As a work of game preservation, Simogo Legacy Collection is thoughtful, principled, and as carefully curated as you could wish for. (It’s only a shame that there are no physical releases for the Switch and Switch 2 versions.) As an act of self-celebration by a great studio, it’s joyful and very much earned. The fact it needs to exist at all is a quiet condemnation of Apple’s compatibility policies, but in this case, the App Store’s loss is our gain.
Though the themes never circle to anything profound, Horses’ power still lies in its moments of discomfort. All you can do is squirm as you’re roped into atrocity after atrocity, forced to participate in a sick ritual led by a man who gets off on controlling others. He makes the rules and everyone in his orbit has to follow them — or else. Put a tool back in the shed after you use it. Eat another piece of meat even if you’ve indicated that you’re full. And absolutely no fornicating! At what point do rules become something that are only designed to give their creator a power trip?
When taking its narrative, combat, and town management separately, Octopath Traveler 0 can make for a perfectly enjoyable RPG experience. But when you consider how all of those elements come together to form a whole, the cracks become more explicit. Below the dysfunctional amalgamation of a questionably transposed narrative structure, an unjustifiably large group of characters, and an underused town-management system, there's still RPG gold to be mined.
Mesmerizing visuals, a gorgeous soundtrack, and an off-the-wall plot that's still grounded in reality all help make Eyes Out's take on dystopian fiction a satisfying, thought-provoking, and truly unique experience. Even if you're someone who finds tales of other people's dreams to be snoozeworthy, Sleep Awake is worth taking for a spin.
AILA’s unique premise has a lot of potential, but crumbles under the weight of its many moving parts. Perhaps more disappointing is the fact it never manages to say much about AI itself, nor live up to the multitude of other genre staples it insists on constantly referencing.
Between all the failed experiments built to resuscitate a once-powerful series, there are sublime moments that keep pieces of its legacy sacred. You can gather hope in its remarkable level design, its evolved item-hunting, its genre-hopping action setpieces that thrill even when the companions can’t stop yapping through the tension. There is a future in Metroid Prime 4, so long as someone is brave enough to excavate the seed from the wreckage and replant it in healthier soil.
Moonlighter 2 has its stumbles, but I don’t expect it to fall on its face on the long road to its 1.0 launch. As it’s still in early access, it has a lot of room to grow — both in terms of content and quality. I was able to reach the end of its current version in about 10 hours, and I’ve only completed about 25% of the entire game according to its in-game counter. Developer Digital Sun has also been very open to feedback and quick to resolve any and all issues, which is surprisingly an oddity in the modern era of gaming. (As a matter of fact, I had to omit a line about a stuttering issue from this very review as it was fixed in a mere matter of days after the early access release.) In its current state, Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault is not the perfect dungeon-to-shop simulator, but with developer Digital Sun running the register, it has the potential to be. [Early Access Review]
Clocking in at around five hours, The Berlin Apartment is as much a digestible history lesson as it is an interactive game. Like Dilara, I came away from it with a new perspective on the world around me, and the stories that world holds.
Thankfully, Kirby Air Riders provides the familiar magic that the original game did, turning me back into a kid on a lazy Saturday afternoon with my friends.
As it is, battles just start feeling tedious and poorly paced. I stopped caring after a few hours and accepted my less-than-stellar combat grades without any negative repercussions. Maybe it's some kind of commentary about how worrying about things like schoolwork is futile since grades don't really matter in the end. But I think I'd rather just skip class altogether, thanks.
