After I recently played VideoVerse and also having listened to them on The Back Page Podcast I knew that I could trust Lucy Blundell’s writing.

In a way this game has passed me by but I will also admit here that the title conjured up something in me that put me off. It wasn’t thinking about one night stands themselves but when videogames attempt to be sexy, more often than not it’s a miss, sometimes cringe and potentially offensive.
This title is not.

One Night Stand is a very short experience but one that encourages you to try it again to discover the different outcomes your decisions can make, surprising revelations and ultimately rack up a selection of different endings.

Each of these are full of wonderful writing, full of realistic and relatable notes. If there is any moment of cringing it is something you have opted to see. There are very few characters involved as you’d expect and the main being the woman you have found yourself awake next to - even their name is a spoiler.
She can be funny, sweet or even cold but again, feels real.

Replaying the story you can skip text and the options are quite diverse considering the, almost, one room setting. These retries also gave me a light feeling of a good detective game, discovering evidence and piecing separate dialogue together with a mental red string that not only painted a much fuller picture than I could visually see but one with some good “ah ha” and “oh shit!” moments.

Speaking of what I could see visually, I love the art style. A simple pencil sketch looking feel that gave me Hotel Dusk vibes. Great facial expressions from your one-night stand and lots of brilliant details within the room that again enhances the feeling that this story is not purely fiction.

In the end however, I feel a little conflicted about this title. It is smartly written, beautifully presented and executed well but whilst I do not dislike short games playing the same short game over and over made me feel contradictory views of wanting more but also finding getting the last few endings more of something like busy work than the mild detective feel I had gotten earlier.
An argument could be made to just get a few endings and put it down when you feel you’ve seen enough variation, but having a screen full of blank squares you know you can fill, boxes you can check - it’s hard to do that when you know the effort, at least in terms of time, is so low.

I enjoyed my initial ending with this game, I played it “as if” it was me and was pleased. It made me want to see more of the world and that is good.
I enjoyed doing things I would definitely not, going for things I felt were possibly the stupidest decisions and having a good laugh at them.
The writing carries this game and it is definitely worth a play considering it's about the price of a coffee - ultimately I’m just not sure that this format of short with a dozen endings is my vibe compared to long with a few endings, but that is fine. There is space for all types of storytelling and I’m happy that we get to experience them.

Bigger doesn’t always mean better. A cliché to kick off the review but it’s a fitting single line summary of how I feel when speaking about Lone Sails sequel.

FAR: Lone Sails was a special experience for me, both in just watching it streamed as mentioned in my review of that title and playing it for myself.
To this day I still play the OST while writing journals for my education, and occasionally depending on mood and my writing subject the music takes me to a place that I find myself getting very glassy eyed.

To hit that high again with a sequel was probably an impossibility and it pains me to say that in fact, it was.
Changing Tides is still a fantastic game in its own right, cleverly keeping the formula of controlling a vehicle, exploring an interesting unknown land and going on a journey, whilst changing up the types of scenery and the vehicular partner enough to be fresh.

Every review I write may be the first of mine that someone has read and I can only apologise if I lack the words for explaining this game, but rather than repeat myself I feel that as important as it is to play these games in order, it is to read my thoughts on them.

Changing Tides, rather than having a “car” like the first, you have more of a “boat”.
You’re still collecting junk which can be used for fuel or saved if you like, you still have nature as a pushing force as well as engineering and the places it goes in terms of travel are arguably more interesting and diverse.
However again, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.
I found this vehicle a lot more hassle, this not only gives some unwanted friction but doesn’t help build the bond I found myself having in the first FAR title.
What also doesn’t really help with this is I felt like I spent much more time away from my motorised-mate in this game than I did the first.
Swimming beneath the sea and doing some mild puzzles and platforming isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. Puzzles are predictable, some reveals are astounding and that scale is one place where Changing Tides does trump Lone Sails but the emotional connection to the journey feeling less didn’t help those moments stick.

Joel Schoch returns to play another beautiful, lonely, sometimes sad and sometimes uplifting OST and much like Lone Sails I can see myself listening to this when writing in the future.
An issue though, not of the music itself, is the weird lack of it in places.
There are points where silence is powerful but it felt too often, almost as if maybe the game was broken.

FAR: Changing Tides may not hold a place in my heart like Lone Sails did, but I had a lovely time and the ending, which I will not spoil, will at least be something that does stick with me. Powerful stuff.

Changing Tides is worth your time, but sadly it does almost everything worse than its predecessor, not terribly so but enough that it loses some magic.
I can only theorise that perhaps the four year gap between games gave the studio time to overthink what they wanted to do, what they wanted to say and what they were making.

I will take a FAR 3 though. Please and thank you.

Variety is the spice of life and whilst this game concentrates on one seasoning executed very well it never forgets that.

Pepper Grinder see’s you control the drill totting Pepper, burrowing through dirt, under the water, between lava and crumbling ice.
Many of the platforming level archetypes are here but due to the rapid drilling versus precision platforming Pepper Grinder finds a way for this classic imagery to feel original in many places.

Holding the trigger on your controller of choice has you bury deep into dirt with constant momentum, with movement and turning circles reminiscent of Ecco the Dolphin, one of the game’s many inspirations.
It is key that any game feels good in the hand and this genre can live or die on it, thankfully the feeling of flow you find yourself in drilling, flying through the air into other bits of ground, avoiding obstacles and using varying devices or gimmicks is exactly where you want it to be.
Occasionally the speed can feel frantic, the turning circles may not feel tight enough, the distance you jump may seem too much but rarely does it ever feel like it’s anything but a mistake of yours and the game is very forgiving with its checkpointing.

A small area where the fault does not feel like it is on the player is the questionable hitboxes of enemies. Nearly all of the Narlings, the small narwhal-goblin hybrid type enemies are splatted in a single hit, but they occasionally wield equipment to halt your progress. Expected and not unwanted but the consistency of who hits first and where the enemies are vulnerable doesn’t always seem to watch and that perfect flow state hitting a brick wall is an irritation this game would be better for without.

Speaking of enemies, the bosses of Pepper Grinder are fun and varied. A lot of pattern remembering as expected but diverse in style, looks and set up with the difficulty of them rising to a real peak for the final encounter.
The only disappointment is that there aren't many, an issue the game has as a whole.

I find it difficult to complain about a game being short, especially when it is so tight.
Each stage in Pepper Grinder brings new and interesting ideas, a strength of variety that the best Nintendo games have and something I loved about last year’s Pizza Tower.
Being left wanting more is a good thing, but I can’t help but feel like this game is one world and a handful of stages too short.

Pepper Grinder does however give you a reason to go back. Each level has five hidden skull coins, a staple of any platformer and with these you can unlock some palette swaps and a hidden level in each world which are typically some of the more fun and gimmick heavy driven stages in the game.
The treasure you collect, this game’s equivalent to Sonic’s rings and the like do not help you survive but allow you to buy stickers.
Stickers and sticker pages are Pepper Grinder’s fun take on a 2D photo mode but act like the sticker books you had as a kid, just with more variety, less permanence and glue-mark based mess.
The annoyance here though is you unlock stickers with coins using a gacha machine and trying to fill the pages feels too time consuming and at time of writing I don’t believe there’s a trick to stop getting repeats outside of trying again and again.

The stickers give you a reason to return to levels to grind treasure but as each stage is finished a time-attack is unlocked and for this podium of prizes additional special stickers and music tracks are obtained. The time-trials are where the game truly becomes “hardcore”, and this is one title I cannot wait to see in the hands of experienced speed-runners.

I mentioned music tracks and Pepper Grinder’s OST composed by XeeCee is one of its highlights. The tracks may not be as catchy as some classics but the variety from mad drum and bass to more lo-fi tracks depending on the stage are welcome and something I find myself wanting to go back to.

Pepper Grinder is a fun and sometimes furious, drilling platforming experience with interesting ideas and fun mechanics spread throughout. To spoil what the game brings in variety would spoil it but as well as stage variety Pepper gets to do a little more than you’d expect a drill normally would - at points making me grin from ear to ear as I realise what is happening.
A little too short with some minor annoyances in hitboxes and the curse of gacha but otherwise an early contender for GOTY and an easy recommendation.
One that may only slide down the mental list of good games this year because it is so brief and hasn’t quite changed the game or blown me away the way the previously mentioned Pizza Tower did. It comes close though, I’ll take a dash of pepper with my pizza - thank you very much!