This game piqued my interest from the get-go, the melding of Wizardry style exploration and Punch-Out combat combined with the raw energy of Black Knight 2000 seemed promising if not interesting. Unfortunately, this elevator pitch barely holds together past the game’s first floor, unraveling into a series of incredibly tedious puzzles interrupted by constant ""random"" encounters. In reality, each floor has 3-5 distinct sets of enemy encounters that it will eventually stitch into the fabric of your soul as the monotony of the puzzle solving is interchanged with the monotony of repeating the same encounters over and over and over. Some fights do take you by surprise the first time, but ultimately most battles will boil down to:

*1. Hold Auto Attack
2. Parry
3. Repeat*

I suppose it lived up to its Dungeon Crawling influences more than I had anticipated, but at least those had a modicum of player progression and agency that FIGHT KNIGHT desperately lacks. Your options here are limited to supers and armors that add varying levels of risk/reward to your base kit, but ultimately the clunkyness of having to completely put the brakes on whatever you were doing in the dungeon to painstakingly walk back to the hub world just to change your equips defeats any situational benefit they may have had; and frankly, what you start with by default is better than the vast majority of what you unlock.

There is no carrot dangling on a stick here to keep you going, it’s so unbelievably bland in almost all aspects, and what is there in the way of dialogue is better left unmentioned; the amount of words spent saying absolutely nothing would make a Dark Souls NPC blush. Beneath the garish color palettes and repetitive music terribly unfit for how often (and how briefly) it rears its head is an experience that is nothing short of nauseating.
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Edit 12/05: It would be remiss of myself not to acknowledge the allegations of abuse levied at Team Sorcerobe and lead developer “Boen” by a former writer on the project. Boen has chosen to respond by flooding all available avenues of information including the game’s Steam discussion forums with vitriol and rage; engaging one-on-one with parasitic individuals lusting after the latest gamer drama and indulging them in kind with unprofessional and crude attempts at generating Kiwifarms-style interest in the matter for his own sake. The Steam reviews for this game are a reflection of that behavior, where you will find no shortage of hateful jabs at sufferers of mental illness and other depraved takes on the events. This is the Fight Knight Boen wants you to see, and I will not accept any spineless calls to simply "ignore the controversy" in light of this.

As a hard-drive carrying member of Xbox Game Pass™, this game struck me as the equivalent of loitering at the Barnes & Noble after a long day of squandering what little savings I had with my buds at the mall. An oasis in the desert? Far from it, but at least they had a working restroom and comfy chairs!

Shredder’s Revenge exchanges your local bookstore's comfy chairs for controls and movesets that feel snappy and satisfying. Strap in, because for the next 2 hours you’ll have a perfectly adequate time while you go through the motions, quickly realizing that despite the options presented to you by the game, there’s really nothing better than spamming your taunt and specials. On and on the mashing goes, and the hooting and hollering of the others in the room grows all the more uproarious. While waiting for a boss’s invulnerability phase to pass for the umpteenth time I found myself wondering: why am I still playing this?

Because I love my friends, and I want to hold on to these fleeting moments as they become more and more infrequent. The bookstore of days past was simply what we were able to settle on as a place to ride out the rest of the day. I don’t even like books! Just the same I was never really gripped by the turtle craze despite being born during its apex. Where and What simply can’t hold a candle to Who. Perhaps I’m just better at remembering faces?

To it's credit I suppose Barnes & Noble did a pretty serviceable job of creating an inoffensive environment for miscreant youth to take shelter in, but soon it will look like the local bookstores that it killed off. Will I mourn it? Not particularly. So too do I not lie in anguish at night about the coming and going of mediocre beat em ups like Scott Pilgrim and its ilk. But I’ll keep listening to their bangin’ soundtracks and remembering the good times I had with my buds.

Also daawwww I want what Bebop and Rocksteady have. Love those buffoons. <3

It is rare to find titles in the medium that provide complete freedom to explore unbound by conventional means of progression. Rarer still are those that leave the player feeling that the world they inhabit outside of the game is a warmer, kinder place than the one they parted with at the door. These feelings have only grown stronger the more time has passed since my inaugural flight from Timber Hearth, where you inherit a rocket ship and the dreams of a space program birthed not as a military show of force, but out of a desire to understand the past and present.

The Outer Wilds is no mere puzzle game, its “solutions” betray the simplicity of the answers we expect to see when we march to GameFAQs in frustration. Nothing in the game just "is". You don't understand how to interact with something? The knowledge required simply lies somewhere else. Knowledge in this game is what items are in typical puzzle-adventure games, and the core of the gameplay is conducting science in tandem; experimenting, understanding and forming conclusions -even just tentative ones- to understand and experiment even more. There are few experiences as fulfilling in gaming to me, or in any medium for that matter.
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Originally submitted to u/Pangburn's S&S list

Inscryption is a poly chromatic card-based odyssey that replaces deckbuilding roguelike, escape-room style puzzles, and psychological horror with a 2D adventure and poorly produced FMVs, resulting in a blood-laced ARG.

Real talk? As someone who quickly became apathetic to Marble Hornets and the flood of copycat ARGs that followed in turn I am deeply disappointed that Inscryption’s strong core it had laid out in its first act was merely a sacrificial lamb; sacrificed in service of chasing the creepypasta zeitgeist 10 years too late for the remaining 2/3rds of the game. Painfully predictable and cliché, Inscryption clumsily tells a story you’ve already heard plenty of times. Meta tomfoolery is such low hanging fruit in 2021, and it’s frustrating that Daniel Mullins would rather lampshade his own unfinished game IN UNIVERSE instead of giving it the legs it needed to run, because he legitimately struck gold with the initial foray into Leshy’s cabin. It’s tragic to me that I spent the majority of my playtime begging for it to end, because it is a goddamn feat to get me to sit down and embrace a rogue-anything. Now I am left wondering if it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

In the same breath used to recall its lengthy name, Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru AKA For the Frog the Bell Tolls AKA The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls is often cast under the shadow of Link’s Awakening; cursed to become a mere footnote in Nintendo’s monolithic history.

The comparison is easy to validate looking at a few screenshots, but I would argue Frog’s side-scrolling sections are moreso a natural paring back of what Zelda II brought to the table, with Link’s Awakening being the conclusion of Nintendo’s brief infatuation with experimentation in the Zelda series. Frog engages with the player by providing a world with clearly laid-out rules and few tricks: either you out-DPS the opponent standing in your way or explore more to become stronger and do so later, sound familiar?

Don’t worry, I’m going to stop short of calling Frog a deconstruction of the JRPG genre, but it playfully flirts with its tropes in a very cute and endearing way that is hard not to smile at. In stark contrast to Zelda II, Frog is on your side and rooting for you all the way to the finish line. It does not waste the player’s time with long walks out of dungeons, nor does it mince words about whether or not the player is equipped to take on a certain foe, very bluntly telling the player exactly how much HP or what item is needed to progress. It was a breath of fresh air at that time in gaming and just the kind of game I need now at a time when my own prospects seem bleak. Bleaker still was the GameBoy’s library back in 92’, and it is a true shame this game never made it stateside to help break up the monotony of sokoban clone #6.

I’m unsure how much of it is owed to the fan translation, but Frog strikes a gleefully self-aware tone that lives on in the Indie games of today. Many find their inspiration in Nintendo games not unlike this one; but this one manages to stand apart from even its own peers. It’s not everyday you’ll see a major corporation break the 4th wall just to enthusiastically admit their championing of planned obsolescence, and all it asks of you is an afternoon’s worth of your time. Please check out the patch at the link below.
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https://www.romhacking.net/translations/1623/

Confounded at this game’s reputation as a cardinal sin of gaming and the hate you and I as capital G Gamers are expected to levy at it. Sure, it's got problems, least of which is wearing its heart on its sleeve, but it’s still leagues from what I’d call the true lows of the Sonic series (Chronicles, Labyrinth, etc). So why does everyone take the bait and sweep this one under the rug? To appease the hordes of gremlins cackling endlessly for Sonic Adventure 3 so they’ll shut up for 5 minutes while they bicker endlessly about the game mom wouldn’t pick up at the Rent-a-Video? Are you really content marching into the grave with the most milquetoast of WatchMojian opinions? I had to find out for myself, and as one who found the lulls in gameplay (every single treasure and mech stage) in Sonic Adventure 2 an achilles heel to the pacing, I would have ran head over heels to Shadow if I had known it was structured as a back-to-back series of the Sonic & Shadow stages from its prequel. I hadn’t even know of it’s status as a direct continuation of the story in SA2 because of the persistence of this game as a footnote best forgotten in the same manner the proletariat & bourgeoisie amass in unison to turn their collective noses up at other black sheep of gaming like Dark Souls 2 and Devil May Cry 2.

I do quite enjoy DaSII, and while it’s likely I’ll walk away from DMC2 feeling less than stellar about it, I still want to give it a shot. Unfortunately it’s unlikely I ever will because the people egging me on to do so expect me to validate their own hatred of the game as if I was checking it off a list. I don’t fuck with that approach to absorbing media anymore, and while I’m reluctant to embrace Shadow the Hedgehog I also do not feel emboldened to take cheap shots at the lowest hanging fruit of the early 2000s. I couldn't think of a better poster child for the term “guilty pleasure” if I tried and that frustrates me. Compared to the other 3D Sonic games I’ve played (SA1,2, and Heroes) I found it to be largely jank free with solid collision overall, something I couldn’t say about any of the aforementioned. Why must experiences like Shadow be eternally doomed to categorization in varying shades of irony? As the last game made by the "classic" 3D Sonic group (Iizuka, Eitaro Toyoda, Hiroshi Nishiyama, etc) I can’t not see it as anything but a reappraisal of what stuck in Sonic Adventure 2, even going so far as to reimplement the scrapped branching paths from it’s early development. Admittedly, they didn’t quite stick the landing, and I have my good friend /u/Bojangles4th to thank for helping me navigate through the game with minimal retreads on my way to unlocking the game’s “Final Story”, a feat that requires the player to obtain the other endings by way of playing the game over and over which DISCLAIMER: I don’t recommend doing; call it after a few endings and watch the rest on YouTube. I’d still say Sonic Heroes embodies the worst of these faults but it gets looked over because it’s not the game with a skrunklified genocidal gun-toting baby Vegeta tied to its back.

And that’s a good thing!

Boom, Snap, Plonk; three aircraft carrying 300 passengers have crashed into the ocean. With the same brevity of a Mario Party minigame, you are tasked with planning and executing a search and rescue operation to save these poor souls. They've waited their whole lives for this moment but you only have 60 seconds.

For being born out of a game jam and clocking in at 30 minutes tops, it does a damn good job of distilling the science of deduction that Lucas Pope has become very comfortable at teasing the player with in his games. The difference here is the cruel reality of the situation unfolding before you is entirely in your control right from the get-go. You will fail, people will die, and before you know it you'll have made a small dent in the unending battle against hopelessness and despair.

Give it a shot here: https://dukope.com/sea/play.html