I'm a fairly big NSMB defender, but this one is just so boring to play through. It took me months to finish just because I'd go week after week with zero desire to pick it up even just for a few more levels. The coin gimmick is fluff and I still dread tiny mushroom required areas/coins lol.

As is typical, the extra world (Star World in this case) is a lot of fun with a decent bit of challenge but even that is only 9 levels and some of them are still a breeze. Happy to say I've played through it, but I certainly will never return lol.

(Still checking off mastered even though I only got 4 out of 5 save file stars. I simply can't be bothered to quickly rack up the extra lives for that final star when I'm literally never going to touch this again lol.

This is the first time a shump ever gave me the "just one more" itch after failing a level. The ships are all mechanically interesting and the enemy variety and design helps keep each level feeling engaging. Jamestown is also one of the first times I've ever gone back to previous levels to play them again on a higher difficult just because I wanted to see what they were like. I wish I was better so I could see it through to the end! The final level is a steep jump in difficulty and has to be played on at least the second highest level of difficulty (of the initial 4 difficulty modifiers) so after a few dozen attempts I threw in the towel. The thin narrative veneer wasn't interesting enough for me to want to bash my head against the wall until I finally broke through the other side.

(I do think this would be a lot of fun in co-op just didn't have the opportunity to play it that way.)

A Little to the Left has a very cute and relaxing aesthetic which is then betrayed by the rigid solutions required for each of the little puzzles. Some of the solutions are fun to puzzle out but, for the most part, I quickly found myself referencing a guide if I was spending more than a few minutes thinking it through. While I was hoping for a more free form path to organizing, seeing each level and the rare glimpses of the cat were enough to make me want to keep going. Unfortunately, that's not enough to make me want to continue progressing to finish up the remaining achievements or grab the DLC (which is a bit surprising because, going in, I had planned to finish the achievements and pick up the DLC lol.)

Zoom around in a ball shooting strange robots; it really is as good as its central idea sounds! I wish each combat room had a little more variety and took a little less time to complete. Maybe I'm just bad, but after the first world the level pacing never felt like it matched the inherent speed of the game. I also wish the upgrades offered a bit more in terms of flashyness and had less of a focus on just pumping up the numbers.

I haven't finished the final world and boss, but I'm shelving it (for now) just because my pc gamepass subscription will lapse in a week or two and this isn't going to be a focus of mine to finish up before then. Really hope to return to it at some point and get all of the achievements.

Wow! I hadn't tried to play a Souls or Soulslike game since bouncing off of the first Dark Souls in late 2015 but I just couldn't resist the allure of this Pinocchio inspired world. I'm not even a big Pinocchio fan, but I just had to know and quickly found myself sucked in. The costume design and music is what hit me first, but I soon found myself completely enamored with the world design and combat flow as well. Lies of P certainly isn't the first game to explore humanity through robots, uh puppets, but the broad strokes are genuinely quite heartfelt and some of the smaller moments that help build the larger narrative are quite poignant.

Granted, this was my first real time with any Souls(like) game so I got stuck on most bosses as well as some mini bosses and regular encounters, to the point where it took me more than double the amount of time to finish the game compared to the 30-40ish hours I was routinely seeing. (And I didn't even fight the final final boss on my first run.) But nonetheless I was hooked. For the first time in close to a decade, I actually started a new game plus playthrough immediately after beating the game and seeing what I could see in the endgame's state of the world.

My biggest complaint about the narrative itself was Gemini. He rarely moved past his role of explaining what you were seeing on screen and, even in those moments, his explanations were never particularly insightful. Laxasia also sucks shit. By and large, I think the bosses are well designed even if I struggled mightily on my first playthrough with the singular exception being Laxasia. Having beaten her twice, I can't confidently say that I got through her second stage with anything more than luck on my side.

At some point in the near future, I will, at the very least, revisit the first Dark Souls to see if my interest in the broader genre has been piqued. And I'm very much looking forward to the DLC and whatever the next game is from these folks. (Not that it matters, but extra half star just because it did the impossible and got me sucked into a genre I had largely accepted wasn't for me.)