This review will speak about both The Painful and The Joyful games, and what the Definitive Edition has added to them

The LISA duology has always been one of the top games when speaking about indie RPG Maker games (not counting The First, since it's a Yume Nikki kind of game), and being its release date one year prior to Undertale's, the other juggernaut of the genre, and being both inspired heavily by the MOTHER series, it's important to point out how different LISA plays when compared to anything else.

The LISA Duology takes on a lot of dark subjects, such as abuse, emotional manipulation, drug addictions or abusive environments, but it does those things in a subtle way, instead of straight telling a story, the game focus instead on the journey of their protagonists, who, initially, we know little about them, and exploring bit by bit their traumas, their inner thoughts and their fears.

The humour of this game in my eyes is excellent, the game knows how to mix a serious, dark setting with dark jokes and gags that don't feel out of place, and a lot of the time reinforce the narrative the game wants to go for.

In terms of the protagonists, in The Painful we'll play as Brad Armstrong, and in The Joyful, as Buddy, his adoptive daughter. Brad, is in my opinion, a magnific main character, he's obviously flawed, and he's far from being a good person, but that doesn't stop him from being sympathetic, and in the end, he feels like a person trying to do the best he can to improve as a person, and you can empathize with him.

In the other hand, I didn't feel the same with Buddy, I think her goals are just stupid, and I feel like her character arc in Joyful is just there to give an extra game with more context in what happened in Olathe.

Now, about the extra content of the definitive edition, it is very few, and it's not worth a replay if you played it recently, there's a new superboss on each game, and they're both found by doing a lot of cryptic stuff (and I really mean it, nothing in the whole game points it out, and it's basically impossible to find them without a guide), they're there mainly to give some extra context that the original game didn't have, and in the case of Joyful, it gives a better ending than the previous ones (which weren't bad per se, but there's an extra conversation that feels really gratifying after playing both games).

There's also campfire conversations, which gives some extra dialogue to almost all the recruitable party members, and helps to give some extra information about them, which is always welcome.

In the end, the Definitive Version has been to me more about a reason to replay LISA, since it's basically the masterpiece that has always been, with a cherry on the top.

I'm not usually one to hop on trendy flavour of the month multiplayer games of my own volition, but I adored the first Helldivers and word-of-mouth for this game was positive, so once my IRLs took the plunge I happily saluted the sky and fell backwards into hell.

Helldivers 2 is simple: It's a third person shooter, I assume you've played one. Every now and then you do a series of fighting game inputs to summon a nice gun/big explosion/several explosions/your dead friends back to life/a nuke/etc and they're on cooldown until you do them again. You do all of this to kill lots of insects, or very angry robots, usually in service to an objective or three. The controls and movement all feel very fluid and snappy, there's no mechanical or physics-based resistance at play here.

Where Helldivers stands out is in the capacity for things to go wrong, and the potential for situations to break a team's resolve. If you advance slowly, only fire while standing, use your strategems on big swarms, and never split up? This game is easy. Very easy.
The game knows this, and its idea of 'challenge' is trying to hammer you against an anvil with different implements. Difficulty levels don't bloat the stats of enemies, but you'll suddenly experience enemies flanking you and firing from cover in ways that're meant to make you panic. It's telling that the Machine Gun you start with has a fire selector for those especially terrifying moments.

The highlights of this game aren't really the easy victories. Clearing harder difficulties without much bother is boring, honestly.

No, the highlights are the skin-of-your-teeth victories where you and your team get scarily into the role. Moments that are... Filmic. That's the only word I can use. This game gets very filmic when the action kicks in.

Advancing through wide open plains while a fog slowly sets in, obscuring your visibility and forcing you to blind fire into the mist at shapes that could be either your death or some background detritus. Eternally afraid to turn around because what once provided comfort via visibility is now an endless murky sea of potential ambush spots.

Summoning your 3 dead teammates back to life at the cost of your own, screaming "LIIIIIIIIIIIIVE" as you throw the beacon out of the fight, using your last reinforce and watching as someone picks up your grenade launcher and avenges you.

Walking out of a brutal fight in closed spaces, dashing to 'freedom', and seeing a sea of enemies descend upon you. Forcing your weapon off of burst fire and emptying your magazines into the swarm one by one, unsure if you're doing anything but agonizingly aware of just how finite your resources are.

Those mad dashes to extraction once enemy hordes appear, dodging your allies' artillery fire and explosions more than any enemy. Sprinting towards an ever-louder chorus of explosions, gunshots, shouts and screeches.

More than any game that actually tried to do 'war is hell'', Helldivers exemplifies it with missions that leave me needing a 15 minute break after they conclude regardless of victory or defeat. The sound design really adds to the effect; the explosions and gunshots here are on par with Killing Floor 2 or ARMA 3, but used to arguably more terrifying effect.

Progression moves at a smooth pace, within the few hours I played I'd already acquired a decent amount of stuff just from doing objectives and mowing things down. I'll admit to not liking the pseudo-battle pass format that much, but after my time with Helldivers 1 I do admittedly like having some say over what I unlock, and mercifully both Strategems and more specific ship/player upgrades are separate from it.

I think the best indicator of how much this game hooked me is that my "first quick session" went on for 4 straight hours with nobody taking a break besides the obvious snack/drink pickups. It's rare for both me and my regular crew to get hooked so easily.

10/10 would kill my best friend with rocket launcher backblast again. Please nerf rocket robots.

Control is a very wonderful, very well written game, any fan of Alan Wake would probably love this game's writing and all the setpieces and scenes Remedy sets up brilliantly.

I don't think most people should play it.
EDIT: I've thought on it for a few weeks, I recommend playing this game solely because it's an amazing experience writing wise by Remedy, it plays boring as shit, but it's so worth it for the acting, the narrative, the writing, all of that, they're just so good at everything they do EXCEPT gameplay.

Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful thing to experience with all the beautifully done modelling for the brutalist bureaucratic office spaces of Control, as well as all the FMVs, set dressings and incredible graphical fidelity for performance that has become standard with Remedy's titles, but just, watch someone else play this game.

I'll start with the pros and cons of everything other than the gameplay, and get to the slew of gameplay complaints near the end.

To start, the game is beautiful as mentioned above, but the PC port is not going so great, I had a consistent input lag problem that was only slightly reduced by turning vsync off, and it made aiming difficult, also any time I died I was getting a loading screen of at least a whole minute.
Some minor NPC faces just look, weird, but for optimization and budget sake, I get it.
The facial animations on the other hand, typically are really bad, they look stiff and weird and just look very uncanny, I don't know why the cutscenes focus on the faces so much knowing this.

The tech to make all the debris is great, it looks amazing seeing all the stuff fly everywhere in combat and it makes it super cinematic, and the fog when killing enemies is amazingly cool.

As good as the writing is the dialogue isn't the best, conversations between characters always feel very stiff and awkward, and Jesse's inner monologues are just weird and usually unhelpful comments like pointing out that something is odd
Pacing is just kind of all over the place, things just kind of suddenly happen after a long duration of nothing during the gameplay segments, but I guess this is because I didn't stop to do side-quests.

The audio logs/hotlines were filled with some of the far more interesting stuff in the game, but I ended up not listening to a lot of them around halfway through because they didn't have transcripts and waiting for Trench to slowly say something vague over the span of a minute and a half for the fifteenth time started to get draining, but the Dr. Darling stuff is great, amazing job with the FMVs as usual for Remedy.

But onto the gameplay, opening with the pros, the weapon options are really fun to mess around with (Shatter and Pierce were my favorites by far) and really let the gameplay flow in different ways, same with the powers (though I did probably miss a ton, I didn't go for side quests)
Puzzles in the hotel in particular are really interesting and fun, but really short and only like 3 exist
Ashtray maze is a really fun segment, though sadly very short.
Entire ending sequence is great, the highlight of the game by far and if not for it I would have been coming out of the game quite sour, but they're less gameplay and more setpieces.

The gameplay loop is REALLY bad, the shooting is imprecise with a misleading small crosshair and the third person camera angle can make you accidentally shoot a wall which can get very frustrating fast, the reloading feels far too slow and....

The game feels like it was designed by the people who made Destiny, the enemies are bullet sponges, there's like 2-3 particular enemy types that are drastically more threatening than all the rest out of what seems like an oversight (FUCK the rocket enemies, getting hit 2 times is near guaranteed death from them) mixed with some just plain boring annoying ones (suicide enemies, yay!)
Drawn out encounters that make exploring the areas and seeing all the sights and taking note of the scale in the beautifully crafted world just too much to focus on, as you deal with the fourth set of bullet sponge enemies in the wave that'll come back if you ever come back to that room again anyways and to top it all off, useless weapon mods that give you shitty modifiers like +4.3% dmg to armored enemies only on Thursdays, and MATERIAL GRINDS TO UNLOCK ITEMS.

Prop throwing power feels really bad, should have been designed more in line with Half-life 2, where it just SNAPS right directly infront of you and doesn't try and smoothly fly over to you as that will get it caught onto things easily, and the damage is universal with whatever you throw so anything you throw lacks weight or impact as it just feels like a damage ball and not an actual object.

There's a bunch of really boring "puzzles" that feel like they're lifted straight from Half-Life 2 where you pick up a battery, and put it in the battery slot, it's super boring, Physics manipulation was cool when it was new in 2004, now it feels like I'm putting the square in the square hole, move on with game design, please.

Navigating through some areas particularly in the early-game when you haven't unlocked a lot of the convenient fast-travels feels awful as the areas are confusingly laid out and the map does more harm than it helps outside of the most basic A -> B areas, AKA only the first area.

The Dark Souls Bonfire esque checkpoints, while a neat idea, in practice just mean that if you die suddenly you have to go through the death loading screen, and then walk all the way back, and part of the combat encounter you just did has been restarted, I spent a LOT of time walking back from where I died, almost as much time as I spent recovering from the loading durations.

Weapons would be more fun to play with if you could hold more than 2 at a time, I guess this was a limitation for console controls though.

Levitate controls are just bad, you can easily accidentally tap the button again to drop, and now you can't gain any more height, and you've probably sank far enough that you can't reach another platform, you die and have to walk all the way back (happened TWICE on one of the final segments)

Enemy spawn behavior can be just bad sometimes, on one of the final segments, where you have to take out radio towers, the very last one spawns a bunch of enemies that will destroy you if you don't get into cover to block their attacks, and there's too many of them to just dodge them.

They spawn these in an area with no cover, and don't spawn until you walk into it, and after you kill them, they spawn 2 more, Irritating as hell, killed me 3 times, 1 minute loading screen per death, another minute to walk back, and one more minute to climb back up.

Over-all it feels like the game would have played way better if it was first person, it would have made things a little less cinematic, but it could be worked around with having third person for the non combat segments.

The gravity gun power would work better as it could be designed more in line like the gravity gun and not having a different angle than your character would make your throws less awkward and imprecise, the gunplay would be able to be designed to be more reliable, and it would make the environments a lot cooler, giving you a better sense of scale and able to really kind of get immersed in the office environment, feel like you're part of the action.
That, and the third person movement feels oddly weighted, it just feels awkward to move until you get the dash power which just goes instantly.

I can't say I had a terrible time with Control though, but I'm still holding out that one of these days Remedy will have a game design team even half as good as their writing and narrative teams some day, I know you have it in you Remedy, Max Payne did it, I know you can too.

If Vane were to be in its entirety its opening act fully fleshed out - I'd have a new favourite game. An hour of pottering over a vast pearlescant desert where what remains of a civilisation that hasn't been devoured by the earth's crust has the gentle presence of a great elder, sleepily telling their tale. Pulled in different directions by faint shimmers of glass and specks of stone in the distance - as a crow, that's all the provocation to explore you need in this mercifully waypoint-free world. It felt like a game that was finally learning the right lessons from Thatgamecompany and Team Ico; the flatly-shaded polygonal artstyle age-wearing the details and lending a sense of greater mystery to the windswept world, of which the player must take great care and attention in navigating because it's grand architects weren't designing a platformer game stage to collect coins in. To be present is to be prayerful.

The latter chapters give some distinctly diminishing returns as their gameplay shifts to more functionally grounded puzzlesolving. Not without their standout moments, it was therepeutic to scream at an orb.

Look at the way it displaces polygons for a timelapse effect!! This world shakes and breaks as you poke and meander, its wonderful stop-motion environmental unbuilding quirks lend Vane the feeling of a world barely held together by its 3D-printed infill. Not to make excuses for the game, but this was a case where I didn't mind the handful of glitches I encountered during my playthrough. In a game that takes great pleasure in ripping itself to shreds, veering itself wildly off course in a kind of implicit panic, I'd almost expect its rulebook to skip a page or two in the fray. Sometimes you clip out of the world, crash your console, and you just have to think "cool".

Like all the best art, Vane can be brilliant and subversive and confusing and frustrating. Definitely, the best of the Flower/Journey derivatives because it genuinely feels like it wants to carry their legacy like a true apprentice - but the game is sadly just too disjointed for it to stick the landing for me.

2D walking simulators seem to be a whole new genre of their own, are more interesting, and tend to be better than fully 3D ones. Games like Limbo, Little Nightmares, and Inside are perfect examples of this. There is some light platforming, some puzzle solving thrown in, and maybe a little bit of stealth. While none of those had stories that blew me away, they did make up for it in atmosphere and character. Shady Part of Me sadly doesn't accomplish any of those things. The only thing going for it is the dual-character puzzles, and that's about it. There really isn't even a story to speak of. Yourself, your shadow, and some disembodied voice narrate the entire game with cryptic dialogue that really is either open for translation to the player or is entirely meaningless.

This game reminds me a lot of Limbo and Lost in Shadow. You play as a little girl in a white dress who is afraid of light, and her shadow (always on the wall) is afraid of darkness. You switch between both to help each other advance. Puzzles involve pushing boxes and pulling switches, and in later levels, your shadow can defy gravity and even take over puppet bodies. Most of the puzzles have that "Aha!" moment, which can be satisfying, but there were a few that really stumped me and took a lot of time just fiddling around until something changed. Most puzzles have you manipulating objects in front of lights to make new shadows, move them, or make them grow or shrink. The real girl can't jump, but your shadow can. This means there is light platforming in the shadow, but nothing complicated.

I did find the aspect of two characters to be a bit tedious. Some areas just have you running to the right to stop in the circle to advance to the next area. You then have to switch to the other character and run that full length again. It's not a major problem, but it happens too frequently. I also found the rewind feature to be really handy. This prevents constant deaths and restarts. You can rewind as long as you want, so I have to applaud the developers for making this a frustrating mess. A lot of times your shadow will die or you will get caught in light, and it stops the game, but rewinding allows you to see the error you made and correct it. If you fully died every time and went back to a checkpoint, this game would be unbearably frustrating.

Overall, the visuals are great. The sketchbook look and early 20th-century aesthetics are fun, but they're also nothing memorable. We've seen this kind of art style before in other games. That's the biggest takeaway from Shady Part of Me. It does what it does fine. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't leave a lasting impression like the above mentioned games. Limbo was gruesome and had a memorable atmosphere. Little Nightmares' ghoulish monsters stood out, and Inside's dystopian world put you on edge. You will spend around five hours in this game and mostly forget about it the next day.

Sights & Sounds
- The character portraits are pretty rudimentary but nice in their own way. The backdrops are pretty, though
- I would have liked a little more variety in the enemy designs. The bosses are pretty well done, at least
- The music is an interesting blend of folk songs. I like how you can actually collect music as you progress through the story
- The English voice acting is a bit amateurish and inconsistent, but that's okay. I just wish the pronunciation of various words and names was consistent across the board

Story & Vibes
- The basic thrust of the story is simple and sad. Your lover has died, and you're trying to become a witch so you can make a bargain with the devil to bring him back to life
- In order to do so, you have to use the titular Black Book to unlock a set of seals and proceed to hell to make your wish
- All along the way, you'll learn a lot about eastern European folklore and the ways in which it interacted with Christianity. There's some fairly interesting cultural education in this game

Playability & Replayability
- It's a card battler RPG that eschews the usual rogue-like trappings of so many similar games. I have to be honest, that makes it a little refreshing
- Unfortunately, that leads you to lean on maybe one or two different deck constructions for the whole game unless you hit a boss that requires you to switch things up. I just ran a curse deck for about 3/4 of the game that trivialized most encounters
- When you are forced to switch things up, you better hope you have some money on hand. You'll probably need to buy cards while you're at your home base or from a vendor to switch to something more viable at some point
- Although it is indeed not a rogue-like, you'll often have mini-events in different areas you travel to that kinda feel similar to games in that genre. You'll have options to fight, try to weasel your way out of conflict, gain information, run away, etc.

Overall Impressions & Performance
- Although an interesting concept that taught me a bit about a world folklore that I didn't know much about, I never really found myself having fun. Maybe card games aren't for me
- Worked well on the Steam Deck. It's an easy game to pick up and put down

Final Verdict
- 6/10. If you love card games but want a cohesive story, this is a decent game to try. The card battles don't do anything innovative or fancy. A solid if unimpressive game