Harold Halibut is a strange, unique, and also heart-warming experience that unfortunately isn't going to be everyone's flavor. "Game" might even be a strong word for Harold Halibut -- there's very little in the way of mechanical friction for the player; no real puzzles, challenges, or other elements you might expect from an "adventure game". Instead, Harold Halibut presents a quirky cast of characters living aboard a crashed, underwater spaceship-city and invites you to intimately get to know their lives, their routines, their thoughts, fears, and everything in between. If you give this one a shot and aren't intrigued by the world within the first hour, I'll be honest: bounce off it. You're not likely to find much to love here.

That IS Harold Halibut, though. The game revolves entirely around running here and there, helping neighbors and friends by doing odd-jobs or delivering messages, and getting to build up relationships with the cast. Sometimes, that's enjoyable enough. The art direction of the game frankly incredible, the soundtrack is great, the animations and acting are solid and feels like you're watching a real claymation film -- most of the time I was fully engaged. Sometimes it drags, though. The titular Harold, being a quite plain guy, often does plain, boring things; understandable that the player will too, to better understand him and the grievances he comes to express in the story. However, when you're nearing double-digits in play time and still running back-and-forth, back-and-forth to initiate a chat with a character 3 loading screens away, it starts getting old. Not to mention there are multiple instances where the game forcibly takes away your ability to run, or even in one scene towards the end, makes you move in slow motion, which only compounds how slow things feel sometimes.

All-in-all I liked Harold Halibut quite a bit, and even had a melancholy feeling when it ended, having to say goodbye to a cast of characters I felt like I had grown to know personally. It's hard to shake the feeling, however, that there could have been more use of the video game medium here, and a bit less of the running around the game has you do most of the time.

Fun little kart racer. I've never been a huge fan of the Mode 7 style kart racer, but this is definitely one of the better ones. 4 cups with 4 tracks, some side missions, and a weird little story inspired by the cool new world of the personal computer and email! Typical Mode 7 complaints apply here: gravity doesn't feel real and hard to tell what are obstacles or just part of the track, precision items suck ass to try and aim, the final cups use a shitload of course hazards (water, lava, etc.), which is fine, but if even one pixel of your sprite touches a hazard you fall into it, so it feels really weird and bad sometimes. A lot of this is a modern perspective though; still had a decent enough time.

Art-wise, the game looks spectacular. Unfortunately just about everything else is a slog. The entire game is just walking from linear environment to environment looking for the white-outlined thing to interact with to do a puzzle. The puzzles are rarely all that interesting beyond trying to figure out what the alien thing you're interacting with is. If the game were just that, it would be okay I guess, but it also has maybe the worst combat I've experienced in recent memory. I've heard it described as "survival horror"-esque, but I personally just found it really tedious. Lots of running backwards and ducking from behind corners to pop off one shot while waiting for another to reload hoping you don't get hit by seemingly-homing projectiles. The worst part of all is the checkpoints are garbage and if you die in combat, congratulations, you get to do a bunch of puzzles you already know how to solve and a bunch of fights you already hated, again!

This is one of those games I owned as a child that I never beat, until now (with maybe a little help from some select save states). It's basically a Castlevania clone with ninjas and wall-climbing; what's not to love? Well...perhaps its brutal difficulty level. Especially in the latter half of the game, the screen is filled with projectiles and rabid animals that are out to fling you into the nearest death-pit, of which there are many. And don't get me started about Jaquio. But otherwise, the game has a lot of charm, some great music, and is one of the earliest users of video game cutscenes. Can't hate hearing the death sound for the Nth time too much, I suppose.

I've truthfully only played through a handful of GB platformers to completion, but this is one of the more solid ones I've gotten through. As the last Super Mario Land game and also the first Wario Land game, this one has a little bit of an identity crisis in that it still plays quite a bit like Mario, but has some sprinklings of the elements Wario Land games would really become starting with the second entry. Levels are somewhat more open than the were in other Mario Land games, and Wario's controls and powerups have a bit more gusto to them. While the game has some decent length with 40 levels, a lot of them are pretty simple, and if you can manage to hang on to the Jet Wario power-up when you get one, I found it kind of trivial to just literally fly over a lot of the parts of the game.

A fascinating, short, narrative-game that deals with the topic of creative expression and a creator and their audience (or in the case of video games, the player). I feel like I’m still chewing on “the message”, having just completed this one a few moments ago, but the closing question of “what does it mean to create not for external validation” really resonated with me currently as I feel similarly stuck in a place where my own work doesn’t feel like it is for me a lot of the times. Highly recommended for anyone involved in any sort of creative endeavor, especially video game development.

This game is okay. I wanted to love it. I love the first and second entries, and gobbled them up in the span of a few days after starting them, but this one took me months of revisiting it to get through.This game tries to pepper in so many different new things, and frankly very few of them work well enough to commend their addition. If you distill the experience down to the moments when you're just Bayonetta kicking some ass, it's fine. Otherwise, it has cracks all over the place.

The story is just a mess. Not that Bayonetta has been known for great storytelling, but the one they put together here feels particularly sloppy and strung together. Jeanne is now relegated to sidemissions (which is a weird thing to call missions that are not optional, but whatever) that are these uninteresting, side-scrolling, sneak-through-some-hallways affairs. There's a new character, Viola, but her combat style just does not compare to the fluidity of Bayonetta's and is a chore to play as (yes, even post 1.2 patch where they made her feel better, but still not great). Luckily and unluckily she's only playable in a few chapters, so you don't have to suffer much, but you also don't really have a reason to give her a fair shake and try to get better as her. I didn't find the demon summoning aspect of this game to be that intuitive either; it didn't feel good to use like 80% of the time, beyond as part of a combo. It also introduces a ton of unlocks and equipment management, that roughly halfway through the game I just got overwhelmed and gave up on experimenting with, sticking to what I already knew how to use.

Honestly I can excuse a lot of that, but what irked me the most is this game has pretty bad performance. Some might not be sensitive to it, but its framerate is constantly all over the place. Environments often feel barren, I presume to save on processing power, and have noticeably low-res texture work in a lot of places. On top of that, this game uses this weird dithering effect on almost everything that moves or has transparency that takes me back to the PS1 days. It just feels like they sacrificed a lot to get this running good enough on the Switch hardware.

Again, I think this game is playable, and I enjoyed it well enough at certain times, but it doesn't come close to its predecessors. I already waited like half a decade for this game; honestly I kind of wish it cooked in the oven a little longer.