A fun, lightweight Paper Mario style mini-RPG that stands out because of its excellent retro anime presentation. There's light strategy in the turn-based combat, and room for buildcrafting. The story is like an old cartoon. A comfort food game that feels like it's from simpler times.
A great game ruined by overtuned challenge, and a toxic troll attitude. The art, scenario, movement, dialogue, world-building: perfection. It's approach to challenging the player: obnoxious, and cruel. The "gotcha" traps, precision platforming with flying enemies, unreasonable/unfun runbacks, silk-rotting mechanics, bosses with cheap extra difficulty via minion waves, environmental hazards and basic enemies hitting for two health, charging beads to save and heal — it's just *nasty* stuff, pure and simple. Taken together, it kills the vibe. Modders have had to make it playable, which says it all — console players are left with no options. Team Cherry lost perspective, over-egged the difficulty, and ruined an otherwise excellent the game.
A short but memorable journey. It has some performance issues on PS5 that a game with this kind of lo-fi graphics shouldn't, and the "stealth" sections were frustrating and ill-conceived, but overall, a worthwhile experience.
This was a brilliant game. The faction system, the creative approach to skills, the variety of open world activities, it all coheres into something really compelling. Underrated.
This is a rare case where I'm like; this meta score is just wrong. This is as easy 8.5 or even 9/10 game — imaginative, bizarre, hilarious, and a genuinely enjoyable mini open world.
The best act of the best game.Feel the underground wind in your hair as the sail down the Echo, forgetting, remembering, experiencing. This is peak video game art, still yet to be topped.
A great sequel to an all-timer indie game. We get more mechanics, new characters, and a solar system to explore. The stress mechanic adds to the feeling of precarity, and the writing is, all always, intelligent, sensitive, and on-point throughout.
A short, fun DLC that starts off with a high stakes card game and escalates into an interesting little Imperial story. There's a great new location at the start in the shape of a dilapidated casino vessel. Revisiting Outlaws gave me a chance to see all the patch stuff too—spiced up gunplay, no more awful stealth fail states, stashing heavy weapons. Good stuff, bring on the nex!
This game is a modern classic. It blends complex, difficult themes into an intoxicating, atomised sci-fi story that's original, bold, and both generous and elusive. An intelligent and thoughtful GOTY list contender for 2024.
I was really looking forward to this game, but the busy-work and menus and crazy amount of survival-crafting all feel like a lot of work. I just wanted some fun weird driving, not to have to take a degree in the various menu systems :')
The way text is presented in conversations with multiple participants felt too hard to parse, for such a text-heavy game. Using one big speech bubble for everyone, with only minor visual cues on who is speaking, was a fundamental problem.
This game was really great. Bethesda know how to make a great gameplay loop. The shooting feels good, the base attacks are fun, looting is satisfying, ship-building is cool, and the side-quests and story missions were all on point. I loved my time with this game. There were some bumps in the road, and odd decisions – the menu-based space travel was a mystifying decision that detracted from the games core appeal. It's also feels like, to be blunt, it was made my older people with rose-tinted American nostalgia. The writing and conceptualisation of space faring humanity feels dusty and naff compared to something like the gritty Cyberpunk 2077. So, ups and downs. But as a whole, it does still work.
Ultros is an instant classic. Not only is it an audio-visual masterpiece, but it layers new mechanics upon new mechanics, and never stops expanding and developing. The endgame reimagines what playing the game means, and makes the player see the map in a whole new light. The gameplay splices together elements of metroidvania, roguelike, and sandbox—and in doing so, it becomes something thrillingly unique. Bravo, chapeau, hats off, well done!
This was a big disappointment - a cute game about tidying up and arranging that turned into a maddening frustration-fest. The puzzles seem like 50/50 coin flip on whether they are legible. Many simply don't read well enough. You can shuffle the same objects around way too much looking for the solution. When it arrives, it sometimes doesn't make sense - a random looking out-of-order jumble. The hints system often doesn't help by lacking specificity, or if it does, you still don't know why the objects were arranged that way after executing the solution. Infuriating, maddening, poor.
One of the best games I've ever played. Ingenious, confounding, funny, dark – a game built to subvert your expectations in the most delightful, unexpected, surprising ways.
This is a Very Bad Game. It desperately needs button prompts for obscure and inconsistent controls, and highlight for interactive objects, and some sign of climbable surfaces. It's just not playable as it stands. The gameplay design is truly awful, and it all reads terribly to the player. Performance is bad, too—framey, glitchy. The few promising elements—scenario, cinematography, tracking camera—are just buried beneath the torturous experience of actually playing it.
This could have been good if it weren't for the unwanted, incongruous Souls influence. The difficulty options are a mess, even after a patch. The combat feels too loose to demand proper precision and timing. A bad game, IMO.
A quite brilliant game that's built to spectacularly subvert your expectations. It takes pleasure in setting up rules, then letting you break the game spectacularly... and it's not afraid to cheat. Dark, ingenious, mesmerising, surprising. This kinda game is why I play games! 10/10
A strange, haunting masterpiece in which you explore lost footage from three mysteriously ill-fated, never released movies. It combines ingenious edit-suite film-scrubbing gameplay with unexpected modes of interaction, and some mind-blowing twists. It takes some patience, and active curiosity, to get where this game wants to take you—but boy is it worth the journey. This simply hasn't been done before. 10/10
Simple and sweet, but comes with a very expansive and demanding economy (re: character energy - you need to consume three intensely expensive coffees, two laboriously produced hot dogs and have a nap or two just to perk up after a couple of minutes of light gardening??). There are several woefully underdeveloped central mechanics, such as a pointless fishing game (you only cast! That's literally it!) and a simplistic card game (that can usually be won by playing any card you're dealt in any order). The UI is poor (illegibly small inventory icons and a pop-up text box that covers your inventory, a jumbled-up approach to organising info in your journal; no map unless you literally go to the one town map). So many strange oversights considering the lengthy early access. This game needs work. And feels like work, tbh.
