This was a very pleasant surprise. I absolutely love the concept, aesthetic, and music. I had a good time overall, this is much more enjoyable than the PICO-8 Celeste games in my opinion, but I do feel like it has some shortcomings in controls and polish that I wanted to talk about. These aren't a huge deal for a very short game made in a week, but I just think it's interesting.

There's some clear issues with the controls, particularly relating to the camera, that become much more obvious doing some of the more difficult B-Sides. Edges of platforms also feel particularly slippery where I feel like other games would be more generous, and Madeline is all too eager to perform a ledge climb when moving along a wall even when there are spikes on top that will instantly kill you. Many of the jumps in this game require a lot of active camera management to see where you're going, and since you also want your thumb on the face buttons to be able to dash mid-air you're constantly moving your grip back and forth. There are no control options whatsoever, and in most games I'd settle for being able to put dash on a shoulder button. I generally think taking common actions off of the face buttons in games that use both analog sticks is a good idea and fully solves a lot of issues like this, but here it feels like it would still be a band-aid solution.

The problems with the camera go deeper. For one thing, I think putting the ability to zoom in and out on the right stick's Y-axis was a mistake, you're not going to be getting perfectly horizontal inputs every time you want to turn the camera, so over the course of a series of jumps with quick camera turns you can find the camera at a very different angle than you intended. This is especially annoying since the camera doesn't reset when you respawn and you almost always have to adjust it before each attempt at a section. It's also often very hard to judge distance, I found myself under or overshooting small platforms a lot of the time. I've played a lot of 3D platformers and this is not an issue I usually have, and I had to think for a bit about what the actual cause is, which I think comes down to a couple of things. I think the developers realized this problem as well, since they included a very exaggerated guide that's enabled by default, rather than the traditional shadow below your character there's also a dotted line that extends from you to the ground. I don't think this solves the issue however.

The camera does a lot less automated movement than the average 3D platformer. In Super Mario 64 the developers only had a single analog stick to work with, and were also designing for players new to 3D games entirely, so they made the camera movement largely automatic, keeping it at a good angle behind Mario as he moved, with buttons left only for larger adjustments. Even with the move to dual-analog controllers, most 3D platformers since have largely copied this behavior. Celeste 64 seems to expect the player to do a lot more of this camerawork on their own, which is a decision I can understand sounding good on paper but doesn't really work in this genre. An interesting side-effect of this is that I think a lot of how distance is perceived is through seeing the edges of objects or textures move as the camera moves, and when the camera is at a locked angle even though the player is moving this makes the scene appear flat.

While fixing that problem would go a long way, I think there's also just an inherent issue with the amount of air control expected from Celeste's mechanics when applied to a 3D space. Most 3D platformers give you a lot of control in how you start your jump, but once you're in the air you're mostly just expected to make minor adjustments to ensure you land in the right spot. Completely changing your trajectory in the air and having to use that precisely is a lot more challenging, and even as someone who has played many difficult platformers I think that type of challenge is more awkward than it is fun. It's still probably possible to make a better-controlling game around this idea, with a better camera and level design that keeps this in mind and tries to avoid the awkward situations, but I think this game shows how difficult that would be to make properly.

While I mainly focused on negatives so far, I did have a very nice time with this overall. The play area feels packed with secrets and I was really impressed with the number of B-Sides. The ideas taken from Mario and the way they're implemented is great, I love the inclusion of 64's side-jump, and the short B-Side levels as secrets fit in great with the more open exploration. Like I mentioned at the start the game looks and sounds great, especially so for something put together so quickly. For something that took me under 3 hours to 100% the downsides are easy to overlook, and I had a really fun time with it.

Like many of my favorite games, I knew from very early on that Ghost Trick was something special. I put off playing this or even really looking into what it was for years of hearing that it was great just through a misunderstanding of what it actually is. It's actually a very unique game, but if you were to try and describe it to someone unfamiliar, the closest fit is probably a mix of a visual novel and a point-and-click adventure game, two things I am very much not fond of. The recent remastered release caught my attention, and I'm very glad it did. I've tried to avoid any spoilers in this review, but really if the game already has your attention and you haven't tried it, let this be a recommendation to just stop reading and play it. I was very skeptical that it could live up to its reputation, and throughout the game I was still half-expecting the story or gameplay to fall apart by the end, as good as they were. I can say now that it definitely doesn't do that, and it's a game I think everyone should play.

The game's charming presentation is one of the first things you'll notice and goes a long way towards making a strong first impression. It feels high quality in so many ways, and that extra effort really pays off. I've seen similarly structured games with a lot of dialogue like this where characterization is done entirely through text and character portraits (which there are often a real lack of, with characters only having a couple of faces or emotions). There's still a lot of that here, and it could probably get by with the great dialogue writing and wide range of expressive character portraits, but the animations and presentation of scenes outside of that visual novel format really add a lot. Even if they're smoother in the remake, I'm shocked these animations came from a DS title. I think this is a big part of what helps the game go between serious subjects and comedy effortlessly. Comedy is very hard to do well in games, and I laughed a lot while playing this. More often it came from visual jokes with the character animations than from dialogue. This doesn't fall into the trap of detracting from serious subjects in the story though, and both aspects feel respectful of each other.

Another big part of the presentation is the soundtrack, and it's fantastic. One of my favorites I've heard in quite a while, it has a very unique sound to it and has enough variety in tracks that none of them feel old even with some reuse. The remake has a new arranged version of the soundtrack as well as the option to use the original, which I'm really glad they included. I played mostly with the original version, and have listened to the arranged version afterwards. I think I have a slight preference for the original, but both are great, it's hard to pick a clear winner so it's very nice to have the choice there.

The core gameplay is a very unique twist on classic point-and-click adventure games, which feels like a natural evolution of that genre, and was very enjoyable even as someone who dislikes most of those. You play as a ghost who can hop between nearby objects and interact with them. You're very limited in both range and strength, making puzzles into elaborate chains of actions to achieve simple tasks. It never feels like the puzzles get too complex or open ended, but they do a good job at making you feel smart for figuring them out.

I do have some small complaints with the gameplay. The puzzles take a little too long to ramp up in difficulty, and it feels like the game is feeding you a few too many hints for the first third or so of the runtime. It's not too overbearing, but it does hold your hand a little too much. When the puzzles do get harder it's mostly very fun, but getting stuck can be a frustrating experience that I think they could have easily alleviated. Checkpoints are a little inconsistent, sometimes being there when you don't feel like you need them, but sometimes feeling like you have to redo a little too much each attempt or listen to the same dialogue after each restart in some spots. There's an in-world reason for how the checkpoints work, which could excuse this, but a lot of that reasoning starts to feel a little flimsy for some of them anyways, so I feel like it wouldn't have been too hard to place some of the checkpoints better. There's also a lot of timed elements to puzzles, and a fast-forward feature would have been appreciated. You're never waiting for too long at once, but it can add up if you get stuck for a while on a puzzle with a timing element. The game is also very eager to give you hints at the start of a puzzle, but there were a handful that I got stuck on and it never gave more hints or any help, I think there could have been more stuff like that for the later puzzles that only shows up after a certain number of retries. This is all just nitpicking really, the flaws are very easy to overlook in something so unique, and the pacing between gameplay and story sections is excellent and makes it hard to stay frustrated when the game gives you something else to focus on for a bit after a difficult section.

As neat as the gameplay is, the story is pretty clearly the main draw here, and I was shocked from start to finish how good it is. The basic setup is that you've died and lost your memory, and you have to use your ghost tricks to help yourself and others along the way. In addition to manipulating objects, you're able to replay the moments of death of the recently deceased, and interact with the world in the minutes leading up to that to try and change their fate. In doing this you get caught up in a much bigger plot with a wide cast of characters across a variety of locations. It's often unclear how these threads are connected, both to each other and to your character's story, but against all odds the game manages to wrap it all up in a very satisfying way. Each character in the game has a depth to their personality and attention to detail that you really don't see in other games, and it manages to make even the most unimportant seeming side characters endearing. The story has a lot of twists and reveals, and on top of these being excellently paced and spread throughout the story, they all do make sense within the narrative. Some pretty wild stuff happens, but the writing does a great job of making it all make sense within the game's world, and also addresses every concern I could think of, even if some of the explanations are withheld for a while. I really didn't think the ending could possibly wrap everything up while also addressing some of the minor criticisms I had with the story's logic, and I would have been happy with just a good ending, but it's an amazing one. Everything comes together perfectly and things are addressed in ways I never could have seen coming but make perfect sense. The way the story is put together just feels masterful, and it belongs on the very short list of game stories that I think only work in this medium.

Ghost Trick is such a standout game in every aspect, and while it's not perfect I've never played anything else quite like it and doubt I ever will again. A story this good in a video game is something I've only seen a few times ever, and it's definitely among my favorites. I've been recommending this game to everyone I know since well before I finished it, and it nailing the ending as well as it does only reinforces that. You really owe it to yourself to play this, it's a very special game.

Pseudoregalia is one of the best executed 3D metroidvanias I've seen. It's a game almost entirely focused on movement, and it really nails that. Your abilities are fun and interesting, and many of them aren't the generic upgrades you'd expect from many games in the genre. You can find them very out of order and it feels like the game almost encourages sequence breaking with the amount of opportunities it gives for that. The combat for the most part is just there, it's not great but it's not in the way to the point of being annoying either, with the exception being the final boss fight which I found surprisingly fun. The vibes of this are great, you're exploring a huge castle with very N64-inspired visuals, and it gets those right in a way that feels very authentic and nostalgic as someone who grew up with that system. The music is also really good and adds a lot to the tone of the game.

My biggest complaint that while the castle has a variety of areas, navigating between them can be a little confusing. The game doesn't have any sort of map, and I mostly respect that decision. I feel like if it had one I probably would have been over-reliant on checking it constantly, and the challenge of mapping everything out in my head in a complex 3D space was pretty fun. That's a pretty fine line to walk though of balancing that complexity without frustrating the player, and where it failed at that was near the end of the game when I had to backtrack to specific areas. Within a single area I was usually fine with navigating off of memory, and didn't get stuck often at all, but in the later parts of the game I would know a specific location I needed to get to, and remembering where the zone transitions were and figuring out how the areas all connected together was more frustrating than fun.

Overall it's a very neat game that's good at what it does, and it's very short and underpriced for what it is, so it's an easy recommendation. I could see myself replaying it just to see how doing things in a different order went, or trying to speedrun it as it seems like a really good game for that.

The more I play 3rd Strike, the more I realize how central parries are to its design, and how fundamental of a misstep it was for every fighting game after this not to copy that mechanic. Every main series Street Fighter entry has its universal gimmick mechanic, but SFIII is the one that went beyond being a gimmick and really changes the core gameplay.

The concept is simple enough to understand, holding back to block is the safest option in most every fighting game, but if you guess the timing of your opponent's attack and press forward at just the right time instead, you're rewarded with one of the most satisfying sound effects known to man, and turn the tables on your opponent putting you into an advantage state. This is carefully balanced however to not be an automatic win state, and introduces a whole new set of mixup opportunities. The difficulty of getting a parry is very carefully balanced as well, anyone picking up the game can get some their first time playing and you'll immediately realized how cool it is, but it's still difficult enough to do consistently that you can't just parry everything all the time. One of the beautiful things this mechanic does is level the playing field. In a lot of ways, 3rd Strike has incredibly imbalanced characters, and at a top level that is actually true, but for most the difference between Chun-Li and Sean or Twelve can be overcome with a good read on your opponent's habits. Parries also help to encourage aggression and varied playstyles, things that almost everyone likes but knows deep down aren't the winning answer in most fighters. I'm not joking at all when I say I think every fighting game should have shamelessly copied this.

People have already discussed the other great aspects of this game, from the top notch animations, to the personality and variety of the characters and their toolkits, to the amazing soundtrack and sound design in general, but I wanted to draw some attention to why I think parries are what truly sets this game apart and has given it staying power where it might otherwise have faded into relative obscurity.

A prime example of a game feeling like more than the sum of its parts. There's a lot that feels dated about this game, and a lot to dislike, but it still has a certain charm to it that made me want to finish it out. The combat mechanics are passable but get overused in boring combat rooms that are unnatural looking and apparent as soon as you walk into them. There's some variation added at the very end of the game which is nice but it's too little too late for how much combat there is in the game. The exploration and climbing is fine, and probably the best part of the gameplay even though it's been done better since. The puzzles are very basic but do enough to be a change of pace and add to the vibe the game's going for. The story really isn't anything special either, it's like a trope-filled mix of indiana jones and national treasure, but it was still fun enough to want to see it through. I will commend how the major twist is handled. I was spoiled on it beforehand but still enjoyed the execution of it a lot. Very interested to see how they polish this formula in the later games and see if they live up to the hype.

The Makaimura series is probably best known for being extremely difficult, and while I wouldn't say that Ghouls 'n Ghosts isn't a difficult game, it remains an extremely approachable and fun one. You'll die a lot, but the tightness and simplicity of the controls typically let you see what you could have done better, and the infinite continues and fair checkpointing make it less of a slog than many action platformers of this era without resorting to save states.

You can easily get some enjoyment out of this game just doing a quick playthrough (it only takes a couple of hours even at a slower pace), appreciate the art and fantastic soundtrack, and see what the game has to offer. That's exactly what I did when I originally played the game a couple years back. Recently, however, I got a song from the game stuck in my head out of nowhere and had the urge to play it again. So I went back, got the true ending this time in its NG+ equivalent, and have beaten it several more times since. This is the first game of this type that I've really wanted to get good at and attempt to 1CC, and in that process I've seen a lot more of what makes this game great.

I praised the controls a bit above, but they really are a huge part of what makes the game fun. In your first minutes playing it, especially if you're coming from a background of mostly playing newer games, things like the slow walk speed and your jump being high commitment might feel dated or clunky, but the combat of Ghouls is all about careful positioning and reading the scenario you're in. The options available to you are simple enough that it's easy to keep in mind at any time, but the combat always feels dynamic and interesting, and the responsiveness of your moveset allows you to manage the chaos the enemies create through thoughtful play. A mix of fixed and random enemy spawns makes the levels feel a bit different to play through each time, and many of the enemies are faster than you or have attacks that will punish careless movement or overextending your position. Learning all of their patterns and how to play against them is very fun, and as you learn you'll see how Arthur's moveset is designed to complement that style of play.

My main complaint about the game is definitely with the weapon balancing. Weapon spawns are mostly random, you can learn when they'll spawn after some time with the game, but even that will seem random to inexperienced players and you never have control over what you'll get. This wouldn't be a big problem if all of the weapons felt viable, but there are some real stinkers. The sword is at least interesting, though it struggles a lot more in some levels than the good weapons. The axe and holy water are next to useless, while the starting weapon of the lance as well as the discus are serviceable, and the dagger outclasses everything with the only exception being the special NG+ weapon in certain situations. What makes this lack of balance worse is that you can get stuck with weapons very easily. Weapon pickups never despawn, so avoiding picking up an unwanted one can be challenging or even impossible without taking an intentional death. Your weapon also persists through deaths and continues, so failing to avoid a weapon or having one spawn on top of you unexpectedly can put you in a bad situation and make the game much more difficult until you manage to get back to a better one. I don't think this is a fatal flaw, but it seems like such an easy and obvious thing to improve, which makes it confusing from what I've heard that none of the future titles in the series managed to do that. Strange.

I'm not sure how many people are in the same boat as me with enjoying action platformers but being turned off by a lot of the classics for one reason or another, but if that describes you, or if you've just ever been curious about this game or series, this is an excellent game to try. I've been having a blast with it, and it's become an easy game to just pick up and play for a few minutes when I'm not sure what to do. I don't know if I'll stick with it to the point of 1CCing it, but I'm working towards that, enjoying the process of improving, and loving the game.

Alien Soldier is a really cool game, and feels very ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The game's kind of difficult to get into because it just dumps you straight into things without much explanation, but once you actually start learning the systems of the game all of your abilities and weapons are really satisfying to use. Boss rush games don't really seem like something anyone was doing back when this was made, and it mostly does a really good job at it aside from some weird difficulty spikes. Stage 20 is brutally difficult and the few after that are kind of anticlimactic because none of them were anywhere close to as difficult, I even first tried the final boss (which was not very good imo). That aside though, really cool game overall, I could see coming back to this and trying to complete a Superhard run sometime.

2001

What an amazing experience. Everything about the presentation and feel is just so cool. Gameplay is mechanically simple but very satisfying, and the variety of encounters is great and paced out perfectly. Everything about it is so elegant that it feels hard to talk about much other than just saying you should play it yourself if you haven't. The main reason I even wanted to write anything is to talk about my experience with trying it previously. I played the first level in the remake a couple of years back (also tried it in VR, which looked cool but did not play very well), and I thought it was neat but it didn't compel me to keep playing. Trying the original Dreamcast version it instantly clicked, it really feels like the way the game is meant to look and feel. Maybe not everyone's experience but I don't see anything about this that needs updating anyways. Anyways, absolute banger of a game, easiest 5 stars in a while.

Fun little game with a unique concept. Feels like something that would be an indie game these days but is neat to see in a game this old. The controls are a bit awkward being dpad-based and the levels vary a lot in length and quality. I'm interested to try the sequels at some point to see if they improve on the idea, because it's a solid foundation.

2021

Sable is such a flawed gem of a game. It's a beautiful experience that I really loved, but it's also plagued by technical issues and certain things feeling rushed that it takes away from the game just a bit, and that's really unfortunate because the good parts of this are truly great.

It would be very easy to dismiss Sable as an indie version of Breath of the Wild, and mechanically it's not far off - you're exploring an open world, climbing using a similar stamina system, searching for hidden collectibles, and doing self-contained shrine-like puzzles. I love Breath of the Wild, so none of that is a bad thing, but Sable's story and atmosphere are really what set it apart. It's an emotionally touching coming of age story that works in a way few game stories do, largely in thanks to two things. First, the dialogue does something I've never really seen but feels obvious in hindsight, you're shown Sable's own thoughts and feelings as she talks to people, and often this skips over the actual dialogue and just summarizes it. This really lets you connect with the character even with a minimal amount of dialogue in the game, it feels a lot more like reading a book, but in a good way rather than just dumping loads of text on you. The second thing is how well the story meshes with the gameplay. You control Sable on her Gliding, a chance to explore the world and find her place in it. Exploring is what you're doing for the whole game, there's no combat or extraneous systems, you're just meant to see the world, and sometimes help out the people you meet to get a sense of their roles they've chosen. If you're looking at this purely from a gameplay perspective, it's fun but doesn't really do anything unique, but it's the combination here of story and gameplay as one that's a special experience.

Unfortunately, that experience is marred by a large number of minor issues that took away from somewhat. Playing this a couple of months after launch I would've expected it to be cleaned up with some patches by now, and I kind of want to urge people to wait more but at this point I don't even know if most of this will ever be fixed. On the technical side you have things like awful performance in certain areas, glitchy animations while climbing (which you do a ton), objects you're climbing on going invisible, random very loud noises while you're driving around the world, quests constantly un-track themselves so you lose the quest marker, UI elements that are meant to be temporary get stuck on screen, when you restart the game your selected outfit and certain game settings get reset, I had NPCs fall through the world while talking to them, whenever performance dips (pretty often) the audio gets really choppy sounding, and I could go on more but the point is it's a very unpolished game. Aside from the technical stuff there's also some rushed feeling things that are there by design. For example, I missed the place that lets you upgrade your stamina for the majority of the game, and thought the climbing sections were just supposed to be difficult. There's only one location do do this at and as far as I can tell no quests or dialogue pointing to it. I knew I needed to turn in the upgrade items somewhere, but either pointing the player to this better or having more turn-in locations throughout the world would have gone a long way. Also certain things that appear in multiple areas across the game start to get a bit repetitive towards the end, especially if you're going for 100%. I feel like the designers probably would have had some more variety here if not for budget constraints, just a guess though. There's an item that helps you find collectibles that you get after completing the quest for collecting 100 of them. The bike customization is a cool idea, but you can get the fastest bike parts pretty early on and since the top speeds aren't really that fast and you'll be traveling with it a lot (especially if you choose to ignore fast travel like I did, I felt it would kind of ruin the point of the game) you really don't get much chance to experiment with others. Money can go from very tight to not at all a concern very quickly with how the item prices are balanced and how easy some high value items are to get once you find them. There's probably more I'm forgetting, but all of this to say that the game really feels like it could have used a few more months in development.

Despite the negatives, you've already seen my very high rating for this, and while the problems with it make me sad that it's not just a tiny bit better it's still not quite like anything else.

Fun for what it is, and hard to complain about a surprise free release like this, but it does start to show its problems on Furier mode. Some bullet patterns are very annoying to dodge because of the invisible walls, the contextual shoot/melee button really does not work well, and parry being back+attack rather than a dedicated input is annoying. Lot of things are just unclear generally, unsurprisingly not as good as the full game. Worth a quick playthrough on the base difficulty then put it down imo.

This review was written before the game released

I'll release the game when my BG&E review gets enough likes.

-mr ubisoft

This is everything I'd hoped for out of a sequel to the first Max Payne. It feels similar enough while keeping all of the good and improving greatly on the bad. Few sequels hit the mark this well.

The main gameplay feels much better just from some minor changes. A little more weapon variety, not being forced into a vulnerable stand up animation after your dive, a better grenade/melee system, and the difficulty/health system being handled in a much more sane way. This game gets what Max Payne was going for with its difficulty, enemies die quickly and kill you quickly. For the most part bullet sponge bosses are gone, and normal enemies don't benefit from the insane adaptive difficulty of the first game. Max dies quickly, but not from one shot anymore, and painkillers are abundant rather than having a scarce handful hidden out of the way in each level. Exploration off the main path feels rewarded more now with extra painkillers and ammo in places that make sense, with the main paths through levels being a bit easier to make out. I did like the environment variety in the first game while still staying on theme, but that's still done better here and with better paced levels. The presentation is also much better, the graphics and sound are a notable step up while still being on the same engine. This is especially notable in the dream sequences, which are improved in gameplay as well, doing away with the poorly implemented platforming and dull mazes. My only real complaint here are the escort missions, some of which are an okay change of pace but the ally health system can feel unfair at points, and there's one mission in particular that's a standout low for the game. Overall though it was really fun to play, and while the story and tone of the first game was what kept me going, here I really got why people love the gameplay. I really wish that there was a way to play through the first game with these updated mechanics, hopefully the remake is good.

The story is just as cheesy as the first time around, but I'm impressed with how they kept that same tone that I loved while blending the comics with real time cutscenes and much more dialogue during the levels. The first game felt like an extreme case of story being separated from gameplay most of the time. You'd fight through waves of enemies in same-y environments for half an hour (even if they did change it up between levels), and then get a bit more of the story. Here there are way more important characters talking to you in the actual levels, or bits of background info that aren't exclusively told through cutscenes. It kept my attention way better and felt like the pacing was much smoother without detracting anything from the tone of its predecessor. The ending is a slight weak point I think, it didn't feel as climactic as the first game, and the final boss fight being mechanically similar but lesser in scale didn't help with that.

This is also a shorter game, and while the pacing is excellent and I definitely prefer this to it overstaying its welcome, I would've loved more here (or just a third Max Payne game by Remedy). Still, a very easy recommendation to anyone who enjoys shooters, this is the one that people talk about when they talk about Max Payne, and I honestly think people remember the first game as being more like this than it is. I remember liking the third game, and I'd like to revisit it now that I've played the first two to see how it holds up. Also curious how much they'll change with the remake, but I'm glad I played the originals regardless. Maybe just watch the cutscenes of the first game if you're checking these out yourself and skip straight to this one, it's a great time.

I love the concept of a picross / murder mystery game, and that more or less pays off with Murder by Numbers. It's a very solid picross game, notably with good controller support so I could play it on my Steam Deck. The puzzles are a little slow to ramp up in difficulty but they do get tougher towards the end. The only real gameplay mechanics aside from normal picross are having to scan the environment for clues, which unlocks new puzzles to complete and progress through the game, and a timed hacking minigame that comes up a few times where you have to rapidly solve multiple tiny picross puzzles on a timer, which is quite fun.

The murder mystery side of the game is more just a visual novel, you're not making any substantial choices or doing much real detective work here. The few times it does ask you to come to a conclusion there's no punishment for guessing wrong and you just get to pick again until you find the correct path for the story. That said, I found these parts of the game surprisingly charming. I'm not normally one for visual novels, but something about this clicked with me, perhaps just ingesting it in small bits between the puzzle sections. The story doesn't really go anywhere surprising but it's fun enough to be along for the ride, and the characters are pretty well done.

I do have two big complaints that kept me from enjoying this more. The first is the music situation. The soundtrack for the game is actually quite good, but it's also rather short, and only a smaller selection of music can be played during puzzles. This is also a minor problem because puzzles that come up in more tense situations still use the lighter, more upbeat music from earlier in the game. The bigger problem here is that there's only one volume setting for music, you can't turn off the music during puzzles without also turning it off during the story. I wanted it on during the story and thought it added a lot to those parts, but got really annoyed with it during the puzzles and ended up toggling it off and on throughout the second half or so of the game. You also notably can't open the pause menu once you're in a cutscene/dialogue, so even manually turning it on for story moments is out of the question unless you remember to do it before the end of every single puzzle. This was a pretty big annoyance over a roughly 40 hour game, and could be solved very easily I think, hopefully a setting gets patched in at some point.

The second complaint is about how the side content in the game is handled. There are four main cases you solve in the game, and for each one you get a rating that goes up as you solve the main puzzles without making mistakes or using hints. The higher your rating, the more side puzzles you unlock, and if you get an S rank and complete all the side puzzles for a case you get a bonus cutscene. These are actually quite important to the story and fill in some important info, which in theory I wouldn't mind because I'm playing this game for the puzzles and didn't mind doing the extra ones. This became an issue when I finished one of the cases, assuming there was just another puzzle at the end that would bump me up to S rank, but it turns out I somehow missed one. After you complete a case you cannot go back to the areas from it to search for more clues, the cases are almost treated like separate playthroughs and unless you manually make safety saves, you'll have to replay the entire case (a quarter of the main game) from the start to revisit any part of it. I ended up just looking up the cutscene I missed on youtube, and I only missed out on something like 2 side puzzles because of this, but it was very frustrating and easily avoidable.

Those rants aside, I had a really good time with this overall. It's easy enough to pick up if you're new to picross, but does provide some more challenging puzzles by the end even if the ramp up is a bit slow. The story is also fun and I think most people would enjoy it, so I'd still give this a solid recommendation if it looks interesting to you.

Played through this on a whim. My first game in the series, just saw it mentioned and it seemed neat. Cool game overall, the visuals hold up extremely well and the soundtrack is great, lot of style all around. Pretty severely held back by a lack of content, or a lack of the right type of content. There are only 8 tracks, and you see them all in the grand prix mode. They're mostly good tracks, except the final one which is bafflingly a very simple layout where it seems like the optimal strat is full speed with no drifting, which isn't challenging and doesn't play to the game's strengths. It's also probably the least interesting visually. So, 7 good tracks. I could see replaying them a bit in time trial but that's pretty slim, and replaying grand prix with the different car sponsors doesn't seem all that fun. It seems like way too much of the development budget went into making over 300 cars, which is fucking insane. You play as 4 of them during a grand prix. I'd rather have like 10 cars total and double the tracks or something. The grand prix also has a story between races that's just really fucking weird? It's just one character having a one sided conversation with you and it's really strange, I don't get at all what they were going for. The actual racing feels pretty great, I wish it had analog support, especially being the 4th one on the console by that point, but I guess it's not too unusual for the era and it controls well despite that. Drifting feels really good, and the first person perspective stands out for that time. I had a good time but just wish there was more there.