PurgatoryDreams
2005
2017
A metroidvania with a world that is brimming with atmosphere. It's really easy to get lost in the world, exploring and testing the limits of what you can do - and the game rewards you for it. It's very challenging as well, but mastering the mechanics is incredibly satisfying and allows you to do a lot of flashy plays.
2018
Way more enjoyable than I thought. The gameplay is really repetitive, but the story and the dialogue have a lot of charm to them. It feels like a very natural extension of the Pokémon world, which I didn't really expect to get out of this. Could use more interesting gameplay, however... It feels very point-and-click and nothing else at times, and not in the fun Ace Attorney way.
One of the Pokémon games with the most content. Contests, the Battle Frontier (even if it wasn't perfect, its addition to toy with the concept of endgame content was fun), practically remaking the battle system with the addition of natures and abilities, etc. Definitely a big step for the franchise.
All in all, a really interesting free indie game. A really painful look into the sex work industry and the pain of dealing with it from the perspective of a transgender person. It's really deep, and it tugs at my heart in a really personal way. The auto-biographical nature of the work might not appeal to everyone but I adored it, it was horrifying to read the author's thought process as everything happened.
Same opinion as with FRLG. A new game to play the originals, and though the gameplay changes have been pretty divisive among the fanbase, I think it gives these games a fairly new identity. It was pretty fun to get through these games, a lot more relaxing than Pokémon usually is... Needed a little bit more content to separate itself from Yellow, and it needed to explore some of the gameplay mechanics it introduces (controlling your Partner in the overworld) a little bit more.
Insanely fun game, the natural evolution of Pokémon RBY. Pokémon have a much lower power level, but that only incentivizes strategy a lot more. The difficulty of the game was just right, and it has two regions (even if Kanto feels like just a smaller extra, it's still undeniably quite a bit more content).
1996
These games are... fine. They're the first Pokémon games, and I think there's some really cool aspects that make it interesting. The designs are pretty cool, catching them all is somewhat fun, and the glitches are actually fun to play around with imo. Somewhat frustrating to play sometimes, however -- there's a lot of time-wasters like the really, really tedious Safari Zone. Somewhat grindy at times unless you're using overpowered mons.