Bug Fables is... one of the most charming things I think I've ever played. I ended up having a real good time with this one, but it did take a hell of a long time to get to that point.

This game does not start off on the best foot. The early game combat is lacking in tactical depth, making it either trivial for easy enemies or frustrating for harder enemies where there simply isn't the depth to change your tactics. The plot, setting and first few locations are all cute but, in the early game, everything can feel a bit... bland? Add to this the overall air of jank that this game exudes, especially whenever you are tasked with any amount of platforming, and this felt like it was shaping up to be a pretty mid game.

But it really does get better as it goes. There isn't a sudden moment or anything like that where it transitions into a good game, but there is just a constant upwards trajectory in quality throughout the playtime. It feels like it gets more confident as it goes; the combat gets some room to breathe when you get enough medals to make meaningful decisions, the locations and quests become crazier and more atmospheric, and the characters become more fleshed out and, frankly, lovable. It feels like this game was developed in order, and each level gave the devs the confidence to push the boat out a little more for the next.

Some parts of Bug Tales are definitely a bit heavily inspired by other games; the Paper Mario comparisons are obvious, and a couple of the story beats reminded me heavily of games like Undertale (especially the lab section...). But I certainly wouldn't call it derivative; the worldbuilding here in particular is all pretty unique. The way the bugs misinterpret mundane human objects as magical, especially when juxtaposed against actual straight up magic, manages to give the world a very charming feel without feeling gratuitous, as in something similarly themed like A Monster's Expedition. Bugaria is a wonderful and mysterious place and I will miss it now I have finished the game; I would definitely welcome sequels to take place in this world.

All in all, Bug Fables is not the most polished thing in the world, and the early game in particular can feel a bit sketchy at times. But I cannot emphasize how much this grew on me. If you try this and don't get on with it at first, I can definitely recommend sinking a few more hours into it to see if it hooks you, because it hooked me eventually and I can definitely recommend it.

There's very little substance here in terms of gameplay, but it's honestly extremely impressive how much worldbuilding, character building and emotional storytelling this game manages to cram into its 20 minute playtime. At the same time, I wouldn't call this a visual novel; the flower arranging gameplay is simplistic but satisfying, and has enough tangible impact on the game's world to keep me engaged throughout.

I think the best strength here is the writing. Notwithstanding a bit of janky language here and there (I believe the English dialog was written by someone in their second language), the writing here is excellent, giving a firm and vibrant picture of the world and its inhabitants without feeling forced at all. And of course all of this is helped along by the great music and pixel artwork. Again, all of this in a runtime of 20 minutes; this tiny game somehow has more character, more charm and more to say than some 50+ hour open world adventure games I've played.

But yes, it is very short, and I don't think I can really rate something with this little content much higher than this. All in all, Eternal Home Floristry is a pint-sized Red Strings Club, but one that is all the more intense for its brevity... but without all of the depth that a longer game would be able to explore. This is very strong for what it is; yet another one to go on the 'unreasonably good free game' list alongside Yume Nikki, Sheepy and NaissanceE.

I'm not fully sold on this one... Don't get me wrong, I think Fatum Betula absolutely nails the atmosphere its going for. The premise is utterly bizarre in a good way, the individual set pieces in the game are generally good and some are great (I'm a big fan of the kaleidoscopic 'Nightmare Cherry Blossom' area). The music and visuals are both pretty damn solid and, despite the absurdist and dreamlike nature of the game, the puzzles don't rely on too much moon logic to be solved.

But Fatum Betula really isn't much more than the sum of its parts. The game in general lacks coherence, and most things in the game feel like they are just there because the dev wanted to make them rather than for any greater purpose. The only real universal thread in this game is a theme of existentialism, but the game really doesn't have a whole lot of interest to say on this theme and comes across as a little obvious and shallow.

Also, a minor complaint, but why are the loading times as long as they are? This game looks like it's optimised to run on a baked potato, so why is there a 5-10 second loading screen whenever I move from one small area to another? This doesn't sound like a lot, but a couple of the secrets in the game are based around objects which have a random chance to spawn, and constantly reloading areas to try and force these ends up being deeply painful. To be honest, I think having randomly spawning entities in a game like this is a massive misstep, but the coupld of instances of it here are late enough into the endgame to not have much effect on most of my playtime.

I dunno, maybe I just don't get it (see also How Fish is Made), but overall Fatum Betula felt too random and tonally disjointed for me to really get into this like I did with, say, Yume Nikki. I certainly didn't dislike this or anything, and I'd say it was worth it just for the unsettling vibes and trippy visuals alone. But despite that, the lack of depth here means I probably won't remember this one for too long.

This does not get off to a good start at all. The game opens with a very drawn out, verbose and unnecessary cutscene which takes itself far too seriously for its hackneyed dialogue to support. After that you and your co-op partner get dumped into a world of slow and stiff platforming with awkward controls, interspersed with more cutscenes which do not get any less flowery as time goes on. To put it lightly, it's a very slow first half an hour or so, and I thought we were going to be ending up playing a poorly-written co-op clone of something like Inmost.

But you know what? Bokura won me over pretty big time with how it developed beyond that point. The theme of this game is that different people see the world differently, both metaphorically and literally in this case, and it ends up leading to some great puzzles and some very satisfying moments of realization. And they really do mean it when they mean you see the world differently; different objects will appear different to different players, one player may see a bridge where the other sees a death pit, etc. etc. Even the artstyle is completely different. This does mean it ends up falling back on the usual co-op game trappings of communicating difficult to convey information, but the world is so different between the players that its impossible to make any assumptions on what knowledge is common to both of you. Many times we struggled on a puzzle because to one player it looked like there was an obvious solution, but the second player saw a completely different set of objects with their own solution, and it became a sort-of iterative process piecing the worlds together which was always very satisfying to solve. It just adds another layer on top of the way these games usually operate, and I appreciate it greatly

The art style is... absolutely fucked up, in the nicest possible way. The art style I ended up with was hypersaccharine kawaii forest creatures in an agressively pastel world... which also happened to be filled with some really weird shit from the mid-game onwards. This is legit one of the more disturbing pixel art games I've played, and I'm absolutely here for the weird juxtaposition of styles. I'm looking forward to going back in and playing the other side, because I'm fascinated to see what my co-op partner was seeing (and, y'know, find out why he kept calling all the plush toys 'springs').

The story ends up being... confusing and a bit slow but ultimately charming; it's not at all clear how any of the events in-game are supposed to be real and how many are a child's imagination, and it all adds to the dreamlike and surreal atmosphere that the visuals already laid the foundations of. The game does tend to get a bit indulgent with its cutscenes and I probably could have done with a couple fewer of them, but they all feel much more earned than that sub-par opening monologue.

So yes, final word: good game, great art style(s), good puzzles, passable writing, and overall a short co-op platformer that seems simultaneously familiar and pretty unique. Can recommend playing this one.

Definitely a more rich experience than a lot of the early David Szymanski games, despite arguably being the purest walking-sim in the collection. This game is aesthetically great; the visuals are very striking throughout and absolutely stunning in places, and the sparse music is used very effectively throughout.

Where the Music Machine loses me a bit is with its storytelling... sort of. There are a lot of different lines of intrigue at play in the world of the Music Machine, but a lot of it seems very disconnected and I legitimately don't understand why some of it is here. The pseudo-Christian / eldritch dimension hopping side of things is genuinely interesting and pretty well realised. But then, at the same time, you play a character possessed by a malevolant ghost, which has absolutely no connection to the underlying story. Add to this that the relationship between the ghost and his host is... really uncomfortable, and not in a good way (she is 13 and he is 35, I will let you fill in the blanks). And the dialogue of the two player characters is honestly pretty awful to read through at times. I get that it's supposed to be an unpleasant and unsettling dynamic, but I'd really rather it just wasn't here, especially as its such an unnecessary addition on what would already be a nice complete experience.

This is definitely one of the more experimental Szymanski microgames, but for the most parts I'd say the more experimental stuff landed for me. Parts of this game remind me more of NaissanceE than something like The Moon Sliver, and NaissanceE-style atmospheric art games are absolutely my kinda jam. But in the end I do feel the Music Machine tries to do a bit too much with its short runtime and ends up tripping over its own feet a little. Cut out all the awkward and weird crap about the ghost guy and this would have been a much more focused and enjoyable experience.

Animal Well is an outrageously dense game. It's a bit hard to be more specific than that without accidentally veering into spoilers, but it feels like every major discovery you find completely recontextualizes everything you thought you could see or do in this world. I don't think I've ever had as many mindblowing moments in a single game before and, even if you ignored the rabbithole this game invites you to dive into, the surface layer of Animal Well stands up on its own as a very well executed Metroidvania. This is honestly a stunning achievement of a game, especially for a solo developer, and I'm glad it's getting the praise it deserves.

To address the elephant in the room, Animal Well can indeed get pretty Fez-like at times and, while I certainly didn't dislike Fez, I wouldn't say I was a huge fan of it either. My issues with the more esoteric side of Fez are twofold, but in my opinion Animal Well solves both of these issues in it's own way. Firstly, an awful lot of the content in Fez is locked off behind one or two major bottlenecks that it's very easy to get stuck on. Animal Well on the other hand is remarkably good at making most of its puzzles have multiple solutions (at least at the lower and mid levels), making this not be an issue until you are literally cleaning up the last few dregs of any given challenge.

I also thought Fez's late game puzzles were too clever and mad for their own good. And... well, Animal Well is no different there. But Animal Well is much better at signalling its off-ramps. In Fez it only became clear right towards the end that I wouldn't be getting all the Anticubes, which made all the time on the ones I did get feel wasted. But in Animal Well, there is a pretty strict hierarchy of madness; going for completion in any of the 'depth levels' rewards you with something and is pretty good at letting you know what to expect from the next level, so you can know in advance whether that layer is for you or whether now would be a good time to stop. Compare it with something like Inscryption; most players will get a peek or two behind the curtain at some of the ARG madness in that game while they play, but the ARG side of things is well-telegraphed, clearly only for a subset of players and has very little impact on the game if you choose to ignore it. Animal Well does exactly this, but refines the formula even more in ways I cannot discuss because of spoilers...

The puzzles in this game are mostly very fun, very clever and make you feel like a genius when you work some of them out. And this is somehow true at every level in the game; by the late-game I was looking back at some of the early secrets I was smug at finding and thinking how foolish I was for thinking that was impressive. The game is very good at giving you reasons to go and explore its entire map yet another time, and this... it's a mixed blessing to be honest. While it is very cool to go back to a room you thought you'd fully explored and find yet more secrets hidden in the cracks, a lot of the mid-to-late game in Animal Well does end up with you somewhat aimlessly traipsing across the map, and it can feel quite time wastey. For the most part the few moments of discovery do make each journey worth it, but often times collectibles are hidden behind illusory walls and the like, which are just a bit frustrating and not always signposted in the best way. But overall, the puzzles are great; I am super impressed by some of the ultra late-game puzzles (which I googled after completing the game, no way was I diving that deep into the Well on my own), and the variety on show in this game is incredible.

The aesthetics in this game are also very strong. The retro art style, bizarre animal theming and droning ambience make this a richly atmospheric experience, and a unique one at that; I don't know of any other game that feels anything like this one. What Animal Well is sorely missing, however, is some context. While there is definitely worldbuilding of a sorts in Animal Well, there isn't a plot or any characters to speak of, and this lack of any real context makes the game that much less immersive and that much more... well, video gamey. To be clear I'm not asking for Disco Elysium levels of writing here; the plot in Fez was extremely thin in the ground but, at the very least, I knew who the PC was and knew why they were solving all these puzzles. I really think a basic introductory cutscene like Fez's would have really helped frame Animal Well in a much better way and made the whole experience that more engaging.

But I think that lack of context is the only thing stopping me giving full marks here really because, aside from that, it's hard to see how Animal Well could do what it aims to do any better. It's one heck of a debut solo game, and I look forward to seeing what Billy Basso goes onto create next.

Right. Sit the fuck down Lobotomy Corporation, we need to have a talk. I'm a big fan of SCP-like settings such as this (I even managed to get one accepted to the official SCP canon back in the day) and, while these settings can quickly devolve into edgy and cringey, Lobotomy Corporation does not. Honestly the writing, setting and premise in this game are awesome; the actual entities you need to manage are fantastically well-realised, bizarre, terrifying and most of all varied. I was constantly surprised by the weirdness of the effects and conditions attached to the monsters in this game, and it was absolutely engrossing getting to know them individually, how to work with them and how to deal with them if things go wrong. Basically, I love this game. But it's also utterly unplayable.

The thing is, the elements that make up the moment-to-moment gameplay in Lobotomy are mostly solid on paper. One of the main challenges to the player is to work out what the hell each anomaly even is; working with each one gives a currency that can be used to unlock information in the anomaly's profile. In practice this results in having to use trial and error a lot of the time, and some of the anomalies are borderline impossible to guess what you need to do to get any significant amount of that currency in the first place. But honestly, I'm fine with this... it really helps the SCP vibes of the game, and you can reset a day at any time so even the biggest fuck ups can be undone (...mostly). Nor do I have any issue with how quickly things can spiral out of control as soon as something does go wrong; this is very much a one-issue-leads-to-another house-of-cards kind of game, but all that does is incentivise you to be extra vigilant that the first domino never has a chance to fall. I don't even mind how inherently unfair this game is at times; I think a bit of unfairness actually helps with the vibe here, and goes well with the theme and setting of the game. After all, this is a game about unknowable entities that some chucklefucks are trying to harvest for electricity, why would any of them see fit to play by the rules?

But despite all this, and the genuinely great time I had playing this game and the many hours at work or in bed where I'd be thinking about this instead, I only got about halfway through this game before I could take no more. I suspect this will be the kind of thing I will pick up again every once in a while, play a day, rediscover what I hate about it and then kick it down the road for another week or two. So I'm not fully calling this 'abandoned' per se, but my opinions of it have definitely crystallised by this point. And my issues with this game fall into three broad categories: terrible UI, lack of player agency and an overwhelming lack of respect for the player or their time.

Let's start with the UI. It is an absolute nightmare to find some of the information you need access to in order to play this game. There are at least 3 ways you can view the stats of a given employee, for example, but they all show different subsets of their current condition information, and there just isn't a single unified employee profile anywhere to be found. Some information is just nowhere to be found at all as far as I can tell (e.g. the range of an employee's currently equipped weapon), and in some cases the actual visual design of the UI gets in the way (like when the textboxes that appear when an employee works with an anomaly straight up cover up the HP bar so you can't see it at all). There is a good chance that some of these UI difficulties get resolved later on, because the game makes you unlock some of the most basic things you can imagine (why the fuck did I have to play through 4 days before I could even see employee HP!?). Considering the game is about unknown entities that you have very little information about, making the information on your own employees and facility just as awkward and opaque feels like a major mis-step.

Even worse than the UI though is some of the things that you really should be able to do as a manager, but just can't for some reason. This issue is probably best explained with examples, which I will keep as spoiler-free as possible. One of the anomalies I had to manage had a habit of breaking out pretty often, and when it did this it would place a trap in a random spot on the map that would instantly kill anything that went over it until you had your employees go clean it up. And more than once, I had this trap spawn directly on top of the door to one of the containment chambers, while an employee was working in that chamber. What this meant is that employee would finish their work, leave the chamber and immediately die, and there was absolutely dick all I could do about it (the trap takes far longer to disarm than any work cycle). Why can I not instruct the employee to just remain in the chamber for a bit? By all means give them some sanity damage or something for staying longer than necessary, but why isn't this an option? Another time I had the same anomaly spawn a trap in a random corridor near one of the wing hubs... only for all of the clerks (expendable non-controllable employees you get for free each day) in the wing to suddenly decide they needed to walk that way. This wasn't a power that the anomaly had or anything like that, just part of the clerks' random walks around the facility. So I watched an absolute torrent of clerks just march directly to their death, even while my own agents were desperately shooting at the trap to try and disarm it. No big deal right, they're just clerks, they aren't important... apart from the fact I had another much worse anomaly that would breach if 10 people died, which happened almost immediately and fucked up the entire facility. Why couldn't I place that corridor on lockdown? Or confine the clerks to the hub room? Or... just fucking do anything about the situation rather than just hopelessly watch my own employees bring forth the fucking apocalypse while I could do nothing to dissuade them. Again, the anomalies are supposed to be the hazards here, not my own employees, so being unable to do simple and obvious things to prevent an unfolding calamity always just made me feel helpless in a bad way.

But whatever. I've played games with bad UI before and enjoyed them, and like I said a bit of unfairness feels almost right for a game in this setting. And this would all be well and good if not for the fact each day took something like 30-40 minutes to complete. It is absolutely soul-crushing to play 20 minutes of a day perfectly, then roll badly for one of the ordeals (combat encounters you get at set points in the day) and have everything immediately go to shit right before your eyes. I feel like I could forgive almost all the problems with this game if each day lasted more like 5 minutes. But as it stands, the vast majority of days consist of going through the motions for 20 minutes, followed by a frustrated sigh and a hit of the reset button. I pushed through it for this for the sake of the world and the writing... but as the game goes on the days get longer, the routine start of each day becomes more mundane, the number of points of failure in the system goes up and your ability to meaningfully interact with them just cannot keep pace.

That three star rating should be testament to the fact that, despite the fucking torture this game put me through, I do like it, love it even. But I don't enjoy it... at all. I really, really wish this game was implemented better, because with a few minor tweaks I think this could easily be my favourite management game of all time. But as it is now, I'm not even sure I can recommend Lobotomy Corporation, and that honestly makes me pretty sad. There is so much promise and potential here, and so many aspects of its production are absolutely top-tier, but it all ends up being one of the most frustrating experiences I've had in all of gaming.

Remnant 2 is mechanically a very solid game. The combat is mostly satisfying and fun, the character and class cutomisation system is deep and impactful (albeit very intimidating at first), and the weapons and skills all feel great to use. And yet I came away from this game feeling pretty indifferent overall... it feels like Remnant 2 drops the ball when it comes to many different aspects of its production and, while the gameplay is mostly good enough to save it from the shortcomings, it isn't enough to elevate the game beyond the lofty heights of 'fine'.

One of the major issues I had with this game in the moment was its difficulty curve. While most of this game is challenging but not too frustrating, there are a number of abrupt spikes in difficulty which all feel very rough to encounter. In particular, one of the areas has enemies which are bizarrely tanky, and this was the only part of the game in which ammo scarcity was a major concern, and a couple of the bosses are dramatically more difficult than the bosses immediately before or after them which can make those next few bosses feel very anticlimactic. I had particular issue with the final boss; the gimmick of the boss is honestly great (I won't spoil it here), but the screen is so busy with particles and brights lights that I had absolutely no hope of working out what the fuck was going on at any given time. This boss fight, as well as some others to a lesser extent, end up looking more like an overproduced superhero movie with how much glowing crap is all over screen, and I really think a cleaner visual design would have made these bosses a much less unintentionally stressful experience for me.

But I think the biggest missed opportunity in this one is its plot and its setting. I haven't played Remnant 1 and, without it... well, Remnant 2 does not give a good first impression. The first few minutes play like a bargain bin The Last of Us, in an incredibly generic post-apocalyptic world with some truly unlikeable main characters. But before long, the game introduces the dimension hopping which is going to be its core premise. The levels you go to in this game are definitely more interesting than the post-apocalypse hub world, but they're all just so... generic. While each world has its own lore and backstory, these are devloped almost exclusively in po-faced and overly dramatic exposition dumps. Admittedly I wasn't paying too much attention to the worldbuilding once it became apparent how stale it was going to be, but none of the worlds' stories seem to connect or influence each other in any meaningful way. The dimension hopping aspect does do wonders for encounter diversity, and the worlds certainly all look the part, but Remnant 2 comes off as rather disjointed and I feel like it wastes the infinite creative freedom that its own premise allows for.

All in all, Remnant 2 feels like a below average and very generic affair but with a central gameplay loop and character building system that are both good enough to make this game worth a look at regardless. It's definitely one of those games that gets better the less attention you pay to its plot and lore but, if you do that and play with a couple of friends, this game offers a good enough time.

So... the story in Sheepy is an absolute trainwreck. At times it almost feels like it was written by AI; all the tropes of a classic 'cute character in a scary world' Metroidvania are here, but nothing seems to really fit together. The game puts you in one of the traditional locations for this genre (abandoned factory, ancient ruins, etc) and scatters tapes all around for you to listen to to get you interested in the lore and the world, but then just moves on to the next set piece location before anything is resolved or explained. Aside from the most basic of elemental story beats, I pretty much had no clue what was going on in the story here and I'm fairly sure no coherent story exists.

In every other way though... Sheepy is nearly perfect. The atmosphere is great throughout, the visuals and sound design are absolutely fantastic and the gameplay, while simplistic, strikes a near perfect balance between challenge and frustration. I did find the first two bosses a little bit lacklustre, but the game more than paid off for these with its final boss which was just epic in terms of scope and spectacle.

But in general yes, this game has everything you'd want from something like this. It's got a good variety of Metroidvania-style powers, hidden collectables, timed challenges, speed challenges... all within a game with a run time of ~1 hour at most. I think if the game had been longer there would have been more time to flesh out the plot and setting in a more sensical way, but aside from that it's remarkable how the game manages to cram in all its content into such a short time without feeling overcrowded. That short runtime has led to a game where everything has clearly been meticulously hand-crafted down to the pixel, and it's all just fantastic.

So yes, hearty recommend from me on this one; this is almost certainly the best free game I've ever played, and frankly I'm baffled that it is free in the first place. It is a shame about the underdeveloped setting, because in my opinion that is all that stands between this and a bite-sized Hollow Knight. But worldbuilding and lore is a big part of why I play games like this so I do have to dock some marks on that front. Still, otherwise an all-round excellent and well-polished little game, and would probably score up in my top 10 or so games in its genre.

This game is... very pretentious, but it's absolutely my kinda thing. The closest thing I could compare it to would be Scorn; you spend your time exploring this vast, uncaring and alien landscape and, while there are occasional puzzles or platforming sections, the main reason you are here is just to drink it all in. Again like Scorn there is no real story to grasp on to, it's more about vibes and a nonspecific sense of dread, and the experience comes off more as an art exhibit than a video game (see also Yume Nikki and, for a bad example, Agony). In my experience games like this can feel a little aimless or content-poor in terms of actual gameplay challenge, and I get why many would find this boring... but it turns out these kinda of game are absolutely my kind of shit.

Naissance is absolutely beautiful and, despite basically nothing happening in the whole game, utterly terrifying. The use of massive scale, harsh lighting and pitch blackness make you feel like an insignificant mote of dust drifting through a world that wasn't made for you, doesn't care about you and mostly doesn't even realise you exist. The use of darkness in particular is very bold... parts of this game are so dark that it's extremely difficult to see anything, which sounds like terrible design on paper, but it really hammers home the feeling that this is not a world that was built for you to explore. Later on in the game it feels like the world 'notices' you somehow and begins to fuck with the player character more directly and... well, it lost me a bit there, and I much preferred the feeling of loneliness and lostness that came in the earlier part of the game.

Overall, though, I did find this game weaker than Scorn. The art direction in NaissanceE is, don't get me wrong, austerely beautiful... breathtaking, in fact. But it just can't compete with the overwhelming detail of the world in Scorn. There are also a few parts of NaissanceE where it opens up into a quasi-open world, and honestly these feel pretty aimless (and not the good 'aimlessness' of the explorative parts of the game). The area I'm going to refer to as 'the Desert' is the worst example of this; just a huge area with a few random points of interest in it. Each of those landmarks is interesting in its own way, but they all come across as just randomly placed set pieces that were dumped here because the devs couldn't figure out where to put them. Also... yeah, won't lie, that ending made me roll my eyes pretty hard.

Still, the overall experience I had with NaissanceE was a strong one. I particularly liked the more maze-like areas where it felt like there were dozens of different paths you could take; I'm sure that video game magic ensures you get to where you need to go anyway, but the illusion of choice really helped sell this game as an exploration of an unfathomably large place in a way that few other games can. Definitely recommend trying it if it's your kind of thing (it's free!), but do be prepared to bounce off as this is definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

At the end of the day, this is a very simple game and it mostly does what it sets out to do well enough. It doesn't have the purity and streamlined design of something like Geometry Dash, and yet I found Bit.Trip to be a much more enjoyable experience than Geometry Dash because it doesn't feel the need to get unplayably difficult right off the bat. On the surface, Bit.Trip feels like a pretty mid game; nothing too bad, nothing too good, it's all just... adequate.

That's not to say I didn't have any more significant issues with this game because I definitely did, but they mostly ended up being rather specific. While I found the level design to be quite good (decent use of repetition without becoming stale, interesting mix of obstacles, etc), the overarching difficulty game is rocky to say the least. In particular, level 1-11 is an absolute nightmare. It's by no means the hardest level in the game (although it is by far the longest), but placing it at the end of an introductory world filled with pretty trivial levels for the most part is just sadistic, and led to one of the most abrupt difficulty spikes I think I've experienced in gaming.

I also don't really get on with the aesthetics in this game, or how they impact the moment-to-moment gameplay. For starters, the game is so heavily pixelated that I had to learn how to read the HUD, because none of the characters looked like the letters or numbers they were supposed to. I also don't like how similar the colour pallets for the foreground and background are in large parts of this game, as it can make it very difficult to make a snap judgement as to what is a hazard in some of the more challenging levels. In fact the use of colour in general is overall poor in this game. It feels like colour could be used to convey player information (e.g. all kickable objects could be blue, all objects that need ducking under could be black, etc); the game does do this, but only with 2 or 3 of the many types of obstacle, and most of the time working out the correct way to deal with a hazard is left to educated guesswork or trial and error.

The most heinous misuse of colour though has to be with the little squares you have to use the shield for in World 3, which are coloured the same as the gold bars you are supposed to collect. The game spends 2 whole worlds conditioning you that hitting gold objects is a good thing, only to sadistically 180 at the last moment. When I'm in a flow state in this game my lizard brain is 100% in control, and it simply cannot differentiate between two small identically coloured objects in the 1/10th of a second you have to process information in the more hectic parts of this game. Honestly this feels like a deliberate choice to fuck over the player, and it's not the only one; Bit.Trip Runner also loves to have obstacles fly at you from off-screen so unreasonably quickly that the only way to deal with them is to just learn exactly where they all are. It really goes against the sense of flow and rhythm that this game can create at it's best; I think the 'haha fuck the player' attitude present in many of the early indie titles is nearly always a mis-step, but especially in a game like this where it seems completely antithetical to its specific brand of gameplay.

I think the game also hates anyone who would be interested in 100%ing it as well. If you collect all the aforementioned gold bars in a level you get a 'perfect' score for that level and a little badge for it, which is a nice reward for opting in to a bit of extra challenge. But you also get a bonus level. These bonus levels are obtusely long, deliberately awkward and incredibly uninteresting... and you need to get all the gold bars in the bonus level too to get a true perfect score on a given level and an even nicer badge. Missed one or two gold bars in the bonus level? Well then you'd better go get a perfect score in the original level again, because that's the only way to have a second go at the bonus. In a game that so heavily relies on trial and error, having such a hurdle be in the way of retrying content is just agony, and makes any effort you put into getting regular perfect scores feel completely wasted.

All this makes it sound like I hated Bit.Trip Runner, but I really didn't. At times I did (1-11 can continue to go fuck itself), but my issues with the game were mostly surmountable roadblocks rather than persistent problems. Once I learned to give up on 100% and treat this more as a memorisation game than a reactive one, I started to get a lot more out of this. I am glad to have played it, but I do think this is still one I'm going to remember more for its failings than for its successes.

I didn't get far into this before giving up, and I'm blaming that on the control scheme. The Steam port is actually unplayable on controller: the camera immediately pans hard to the top-left for no reason and Giana likes to have switching fits where she toggles about once a frame for a few seconds every now and again, even if I'm not touching the controller. Even if it had worked, the control layout is baffling (why the fuck is pause bound to R1!?), and the keyboard controls are equally horrendous and of course cannot be changed. I don't know if maybe this would work better with a different controller or if something is going wrong due to the sheer age of the game but either way, from what I've played, I really don't think I'm missing much by giving up on it.

The visuals are... let's say 'technically impressive' given when this game came out. Considering this game came out in 2012 it really doesn't look that old, and its aesthetics have aged remarkably well. Those aesthetics are, however, absolutely hideous. Like, the game definitely has a style to it, but it just looks so damned ugly... the colour pallette is all over the place, nothing really gels together ('because dream' I guess) and the general creature and object design is bloated and deliberately gross. I can appreciate a lot of effort has gone into this in terms of the visuals, but in my opinion this game looks worse than Cruelty Squad.

The level design also seems to be a big nothing-burger as well. Again, I only got to near the end of the first world, so maybe it all ramps up and becomes a gameplay masterpiece later on. But from what I played, Giana Sisters is based on a solid core concept, likes introducing new puzzle pieces and ways to interact with the environment and then applying them in the most piecemeal and phoned in way possible. You spend the entire game switching between a character with a dash and a character with a double-jump, and you could do so much with that in terms of movement, but the game would rather have you ride a moving elevator twice so that each character can pick up all the gems specified for them, or have you jump across platforms that disappear and reappear when you switch with no regard for the character's different movesets. The entire game is basically just the second mask from Crash Bandicoot 4 but implemented in an incredibly sloppy way that makes no use of its potential. No, the game is much more interested in positioning enemies perfectly off-screen so that you'll run into them before you have a chance to avoid them. Or placing a gem for character 1 behind a barrier that only opens for character 2, making me assume I had to switch and then dash through before the gate has a chance to close... it really shouldn't be this easy to softlock level 2 of a platformer for fuck's sake.

So yeah, I didn't like this. Admittedly my main issues were technical issues which I'm going to assume are specific to the version I played, but I really don't feel too sad about skipping this one based on the experience I was able to have. In any case, the final straw was entering a level and seeing 0/700 gems on the UI... yeah, no thanks, I'm good. There are so many great platformers out there, including from the same era as this... just go and pick any one of those and I'm sure you'll have a better time.

I think I enjoyed this? I never played the original, so this is my first introduction to the series as a whole, and I can understand the appeal. It's weird, joyful, chaotic, cathartic... Katamari certainly isn't afraid of being different and, for the most part, it works.

But while playing this game there was always something in the back of my mind preventing me from enjoying it to the fullest, and it took a long time to figure out what it was. My initial thought was the aesthetics; I don't get on with 'cutesy for cutesy's sake' as a design choice but, while Katamari definitely is cutesy, the sheer hectic bizarreness of its premise won me over on that front. I see a lot of people giving this game credit for its soundtrack; I agree that some of the music is great (the title theme in particular, but I found the more swingy/loungy tracks to be pretty great too), but it has to be one of the least cohesive soundtracks I've ever heard, and some of the tracks are actively bad. I didn't particularly enjoy listening to a robot tell me I'm smart for 20 minutes, nor did I enjoy having to listen to children who literally couldn't hold a note at all... So the music ended up being a very mixed bag for me, but it definitely wasn't what was bugging me about this game.

So my second thought was maybe the controls were the issue: the tank controls in this game are clunky and awkward to say the least. This game is absolutely unplayable keyboard and mouse (which to be fair would obviously not have been a consideration for the original), but it can be equally painful to play with a controller. Very early I switched to the 'simple controls' layout which was honestly such a trap; the controls are indeed slightly simpler (albeit still clunky), but at the cost of a huge amount of your manoevrability. I definitely recommend sticking with the default controls and, when I went back to them and really tried to learn them, it almost felt like the shitty controls were a deliberate part of the game's difficulty. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the control scheme in this game, but by the end I didn't hate them either.

So finally I decided that what put me off this game was its level design and pacing. Some of the levels are great, with a constant stream of slightly larger items to keep absorbing; you always feel like you are making progress, and the sheer visceral nature of absorbing everything around you delivers a nice steady stream of dopamine to your lizard brain. But then in a lot of the levels, there just seem to be gaps in the object size chain. What I mean by this is I would be exploring a level and get to, say, 1.9m, only to find that every object I could see around me was either slightly too big to absorb or too small to have any notable difference on my katamari size. And then suddenly everything comes to a screeching halt. I would be left either with the option of exploring the level in depth to find some pocket of untapped mass (not a fun prospect at all given the aforementioned trash player controls and lack of any camera control), or resign myself to spending ages mopping up tiny things around me until I could creep over the critical threshold to start collecting things above the mass gap. This sounds like a minor issue, but the entertainment value in Katamari is so surface level and mindless that these gaps in play absolutely destroy the flow. Bear in mind that me calling the game surface level and mindless is not meant as an insult: I love some far more vapid games such as Cookie Clicker and Vampire Survivors, but these hold my attention so much better than Katamari because they just don't have gaps in their feedback loops.

I don't want to be too down on Katamari though. At its best it really is an incredibly cathartic experience. Especially in levels where you start and end at completely different size scales, it feels great to end up mopping up tiny objects that started out as impossibly distant background details. The change in the scale of the world is very gradual and very nicely done as you grow; there were multiple times where I had a great 'a-ha!' moment upon realising that I'd ended up back in the starting area but now everything was 1/5 the size. The Katamari itself always showing what it's made of is a masterstroke as well; it really helps with the organic changes of scale in the game, and helps give a visceral sense of achievement when you can simply look at your character and see how much garbage you've managed to roll up. Katamari deals with both this scale and this sense of progression so much better than the heavily-inspired Donut County that it's absolutely night and day, and I would 100% recommend this game over Donut County any day of the week.

So all in all, a mixed bag experience for me. I'm very glad this exists, and commend how experimental it's willing to be (especially given the era that the original version came out). I wouldn't say it lives up to the near-legendary plinth that the gaming community seems to have placed it on, but it's a decent little game and overall I am glad to have played it.

I've played a fair few Sokoban-likes since making an effort to play a wider variety of games. And I think in general... the subgenre isn't really for me? Don't get me wrong, there are some Sokobans I have really enjoyed and appreciated: the genius concept of Baba Is You and the organic simplicity and focus on player discovery in Stephen's Sausage Roll make these among some of the best made puzzle games I've played. But there always becomes a point in these games where frustration overtakes me... when the number of interacting mechanics becomes too great, or the convoluted solutions to the puzzles become too clever for their own good. When the artificial complexity begins to outpace the more organic complexity of one of these games' premises, I always find myself losing interest. Well... that didn't happen with Parabox. Patrick's Parabox starts off a little slow but before long it had grabbed onto me completely and, despite my checkered record on that front, I didn't find myself cheating on a puzzle even once. In terms of pacing, level design and player experience, I would now rate this to be the best Sokoban I've played.

The premise of Parabox is fantastic; the recursion theme is great and requires some really lateral thinking. The actual number of distinct rules the game introduces is surprisingly small, and most of the puzzles are less about applying them in an awkward way and more about exploring the way they interact and their natural corollories. It meant that every time I got stuck on a puzzle it was generally because there was an implication to one of the rules I hadn't worked out yet, and it meant each of these sticking points ended in a great 'a-ha!' moment when I finally managed to solve it. In terms of both the recursive theme and this focus on streamlined puzzles, Parabox reminds me a lot of Cocoon; but while Cocoon came off as being very handholdy and afraid of reaching it's full potential with its puzzles, Parabox is much more trusting of its player's intelligence, and really wrings out every ounce of puzzle potential from its core ruleset. In short, Parabox is pretty much exactly the game I wish Cocoon had been.

There's not much here to write home about in terms of aesthetics, though. I'm not really a huge fan of the music, the visuals are very simplistic and there is no attempt to really have any kind of theming or framework. At first this can make the game seem rather sparse, especially in the early levels where not a whole lot is going on. But once you enter the mid-game and the complexity really starts ramping up, this visual simplicity becomes much more of a blessing than a curse. In particular the use of simple shapes and bright block colours makes it remarkably clear what's going on no matter how crazy the play area gets; the game has the option for you to zoom into any box at any time to see what's happening inside, but the visual design was so clean that I almost never felt the need to.

So yes, all around, a very solid little puzzler. It's a very pure game; like I said, there's no real atmosphere or interesting visuals to speak of, but Parabox really goes all in on its puzzles and they are executed beautifully. Strong recommend from me on this one, even for people who are (like me) unsold on Sokobans in general.

I mean, it's fine. On surface level there's not really a lot going on here, and I'm honestly not sure how it's gotten so popular: maybe it's a generational thing, because I'm very much a millennial and this game feels very zoomer-y, if that makes sense. I've only played maybe 10 hours or so of this with a friend, and we did have some fun, but I kinda feel I've got everything out of it I'm going to get.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy this, because Lethal Company was pretty fun... once we worked out how to play it. The onboarding in this game is terrible, and at first we assumed we were supposed to both go scavenging, which just ended up being a painful and aimless experience filled with unavoidable deaths. Once we started leaving somebody in the ship, our time got considerably better; having one person guide the other over walkie-talkie with a finite battery life leads to a pretty fun dynamic, and there was always a genuine 'oh shit' moment when the scavenger would go silent and you didn't know whether they'd died or just run out of power. Lethal Company has a pretty good vibe to it, and in general it succeeds in both its horror and its innate silly comedy.

There are a lot of different enemy types and quite a few different planets in this game, but it all ends up getting pretty samey pretty quick. Almost all of the interiors look exactly the same, the exterior layout on each planet is exactly the same every time you visit, and every enemy was functionally exactly the same for us because we never worked out a way to deal with literally any of them except 'run away'. I get the impression this game would be a lot more fun if you went diving through a wiki to learn enemy behaviour patterns and how to unlock secrets; as an example, once we went into an interior only to find a huge old-fashioned library instead of the regular steel corridors. I'm sure there must be hundreds of other secrets like this in the game, but yeah... we never had any idea what caused that area to spawn and we never saw it again. Again, I'm sure I could pore over the wiki to find these things out, but that's just not how I like to play games. And it feels like LC discourages organically discovering any of these secrets, because the cost for exploration and player death is usually so high.

I think the vibes here are generally strong enough that I'd be willing to push through the difficulties I'd had with this, if not for the quality of life in this game being pretty awful. For some reason you have to use an in-game Command Line on a terminal to do pretty much any in-game menuing, the exterior maps are overly large and easy to get lost in despite having nothing to see or do, and for some goddamn reason there's no way to reset the game! There were many times when it became clear we weren't going to meet the next quota, but in order to start again you have to land the ship however many times you have left and then sit through the cutscene of you being fired by the company. Every single time. And we fucked up a lot in this game; like I said, LC doesn't feel like it designed to be played by people who haven't read the Wiki, so we quite often would die and not even have any idea what killed us. For some reason if you both die, any scrap you had stored on the ship gets magically deleted, so yeah it can be obvious pretty early in a run that you're doomed... and yet the game forces you to go through the motions yet again. There's only so much of this I can take, and it's the single biggest issue I had with this game. I know there's mods that can fix it, but I'm not a big fan of modding, and this is a review for the base game so I'm not going to give it points for mods that happen to exist...

So yeah, there are some nice ideas in here, many of which are actually quite well implemented, but the poor quality of life and lack of player feedback really drag this one down for me. I imagine this is the kind of game that would be much more fun if one player knows what they're doing and the other doesn't, but two novices playing this together got pretty stale before I feel we'd really scratched the surface.