This is one of those situations where I don't know why this game is in my Steam library, but I've purchased enough bundles over the years and this seems to be one of those games that you get from some bundle somewhere. Either way, if you have this in your library and haven't played it yet, please do.

The pitch for Valfaris is that it's a Contra-style run-and-gun but with metal music, stop motion-style animation, more forgiving checkpoints, and a much greater focus on biomechanical creatures. It looks and sounds wonderful.

This is a pretty tough game -- the end boss took me an hour or so to beat -- but it's very well designed. Valfaris gives me the type of experience I always wanted out of a Contra game. Tough-but-fair action, great-feeling guns, sick bosses, and a rip-roaring power fantasy.

It is a game that gets dramatically close to 5 stars if not for a back chunk that features both a small difficulty spike and a couple levels that go on and on. Worth playing and I fully recommend it, but with that asterisk.

Going to buy its new sequel either at full price or the next time it goes on sale to support the developers.

Ato is a strange one in that it has a hand to play but refuses to show you it for the first hour of its ~5 hour runtime. You're dropped into a world with a blocky early-NES samurai guy who has to save his child from a clan of ninja, and it feels stiff at first.

You have no abilities, and without even a double jump you kind of have to ride the promise of stellar audio design and gorgeous parallax scrolling in order to make it past a somewhat tedious intro. Eventually you beat the introductory bosses (which are fun but somewhat similar) and the game shows its Metroidvania hand. There's weird mystical stuff? Hollow Knight and Sekiro vibes? Crazy bosses? Woah!

In Ato, you explore a managable map, do some platform challenges, grab some collectibles, and beat some bosses through parry or cheese. The post-intro bosses are all extremely fun (outside of maybe the very last one -- Tip: use the dagger!) and the platforming challenges are fun and well designed, The story goes a neat place or two as well, so at the end of it all I thought hey, this is pretty nice!

Little friction points here and there. The intro is, as mentioned, a bit tedious; the parry/charge slice is a bit awkward to navigate and doesn't keep you in the moment as much as, say, the Sekiro deflect; and the world feels a bit lifeless at times. A few villages, a shop with consumables, and a few sidequests would have went a long way, though that's easier said than done and maybe contrasts with the lonely feeling Ato tries to convey.

Still, quite good. Excellent audio and use of parallax, fun boss fights, doesn't overstay its welcome.

I just hit the "10 hours or more" mark for this on Switch for a $5 package of 300+ Picross puzzles (that are called Picross...I ain't buying no "Nonograms" crap!) and as is typical with Jupiter, this is a functional, highly polished puzzle pack with a clean UX. I have done about 110 of the basic puzzles and 15 or so of the Megas (which use the same pictures as the 150 basic puzzles I'm pretty sure but twist the rule sets slightly).

My only real criticism is that once you hit 15x15, the difficulty doesn't progress very much so I have started to get a bit bored. But this isn't much of a complaint because again, 300 puzzles! Clean user experience! 10 hours in so far! $5!!!

I'll probably either get a recent Switch release next or play one of the Picross 3D games rather than finish everything in this 3DS repack. But if you want a cost-effective way to check out a Jupiter Picross game, yeah! Get this thing.