'Moving Out 2' somehow takes the misery of real life moving and worsens the experience by gamifying it. This game is DESIGNED to infuriate. It is a precision puzzle game with controls made purposefully imprecise so as to add to the game's nonexistent humor. In order to receive five stars on a level, you must complete a list of challenges that remain hidden until the level is beaten, forcing repeat playthroughs. Every single challenge dares you to replay the level in such a way that your experience will be worse than the first time. Not necessarily more challenging; just in some way worse. And not a single level is fun enough to make second (third, fourth, fifth, etc.) playthrough even remotely desirable. My gaming group started this game trying to complete all challenges. We finished by ignoring all challenges and with all of the cheats turned on. And even still, we weren't having any fun. Given the seemingly endless levels in this god forsaken game, you'd think that one of them would have been accidentally fun. Nope! Avoid at all costs.

In 'Demon Quest 85,' you play as a high school student who playfully summons demons by choosing food items, music, and companions that will appeal to the demon of interest. These are chosen according to the clues found in a book of demonology and gleaned from conversations with other demons. It is a very quick game and there seem to be many different paths to completion, so it might warrant a few playthroughs. After my first, I can say that this was a fun and genuinely funny Playdate experience. No lie, I laughed out loud. The humor comes from the ridiculous dichotomy of your high school life and your developing relationships with these powerful agents from hell. Great time. Not to be missed if you own a Playdate.

I'm calling this one complete after having played all courses in the base game, finding all lost balls, and completing all scavenger hunts. But there is much play left to be had as it is an addicting online multiplayer game and the DLC course options are many. This is simply a rock solid mini golf game in VR. It works exactly as you want it to and, because, it's in VR, it can go to those fantastic places that make it, in many ways, even better than reality. The art doesn't look great in still images, but alive in VR (in motion and with the lovely in-game music, weather effects, etc.), it really is more captivating than you'd expect of a low-priced miniature golf video game. If you have a platform that runs it, play 'Walkabout Mini Golf.' Hard to imagine anyone being disappointed with it.

Not much here to recommend 'Escape From the Past' over the base game or the first DLC. I preferred the novel (for the series) tropical setting of 'Escape Island' but I think I prefer the variety of puzzle rooms (including a competitive room and a whodunit) in 'Past.' The in-game character art continues to be comically atrocious. And the difficulty has odd spikes and dips but the game remains generally quite easy. The five-key difficulty scale continues to be nonsensically applied to the rooms. Of final note, the title 'Escape From the Past' refers only to this game taking place years before the base game. But nowhere does this feel like a period piece. And there is certainly none of the time travel that the title seems to imply.

By the year 2024, I have become so exhausted in trying to piece together game narratives that are presented, out of order and exclusively, as mawkish audio recordings and diary pages. I HATE the storytelling of 'Viewfinder.' I should have taken the advice of @joshua0484 and just ignored it. Leave the phone ringing. Never press play on the audio recordings. Trash the documents. That aside, the puzzle game here is wonderful. You can photograph three-dimensional level architecture and move it to anywhere you please. It's hard to explain how any of it works, but know that it works. 'Viewfinder' has smart puzzle mechanics that expand in interesting ways throughout the runtime. I would recommend this game to anyone unlikely to get frustrated in a first-person puzzle space. But please do yourself a favor and ignore anything relating to the story.

Ignoring the 'Super Mario Maker' games, 'Wonder' is easily the best mainline side-scrolling 'Mario' game since 'Yoshi's Island.' Now that isn't a very strong statement because the 'New Super Mario' era was a dark time indeed. But 'Wonder' finally brings back the magic of 2D Mario, that bopping FLOW that 'New' games never seemed to capture. Perhaps it's the returning focus on solo play that fixed the problem? Ignore all the new additions, the (too few) power ups, the wonder flower effects (that strongly and smartly recall 'Odyssey's' Cappy transformations), the badges, and there is still something so satisfying in just how Mario moves through these spaces. If I have any complaint, it is that none of the music ever even approaches the quality of any given theme from those titanic 'Super Mario' 2D games of the past. A shame then, given the score, that 'Wonder' didn't make more use of some of those legendary tracks. Might have remixed or reconsidered them in new ways just to add a jolt to this songbook. That aside, this a big, satisfying, (at times) insanely difficult 'Super Mario' game. In other words, this is close to peak video game.

'Omaze' is a maze-based puzzle game. Get the ball to the hole. Hard to describe, but there's a bit of miniature golf in it. A bit of 'Marble Madness.' And at this point in Season 1 of Playdate, 'Omaze' and 'Crankin' are my favorite games. Both are enitrely unique puzzle games that make good good use of this very specific platform. For me, 'Omaze' may have the edge over 'Crankin' simply for how perfectly it executes on its concept. Suprises across its entire length. And ends leaving you wanting more. It's a shame so few will ever get to play this game, but it's hard for me to imagine it working without the Playdate crank.

'Flipper Lifter' is a multi-floor elevator game that is more of a dexterity challenge than a puzzle one. You control the elevators with the Playdate crank. Penguins get on and then get off when they arrive at their floor. There are five different stages, all but the first you unlock when your cumulative high score reaches a particular threshold. There is nothing here but a 'forever mode' on whichever level you select. And the elevator/penguin movements are too sluggish and the door opening/closing too janky for this to be much fun at all. And, worst of all, high score is dictated less by your own skill and more by how conveniently located your penguins' destinations happen to be. Maybe if they had designed in shorter challenges on these stages and framed it with some kind of story, I might have had a better time? As it is, I unlocked the levels, played on all five, and now just don't care if these penguins ever get to their floors. They're probably still sitting there waiting for the elevator. Tough luck, birds. I quit!

This is a challenging but fun and fair puzzle game that finds you manipulating time with the crank to get Crankin through all the obstacles standing between he and his date. There is trial and error required to make it through all fifty levels, but I otherwise didn't have much trouble completing the game. My advice if you're starting out, or you've already abandoned it, is to power through the few tricky levels. These few tough levels are sprinkled through and act as culminations of the mechanics to which you've been introduced. But immediately after one of those challenge levels, the difficulty drops way down so as to start training you on new mechanics. It does NOT continually get harder as you get deeper in the game. For example, day 47 was hard. Days 48, 49, and 50 were breezes. Stick with it!

'Cyberpunk 2077' is a good, open-world FPS. What surprised me is that, while it may offer all kinds of technological options for stealthy combat, including the hacking of enemy cybernetic implants and environmental objects, using these features has little more effect than slowing the game down to a crawl. Or maybe the game was just adapting to my own play style? Why would I ever bother to play hacking minigames to alter the viewing field of a camera? Or hack into an enemy's cybernetics to influence his behavior, then perform a silent takedown, then carry the body to a hiding location and stash it? And then do that fifty more times in order to clear out a room. You know what's faster than all that? Blasting someone's head off with a single shotgun blast. Or better yet, throwing a single grenade and killing six guys instantly. I was perpetually convinced to play this like any other FPS and doing so stripped the game of much of its intended individuality. Speaking of a lack of individuality, the player character V underwhelmed. Maybe the problem was pairing him wtih freaking Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand. Silverhand is everything V is not and so he has the effect of making V seem passive, weak, and without ambition, politics, or drive. The story of 'Cyberpunk' is particular. I was happy with the ending I chose. And I might be convinced to play 'Phantom Liberty' someday. Right now, though, my complete-feeling forty-hour playthrough has me plenty sated.

There's no completing 'Whitewater Wipeout,' but I've gotten good enough at it to set it aside for now and move on to the new games opening up on my Playdate. 'Wipeout' controls well, makes a good case for the crank as an input device, and is fun. I think there was an opportunity here for the game to recognize more stunts than just 360s, though. Why not points for height? Or even backside 360s, which are possible but not treated any differently than a frontside. For what this is, though, I had good fun with 'Whitewater Wipeout.'

Six plays in all of 'Backloggd?' Zero reviews?! People, don't sleep on this one. 'Manic Mechanics' is the kind of purely cooperative multiplayer countdown score chaser that made 'Overcooked' such a hit. I wish there were more games like this. Where communication is key. Everyone needs to work at high efficiency, and together, and at all times. I don't think the character art compares favorably against 'Overcooked' and 'Overcooked' offers more variety in dish preparation than you get here in car repair. But 'Manic' controls well and is fun from start to 100% finish. Any fan of 'Overcooked' should give this one a chance. It's often deeply discounted too! I think I got it for six dollars.

'Paranormasight' offers an intriguing paranormal mystery story and good characters but with only the lightest of gameplay elements. There are multiple parallel stories told following a handful of different characters. And the only control you have over anything is which timeline to visit and where in that timeline to visit. I will admit that there were some clever tricks to it. The story is influenced by how you, the player, plays the game, making for an interesting meta-narrative approach to it all. I enjoyed this, but wasn't bowled over by it. It feels very much like a development team's first attempt at a visual novel. Would be curious to see what comes next.