Remarkably good detective game with a lot of emphasis placed on investigation and deductive reasoning. While not based on any pre existing story and taking the other common approach of pitting Sherlock Holmes against some contemporary mystery, the writers of this game have a clear passion for the character that oozes through every little detail. Just cruising around in the Baker Street apartment is fun for detail dorks to pat themselves on the back for all the attention paid to literary description.

The game is very good if a bit dry, though there are a few segments that feel more experimental in their design and result in the solutions being not necessarily intuitive or working quite correctly on the first pass. This doesn't really bother me as a gigantic brained adventure game genius who is well seasoned on matters of trial and error, but may throw up early obstacles to new players that will turn them away too soon.

It's a frequent pitfall of city builder style management games to try and go the Dwarf Fortress route of simulating everything to the point where the game becomes a grandfather clock, a huge daunting complex thing you dare not stick your hands in and try to play with yourself. This is not in itself a bad thing, but it has created a very intimidating image of the genre.

Banished is so honed in on what it wants to simulate that it is actually pretty hard to get sidetracked - there's not diplomacy systems, there's not military systems, there's not intricate settler relations, it simply gives you a bunch of tools with the goal of "don't go extinct immediately" and lets you work it out. The game can be punishing, but its very restrained scope ensures that most of the factors of survival are things that you can very quickly learn to control.

Really the only downside to such an approach is that the lack of objectives and complex "projects" means that once you get a stable settlement going there's not much driving you to keep on going.

Buried under the bloated and swollen surface of AoE2: Definitive Edition is a fascinating game within a game (literally it is just embedded into the menu for some reason, you press a toggle to make the game into Return of Rome...) that defies the absurd overengineered shell it is contained within to actually be a very good and faithful remaster of the original Age of Empires.

Changes made are only to improve quality of life, like farms reseeding and operating like their AoE2 counterparts, trade carts allowing land trade, and being able to build gates. The biggest mark against this expansion (remaster? I have no fucking clue what anyone can call this) is the new campaigns that embody the AoE2DE design philosophy of making you play impossible time trials against large masses of fully established foes advanced several tech trees ahead of you.

The nicest part is that because this game is weirdly buried under the skin of another game, the psychotic mega-competitive fanbase of AoE2DE has left it untouched and so it remains fairly stable without much risk of needless new additions - they've instead been reworking the classic campaigns back into the game, which are among some of the best in RTS history and well worth the playthroughs.

This is the one that solidified what became the base formula that the franchise really built off of, it's the Big Mac of Zelda games. It's not fancy, it's not 20 games deep and trying to throw you a curveball, it's just pure Zelda.

Looking back on it from a modern perspective it's actually very fascinating to see just how much of this game's skeleton is in nearly every other Zelda game from the encounter and dungeon designs to the pacing and item distribution - You'll play this game and then start noticing its timing and world structure all the way up into Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess. It parallels the anthological plot devices of the game narratives themselves in a strange way.

Like pottery......