I've been on a bit of a negative streak with my reviews. Time to lighten the mood with a wholesome pallet cleanser. I thought the writing was enjoyable, and exploring around was a lot of fun. What makes this game work for me I think is how a majority of it is truly just exploring for the sake of experiencing more of the game. You can rush through and finish the main mission and roll credits extremely quickly if you want. But the game's about roaming around being a lil' kitty in a big city. Perfect gamepass game to brighten my gaming mood. Love that despite initial impressions making me assume this would be a goose game mixed with stray type thing, it was able to stand out on its own ultimately not sharing much beyond surface level observations with those two. Cat-likes haven't become oversaturated yet thank goodness.

It's a tad buggy, and normally I wouldn't even bring something like that up because I genuinely do not care. Bugs don't bring a game down imo. Gamers gotta stop pretending they're professional game critics 'cuz they saw a Glitchy animation and pointed it out on youtube with an arms-crossed sighing PNG looking at the footage. But uh, I do bring it up this time because the game glitched so hard that taking a picture in the camera mode warped me to the ending cutscene and put the game in a bugged state where the cat was spinning rapidly during the credits. So that should probably be fixed lool. It happened consistently when taking a screenshot while running around a human's feet. After I'd already seen the ending, doing this again would just fade to white. While it was white screened, 20 seconds later I got an achievement for knocking someone over by landing on their head. Wild stuff lol. Otherwise small thing to note is the collision can be a tad wonky, but I'll gladly take that over every jump being hard scripted uncharted style.

But yeah loved all the little hats you could find, characters and their quests were charming enough to hunt down and complete. Fun list of achievements to figure out. A couple of 'em were a bit too grindy, most were fine but asking to recycle 100 cans is a tad overkill. I think the industry could use some more games like this. Small but packed with love. Absolute breath of fresh air after a lot of these obscenely long games I've been trudging through lately.

It also let me live out the fantasy of living in a walkable city. I live in an automobile infested nightmare where even on any given quiet street you'll see, no exaggeration, 50+ cars lined up and down the entire road on both sides, with any notable destination being 10+ miles in any direction... So that's a plus on a personal note. Big Car doesn't want you to realize cities can be small enough for little kitties to explore. Similar to how Big Game doesn't want you to realize we could be getting smaller games with "worse" graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and we'd all be happier for it.

It was fun to experience the first entry in the beloved Pikmin series! It's easy to tell that the first game was experimental, as many ideas weren't completely fleshed out yet and mechanics could be pretty janky. Others have talked about these points ad nauseam, so I'm going to focus more on the experience.

I really enjoyed the atmosphere. Compared to the later games, Pikmin 1 has an incredible sense of loneliness. You're trapped on an alien planet with a limited time to escape before you asphyxiate, and you're forced to place your trust in a hive mind species to survive. It's a great hook for a minimal story! Most of the dialog is revealed through daily logs and ship parts, which adds to the mystery surrounding Pikmin 1. Who is Olimar, why is he here, why do the pikmin help him etc etc.

When you finally get all the ship parts to return home, Olimar seems almost sad that he has to leave the pikmin behind. Again, no dialog (which is a good thing!) These moments made Olimar feel more human. This might be the last time he would ever see the species that would save his life! Of course, we know that's not true, but the subtle storytelling is very well done here.

Like many others, I was frustrated by tripping, dumb pikmin ai, and selecting specific pikmin, but Pikmin 1 started the series on a strong note. It was more difficult than I thought, which makes me excited to finally play Pikmin 2 and finish the series!

Man, I'm in a real rough spot. Family members are getting older and sicker, I'm overworked, not getting enough sleep... I need a real pick-me-up, something that's easy to play and has a lot of charm. Help me, Hello Kitty!

Gets cracked in the nose by a disc travelling at 95MPH, completely caving in my facial bones.

hello kitty ,why. ..........?

Like Tetris Battle Gaiden and Windjammers, Sanrio World Smash Ball! is a game I was first exposed to through Giant Bomb, where it ended up in their rotation of competitive multiplayer games on more than one occasion. And I can see why. Even sticking to the single-player mode, Smash Ball's head-to-head Breakout-inspired gameplay is addictive, and in its later stages, weirdly demanding.

You have precisely two moves: hit disc and hit disc harder, and while the early game is such a breeze it can be played on autopilot, the later stages will see you smacking that disc around an inch from your opponent's faces - which the stage itself is designed to resemble, as if Keroppi's smug visage was there to mock you - all in a frantic bid to keep it from your side of the court, which has progressively been designed to put you at a disadvantage. This is still a kid's game at its core, so the difficulty never excels to the point of brutality, but there's a curve here that keeps Smash Ball surprisingly engaging.

I hope one day I can find someone willing to sit down and actually play Sanrio World Smash Ball! with me, I think that'd be cool, I wish I had friends like Hello Kit-

Gets hit in the mouth by a charged shot that ricochets off of and back into my teeth several times

uuugh i thinki n eed to go to the hompsital

One of the rooms in this game has the shape of a heart and is full of capybaras, and if that doesn’t prove to you that this is the clear GOTY of the year of the decade of forever so far then I don’t know what will.

Despite being a highly anticipated game for me, probably one of this year’s releases that excited me the most this year… I had no fucking clue what Animal Well really was. By that I don’t mean that ‘’I didn’t know what to expect’’, there have been a ton of games I didn’t have expectations of what they would be prior to playing them, but at least I had a small idea what they were about, their mechanics, and overall ideas. But with Animal Well, I had no clue about how it could even play like.

It was supposed to be a Metroidvania? Is it Puzzle-Platformer? Or perhaps an immersive-atmospheric experience? Maybe a highly experimental take on open spaces and secret finding? I didn’t really know before I hit ‘’start game’’ to be honest, and yet, even before that point there was something that called me, that fascinated me. This world of blues and greens seen through the lenses of an old CRTV is an aesthetic I didn’t know I missed this much, or maybe is that it’s done so effectively here; the surround sound and flickering lights that accompany such abandoned yet beautiful looking structures and the nature that melds perfectly with it… I don’t know, it reminisces of feelings and memories I don’t think I can properly put into words, but still filled me with a desire to explore this rabbit hole.

Well, I finally played it, and I have finally found the answer to all of those questions that once plagued me:…

…Yes.

Animal Wells is an experience that feels like it takes inspiration from a million different places and ideas, and yet it molds them together to create something unlike any other game I can think of; is the idea that surrounds the ‘’Metroidvania’’ genre distilled in its purest form, yet it’s far from being simple.

The well is a place of few words; none of the areas have a proper name, there are no NPCs to chat with, and it’s not like the small slime-like creature we play as has a mouth to begin with. The only text present is one found in menus, small one-word prompts, and the name of the items, and that’s more than enough… because the rest speaks for itself. Each area and the animals that live in them chant a different song, each room a part of a puzzle of their own; I didn’t know for them to have a name for places to stand out vividly in my mind, like the Lake of the Cranes, or the Giant Bat’s Cave, or even smaller locations like the Peacock’s Palace or the Disc’s Shrine. The world of Animal Well may be quiet, but everything speaks volumes, like visting an abandoned virtual zoo: every encounter with a new-found critter, whether friendly or aggressive, every new interaction like distracting dogs using the disc, or every major tense moment like running away from the Ghost… Cat? Dog? I actually don’t know which of the two is supposed to be, nor do I need to know that the entire sequence and puzzle is an amazing highlight and super satisfying to overcome completely on your own… No wait, that’s also the rest of the game!

Managing to create a world that feels so well thought-out and designed so every puzzle feels intuitive, while at the same time offering such fun to use and multi-purpose items that can break open the game completely and taking ALL THAT into account is honestly worth getting up and applauding. The Bubble Wand is the clear star of the show for me; being able to create temporary platforms is already a game changer, especially when pairing it with fans and wind currents, but then you realize you can ‘bubble hop’, as I like to call it, by pressing the action and jump button both at the same time and completely bypassing many parts and sections that otherwise would have required other actions, and best thing is that even if it seems that it breaks the game at times, the dev clearly accounted for it since some rooms have passages too thin for you to maneuver or create bubbles or even animals like hummingbirds that immediately pop them once you make one. I normally wouldn’t like when a game makes a tool completely useless for the sake of a puzzle, but in here it makes total sense and balances out the moments were you make out your own path with pre-designed puzzles this amazing, and it’s not like that’s the only tool that lets you get creative anyway.

The moment you get any item, about two seconds is all you need to realize the possibilities it can offer, yet, as in the rest of the caverns, nothing is ever spelled out; you yourself and your own imagination and problem-solving are the ones that need to overcome the challenges this wildlife imposes; I’ve never felt so rewarded in such a long time than when using the Yo-Yo effectively, learning the code to fast travel to the main hub with the animal faces —which remind me of a certain game, I think it starter with ‘’Super’’ and ended with ‘’2’’… can’t put a finger on it tho—, or skipping completely the Ostrich escape sequence and its puzzles, near the bowels of the map, by using the Spring, Yo-Yo and myself. It honestly comes really close to feeling like the levels in Mosa Lina, now that I think about: you have incredibly useful tools that serve a clear purpose, but ones you can also use whichever way you like to, only with the difference that Animal Well is an already built, profoundly engaging and interesting world, and using all this arsenal while interacting with the animal and the curse that seems to affect the well is amazing, and little things like fall or water damage aren’t taken into account to incentivize and reward experimentation even more than it would have otherwise.

If I had to point out a flaw, and one that may honestly be a ‘’only me’’ thing, is the inconsistency with how it handles some switches and shortcuts. While I get and really enjoy some gauntlets of puzzles, he fact some of them reset, like the ‘’On and Off’’ switches, reset every time you teleport or get out of a room, just makes things a tad more annoying, in contrast to how the yellow door switches stay activated even if you don’t press them all or die, which makes other rooms kind of a joke and strips them from the tension found in the boss encounters, for example. I understand that this won’t be that big of a deal for many people, but when the rest of the game is so impeccably designed and each room amounts to so much, these little annoyances are noticeable.

A game that otherwise… I still don’t think I can say I've come close to experiencing all of it. In a way, it’s kinda interesting to have played this so close after beating Fez for the first time, because while both of those games have a similar sense of wonder and are brimming with secrets, that game created its mysteries through the tools you can find within a same room and code-finding through a fragmented world , while Animal Well is an ecosystem on its own, with the complete freedom that entails. Even after finding out what dwelled at the bottom of the well, it's insane how much there’s for me to find, not only the Eggs, but I’m convinced there are things that I haven’t even seen yet, and I know for sure that there are far more items than it seemed at first.

At this point, it shouldn’t be a secret that one of the things I love the most in games, or in any form of art for that matter, is when they give so much food for thought, letting the imagination run wild and feel so massive and grand even if their locations are small; Animal Well is only a 30 MB game, and it’s the perfect representation of all this, the wild desire to explore, to have fun, and to fear the unknown, even when it's scary as all hell.

I’m obsessed with Animal Well, and its ambience, roars, and silence speak to me in a way few games do, and I’m happy to see that’s a sentiment already being shared by so many people.

Possibly the most charming RPG I've ever played. Live a Live has a bunch of heart and never lacks soul for even a second of its total, relatively small runtime. I clocked in at 25 hours and enjoyed most of it. My complaints mainly lie in the weird, archaic game design decisions that weren't ironed out in the remake, a few hit-and-miss chapters, and the cryptic facets of some stuff like accessing the Superbosses and pretty much all of the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter requiring an open guide to play optimally. Still, those complaints are relatively minor and I let myself be carried by the unique, singular charm of Live a Live and its many homages.

This is a perfect remake of the original in terms of the creators' original vision. I wish the creators' vision was less rough around the edges, but I love the game lumps and all anyway. I would gladly recommend this game to anyone looking for an RPG.

the part where the author asks whys so many games reward killing enemies or have a combat system is very interesting to me. games can be so much deeper than killing shit yet so many games involve beating the shit out of something. and it made me think about kirby because kirby just seems really confusing to me. in the ads and products its shown that he protects dreamland and loves any creatures and making friends and it’s really cute, yet in the gameplay he’s just beats the shit out of anything that moves and doesn’t even pose a threat which is just really odd messaging of what kirby is, and most of the creatures kirby beats up are just really cute dudes that are just hopping around. it would’ve been much more interesting to play a platformer where instead of resolving conflicts via violence you would’ve solved it via cuteness and friendship and the power you obtain aren’t from eating people and instead from making friends

With games where you practically require a guide, it feels that your enjoyment will derive from how good the walkthrough you're using is. One of the people I follow on here mentioned that the guide provided by IGN doesn't make much sense, so just in case that is true, USE THIS GUIDE: https://www.zeldadungeon.net/the-legend-of-zelda-walkthrough/ . It tells you exactly where to go and what to do, no waffling or bs.

Even without a guide, this game can be fun. Just jumping in and seeing what you can find or discover is a great time.

If this game wasn't so cryptic, and had better hints (and if the darknuts didn't exist, I FUCKING HATE THEM SO MUCH STOP TURNING AROUND I HATE DEATH MOUNTAIN), the rating would be alot higher, but I used a guide so idk what i'm talking about. All in all, its pretty good. Not sure Zelda 2 will hold up to that standard though lmao