I’m fine with this type of walking-sim/experiential game, but this did not do it for me. While the visuals are fantastic, the gameplay was virtually nonexistent, the musical was surprisingly unremarkable, and worst of all, the narrative was fairly unremarkable. The themes were overdone and too shallow in general, with a plot line that was pretty predictable — not enough to make up for the other shortcomings.

The game certainly has its moments, and if it looks appealing to you, I wouldn’t advise against trying it. It doesn’t ask much of you in terms of time, skill, or thought, and while that might make it easy to recommend on one level, it also means that it might not be worth the recommendation at all.

Little Silly, Cute Kitty

I'm a cat owner and have been for the last sixteen or so years of my life. My first cat was an all black football cat named Lurkey. This was a name given by my father because our large lad spent the first year of his life with us after moving in from the frigid outdoors living in the shoe room only emerging from his cave to eat and use the litter. Lurkey passed and my parents obtained a new cat via the cat distribution system while I was away in college, her name was Esme and she was also a black cat with a shame reminiscent of a pigskin. I write this all to say that I have a long love for black cats, and Little Kitty Big City is playing right into its target demographic here... a gamer with a cat who grew up with black cats.

My ferocious feline, named Albert Whisker (yes RE fans that's for you,) began to maul at my screen as SOON as I started Little Kitty, Big City. Maybe upset he isn't getting the same adventure in my humble apartment as our purring protagonist gets in a bustling (presumably) Japanese city, but that's neither here nor there. LKBC gives you one simple objective as the procatonist: get home after a tragic fall leaves you... not home! What gives the game a runtime as long as you want is the world filled with a plethora of collectibles, objectives, and animals to meet and converse with around town. The humor is endearing, a continuous hide and seek match with a chameleon comes to mind here, and the charm of interaction with your surroundings is endless. The environment is easy to make your way around and becomes immediately familiar to the player after a few rounds. I commend the dev team for knowing how to stack things inside such a small area to make it fun and traversal not feel like you're spinning in circles through the same area.

Ultimately this is a short game without too many bones to stand on, but it was fun for the couple hours I ran through the "main story" and putzed around side objectives. I had a few bugs that I couldn't really call frustrating because well... look at the game, but they were a bit annoying when trying to time or prepare jumps that faltered right away. I only had to reload a save once after being stuck in a stool but again, I only lost about a minute or two of progress. Game Pass was the right price for LKBC, otherwise I probably wouldn't have bought it. I'd recommend to anyone with a subscription or people who just really like cats, it's a fun one.

They fully leaned into the millennial cute cat memetics, and honestly, it sort of works. It's a very cute game that doesn't really try to do much else aside from being cute. And that's alright.

I do feel that these kinda of cutesy/wholesomy kind of games often ends up feeling a bit substance-less and fast food-y; And LKBC isn't immune to that; but honestly, that's also fine. I was reading a tweet by the devs about how they made sure that the game didn't have anything scary or morbid in it, because they wanted very young children to be able to enjoy it, and I think that's cool and good.

I unno, it's short and cute and I enjoyed it and I wish I could have a cat but I'm not allowed one in my apartment.

I am not immune to cataganda.

I knew I’d dig Pacific Drive, but I didn’t expect the car maintenance to become my favorite part of it — or for it to keep me invested for nearly thirty hours.

My play style in games like this is to play the janitor: grabbing everything not bolted down and tossing it in my sack. That served me very well for the incredibly robust crafting system, amassing a large tool shed of doo-dads. Unfortunately, I think it also kept me too far ahead of this game’s best moments where everything is going wrong and you have to be like Matt Damon in The Martian to “science the hell” out of the problem, crafting the essentials to keep you going.

It pays to pay more attention to the details than I did: figure out where to find what kinds of resources and just grab what you need to have the best freeform experience. If you’re an anxious little thing like me, you might burn yourself out a bit on stopping for resources too often and losing momentum on some of the more grand objectives. As with any immersive RPG like this, it’s a dance between what you need to do versus trying to do everything. Finding that balance makes for the best trip.

Just like the best immersive sim games, there’s a tradeoff for the endgame that you either end up having the final mission that tests you in every lesson you learned — or lets go of the gas and lets you walk through a shoegazey reflection. This one fixes eyes to shoelaces, where I maybe wanted to really show-off, but it might be best for a game about driving to have at least one joyride.

Pacific Drive is a new game that’s basically Stalker… with a station wagon. And brother, lemme tell ya, you’re gonna love the way you look in this wagon.

This beauty’s gonna be your lifeblood as you explore the mysterious post-apocalypse (??) of the Pacific Northwest, raiding gas stations, research bases, and derelict shacks for everything from fabric scraps to plasma canisters, which you’re going to use to craft upgrades and repair kits for yourself, but more importantly - your car.

See, when you first start, your car’s going to be a piece of shit. You’ll be trying your best to drive through overgrown pacific forests on spare tires and hope, with your body panels literally being held together by duct tape. But as you go further and further on, you’ll be replacing these shoddy components with rugged off-road tires, armored bumpers, roof racks, literal jump-jets, and electric coils to blast off anything that might cling to your car.

Because that’s another thing - you’re not just moseying around out there in the forest and small towns with you and your car. You’re doing all that while dodging a heaping helping of anomalies - ranging from helpful repair critters to devastating buzz-saws and creepy exploding mannequins. These anomalies are well-and-good as you’re looting, but everything ramps up to 11 when it’s time to extract - by the way, did I mention this is an extraction looter? Anyways - when you’re extracting, you’re opening up a temporal portal to warp you back to homebase, and the new denizens of the forest don’t like that. So now, you’re on a timer, screaming over hills and ditches, down mountains, all the while trying to avoid anomalous ley lines that hurl you up into the sky if you touch them, or abducting machine-beasts that will try to steal your car with you inside of it. It’s a white-knuckled exciting thrill-ride that turns the slow methodical looting leading up to it on its head.

When you finally get back to base, you’ll be given a chance to use your hard-earned loot to upgrade your car, as mentioned, but you’ll also get the chance to diagnose some… quirks… that your car develops in the Zone. See, your car is sort of anomaly itself, so sometimes you’ll get little mechanics gremlins that are simple - everytime you shut your trunk, the car beeps. Small, endearing foibles that feel like honest-to-god quirks you’d expect from an old well-loved car. But then you’ll get more.. Anomalous quirks. Stuff like, whenever you turn on your windshield wiper your car jumps upwards into the air, or when you turn the steering wheel to the left, your gas pedal slams to the floor.

These quirks are probably my favorite system in the game, because they’re developing while you’re in the zone. So you could be three sectors deep into your run before realizing that whenever you turn your headlights on, your car shuts off - so you augment your behavior around that newfound quirk. The best part, is that a lot of the time you’re not going to immediately realize what’s occurred. You’re probably just going to think - huh, that’s weird, why does my car keep cutting off? That’s because in order to fix the issue, you need to actually diagnose it first. You need to know that, not only your car is shutting off, but WHY it’s shutting off - what action is triggering it.

I know I’ve spent a healthy portion of this short review raving about this system, but I genuinely think that it’s such an awesome way to tie the gameplay into the feeling of owning and keeping an old beater car running. You develop a real attachment to the car as you’re tinkering with it, painting it, and fixing it up when it starts to buckle. It’s a system that works waaay better than I was expecting it to, which is a good thing, because the game’s best qualities sorta stop and end with the car and your interactions with it.

Looting the abandoned buildings and research stations is pretty dull, to be honest. They’re the same buildings, and nothing really changes, except for where the toolboxes are. For huge portions of the game, there’s basically nothing to threaten you while you’re on foot, so you’re just doing busywork gathering materials before getting back to your car. And it’s fun for awhile, gathering stuff that you know is going to be pumped into meaningful upgrades. But the abstraction of materials to plastics, scrap metal, rubber, etc means that you’re kind of just making the numbers go up. It’s not a strictly bad thing, and it seems clear that the game is doing this to further its ambitions to create something that isn’t another extraction shooter, but some small part of me can’t help but pine after this with an extra layer of imm-sim shooter spread over it.

With that small quibble aside, I really can’t recommend Pacific Drive enough. It’s a fantastic game that had me one-more-running well into the night.

Helldivers 2 is basically Starship Troopers meets Earth Defense Force and the most fun I've had with a co-op shooter in ages. The gameplay loop and progression is great and constantly rewarding and while I hate the concept of live service models in games in general, Helldivers 2 is easily one of the best and most fairly executed live service model systems I've ever experienced thanks to the devs giving the player the opportunity to earn the premium rewards without actually spending a single dime on micro-transactions just by finding bonuses in the missions themselves and gives you extra incentive to go off the beaten path in missions and explore every planet to its fullest.

Helldivers 2 is far from perfect, it's a very buggy game (Both literally and metaphorically), it has major server issues and half the time you won't even be able to log on and it could use much more variety in the mission objectives, enemies, weapons and locations, but it will still provide you with hours upon hours of mindless chaotic fun liberating planets from waves of bugs and bots and spreading managed democracy far and wide with your boys.

I'm doing my part!
Proceeds to drop a 500KG bomb on teammates

I randomly found that game while searching some interesting games. I bought it and I must say that it's a funny little game. Crime O'clock is some sort of 'Where's Waldo" and the story reminds me a lot on the TVA in the Marvel series Loki. I often imagine that I'm just playing as a TVA agent because of that "paradox", "anomalie" and "Crimes that take place even though they shouldn't" stuff. It's not the best game ever, but if you're searching a distraction for a few hours, this might be your game