In terms of the Earthbound-inspired indie RPGs about depression, this one is probably the best designed from a gameplay standpoint. The emotion system spices up the turn-based combat, the art style and music are great, the story is deeply moving, and there even some decent scares if you go looking for them. My biggest issue is that the side quests are kind of poorly optimized. The vast majority of side quests require you scouring the whole map to find some ghost or some sign with a joke on it or something, and the fast travel system is probably more sluggish than it has to be. Otherwise I really enjoyed it.

I really think this is one of those games that everyone should play, especially if you like puzzles. It's an extraordinary experience. My biggest complaint, which isn't exactly minor, is that sometimes certain clues can be weak (as I understand it, the clue for one single character is actually a flat-out mistake), but the "three correct answers" system should help people along without making them resort to guesswork or solving things prematurely for people. The feeling of figuring something out for yourself is really satisfying, and some of the big bravura moments in the game were worth the price of admission by itself. It's too bad that there's so little replay value in this, because this game is something special.

This game really makes you think about how masterful Return of the Obra Dinn is. It's a very similar premise--looking back at a story and trying to piece together names to voices, figuring out who did what and why--but this is, to put it bluntly, a bad version of that. The writing is very weak, not to mention the voice acting feels like an amateur D&D podcast, and there's basically none of the clever "aha!" moments you get in Obra Dinn. You notice how in Obra Dinn they almost never just say what their names are? Or give names at all? In this game every character pretty much just loudly announces their name at some point so you can't screw it up. It's so lame.

I liked it, but I think this is the kind of game you can only beat once. It's basically a clicker idle game but with a lot more meat and content to it, a lot of the game is based around the same repetitive tasks and getting more and more efficient at doing them. There are puzzles and dungeons and boss fights and stuff, the best parts of the game, but most of the game is just repetitive busywork where the excitement is getting to do less and less busywork. That sounds pretty bad, but I actually like these kinds of games, so it really depends on whether or not you like clicker games.

I'm torn on this one. I've been a fan of all the God of War games up until now, and I was excited to follow Kratos's story in 4 (sometimes I feel like the only guy that actually liked Kratos as a character before 4). And I truly love the story in 4, it feels like the perfect place to take him as someone who is finally trying to cope and move on from all the trauma and anger and murder. Outside of a bit of dumbness with the father-son relationship towards the middle, I think the writing is fantastic. But I just hate the direction the series has gone gameplay-wise, I'm sorry. Knowing that the game got rushed and that they had to make cuts for budget and time reasons makes PERFECT sense to me. It explains why there's such little enemy or boss variety, why they make you fight the same recolored boss monster like 12 times during the story mode. Recolored boss enemies in God of War!! It feels like a slap in the face to what the game originally was. It just doesn't feel like the gameplay is anywhere as high quality as it was in the other games, especially due to a frustrating and obscure gear system that made some enemy encounters excruciating. It's too bad that I would've gotten a better experience just watching a playthrough on Youtube, because most of my memories of playing the game are just slowly drifting around a big empty lake and occasionally fighting the same draugr enemies over and over. I'm not gonna make that mistake with Ragnarok.

Sort of a nostalgia ranking but I've gone back and replayed it a few times and I've always been struck by how well this game holds up. Probably one of the best 3D platformers I've seen. The biggest thing that will always stick out to me is the soundtrack, the spacy poppy synthy beats in this game are iconic and I have nearly all of them tucked away in my head somewhere. It's hard for me to even listen to that music nowadays, it gets me caught up in my feelings remembering what it was like playing this game. Fun worlds, tight controls, generally bouncy fun game with a ton of content.