A very pretty puzzle platformer where a lot my complaints with the game are because I played Inside before playing this game. I felt like such an asshole playing the game because through out the entire thing I just kept on thinking to myself "okay, but I liked how Inside did it better."

I found the puzzles to be not that fun to work out and execute on because even when you know the solution to the puzzle, the game is just so slow with everything. Your character, Lana, climbs up ledges, runs, moves objects and swims at a pace where it's not egregiously slow, just annoying enough for me to complain about (Lana could be chased by an eldritch horror and will run like a grandma power walking through a neighborhood). For a game that has way more mechanics with what your character can do compared to Inside boy, the puzzles are not that varied as I'd say 70% of them were "how do we stealth past this robot." There's probably like only 2 puzzles in the game that were unique, both of them being music based, and the former being one I really didn't like due to how slow Lana moves.

When it comes to the presentation, obviously the game is pretty. But when it comes to the cutscenes, every time one played, I kept thinking to myself "why does this have to be a cutscene" as almost all of them could've been done in game without having to take control away from the player.

Lana is a very pretty game where the gameplay is unfortunately holding it back by a lot.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that I think Inside boy could beat Lana in a Death Battle.

For a game that's set after a world ending event and takes place in an apocalypse, this game is probably the funniest Advance Wars game cause of the hint system. Characters will do some two man comedy bit talking about the most random shit like cooking rats or drawing doodles of tanks on war notes, and then the enemy CO will tell you the most optimal way to choke out their units.

Also shoutouts to the game only letting you play as the ranged CO specialist once in the campaign in a pre-deployed mission with no ranged units.

This game frequently had me flip flopping between thinking "Oh this is neat" and "Oh this is dumb." I found that a lot of the areas have a really not fun gimmick to them that makes traversing to them a huge slog (stuff such as water that makes you move really slowly through it, lava streams that take like 3 full seconds to disappear, invincible ghosts you can't dodge through while you have to fight several enemies etc.) There's also a bunch of really weird design decisions that I just don't get, one of the biggest ones that comes to mind is that to unlock fast travel between your save points, you have to donate like 10k of your currency to a random alter that gives no indication that it will give you that.

For a metroidvania, I'm kinda baffled that the game never really gives you any powers through the main quest that allows you to backtrack and unlock new places like most metroidvanias do, but instead all of the abilities to unlock new areas are completely optional. And these abilities are so binary and uninteresting that don't do anything to affect how you play, but instead it's basically a switch you flick on and off only meant for discovering new areas and that's it.

Combat is simple, but simple isn't bad, it's just the fact that as absolutely gorgeous the artwork is for the game, and especially the bosses, I'm let down by the fact that all of the bosses in the base game are insanely easy and pretty much the most memorable things about them are their designs. The only exception when it comes to this is a snake boss that was added in a DLC that is an absolute nightmare of a slog to get to and one shots me.

Overall even though this review is all complaints, I did enjoy exploring this game, it's just that a lot of the times the reward for exploring is very underwhelming and aside from the visuals, this kinda soured me to the point where I'm just not interested in doing any of the DLC or NG+ stuff even though the NG+ features seems like a super cool thing I would love on any other game than this.

A very short VN with some charm to it and an aesthetic I really dig. Honestly I'd say that the visuals were my favorite part of the whole thing, I love the harsh stark colors plus the environmental designs making the setting feel alien.

The tone can wildly flip flop between trying to be comedic, emotional, and atmospheric with varying success. I can totally see if people don't really jive with the constant rude and crassness of the main character, my tolerance for these types of characters is pretty high so it didn't bother me that much. The game tries to go for some emotional moments, and they just did nothing for me really. The game is super short so trying to get me to care for a character we only know through flashbacks is a losing battle. Comedy is super hard to write so I can't even blame the game for not really making me chuckle, but the attempts at humor undercutting other scenes feels very jarring.

For a visual novel with multiple endings with barely any choices, it sure is really hard to figure out what to do to get the other endings. Trying to get endings in this game is like banging your head against the wall, because there's so few choices in this game, Q.u.q. makes it so that all the choices matter in a way where you need to have a specific combinations to progress that and this wouldn't really bother me in other games but some of the combinations of choices you need to do feel so abstract that I needed to use a guide to get like 5 out of the 10 endings.

TLDR I think the game is at its best being a weird abstract vibes game with really nice visuals, and is kind of hit or miss with everything else.

I don't think the game is bad, but it really struggled to hold my interest for almost the majority of my time playing. For an open world game, I didn't really find the world all that interesting to explore as so much of it is just open empty areas and all the small landmarks scattered to be really basic, and this is coming from someone who hasn't played BOTW so I don't have the added fact of having to go through the same world again. The only time I had fun exploring was during the first few hours of going through the depths, but quickly got old as the darkness just hid the same critiques I had about the open world. I think the breaking point for me to finally put down this game was the fact that 95% of the rewards in the depths were just various amounts of Crystalized Charges. I didn't find running around the world all the interesting, and the rewards to doing so were beyond generic so I thought why bother.

IDK man, I feel this game is really weird on what it wants to be, like there's a bunch of mechanics telling you that stealth is an option, but all the maps have so many people clumped together that killing them one by one trying to not get caught is really tedious and boring. The other half of the game also encourages killing a bunch of people in a row really quickly because it has a combo counter, but doing so alerts the police and you either have to mess with the ai to run from them or use an extra set of clothes which are one time only and you'll most likely be alerting the police again. Maybe the game wants me to switch between them but each play style feels really undercooked and not really engaging to do. The story is very whatever too, and I'm genuinely unsure if it's supposed to be like a parody of crime drama stuff, or if they're really trying to be serious.

Also this game might have one of the worst sprints I've seen in a video game ever.

It started off as a novel and cute puzzle game where you push and pull blocks that I found fun, but my enjoyment started to really waver towards the 4 star and above puzzles as it made me realize that doing those higher level puzzles required actual foresight, and not me just manhandling and hoping the blocks I pushed lead towards the top, was a skill the game was asking from me that I did not have/learned. I don't know if there were specific tricks to the game I was supposed to pick up on and mentally keep a bookmark of, but towards the final few levels of the special challenges, I just decided to use a guide as you have to move the blocks in a certain order so many times it was really getting on my nerves that little John Pushmo and the rewind function were so insanely slow where I was already struggling on trying to figure out the puzzle in general.

Playing this game where I had to stare at colored blocks when some of my play sessions were around a few hours really drained my mind and made me feel like I was in a padded cell made to look like a Rubik's cube with a single plushie in a sumo outfit.