Star Sled feels quite competent. It didn't ever really click with me, but I'm hesitant to blame the game - it may just be a bad fit for me. I didn't find the controls satisfying to use, they were quite floaty and imprecise in a frustrating way.

The mechanics seemingly change every few minutes, and they drop in and out depending on the mission so I found it quite difficult to get into a groove.. as one minute I am boosting with B, then next the B button is for warping back to my path, then it's for hitting enemies. The aiming felt quite fiddly considering how quickly you have to react at times.

I did manage to finish all the main missions, and one of the "hidden" ones I'd unlocked, but I didn't find compelled to go back and find the rest.

Wow, surprised by how much I enjoyed this game. Perhaps not to everyone's taste, but right up my alley. The story was extremely compelling, I found myself pretty much unable to put this down and burned through it in only a couple of sessions.

Very cool vibes going on in here, a minimalist but effective score and lots of great sound effects. Lots of great dialogue and characters, the main character is no-nonsense in a satisfying way. Smart, but fallible for sure.

I am a big fan of point & click games generally, and this game was quite an easy ride in that sense as most of the puzzles were fairly simple. I had one minor criticism, that ultimately was wrapped up neatly by the end - it's a small spoiler so I won't elaborate.

Suffice it to say I enjoyed this game a lot!

Cool concept executed well for the most part. I liked the retro computer aesthetic and sound effects, a good fit for Playdate! Chess pieces make for excellent game mechanics, of course, and the idea of using them in this way is a really fun one. The levels were generally short and sweet, with a lot of freedom in how you approach them.

I felt like some aspects of the game were poorly communicated - I'm still not sure what all the items do. Having to farm pieces as you used them was also a bit annoying, and being instantly booted out with no option to change piece was frustrating, especially at the start! Sometimes I had to literally go back and redo a different level to change pieces. The level completion metrics are also a bit strange, punishing you for having low health even if you did the level without losing any. I also couldn't figure out how to "kill" a king piece, just got checkmate and thus I got 0/1 pieces for the bosses.

Still, overall a fun time and I had no hesitation picking the game up for a few minutes here and there over the course of several days until I finished the campaign.

Lovely game, a true metroidvania. It's really fascinating to see a game this old having all the elements you would expect to see in modern games.

The map system works great, exploring is not burdensome at all. As the game is so small, it doesn't really take too long to get anywhere and simply looking around will guide you to the critical path.

Still, this is a game from 1991 and that's most obvious in the game's punishment for death. It is not too severe - you don't lose any items or upgrades but you always respawn at the beginning (the middle of the map) with very little health. Grinding for HP takes a ridiculously long time, but there are quite a few game sections where small slip ups can kill you very quickly.. as well as some boss encounters that will likely take more than one attempt.

The bosses are generally quite simple to figure out, but controls are not the most responsive in this game and when I made mistakes they often felt sort of unfair.

Still, these are minor nitpicks - the game overall is breezy and fun, oozing charm from every pore and feeling incredibly modern in a lot of ways. Highly recommended!

Zipper is a smart game, with a satisfying gameplay loop - the mechanics are deceptively simple but surprisingly deep. Almost every time I rushed a room, I paid for it even when I thought I had a good grasp on the game. The sound design is fantastic here, with great atmospheric music and awesome sound effects. The artwork looks excellent too.

It's a little bit mazelike for my tastes, hunting for a random key can be a bit tiresome especially as you lose all progress from a single mistake.. but I can see the appeal also.

Yakuza: Dead Souls is a really funny game, I love RGG studio's take on a zombie outbreak. It's all very silly and lighthearted for the most part, especially the sidequests - many of which are hilarious. The main story is quite weak for a Yakuza game, though, the villains are dull and their motivations shallow.

The main gameplay - running around shooting zombies - feels awful on first blush but once you get adjusted is functional enough. However, there is a lot of it and it does wear out its welcome. Particularly given how terribly the game performs, I found myself avoiding many attacks because they completely tank the game's framerate.

Still, this is a fun way to spend time in the Yakuza world. Great to see Ryuji Goda as a playable character and his arc is an interesting one (though his gameplay sections are among the worst). Majima's whole section is great. The other two characters don't have much going on in the story, but they have unique gameplay styles and a nice selection of sidequests. Overall I had a decent time with this one.

This is a decent platformer for the era. The playtime is just about right, I doesn't outstay its welcome. Visually, the game is nice - there is a great variety in the different areas and it succeeds in making the world feel like a cohesive whole. The story was very basic, and the humour was not really to my tastes but tolerable. Exploring and finding all the items is satisfying - as you'd expect! It feels like a strange mash-up of Crash Bandicoot and an N64 collectathon, it's clear Naughty Dog took a lot of inspiration from Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie.

Controls are a bit annoying in places, particularly the camera - but also the double jump was a bit inconsistent for me. I felt like many of the things that went wrong weren't my fault.. but perhaps that's just me being used to modern games having a bit more leeway in their controls. When I took my time with the platforming, mostly it went well. A couple of times there were areas where it felt very difficult to gauge depth and I just kept jumping into a pit.

Despite control issues, the game is fairly easy - there are checkpoints sprinkled throughout the levels and no limit to lives, so you can just keep trying until you get it.

Overall, I enjoyed this game and would recommend it to fans of 3D platformers/collectathons - just remember this is a 20+ year old game and it feels like it!

Beautiful game, runs so smooth on PS5. Swinging around the city is fantastic.

Beyond that, I felt like the core gameplay was quite derivative of the Arkham series. The main combat is okay, but gets repetitive quickly - the enemy types are quite limited and unimaginitive, and there is not much strategy or nuance. They took a combat system that was designed for Batman, and just put some Spider-Man stuff in it instead. It doesn't fit as well and I don't think it's the gameplay system you would arrive at if you built it for Spider-Man from the ground up.

The stealth sections are extremely dull, very low stakes and easy. Again they feel like they are in here because they are in the Arkham games, but in those games the predator mode is just as important as combat - with a bunch of interesting mechanics, enemy types, environmental hazards, etc. it is actually engaging, high stakes and satisfying. In this game, you sit above the enemy and wait for the prompt to say that they're safe to take out, maybe distract them by making a noise. That's it.

The side-content is unimaginitive. Climb towers to reveal a map, collect objects dotted around. Repeat the same few variations of enemy encounters over and over. The research stations in particular were very annoying, with extremely lazy half-baked narrative justifications and laughable pseudoscience.

Don't get me wrong, the game is broadly fun and very easy to play. It's like a mainstream big budget movie or a pop album. Flashy, expects very little from the player but is ultimately not pushing any boundaries from a game design perspective. Just design-by-committee, low brow fare. Technically the game is a masterpiece, though - truly the people working at Insomniac know how to make a great looking, great performing game.

This is a difficult one for me to review, there are things that love about Bloom but I also had many issues with it.

Firstly, the things I liked - the games atmosphere and style are great, they are clearly going for a sort of lo-fi chill mood here and they absolutely nail it. The pixel art looks fantastic on the Playdate, the two areas in the game are beautiful and I love the way little parts of it change depending on what's going on in the world. The way you interact with the game world, through the character's phone essentially, is an interesting choice and gives the game a sort of voyeuristic feel - you aren't really playing as the main character, rather it feels like you're spying on her through her phone. There are moments in the story where this dynamic caused me some anxiety, and I think this was deliberate and effective. The side activities on the phone are also quite fun, the little asteroids game is great and the collectible figures are again very detailed and charming.

The characters are generally quite memorable, and there are some nice little story arcs that play out throughout the narrative. I felt like the post-game story was a lot better in this regard - it didn't feel like it was trying to create any conflict or tension, just a pleasant slice of life.

Now, for the negatives - the flower "farming" portion of the game is so trivial as to be almost pointless. From what I could tell there is no strategy at all - you unlock more valuable flowers as the story progresses, and there is no point planting anything other than those.

The amount of money you accrue also reaches comical levels, with "rent payments" big enough to buy entire mansions by the end of the game. There is lots of scope for a more rewarding system here, like needing to maintain a steady supply of each flower, or weather conditions affecting what you can grow. The rent payments didn't really even need to change that much, it could have just been that you need to keep paying the same amount instead of the ludicrously ballooning costs.

In terms of the text messaging, you are presented with a choice of what to say for every message - but it became clear early on that this has no effect at all on the events of the game. I'm quite sure that most if not all of your responses don't even affect the response you get, as many times I felt like the response I received was a better match for the option I didn't pick. The "illusion of choice" here is barely an illusion at all, there might as well just have been a "progress dialog" button instead.

Finally, this one is a bit more personal but the main story wasn't all that satisfying for me. I will discuss the story very broadly here, I don't think it constitutes spoilers but you may want to stop reading if you are extremely spoiler-averse!

I felt like the main character made many poor decisions, but never really suffered any meaningful consequences from them or learned any lessons. She came across as dishonest and self-absorbed, and in the game she never really deals with any major fallout as a result of this.. things just kinda solve themselves around her. The story also sets up various potential plot points that just never really pan out at all. In a sense I think this is quite true to real life, many people do act like this and lots of things just happen with no consequences - but as a story everything just ends up feeling somewhat pointless.

I like the concept of this game, withholding information from the player through a skill check. The joke was intriguing enough to keep me motivated to the end and yeah the punchline was pretty good, I laughed.
The only frustrating aspect is that if you get the stars quickly in succession, large chunks of the joke are skipped through. As you have to keep restarting and gradually uncovering more, you generally will hear all of the joke in different runs except in my case, I skipped over several sections toward the end. I got the gist and of course it makes sure the punchline comes through, still it would be nice if you could view the whole joke in sequence once you beat the game.