Not sure how to feel about Buried Stars. It’s a murder mystery visual novel with an interesting premise, but not a whole lot actually happens. Most of the game's events are inconsequential, and the free conversation gameplay got really old really fast. Suggesting keywords to each person over and over was so boring that I ended up just speeding through text until I could get to actual story progression, which was decent.

This might just be a me thing, but I felt the mystery was pretty simple and I figured it out almost right away. This is probably a side effect of the game's cast being super small, so there's not a lot of room to hide.

The game forces you into a bad ending regardless of your choices on your first playthrough, which I thought was a really weird choice. The game is already repetitive, and having to replay a significant portion of it was super tedious.

The game's characters are decent, and I was still compelled enough by the story to finish, but it's not an amazing game. It's just okay.

6/10

Super Mario RPG remake is great. I liked all the new mechanics, especially switching party members in battle. That said, the core gameplay is a little too simple for me. Playing it mostly reminded me why I always liked Paper Mario more. While it was still fun, I probably wouldn't play it again. I do have some nostalgia for it, but it was never my favorite game as a kid. It's always just been a game I liked, but nothing more than that. Amazing new OST though.

8.5/10

However, specifically as a remake, it's probably a 10/10 when it comes to quality of life improvements while still being faithful to the original. If you loved the original game, I'm sure you'd love the remake.

Tunic has a really cool concept: everything is in a foreign language, so you need to figure out what to do via context clues in pages of an instruction manual you collect throughout the game. Unfortunately, its quality falls off a cliff in the last third of the game.

I'm honestly not sure why this game has Soulslike elements. General enemy and boss design is just terrible and not fun to fight. I think the game would've been much better if all the focus on combat got shifted into crafting more unique puzzles utilizing the game's selling point.

That said, I liked the game up until that last third, and some puzzles like obtaining the Holy Cross are really well designed, but I wish there were more variety rather than the Holy Cross being the game's only big puzzle.

6/10