storageheater

It seems like a sweet game and they did attempt to solve some of the issues but everything is a compromise on the Switch. The zoom is unwieldy, it's hard to move plants, I got a game over by trying to get the plant out of the label screen and hitting a button the UI claimed would "return" the plant delivered it to the customer. Don't take this as a fair criticism of the game, just that it's not the right medium for it. I'm glad I got it in a very good sale, but it's of no value at all.

In short, this is Fantasy Life for the 3DS, warts and all. Every new positive thing is counterbalanced by an old negative thing, or the absence of an old positive thing. A fun cosy time on the 3DS, an outrageous piece of overpriced nostalgic slop on the Switch 2. I had fun, but to see a game that relies exactly on the same music, the same art, the same bland procedural generation, as a 3DS game from 2014, and to know that we accept less and less, is just plain weird.

I really should preface this with: I'm not a fan of Marvel but I really liked the first game. But this one seemed held together with string, with some deeply unenjoyable load times and a frustratingly long unskippable post-level roundup stat screen. Intro and outro cutscenes were skippable when you replay levels, but slow scenes and pans within the level were not. The map was awkward and not terribly legible - unlocking the Gwenpool missions helped because finally there was a fast travel point that you could see more clearly than the Map Points (the decision to obscure those with a small green tick like all the other icons is quite funny though,) but I'm curious as to why they were designated fast travel points at all. I actually did enjoy the cast, and I'm sure it's my own unfamiliarity with the franchises but often I'd load into a level with no idea of what my characters could do and how to interact with the game's puzzles, and the game was very very very unpredictable with its nudges and help, often simply trying to talk about another nearby interaction, and covering the minimap as it did so. On top of that, there were just too many powers per character, and having every button have tap, double tap and hold powers did not work well. The fact that Iron Man would go into an incredibly long transform animation every time I tried to switch was infuriating and I dreaded having to use him at all. The writing was pretty solid, but again let down by the game simply not being good enough - repetitive and overlapping dialogue meant much of it was annoying in their effort to bring the city to life. Stan Lee sounded absolutely terrible and having him constantly bleating in most of the levels was dire. He'd start calling for help anytime you were near, and the levels are not big. It could be relentless. There were some inspired collectables and fun minigames, but there were some really terrible ones as well, and with no way to track most of them without just exhaustively scouring the whole map, it felt so dated and tiresome. I'm sure there's a lot of joy to be had if this was the only game you had over the summer, but I'm pretty sure that even older Lego games worked better than this did, and I sure hope more recent ones got it back under control. Would not recommend.

I was actually looking forward to this, as it looked a treat and I've really enjoyed similar games like Chicory, Tearaway and Psychonauts 2. So, the good: it's fun enough and pretty enough, I mostly liked playing it. Since you can't skip the cutscenes, here's the main core of why it left such a bad taste in my mouth: it's so shallow that it's actually quite loathesome. Opening with a vindictive display of contextless bullying - our perfect, smartass, confidently quipping all-American jock is cruelly victimised by the fat ugly kids for... drawing? This game posts on Twitter about how they're the real minority, and it's really giving "forgotten 80s cartoon that sells a product range" energy. A key Sad Moment is just your character crying about a 2D blob he met briefly an hour ago, and it does some baffling work regarding oil pollution and how it relates to how sad and abused you are. The merging of story and gameplay events is so unconsidered and careless that somehow everyone is shocked at the end that you have a magic paintbrush. Still, for a game so clearly focused at children, it then seems bonkers to have things like exposed electricity pylons be completely safe. Almost as if "it's for kids" is a lazy excuse for not trying very hard. I was a bit surprised at how restricted the arty bit actually is, but it makes more and more sense as you play. It's extremely cool that you design genies that come to life, and I liked playing around with it, but you're just adding a few presets to an existing template and they get messy and blobby pretty fast. I often had to delete the entire painting just to have a chance at seeing exactly what detail they wanted me to add, and very quickly stopped customising my Genies at all, as they would all crowd art scenes and render them hard to see even before I'd covered them up with my stickers. Still, Genie interactions were really delightful and although I'm moaning a fair bit about this aspect, I think it works. It could've been glorious, but what we have is successful and quite pleasing. It feels like a lot of compromises on a budget, which in fairness probably describes most games. It feels like an idea that underpaid some writer to justify its existence, which again probably describes most games. I just wish it had come to a compromise that wasn't so insipid.

Anodyne 2 looks and feels like one of the most intentionally artificial things I've seen in a long while - the opposite of seamless, its boundaries are made extra-visible and its structures are playfully implausible. With abrupt changes in dimension and playstyle, and disturbingly designed characters presented in obscure ways, this game is almost demanding you stop looking at it, to accept what it's saying first and foremost, and then find a new way to look at it. And then it removes a new boundary, and another, and then it places more and more artificiality on top of itself. It's quite dazzlingly silly, sometimes. I think that the decision to make its central plot far clearer than Anodyne 1 was smart - it's still patched together from the things people worry about in dreams, but the choices they make about feeling, pain and forgetting were loud and clear, and the characters get to be a bit bolder and funnier. And what I give it most respect for is how deeply it argues for and against its options, and the people who choose one way or another are not lesser for it. And more respect still for - having argued both sides - not being ambiguous in its own ultimate choices. It is sometimes a little too retro in terms of gameplay, but never in an obnoxious way - it's a tiny team, rather than a team who is trying to make things less fun. I think if you're past the visuals and ready to give it a go you're barely going to notice. And the sound is always either lovely, or appropriate. All in all it feels like a really personal, thoughtful experience - is it weird to feel strangely proud on the behalf of the developers?

I think this does an admirable job of bringing the same surprise and wonder that the base game did. But I wish they were more clear about what the Reduced Frights option did, because when I got to the relevant section, I was frustrated and annoyed and ultimately bored. It's also especially punishing to people who are bad at that section due to all the extra journeying you have to make, so I just gave up and watched someone else finish it. And it was such a joy! And then I learned I could've made the game more accessible to myself and finished it alone, but it had never crossed my mind because being frightened was not the problem. So it's a very bittersweet 8: a splendid expansion, but while accessibility options are nice, please don't treat them as a mystery for players to work out. I don't personally feel cheated by not playing about half of it for myself because it was clearly a fabulous creation, it just absolutely wasn't for me.

A pretty decent installment in the series, I genuinely do like the automated options but it does feel slightly hard to categorise as a result, and I can see why some people loathe them. I love it for things like the Item World, but on the occasion where your AI can't complete a level it does raise questions about what it's for, and what the gameplay actually is. Likewise it's fantastic for level and resource grinding... but then why am I leaving my Switch on for hours at a time while I wait for things to finish off? There's more grinding than ever, therefore I'm interacting with it less than ever. It's difficult. I'd think I'd quite like to see a true idle game spinoff, just because I'd like to turn the switch off. Adding 3 extra 0's on to every number is quite a funny idea, and it probably intentionally messed up with the sense of progression so that new players weren't turned off by the usual level 1 plinking stage, but I found it offputting to start with and very distracting and hard to read throughout. The first third of the plot is just sequentially introducing each cast member through some of the worst and most repetitive dialogue, and at no point is anyone surprising enough or funny enough to justify that amount of work. It does warm up a bit to an okay Disgaea plot by the end, but it's so rough and lazy it's almost insulting. I don't get the vibe that this was just a bit of fun silliness, it felt churned out resentfully and I almost felt bad for being responsible for them having to keep making Disgaea. Everything about the main character's motive and "family relationship" felt alien, like it was a summary of something else that I was meant to have recognised. I'm sure it's a trope that some people just understand and engage with, and I'm glad some people are liking it. But it really annoyed me. And finally, I'd still be playing it but after about 50 hours it began freezing constantly and I went from genuinely not caring about the performance and visual options, to just deleting it. A huge shame really, though I am assured by the internet that this barely happens to anyone, so it's probably still worth getting. Perhaps don't buy the DLC before you reach the postgame though.

It looks and plays like a fun platformer. I just wanted to get that out of the way: I enjoyed it, despite the high price for what it is. It's very accessible (although honestly the awkward and padded fetch quests were occasionally poorly signposted, but talking to characters in town usually meant they'd direct you.) It's just very odd and mediocre. Its bloated array of obsolete upgrades is overdesigned and underutilised, and they fail to disguise the fact that almost all of them are just ways to cross barriers. The map has a surface bit, and some underground bits that are colour coded, that's all of its identity. I'm sure it won't disappoint younger players or anyone looking just for a more simple platformer, but it's not even the best Shantae game by a long way - and in terms of being a "metroidvania" it is right at the bottom of the barrel.

The first ten minutes of this game: oh my GOD it's so ADORABLE I'm gonna save it to play with a friend then oh my god i love how the powerup things are split unevently it's like having to share when you're a kid and everyone's got different **** going on and the art and music are fabulous then oh wow it has a plot too, neat and it's funny and silly with some wonderful one-offs and supporting cast At this point I'd give it 10 out of 10 then it turns out that playing with someone else is a letdown cause half the time it's taken you ages to get to the edge of the screen that isn't progress so you have to trudge across to the other side, and then that's not it either, and the perspective and art style can make it really unclear about what's a wall or entrance and sometimes it's just broken and your save file is now corrupted so you reload from the thankfully great bookmark system and then cutscenes aren't skippable, which is hilarious because of the amount of times we skipped dialogue as both of us are pressing buttons (apart from the times Nessa's dialogue can only be advanced by Nessa) and movement is a bit slow and the camera moves a bit floatily and... It's absolutely a delight, but it's just very rarely *fun*

It feels like it's learned from mobile games about how to dripfeed gameplay mechanics to sell back to the player for real money. As if they created a slightly less satisfying game on purpose so you'd like it more when they offer you a way to get round it. The way this game implements difficulty is always at odds with what I'm expecting. There's times where the game will rush so quickly to give me a hint that it actually curtails my exploration, interaction and fun. I'll still be at the "breaking everything for goodies" stage and it'll solve the puzzle for me. Then other times it's a difficulty spike out of nowhere. It seems like it's always giving you ways to mitigate the actual gameplay, which kind of influences how I feel about the gameplay, as if perhaps they weren't sure it was alright on its own. Combat seems like what happens when you play the game badly, so you get the ability to evade lots of it. Failing the puzzle makes turnbased combat your punishment, but you can pay to make combat deal with itself anyway, and you'll have hundreds of powerful healing items. You get items that find hidden items for you. The hint system is almost always a clear indicator of what to do, if it hasn't already forced you to go the direction it wants you to. Your weapons break...occasionally. Why? You get loads through finding boxes, it's really cheap to buy more, and I don't believe anyone has ever run out. Is the purpose of this to force the player to have 20 identical boots in their inventory? While you can only carry 3 boots and 3 hammers into battle, you can change them out at any time during battle. Why have the "only carry 3" thing if you're actually carrying all of them? I don't dislike the mechanic, I just think it's bloated nonsense that thankfully never matters. I always dragged my heels when it came to the boss battles, they were such a low point I'd often put the Switch to sleep as they started up, to deal with later. That said, it's a fun game and I really enjoyed it! But even though the good stuff is enough to make it worth playing, there's not much to say about it* and the only thing I'll ever remember is how much I hated the combat and how weirdly the systems in it work against each other. *it looks nice, it controls well, it is often funny, you collect lots of things.

If you've played big RPGs recently and felt like you were staring at the minimap as you trek from quest marker to quest marker, Eastshade offers an alternative. It's a gorgeous and detailled island with a couple of towns and plenty of curious landmarks you'll want to visit, and using them to navigate around with its map is just a delight. Your primary goal - to paint pictures of the landscape - constantly keeps you aware of your surroundings and on the lookout for new things. To access certain places you'll need to please quite a lot of people in an impressively organic chain of events. The NPCs are lively and unique, and won't waste your time with pages of wacky dialogue and backstory, and the excellent quest log means you won't lose track of what you're doing. That said, the PS4 port is quite janky. If you're the sort of person who looked up early Red Dead Redemption glitches because they were hilarious, but also wanted a light combo of Myst and Skyrim, this is heaven. Crouching before talking to people often results in unexpected silliness, and certain dark locations were very unclear about whether they were full of really stylish contrast or just dimly lit, as it changed depending where I stood. It also won't win any awards for NPC programming or animation, but none of that detracts from the actual experience for me.

I'd bought this game on the PS4, which I don't feel is the ideal medium for this type of game, though I did enjoy it there. So I thought I'd enjoy it even more on Switch because it's perfect for a handheld in short bursts. I'm going to assume you know what shop/crafting games are like and just say "it's a decent one of them", and move straight onto what the Switch version is like in comparison with the PS4: The touchscreen controls are fine, I think it helps that the Switch just seems to have a very good touchscreen generally, but Holy Potatoes makes good use of it. But if you're after a complete touchscreen experience, why not just get it on mobile? The Switch is quite heavy, for me using the touchscreen is a gimmick that I don't find comfortable. Using the buttons, the input lag on the Switch is often a second or more, and the way they've mapped them is a direct downgrade from PS4. "Select Smiths" and "Smith Notifications" are not the same button like it is on PS4, "Notifications" is mapped to the - button on Switch and that is an incredibly annoying one to make so important. It's not unplayable by any means, but it's those things that mean I pick it up less and less. Also I'd just like to say that having to reposition your blacksmiths every single time they come back from shopping or exploring is a constant hateful extra step and I can't for a minute understand why the game doesn't just remember what slot you had them in in the first place. Combined with baffling mistakes like sometimes it has a menu shape that doesn't correspond with the directional inputs (the hexagon shape behaves like a square, are you kidding?!), I feel like the Switch version has ended up with more foibles overall than I can take. I notice in the NintendoLife and NintendoWorldReport they both say the game is uncomfortable to play, which is interesting cause I assumed it was cause I've got a lot of arthritis going on. It's like reverse alchemy - a game I like, perfectly suited to the Switch, given just enough problems that I'll never enjoy it.

The first half of this game is a delightful little farming sim with crafting, quests, fun characters and the lightest of RPG elements. It makes the transition from mobile pretty well - the plants take a few minutes to grow but it rains frequently and that will speed it up tremendously. You have to sleep every so often to refresh your energy, but these features make enough sense that it doesn't feel like you're always skirting round what used to be a huge framework of in-app purchases. Working out what to do next is largely a relaxing and pleasant time, and there's always something to forage for. It looks utterly charming, and feels pretty good for the most part. Features such as fences don't seem to serve a purpose and the gates aren't terribly responsive, and generally it's slightly irritating to try and get round too many trees and obstacles so it doesn't feel as fun to decorate my farmplanet as I'd like (add the tiny chicks that block your path, and it makes some things infuriating.) Ideally my review would end there, and earlier today it basically did. However, the end half of the game is a totally different story. Obtaining wool is especially terrible (the trick is to starve your sheep!), and important stuff that unlocks a late character who herself brings a host of features seems to be both random and not explained ingame. These features might've had a use if you weren't just about to finish the game, but that's just how the last few hours go. All my quest logs are at 100%, but the game still seems to think I should head to the mines to look at that strange cleared out section again, and the final post-credits thing it did was give me explosive potions that I can't use. Maybe that means something and I missed a huge secret! But there's nothing to go on. On top of that, it's crashed several times and I was scared to feed my chickens because eggs often result in a long, alarming screenfreeze (i've since learned you have to change your equipment to be allowed to move again) Trophies are widely reported as glitched - the ones that work seem quite generous and respectful of your time, but who wants to grind for hours on that gamble?

Note, I am reviewing the demo, and I strongly urge you to try it out for yourself. Perhaps the demo is not representative of the real game, maybe there's like a physics engine that hasn't been fully implemented. It's a decent price for 300 puzzles, it's the usual picross format, no real complaints or anything new to say there. If you've done all the other picrosses in the world and want a new one, this is more picross. However, once I had played for a little while the game began to lock up, I had to keep exiting the puzzle and the program to get it to respond. Then on the 11th puzzle, 20x30, it's so strangely formatted that it's virtually impossible to read the numbers and it seems the boxes are so small that it won't show the X's in unused squares - though it does register that there is something there preventing you from then filling it in. There's a huge amount of empty space around the puzzle and no zoom option, so it's unbelievably wasteful and thoughtless. I was playing undocked, so I put the Switch back in the dock to see it on a proper TV and hilariously the layout is so bad that it's almost as unreadable there too. But lets face it, even if that had fixed it this is a game you don't want to play on your TV anyway, so the fact it's bad there too is just bonus sadness.

This would've been a day one purchase if it hadn't seemed to function rather as a patch in the vein of a modest Terraria update rather than an actual new game, so when it was on offer at half price, I thought that was a reasonable request. The good: it's slightly more structured than the previous, with a pleasing system of gods in each realm to build up favour for as you do, admittedly, exactly the same as in the previous game (which is kill an endless series of varied monsters with interesting abilities that you can then use to create the perfect team, and repeat). But more carrots per stick never hurt, and more things to go and look at and fiddle are usually welcome. I'm about to complain a lot, so I should clarify: I enjoy this game, I hope one day they make a game that hits every one of their goals and really shines. The bad: on Vita the lag is extraordinary. When you've been playing for a short while movement is like ploughing through treacle (made worse by the fact you can get a 2x speed upgrade that kicks in once all the monsters on a level are dead, and then it feels borderline too fast but it makes the slow gluey speed even harder to bear), and even though fights are incredibly basic it gives the impression of millions of calculations are going on in the background at any one time: flickering sprites, damage numbers not displaying, you have no idea really what an attack's done until the computer's caught up. I find myself mashing the X button because there's just no feedback on what's progressing the information onscreen and I just want it to hurry up. Perhaps it's smooth as butter on PS4, a big plus is that it's crossbuy. It's also potentially great on the PC. But for me at least, the kind of long turnbased grind is ideal for booting up on a handheld and so that's where I'll always try and play it. And if the Disgaea team managed to put those beasts on the Vita (and the DS!) I do expect a little more out of it. [Updated 24th Sept, I started to progress past the end of the Main Quest (that is, everything after level 40, Nether Realms etc) and it now crashes whenever I enter a realm, which is quite fab if you consider that the main quest is viewed largely as a tutorial, in those terms I've essentially paid for a demo. However I'm not reducing my already mediocre 6 to a lower score, as there was still a fair bit of game that I spent a fair amount of time playing.]

This game is sadly exactly what you expect from a budget pinball+RPG with mediocre reviews and not a single speck of inspiration more. It's a charming, appealing idea, but the developers deliver the exact minimum they can possibly get away with. The physics seem wonky and the gameplay areas are quite basic, not wild and imaginative places to rack up points. Text interruptions to the pinball action are common and very intrusive, it's worth noting that an actual pinball game uses level design and lights to direct the player without interrupting them. In short, it really does not deliver a good pinball game, it delivers a pinball-like game, more Peggle or Breakout - fun enough but not polished. The bosses are a joyless slog though. The RPG elements are formulaic and adequate - some of your pinballs has unique powers, and that does give a couple of them a surprisingly strong identity. There's easily twice as many characters as there should be though, which means switching characters for a specific skill is a real pain, and (in keeping with the theme of not making use of potential) there isn't enough made of the potential of the unique powers. The story is of no value, but at least it's voice acted, which helps in the tiniest of ways to sell it as an RPG. Jarringly, hiring the Hired Hands characters adds them to the main plot but since you can only buy one every 3 levels, some of them are going to enter at the end but behave as if they've been there all along. Obviously their purpose is just extra lives, but the way they're meshed into the RPG aspect is clumsy and bloated. The experience gained from playing the campaign will get you to level 7, but if you want the final character (and all the trophies) you'll have to repeat levels or grind the arenas - pointlessly - til you reach level 10. For some reason one of the trophies is "play for 10 hours" and it's quite telling that only about 5% of players ever got it. When it's on sale it's about £3 and I think that's about ideal - I'm very critical of it (because it could be so much more than this. And because it's obviously really flawed), but I don't regret getting it at that price. If you're still curious (or have a kid to entertain) it's worth it.

It's alright, but I wasn't engaged enough to care about the difference between picking up chewing gum and picking up chewing gum with the correct object anymore. A few screens later, when I got to the "light switch puzzle", where you walk into a dark office and behave like light switches are incredibly rare and unpredictable (and impossible to flick with one hand) I realised I hadn't been enjoying it enough to carry on. I do wish I liked it more, it's charming and nicely written and it'll definitely please the right kind of person.

This is a well polished low-budget puzzle game with 15 proper stages and a few smaller challenge stages sprinkled around. It's simple enough - swap tiles on a scrolling board so that your character can constantly progress, picking up treasure and defeating enemies along the way. Challenge stages can have you trying to deal with something on a fixed board, or puzzling out how to defeat a larger boss, though while I appreciate the variation I didn't often find them fun, even on easy mode. Bolted loosely onto this is an RPG mechanic where you exchange gems for better equipment, but it's really inessential - you can completely ignore it and still puzzle your way through the game, or you can upgrade skills and equipment at some length. There's six characters, 18 skills, assorted armor and weapons and status effects, so there is some variety there, but the levels are so similar it doesn't tempt you to replay it with a new character. Should you wish to max out your equipment to boost the game's longevity, the process of grinding isn't varied enough to remain enjoyable. Ideally, you'd have been able to switch characters at will, but they're locked to a save file. Replaying the game six times just to see what they do is a big ask. Frustratingly, my second save file (the one where I used the very easy "jump anywhere, let your dog collect treasure for you" one) was subject to a horrible glitch where about half the time the game stopped responding to touch controls. I went back to my first save and it remained fine, so that's something. Also, any google of "swapquest" brings up the widespread glitch that is that some crystals simply do not work - you need to collect all 12 - and one of them requires you to play the level up to 15 times for it to release (for me it was 8 times. All other crystals release just by tapping them or killing the red enemy holding them, they're not meant to be a big ordeal.) So, overall, it's a nice idea, presented extremely well, but it has a surprisingly short shelf life for a puzzle game and the RPG elements don't truly cohere with it.

I considered writing more but it seems no matter how well you explain your viewpoint on this game, criticism is considered "unhelpful" so I'll just go with my own personal viewpoint boiled down to its core: I very rarely found myself thinking "this is fun."

It's clearly a good game with neat, tricksy little puzzles, the price is excellent but make use of remote play if you absolutely must play it on the Vita. I'd give it an 8 or a 9 I reckon for what it is and what it asks you to pay. That said, if for some reason you only have a Vita and don't have a PS4, iPad or Smartphone to play it on, I think it's alright I guess, if you're playing it while watching TV or something. So my "7" is for Vita owners who live in a bubble only. If you can buy the game on another format, consider this a 5. The load times are amazing - the game loads up each area in full so as long as you never die, you can seamlessly walk through three entire screen-sized rooms before the next loading screen. When I first booted it up I actually thought it had crashed, it simply doesn't tell you anything's happening after you press Start for so long. Also as it's turnbased, each time you move all the enemies move. The lag on this would make you think you were playing chess against an AI from the 1980s, but actually the enemies follow set paths of three or four steps so I do not know what is happening behind the scenes there. This means you can easily overstep or find it unresponsive. My favourite moment happened at the end of the first bonus set of puzzles, where I'd completed the final level and only had a corridor to walk through to reach the exit. As you walk down it an enemy triggers and starts to follow **** since there was no way to progress down the corridor I had to suicide on him. The game reloaded me at the start of this corridor again. Yes, it had a checkpoint AFTER the final puzzle but before the four steps I had to walk down towards end of the game marker. On the one hand I appreciate that they didn't force me to play the entire level again, but that checkpoint is clearly there because they knew there was a problem with the final bit of the level loading. It is a shambles. Oh the Hint system is terrible on Vita too, on the grounds that if you choose Hint, it simply reloads the level but now adds a red guide line. If you wanted a hint later in the level or were just curious about whether it charged you as much as the iphone version did, you're rewarded with loading times and annoyance. But at least it's free!

It's pretty darn light in terms of puzzles, though they are satisfying enough to plough through (in 4 hours tops by the way, "6 hours" is an excessively kind overstatement) - controls seem fine, excellent attempt to acknowledge colourblind people and the art is nice and clean, and while it delivers all the moving parts of your colourwheel arsenal quite briskly, it still takes quite a lot of the game up by doing so. Very few of the puzzles demand great hand-eye coordination, so while timing is sometimes important it is still very accessible, it doesn't punish you for being a bit cack-handed. All in all a decent quality puzzle game for low to medium skill level puzzle fans. I'm not going to count the rest of this against my score despite it being a tirade of hate, because it's entirely superfluous to the actual game: It also has a terrible narrative (that "touches on themes of love, loss, existence and remorse") bolted on in a way that's really front-and-centre and you can't skip it, since the developer put all the narrative sections as voiceovers that play in extremely long and time-wasting corridors. So even if you mute it, you've got a long empty corridor to walk down. May as well listen to it, you don't have anything better to do. It mentions "research" and "universities" a lot so you know it's profound, and nothing wins awards like indie games that make you think. If you're wondering how much it touches on themes of love, loss, existence and remorse, it touches on them this much: "Do we all see the same colour? Makes you think, right? You should look at things sometimes. I wish I'd sorted out my work/life balance." That's technically a spoiler, because that is exactly as far as the game takes these themes. Sorry. The "collectables" have very few good things to say about them. There's a couple of them that demand you do a puzzle slightly differently for "challenge" but the majority ask you to press against the wall to find a bit that's actually hollow then walk down a narrow stretch to collect your thing, or drag a box slowly down a narrow stretch to collect your thing. Some demand you play entire zones again but with a new colour you didn't have first time to access the blocked-off collectable. (as a bonus, I just checked the Steam page for this, the blurb lists this as a Key Feature: "A world full of lively characters to talk to, each with their own personality and story." Let's see, you meet a miner behind some rocks, he says "i am trapped" and "thanks for saving me," and you meet a fisherman by a lighthouse who says "I wish we knew why the lighthouse doesn't work" and "the lighthouse works!" and "did you fix the lighthouse? the ships can now find us because that's what lighthouses are for", the sailor says "you can ride on my boat" or something, and it's true you do ride on his boat, and there is a woman by a waterfall who says "there are caves behind the waterfall but I wouldn't go there." Oh there's a dude in the university who says "you shouldn't be here" but since he is actually just background flavour you sail right past him in search of the end.)

For the first half it's a very simple and largely linear game that anyone can pick up - a few control issues aside it's a very gentle throwback with no puzzles or anything. Then it adds some of the worst old-school ice physics I've ever seen in a game and all my goodwill goes out the window. There's quite a lot going for it, and I'd give it 8/10 in other circumstances, but since the price is twice as high as I would have liked - and the ice is just so bad - that it gets a 4. For what it's worth I used to love Head over Heels. Wait for a sale.

First and foremost: Do you like old science fiction radio dramas? Do you have audiobooks or listen to them on the radio? If yes, then this game will delight. If no, then it probably shouldn't trouble you further. I absolutely love old scifi radio shows and it's a very beautiful game, so really this ticked a lot of boxes for me. I can see the criticism that having everyone represented as light was lazy but I think it's done incredibly stylishly, and makes more sense and has more impact as the game goes on. So if you're on the fence, I think you'll come to appreciate it. However, what to make of the story? Well it's no slow burn, dropping you into the plot surprisingly quickly. In retrospect, I feel somewhat cheated by this. The game offers you several characters in order as you progress, and they talk to each other a bit and that's about all it has to offer. Then you reach the end and you've learned very little about the "scifi" part of it, and if you're unlucky, learned little about the people too. I found that if I didn't constantly look for the orange blob, I had absolutely no idea where to go. Without it, I would be so lost that I'd have to close the game (there's no ingame Quit option) and reload, just so I'd be near the last checkpoint with a chance at catching the orange blob again. This meant that I could never really explore, because losing track of the blob was such a nightmare, and ensured that I didn't get to fully appreciate it all. I'm sure this is in large part down to my fault, with more time and more love, and maybe a pen and paper, I could have worked through. Checking the trophies is the most damning evidence though - 2.8% of all players managed to see all of the story before the end of the game. Perhaps we're playing it wrong, but I feel like that is a massive failure on the part of the developers. The trophies suggest there was a modest wealth of things I could have done that I just didn't know about - interacting was such a rarity that it was tiresome to keep checking anything that wasn't a door or a phone. This is a brave attempt to go without holding the hand of the player, but ultimately if 99% of the things I look at aren't responsive, I am just not going to spend six hours still trying to interact with everything I look at. I want to love it, I do love parts of it, but in the end the story never quite becomes memorable and it's not a very player-friendly result. Fortunately there's still old scifi audio dramas on the radio.

This is a game about a concept - a bird and a fish fall in love, and live parallel lives, never meeting. That's everything there is to it, though. You play nine near-identical levels with aimless 'reward' arenas for you to pootle about in, only for it to announce "Entwined!" and boot you to the credits. It's a game that seems to value aesthetics above all, and yet it's not even a very pretty game when you get the chance to look close. It's repetitive and twitchy but in a strangely imprecise way, a way that doesn't make you feel like you're getting better at it. And when the final level is just a rehash of all the (incredibly modest) variations in previous levels it couldn't be more disappointing to finish. I simply had no fun at all playing this. (i bought it when they did the surprise E3 release last year, but having it come out on PS+ reminded me to have a quick moan about it.)

It's a fine, slow paced ghost story **** (was it really meant to be horror? I guess there isn't really a "Contains ghosts but isn't horror" category), but when it put ghosts in my way and tells me "Ghosts can be killed by light" I spent ages trying to find the puzzle that would remove them. It turns out it isn't expecting me to solve puzzles, I'm just meant to rush past them and hope I don't get hit and instantly die. For me personally, all of the many stylish and positive points are let down by this, and I simply never went back to play it again.