Mediatonic announced today that they are doing away with seasons, and I think that's as good of a reason as any to go ahead and write this review.

The creative mode introduced in this season is... fine? Building levels is easy enough, although it could do for some quality of life improvements. The user-created levels I've played have been mostly okay, although they all give off this sense of emptiness not found in the levels created by the devs in Unity. Hopefully this will improve as people get better at using the tools and as Mediatonic makes more tools available.

Unfortunately, discovering good creative levels is extremely difficult, and even when you find good ones they become a solitary platforming experience without a dedicated group to try levels out with. And without a good way of getting players to try out your levels aside from the one-in-a-million chance that Mediatonic decides to feature it in a playlist, there really isn't much incentive to get me to spend time making them.

As for the game itself, Fall Guys is on autopilot at this point. The same events, same rotating playlists, and no new developer-created levels. There will be new costume collaborations and Fame Passes to spend your money on, but creation of the actual in-game content has been passed down to the players.

It blows my mind that Fall Guys has been around for 3 years and that it has kept me coming back nearly every day for that entire time. It's been a great ride, even with its less than stellar free-to-play relaunch. I don't plan on totally quitting, but I've already stepped back quite a bit the last month or so and don't know that anything will really suck me back in at this point. But I do hope that it will be there for me whenever I do come back around.

The original Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened had always piqued my curiosity, so I was thrilled when this remake was announced. I'm happy to say that The Awakened lives up to its zany premise and has reinvigorated my love for this franchise.

The Awakened is much more of a traditional adventure game that the last several Sherlock Holmes entries from Frogwares and I think the game benefits from this scaled-down approach. There are a few more open areas to explore but they are tighter and more dense than the sprawling and empty streets of Cordona in Chapter One. Investigating and gathering clues is just as engaging as before, though I did miss the less linear conclusions of the previous games' cases. I certainly did not miss the clunky combat and action sequences of the previous titles, which are thankfully missing in this remake.

As I hinted before, the story is wild in all the best ways. This story does a much better job at presenting a young and conflicted Sherlock than Chapter One, pushing him to the absolute limit. I found John Watson especially endearing, and I hope we get to see more of this version of the character.

By bringing this new, young Sherlock Holmes back to his roots, Frogwares has produced my favorite Sherlock Holmes game since 2014's Crimes and Punishments. I have no idea how they'll continue the story from here given where things ended in The Awakened, but I'm excited to find out.

Ratcheteer is certainly the biggest game of Playdate's season one, revolving around its story and world while the others focus more on simple gameplay mechanics and loops. Because of this I don't think you'll find that Ratcheteer really does anything particularly unique in the genre, but it is a nice proof of concept that the Playdate can be a place for bigger experiences as well as smaller ones. I wasn't able to finish when I picked this up the first time due to life getting in the way, but I definitely plan on coming back.

In my review for the previous season of Fall Guys I called it a "disaster," so I'm not even sure what to call this one. Things went from very bad to worse throughout this overly long season. Rounds were removed from the game left and right, resulting in a game with less variety than it had even a few months after launch. Uncreative and repetitive limited time events give very little incentive to play, and when I do the game is as buggy as ever and rampant with hackers. Fall Guys really feels like it's on fumes, with its future riding on its new creative mode coming this week. Will that be enough?

Delivers on the promise of tense, stylish spy action. There's a bit of a steep learning curve in how the matches play out and figuring out the best ways to stay under everyone's radar but once it clicks the rounds get really fun. There are a few balancing issues and only a handful of maps at the start, but these are minor problems that if handled correctly are very fixable, and the developer seems keen on listening to the community. The base game is strong enough to be very encouraged that Tripwire will be able to build something special off of it.

I found the first two-thirds of Citizen Sleeper much more engaging than the last third. It's true that after a certain point if you've been smart with your decision-making the game becomes significantly easier, losing a lot of the oppressive tension that pervades the opening hours. And I never really found an ending that felt right with the way I was approaching the story.

All that being said, for the majority of my playtime I was enthralled with Citizen Sleeper. It's tense, brutal, cathartic, and warm all at once. I was completely absorbed for the 8 hours or so that I spent on the Eye, always pushing for just one more cycle when a session was coming to an end. Just one more cycle.