Francis is a visionary musician. His performances take the form of slow games of Simon.
He traverses the galaxy, by holding right.
His shredding restores life to dull planets by draining the life force from the player's ears.
I guess I get what it was doing, but it's a colossal misfire on every level. The style of that first trailer way back when hooked me so much I didn't expect actually playing it to be such a slog, and I especially didn't expect the visuals to be so unpolished to the point of unpleasantness. Bummer.

I think I'd play these things forever, even if it is functionally mostly the same as Her Story. It's not a novel story except for the way it's presented, but putting all the pieces together in your head is especially satisfying knowing that you're probably the only player who's going to view those clips in that order. It's unique for everyone. Mechanically, "Click here when you're done to win" has evolved into "Click here when you're done to get a procedurally generated blurb about your win." My playthrough might have bugged out a little, too, because I got all the "skits" in a row just near the end.

There should be a DVD bonus feature where it just plays all the conversations in order and synced with each other. I was surprised there wasn't a way to link the two halves of a conversation. I guess you could use bookmark tags but bookmarks were so clumsy to manage I never bothered.

The actual generated landscapes are a cute novelty which the author acknowledges in-game were more useful for his own development as a programmer than as fun for a player. But I get the sense he pushed this out the door still under the impression the world creation was the core of the game.

It's not. The characters he made to introduce it are. The idea of a random procedural-generation algorithm and a not-so-random generation algorithm having personalities and conversations is really really clever and I wish there was more substance to explore that here. Hey dev man, make a sequel! Show Bit and Bot some love!

Oh jeez Adventure for a *BIT* I JUST got that.

As the first review of this on Backloggd I hereby give all users permission to mark this "Mastered" at 100% even if you don't get 101%. I have this authority. (I also command you to not spoof the achievement. What is there to gain from that?)

Let's talk about "short games," which have kind of become a meta-genre by now. If you follow as many indie devs on Twitter as I do you probably see a lot of them, including Nifflas, arguing that games should be shorter and easier, and that action-focused ones should have highly configurable difficulty settings. Whether or not you like Ynglet will probably depend a lot on how much you agree with that. Personally I think I do agree with it, at least in the abstract. Then I play a game like this that consumes my attention for about 90 minutes, and then it's over just as it felt it was getting started.

I'm not sure how much that is a criticism. It should be a common courtesy to assume the game is exactly as long as the creator wanted it to be, right? It's extremely reasonably priced, the art is beautiful and the controls are pretty much perfect. If expanding the scope of the game would have had an impact on any of those things then this is certainly the balance to aim for.

So I guess this is a case where "I wanted more" is high praise. If I were still in college doing speedrunning streams on Twitch then I would absolutely be doing some Ynglet runs starting tonight. That would give me more. But because I'm a working adult I'm probably going to put this down for a long time, and in a year I'll remember the visual aesthetic more than I remember how many collectibles there were.

This is a pervy match-3 game. I did not know that when I bought it. Must have missed that part of the Nintendo eShop description.

I'll just ignore the part where you strip high schoolers to their underwear. It's your typical visual novel about investigating mysteries where you have to replay several times to get all the clues. Sure, fine, it's a staple of the genre. But this reason it fits the genre so well is most of them have a fast skip feature for previously read text. This one does have a skip button, but even with that, the game is so slow. Every investigation sequence, every match-3 intermission, every uncomfortably long loading screen for those match-3 games. You'll start figuring out the exact frame you can enable skip on entering a room, just to get through it a millisecond faster. I might like the game better if replaying a loop wasn't so boring.

Emphasis on "might", because the way they use the replay aspect betrays a lack of respect for the player's time. If you're playing without a guide like I did, expect to fail a loop because you forgot to check in-game fake-Twitter at the right time, or you misclicked one option and didn't make a save because the save menu is so sluggish. Add a few loops for the time it takes to figure out the baffling decision to indicate true-ending text in red and fail-state text in blue.

The mechanical sloppiness bleeds into the story as well. Typos, dialogue errors, typos, typos, typos. The story veers into some dark territory aimlessly, focused solely on mining it for shock value and twisting expectations. While I'm not as negative on the true end as a lot of reactions I've seen, it feels like they never quite connected the final dot there. There's not a thematic cohesion to the mysteries and Nanami's arc.

In an effort to be more positive about life, I will now list both of the things I like about this game:
• Lots of visual novels make you replay a few times to solve the full mystery, but not many put the unsolvable chapter smack in the middle. That was mildly different.
• In the segment where you chase a student around the school, fake-Twitter starts buzzing about what on earth the freaks are doing. It made me laugh.

One star feels harsh. I'm an advocate of "star ratings are mostly meaningless" and I still wish I could give it two. But I think of scenarios where I would recommend this and can't come up with any. I'm going to remember this game as the one that prevented me from starting Famicom Detective Club on release day.

I'm very nostalgic for this game. This was my first time playing it.

Because I can't think of any media release since, video game or otherwise, that felt like such an event. (An Avengers? Star Wars 7? Certain WoW expansions?) Or maybe that says more about my age and friend group in 2007. Or the sodas I was drinking.

And I'd say it lived up to expectations. Shooting bad guys is fun, and grenades feel useful and balanced. Only one level made me angry when it refused to end. I did the accidentally-return-to-the-start-because-the-environment-has-no-landmarks thing again, in the same level. There's a comically easy boss fight towards the end, which is odd but I prefer it to the opposite. Basically, this is what I wanted from Halo 2.

The story ends the only way it possibly could have. Maybe a little too neatly. But it shows an ambition in storytelling that I don't think was there in the previous entries, even though it seems unpolished by today's standards. But hey, it was 2007. Seems like that was the year everyone everywhere was figuring out what video games stories could be. Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Super Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect, Portal. As much as I grumbled about the story and writing of the series before, Halo 3 improves on the faults of the previous entries, and it deserves to be on that list. As a transitional moment, if nothing else.