Nottolot is part of a Namco Bandai programme to help give experience to some of it's junior developers. The games are published on steam for free for people to try and gain feedback, The first batch of games were initially released in Japan only with the three 2024 titles (Nottolot, Doronko Wanko and Boomeroad) being released internationally for everyone to play.

Of the three games the one that interested me the most was Nottolot. As a fan of Sci-fi, Wall-E and Astrobot the appeal of a cute robot escaping it's production factory to see the sky should be immediately apparent. First thing I need to highlight is this game will start in Japanese but thanks to other steam users advice it does have an English menu option. (In order to change it to English click on the second menu tab, here are the options and now go to the last menu tab at the bottom and change it to English.)

The game itself once that is sorted is extremely simple. Your robot, Rolly is a ball that can jump, dash, move around by...rolling and hack as a small set of abilities. You need to sneak and solve some basic puzzles on the way across three stages that in total take about an hours playtime. As you travel through the production facility there are plenty of other robots that are on alert for you. There isn't really any stealth needed though getting in their line of sight is an issue but fortunately Rolly can hack other robots inserting itself in their back socket and taking control of them making it invisible to the other robots. Whilst controlling them there is a timer for how long you can control them before being thrown out and the robot exploding though you can do the same of your own accord any time. There are three robot types to control, a little walker, a flyers and spiders. Each robot (apart from giving Rolly invisibility) is needed to pass certain basic puzzles to get keycards to go to the next area. Switches, platforms and lasers mostly involving the robots. Walkers can go over electrified panels without damage, flyers can reach areas others can't and pick up and drop walkers and spiders can crawl along certain walls and ceilings. None of the puzzles are remotely hard and the little game feels very family friendly in both gameplay and art design.

The visuals are cute and crisp. Rolly itself despite being just a ball with eyes is quite a cool little character. He has a nice animation where if you stop rolling around he will hop onto the side so his face is forward rather than at the ground or sky I thought was a nice touch. The whole game is set in the production facility but it comes across as unrealistically super sleek with bright clean metal panels, pipes and boxes. It has a nice visual style where everything is clear to see.

For free this was a great little experience and like an extremely well polished student project in some ways. I don't feel that scoring a free project made for developers to gain experience is the right way to do this so I will just say I had fun during it's playtime. The art style and gameplay mechanics have quite a lot of potential and I would love to see an expanded version of this with more robots, puzzles, chase scenes, areas and mechanics.

When I was in my early 20's I had to go to London for an appointment. I had time to wait for a few hours so my mum said we should go to Westminster Abbey as it was nearby. I can't say this thought really interested me but that line of thinking soon changed when I actually entered the building. It's amazing how much you take your own country's landmarks and history for granted sometimes. Westminster Abbey is such a stunning cathedral full of history. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Laurence Olivier, Geffery Chaucer, Charles Dickins, Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling among others are buried there. This is nothing compared with the architecture, artifacts (the coronation chair is located here) and atmosphere of the building. I've had a real interest in church and gothic architecture ever since. It was an eye opening experience that sometimes you can miss what is right in front of you.

How is any of this relevant to The Pillars of the Earth? It brought back that same feeling. That impression that I take more interest in other culture's history and landmarks than my own, this especially hit when I had to look up to see if King Stephen in this story was a real monarch (He was). You see this game is a work of historical fiction based on the novel by Ken Follet which much to my chagrin I also haven't read. It's set in 12th century England about the building of a cathedral, the clergy and monks, lords, politics and ordinary people around it over several years. There is a surprising amount of content included here with the game split into three sections called books where the characters vary as the story gets told from different perspectives. The characters are all extremely well written and the dialogue and pacing of the story wrapping everything together works far better than I had anticipated it would though it's very slow and mundane at times. It's not super thrilling or action packed but feels like a very mature and often disheartening story as I would expect based on the original source.

What really brings the characters and world together though is the games superb cast. The voice acting for each character just feels like perfect casting and considering the bulk of the game is these conversations it was imperative they got that right and I couldn't find a single fault. The games entire presentation is stunning actually. The game is 2D art and almost every scene just felt like a stunning painting with carefully calculated backgrounds and prominent character art and colours. It's often bleak in setting but gorgeous in visuals and sound. I never got tired of looking at it and I don't think I can praise it's presentation enough.

Whilst not admiring the vistas or enjoying the conversations, Pillars of the Earth from a gameplay perspective is a point and click. It really doesn't get much deeper than that, you pick up key conversations or items that you can use on characters to progress various quests or unlock more information. The items have a wheel or you can quick select on the d-pad. I appreciate there isn't anything bonkers like the Discworld games. Everything here is fairly straight forward and logical for the most part. It's clearly more about pushing the flow of the narrative of the source material rather than in engaging or challenging puzzles. The overall story is set but small actions you make or don't can have impact on aspects of it even if they seem small initially. Each chapter will highlight these decisions for you at the end.

Whilst I've been positive overall I did have some technical issues like once when loading my game I couldn't move my character at all, completely frozen meaning I had to restart a couple of hours of content as well as a crash and some audio issues which brought my enjoyment of the game down slightly. Despite that though I would really recommend it. It's like no point and click I've played or seen. The visual and audio quality are sublime mixed with an interesting period of history I really should learn more about.

+ Stunning artwork.
+ Great voice acting and casting.
+ Engrossing story.

- A few technical issues.
- Can feel slow at times, especially playing a lot it one sitting.

Project Eden is definitely a product of it's time. Released in 2001 on PC and PS2, it is one of the earliest releases in the sixth-gen of consoles. Before and after this came two of the worst Tomb Raider games, but this was Core Design's first PS2 game and it's good for the most part.
It does have action elements but it is mainly a puzzle orientated adventure game, much like Tomb Raider. The setting is fantastic, a delve into the lower parts of a cyberpunk mega-city where the buildings and foundations become increasingly dilapidated and unstable.
You're taking control of four characters with their own abilities and you'll be combining them a lot during the course of the game. With four characters in tow comes a rudimentary command system allowing you to command the three remaining characters to follow or hold their position. It does work for the most part, although with how precise you have to be with the platforming the AI will follow your exact path of travel, often leading to the team members at the back getting lost and requiring you to manually switch back to them.
What is noticeable from the start is that there is no jump button. Instead you will be ascending and descending ledges in the map geometry, which can lead to some confusion with judging if a drop will kill your character or at the least deal some damage.
And that's the primary reason for why Project Eden hasn't aged the best. Its slow and methodical way of doing things is archaic and leads to a lot of frustration in the gameplay when you're forced to repeat an action multiple times to move along in a level.
The shooting is basic but the weapons you pick up throughout the story do freshen things up when it starts getting repetitive shooting fellas with the basic weapon. A couple of cool gadgets show up early on in the game, presented in such a way that you know when you'll have to use them for puzzle-solving.
Prepare to get lost every now and again, the 3D environments aren't much to look at now, but compared to what was around in 2001, it's pretty impressive. Sometimes you'll miss an item you were supposed to pick up, a button to press or a thing to shoot but the game makes a good effort in pointing you towards the right direction and letting you figure out what you've missed.
I do feel a bit of nostalgia for the game and that most likely weighs a bit in on my rating but after going over fifteen years originally playing it on the PS2 and coming back to it, I certainly still see a great game despite the aging and the flaws it has.

Not all heroes wear capes, some wear seriously outdated suits.

It's been a long road getting to this point for both myself and Yakuza's main star Kiryu Kazama. Like many people I got into this series with Yakuza 0 through word of mouth in 2017 and wondered what I had missed all that time. There simply isn't another game series like it. It's a Frankenstein's monster whose separate parts on paper don't feel like they should work but amalgamated together they create something magical. They are serious crime dramas, only they are off beat comedies. They are beat 'em ups yet also adventure games, RPGs and dating simulators. It's all of these things and yet none of them. Not all it's ideas work, when they throw so much at the wall some things don't always stick but without fail for me they are always emotional, hilarious and entertaining.

The series' big selling point to me though is actually it's world design. This series along with Deus Ex made me realise I don't dislike open worlds, I dislike vast areas for the sake of being vast with empty meaningless content, sometimes less is more. Yakuza games are open worlds done right, not gigantic bloated icon maps usually used for those descriptions but smaller denser hubs. Locations have meaning, they have personality, the cities feel like characters in the game as much as the cast. If the game tells me to go to a shop or street I normally know where it is without having to bring up a map. They are full of life, small compact and focused.

Yakuza 6's story follows this same thought, whether it was because this was the first game on the Dragon Engine at the time meaning they cut back I don't know but I appreciated the sharper focus on Kiryu rather than the overly large games before that were getting a bit too big for themselves. Kiryu was really the heart of this game, it's his personal story about his own values and dedication to family. Hard to discuss without spoilers but whilst the overall story wasn't quite my cup of tea generally resulting in some pacing issues it still has some fantastic characters, moments and voice acting. This is partially because Yakuza's cinematography for it's cutscenes are a step above most games to me. The camera angles, facial details and expressions have always been extremely impressive but I truly noticed it here.

Like every Yakuza game the side content is often as important as the linear main story. Yakuza 6 scales back on this too but there is still a wealth of content here I spent a lot of my 70 hours playing through on. Spear fishing in an underwater on rails shooter, building up a clan for street fights in a mini strategy game, helping a small baseball team beat their countryside rivals (I'm not into baseball but this is making me consider some other games for it) as well as the usual suspects like cabaret clubs, video chat dating, mahjong and arcade games. It even has the full arcade game of Virtua Fighter 5 as optional content which is pretty crazy as far as a throw away mini game is concerned.

Honestly except some story beats I just don't have anything negative to say about this game. The combat is a little simpler than some other titles though that doesn't concern me much as the moment to moment narrative beats and atmosphere are the core to the series to me. I started it because I needed to play it to play Gaiden as I skipped from 5 to 7 initially but then had a feeling of regret I hadn't played it sooner as the Yakuza magic took hold of me. I love the world, the characters, the side content, exploring and taking in the sights of the locations. Yakuza as I discussed is a lot of things but to someone who grew up as a Sega fan it really shows to me that they still have that spark that made me a fan of theirs in the first place and may it long continue.

+ Hiroshima is a great new location.
+ Cinematography and voice acting are superb.
+ Baseball, spear fishing and clan fighting are pretty fun side content.
+ It's Yakuza.

- Storyline is a little up and down.

This is my second attempt to play Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I originally bought it when it launched in 2010 having been hyped by the launch trailer with Patrick Stewart and Robert Carlyle narrating. Its been 14 years since then and all I remember is not enjoying it much and eventually trading it in but nothing specific about it. A friend of mine bought it so we decided to play through it together as Castlevania fans, what could go wrong?

Everything about this game feels bad to play.

Let's start with the protagonist Gabriel Belmont, he has all the personality and emotional range of a slab of granite. Literally anything that happens gives him no reaction at all like the developers forgot to animate his face. A magic horse teleporting in next to him? No problem. Giant titan smashing out of the lake? Sure. Dead wife appearing in front of him? It's Tuesday. Not a flicker of acknowledgement of surprising events like an animated corpse. His voice actor Robert Carlyle is normally a great performer but it doesn't seem like he was given much direction here. Perhaps it's because voice acting is a very different skill? but it really sounds like he is just reading off a script. Perhaps I'm underselling him here and he is acting to the characters visually displayed emotions, which is absolutely nothing, so in fact an A+ performance.

I could overlook this if the game was fun to play and control Granite Belmont but that's actually the worst part, by a country mile. It's a 3D action game but has a fixed camera with a soft lock following the action. Because the game lacks personality as much as Mr. Granite it's essentially a God of War clone but it fails to understand the level design to make that enjoyable leaving large dead zones of the camera view constantly. The combat just feels terrible, It's slow but not deliberate. Attacks lack weight and impact yet everything is unresponsive at the same time. The controls are somewhat baffling in their design to compound this further. Roll is on L2 with the left analog stick, the right analog stick doesn't seem to be used at all as you can't control the camera. There is no manual lock on to attack enemies, just a soft lock that's easy to lose. It's feels so cumbersome, even after a few hours it still felt like we were learning the controls.

A second friend came by when we were playing and gave it a go and their only impression was "This doesn't feel good does it?"

You can buy more combos for your whip using experience gained through combat but none of them feel easy to pull off or actually useful in any way when you do. The whip completely lacks impact. Enemies will just interrupt you mid attack so most the time hit and run is the most effective strategy. It's Castlevania yet you get access to one sub weapon of a throwing knife and two magic spells of light and shadow. Light heals you, shadow increases your attack. It's...coloured auras in which you collect orbs from enemies with L3 or R3 depending which pool you want to refill. Getting access to this IP and only giving that as options feels so...derivative.

This complete lack of imagination extends to the level and enemy designs equally. Enemies are bland fantasy archetypes of werewolves, trolls, goblins, and spiders. We completed 14 levels in two chapters with several hours of play and barely saw anything else. This is a series known for animated armour, floating medusa heads, dancing ghosts, chimeras etc. How do you take the past games and boil them down to such uninteresting foes? The first main level after the tutorial fight was a swamp you slowly trudge through with some goblins. It's so painfully generic but it's not even done well or designed interestingly to make it fresh. It utterly lacks the panache and style of the series it's based on.

It feels like it's aged terribly going back to it, it has all the worst aspects of the PS3 era. Quick time events for finishing enemies or traversing with a circle going into another circle. Balancing to cross a beam and having to hold R2 if you are about to fall. The game also constantly takes control away from you like it's mansplaining everything feeling incredibly patronising. Constant tutorials, pop ups, camera sweeps. Just let me play the game! I know I can pick up items with R2, I've been playing for over 2 hours! It treats you like your memory is wiped every 15 minutes.

The game tries to be a large epic with high production values with epic music and voice acting yet there are large chunks of levels with no music at all but it's not atmospheric, just empty. What music there is is forgettable like a generic orchestral theme for a summer block buster but no punch or stand out beats. Like trailer music.

After several hours my friend and I just called it quits. Maybe it gets better further on? I am aware of the twist but after learning there were still 34 more levels we just didn't actually want to play anymore. We moved onto Space Marine after this as my friend hadn't played it and the quality difference on the same system was night and day. Full camera movement, easy fluid to use controls, and interestingly a better frame rate and clearer image quality. It really just emphasized all of this game's flaws.

The thing is, I'm sad about this. We wanted to like this, we wanted to beat it and play Lords of Shadow 2 to fill in some gaps in our Castlevania history and see Granite Belmont's story unfold. There isn't an original idea to be had here though and everything just feels so banal with it. Playing this feels like a PS3 game with all the negatives that sentence implies. It takes the worst aspects of gaming in that generation and merges them together but above all it's just forgettable.

Even Patrick Stewart can't save this.

+ I like Granite Slab's outfit.

- Awful camera, controls and combat.
- Bland level, skills and enemy designs.
- Gabriel has the personality of a plank of wood used in a button measuring contest.
- Everything feels so safe and by the numbers like designed by committee.