A Hat in time is a good time
Often considered one of the best indies, the hype for this title is more than justified. It's an amazing 3D platformer, incredibly polished and able to offer a really nice experience from start to finish.

Hat Kid is one of the best controlling platforming heroes: the ability to keep going, jumping dashing around and maintaining a constant bubbly momentum makes the simple ability to run around so fluind and fun that it alone will sell you on the game.

But a Hat in Time doesn't stop there: the game presents such creative maps, so charming, wide and full of secrets that are able to compete with the Kingdoms of Mario Odyssey in terms of creativity and replayability. There is not a huge amount of world to explore, but what is there it's totally worth the hype: all immensely creative and able to always offer new gimmicks and challenges, that go toe to toe with the really funny and adorable tone of the game (except for a certain manor that.... if you know you know).

Not my favorite indie game or my favorite 3D platformer, but for sure a title that will stand the test of time both on the pantheon of indie titles, and in the great general gaming catalogue.

12 years on from the strange, incomplete original, DD2 is more of the same, uneasily sitting between the uncompromising Souls series & more conventional narrative ARPGs. At times evoking a desolate offline MMO, DD2 is at its best when out in the wilds, the sun setting at your back & two or more beasts landing on the path ahead, all Arising out of dynamic systems.

The main questline unfortunately does not play to these strengths, with much of Act I confined to the capital & some really dull writing. Fortunately, writing does not maketh a game, and side-quests that take you out into the unreasonably huge map are much more interesting, and really need to be sought out in the crowds and corners of the world. Keeping track of these with the bizarre quest tracker is uneven and obtuse: you’re either reading the landscape and tracing clues or just beating your head against a wall figuring out what the game requires of you.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is singular, not quite fully realised, a beautifully rendered physics-heavy oddity. The art direction is profoundly generic, but so deceptively understated it at times resembles a Ray Harryhausen film, full of weight, movement and character. DD2 makes you feel like you have friends, albeit stupid friends, who'd throw themselves off a cliff for a view of yonder.

Hi-Fi Rush is just a blast from start to finish. The characters are fun and interesting, the writing is great with fantastic comedic timing in the dialogue and physical humor, the combat is really fun and the music is good too.

The only reason it's not getting 5 stars is because
1) I found that the music was a little too similar from one level to another. While I enjoyed all of the music, I think the very fact that it's a rhythm game kind of locked them in to featuring heavy beat, high energy music, and I did get a little tired of hearing the same stuff over and over.
2) As I got better at the timing I, of course, felt more satisfied with my performance, but also started to get a little bored of the combat. At the start combat was challenging because I was learning how to make sure that my rhythm was on beat and it took time to learn how many beats different attacks take to execute, but by the end of the game I was able to intuitively dodge or counter incoming attacks without much thought. This is a very cool and incredibly apparent indication that I was learning and improving and that the game mechanics are solid, but unfortunately it translated to slightly monotonous battles near the end.

I absolutely loved my experience with Hi-Fi Rush even with the two complaints above. There were some truly epic moments!

Without fail, my experience has been that games made by Good-Feel are very charming, occasionally very fun, and at times a little boring to play. Princess Peach: Showtime! is no different.

I think to some extent, the demo and press previews incorrectly pitched this game as a one-button action game for babies. Having playing through it over the course of 6-7 hours, I'm surprised to say the vibe is more like Luigi's Mansion 2-3 than anything else.

Like other Good-Feel games, levels are 15 minutes long and have a bunch of collectibles -- some frustratingly missable -- but like newer Luigi's Mansion the levels themselves have little themed stories/vignettes attached to them. The difficulty/action gameplay feel almost in service of the adventure-y elements rather than necessarily being the point of Showtime.

This is totally fine of course, and it's not like there's nothing to the gameplay either. Peach has 10 costumes to use through levels themed to each (3 levels per costume) and although it's a one-button action game, the different themes mix up the gameplay well. Ninja Peach has stealth gameplay, Mighty Peach (Hero Peach?) has some shmup sections, Swordfighter Peach has some basic parry/dodge mechanics, Baker Peach (or whatever she's called) has baking minigames, and so on.

I enjoyed this aspect a lot, though all costumes are not created equal. The Kung-Fu, Ninja, and Hero levels sat at the top of the pile, and the Baker/Detective ones were really dull I thought (they had no action gameplay to speak of). Everything else sat somewhere in-between. This created an odd pacing to the whole thing where I would be bored, then entertained, then bored again.

On the positive side, the boss fights are fantastic and feel like some of the better fights you'd see in a GameCube/Wii-era platformer.

Peach is a good Nintendo protagonist and I hope they do more games with her. But aforementioned elements and others (it's pretty short for a full-priced game, gets fairly framey at times, and doesn't have much to do after you beat it) paint a portrait of a game that has high highs and low lows. Good-Feel at its most Good-Feel!

Reviewing this now since i will probably never beat this game.

As someone who as only very recently gotten into fighting games through the street fighter series, when i saw this at the thrift store for 15$ i figured why not give it a try. In the end i can say i can see why this game is so highly praised, especially when i consider when it came out. The graphics are absolutely incredible and though i am way worse at this than i am street fighter, the game-play has a sort of fluidity to it that is very hard to explain, you really just have to feel it for yourself. There are plenty of modes to play, in fact probably more than i ever will be able to play.

My personal problems with the game come with the inputs. While i think it is super cool that each character has such a wide range of moves, it is very, very difficult for me to remember which ones do what when i am playing, as someone who only as of recently can just barely handle all the moves in street fighter. Still, this is just an issue with me and not really with the game.

Overall i think this game is excellent and probably one of the best multiplayer games on the playstation, though it can be a bit frustrating when I'm completely one-sidedly crushed by my friends who are somehow 10 000 000 times better at the game than me.