Tetris Effect:
I'm yours forever
There is no end in sight for us
Nothing could measure
The kind of strength inside our hearts
It's all connected
We're all connected in this love
Don't you forget it
We're all connected in this love

Me, not leaving a space for the square piece: Shit! Fuck!

Not only a very solid tech demo for all the new capabilities the PS5 has; but also a Super Mario quality level platformer, and a charming homage to the history of PlayStation. If y'all enjoy this one I really recommend giving Tearaway: Unfolded a playthrough because that game should have come with the PS4 like this did with the PS5 but it went really underappreciated!

Hi my name's Mike and my level is all about blowin'!

98 of y'all: It's not F-Zero GX online! Everybody is bumping into me! Q_Q

Me in 1st place: Hehe fun game.

I did a lot of this out of order and by the end my guy was way too strong and could brute force all the bosses lol. Gotta give 5 stars for the impact this had on the medium though. If I play another one of these I'll definitely try a dexterity build so I can't just brute force things.

Life is Strange and Night in the Woods had a dino-baby and I loved it! Truly we are blessed to have queer folk in this world. Beautiful coming of age story during the end times, when so much is out of our control, and we see all the more clearly the importance of our connections to those we love. The only reason this isn't a 5 star from me is because for much of the game it seems like you're making choices that can shape how much your character will accept certain decisions their friends make, but the game seems to force drama in the latter parts regardless of your decisions. Even so, the ensuing friendship make-up sequences were really touching and I dug the soundtrack which I felt elevated the scenes in a really good way. If you like the high school indie vibes of the original Life is Strange you'll know what I'm talking about; and it's also got playable musical segments a-la Night in the Woods but more mechanically engaging in a way I thought was pretty cool. This game seems to have some of the production value I felt was sorely missing during my playthrough of Stray Gods. You could say that the animation here is flash animation level stuff, but I still felt the art was gorgeous to look at, and I felt that it helped to elevate the game above the typical still images we get from most visual novels. Apparently there was some kind of 4chan driven anti-LBGT "parody" game made of this and I really hope that's not what's driving down the average rating on here, because I really thought this game was a treat!

This review contains spoilers

Pretty cool to see how the songs can change pretty significantly based on which of the three options you can go with actually. I can't believe I found the option to bring Freddie back from the dead on the playthrough where I wasn't romancing her!

Ultimately a pretty middling experience for me, though I am down for supporting any kind of effort to make a video game musical, because I want to see a really good one of these made someday. How much you like this game is going to depend a lot on how much you like TellTale-likes, there's a lot of choices that won't effect where the overall story goes but will effect the tone of how it goes. A lot of the songs are pretty forgettable, and there were a few where I got that "this really could just be spoken but we're doing this I guess" feeling. Also, I would never have guessed this game would prompt this sentence out of me, but one of the more memorable songs in this game has a weirdly optimistic view of the nuclear bomb???

Obvious thing is obvious but, a lot of this game could be improved by increased production value. When I saw the game announced on Fig I was assuming that the near animationless characters were placeholder concept art that would be animated in the full release, but I was wrong! Also the audio balancing was all over the place. There was a pretty important character reveal in the third act in which the character was barely audible and I had to rely on the subtitles to know what was being said.

I think this is worth checking out if you're in the very small niche of people who want an experimental musical TellTale-like, but it's probably not going to be your cup of tea if you're not in that camp.

Game tried to tell me that Big Bird originated from The Muppets and not Sesame Street and then tried to tell me that Muhammad Ali's name before he converted was Evander Holyfield and not Cassius Clay. I am not dumb enough to get the million.

This review contains spoilers

So glad I managed to avoid ending spoilers for 6 yrs because that was dope!

I'm incredibly late to this party so I was initially going to make a joke review like "Y'all heard of this one?" or something but then I got to the credits and found out this game is directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi, a dude nobody has ever talked about or seen. So uh...

Y'all ever heard of this guy?

Games culture is fuckin' wack.

Used to play the original on Facebook when it was a normal game and this has just been utterly ruined by showing you 3 ads every time you play a word. Congratulations, you found a way to make Scrabble bad.

This seems like it'd be very fun if I had enough patience for it! Truly this is the Dark Souls of little rotating bar games.

This is a criminally under-talked about game imo most likely due to a combination of under-marketing, Marvel fatigue, and the fact that it came out right at the end of the year making it miss a lot of GotY discussion. I really liked this though. It's a turn based tactics game from the team behind the rebooted XCOM franchise, fused with card battle gameplay and with a hefty dose of BioWare inspiration as you talk to your team between missions.

If it wasn't for that BioWare bit this would've easily been a 5 star rating from me, but I really could not care less about the story in this game. The idea of being able to chat up and build relationships with my favorite Marvel heroes as the game progresses is appealing to me, but it just failed in the execution. The dialogue is the Joss Whedon quip stuff that most people have grown tired of by now. Your companions are split into two camps, The Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America, Captain Marvel etc.) and The Midnight Suns (Nico Minoru, Magik, Ghost Rider, etc.) and much of the game's drama comes from these two groups bickering like petulant children. The plot is also a very generic supernatural good vs. evil story with a twist you'll see coming a mile away.

If you can put that aside though, there's some five star gameplay going on here as you'd expect from a Firaxis game. You're given a limited amount of card plays, but there are some cards which will extend your card plays if you get a K.O. with them. Weaker cards build up hero points which you can then spend to use more powerful cards. Positioning is also important as a lot of abilities involve pushing enemies into hazards, teammates, or other enemies. A lot of the gameplay is spent trying to find the optimal way to maximize the amount of moves you can make in a single turn, and it makes for a fun little puzzle every encounter. I also really like how you unlock difficulties over time, and that those difficulties are very transparent as to what values they're adjusting to make the game harder (enemy H.P. and damage, number of revives, stronger enemy reinforcements.) You get a star rating of 1-3 depending on how good you do with each mission, and after you've earned enough of those stars the next level of difficulty unlocks. It was fun playing on the harder difficulties and really having to optimize my moves to a much greater level of efficiency, and seeing myself get better at the game as more was demanded from me.

They also just really nailed making each character feel unique with the gameplay. Captain Marvel for example starts a match weak, but after playing 3 of her cards she can go into binary mode, doubling her damage and giving her a ton of block, which you have to maintain because she loses binary mode when out of block. Captain America is a super tank, having abilities that let him gain block as he damages and taunts enemies to target him. Ghost Rider will gain souls with each enemy he K.O.'s and after a certain number of souls are collected his max H.P. will increase and he will get an ability which will let him steal H.P. from enemies. Those are just three examples but each character is just as well thought out as these ones. It also incentivizes using a variety of characters by offering research rewards unlocked by using different characters, which I greatly appreciated as usually in these BioWare style games I will pick my team of 3 or 4 people for the gameplay and then only interact with the others in the hub area. It also just makes the whole experience that much more fun because you are constantly playing in different ways because of how these character's gameplay styles differ.

It's also quite a lengthy game if that's something that matters to you. You can easily sink over 100 hrs into this if you're playing through the whole story and exploring the hub area between missions. I definitely recommend this one to fans of the tactics genre.

Abandoning this really early on which is a shame because I was a backer for this game based on a cool premise and some high profile names hired to write it. It's just clearly unfinished, and seemingly abandoned. Feels like a less good version of Dragon Age: Origins where every character wants to be a less funny version of Alistair. Combat somehow feels more janky than Dragon Age: Origins. Lines of dialogue that appear in the subtitles aren't spoken. The intro level just skips ahead in time in what feels like a missing-content kind of way without explanation. Damn shame, was looking forward to this one but it just didn't pan out.