A dialogue game—I'd call it a visual novel, except the character models are so small you can't see anything—where your choices don't matter. Capped off with a "good ending" (that still ****) locked behind a stupidly difficult minigame. Performance on Switch is terrible, with very long load times and a lot of lag and stutter. Overall a self-indulgent diatribe about how actions have no consequences and life (and the afterlife) is arbitrary and meaningless. Hard to recommend.
I honestly don't understand the appeal of this "game." It's a walking simulator that involves a ton of backtracking through the same areas over and over. Sometimes this leads to decent running gags, but most of the time it's just repetitive. There are no puzzles to solve: someone asks you for help, you go to the place they ask you to go, and punch the thing that needs to be punched. It's linear at all times: anywhere you don't need to go right now will be blocked off. The selling point is clearly the humor, which can generously be described as "quirky." I'm more inclined to describe it as puerile, bizarre, and largely predictable. I never laughed or even smiled once, although it did get a lot of furrowed brows and "WTF?" reactions out of me.
Puzzles in It's a Wrap can be broken down into 3 steps: Figure out what you need to do, figure out how to do it, and do it. The game tells you what the objective technically is (usually get from point A to point B), but the real obstacle may be something else. To take an example from the demo, the obstacle might be "Don't be seen by the giant robot." This means that the real objective is "line up the props in such a way that you can be behind cover for the entire route." This can result in puzzles being oddly unsatisfying, where the first or second step is the hardest and the final step is just going through the motions. The closest comparison for me is The Incredible Machine. That game has you placing objects such as bowling balls and trampolines in such a way that when you start the level, everything moves in such a way as to complete an objective, e.g. "get the mouse to the cheese." It works because you don't know exactly what's going to happen until you push Play, so when it works, it's incredibly satisfying and you win instantly. In It's a Wrap, in most levels, you can tell that it's going to work by scrubbing back and forth in the timeline. I see other reviewers that complained about the platforming difficulty. It's really not hard at all. I'm an experienced but not an expert platform player (Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Shovel Knight are the hardest platformers I've beaten, with great difficulty), and only a couple of levels had sufficiently precise platforming that I couldn't win in a couple of tries, once everything was lined up correctly. I have a feeling that those reviewers found an incorrect puzzle solution and tried to brute-force it into working; I found a couple such "alternate" solutions that I quickly gave up on because I figured it wasn't intended to be that hard. The game is a little short, with 25 levels altogether, which took me about 10 hours to complete. Some levels took only a few minutes, while others stumped me for the better part of an hour. Several of them have a lot of moving parts that seem arbitrary until you figure out what you're supposed to be trying to do (i.e. step 1 is the hardest one). Overall, this is a clever and unique game that's well worth a play, but if you don't love fiddly puzzles or are not decent at platforming, you may find it frustrating.
For years, I've seen Monster Sanctuary recommended to me as "Pokémon, but with everything done right that it gets wrong." Which was a good enough reason for me to play it, but not get around to it until now. I have to say that that description falls well short of what this little gem has to offer. It starts with the same idea, but the 3-on-3 battles, the unique skill trees for each monster, the fact that every single monster is completely viable throughout the game, the Metroidvania exploration, and the much deeper combat make it a very different beast than Poké-clones like Coromon and Nexomon. To all the critics who complained that the game is too hard, they're probably trying to play it like Pokémon, just focusing on damage and damage type advantages. That will get you through the early game, but no further. After that, you need to think about team composition and synergy; you can't just dummy or bully your way through, though there is an easier difficulty level (and a harder one). There's also a ton of replay value, with several challenge modes. I will say that presentation could be better. The small damage preview bars are handy but hard to see and not always accurate. The monster designs are an inconsistent hodgepodge. And some of the music is great, but some of the music you'll be hearing the most often, like the standard combat music, is really dull. Exploration could also be smoother; swapping between multiple monsters for movement options can get tedious. Overall, a really great game that I wish I'd looked into earlier. I recommend it for any RPG fans, not just people looking for a better Pokémon.
As you play this game, you discover that there's a deep rabbit hole of secrets hidden behind the initial card game. But when you follow that rabbit hole all the way to the credits... there's nothing. You have to solve an insanely complicated ARG to get answers to most of the questions you may have at that point, or, more likely, watch a video that explains it all. And even then there are a lot of questions left, and a lot of mysteries that don't make sense. I adored the conceit of this, and I enjoyed following the path while it went. But when it went nowhere, I felt like the whole thing was a colossal waste of time. Such great ideas, so much promise, so little payoff.
A worthy extension of Portal 2's puzzles and lore. This could easily have been paid DLC, and worth the price. It's not quite up to the quality of the original games. The humor is... fine. Nothing exceptional. The voice acting is excellent, though. The story is an excellent companion piece to Portal 2. The puzzles are all very good, nothing too obtuse, very few too easy. The only problem is that they're introduced in an odd order that fluctuates weirdly between complicated and simple, sometimes putting complex puzzles that clearly expect the player to remember certain mechanics from Portal 2 immediately before simple puzzles that seem to introduce those mechanics. More than a few times, I got stuck for a bit on a puzzle trying to figure out how to make step A lead to step B lead to step C to lead to the goal, when step A led straight to the goal and I was making it much harder than it needed to be, because earlier puzzles had led me to expect that level of complexity. All in all, if Portal 2 is one of your favorite games (as I know it is for many), Portal Stories: Mel is well worth your time.
Dandara is a unique Metroidvania, in which you do not jump or even walk, but instead zip between surfaces; there is no difference between floor, walls, or ceiling. Unfortunately, while it's an interesting experience, this game has so many flaws that I have a hard time recommending it. Played with an analog stick, the game will attempt to zip you to the surface closest to the one you point to, but with some oddities. If you point at the floor you're standing on, your angle will "reflect" and point away from it. This can mean going in unintended directions when moving quickly. Frequently I found this meant diving into enemies headfirst. Your weapon takes a moment to charge. This encourages thoughtful play, which I approve of, but the level design often trends towards enemies that appear quickly and in great numbers, and move erratically. If the only trajectory you can move in is blocked, this can leave you with no way out but to block. Unfortunately, blocking (once you unlock the ability) drains your Energy quickly, so you can't do it often. Speaking of difficulty, most of the game is pretty reasonably balanced. There are a few challenging areas and bosses, but I beat most of them in 3-4 tries. The problem is that failure is often pretty punishing. One area features a macguffin that makes you backtrack and restart if you get hit even once. Several puzzles require your sub-weapons to solve, which expend Energy, which can only be refilled at save spots, which are far between. And the last boss is a colossal difficulty spike over anything before it: I died over a dozen times, barely depleting its HP by half, before I decided to turn on the infinite Energy cheat... and even after turning that on and abusing it like mad, it took me more tries than any other boss or section in the game. How about exploration? The world has some very attractive pixel art, and decent music, but navigating can be frustrating, as I mentioned above. The map tries to show you the different obstacles blocking your path, but most of them are simple lines in various shades of red or brown, and it's hard to tell what's what. It takes a long time to unlock fast travel, and you fast travel only by location name, so you have to memorize or guess the names of the locations you want to travel to. Also, I beat the game with 100% map completion but only 62% chest completion, so clearly many of them are very, very well hidden. Regarding the story: there's clearly some very deep lore here. The Salt is a unique environment, and before being ruined, seems to have had a long history and interesting characters in it. Unfortunately, none of this is ever explained in-game. Even after beating it, it remains unclear what the place was like, what happened to it, who was involved, and really almost anything that's going on. While there was a lot I did enjoy about the game, so much of it is sullied by poor design decisions at every point that I came out of it feeling very bitter and disappointed. I tried very hard to have a positive attitude about it, and did not succeed. The final boss sequence — which took me 2 hours out of a total play time of less than 11 hours — followed by a very dissatisfying ending, was the nail in the coffin.
I can't say that I understand all the hype about this game. For being an interactive narrative ("walking simulator"), there's no coherent plot to speak of, and the vast majority of it is stream-of-consciousness rambling that makes no sense at all. Along the journey of these poorly-established characters, expect to deal with scenes revolving around the life cycles of bats, extinct Pueblo peoples, whiskey factories, feral horses, incomplete text-based video games, arcane phone help lines, a modern art exhibit, an incredibly long and boring scene from a play, a small restaurant's unusual menu, and more. None of it connects to anything. None of it makes sense. The "story" has no real ending, the characters have no real resolution. Your choices are, of course, meaningless. Even the art is crude and low-poly. There's some good voice acting, though. If you're into trippy art experiments that you have to work to find meaning in, you may enjoy this. I did not.
Final Fantasy Tactics was a contender for my favorite game of all time, and this spiritual successor might just be even better. It's clearly intended to be exactly that, as it takes nearly every mechanic and a good chunk of its aethetics directly from that game. But it also adds a ton of quality-of-life and balance features, such as visible class stat growth and an answer to item spam. There are fine-grained difficulty options and a bunch of optional tutorials to make the game more approachable and/or challenging. It's not perfect. The classes still aren't balanced as well as they could be, you won't be able to unlock all the classes until you're nearly at the end of the game, and certain builds are still dominant (notably But it's still amazingly good. The plot is coherent and comprehensible, the characters are rich, and there aren't ridiculous unnecessary gimmicks like zodiac signs or laws. It's pretty much exactly what I was looking for, and I can't want to see what this studio has in store for us.
A clever little stealth platformer, where you use the elemental powers you learn to distract, evade, or eliminate enemy soldiers to rescue your fellow villagers. You can use these elemental powers in a number of different ways, unlocked as you progress, which give you a ton of different options for getting through each level. While a single play through is fun enough, the real joy is after you beat the game and can replay in New Game+ with all your abilities already unlocked. This gives you all-new solutions for solving each level more quickly and easily than before. It's obvious that this is the way the game is intended to be played, because you won't be able to fully unlock all the skill trees and equippable upgrades in one playthrough, possibly even two. Each level also has a speedrun goal, which is extremely hard the first time through and much easier with some upgrades under your belt. Only a few **** things keep this from being a 10/10 for me. The big one is that some of the game's rules aren't explained well. In particular, the villagers' wooden restraints can not only be burned with fire but frozen with ice, smashed with thrown objects, or even broken by dropping on them from high enough. Ice doesn't last as long when an enemy is encased in it. I eventually figured out how to put guards to sleep, but sometimes they wake up and I don't know why. Enemy AI is kind of inconsistent. They don't always seem to spot me at the same range and at the same angles, and sometimes they'll climb or jump to look for me but sometimes they won't. Sometimes they'll get to the spot they want to search and look around, but sometimes they'll just stare off in one direction. It makes consistent solutions hard to figure out. There are also a few collision bugs. Notably, I've had villagers teleport and stand on thin air pretty regularly, and occasionally soldiers will zip around as well. Overall this is a delightful game, and I discourage anyone from passing judgement on it too early. For the most positive experience, I recommend skipping any frustrating optional goals on your first playthrough, and come back to them in New Game+ instead. Once you have most of your upgrades unlocked, breezing through the levels is a ton of fun.
A great top-down Metroidvania with only a few flaws to bring it down. One flaw is the game's unique gimmick: Your character, and all the NPCs, are on a timer for how long they can keep going before going "Unsighted" and becoming like all the enemies you fight. (In fact, many NPCs share a sprite with common enemies, pressing this point home.) The problem is that this is a Metroidvania, which encourages exploration. And while you're exploring, the clock is ticking. It doesn't make a lot of sense to spend 2 in-game hours to find a pile of "meteor dust" to extend the life of one NPC by 24 hours, when it means 2 hours taken off the lives of the other dozen or so NPCs in the game, not to mention yourself. I beat the game in 20 in-game days, and few NPCs have that much life in them, even after gifting them the 3 doses of meteor dust needed to unlock that NPC's unique reward. Your protagonist only has about 13 days of her own, so I would have needed to use 7 of those doses on her (though there is an upgrade to make this more efficient... if you can find it in time). Fortunately, this is an option you can turn off by putting the game in easy mode. Speaking of easy mode, another flaw is balance. The combat is actually quite easy overall, as long as you get the parry timing down. Even the giant monsters that the game constantly tells you are too strong to fight, and which you should avoid, go down in only a couple of successful counterattacks. And because the game is nonlinear, it's possible to get the best weapons in the game (other than the super-powerful plot weapon) almost right off the bat. It's also quite possible to unlock movement tools that short-circuit puzzles you have yet to encounter. Speaking of that plot weapon, it's so strong, you have no need to use anything else. This is convenient, because it means you can leave your subweapon slot on something used for movement. Unfortunately, the game combines the worst of both worlds when it comes to Zelda and Metroid: You have Metroid's constant need to use your mobility tools, but Zelda's need to swap between tools in the menu, no quick-swapping. It's very tedious, and it means your guns are too annoying to bother pulling out for most of the game. Speaking of the end-game, the combat falls apart in the end. The game tries to increase the challenge with enemy spam, which is very bad for a parry-based system. You just can't parry it all. You will be hit. And you make up for that with the unlocked ability to craft healing items and temporary buffs, even in combat. This is even more tedious than it sounds; crafting requires a lengthy process of going into your inventory, using the portable crafting table, selecting a blueprint from a long vertical list (and if what you want is at the bottom, scrolling to it will take a while), selecting it, and confirming. Then if it's a buff, you have to go activate that in a separate menu. That said, most of the game was quite enjoyable once I turned off the NPC decay mechanic and took the time to explore. Fortunately, you can leave it on medium-difficulty combat even if you do that, though I personally wish it was harder; I died very few times, and most of them foolishly. The NPCs have a lot of character, the bosses and puzzles are as engaging as any Zelda game, the exploration is excellent as long as you have the time to do it, and the plot is... not amazing, but certainly servicable. Overall, highly recommended, and I'd love to play a sequel with these quality-of-life issues improved.
This game is a Soulslike, make no beans about it. Even on the easiest difficulty, it will chew you up, spit you out, and make you backtrack 10 minutes from the last save spot. For my own experience, I started off going left, because this is a Metroidvania and that's what you do, right? Well, nothing stopped me from immediately encountering a powerful enemy that killed me in about a second. I tried again, more cautiously this time, but after a short duel I still died. I decided to try going right instead, and reached the tutorial. Yes, that's right, I managed to die twice before the tutorial. I proceeded for a bit until I got to an area with strong but normal enemies with a large, hard-to-avoid ranged attack that kills you in about 3 shots. After dying twice here, each time making me spend several minutes getting back to where I was, I decided maybe the Easy difficulty was a better fit for me. On Easy, I did better, but not a lot better. I still died trying to go left, though I survived longer. I made it to the first movement upgrade, but on my last tick of health. One more hit and I would have gone back to that first save spot, and it was a long way back. At this point I decided this game wasn't any fun at all, and quit. Thank goodness I was playing it for free as part of Humble Choice. I'm not a bad gamer. I've gotten the true ending in Hollow Knight (though not the Path of Pain). I've beaten Celeste (though not Chapter 9). But this game wasn't just too hard for me, it was too punishing. The Dead Suit in this game moves so sluggishly that just catching back up to my last death was a chore. Everything about this game tells me it was only playtested by people who got really good at the game and forgot what the experience of someone trying it for the first time would be like. Maybe it gets good when you've mastered it. I'm not going to try to find out.
There are three key components to a murder mystery: means, motive, and opportunity. You spend most of the game on the first of these. You never establish opportunity: one suspect lies about their alibi and you never prove otherwise. Motive is never even touched on until the end, and it has to be spoon-fed to you because there aren't any clues at all. So as a murder mystery, it's very unsatisfying. The reviews of this game frame it as a puzzle game, but there are only about half a dozen puzzles in the game. You'll spend only a very small amount of your playtime on them. And if you're a fan of puzzle games, you won't find them remotely challenging. So as a puzzle game, it's also very unsatisfying. The bulk of the gameplay consists of talking to the suspects about each other and about the clues you find. Some of these are frustrating because they're gated behind certain other conversation options. For instance, one of the clues you find is a telescopic lens. If you've ever encountered a telescope or spyglass at any time in your life, you know what a telescopic lens looks like. And yet, when one character calls it a microscopic lens, you can't challenge them on it until you show it to one specific other character first. Several of them know what type of lens it is, but only one of them triggers the dialogue option. The game has several of these, which force you to show arbitrary items to arbitrary characters to make progress. So as an interview/point-and-click game, it's again very unsatisfying. I will say that the art, world-building, and voice acting are top notch. And the writing is also great except that the murder mystery part of it doesn't make a ton of sense. That's not enough for me to be able to recommend this game as a game, though.
A delightful little block-pushing game. The twist is that you have to create three snowballs---one small, one medium, and one large---by pushing them over snow, then stack them on top of each other. Make them the wrong size and it won't work. The game is short, but it's a perfect length for such a simple concept, with no new mechanics added... except one. There's a secret postgame which takes the basic concept and adds a new twist. I won't spoil it, but just know that "The End" doesn't mean the end. I'm docking one point because it's unclear that the postgame even exists, and I nearly put the game down without finding it. Otherwise, if you enjoy this kind of game, you won't regret picking this up and spending the couple of hours on it it will take to beat.
Drinking ruins lives. Now that you've read those three words, you have no reason to play this game. It's a hamfisted portrayal of alcoholism from the perspective **** whose parents and friends are burdened with it. It's not even really a "walking simulator." You have no agency whatsoever, aside from two very simple puzzles which will take you seconds to solve. The characters are one-dimensional, and the message is overbearing. There is some attempt at symbolism, though some high-quality fantasy art. (Why are these psychological games always in black-and-white?) However, the writers gave up on this approach halfway through the second chapter, to revisit it very briefly at the end. Otherwise it's literal and uninteresting. In a genre saturated with similar, better games, like Gris and Fran Bow, I have a hard time recommending Lydia.
A delightful puzzle game for those who like block puzzles but have played enough block puzzles. As in normal golf, your job is to get the ball in the hole. You have a set of "cards" to use, each one of you gives you a specific type and distance of shot (e.g. roll 3 or chip 2) and can be used only once. There will be golf obstacles such as water hazards and sand traps, but also block puzzle classics such as ice and conveyor belts. The result is a game both familiar and unique. There are 121 levels. Early levels are obvious and can be solved in a few seconds, but some of the later levels took me several minutes of staring and trying to figure out. I'm good at these sorts of puzzle games and found the last couple of worlds, especially the bonus levels, satisfyingly challenging. The graphics and sound are a bit of a downside. The music is ambient and not very interesting. The simple isometric graphics are sometimes confusing with regard to depth and perspective; there were several levels that looked obvious or impossible because it wasn't clear how the blocks were aligned with each other. A couple made my eyes swim after staring at them for a while. As a mobile game or at a deep discount, fans of these sorts of puzzle games should give it a shot.
Far From Noise is not, strictly speaking, a game. I've played "walking simulators," like Gone Home, and dialogue games, like Doki Doki Literature Club. This is not like those. You have dialogue choices, but each one influences no more than a handful of lines. There is no real interaction, no discovery, no choice, no consequences. It's a silent film with no action, a philosophical diatribe with no conclusion. I knew it was short--it had to be, for how little there is here--so I stuck it out to see how it ended. I was disappointed. Maybe the philosophy will resonate with some people. I am not one of those people. For me, the experience was boring and pointless. I would recommend it only if you're interested in a meditation on mindfulness more than in a video game.
Unique mechanics spoiled by inconsistent level design and an incomplete story. Grapple Force Rena is a platformer with an innovative control scheme: one control stick controls Rena's movement, while the other controls a grapple beam which can attach to any surface, similar to Bionic Commando but with full 360-degree control. You can use the face buttons to jump and fire the grapple beam, but since you need both thumbs to move and aim, you're better off using the shoulder buttons, which takes some getting used to but allows for some delightful movement once you master it. Attacking is performed by picking up enemies or objects and throwing them, so all you need is those two buttons and the sticks. Each level has a different objective, with "reach the end" and "defeat all enemies" being the most common. Unfortunately, most levels with different objectives are frustrating and repetitive, such as collecting macguffins and hauling them back to where you started, one at a time. Some are clever but more often than not I found myself just wanting to get them over with. My other main complaint is the plot. It seems simple enough at first, but there's a twist in the middle of the game that leaves it unclear what is actually going on. Unfortunately this is never resolved; apparently there was a bug in development that precluded the creators from actually finishing the story in time for launch, so they simply left it incomplete. This is a shame, because clearly a lot of imagination went into developing the setting, and you learn hardly any of it. I'd be very interested in seeing a follow-up title or remake that smoothed out the bumps and finished the story. As it was, it was an enjoyable experience that's worth a shot due to its unique mechanics, but not one I'd be eager to replay.
A terrific Metroidvania, but terrifically short. Clearly a lot of love went into the look and feel. Lunais controls exactly like a Castlevania character, especially Soma from Aria/Dawn of Sorrow once you have all the movement abilities. The graphics, while done in a colorful 16-bit style, still capture the ambience of a war-torn world (unlike Iconoclasts, where the bright aesthetics and the grimdark story are jarring). You get upgrades in the form of "orbs," each of which can be equipped to a melee, a spell, or a passive slot for different effects. The variety of combinations you can get makes switching things up a lot of fun. It's a joy to look at and to play. On the other hand, the game is quite short and easy. If you've played Hollow Knight or even Guacamelee, I recommend starting at the hardest difficulty even on your first playthrough. You can easily beat the game in about four hours, and 100% it in six. Also all those orbs are not very well balanced, with the Iron Orb and its Colossal Hammer spell being notably overpowered for how early you get them. And since you gain experience points with each orb, you're rewarded for sticking to the "best" one. The "time" mechanic isn't much of a mechanic. You have a limited ability to stop time and use enemies as platforms, but it's not that useful outside of puzzles. In practice it's more like Samus's Ice Beam. And changing the past to affect the present is really only used to remove one specific obstacle. As for the "progressive agenda" other users complained about: most of the characters are gay or bi, and the protagonist's people are polyamorous. Nothing more is said about it--there's no value statements or contrast. The villains are all male, with one sympathetic exception, and one is a caricature of toxic masculinity. I didn't even notice at the time, though; that kind of character is a villain in all kinds of works. So the game isn't perfect, but it is a lot of fun, and easily worth a purchase. I'll be looking forward to a sequel with a little more depth and balance.
An interesting take on the "walking simulator" genre, except that instead of walking, you're digging through a phone. Ostensibly this would be to find the owner's contact information and return it, but you're artificially limited in what you can do. You can send email drafts, and receive emails and texts, but not write new ones or send texts. You can send one specific message in an app. Mostly you're entering passwords (the phone's owner is shockingly bad at choosing them). I would say that if you enjoy other voyeuristic narrative games, especially Gone Home, you would enjoy this--except that this game and Gone Home, and a lot of other recent indie games, such as Mission: It's Complicated, have a -lot- in common. I got major "been there, done that" vibes. It's a cute idea but the novelty wears off quickly. It's a stale sandwich in fresh bread. Well-done, but well-trod.
There are some good ideas here, but overall this game is a hot mess. Your protagonist controls horribly, with slow, steep jumps that make basic platforming a chore. The music and sound effects are terrible, and the graphics, which are supposed to be charmingly retro, are instead bland and featureless. The overall package is reminiscent of bad 80's freeware. I can't call this a metroidvania. It seems to be almost entirely linear, and no powerups are to be found, at least not in the hour of play I put into it. There were merchants early on who could sell you offensive and defensive upgrades, but there weren't enough "souls" (the game's currency) to be found at that point, and backtracking to buy them would have been difficult if not impossible. I found a few teleporters which seemed like they would facilitate nonlinear exploration, but without a functioning map, narrative, or powerup progression, it was impossible to tell which way I was "supposed" to go. Speaking of maps, I did encounter one NPC who offered to make a map for me. I couldn't figure out how to say "yes," though. I kept talking to him, and he kept offering, but every button I could push either closed out the conversation or did nothing. The one clever idea is the scythe, your basic ranged weapon. Hold down the button and it flies forward, release the button and it disappears. If it hits a breakable block, and you keep holding the button, it will float in place and destroy the blocks. But most importantly, if you hit a wall with it point-blank, you'll get a high jump. And herein lies the problem. The jumping is horribly janky. You can only throw the scythe once during a jump before landing, and you go up and down very quickly, so you frequently have only a few frames to perform this wall jump successfully. Also you have a double-jump, which only works if used before the scythe jump, which adds even more precision. It's difficult and frustrating for no good reason. Also the fact that you can't break blocks at point-blank (you'll scythe jump instead, even from the ground) makes for some inconsistent moments and even a soft-lock at one point I reached. Even more fun: the game likes to troll you. Spikes will fall without warning. One section has ? blocks which could be solid ground, spikes, holes, enemies, or even troll checkpoints in inconvenient places, and you can't tell which one they are until you get close (although attacking them could provide a clue). Making all this worse: you have only two hit points (which, presumably, you can upgrade eventually), and the checkpoints are few and far between. Also your corpse, from your previous death, attacks you, making a repeat attempt harder. Avoid this game unless you're looking for a bad time.
Animal Crossing meets Dear Esther. Your task is to reach the top of the island's peak to be able to use your cell phone, but to do that you'll need to explore the island and talk to the other animals there to collect Golden Feathers. At least 7 Golden Feathers are required to beat the game, but more makes it easier (as well as exploration in general). I personally didn't find the islanders particularly endearing. They only have a few lines of dialogue each and only a couple are in any way memorable. The ending is brief, adding a tiny amount of background to your protagonist but nothing I would call "heartwarming." Many of the major "quests" require you to complete other objectives first, but the island is big and mostly non-linear. I missed out on all the treasure hunts because I didn't find the shovel until I was done with the game, and I missed out on all the races because I never got the running shoes. Several are tedious. Fortunately, none are mandatory; I found 15 Golden Feathers, so it's possible to complete the game twice without collecting any of the same feathers in both games. I didn't have any trouble with controls or keybinds. Z was Z, X was X, menu is Esc or Space or Enter. I sank about 2 hours into it total--1 1/2 hours to beat the game, half an hour wandering around afterwards trying to complete some of the quests. The game is cute and relaxing but I didn't see a whole lot of point to it. I don't know anyone I'd recommend it to.
A decent point-and-click puzzler, but lacking polish. Agent A is supposed to be an elite counterspy, but their dialogue comes across as goofy and self-congratulatory, more like Roger Wilco or Guybrush Threepwood than James Bond. It's also missing a lot of punctuation. The overall effect makes it feel like the story and the dialogue were written by different people who weren't talking to each other. Chapter 3 contains a broken puzzle: there's a laser puzzle where you're supposed to point the lasers at sensors, but I lucked into the right placement and the sensors just appeared out of nowhere. I'm not sure if the sensors are just invisible, or if the game forgets to check if you've made them emerge before checking to see if you've pointed them in the right direction. There's also decent amount of backtracking involved, especially in Chapter 5, which can be tedious. If you like the puzzle style of The Room or Myst, but the lowbrow humor of Space Quest or Monkey Island, this is a decent endeavor. Not worth the full price, but it goes on deep discounts often, and it's worth your time and a couple bucks.
A dating sim in which you lead a team of young superheroes on a bunch of random missions together in hopes that they'll bond. A world-eating destroyer is coming, and Earth can only be saved by the power of love, literally. The format is simple: by night, choose missions on which to send two of your heroes. You don't get to control these missions, just who you send on them and who takes point. Their bond will grow regardless, though it will grow more if they do well, and they could be injured and have to sit out a day--and you only have 12 days. Max out the relationship between any two heroes--romantically inclined or not--and pick up the magical Possibility Stone along the way--and you win. Don't, and you lose. During the day, if two of them have reached certain bonding thresholds, you can send them on dates. You can give occasional advice during these dates, but mostly you just watch how things unfold. The heroes are all "complicated" in one way or another, usually in more than one way. LGBTQ+ issues take the forefront: although two of the heroes bond over being the two gay members, the other three are either bi- or pansexual. Most also have mental health issues, such as bipolar disorder, social anxiety, and PTSD. All are handled in a sensitive, mature, positive way. The only exception is that each pair of heroes has only one script for each dating event, which means that even if they're in a committed relationship, they'll happily pursue other heroes romantically. Despite being a strictly text-based game, plenty of thought was put into replay value. There's a true ending you can get if you beat the game using all 10 permutations of heroes, which is cute and funny. Most of the stories have secret art you can unlock, either by sending a particular hero on a particular mission or by building the rapport between two heroes and having them "team up" on a particular mission. The art is adorable and worth the effort, especially the end-game art, which are all parodies of famous comic book covers, with great attention to detail. You can auto-skip any mission you've beaten on a previous playthrough (although you can't skip the dates, which is unfortunate), as well as the tutorial and the credits, so you can blaze through replays quickly. It also seems like relationships build up more easily on replays, although that may be just because I knew the best choices (and figured out that if things look like they're going badly, you can quit the game--results are only saved once you see the results screen). As of version 1.1.1, there are a few typos and grammar errors scattered throughout. I also had one experience where starting a new game put me on day 12, with no relationships built up and no MacGuffin, so I lost instantly. If superhero LGBTQ+ relationship stories with giant walls of text are your thing, I highly recommend Mission: It's Complicated. If you're looking for more of a "game" or if you think "diversity" is a swear word, pass on this one.
This is a game full of conflicts that doesn't quite know what to do with itself. It's in a 16-bit cartoony style that would appeal to children, but the subject matter is incredibly mature, dealing with corrupt theocracy, torture, and graphic death. It's a Metroidvania with lots of hidden collectables, but those collectables--materials for crafting "tweaks"--quickly add up to more than you can really use until the post-game, so there's not much incentive to explore until then. The battles are tough but also contain puzzle elements, meaning that you'll spend a lot of time dying and reloading because you got to a new phase of a fight and have no idea what you're supposed to be doing. (At least the checkpoints are generous.) Some of the big bosses have a lot of moving parts and it can be hard to even see what's going on. There is a good (if dark) story, the mechanics are solid and unique, and the controls are smooth . There are just a lot of choices that crossed a line into being not fun. I usually try to 100% Metroidvanias, but the postgame here consists of optional bosses (frustrating), exploration (not rewarding), and fetch quests you'd never figure out without a guide or hours of random wandering, so no thanks. I beat the game at 59% and even that was after collecting a whole lot of stuff that was literally useless to me.
Mechanical synergy. I slept on this game for a long time despite being impressed by the gameplay I saw at a convention, and these are the two words I needed to hear that would have made me play it earlier. Your character gets an array of combat abilities called "functions" with pseudo-programming names, like Crash() and Breach(). Initially you can only use these abilities actively, but later in the game you learn to use them as upgrades to other functions or to yourself. So, for instance, Spark() shoots a ball that fragments on impact, but if you put it on another function it will cause that function to emit damaging sparks in addition to its normal effect, or you can use it as a passive function to make it so that when you're damaged, it creates an illusory copy of you to draw attacks. As you can imagine, with four equippable functions with two upgrade slots each and four passive slots, the opportunities to come up with synergistic effects is tremendous. It turns the game from a fairly straightforward tactical experience to a complex optimization challenge. On top of that, you can also earn options to gain bonus experience by upgrading your enemies instead! If you choose not to do this, you don't have to be a strategic genius to beat the game; it's not terrifically challenging at base. If you do, though, you'll need to come up with ways to counter the abilities you've given your enemies. Other reviewers have raved about the game's art and story, so I won't go into that. Those won't sell me on a game. But the mechanics did.
This game is a metaphor. It's unclear through the actual game what it's a metaphor for, unless you complete various obscure optional challenges and get all the collectables. The highlight of the game is the gorgeous, hand-drawn graphics. The world is very pretty, and the cutscenes are reminiscent of indie animated films. It's entirely wordless except for the instructions of what button to press when you get a new ability (which happens only 3 times). As for gameplay, it's a puzzle-platformer. None of the platforming is at all challenging, and most of the puzzles are obvious on the face of them. One or two will require a bit of experimentation, but that's about it. There are also hidden collectibles, some of which are moderately challenging, but most of which just involve going the "wrong" way at a juncture. It's not at all obvious which way is right and which is wrong, so you're likely to miss several on your first playthrough. The controls are smooth, but with the game's plodding pace it hardly matters. If you want something pretty, slow-paced, and thought-provoking, you'll enjoy this. If you want something exciting or challenging, with a narrative story, you should pass.
Distinctly inferior to the fan-created AM2R, this is a decent effort but the weakest entry to the 2D Metroid series since the original Metroid 2. The linear design stifles exploration, and the early Scan Pulse ability relegates item collection to backtracking busywork and puzzle-solving. The limited enemy set quickly grows repetitive (palette-swapped stronger versions of early enemies in 2017?). Many items are locked behind secret game mechanics, and in this game there are no Etecoons or Dachoras to teach you the ropes. Bosses will take several tries to beat; they aren't hard after you've learned how to fight them, but they'll kill you in just a few hits, and you need to learn how to telegraph their attacks the hard way. "Fortunately," you can look forward to fighting most of the bosses several times, so those skills you've learned won't go to waste, but these fights are long and get monotonous by the third or fourth time. There's some effort with the early Metroids, especially Beta and Gamma, to at least vary the rooms you fight them in, but the Zetas are basically all the same and the Omega battles are identical. If you adore 2D Metroid games and eagerly snatch up anything with the name, you won't have a bad time here. If you really just want to experience a modern presentation of Metroid 2, hunt down AM2R, which is better in basically every way--better exploration, more fun (but still difficult) bosses, less repetition, even better music. Nintendo should be embarrassed that with all their resources, they couldn't do better than this.
This "game" is the creator's attempt to portray what it feels like to live with mental illness (although exactly which mental illness is not clear, either in the game or in news coverage). The protagonist stumbles through large, empty environments running into disturbing, violent imagery and confronting vague traumas in his past. The problem is that, other than an avenue for presenting a state of mind, there isn't anything here. Each "chapter" consists of walking through hallways that quickly grow monotonous. There's a shock factor the first time you encounter a disemboweled corpse or a creepy doll, but after then tenth one (no exaggeration), you just want to move on. Unfortunately, your character moves slowly; he can sprint for short distances but he runs out of stamina quickly. There are creatures that can kill you that you have to avoid, but most of them you just run away from--a task that is made artificially difficult by the horrible controls and limited stamina that you probably wasted just trying to progress. For some enemies, you have to anticipate their appearance at the first possible opportunity and then optimize the movement timing to avoid death (although such deaths usually just send you back to a nearby checkpoint). A couple of them took me several tries, and one (just one) is a mini-puzzle that involves interacting with an object in the environment that doesn't appear to be a thing you can interact with. As for plot: I played through every chapter and reached every ending, and was completely unsatisfied. One ending seems to tell you a tiny bit about a thing that happened in the protagonist's past, but the others tell you nothing whatsoever. Of course there's no real resolution because mental illness doesn't just go away. But that doesn't make the game any more engaging. I respect the creator's intent and chutzpah in putting this out there. But I can't encourage anyone to actually experience this.
A smooth, fun platforming game, but an incomplete one. Controls are simple: hold left or right to walk that way, and to climb up walls in that direction. Double-tap to run and automatically jump off ledges. Each stage has between one and three special items, and you have to collect most of them in order to progress. You can skip a few hidden cat bells, but you'll need most of them, and all the keys, to reach the end of the game. As you play, you unlock different playable cats with different abilities, but each ability is used to specifically bypass a particular type of obstacle: break through breakable walls, crawl through narrow passages, swim against currents, etc. The right cat to use is always the one you need to progress; otherwise it makes no difference which one you pick. They have no other advantages or disadvantages (except for the last one, but the difference is minor). However, the cat select screen shows 10 unlockable cats, but only 8 of them actually exist. The developers intended to put two more in, but they never made it out of beta and the developers say they never will. There's also no ending. You complete the last stage and there just aren't any more stages. The cats, marooned in this land when their hot air balloon crashed, are apparently just stuck there. My other complaint is that some of the challenges just aren't fair. You lose a life and have to restart the stage when your cat takes two hits within about 5 seconds. It's very easy to get knocked from one enemy to another and die instantly--there's no invulnerability period. There are also sections with moving platforms where you have to stand on one side to move the platform in that direction and dodge enemies while doing so; the controls aren't quite responsive enough to make these tight movements in a narrow area, so deaths here can feel cheap. A word about advertising. Skippable ads appear from time to time; they interrupt gameplay but only for a moment and never at inconvenient times. You can also watch video ads to recover your lives (instead of waiting), get a temporary floating helper (offered randomly), or become invincible after losing two consecutive lives in the same level. The last of these is extremely unbalanced, as it's basically a free pass for the whole level. If you use more than two at a time, you have to buy a $1 IAP (no more free uses from watching videos). Unlike other games with similar "mercy" power-ups, you aren't penalized in any way for using them. The game is good enough that I'll look out for an improved sequel. Even as it is, it's a fun romp with only occasional frustration.
Bejeweled meets Scrabble in this excellent puzzle game. But it's more than that: each level has survivors placed in it, and your goal is to clear enough blocks, by creating words with them, to let each survivor reach the bottom of the screen. There's even a plot that unfolds as your protagonist descends the ****, meeting with other survivors and finding clues about why the building is collapsing in the first place. The levels have different layouts, as well, filled with obstacles such as rock (destroyed by matching adjacent blocks multiple times), fire (needs to be cleared twice and spreads to other blocks), and conveyor belts (slides all blocks and survivors in the row to the side). Some levels mix up the formula as well, such as needing to match every letter in the alphabet, make matches that include bananas (for the chimpanzee survivor, of course), or even replace the letters with numbers and require you to add them up to reach a certain total. There are over a hundred levels, but I never got bored getting a 3-star score on each, and am even going back to complete the special "banana" challenges in some of the levels (such as forming an 8-letter word or a palindrome). The obstacles in each level are the same every time you play it, but the letters are random, so there's no one "perfect" solution to find. The Android version has some bonus levels as well. Two minor caveats, though. First, the difficulty level is kind of swingy. Some very late levels are quite easy and can be completed, with a 3-star score, in literally two five-letter words. There are, however, some extremely difficult levels that took me many tries to get 3 stars. Most notable are the levels where you have a time limit instead of a limited number of turns; these timers are -very- short, and you'll get a 3-star score only if you spot long words or ones with multiple score multipliers very quickly. Second, the game's dictionary is a bit odd. It's missing several words that aren't all that uncommon, has a few modern internet lingo words but not others, and even contains a handful of proper names. It's very frustrating to spend a survivor's special ability or some precious time to create a word that the game inexplicably doesn't recognize. Those are minor issues, though. If you enjoy spelling games, I can't recommend Highrise Heroes highly enough.
The horror movie theme is misleading--this is a surprisingly deep and challenging puzzle game. Players must guide the killer (whose identity changes in each chapter) to murder each victim and reach the exit, but the killer can only move in straight lines and stops only when reaching a wall or victim. The main gimmick is that the victims must be killed in a particular order in order to reach all of them and the goal, and often have to be manipulated by scaring them into running away or though various level mechanics like telephones and light switches. There's a lot of play value here. Each "movie" introduces one or two new mechanics, simple but with profound mechanics. Turning the lights off prevents victims from seeing you and running away, disables deadly electric fences, and lets you kill cops with impunity (but watch out for the laser sights of the SWAT team). Victims can see you past low walls. You're not allowed to kill cats (this is a movie, no animal cruelty!), and they run away from ringing phones instead of toward them. And so on. There are ten regular movies plus two bonus movies, and they get hard. Very hard. I play a lot of these sorts of games, and I had to use the hint feature two or three times in the bonus levels. But they're all fair and doable. There are no surprises, no random behavior, and no skill or speed required. With persistence, experimentation, and thinking outside the box, you'll eventually be able to clear every level. My one gripe is the in-game money feature. You get a few coins for clearing a quick minigame at the end of every level, and these are used to unlock new kill animations and new killers. The problem is that earning money is slow and the rewards are expensive. Since this is a puzzle game, there's little replay value, which means that most of the animations and killers will remain locked by the time you complete the game. There's a "grind" movie which just lets you play the minigame over and over again to earn money, but it's incredibly boring. Fortunately, the unlocks are all cosmetic, and you can find unlock codes online, but still, it's paced poorly for someone who just wants to sit down and play the game. Highly recommended for puzzle game fans, especially those who want a real challenge.
An engaging puzzle game in the same vein as Lemmings, where you have small, mostly helpless little creatures who wander back and forth as you try to guide them to the goal (a spaceship). There are only three types of critters but an array of environmental tools and hazards--the usual puzzle game suspects of lasers, electricity, lava, monsters, etc. The gimmick is that your only form of control is to "slash" the environment with your finger and realign the resulting halves. The game isn't very long--only a few dozen levels, all but the hardest of which can be completed in a couple of minutes--but there's a good range of challenges. Not many are really hard (and the hardest ones are post-ending bonus levels), but few are completely trivial. The game does a good job of making you think about the limited tools in new and creative ways. It won't hold the hardcore puzzle enthusiast's attention for more than a few hours, but they're quality hours. Highly recommended.
A fantastic puzzle-solving game. If you've found games like Monument Valley to be too easy, give Tetrobot & Co. a try. The game revolves around the placement of different types of blocks, each of which has different properties. Iron blocks are pulled by magnets and can retain an electric charge; lasers will burn wooden blocks but pass through glass ones, etc. The challenges start off easy enough but get fantastically challenging by the end, especially if you want to collect all the optional Memory Blocks and score 100%. There's a small number of fun and challenging achievements, too (and one super-annoying one). Every single challenge is fair and straightforward, no hidden tricks or secrets; everything is placed right in front of you to figure out. Every new mechanic is introduced in a way that guides you into learning it in an obvious way, then gives you more and more complex ways to make use of that mechanic. (With one tiny exception: there's one puzzle that requires you to discover a mechanic that you won't have been forcibly introduced to by the time you reach it. But it's just one.) There are a couple of sections that require a couple of quick taps to move Psychobot while the blocks are still falling into place, but otherwise time or speed are never a factor. I was able to get 100% without the help of any guides or anything, so it's definitely doable--but there were a couple that I had to stare at and fiddle with for a while, put the game down, then come back to later. Perhaps my biggest complaint is that solving an entire level can sometimes take a while, and there's no way to suspend your progress mid-level. If you solve a puzzle by trial and error and then have to quit before finishing the rest of the level, you'll have to figure it out again when you come back. If you want a brain workout, I can't recommend Tetrobot & Co. highly enough. If you want a relaxing game where you can just let things flow, this isn't it at all.
