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!

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.

An amazing little game that takes the form of a Zelda-like, but offers so much more than dungeons and hack-n-slashing enemies. The core of Tunic is effectively just learning how the game actually works; basically nothing in Tunic, down to simple mechanics, is explicitly explained to you as a player. You spend the game having these "a-ha!" moments for things as simple upgrading stats, to things way way beyond. My only complaint is the true ending requirements get a little Fez-ian (if you know, you know) and might be over some player's heads or patience, but the dopamine rush is still there if you invest the time on it.

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.

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.