Short little game with cleverly constructed puzzles that never feel too challenging, but are designed in such a way that you never break out of that loop of satisfaction every time you solve them. I was also surprised about the story and how the game has something to say, with an ending I found particularly crushing, yet somehow hopeful. I really recommend this game.
Music and visuals are also a highlight, I think the devs had a very clear idea of what the wanted to make, and they made it perfectly.

In some ways, Tunic is one of the smartest and most beautiful experiences i've had in a game in a long time, but the reality of actually playing it leaves something to be desired for me, but never enough to outright diminish just how exquisitely crafted the world and the game 'experience' feels. The atmosphere of this game is outstanding and though a tiring comparison, does feel reminiscent of dark souls with how you venture out as a lost and lowly 'face' without much purpose only to discover your grand purpose and fulfil your destiny. Also the vibe of the world, the isolated feeling and looming ambience are spot on and the ultimate goal of the game is not unlike dark souls or hollow knight, but similarly you have control over how things play out.

Fundamentally, the game's runaway success is the instruction booklet both as a feature and as a piece of art in itself. The art inside of this little booklet is stunning, evoking a feeling of old school game manuals, text guides and retro game magazines like nintendo power. The delicately handcrafted nature of the art combined with the cryptic application of the information it divulges into tunic's own game systems is ingenious and a masterpiece by itself. Its rare to see an idea so original and so well designed and applied to the game experience, from finding your place in the world with its intricate maps and diagrams, to uncovering uses for items and upgrades as you have to decipher this kind of alien language and make pictures make sense. This is best done in the first half of the game where I felt particularly isolated and confused, as the way the manual intricately teaches you the game and helps you along as a constant companion allowed me to develop an attachment to the game and its mechanics in a way I had never seen before, its just so smart.

I don't have many problems with the cryptic nature of the game or how it seeks for the player to uncover things for themselves, I think I just find it more difficult than a lot of people and it doesn't come naturally to me. Also, once you put the guide down and start actually interacting with the game after you understand its basic mechanics, I find that the game is an actively lesser experience. This is why I find the 'idea' of the game better than the game itself, as once that guide is down and you're set off on your adventure, I realised how little depth there actually is in the gameplay. Now, this is an indie game developed largely by one guy and I need to give credit to that because that's incredible, what an amazing achievement. However, I do find playing this a bit of a chore, most secrets are found by lazily walking against walls in an isometric perspective once you realise how many hidden paths there are. In the beginning, this is dope, when you find out how the world interconnects through its hidden bridges and shortcuts, again not unlike the first half of DS1, but eventually it became tragically tedious as I constantly found myself circling the edges of an area to try and find my way to a chest or secret - usually successfully, but not in a way that felt all that fulfilling.

I also take some issue with the game's combat, which feels somewhat stale and derivative and less interesting than some of its counterparts, there's also such a short range on attacks meaning you need to be right up against an enemy to hit them and a general 'heaviness' to the overall feel of combat, with almost every action in combat feeling slow and clunky. The depth of field is a cool cinema effect that adds to the games' aesthetic and adds layering to the world, but in combat i'd rather it were toned down since I just find it overwhelming and frustrating since it blurs everything including enemies, attacks and projectiles, making translating what is on screen tricky at times - its particularly noticeable during the siege engine boss fight. I also find dodge rolling quite sluggish and ineffective a lot of the time since the long animation means you're vulnerable for a lot of it and enemies will lock onto you mid-roll and hit you with an attack even after you roll behind them - you will dodge through an enemies' first attack perfectly only for their entire body to turn 180 degrees instantly and hit you again, its not heinous or anything but it makes dodging feel worse than just putting your shield up and makes combat feel less dynamic and engaging as a result.

Stylistically I think this is awesome, evoking the wonder of old school exploration games and top down zelda games while also putting its own spin on things. I think I preferred death's door for the most part but tunic's general atmosphere is unmatched, with a beautifully calm and delicately ambient soundtrack and a cute and charming low-poly artstyle. The cover of this game doesn't do it justice at all I don't think, they should have used the type of art taken from the game manual, its not what I expected at all. I didn't know much about this game going in but I was positively surprised by how it turned out, since I was expecting something more akin to ocarina of time but instead it takes more influences from zelda games pre-ocarina. I understood the developer's intentions a lot I think, since I felt the need for the player to uncover things for themselves and experience a feeling of wonder, it just doesn't always work for me since I value really strong, faster-paced gameplay (DS1 being an exception) and an engaging narrative told through gameplay and cutscenes - instead, tunic favours a slower-paced feeling of patient discovery and a story that encourages putting the pieces together and then interpretation, but instead of the souls' approach of finding things out largely through visual storytelling and lore-soaked environments, tunic leaves a lot of it to pages in a manual and an indecipherable language that is cool, it just doesn't do much for me. That said, exploring the inside of the ziggurat and seeing the foxes trapped inside obelisks and deciphering what might have happened to this fox 'civilisation' is intriguing enough by itself.

I do find the game falls off pretty hard in the last third for me, I genuinely would have preferred if it just ended after you got the keys since by that point I was ready for it to be done and I don't think the last third adds all that much since you're kind of just retracing steps, but in terms of pure 'vibes' its definitely a really humbling moment and meaningfully changes how you see the world. In terms of what it sets out to achieve I do think its successful and a great achievement as an indie game, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the gameplay for me personally, I think there's lots of games that have done this kind of stuff better but the art, soundtrack and that manual system invigorated me, that stuff is worthy of the highest praise on its own.

I loved this! As someone who has become bored and jaded with Pokemon after the last few iterations, this game feels like a breath of fresh air. The monsters designs are more often than not imaginative, the typing's and their integrations are intuitive (and numerous), and the aesthetic is sublime.

I will say, Cassette Beasts desperately needs some better onboarding. While I love how intuitive the typing system can be, it can be very overwhelming in the beginning of the game; especially when combined with an open world to get buried in.

As someone who has been kinda underwhelmed by other mon-catcher RPGs of late, this game really hits the mark for me
The battles are genuinely fun, the art style exceeds my expectations, and the hook of the game makes the world interesting right from the get-go. It keeps that momentum til the end of the game and sticks the landing
Catching bootlegs (this game's version of shinies or luma) has been a highlight for sure, having more than just an aesthetic difference makes them super interesting when it comes to team building

I honestly think this game is wildly overrated. Don't get me wrong, the window dressing is great. Voice acting is well done, the home base is well designed and constantly adding new dialogue to add to the story after each failed run, the characters design is cool and an interesting take on Greek mythology.

However to me the core gameplay loop leaves much to be desired. This isn't to say the game isn't fun, it definitely is. The controls are sharp and the combat is fast paced yet deliberate in nature. The problem is that for a roguelite to really hold your interest there needs to be a wide variance in gameplay on each individual run. This stops the game from getting too repetitive and eventually causing you to lose interest. The problem here is that there are only a handful of weapons and these are really broken down into two categories ranged or melee. All melee weapons play roughly the same and the boons you get during each run don't really change the way that you use them that much besides whether you will be using primarily the special attack, main attack, or dash attack. These boons also don't significantly alter the function of the attack, but rather just add an effect like a dot, pushback, extra damage, chance to crit etc.

There also seem to be a number of "must have' boons for a run to have a realistic chance of being successful. In my experience there is a clear and obvious best build that includes getting divine dash which allows you to reflect projectiles when dashing. This ability is simply a must have for any successful run. You then want an attack that causes doom and the dash ability that automatically procs doom. This to me is by far the best setup in the game. A game like this shouldn't have a clear and obvious best build and no item should be a must when each run is randomized.

Ultimately I didn't dislike this game, but was a little disappointed based on all the hype it got. I mean this game won GOTY awards so I was expecting to play one of the best roguelike/lite games ever and Hades simply didn't live up to that for me, not even sure if it would crack my top 5 roguelike/lites to be honest. Hades had all the extra components that add to a great game like good voice acting and dialogue, cool character design, an interesting narrative, etc. but missed the mark on the core gameplay loop that is simply necessary for a repetitive game like this.

I originally played Metroid Prime for the GameCube when I was much younger. I never finished it, and remember only making it as far as Phendrana Drifts before I became too frustrated at not knowing where to go, where I then proceeded to put the game down and never pick it back up. Today I have finished Metroid Prime Remastered to make up for my impatience in my youth, and I come away from it thinking, "Yeah, I'd say dropping it over that was pretty justified."

I'd wager most of the appeal for Metroid Prime comes from the feeling you get of being a space adventurer on an unknown planet. After all, Samus Aran is a fantastic character to play as in Metroid and most games don't feel quite as alien in it's aesthetic in quite the same way as Metroid. In Metroid Prime, you're never pointed to go in any direction, only ever trusting your map, data logs, and memory for points of interest along your journey. The game definitely had that affect on me for most of the game, though putting the game down for any long amount of time would result in me needing to spend several minutes going back over the map screen and remembering those points of interests. Like the 2D games, you're given a good amount of freedom to look around an area even with your limited abilities at the beginning of the game, always keeping note to come back through later when you might have a new ability that opens up more of the area.
That's more or less the gameplay loop for Metroid Prime; comb through zones to find new abilities until you finally have all of your arsenal to beat the game (wow it's like a Metroid game or something). The only real issue I take with the gameplay loop in this game is, most of the time, you can never judge if a new location you can access is progress towards a new ability or a dead end. The game has a strange way of giving you an incredibly valuable ability in one room, showing you a door that ability can now open, only for you to hit a dead end immediately upon exploring it. Now is there anything so wrong about finding more rooms that require more abilities to unlock? No, especially in a series that relishes in making the player backtrack as frequently as Metroid does. I guess I just found myself becoming annoyed whenever I found myself creating more mental checkmarks of zones in the future rather than being able to knock out a good chunk of an area when getting a new ability.

Combat is... fine... until it's not. Enemies early on are very simple; you shoot small enemies with your laser beam and big enemies get the missiles. It does the job and can be pretty fun at times, even if most harder enemies before the middle of the game start having weak points only on their back. Later on, you also start to unlock different beam weapons, each one serving a separate use and unique interactions with puzzles and enemies. But where the combat goes from being fine to not fine is once they start introducing enemies that can only be damaged by specific weapon types.
This starts out harmless enough with enemies that are more like stage hazards requiring a specific laser beam weapon to destroy them. But this problem caps once you hit an area where suddenly most enemies in the zone are now color coded, requiring the weapon type that their color matches with to deal any damage. What's worse is these enemies aren't even unique from one another, they all still have the same basic "run around, shoot you at a distance, melee if you get close" move set, no matter which color they are. I can see what they might've been going for, having enemies act as a sort of light puzzle to solve in each room, but this made me end up opting out of combat entirely when needing to backtrack through those rooms later on.
I'll be keeping this review spoiler free as usual (unless revealing gameplay elements like this is a spoiler, in which case, my bad), but just know that I hated this inclusion in the game and it never gets any better from that point onwards; if anything it gets worse.

Overall I'd say that, for most things I enjoyed in this game, it always came with their own frustrations. I love the moment in a Metroid game where you finally have your full arsenal of weapons and moves, but I can't say I enjoyed the frustration of constantly hitting dead ends before getting to that point in this one. Combat in 3D compared to the 2D games still feels like what you'd expect, but falls on it's face later on in a poor attempt at trying to mix things up for the end game. I'd say the positives mostly outweigh the negatives and at least the problem of not knowing where dead ends are is a feeling I wouldn't have again on another replay. I consider myself a fairly big Metroid fan and I'd slept on this game for quite some time, always hearing that it was a beloved classic and a great example of transitioning a style of play from 2D to 3D. I'd say I'd agree with that sentiment, though a part of me does think the game lives in such a positive space because it's well beloved for it's sci-fi aesthetic and impressive graphical fidelity for the time. Everyone likes to remember their favorite childhood game being just as good as they remembered. But Metroid Prime is definitely a game where you have to eventually take off your red rose tinted glasses at times; that enemy you're looking at is purple, after all.

I wanted to like this game really badly. I had heard people did not get the game they were expecting and I thought I could appreciate it regardless since I had no expectations. Unfortunately I can't say I enjoyed most of my time with the game. This is in large part due to the gameplay in the mid section with enemies. I would enjoy the game MUCH more if the "combat" segments were gone and it was just an exploration puzzle game. They throw way too many enemies at you sometimes for how shitty the gunplay (intentionally) is. Frequently they give you ammo refills just to immediately throw enemies at you to blow it on. I never felt like there was a choice to stealth or fight, I could only blast away and hopefully not miss for the next encounter. If you die you go back to a checkpoint which can suck when the spot you're dying is after a bunch of cutscenes and mandatory interactables. The game looks great but the levels can get confusing since things look samey. I wouldn't complain about getting lost nearly as much if I wasn't dreading more shooting the whole time. This part of the game I'm complaining about weighs the game down so significantly since it makes up a lot of it. At least I found the puzzles fun.