For most of my Star Fox Adventures playthrough I didn’t feel like reviewing it. I definitively look upon it more fondly than most, but even then, I didn’t think I would have much to add to the discourse.

The starting hours of Star Fox Adventures were a blast, with very few hick-ups. I really enjoyed the gameplay-loop of finding a Gatekeeper making it able for me to get to a dungeon, finding a SpellStone which makes me able to find a Krazoa Spirit and then finding a SpellStone and so on.
Gameplaywise Star Fox Adventures brought with it an eerie feeling of familiarity.

Now I’ve never been interested in the mainline games, as I’m not big into on-rail- or any kind of shooter, so this feeling took me a while to understand, but after thinking about it for a while Star Fox Adventures really felt like a proto-[Kameo]( https://www.backloggd.com/games/kameo-elements-of-power/), which makes more and more sense the longer I think about it.

You visit pretty much the same settings in both games, the combat system can feel similar at points (though not as fleshed out here) and these are only a few of the similarities between both games, which makes sense as it’s mostly the same people working on them.

Now unfortunately this game really takes a dive in the final stretch and starts decreasing in quality around the half-way point, which is around when you have seen all Dinosaur Planet has to offer and must start backtracking. They probably had to rush the game out, considering it came out a day before Microsoft announced its acquisition of Rare and it shows.

You will have to revisit old dungeons, which repeat their previous puzzles, but a little harder, one of the Gatekeepers is just a random guy and it all accumulates (slight naming spoiler for this 21-year-old game) Dragon Rock.

Dragon Rock is the worst thing any game has ever made me suffer through and this isn’t meant as some kind of metaphor, no! It is the worst part of any game I’ve ever had the displeasure of going through and me beating it should only show you how much I liked the rest of the game before it. I should probably say that at least some of my criticism of this part of the game is partly made worse by my controller being a bit overresponsive and having a few blind spots, both of which only becoming a problem when I had to do more precise movements.
Dragon Rock doesn’t start of all to bad. You had to shoot at some turrets using the Fire Blaster, which might be the wort controlling thing conceivable, but it isn’t too bad.
After a bit you get told to save a HIghTop and this is where it all falls apart and I started to embark on a journey. This funny little guy is trapped by four fire-blaster-targets, two in the back, two more to the front, symmetrical to the HighTop in the middle. It is your task to shoot all of these 4 points within around 10 seconds. When I got to this part of the game my in-game timer showed ~15 hours.
This task doesn’t sound too bad after all, but let’s talk a bit more about the Fire Blaster.
First of the Y-Axis is inverted, which at least for me didn’t mesh well with quick thinking, the controls are already overresponsive, which only got worse with my controller, the targets are far away enough to make it really hard to exactly line up your shots and if you miss the HighTop will start stomping and shake the screen, making you miss more and making him stomp more. He is also a big moving hitbox, sometimes blocking the targets.
Now the worst aspects of the Fire Blaster. When you stop moving the cursor it will snap back to the middle of the screen and when you want to turn forget it. Fox will accelerate in a way I don’t yet fully understand and then snaps back to some position like 3 screens away. The only way to kind of understand where your camera ends up is to look at the map, which has its own problems.

I tried for around 1 hour, when I got there on April 30th, to do it the intended way, but had to give up and started to investigate if I were the only person with troubles here and unsurprisingly, I wasn’t. Look at any comment-section of this part of the game and you will find complaints.
Not too long after I found positions on both the right and the left, where I can hit two targets by only looking further up. The one on the left is more finnicky as the target on the back-left is more towards the middle than its right counterpart.
I tried it using this knowledge for 2 more hours and went to bed after, thinking about giving up, or spending a lot of money to buy a more or less new first party controller, which was when I had an idea.
Why didn’t I try creating consistent set ups using visual cues to hit the targets, so I would only have to turn to said point, aim up and shoot.
On the next day I found out, that the soot-detailing could be used for such a set-up and the ledge get-up can be used to always shoot from the same position.
Using my amateur picture-editing skills I created my first consistent set up tutorial. After printing it out I noticed that I forgot one crucial point, the turning. As I said I was kind of able to look at the map, but this wasn’t by any means optimal. This set-up was also way to slow. This whole process took me another 3 hours.
Then I had another idea, the position on the right. I had written it off, as I couldn’t make it possible to always stand on the same position, but then I had another idea after looking at my stack of transparent paper. I think you know where this is going.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t ever able to draw out a 1:1 copy of the map, and I now could only use it to know where I had to shoot to hit the other two targets, but it was better than nothing. I tried this method for around 2 and a half hours, it was still to slow and hell to set up after using all your energy and having to run out of the building to replenish.

After 5 and a half hours of trying and failing miserably at what should be an easy task I reconsidered quitting and thought to myself that I might as well go for the whole 6 hour mark. My next strategy was to do it the intended way, but to shoot from the position I tried before, rather than the middle and to my own surprise I got it, not very confidently, but still. I think I just missed the 6-hour mark. But it wasn’t over yet, because what followed was a 3-minute long auto-scroller, which if you fail it you must free the HighTop again.
I luckily did it first try and saved a dozen times.

Dragon Rock doesn’t get much better after. Luckily I found out, through watching the speedrun of the game, to see if you could skip the part somehow, that you can skip a lot of the next by lining up Fox with a line on the wall, looking a bit to the left and throwing the barrel through the wall.
What follows is another (uncapped) auto-scroller and what many say is the actual hardest part of the game, even without a non-assuming third party Wave-Bird-Controller making you struggle even more.
This time I bit the bullet and got myself a controller with turbo-functionality as my fingers started to hurt after not too long.

This is Dragon Rock. I only completed it to finish a game I had thoroughly enjoyed before it and was it worth it? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. The only thing you might be missing is the best Krazoa-Spirit task after the most lackluster Krazoa-shrine.
I should also mention that my game crashed at the final boss, setting me back half an hour, as the game apparently ceased to auto-safe after big, ingame events.

A lot of people have already talked a lot about the let’s say “interesting” final confrontation with General Scales. I personally think it would’ve helped a lot as now the last two boss fights are on-rail shooters which is a really undercooked mechanic, which is only there to remind you that you are playing STARFOX Adventures.

At the end of the day, I still enjoyed most of Star Fox Adventures, but I will never replay it completely. The TV my Gamecube is hooked up on will now forever tell the tale of Dragon Rock with its glue residue.
Play it on an emulator with some kind of Fire Blaster fix, if that exists.

I have never really cared much about Bayonetta as a franchise, because the mainline never really seemed like they would be something I would like. Thus before playing Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon I've had only been exposed to the franchise through Smash Bros., trailers and whatever that situation with Hellena Taylor was about last year.
But when this game got announced at the end of last year and I saw the trailers, the art style and the very interesting looking gameplay, it instantly clicked with me.

Now it took me a bit to get around to start playing it, as I am have been participating in a Pokemon Draft League since January, but when I did 4 days ago (on my birthday) I got sucked in and the game not only met my-, but exceeded my expectations.

As I kind of alluded to before, the gameplay of Bayonetta Origins is very unique. If I had to compare it to anything (and take this comparison with a salt mine) this felt a bit like an isometric platformer/collectathon, as in Skylanders or Lego games, mixed with Kameo and a few sprinkles of Metroid Fusion (in terms of map-design) mixed in and then only the best parts of these games.
This is an extremely scuffed comparison, but it's the best I have got, as it is really original.
Originality for the sake of originality and nothing else is a pitfall for a lot of games or pieces of media in general and make them anything but fun to experience, but believe me when I say that Bayonetta Origins clears that.

I rarely ever go out of my way to 100% a game, even the ones I really like, with a few exceptions, but I had so much fun playing this game that I travelled through Avalon Forest for an extra 10 hours (estimation as the Nintendo Switch for some reason doesn't tell you exactly how long you've played something and doesn't at all until 14 days after starting it the first time.), just to see and experience everything it had to offer.
Now I should mention, that for you have to control 2 characters at the same time for most of the game, but the controls are easy enough that I had them down in under an hour (it probably didn't hurt that I have played this 1p2c), they are also mapped, so both characters can be played using one Joy-Con each.

I can't understate how much fun I had playing this and the ingenious overworld design definitely helped.
During my "item-clean-up" were multiple moments where I unlocked a short-cut, that made me go "wait you can go from here to there?" and this wasn't a one time occurrence.
When talking about the overworld-design I have to mention the map which at best is confusing. It's this games biggest flaw and did sour my experience a bit during said "clean-up" (shout out to Wrapper the wisp), but I think I can say that I kind of understand how it works now and it didn't occur to me as a problem during most of it and definitely not during the (for the lack of a better term) normal playtime of me going through the story.
I would also like to mention that when saying that I have 100%ed this game, I mean that I did everything in the main game and not the new game+.

Outside of the stellar gameplay loop this game also looks incredible. If you don't have an image of it already take a look at this trailer, which still doesn't do the game justice through all its compressed glory and the ost is also really whimsical and beautiful.

The story suffices. I had predicted a lot of story beats, but their execution was good enough for me to not care. I wasn't really the biggest fan of the voice work, but it isn't worse than botw's is and I also didn't care all to much in that game, but be warned if that is something you care about.
The story, such as the game is obviously more tailored towards children than the mainline games (which isn't a bad thing, for the record) and that also shows in its difficulty.

This game for the most part is easy. There is a supposedly harder new game+ though. The only times I died was during one-hit "Tír Na Nóg" trials, but there was one significant difficulty spike during one boss fight.
I have read another review, in which the author said they had problems with the final boss, which might be because they didn't collect the Vitality Petals and/or upgraded their inventory, which probably made the fight easier for me.

I really hope that Platinum will make more games like Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon. There aren't many people talking about it and I could also get the game on Amazon for 40€, which doesn't paint a good picture when it comes to sales figures and that is really unfortunate.
As someone who's first real exposure to this franchise was this game and already loved playing it as a standalone, I really implore you to give this one a chance if you are on the verge of buying it.
Get it! It's good.

Krabat: The Secret of the Sorbian King might just be the most obscure game I have ever played and remember that I have played this, this and (of course) this.
But when I say this game is obscure I don't only mean that it isn't popular, but also its content.
This is the first Sorbian game, it is entirely voice acted in said language tells a story about/is based around Krabat, an old Sorbian tale, which I was vaguely familiar with (more so with Otfried Preußlers adaptation)).

This is a point & click game inspired by the likes of Monkey Island and other classic point & clicks, but before I get into talking the gameplay I would like to mention the overall presentation of the game, which really hit a soft spot of mine.

Visually this really looks like german early to mid 2000s like Little Amadeus, which I personally grew up with and the soundtrack is surprisingly good. I have uploaded a short clip to YouTube to show this, because it is really hard to find anything about this game.

So as I said this is a point & click puzzle game and this could be considered my first foray into said genre and from what I have learned this genre doesn't mesh well with obscurity. There were multiple puzzles which I found to be too hard to complete, but not in the way of me missing something obvious in hindsight, but rather something being obscured by something in front of it, or including an unintuitive to retrieve item.

I know I didn't do the best job describing these scenarios, but I'm going to give a few examples to make my problem more understandable.

Now these might be a bit spoiler-ish (which I will also mention when I get there), so if that is a problem you can skip to the next paragraph, but I'm not the only one who had problems with these parts of the game. So my first and least problematic example of this is a part where you need to de-rust something. Problem is that at this point you have probably already interacted with each thing near you, nothing of which could help you with rust. The solution to this is that there is some sort of lubrication you can find behind a lot of letters, which visually blends in with the background. I came to the solution by asking the nice devs at Rapaki on Twitter. Now the problem here wound up being more about not knowing what to search for, than the blending in with the background thing, because I could figure out were this lubrication was through context clues. Now the second example is way more offensive in my eyes and it is a big part of the end of the game and this is where I might get a bit into the spoiler territory. So the last part begins with you having to bring back two bulls to a farmer. One of them involves a really nice puzzle, but the other one is just way to hard to solve. I had to work with these posts in a German only forum, to solve it. I won't spoil the whole solution here, but one part of it was literally finding a needle in a hay stack, which only spawns there after a certain trigger and another part of it is stealing a crown from a group of snakes, which was way harder to execute than it should've been. I have uploaded a clip of the latter to YouTube, but I did watch a stream in the background, because of it just taking way to long to do and me eventually growing bored of skipping through the same dialogue over and over again, but if you still want to watch it here it is.

Now overall Krabat: The Secret of the Sorbian King is still a pretty solid game, with good puzzles (for the most part), nice visuals and a good soundtrack and for the low asking price of around 5€ and the first chapter being completely free I can only suggest you to give it a shot. Now this being the game that it is, it's of course not that easy to get a hold of, but it is available to download on Rapaki's website.