Somehow this game manages to be worse than the previous one despite showing evolution. Unfortunately, it evolved in all but the right ways. See my review of the first game for more details.

Everything that made the charm of the first game is essentially thrown away, I'll just list some comparisons:

The minimalistic story is replaced with a much more involved narrative. Unfortunately it only serves to show how poor the writing is, whereas it didn't matter in the previous game because the story is relatively unimportant. The abundance of mini-cutscenes is also quite frustrating, the game taking control away from you for usually no good reason. Every so often you have to watch your character agitating the lamp in multiple directions as if surprised by a sound or something, instead of experiencing it yourself. It's the same for multiple scares, which don't work because the game takes control away from you at that point. Not only does it break immersion but it's simply frustrating because of how often this happens are and they really break the flow.

I must admit however that the story has a good surprise toward the end, but that's about it.

Where the previous game could have benefited from being more open ended, this one is even more linear than before. Almost every single location is locked in a precise way by those giant monsters or barricades that magically disappear when it's convenient for the plot, requiring you to take the path the game wants. The directions are also clearer but in a way that only emphasizes the linearity. The annoying dog appears every 10 meters to tell you where to go and it is extremely immersion breaking.

The chases are replaced by mostly awful boss battles that require you to die multiple times and go through the same ordeal to solve them. The biggest problem with them is that they're extremely tedious to redo and require a lot of waiting every single time. This is a very intentional design in many segment of the game where it's obvious that the developers intended for the player to die and it's just infuriating, especially when you consider that they did not put checkpoints and require you to backtrack in many cases. Oftentimes, the boss is just a matter of evading attacks for a few minutes before you can do anything that matters and this is where you die if you do not have the solution, forcing you to restart a sequence of waiting for minutes before trying again.

The biggest change by far : the environmental sound design is much tamer and ordinary. What made the first game stand out was how powerful the environment was, the strong sound of cicadas or the wind in the rice fields. This created a truly unique and captivating atmosphere. This time around, the town is mostly silent and you'll only hear your footsteps. What's worse, the monsters are much more aggressive and most of them have very annoying and violent sounds that completely shatter any peacefulness. Even the dog seems completely out of the loop, why put such an annoying sounding pomeranian? A much lower pitched dog would have done the job better, like in the first game.

Adding onto that, the monsters themselves are rather boring. In the first game, you explore a town where most monsters can easily be avoided and are almost harmless. This helped to create this mystical atmosphere which is not just horror. In this game, you walk through a desolate town where at every corner there's a white ghost looking to chase you for 100 meters while spamming the same annoying scream and death traps are also much more common. There are also less ways to interact with enemies such as throwing rocks so that the ghosts would not pursue you any more. Therefore the appeal of exploration is reduced and there are more chases through areas instead.

All of this just shows that the developers did not grasp what made the first game so interesting and instead invested into much cheaper directions, making a game which keeps the flaws but doesn't have any of the pros of the previous one. I would not recommend to play this game at all and it's pretty terrible in my opinion. The first game is also much shorter, it doesn't help that this one is double the length when it has nothing to show.

Continued by my review of the second game.

I'm genuinely conflicted by this game. On one hand it's a very nice "horror" game. Night Alone is beautiful with an incredibly well done sound design that carries the charm of a lonely walk through a town at night. It has light horror elements that are almost poetic and it really builds an atmosphere around that.

On the other hand, it tries too hard to do horror by throwing some unneeded screamers at you, some of the sounds being way too high and breaking the game's peaceful atmosphere and an absurdly frustrating difficulty at multiple points of the game.

The difficulty is really the biggest flaw of the game in my opinion. One of the things I really loved about the game at first is that it was not hard and felt very different from every horror game I've ever played. You walk around spirits and most of them are almost harmless, the remaining ones are like a puzzle and each of them have an appropriate way of being approached. You're not running, your life is not under a big threat, in many ways it reminded me of a movie like Spirited Away. It's also quite similar to Yume Nikki in the amount of weird and unique things you'll find through your adventure.

But aside from that, not only does the game throw more and more boring chase sequences at you but they're just absurdly difficult and require almost perfect timings (moving as soon as a cutscene is over, managing your stamina...) to survive. The checkpoint system contributes to making this frustrating especially late game. There's even a boss fight which feels completely out of place in a game like this.

I really wish the game had just stuck to the peaceful horror kind instead of trying more. Even the sole fact of walking in such a charming city at night makes it a one of a kind game because I've never seen any game replicate a feeling like this.

I think the game could have also benefited from being more open ended and less linear. Since we're just collecting trinkets through the entire game and there isn't really much of a narrative progression, such a structure would have been perfectly fitting and would have amplified the ingenuity of the design. But it still feels very nice to discover this small city and I really enjoyed that part.

Ultimately, the game doesn't seem to understand what it's good at and tries to appeal to generic concepts instead. Maybe it was riskier, but this game could have been great without being linear, without a "proper story" and without following horror tropes. This also raises a question: do all games that aim to be horror need to be scary? I think this game had a rather cool perspective of that and instead aimed at being spiritual more so than scary: you play a kid as if you were a cartoon's protagonist, there is no stress in regards to resource management (well except the salt, good luck finding salt) and dying isn't punished heavily. It could be an amazing, chill horror themed exploration game, but it's not.

In a way it's a pretty cool game, it's got a strong old-school JRPG and homemade vibe but they're also why this game isn't that good. Overall I'd say that the game would have gained a lot from being more modern especially on the interface side of things, but it plays like a SNES/PS1 game even though it came out in 2009.

The gameplay is fine honestly. It's very difficult and the controls are somewhat clunky but you can do a lot and it was relatively fun. Being able to control multiple characters in an action plateformer is something I've seen in no other game and that's amazing!

However the level design really leaves to be desired and it's mostly mindless dungeon grinding in maze-like repetitive areas. The story is also very slow and while it's funny and cute, the lack of any sort of accomplishment somewhat bored me. I've enjoyed slice of life games like Trails in the sky so maybe this one is just too childish for me. It's similar to a magical girl anime.

I wanted to 100% this game but encountered two problems: 1) some of my progression achievements were not accounted for 2) the game crashed during a sidequest and all sidequests became inaccessible.

Overall a nice game if I exclude this problem. Nice enough that I wanted to 100% it.

The game is pretty simple and bare bone outside of combat, it's the main appeal of the game. The combat is nice and in my opinion offers quite a bit of variety with a lot of moves to be unlocked. I was never quite bored and experimented a lot of different things throughout the game.

The game is fairly easy but it's also why you can afford to experiment so much and the moves are cool, so I had a lot of fun. I also like the fact that every mission has a hard alternative and the ranking system adds some more meat to the game.

Outside combat, there's not much to see. The characters are nice but the story is forgettable and sometimes sounds like gibberish machine translation. The game has some Persona-like events which are disappointingly short and void of any depth. The events are like five long and that's it. For example, one of them was just a conversation akin to "Hey you got a guitar? You'll play music for me sometimes? Yeah ok".

All the collectibles are pretty stupid, requiring you to spam the same action over and over until you get it : eating multiple times at restaurants, spending 10 minutes watching the gacha action to get all the loot... It feels like they were designed for you to come back every once in a while and max them out just like you would in Yakuza for example, but there's no reason to hang out in the city and getting the food buff that way would be genuinely painful. Besides, nothing stops you from spamming and the prices are cheap.

And speaking of spam, one of the achievements require you to constantly water a tree throughout almost the entire game. It seriously takes a long time.

I hope the second game would be less buggy and have improve the quality of content outside combat. Considering the length of these games though, I'm not buying it anytime soon because it's too expensive.

This is a vampire survivors clone with characters based on the Hololive company vtubers. I have no interest in Hololive though but I think the game is pretty good.

The biggest strength of the game is a solid roster of characters that each have their unique abilities and are very varied, yet all of them are fun to play and feel viable. I'm legitimately surprised at such an expensive and qualitative roster, it's impressive. The design is also quite cool and the pixel art is nice to look at.

The roster gives you a good amount of content to explore and grind. There are few stages so far though but the game is still in development after all.

The lack of features such as time acceleration is painful though. Each ruin is at least 20min and this can be quite tedious. There's also only one special stage for now (for an average of 5min runs).

The game has relatively few balancing issues and is very fun to play. The enemies and maps are diversified and great. While mostly a copy of VS, its twists make it a good game that I enjoyed.

The game has a lot to show and always throws something new and interesting to the player. The story is simple and intriguing. Overall, the game is very pretty.

I feel like the linear structure and cinematic walking wasn't really necessary, as most of the game happens through transitioning into a new environment when you interact with something in the house. Having a more "movable" character and a free house to explore (like Gone Home, for example) would have been more interesting in my opinion. If there's a part of the game that doesn't add anything, it's surely slowly crawling through a hole, although I get that they wanted to pace the game like a movie (which it isn't, it's a game after all).

The game has many details but the overly linear and cinematic experience doesn't really emphasize going back to find them, so I do think it's a miss on that part. It doesn't feel as natural as finding something in Gone Home or maybe Deus Ex, for example.

Conceptually, I'd love this game. It's one of the rare "wall defender" type of game where you defend a wall against hordes of enemies and there are few examples of this game, perhaps the best still being Elona shooter from a decade ago because I never managed to find a newer and more complex game.

Unfortunately the game is very shallow and also repetitive. There is little weapon variety, the characters are very similar and every run ends up being the same. There's also what, five different enemies? And the story can be completed in an hour. There are only a few very short interactions to be seen outside of it.

The gameplay is also pretty braindead honestly. You just blindly shoot and you're good, there isn't much thought or strategy involved. At most there's a bit of RNG in the survival mode.

The sprites are part of the game's charm, unfortunately while they look good, there's hardly any animation at all. So overall, it's a pretty average experience.

Everyone praises this game for its gameplay but I believe that a lot of people are forgetting that the gameplay is not just the combat, but the entire interactive part of the game. Yes, SMT5 has solid combats and as always, the demon management part is also good but what else does it do well?

The old dungeon crawler style which is simple yet works was replaced by a bland, generic and unbearable 3D world. The game feels jank to walk through and ironically emphasizes exploration to find collectibles, which doesn't make it any more interesting. The combat encounters are no longer random but I can't find any pleasure in going after the overworld enemies and seeing them move like them, randomly agitating themselves in this empty world.

Yes, this was enough to make me drop the game. This is a big chunk of the gameplay and I personally can't ignore it, the whole game feels jank and cheap because of things like this and I'm not enough of a SMT enjoyer to just care about the combat.

This game is an amazing recreation of the atmosphere of the first movie, in a certain manner, but other than that it doesn't have much to offer unfortunately. It's a fun visit for maybe the first hour, then the environments just repeat themselves.

The gameplay part is horrendous. Stealth games like Thief, Dishonored or Sekiro are fun because they offer interesting and rewarding mechanics while a game like this only has you crawling slowly or hiding in a shelf to avoid enemies while waiting for them to move away. It's just tedious, especially considering the long stretches of stealth you need to do and the save system with no checkpoint, forcing you to restart entire sections if you die. Even Outlast understands this is not very fun, hence why you only have to hide or slow down a few times and why it has regular checkpoints.

Yes, the alien has advanced AI, but did we really need it and does it do anything in this context? Rather than the enemy AI, what can I as a player do other than hide in a cabinet, crawl slowly behind NPCs who follow boring patterns and use a few weapons from to time to time, in an endlessly repetitive loop.

Aside from the stealth, all you do is gather things for a very basic and generic craft system as well as opening doors, repairing things... perhaps the most generic game objectives possible. You arrive somewhere new, you need to repair a door, some machines, that's it, that's the game.

Perhaps these mechanics could have worked if the game was more sandbox and open. Go in any direction you want, find some audio log or something like Outer Wilds while avoiding environmental danger. And cut the length of the game: it would have been a fine 5 hours long game, it's a stretchy and boring 20 hours adventure.

Throughout the whole game I was very confused whether the player is Sam or Katie because there's no explanation given for the "audio journal" that's being read out loud. Turns out the journal being read is the not the player character rambling, but the journal of her sister whose absence you investigate. I think this part really could have been introduce better. Why am I hearing this audio journal when I pick up random notes? Why isn't it given through cassettes or something? Very confusing and it also breaks the sensation of discovery compared to the rest of the game. In a game that focuses on environmental story telling, I don't think the main story should be a narrator's voice-over telling you everything in a very evident manner.

By the end of it, I was somewhat disappointed it ultimately focuses on a single character and the story is very simple. There are few points of relationship between the members of the family and the whole journal about Sam is really just about that one story, with a lot of details that feel unnecessary in my opinion. I would have liked seeing more notes on the parents and how the whole family interacted. The player character also has very few things about herself.

I think the game had very great opportunities to build the characters separately and show how they interact. How the daughter doesn't get along with the parents but then also notes from the other side, more details about their daily interactions...

It's an interesting concept though, exploring a rather normal house and just investigating normal things. Finding notes where they naturally belong (unlike the audio journal, you get why I didn't like it?) and learning about their daily lives. That's pretty much it. It's short but it was mostly enjoyable.

I've complained before that Persona 5 was a bunch of mini-cutscenes that are way too short and ultimately only create superficial plot. Haven uses a similar structure to Persona with short slice of life events but with a single change: there's only two characters and every event relates to the two of them. And boom! The game is only ten hours long but it gives its story more depth and manages to create something meaningful.

I really enjoyed playing through this game and it is a solid example of slice of life in video games. I strongly appreciate how they don't hold just make the entire concept of a physical relationship disappear like many games do, in the spirit of puritanism, but instead they freely refer to it, just like traditional French works.

I do have to complain that the gameplay is too simple and gets repetitive very fast. What's more, the controls of your most common action, moving, are pretty bad. The game hardly renews itself: every map is the same with exactly the same things to clear out and every so often you have to fight a few monsters to clean the area. It doesn't help that you'll usually miss one spot or a monster which is not obvious, which just makes things more tedious.

The environment variety is also poor: there's only four biomes and 90% of the game is in the same one. There's more variety to monsters and I did feel like I was progressing through the combat until I unlocked everything, knew how to deal with monsters and then some of the last battles were just tedious too especially when I had to clear multiple groups per map.

A lot of the game's rhythm relies on the pacing of slice of life events that come up throughout the adventure or when you go back to base. The slice of life is a genuinely enjoyable experience, however most of the game is spent cleaning similar islets of the grasslands, looking for that one last hidden thing to clear the islet and hearing the same repeated overworld dialogues.

It's hard to make a serious game and in my opinion, most big franchises have very corny and boring writing. They're very boring, full of annoying cutscene moments and various gameplay interruptions or other annoying this. This game... did not try to be anything like that and instead focused on being fun, and it's much easier to make a fun game.

From beginning to end, the game is mostly comedic and the story is very easy to follow, without too much cutscene or too many interruptions. Everything in the game seems to be designed to just be fun and not too serious. The gameplay is very similar to a GTA game but the guns are more crazy, the characters walking down the street are goofy, there are many mini-games which are just some sort of arcade games to have fun for a while... And all of this ultimately makes Saints Row 3 a pretty fun game.

That's all I have to say, really. I enjoyed my time with the game and I never felt like it was too long, too boring, too annoying. Hell, I could have even left midway through the game and not finished the story because it doesn't matter at all, it doesn't hook you or anything. It's mostly just some funny interactions between the funny characters. But I actually replayed this game like three times just because I thought it was fun.

Oh and the character creation and the fashionista potential are pretty strong, so that was cool too!

Will I ever have the courage to finish such a long game? No, probably not. I have replayed the game multiple game and really, I can't get close to the ending because it's so long. It doesn't mean I don't like the game though, I enjoyed it a great deal and it's also why I eventually replayed it.

Persona 5 is a game bursting with personality. The user interface is an absolute blast and overall, the visuals of the game really have a good direction. Starting from the beginning, the vibe of walking into the town really made me feel like I'm the new kid in a big city and it's the first time I've felt such a marvel at a video game. Taking the subway felt magical.

The gameplay is like a mix of dating sim and dungeon crawling. The slice of life part of the game is pretty cool but I find the stories to be a little too shallow. All the events are unfortunately short and don't really develop into any type of story arc, which makes me feel like this format is ultimately very limited. Every character only has one story which is basically spread through the multiple events and it feels very short. When you reach the end, you're just left desiring for more. Ultimately, the game is the story of the player growing and meeting people.

The dungeon crawling, I was not much of a fan and it's the part that tired me the most. It just doesn't change. The dungeons get boring fast and they're really long and tiring, especially the memento area which is extremely bland. Unfortunately, it also affects the pacing as you'll have a time limit to challenge a dungeon. I find it paradoxal that they made the slice of life events short as not to overwhelm the player, but the dungeons are so long and tedious. The game offers SMT combat but I really am not that much of a dungeon crawler fan to invest myself into it.

I think this is what ultimately tires me out everytime. It's also the same for every Persona, but at least the dungeons in this one are pretty good unlike the previous games where they were awful corridors.

I like the concept of this game: it's like Minecraft but with that one aspect of Terraria where you make houses to recruit NPCs and they can do things with you. There's also more emphasis on farming and sort of creating a village, and RPG elements.

However, what ruined my enjoyment is... this isn't actually a sandbox. It's a super linear game, everything you do feels so linear that every single bit of progression feels cheap and unrewarding. I get a new weapon? Yeah well it was part of the story. I'm in a new area, I have multiple objectives: I can only accomplish them in order because that's how the story wants me to do it. There isn't much point to exploring because areas are locked into the main quest and aside from a few collectibles, it makes it pointless to go anywhere but where the story wants you to.

While the story is very funny and the writing isn't bad, the game being this linear just made me not want to keep playing. And it's so excruciatingly slow! And you don't get to choose your own pace either, because of how linear it is. Want to play more and do new things? You must sit through the story now and read for the next ten minutes before you can procede to do something.

Just imagine if Minecraft had a main story quest where you have to do things in order. It asks you to cut a tree, then make your first tools, then mine, then build your first house, then farm; every area would be explored in the order the game wants you to; you only discover new things by progressing the story. It would remove all the magic about the game! Sometimes the game will even go as far as telling you exactly what a building should look like and you have to follow a blueprint, can you imagine that in Minecraft instead of making your own wonderful structures? Well, it certainly didn't sit well with me.