This game is the best book I've ever read. It is grimly beautiful, but not the vague, formless beauty of sunsets or mountaintops or weddings. It is real, visceral beauty, the beauty of self introspection as the screen lights up your face, clicking every green circle hoping to find something - something about the case, or maybe something about you, not the detective, but "you" you. Its the beauty of the weary face of a muttonchopped man who, when you look hard enough at his visage, squinting, you can just barely make out its actually your own.


This game has told me a lot about myself - in a way nothing besides soul-shattering literature from my adolesence has before. It made me question many of my beliefs, it made me question how I've lived, and even, or especially, how I think. Voices of half-light, empathy and shivers echo the anxious trepidation in my own life, and honestly, I feel like I'm just a tiny, tiny bit better at ignoring false-positive anxiety thoughts because of the experience Disco Elysium gave me.


I think other people will take different things from Disco Elysium; that's how all good literature is, after all. It's about so many things. It's about everything in a way, and all of us.


If you don't mind reading, please play this. If you do, then it's still meant for you, too.

I was really upset about something in my life when I started playing it. When I finished, I totally forgot what I was upset about, and I had a big smile on my face.

A Short Hike is Summer and Childhood. It is beach trips with your aunt and beautiful pixel graphics that give it a true charm. The calming music swirls around you and you forget you're playing a game, and you're just - you're just there, salty wind on your face, talking to your friends, playing silly beachstickball games, learning to climb, growing as a person.

and

It helped me mourn my childhood by celebrating adventures i never got to have

Bloodstained is an ambitious game, and a game that's unfortunately unable to support those very lofty ambitions without becoming clunky.

The crafting and recipe creation system is so extensive, the list of demons and shard abilities so wide and varied - and yet it all somehow ends up feeling repetitive, needless and bloated. Why have 80 recipes when 60 of them are just objectvely worse? Why have so many unique weapons when the movesets are so similar? It adds unnecessary clutter to the game and supports a monotonous experience.

If you do decide to explore the crafting system, you'll find yourself running between two screens for hours to collect an absurd amount of materials to make some food that gives a negligleable stat bonus and some healing. Or you could've just bought a High Potion.

The crux of the gameplay of Bloodstained is fun. It's very fun. It's Castlevania. I have a hard time saying more than that. It takes heavily from Aria and Dawn of Sorrow, both amazing games, but in this reviewer's experience, loses a lot of the polish of those games. I used the Flying Edge and more times than I could count did it cause frame drops or just bug out completely, whacking in unintended ways. The shards, especially the manipulative shards, are weird but often kind of clever ways to navigate the world, if implemented clunkily. For instance the light reflector shard you get later is EXTREMELY hard to precisely use, and it takes longer than other abilities to execute, really cutting up the pacing of the game.

This game has an amazing core but is just so unpolished, and it makes me so sad, because it really could have been so much more.

Amazing writing, characters dripping with complexity, and an overrarching narrative device that creates intensely interesting conflict despite its incredible simplicity makes The Forgotten City one of my favorite games of all time.


If anyone in the city commits a sin, everyone dies. Navigating this and the ethical questions it presents is the core of the gameplay. It also presents plenty of mysteries that you can unravel - it is not a game whose ending betrays it or relies on the unexplained, there are concrete answers for you, and those answers are consistently satisfying and rewarding.


Through the dialogue and debate you have in this game you can tell it was written by a lawyer - the arguments make sense in a very rational, evidence-based way, and some of them will make you question some longheld beliefs you have about morality. If anyone reading this gets the sense the game is too pro- or anti- law, or has some singular message it tries to preach to you, it's really the opposite. The game is seeping with nuance from its every pixel.


Despite this, I don't think its a game for everyone. If you value writing, philosophy, and complexity in a game I really reccomend it. If you value other things - lots of mechanics, simplicity, or are the type to skip every cutscene or interaction - there's nothing wrong with that of course, but it might not be for you.

This is the type of game that was made with pure passion - the devotion of the creators bleed through every aspect of the game. The beautiful pixel art, amazing music, and especially the new, unique mechanics they created that build on it's inspiration's foundation weaves together in a truly great fangame.

I am not a huge hololive fan. I have seen some Korone and Gura clips, a Matsuri clip here and there - but despite this Holocure is simply the best execution of the genre pioneered by Vampire Survivors. Item evolutions that are more complex and branching, character-specific skills (and there's so many characters!), a whole new side part of the game that is full of minigames and other things to do - it's honestly amazing just how chockful this little game is, and yet at no point do the mechanics feel overwhelming or cumbersome. It is simple at its core, but executed better than I ever expected from a fan-game. These are things AAA titles with million dollar budgets get wrong. It is incredibly impressive what they did here.

Also, non-predatory gacha is always so much fun and is way too rare in today's games.

This sounds dismissive, but the best way I know how to describe it is "Stardew Valley if it was morbid and slightly less intuitive". It wears its inspiration on its sleeve but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.


It's really fun having to plan to unlock stuff on the technology trees that unlocks something else that unlocks something else in this big chain. For me personally, the biggest issue is slightly unintuitive decisions like locking the blue exp orbs behind a story event or having to put logs in this specific bin to use them even though you don't need to do that with other resources. But those are relatively small complaints that are fixed by putting enough time into it or maybe not being as dumb as me :^)


It's charm definitely comes from its morbidness and I think that means, in contrast to Stardew Valley, it's not for everyone. I do think most people who find horror movies fun would enjoy this, though.