A great game with some real unpolished UI and other questionable design choices. The "Learn Skills" option lighting up every time someone gets one (1) skill point, even though it doesn't actually mean they can learn any new skills, drove me nuts for the entire game. Certain menu behaviors really threw me off until I got used to them, the options for managing Lumina are a bit lacking (though it seems this was at least somewhat improved after I played), and some aspects of how information is presented in battles leave something to be desired - more polish in those areas would go such a long way, as it really stands out next to the care put into most everything else.

Also, I played with mods to pull back the camera and add a minimap for navigation, the latter of which especially felt absolutely essential, even with said minimap not actually being very good at times. I just didn't have the sense of direction for 3D spaces to navigate its high-detail environments with often unclear paths, much less find a bunch of things in them without any guidance, especially with fights also breaking up the exploration. (One could argue you don't need to find every single thing, but there's a lot that IS important that I know I would've missed otherwise and had to track down, greatly inflating my playtime.)

But the story is good and the combat is fun, even if the difficulty curve also gets pretty awkward - it's easy to get overpowered mid-game, then the endgame gets too open with too many hard optional areas you have to haphazardly figure out an order for, and there are some extremely all-or-nothing superbosses.

A cute game that I did like, though it really feels like it could've done more with its gameplay, themes, and the intersection of the two. I was definitely expecting a lot more "moving your body with odd controls"-type gameplay, and beyond the "daily routine" tasks and a few minigames, there kinda just isn't. So it's almost entirely carried by the story, which is fairly short and not exactly intricate, even if things do get a little wild. It's also sometimes janky in non-intended ways; it's particularly annoying how limited the spin-flying is by arbitrary invisible walls.

A decent entry in the series, but it's kind of crazy that everything about it screams "smaller spinoff game"... except for the price, which is the same as the other games (and that's ignoring sales discounts, like the ones the previous games had at the time this one came out). Also any future entries need to be forbidden from using the words "Atami" or "porno mag," like, more than once. Kotaro "Don't Worry, I Have Lots of Ideas for Bonus Stories" Uchikoshi

A solid platformer that's especially interesting as, like, a quasi-followup to Freedom Planet 2 (which I also liked a lot). It moves further away from the Classic Sonic style than FP2 already does, with less focus on speed and momentum; indeed, you don't necessarily have to go fast a lot of the time unless you care about certain achievements, and the movement doesn't seem especially speedy at first. But you actually can go quite fast, and the time powers prove useful for both those modes, so it's cool to master them. There's also just a lot of fun and varied gimmicks.

As someone whose Hololive knowledge is "I have heard maybe five of these names in my life and most of those aren't even central to the plot," the approach of tossing in so many characters with minimal establishment often felt a little weak without the expected familiarity; it's very apparent how they're ultimately just a bunch of concepts individual people thought were cool with little cohesion. (Which honestly seems fine for the original context, to be clear - it's just that the nature of the game presents it otherwise.) That said, the main story is pretty well-done and largely stands on its own.

It may just be Picross (since the decorating and customization stuff is a relatively minor bonus for me, although I will say that making puzzles for 3D objects - and alternate ones using different angles - is a smart idea)... but it's a really good, well-implemented Picross, so there. They should make a Picross 3D next where all the furniture gets encased in blocks of cheese and you have to pick it out.

Great game, with plenty of bosses and areas and moments that feel iconic for a reason. Though ultimately, there's just enough crustiness and parts that kinda suck even when you have advance knowledge (Anor Londo archers, Catacombs skeletons, New Londo Ruins ghosts, the last step of Siegmeyer's quest...) to make it feel like something that, while very much worth playing once, I wouldn't be especially eager to do a replay of. I did even take a break before deciding to go back and do New Game Plus for the remaining achievements.

Though a couple bosses gave me particular trouble (Bell Gargoyles were an early hurdle), I came away feeling like Ornstein & Smough was the real stand-out "difficult fight" (in a mostly fun way); they were the only ones I ended up using a summon for. The rest ultimately felt surprisingly manageable, although some got harder with NG+ buffs, in a rather inconsistent-feeling way. Also, the Demon Ruins - and to varying extents, the Lord Soul bosses in general - being what they are is kind of funny and sad.

Great game that I feel really improves a lot of stuff I didn't like in Dark Souls 1 - better menus, flask shards instead of kindling, restoring humanity anywhere, auto-repairing durability, less convoluted equipment upgrading... and while it has its own questionable decisions like Adaptability and the HP decrease from hollowing, they don't bother me that much, and the good outweighs them. Apparently people think this one is weirdly unfinished too, but at least while I was playing having not looked into it, I didn't actually feel that as much as in DS1, even if I'll admit the final (pre-Scholar-patch, at least) boss is a bit of a weird one.

In general, I'm not totally clear on why a lot of people turned on this game. To me, it's pretty much the exact level of "still Dark Souls, yet not just DS1 again" I'd expect. Though I guess with Bloodborne existing, gamers can't help pitting two bad Blighttowns against each other?

The main game tended to feel a little easy, at least on the first run, though it's clear that the DLCs aimed to be harder (sometimes a bit too much), and I'm guessing that was also part of the mindset behind Scholar of the First Sin. At least on paper, Scholar's changes sounded for the worse overall, which is why I played the original... though, it seems they're also not as drastically different as it's made out to be. So I'm not especially interested in playing that version anytime soon.

Great game that I sure wish was more available for people to play, but who doesn't. The structure of having so many optional and obscure areas is a bit weird, but I'm okay with it. Less okay with the Chalice Dungeons, which feel like blatant filler for a few extra bosses of varying quality, go from mindless to suddenly stupidly punishing toward the "end," and which you're mostly driven to do for One achievement. But I guess that does mean they're highly skippable for replays, so hey.

Also, I had a rougher start with the game than I expected given all the games before and after felt fine in that regard. The crowds of enemies, some overlooked by guys who can just shoot you, the inability to level up until you make it quite a ways through all those enemies, two bosses to choose from (with one being harder yet leading to nothing, incidentally), and of course, the Blood Vial situation being at its worst since it's hard to stockpile them at that point without explicitly going back and forth to the lamp to do so. Things quickly started feeling more manageable after Gascoigne, which makes it stick out all the more

But, well, those were basically the only issues I had. Otherwise, I liked it a lot!

...Wait, there's also the fact I couldn't really replicate my Big Woman Dark Souls character. So 0/10 actually

Great game, but I kind of don't know what else to say about it. It's ultimately probably the most "consistent" of the Dark Souls trilogy, yet I'm not sure I'd call it my favorite necessarily.

The aggression of some of the enemies is definitely notable, and I feel like I found myself thinking "not remotely worth it, I should really just run past these guys" a little more than usual - I mean, I'd do that in the previous games too, but usually it was just sections I'd already fought through. And while there are good bosses for sure, a few like Wolnir and Yhorm are just kinda silly. (The Twin Princes sit somewhere in the middle of these two things.) Which you could probably say about the other games too, but for whatever reason, it just stood out more here.

Great game.

I was intimidated by the increased length, putting it off though ultimately wanting to play it this year to (more or less) finish off my quest. And while I'd probably say that I generally prefer this sort of game to be less long - and it's not like I don't see things like boss reuse that, while I didn't mind it in most cases, could have easily been cut down - I hesitate to call it an outright negative, particularly because of how well it managed a sense of progression despite the length. This is largely owed to the drawn map that lets you identify notable areas for yourself, and how it smartly breaks the world up into major areas with a linear order and tells you roughly how many there are up front (although that pacing does get a little messier around Altus Plateau).

The main other open world games I've put a lot of time into have been Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which I do like, but those games let you go basically anywhere after the intros while ignoring the major objectives entirely, and you have to decide for yourself when to do them, which could mean doing them all in a row... It just makes for a much less structured experience than what Elden Ring has. In general, I was impressed with the ways they used the open world format to add to and mix up the formula. The only real "we're open-world now" aspect that I didn't care for was the crafting materials everywhere, which I rarely used but would begrudgingly try to pick up anyway. Looking forward to doing the DLC sometime next year, probably!

In 2023, I'd convinced myself I didn't need to play this. Yet it turns out that for all the details I'd learned about it in advance, I was filling in the blanks with the worst possible version of that game, when actually, it's often the best possible version.

First of all, maybe this is on me and my own perceptions, but "Sokoban" strikes me as such an unfitting, dismissive label to use for just any puzzle game with tile-based movement, and using it here feels like it does a huge disservice to the variety and elegance of the actual level puzzles, which in many cases don't even involve pushing things. (That's on both players and the developers, but to be fair, the store text does say "Sokoban-style.")

The lack of undos and the repetition sound scary/tedious on paper, but in practice I found it pretty breezy most of the time; the snappy movement really helps. While there are a number of difficult levels that require a precise solution, many don't, allowing you room to experiment or recover from mistakes, and it rewards making meta-discoveries and keeping notes about how to solve things. (Granted, someone with zero foreknowledge is a lot less likely to do this, at least in much detail, so I could understand feeling annoyance when they find out why they should.)

I was also scared off by people talking it up as mind-bending and cruel and how they got stuck or wandered for ages not knowing what to do, but... at least as far as seeing the bulk of the content and endings, I found things pretty manageable for the most part? (Though I do think the you-know-what meta-puzzle is a good concept taken just slightly too far, likely from thinking it was "too easy." And unlike a certain critical puzzle in a certain other knowledge-based game, I don't think it's much of an issue if someone solves this one "early.") I do have qualms here and there, but overall, it's just a really good game.

I tried Heart of the Woods on a whim during a Steam visual novel sale because I remembered hearing it be recommended, and loved it. I then realized I had Highway Blossoms from an Itch bundle, played that, loved it too. Got Next Exit (the DLC/sequel), loved it. (The Marina/Amber dynamic is really good and Tess deserves the world.) Then I got Please Be Happy, and loved it maybe most of all; I was surprised how much value I ended up finding in both routes there, despite my Aspen favoritism and the unorthodox approach to how it does the routes.

I also played A Tithe in Blood after that came out this year, and quite liked that too. It probably ranks on the lower end overall, but all four are way up there, with high-quality presentation that only seems to improve over time.

An extremely charming game that does what it sets out to do very well. I put it out of mind for a while since I'm not especially familiar with the specific type of old game it's imitating, and was intimidated by the idea of the text parser, but came away genuinely convinced of its potential for mystery games especially, as it gets you thinking practically about "what could I do" in a way that's harder to achieve with a fixed set of actions. Also, it's honestly genius to have the protagonist be a meticulous and detail-oriented geologist, and for that to make her a natural detective who didn't expect to be one. Nancy Maple you will always be famous.

The mysteries are perhaps not that grand or complex in retrospect, and the amount of redundant evidence (so as to make finding at least one piece more likely) can feel slightly silly, but it was definitely enjoyable. My only real issues with it are the general lack of sound during gameplay, and the number of instances where you can be moved forward with little to no warning, especially for just entering a certain screen, potentially having to redo a lot. Plus the sequence at the very end, where reloading after "failing" is made kind of awkward by how it works.

Not a ton to say about it, but it's a well-made Metroidvania. I also played Ender Lilies before it, which was fine, though the sequel is kind of a strict improvement: better movement and combat, much better map yet still able to hide things, and generally just gets to do more with a premise that allows for "actual other characters who aren't already doomed."