the most unappealing stains of a creature who has ever been created — but it feels like populating a Smash Bros game with only Mario characters. The game might still be just as much fun, but it has somewhat lost something along its way.

The courses are largely based upon levels throughout the franchise — including very recent entries like Sonic Superstars and Shadow Generations — although there were some that I wasn't quite able to place, and may just have been generic, novel entries. They're pretty well crafted, with many interesting layouts but never slipping into the tedious or unfair category. Where Racing Crossworld stands out is the titular "Crossworlds" system, where the second lap of each race takes place on a completely different course. The player in the lead chooses between one of two options to choose from (which action is one option or "random", which always felt like a strange way to set this up), but these singular laps aren't part of any Grand Prix course, although they can be played in time trials. An unlockable benefit allows for every course to be added into the pool, but it does create the odd situation where there's actually more courses in the game than populates the Grand Prix cups. An interesting scenario, and one that I haven't quite decided add replayability to the other modes, or is a weird missed opportunity.

The Crossworlds mechanic feels like the main draw of the game. A number of other items feel like evolutions from Racing Transformed or other kart racing games in general, such as building your own custom karts and equipping various effect-giving "gears". These are well and good, and unlocking the full collection is one of the immediate post-Grand Prix goals of the game, but I do somewhat miss Racing Transformed's campaign mode. It was admittedly a pretty janky affair, but offered a mission-based structure that I felt offered a lot more. This game does have quite a few differing race formats, mainly aimed towards multiplayer (as the game itself tells you), but nothing that quite kept my attention. I know I'm somewhat of an outlier, as I overwhelmingly play single player-only titles, so wanting more single player options in one of the most obviously designed for multiplayer games might be a concern for most. But for me, this is a fine title, one that I think is easily on par with the recent Mario Kart games (whether that's a complement or faint praise depends on you), but not necessarily one that will continue to stand out in what is likely to be an ongoing franchise into the future.

Kirby Air Riders (NS2)

I never thought I'd see the day, but fan-favorite cult classic Gamecube title Kirby Air Ride has received a sequel. I'm a big fan of Kirby Air Ride, it's not the best racing game on the Gamecube by any means, but it is one of its best party games. It's not structured like your typical racing game, with three distinct modes to choose from — "Air Ride", the traditional course racing, "Top Ride", a fixed-camera Micro Machines-esque style, and "City Trial", a timed, sandbox free-for-all to build up stats and better vehicles before completing a challenge at the end. There's less of a focus on traditional time trials and course completion and more on an early version of an achievement system, where the player completes various micro-objectives to unlock more stages and cosmetics.

All of what I described is what has kept Kirby Air Ride feeling fresh, and Kirby Air Riders has no interest in shaking up the formula. Much like the game's name itself, it takes literally everything the previous game had to offer, and just expands upon it a bit more. All three game modes return — along with a fourth, the more campaign feeling "Road Trip" mode. There are a few new karts to flesh out the options, but I found most of the returning items to be the more aesthetically pleasing ones. This game does massively expand the roster though, the original title was 95% "Oops, all Kirbies", with Dedede and Meta Knight available in a few modes as well. Here, you can play as about a dozen Kirby characters from across the franchise, although many of them are notably less iconic than Kirby himself. The achievement system returns as well, and functions much in the same way as the original, although now many of the rewards are directed towards customizing your online profile or making custom kart cosmetics.

This is probably the biggest downside to the new game, it is very, very similar to the Gamecube original. In some ways, that might be okay though. Most die-hard fans will be excited to get more Kirby Air Ride, while newcomers will have nothing to compare to. As someone who falls in the middle, I enjoyed my return to this world and found myself really getting into the gameplay, but I did feel like there was a bit of a lack of new mechanics. Three out of four of the game modes are exactly the same as the older title, and even the new one — Road Trip — isn't really a gameplay mode at all. It's just a fancy way to expose the player to different missions, but the actual gameplay is one of the three other modes.

This means that Kirby Air Riders has a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses of the original. Still only a single City Trial map, still a strong reliance on the achievement system. I could definitely see someone bouncing off this game really hard. However, I did not, and I quite enjoyed myself with it. I gave it the same rating as Sonic Racing Crossworlds earlier this month, but while that game was on the verge of dropping down a half point, this one was on the verge of rising up another. I think it's the better of the racing games, both in its gameplay and unique mechanics, I just wish that it had done more to deviate from what was already in place previously.

4.5 / 5

Assassin's Creed Origins (PS4)

I'm going to be honest, I was not expecting to like this game as much as I did. A large part of it is perhaps because I really enjoy Ancient Egypt and have been reading up on it lately, but I found this game to be really well done in a variety of ways. Playing in a historical setting is arguably the reason to play an Assassin's Creed game, and being able to run around Ptolemaic Egypt is really cool. I was a bit bummed at first when I heard what time period they had chosen, as I thought that New Kingdom-era Egypt would more interesting to see, but in hindsight I think they made a good choice. Setting the game later gives access to Egyptian, Greek, and Roman styles, famous landmarks like Alexandria, and perhaps most enticingly is the presence of some of the most famous figures in history, certainly to appear in the series. This game heralded in a new style for the series, latching onto modern trends like a leveling system, weapons with stats, and an even more open world; but all of these lend themselves well to the play style. The series of Egyptian set pieces flow together well, and centering the plot on a group of specific assassinations grounds the game in a good way (although from what I hear, they basically just reuse this system from here on out). Bayek himself is an excellent protagonist. Assassin's Creed has a bit of a tendency to simply use Ezio-like protagonists, but Bayek is interesting and sympathetic while also being a unique character in his own way. I feel that I got a grasp on him and his motivations and beliefs much better than even after three games with Ezio. The game isn't without its faults though, and in traditional AC fashion, I don't think it handles the ending very well. It reminds me a lot of Brotherhood, where the game has to rapidly jump between various places and events in order to line up with real world history, and they again do this here. After all, there's a very famous assassination they couldn't resist including (even though I think it would've been better suited for its own, inevitable game). This rapid progression to the end didn't bother me as much as Brotherhood, except they stop halfway through it, pump the brakes, and drop you back into the open world for one more region. It was quite jarring, and the stricter level requirements made what I thought was a beeline to the end a bit of a chore. However, this is a complaint about only the end of a long saga, and a pacing one at that. This was a fun experience, and a solid example of what the series can continue to offer.

Grim Fandango: Remastered (PC)

Two of the best games I've played in recent years are the Psychonauts games, from the minds of Double Fine. The studio was originally created from some of the best at Lucasarts, kings of the late 90s point-and-click genre, with their swan song perhaps being Grim Fandango. I think everything about this game is phenomenal. Great voice acting, excellent premise and setting, funny jokes and lines, it's really a masterpiece. You play as Manny Calavera, a travel agent for the recently departed in the Land of the Dead, as he uncovers a conspiracy and tries to save a woman who he believes he wronged. The game is really ambitious in scope, taking place over multiple years as Manny goes from travel agent to owning a Casablanca nightclub, inspiring a union strike and revolution, becoming a ship captain, and more. It's a really rich world and Manny is a great character to follow through it. He's funny, charming, and really well voiced, as are all of the characters. The game is a Lucasarts point-and-click though, which means some of the puzzles are basically incomprehensible. Don't feel bad for needing a guide for this one, particularly in the first half. However, that sort of thing is par for the course, the only reason this doesn't get a perfect score is that I don't think this is a particularly great remaster. The 3D graphics are improved, but there's occasionally some awkward collision, and some noticeably poorer areas where the 3D assets meet the 2D backgrounds. It also is somewhat buggy — I ran into two softlocks while playing through the game. The second wasn't so bad, as I had a save nearby, but I foolishly saved over my game during the first, forcing me to replay a good chunk of the game. All that aside, it's a really unique experience and one I strongly encourage everyone to check out.

Blue Prince (PC)

I'm writing this review after having just seen the end credits roll for the first time, although I do plan on continuing with the game as I really feel I've only scratched the surface. This is Blue Prince, a puzzle roguelike game which has gained notoriety in recent weeks due to the overwhelmingly positive reviews it gained from critics just prior to its release. I, like many others, had never heard of the game up until that point, but decided to pick it up to see what all the fuss was about.

The premise is that you are Simon, a young man who has inherited a large manor from your late great-uncle who has just passed. The stipulation is that you may only receive your inheritance if you manage to find the secret 46th room in the 45 room estate. The other caveat, and main gameplay mechanic, is that each night, the layout of the mansion resets. The building is always laid out in a 5x9 grid, but when you approach a doorway, you are given one of three choices as to what type of room you want to lie beyond. These can be hallways, bedrooms, closets, mechanical rooms, gardens — it's hard to say how many options there are in total, but it's easily in the dozens, of which I've maybe seen 75% of at this point. These rooms not only affect what you find within, but also what exits exist, which will greatly direct or impede your progress deeper into the manor. The closest analogy I've played is Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, although that game didn't allow you to vary your path like this does. Your marked goal is to reach a room — the Antechamber — on the far end of the building, after which you'll need to figure out how to progress on your own.

If you've been following the release of this game, you'll also know what while critics loved it, user reviews have been much more mixed, although growing more positive as people get further. This is a very easy game to just bounce off of. A lot of early reviews praised the abundance of puzzles in every room, leading me to expect some sort of Professor Layton type experience with many cute logic puzzles. However, of the dozens of different room options, I would say there's maybe 5 or fewer rooms which have a concrete "enter the room, solve the puzzle just with what you have there, and leave". Instead, most of your experience will be entering a new space, maybe finding a key or some coins lying around, then moving on, with no explicit puzzles to speak of. For the first few runs, this is pretty anti-climatic. You're just walking around a largely empty house, even if the aesthetics are honestly quite nice. Slowly though, you'll find some stray letters lying around implying a much deeper amount of lore and intrigue, start to take note of some of the recurring patterns in the house, and slowly things will start to click into place.

I encourage everyone playing this to start taking copious notes on what they're seeing and reading — even if what you find will largely not be required just to see the credits. Eventually you'll realize elements of the house are part of layers upon layers of hidden, almost meta puzzles. Unlike games like Fez though, which had a cryptic, almost imperceivable puzzle, this game expertly gives you enough clues and hints to suggest that what you're seeing isn't all there is, and that I think is really what hooked people in, including myself.

An early review I read stated how they were able to roll credits after 20 hours or so, but had continued to put in 150 more. I couldn't understand that at the time, there barely seemed enough content for 10 hours, let alone 100. But having gotten to that same place, I now understand the appeal of the game, and I legitimately do plan to go further.

I very, very nearly gave this 5/5 stars, and I reserve the right to come back and do so. My one caveat with the game is its core mechanic — it's very RNG heavy. There may be this great mystery for you to resolve, but you are at the mercy of the rooms you draw along the way, and often times they can just kill runs before they start. I believe I got the credits on my 26th "day" in the game, but I knew exactly the steps I needed to take several days ahead of time, I just wasn't given the right circumstances. Things like requiring prerequisite rooms to appear before needed ones, or two sister rooms requiring direct contact means that you might know exactly what you want, but have to grind to get it, which in a puzzle game is immensely frustrating. Even worse, I get the impression — and other reviews I've read heavily imply as well — that the post-game puzzles are only going to get more and more reliant on RNG as they go on. I really like the game, I really like how the RNG fits into the system, but I definitely can see how it might get to a point where it stops your curiosity rather than amplifying it. For now though, I do think reaching the credits at least is worth your time, and I completely understand its praise, even if it's not for everyone.

Sin & Punishment (N64)

Treasure is one of the great software developers of their day. They created hits on the Genesis like Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier, and are perhaps best known today for their later shmups Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. Between the two they cranked out a number of solid titles, with one of their most celebrated being Sin & Punishment on the N64. Despite only being released in Japan, the game features full English audio, so while you can get a translation patch that replaces the subtitles, you can also play it just fine without it. The game is probably best described as a rail shooter, similar to Space Harrier or Star Fox. You play as one of two characters running across the ground while the player aims a reticle and fires their handgun. Treasure saw the N64 controller as a challenge, and ended up creating one of the wildest control schemes I've seen in a while. The joy stick aims the gun while Z fires, nothing new there. However the left and right C buttons moves the character (or the D-pad if you're playing lefty mode) while the R button jumps, and the A button swaps weapon modes. It takes a moment to get used to, and there are some levels that require a bit of platforming movement, and it took every brain cell I had to get the controls correct. Still, this game is fun as hell. The visuals are stylish, there's some really cool levels with fun designs, interesting boss fights in the way Treasure likes them; this game really is a blast. I will say that while I like the super angular character models, they didn't quite age as well as some other N64 games — I had a hard time even telling which character I was playing as. That was made all the harder by the plot which is, in my opinion, completely incomprehensible. It seems like a super cool plot, don't get me wrong, with some sort of alien invasion, time travel, mechs — it's such a shame that I could not follow what was happening at all. It's told in a really bizarre way with some nonsensical mid-90s Japanese dialog resulting in a very muddled experience. Still, don't let that turn you off. It's a very short game — I was able to beat it in an hour or so — but one that would is a blast to replay. They did make a Wii sequel, so don't be surprised if you hear from me about that one soon.

REPLAY: Kirby's Adventure (NES)

Continuing on my RetroAchievement adventure, I wanted to replay one of the most influential games on my life — Kirby's Adventure. Influential less so for the game itself, but because while in graduate school, I learned many programming concepts by creating a randomizer for this game (a project that, nearly a decade later I still sheepishly think of as incomplete). That project set me on the career path I have now, although it's been a number of years since I've sat down and played through the game. I always remembered it as one if, if not my favorite NES game, and I'm pleased to say that my opinion hasn't changed. While later Kirby games are still fun affairs, this is the only Kirby game that I consider to be absolute top of its class. I think this is the best game on the NES visually by a wide margin, I think it's one of the most ambitious games on the system, and I frankly think it's one of the most fun. Introducing the copy ability mechanic, it includes around a dozen different control schemes for Kirby, each of which allows for different play styles. Unlike many other NES games though, it's quite forgiving, mainly due to Kirby's very floaty control scheme, making this a platformer where you're rarely at risk of falling off of platforms. The level design is inventive and interesting, with secret rooms to unlock extra content. Even over 30 years later I consider this the best NES game, and one of the best Kirby games to date, it's just a joy to play.

REPLAY: Metroid Fusion (GBA)

A coworker recently mentioned that they were playing through Metroid Fusion for the first time on the Nintendo Online service. This seemed like a perfect excuse to replay the game for myself as well, to see how it had held up. I always though of Fusion as being my favorite of the 2D Metroid games, having had a copy as a teenager. The plot of this game, despite being limited by the GBA hardware, is actually really interesting, and is probably my favorite of the series. In the intro, Samus is infected by a new, mysterious species known simply as "X", which causes her to nearly die. During her recovery, she is organically grafted to her power suit, radically changing her appearance and abilities. In light of this, she travels to a station researching the X which is in the process of going to complete shit. The fusion suit, space station, and elements therein are really interesting. I love this setting, and it's an interesting twist on the formula while still keeping it familiar. There's some top notch spritework as well, and the controls and physics are great, and personally feel slightly tighter than on Super Metroid. I have to admit though, I wasn't quite as infatuated with the game as I was expecting. The first half was just as good as I remembered, but there's a bit of a difficulty spike in later bosses where many of them honestly turn into complete clusterfucks, where the player is just desperately trying to get off enough damage while the bosses are bouncing around. It wasn't enough to make me dislike the game, but I don't think it's in the running for my all time favorite GBA title at the moment (merely being relegated to the top 5). Still, it's an excellent title, and one that I would be happy to recommend as people's first foray into the Metroid series.

REPLAY: Pokemon Trading Card Game (GBC)

I'm pleased to say I've finally obtained my first 100% RetroAchievements score by replaying one of my favorite games as a child — Pokemon: The Trading Card Game. The precursor to the currently-popular Pokemon Pocket, this is a recreation of the earliest Pokemon TCG sets in Game Boy form. You must defeat the eight gym leaders in order to claim the four legendary cards (the three legendary birds + Dragonite). There's over 225 distinct cards in the game, and a surprisingly large amount of content. I've always loved this game, I think it's a blast to play even today, and it's honestly where I learned how to play the TCG. Opponents are challenging, but not overly so, and there are enough cards to create many deck builds. Unlike some retro games, which can have very challenging achievements, this game has a very fair selection. I personally enjoy ones that encourage the players less to do insane feats that no one would attempt unprompted, but instead those that encourage the player to explore the entire game's content, which I think this set does very well. This game does have a Japanese-only sequel, as well as a recent well-regarded Pokemon Gen 2 mod, both of which I would like to come back and 100% as well. Even if you aren't going for achievements though, I would strongly recommend this game, I personally think it's much more fun than Pokemon Pocket currently is.

Earthion (PC)

The year is 1992, and the world is eagerly awaiting a new Sega Genesis title from Yuzo Koshiro and the team at Ancient. As you're walking down the street one day, you're hit by a car and fall into a deep coma. You finally awaken in 2025. Many things have changed, but fortunately for you, you can still play a new release for the Sega Genesis from Yuzo Koshiro and the team at Ancient. And perhaps most shockingly; the game is not only good, but one of the best on the entire system. Koshiro and Ancient are perhaps best known as the developers of Streets of Rage 2 and Beyond Oasis, although they've been continuously assisting on other projects since their hayday. When it was announced a few years ago that they would come back and make a new Genesis title, I was immediately interested. Earthion is more than just your standard shmup though. For one, it's absolutely gorgeous. After 30 years, developers have figured out how to get the most out of these old systems graphically, and Earthion takes full advantage of that. Incredible parallax scrolling, introductory cutscenes, synthesized voices, and some really incredible looking 3D-esque animations makes this one of the best looking games on the system, even beating out Thunder Force IV.

The gameplay itself is also superb. I'll fully admit I'm not the best shmup player, although I do enjoy them. This game offers both high difficulty for those who want it, but features some cleverly designed mechanics to level the playing field for less experienced players. Unlike many shmups, you do not die from a single hit, but instead have a "shield bar". Once hit, this depletes, and depleted enough you will die, but it also slowly recharges as time goes on. This means you can actually tank a few hits, and then play it safe to regain your health. Your weapons and sub-weapons also have a bar, which increases when you collect enemy drops, and decreases as well when you get hit, adding to the trade-off. If you finish a level with a specific sub-weapon collected, you'll be able to upgrade your ship permanently between a few options, including having more sub-weapons, increasing the size of the main weapon/shield bars, gaining an extra life, and more. It's a really well designed system that offers a few different ways to play. There's also a password system which will allow you to begin the game with your upgrades intact, although you will suffer a harsh score penalty at the end of the game for doing so. I was really looking forward to this for some time, and I'm pleased to say it met all of my expectations.

There's been quite a few new Genesis titles released these days, but I think Earthion is my favorite of them all. I should mention that while I keep calling this a Genesis title, it's actually not yet out on Genesis. Instead, just the PC version is playable, with modern consoles coming soon, and a physical Genesis cartridge coming next year. The PC version has quite a few nice features, such as the manual, scanline filters, controller rebinding support, borders, etc. It's essentially just an emulator wrapper for the Genesis game itself, proven by hackers who have already been able to extract the Genesis ROM from the game. The physical Genesis cartridge will be handled by Limited Run Games, whose... less than stellar reputation might turn some off. However, I would still strongly encourage everyone to at least try one of the modern releases of the game, as I think it's one of the best the Genesis — or any system — has to offer.

GoldenEye 007 (N64)

I have vague memories of playing GoldenEye at a friend's house many years ago, but I don't think it was ever on heavy rotation, nor had I ever sat down an played through the campaign before. The game has a famously great reputation, and I've always enjoyed the film it's based on, but I honestly wasn't sure what to expect from this game. I'm pleased to report then that I thoroughly enjoyed this game and would highly recommend it.

To back up, I shouldn't say that this was a complete surprise. I've been a big fan of the Timesplitters series, which — in addition to sharing many of its development staff with GoldenEye — also shares many gameplay similarities such as control scheme, objective structure, and even some level inspiration. The "single-stick shooter" gameplay scheme of this game is a little odd to get used to, especially when the game requires precise aiming at a (usually environmental) target, but the heavy hand of auto-aiming really assists here, making the gunplay pretty fun. The levels can be a bit labyrinthine, but they have interesting layouts and fun locales. I was surprised how much the game deviated from the film, although that's not a knock against it. The developers don't feel constricted to created levels exactly based on the film locations, but instead on what makes the best gameplay.

The main two marks against the game are more of it being a relic of its time. The elephant in the room is of course the graphics. I actually found the visuals to be quite charming, but there's no denying that the human characters look pretty deformed up close. It's not even the low-res textures stretched across the polygons that is the worst offender, but that many of the models have really bizarre, non-symmetric head shapes. Secondly are the mission objectives themselves. You're only given a vague checklist of what to accomplish in a level, and it's often not very clear as to what that might entail. What's perhaps worse is that, unlike later efforts like Timesplitters 2, the game will happily let you continue to progress without finishing an objective, only to tell you you failed the mission upon reaching the end of the stage. Several times had I cleared the area of enemies and was looking for one final portion of an objective when I accidentally passed through a door that serves as the end of the level and had to restart the entire stage.

Still, this is more due to objectives being vague rather than being annoying, and I think this is definitely a game that is even more enjoyable on multiple playthroughs. I have enjoyed Rare's other titles like Banjo-Kazooie, but I think it's only now that I really appreciate when people say they were one of the top developers on the N64. I'm especially eager to try out Perfect Dark someday, the spiritual successor to this game.

Donkey Kong Bananza (NS2)

A new console generation has officially landed, and the first game I've finished for my shiny new Switch 2 is Donkey Kong Bananza, a 3D platformer from the same team who made Super Mario Odyssey a few years ago. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what defines it, but this game really has a similar feeling to Odyssey, from its style, UI, and general vibe. As the name would imply, you play as Donkey Kong, who, after falling through various layers of the Earth's crust, teams up with a tweenage Pauline to try and return to the surface (I guess making this a prequel?).

Nearly everything in the levels is destructible, emphasizing Donkey Kong's strength. Being able to dig holes where ever you want or climb most walls is pretty fun, and really gives a feeling of versatility. It does mean that you can brute force most puzzles — and most bosses — but I think I like that about the game. You're playing as a large gorilla, he doesn't have time to wait for a boss's weak spot to appear like Mario, he just wants to hit stuff, and hit stuff he shall.

Diving through various layers of the Earth is a neat idea for a mechanic, and gives off vague Journey to the Center of the Earth vibes, although it doesn't really have as much wonder and mystery as I would've hoped. I did feel that the level design also wasn't quite as strong as a typical Mario title; that the worlds felt a bit... smeared, if that makes sense. They aren't discrete levels ala Mario 64, nor is it an open world. Each layer is distinct and has its own theme, but the objectives feel a bit free floating once inside.

Still, a very solid title overall, and one that I would recommend. I liked little Pauline, she had a great chemistry with DK, and probably has the best voice actress we've heard from a first party Nintendo title. DK's slight redesign also fits him really well, and actually harkens back to his more arcade-y appearances, like in Super Mario Kart. There's a lot of exciting Switch 2 titles coming out in recent months, but I think Donkey Kong Bananza should definitely be one you pick up.

5 / 5

Chibi-Robo! (GC)

Let me get straight to the point, this is a really great game. Everytime I play Katamari Damacy, I wish there was a free roam mode where I could explore the world they've set up. Chibi-Robo perfectly scratches that itch, as you play as a small cleaning robot purchased to help in a suburban household of three. The game begins simply as exploring the house and cleaning up trash and stains, but quickly evolves into helping the family with their relationship issues, side quests with the local toys a la Toy Story, and even includes some really fantastical elements. By cleaning or assisting characters, you receive both money and "happy points" with which you can upgrade yourself. Upgrades both help you explore new areas as well as adding new interactions with characters to move the plot. I really enjoyed the family dynamic. They're clearly quite dysfunctional, but each are still charming in their own way, and assisting them really does feel rewarding. I don't want to give too much away, but I will say this game is definitely one of the gems on the system. It's fun, colorful, interesting, well-designed, I really don't have anything bad to say about it, it's just solid all around.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (PC)

Once in a blue moon, a game comes out of complete nowhere and takes the world by storm. I had thought that this year's representative would've been Blue Prince, up until the sudden appearance of Clair Obscur. This is a dark fantasy turn-based RPG heavily inspired by pre-World War I France. In it, a mysterious calamity has stranded the not-Paris city of Luminere in the middle of the ocean, facing a large monolith with a number painted on it. Once a year, a giant, mysterious figure referred to as the "Paintress" comes by, decrements the number by one, and anyone of that age or older dies Thanos style. You play as the members of Expedition 33, a group of 32 year olds facing the last year of their life as they head out to try and defeat the Paintress to save the city's younger inhabitants. I've followed a lot of interesting discussion regarding why this game has captured such attention, despite being the first release of a new IP from an unknown studio. Firstly, it's very well made and intriguing. The pacing is very well done, with the world feeling fantastical, eerie, ethereal, and oppressive all in one. It all blends together wonderfully, with a story and setting that really compliment each other. I'll say the plot definitely had me guessing, while still feeling like a natural evolution of the story. I love a game with solid world building, and this game does it expertly, despite many characters and elements intentionally designed to be wacky or outlandish.

I've seen some say that this is the first RPG they've loved since Final Fantasy X nearly 25 years ago, and I think I understand the sentiment. Aside from mixed-reviewed Final Fantasy games or the more recent, yet grounded Yakuza titles, there are fleetingly few RPGs that strive for hyper-realistic graphics while creating a rich, unique fantasy world. Games like Persona 5 are great in their own way, but the overwhelming majority of RPGs these days are action-oriented, anime-styled games about Japanese teenagers, not realistic turn-based games about French adults in their early 30s. It's a trend I hope to see continued off of this game's success.

That turn-based combat is done very well, with sub-systems that really compliment each other and allows for trying out different builds in an organic way. You can balance your party's stats in different configurations, which compliments the weapon you choose to use, along with the skills and abilities you have equipped. It's very well done, and I felt like my characters were growing stronger the whole game. I've said for years my favorite turn-based RPG system is from Chrono Cross, primarily because you gain "MP" by performing physical attacks, not just a fixed pool you have to micro-manage. A similar system is used here, where you gain AP to use more powerful skills by attacking, parrying, or under many other conditions provided by unlockable attributes. You don't need to worry about saving up your best skills for a dungeon's boss, you can go all out on every enemy, and in some cases you'll have to. Consumable items can restock at checkpoints, but you'll respawn all enemies when you do so. The give and take is so well balanced. If I did have to have one gripe with the system, it's that parrying is such a vital component of the combat. Time the enemy's attack correctly, and you are not only completely shielded from damage, but if you block all hits in a multi-attack, you'll riposte with a powerful hit of your own. The window actually felt more generous than many games, but they get around this by having really odd timings between hits, and using fake-out enemy animations to trick you into parrying early. After enough time, you'll pick up the enemy patterns, but it can feel frustrating to mistime a tricky hit, especially when parrying more than anything else can be the difference between a clean win and a knockout drag.

I really think this is a fantastic game, and a strong contender for early GotY. It might even be my new favorite turn-based system, I'll have to continue with the post-game to see if that holds up. It's got great visuals, engaging characters, and is one of the few games to present opposing semi-philosophical perspectives where both felt valid and engaging to me. It's very well done and I really recommend it to everyone interested in RPGs.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance (PC)

Last month, I played the new Ninja Gaiden game, and enjoyed it quite a bit. However, I was never much of a Ninja Gaiden fan, instead my ninja series of choice was always Shinobi. Specifically Shinobi III for Genesis, which I think is one of the best games of the era. Like Streets of Rage before it, the good people at Lizardcube have revitalized a classic Sega franchise for the modern day. I was never very good at beat 'em ups though, so while I found Streets of Rage 4 to be excellent, there was a cap to much I could really enjoy it. Not so with Shinobi, which might be one of the best games I've played all year. For one this game is gorgeous. A 2D, hand-drawn style which really flexes its strength during some of the more wide-open shots. The enemies are well designed while also sticking to the visual style of the previous games. The great Shinobi "Joe" controls similarly to his previous adventures on the surface, but quickly reveals a combo system more akin to what you'd find on a hack-and-slash. I'm typically not a huge fan of such systems, but I found the combat in this game to be really fluid and engaging. The only real knit-picks I have are pretty minor things — some of the levels can be a touch too long, and the voice acting is pretty awful, but these are pretty minor complaints in the grand scheme of things.

Baldur's Gate III (PC)

While I tend to play several games in parallel, I'm one of those people where if a big name game with a very long (>50 hours) runtime releases, I can't just jump right into it. I have to find myself in the right mentality to really invest the weeks or even months to giving that game the justice it deserves. I played the first few hours of Persona 5 before putting it down for around five years, simply because I didn't feel I was ready to play it. Baldur's Gate III was another title like that. I wasn't following its development, so its release and subsequent fanfare caught me a bit by surprise. I did pick it up and played maybe 10 hours of it, but eventually decided to set it aside until I could really dedicate myself to its world.

Well, just over two years later I have return to the land Faerun to see what all the fuss is about. BG3 is an RPG based off of the Dungeons & Dragons gameplay mechanics, where you play as a party of misfit toys attempting to remove a brain parasite you find yourselves with. I elected to create my own unique character for the game, although you can instead choose to play as one of the early party members instead, making their plotline your own. These include a vampire with daddy issues, a warlock with daddy issues, a barbarian with daddy issues, or a wizard, amongst others. This game is so incredibly rich with mechanics, quests, and gameplay options that this review simply can't include all of its praises, but on the whole it is excellent. Each of your party members is given their own backstory and major side-quest which entwine with your own. Many of the choices you have to make throughout the main story will positively or negatively impact your party's personal goals, causing a constant balance between every choice you make. Being able to truly choose your own adventure is something many games claim, but very few actually accomplish, but BG3 is one of the few that actually pulls it off with excellence.

If you've ever played D&D, the combat is exactly that. The game is controlled from a — quite high — overhead camera, useful for surveying towns and environments as you explore, as well as giving you a bird's-eye view of the combat area. Positioning your characters and managing their actions, bonus actions, and abilities is all part of the dynamic here, and it's done incredibly well. Each class plays differently, the loot you get from combat offers an incredibly wide range of possible builds to your combat. It's perhaps the most versatile combat system I've ever used. Out of combat, your decisions in dialogue and interacting with the world are done by literally rolling a d20 die, where your stats and abilities can influence the result. Many RPGs are heavily based on this sort of RNG system, but they mostly hide it behind the scenes. I found it refreshing that BG3 takes the literal D&D approach to things, telling you what sort of dice roll your weapons and abilities will do.

I do have a few minor nitpicks however. The game, particularly during combat, does still have some quirks. I grew accustomed to making a quick save just before entering combat after being burned several times by turn orders not obeying what they should, players being positioned in a weird way, or my favorite, looking around and realizing one of the party members was just standing around in the previous village. It didn't happen too often, but you could tell when the stakes were against you in a way they shouldn't. Elevators and moving platforms also regularly left half my party stranded somewhere. I'll also admit that the ending has a bit of Mass Effect 3 about it, where multifaceted plotlines and intrigues boiled down to one of two binary options. There's one notable late-game decision that I dragged my feet on, hoping a third option would present itself as I didn't like either of the two roads the game was leading me towards. In the end, the game did present me with only those two options, and the one I begrudgingly chose led a character to behave in a very out-of-character fashion. These sorts of things manifested more and more as the story cleared up, but didn't lessen my enjoyment of the game really.

The choices I made probably would be described as some as "bad endings" for some characters, but they were my bad endings. These were the choices I had my characters choose, and they lived through the consequences, and became different people because of it. They all (with a few exceptions) ended up in a place not because the game forced them to be there, but because I did, because that's how I wanted to play them. It's a level of freedom that very few games even attempt to accomplish, and I think Baldur's Gate III really does deserve the hype its gotten over the years.

Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS)

I knew two things about Kid Icarus: Uprising going into it. Firstly, that the game's control scheme apparently gives you carpal tunnel if you play it for long enough, and secondly that despite that it's one of the best games on the system. I'm here to report that these statements are true on both accounts. From the director of the Smash Bros. and Kirby games comes the revival of the Kid Icarus series, which previously had only been an NES and Game Boy title (and has yet to see a fourth title). You play as Pit, an angel working directly under the goddess of light Palutena as the two of them fight against the forces of the underworld. Unlike the previous adventures which were largely platforming games, Uprising stages are broken into two distinct phases. The first, which usually is about only 1/3 of the stage, is an on-rails shooter section — think Star Fox but much more nimble and fast-paced. At the end of those sections, Pit will land initiating a style of third-person shooter section.

As I mentioned, the controls take some getting used to. The 3DS circle pad controls Pit's movement — either around the screen in the flying sections, or the direction he walks in the ground sections — and the L button fires his weapon. Not too out of the ordinary there, but instead of using the face button with your right hand, you use the style to aim the reticle on the top screen by sliding the stylus's position on the bottom, similar to using a mouse to control a cursor on a monitor's plane. A flick of the stylus also rotates the camera only in the ground sections. It's honestly a fairly intuitive system, with the downside that it's difficult to actually hold the handheld comfortably, since your right hand can't provide any support. I ended up largely playing the game on a pillow on my lap, a technique I would strongly recommend to any who want to try this out.

The combat is fun, fast-paced, and dynamic; with different weapon classes to unlock and experiment with. However, what really sets this game apart is its incorporation of the story into the gameplay itself. I think a weaker game would only introduce the story via the gaps between stages, but Uprising has a running stream of dialogue between Pit, Palutena, and the dozen or so secondary characters who make up not only your allies but the villains as well. The voice acting and writing here is really top notch, I found the running narrative to be really charming and I think it escalates the game to a much higher degree than it would otherwise. You really get to know the characters and it only makes the story beats all the better. The story itself isn't a slouch either, it really has some wild plot beats, I was constantly pleasantly surprised with the events.

Everytime a game has a huge amount of hype, I always brace myself to be let down, but I do think this is one of the best games on the system. The fact that it's a launch title makes it all the more astounding as well. There are some minor nitpicks here and there, such as the game having a hidden stamina meter while running, which is an entirely useless and frustrating addition. Aside from that though, I think this is a solid recommendation from me, although I would say you might need to play this one on real hardware, I imagine the unique control scheme wouldn't translate well to emulation.