I really, REALLY wish I could give this game more stars. I.RULE's presentation is incredible! The concept is also extremely appealing to me, a massive fan of TBoI and PvZ. I was obsessed with this game from the moment it was announced on Twitter and I played the original Alpha release as soon as it dropped. I went through the content pretty quickly, and shortly after that I stopped playing because of one major problem that the game had: difficulty.

Back when the game was still very new, the endless gameplay loop of I.RULE got boring to me because the game didn't get more challenging as you looped through the zones. It was easy to get so strong that you couldn't lose, the game was easily solvable, and once I got good enough to solve it that just entirely erased my desire to continue playing.

Fast forward more than a year and the game has gotten many updates. I came back to play it again because I think the concept and style of this game is so perfect, and I was happy to discover that, along with other improvements, my main complaint about the original version has been addressed; the game gets much harder as you progress. Unfortunately, I actually think that there was an overcorrection.

After looping the first time the game quickly ramps up its difficulty, and that is my first criticism with the difficulty system. Clearing the first three zones on normal mode is trivial, it can easily be done without losing any of your chargers (PvZ lawn mowers). This makes the initial run through of the zones feel like a waste of time. Not a huge problem necessarily, but it is made much worse when that ends up being ~half the time spent on each run. I will usually lose runs my second time through zone 2 or 3. This is especially frustrating if your run lost because of reasons outside your control.

Each item and baby only shows up once per run. This means that if you can't afford an item when it shows up in the shop you will never have the chance to get it again. Shops also stop appearing after progressing far enough, so if you didn't get the chance to buy an essential item, there is no recourse. And if 2 critical babies (such as Twin Baby and Fistuloid) show up as options on the same choice, tough luck. Because RNG paired those options together in the same choice, your run will be crippled with no chance to recover later.

To be honest, I don't know how this problem could be solved in a way that would keep the spirit of Isaac intact. The Binding of Isaac is focused on providing the player with unique gameplay experiences each run. The only obvious remedy the the problems I described is to always allow the player to collect things they passed on sometime later in the run. But then, that would mean that every run would eventually end up being the same, with all items and babies collected and no distinct identity. It is a tough problem to solve. Overall I think it would have been better to either remove looping and balance the first loop to be harder, or to allow the confluence of every run to eventually happen and focus the game on score chasing. That being said, I can respect the decision the author made to try and merge the mechanical themes of both of I.RULE's inspirations while adding looping to give the game an distinct identity.

Because the gameplay of I.RULE is so much more restrictive than a free movement game like Isaac or Nuclear Throne, I can confidently say that many of my game overs, especially in hard mode, were unavoidable due to impossibly dense swarms of monsters. Normally I would refrain from making such a claim and assume I have a skill issue, but as someone who has completed all the levels in PvZ ECLISE and is a glutton for extremely difficult Plants vs Zombies gameplay, believe me when I say that sometimes your run will just end because the game decided to make it impossible to clear that level. Obviously, this must happen sooner or later; the game is endless with scaling difficulty. But the balance of that difficulty fluctuates wildly based on factors outside your control, most egregiously in hard mode, where you can quickly lose if not offered useful babies to add to your arsenal or useful items after the first boss.

After replaying it in 2024, I once again see that I.RULE still has the same crippling problem that I had with it in 2022, the difficulty doesn't keep me engaged. But despite all my yapping about this, I still think it is a very good game and appreciate it very much. The difficulty is only a major concern when playing this game for as a score chasing roguelike (or when playing hard mode), which is very unfortunate because it is obviously trying to be one. However, you would probably have a much better time just playing through normal mode a couple times and trying to achieve most of the unlocks. I would really love to see the difficulty better balanced in a future update, and also some more monsters because there isn't much variety, but everything else in the game is very polished. I would be remiss not to mention the impressive attention to detail put into the game. Stunning spritework and animations, very fitting original characters inspired by items from TBoI, thoughtful adaptations of items and trinkets from TBoI, fireflys being extinguished by ice, ice and fire babies being immune to freezing attacks, and more. It is clear that a lot of effort was put into this project. Please check out this game, it is very much worth worth your time.

Finally, I've finished replaying all the original games in the Mario and Luigi series since becoming an adult. I remember not being a fan of this game when I played it as a child, and this game definitely does have some significant flaws, but I was very surprised by how fun a lot of the gameplay was!

To start off with the positives, Paper Jam has the best combat in the whole Mario and Luigi series! This is what kept me motivated to continue playing the game, despite its low points. There are frequent boss fights all throughout the game, which were a BLAST to play. The main reason why the boss fights in this game are so good is because they have more creative and diverse attacks and counter opportunities. One of my favorite examples of this is the paper airplane attack that the Bowser Juniors' have. In this attack, you are basically playing chicken against Paper Bowser Jr. to see who can let their paper airplane get closest to the ground without landing. This attack is extremely unique, fun to play, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Several boss attacks in Paper Jam are also challenging to consistently counterattack, which I really liked! A common problem I had with the older games (especially Partners in Time) was that figuring out how to consistently counter all of a boss' attacks was too simple, and the fights would quickly become dull as you slowly chip away at the very large HP pool of the boss, with almost no risk of taking damage; at that point you already know that you've won but you just have to sit through the rest of the fight repeating the same action commands until the boss runs out of HP. Paper Jam keeps things exciting by including more counterattack options than just jumping and hammering and opting to make bosses more difficult by making countering tighter and more complex, rather than simply increasing the amount of health that each boss has.

The flashiest innovation that Paper Jam includes is the addition of Battle Cards. Serving as the replacement for Badges from Bowser's Inside Story and Dream Team, Battle Cards are abilities that you can activate, without consuming your turn in battle, at the cost of Star Points which you earn for performing successful attacks. The fun thing about Battle Cards is that you draw one each turn out of your custom deck of 10 cards! This inclusion of deckbuilding mechanics did a lot to make Paper Jam feel mechanically very different from all of the other Mario and Luigi games. Improving my deck by buying new cards from the shop and getting holographic cards drops from enemies added moments of excitement to the game that I am very appreciative of. I am pleasantly surprised by how well Battle Cards fit into the already established formula of a Mario and Luigi game, and I am sad that we didn't get the opportunity to see this concept iterated upon further in a future Mario and Luigi game!

The last big shakeup in this game is the addition of a third party member, Paper Mario. Other games in the Mario and Luigi series have added additional party members before, but Partners in Time did a very poor job executing this concept, as you can effectively only have 2 party members active at one time and the babies are entirely redunant characters anyways, and while Bowser's Inside Story did literally have three party members, the majority of that game was spent exploring the world as two separate parties (Mario and Luigi as one party and Bowser on his own). Paper Jam makes the simple change of adding Paper Mario to the Mario brothers' team, and this addition subtly makes the Mario and Luigi gameplay so much better. A problem shared among every Mario and Luigi game is that counterattacks are often easily cheesable. You are encouraged to counter enemies by closely looking at their behavior immediately before they attack to determine what bro they are targeting and then press the appropriate button (A for Mario, B for Luigi) to help the corresponding character avoid danger. But what is much easier to do is to simply press A and B at the same time so that regardless of who an enemy is attacking, you can preform the appropriate dodge without even needing to engage with the enemy's specific telegraphs. The addition of a third concurrent party member greatly alleviates this problem thanks to simple fact that it is very difficult to press A, B, and Y simultaneously. The specific implementation of Paper Mario goes even further to solve this issue, by also making him stand a significant distance behind Mario and Luigi. The reason why this is relevant, is because Paper Mario's distance from the enemies makes their attacks take longer to reach him, making his timing for many counterattacks offset from those for Mario and Luigi. This effectively makes it impossible to cover multiple bases at once by trying to counterattack with Paper Mario and another character at the same time. I consider the cheesability of the other games in the series to be a significant design flaw, and it is very nice to see that problem finally addressed in this game.

While Paper Jam made some incredible improvements to the standard Mario and Luigi experience, it does introduce some serious flaws as well. My biggest issue with the game is that there is a large amount of mandatory gameplay that just isn't fun. In the early game especially, there are many required quests you must complete to advance the story that are a completely different style of gameplay from the standard turn based battles and overworld exploration. The worst offenders, in my opinion, are the quests that make you play hide and seek to find hidden Paper Toads and the quests that make you chase and tackle Paper Toads in the overworld. There are many other types of quests in this game, many of which I actually did enjoy playing--like the quiz and Yoshi racing ones, but strangely most of the fun quests were optional.

The biggest waste of time though, is without a doubt, the papercraft battles. This is an evolution of the giant battles from Bowser's Inside Story and Dream Team, but instead of participating in cinematic turn based battles, you destroy other papercrafts in a 3D free-moment environment. These sections suck for multiple reasons. For one, the controls are very awkward and feel pretty terrible. You use tank controls, movement is pretty slow, there isn't much to actually interact with in any of these sections, and the combat is absolutely horrific. You are meant to bait attacks from enemies and then counterattack them after they miss. This already isn't great, since moving around your papercraft doesn't feel good, but it gets even worse because the enemies sometimes take a long time to get aggressive and try to attack. This leaves A LOT of awkward pauses in between each attack and counterattack combo. This gameplay loop made me very impatient, leading me to another major source of frustration: the lack of expression. The jump attack you use to destroy the enemies has a significant amount of windup, making it implausible to attack enemies before they make themselves vulnerable with a miss. It ended up not being worth the effort and time to try and play offensively due to the extremely railroaded design of this gameplay. There is also a stamina system in papercraft battles, which serves no purpose other than to be annoying. Stamina does not refill automatically and you must go to recharge stations to refill. This ends up being a total time waster because it takes several seconds to recharge and there is absolutely no risk while recharging, as enemies will not follow you to recharge stations. I honestly have no idea how this mode ended up in such a sorry state, the game would have been much much better without the inclusion of papercraft battles.

Something missing form Paper Jam is the imagination and humor that was present in the previous titles. This game is not creative. All of the enemies here are bog standard. There are no weird NPC races like the bean folk or the block people, there are no new enemy concepts like the cavity pokies or the shroobs, the theming of this game is extremely sterile. The most creative part of this game's theming is the addition of the Sticker Star rendition of Paper Mario, and if you know anything about Sticker Star you should know that paints a grim picture. The areas are also just as bland, sporting the all too common plains, desert, forest, ice, beach, and lava themes that the Mario fanbase has long since grown tired of. The world is also really small in this game, you get to the opposite end of the map very early on and you backtrack to every area of the game 1-2 times over the course of the game. One of the biggest falls from grace that this series has suffered in this game is the quality of the writing. Nothing interesting happens in this plot; Bowser kidnaps Peach and you rescue her. The paper characters were written in a way that I think is extremely boring, where they are essentially identical to their real counterparts in all ways other than being flat. And so little is said in so many words that I wouldn't blame you if you mashed A through the dialogue altogether. The humor that was present in the other games is mostly gone now, and many of the games attempts at being funny felt extremely dry, low effort, and fell completely flat for me. I can see these downgrades ruining the game for fans of the previous games, which is such a shame since the battling has never been better.

My remaining nitpicks and praises:
- The inclusion of a speed up button for cutscenes is nice, as the default speed is painfully slow. Its inclusion leave me wondering why they didn't just speed up the cutscenes though. Holding down R to speed up gets annoying too.
- The Koopalings have never been better than in this game. They actually feel like they have personalities here and are one of the only examples of the game doing something interesting with its characters.
- There are a lot of reused assets from Dream Team and Sticker Star to the point I found it distracting. This, the lack of polish in the secondary objectives, and the excessive backtracking leaves me thinking this game was rushed.
- I just dislike how Paper Mario looks in this game standing next to Mario and Luigi. He also doesn't really feel like Paper Mario. His major difference from Mario and Luigi is that he has a flutter jump, which isn't something he has in his home games leaving his inclusion feeling a little arbitrary.
- Paper Mario uses his thumbs up animation way too much, it got distracting.
- The optional boss rematches were very fun! I would like the mode better if you were auto leveled to the max level so that the experience could be more balanced, but it was still very fun additional content and beating the secret boss at the end of the boss rush was very exciting.
- All the tutorials are skippable! You can view them from the menu at anytime later too. Very nice feature.

Overall, I do like this game a lot and I plan on playing it again sometime, but it is such a shame that the overworld, writing, and many of the mandatory missions hamper the experience to such a significant degree. If you like the battling of Mario and Luigi or Paper Mario I'd say that this game is definitely worth your time, despite its many problems. Hopefully one day this series can get revived, because the formula it uses is really fun.

Yume Nikki is not for everyone. It is very slow and there is very little actual 'game'. The experience is almost entirely exploring open areas searching for something interesting among a sea of fantastical things which are paradoxically mundane. I actually found the experience to be similar to browsing 4chan, as it is a very meandering activity, with some unsettling or even disturbing undertones, where you genuinely have no idea what you will encounter next.

Somewhat frustratingly, it is not plausible to actually reach the credits of the game without either spending several hours meticulously combing every single area nor using a guide. I found the game to be most enjoyable when using a spoiler-lite guide to direct me to the general vicinity of each of the collectible effects without spoiling what I would encounter along the way.

I tried this game in high school and found it boring, but I enjoyed it when I came back to it a few years later. To enjoy Yume Nikki, you need to be in the right mental state and not be expecting something that it isn't (i.e. a more traditional video game).

Leaves a ton of space for your imagination to run wild in which is likely why so many people have vastly different experiences with this game. When so much is left up to interpretation, your brain can't help but fill in the lines itself.

My personal experience with the game is one of feeling incredibly isolated and displaced within the world while also being comforted by an abstract warmth, almost as if I am being hugged by a childhood friend with whom I had lost all communication with but who's memory has lived within myself and shielded me in ways over the years that I've never been cognizant of.

I now understand why a common joke is that Yume Nikki's biggest fans are all schizophrenic.

This is the only idle game I have ever played, so all of the mechanics here were completely new to me and I am not sure how many of them were pioneered by Orteil nor how many of them are unique to this game, so I'm not sure how this game would feel to play as an idle game connoisseur. Regardless, as an idle game novice, the cocktail of mechanics that Cookie Clicker has to offer all come together to make an experience that is at times intriguing, boring, exhilarating, analytical, monotonous, and more.

I assume most people are familiar with the general premise of the game: you get cookies by clicking on a big cookie, spend cookies to buy things to click the cookie for you, and use your increased cookie income to buy things that click the cookie faster, and so on and so forth. Before I started playing this game 2 years ago, I wasn't aware of the many other mechanics that are present in Cookie Clicker which are the actually compelling parts of the game. There are abilities that the player can actively use to generate cookies that are much more interesting than simply buying more towers to generate cookies faster. Golden cookies are an obvious example of this, they will briefly appear every few minutes, and if you notice and click them, they will activate one of a few effects that will significantly increase your cookie production. However, golden cookies are far from the only example of secondary means to generate cookies, and I would even say they are the least interesting one. There are self described "minigames" in Cookie Clicker that allow you to manage unique resources to affect your cookie production in many unique ways. My favorite of them is the farming minigame, which allows you to grow crops that can change the properties of many other mechanics, until the associated crops expire. What makes this minigame so cool is that it synergizes with all of the game's other mechanics. There are crops to increase cookie production, decrease shop prices, make golden cookies appear more often, increase the potency of other crops, etc. The farm gives the player lots of room to think of creative ways to achieve many cookie related goals, and a big part of the fun I had playing this game was finding the best minigame strategies to maximize my cookies. This becomes exhilarating after you learn how to effectively synergize multiple of these mechanics simultaneously, leading to explosive amounts of cookies being produced at exponentially faster rates than is otherwise possible.

While I think that minigames are the most interesting mechanics in Cookie Clicker, the most powerful ability would have to be its legacy mechanics. Cookie Clicker is a legacy game, meaning that you will repeatedly start 'new' save files that are altered by the previous ones. How that manifests here is through ascensions, which cause you to lose all of your resources (towers, cookies, and upgrades) from that run in exchange for permanent upgrades on all future runs. There is an ascension skill tree that holds many powerful and unique upgrades, many of which are absurdly expensive the first time you reach the shop. But the permanent upgrades that you unlock each ascension will quickly allow you to bridge the gap between your available resources and the cost of each new milestone upgrade. This is one of the greatest joys to be found in the game: reaching levels of income and resources that previously seemed ludicrously unattainable. The first time I ascended to a new legacy was one of the incredibly exciting peaks that Cookie Clicker has to offer for those who allow themselves to become invested in their cookie production speed. My cookie production potential increased by multiple orders of magnitude and my new run was flying past milestones that took me days in the previous legacy, in only a matter of minutes!

While there are incredibly satisfying and exciting moments to be found in Cookie Clicker, the majority of the time the game is open will be generally uninteresting and low-maintenance, it is an idle game after all. This makes it hard to pinpoint a specific level of enjoyment that the game provides while playing it, since you are meant to give it varying levels of engagement. And, obviously, the less engaged with the game you are, the less you will have the capacity to be actively enjoying it. I think that the rhythm of the game is pretty easy to intuit in the early and mid-game, where you will be clicking golden cookies and buying new upgrades every few minutes, but as you continue ascending and attaining higher and higher levels of cookie production, the rate you buy new upgrades will slow to be hours, days, or even weeks apart. I have been slowly becoming less and less invested with my save file as I have attained every upgrade and almost every achievement. Because ascensions become less and less powerful the more stacked your legacy already is, I have to wait months for ascending to be worthwhile. The exponentially growing cost of additional towers quickly stagnates the growth rate of my cookie production within each run, and the only way to make a meaningful amount of cookies is to partake in tedious minimaxing of the cookie grimoire and golden cookie spawns. The reason I have persevered so long has been to try and reach the last 3 achievements I need for 100% game completion. I honestly should have bailed a long time ago and only continued chasing the last few achievements due to sunk cost. The worst, and downright unenjoyable, parts of the game are all backloaded. I wish that the achievements were better paced so that you could achieve the last few much earlier, when the game was still exciting at times, which would make for a much better clean stopping point to retire the game.

Despite the slog that the game becomes when hunting down the last few achievements, Cookie Clicker is a pleasant experience for the first many months of play with some extremely high highs. Everyone should honestly try it because it is free and such low commitment. Just DO NOT go for every achievement because getting the last dozen or so is a bad time.

I'll get straight to the point and say that Pizza Tower fucks and is one of my favorite games of all time. It is an exhilarating and extremely rewarding experience chasing the P rank on every level. A P rank is awarded for clearing a level near flawlessly, with a combo active the entire level, and getting them is, without a doubt, the best part of the game. Levels are laid out such that you can gracefully, and extremely efficiently, flow through them as you grab each collectibles while continually refreshing your combo meter. This makes the moment to moment gameplay extremely rewarding in itself, once you understand Peppino's moveset and are able to soar through the obstacles laid out by the level at mach-speed! Racking up your combo while pulling off efficient movement tricks makes me feel cool as hell and is what drove me to devour this game.

The level design is far from the only thing that Pizza Tower knocks out of the park; the music, visuals, and aforementioned controls were all clearly given a lot of time to cook, giving the game an extremely unique identity and cumulating in the game's extremely sicknasty style. The hyper stylized MSPaint aesthetic was very offputting to me at first, but the brazen individuality of it quickly grew on me, and the game often takes advantage of it with surprisingly charming artwork that evokes the emotion of high quality MSPaint shitposts (such as the Baja Blast heist to name an example), which I am a major fan of. The music is just as strange as the visuals, with an extremely unique sound and random samples thrown in every so often. Despite that, I think that the music is still generally appealing in a way that non-terminally online people would be able to appreciate (although I am often told I have a terrible taste in music so I may be way off on this).

And finally, to get to Peppino's moveset, once you get a grasp on it, it's amazing. His run speed quickly builds to extreme heights, making long stretches of perfect play super rewarding as you reach record speeds. Fortunately, the camera is way zoomed out the whole game, so there is no issue with not being able to see things that are ahead of you that other speedy platformers like Sonic have. His wall climb also maintains his running speed, allowing you to continue building it up through large sections of each level. Turning around also conserves some of your speed, but it unfortunately has a pretty low cap on how much speed you can retain from it, which I would have liked to see increased or removed all together. The upward dash also stalls for no reason when you do a horizontal dash out of it, which is unsatisfying to lose seconds to. Peppino also has some secret tech that is never explained to the player which I am pretty baffled by. You can build instant speed from 0 with a crouch dash, cancel a dash by dashing in the opposite direction, and ground pound out of a dive by pressing down + jump midair. These moves are really useful, especially the ground pound, and I think I would have enjoyed the game less if I hadn't been informed of their existence by a friend. The second playable character, The Noise, also has some pretty great controls. He is more similar to Peppino than not, but his minor changes end up making him feel very different. Although, there are times where levels were clearly not designed with the abilities of The Noise in mind, making for strangely difficult obstacles and less satisfying sequences. Despite the minor imperfections, Pizza Tower's controls are a huge enabler for the frantic gameplay and rewarding level design that I love so much about it.

I do think that PT has a couple of major flaws that make it hard to get into. First, the best part of the game (getting P ranks) is not at all obvious to the player. Beyond existing and adding to the save files % score on the file select, there is no extrinsic incentive for players to try and get P ranks. In my initial playthrough, I didn't worry about getting S or P ranks at all and ended up being pretty underwhelmed by the game after I had beaten all the levels. Only after deciding to go back and try getting a few P ranks did I realize that that is the main appeal of the gameplay. I think this issue is exacerbated by my second major complaint, being the hidden collectibles. Every level has 9 major collectibles, multiple of which are hidden, often in hard to find places, especially if you are going fast (which is the best part of the game). This leaves the player in a really awkward spot, having to choose between taking their time to explore the level looking for secrets, and going fast to maintain their combo and exercise mastery of the game's controls. This conflict is even more apparent when the secrets are hidden in parts of the level that are only accessible during the timed escape sequence at the end of each level. After I decided to get all the P ranks in this game, I just looked up a guide of all the collectible locations and had a much better time with the game after that, which I think speaks volumes as to how the secrets interfere with the game's biggest strength.

Pizza Tower makes me feel cool as fuck when I am showcasing my understanding of the game's controls and mechanics by earning P ranks. It is unforgettable, with its extremely unique music and art, not to mention the final boss, which is one of the most hype levels in any video game I've ever played. It occasionally gets in its own way by slowing the player down, and getting P ranks does admittedly ask for a lot of effort from the player, since they will have to play through the level at least one time before even attempting P rank just to get familiar with the route they'll have to take. These are relatively easy flaws to ignore though, and everything else is so well done that Pizza Tower has earned its place as one of my favorite games of all time!

There is nothing like this game. Ok technically it’s a pretty basic acrobatic platforming game that is based solely on super mario style gameplay quite unabashedly, but what this game is makes me so happy.

It’s one guy’s ocs based on his old flash animations running through worlds based entirely off of games and media that fall into such heavy obscurity that finding something you recognize is kind of amazing. This is a game where the penultimate world is called Video World and is based on youtube videos one of the devs likes.

The game is free and they don’t care about copyright, they can just have whatever they want in there, it’s a hand drawn pixel art game but it is authentically kitbashed feeling, and that extends to the soundtrack, which is one of the best sets of plunderphonic jams i have ever heard.

The appeal of this game is hard to put into words to be honest, have you ever wanted to have a boss fight against a massive jpeg of that one bootleg MJ Thriller guy? which is in turn a reference to a weird flash game? or have you ever wanted to have a level based entirely off of a creepy pasta that nobody has ever heard of? what about a Stick Figures on Crack level based on specifically a rip off by someone else, or what about a bonus level based on Moppa Wars! (look it up you will find nothing)

Worth mentioning is that this game is dickhead level difficult, as someone who loves tough as nails videogames (not as a hardcore get gud gamer but as a total masochist), this walks the line of what i consider fun and frustrating. But the esthetic, music, quasi nostalgic vibes, and just generally how this game handles itself make me very happy and willing to jump through hoops just to see what else gets this game has hidden in it, i have been on board this game was about Obama dressed as Mario, and i can’t tell you how happy i am this game turned out just as insane as i was wishing.

You can tell this is a Slavic game because the devs made sure every speaking role character just says “Breh” as their text box voice bark.