This installment of Clash changes from first person pugilism to third person. It is also now a soulsish mechanics and a father/son story. It keeps the fun world design ACE Team always brings.

Let's just get to the combat, a little button mashy, but can have some depth to it. There is your basic 4 string combo, a hold heavy attack, a dodge, 3 distinct dodge+attacks (forward, left/right, backwards), and a jump forward attack. There are a bunch of different Fighting Stances that change your animations/damage scaling/properties of your attacks. All attacks are loosely the same thing, like the back dodge attack will always dodge back, then lunge forward to attack, but some are multihit or whatever. You have 2 slots to change between equipped stances, and 3 slots for special moves on the Y button. Stuff like Shoryuken or a teleport forward (if you get hit while doing this the game WILL stop recognizing movement inputs unless you die/reset). Once you get used to your stance you pick, it can feel really good just stringing combos together to knock around the shit outta enemies. Or even get long damage strings on bosses without getting it from including dodge attacks, it kind of rules.

There is also a special meter that fills up and once you unleash it you will go into a first person mode. You have to do enough damage in a limited time and you will unleash a canned animation high damage super on the enemy you activated it on. I found this mode to be very annoying on boss enemies because you can get hit out of the super by a bunch of attacks and it is a waste of meter. Just made me mad everytime it happened.

Before most fights against sentient enemies, you can invoke The One Rule. It is a game of Yahtzee where you roll dice onto a mat. Whoever hast he highest can innact the artifact they picked to the fight. Artifacts buff whoever won with numerous things like summoning an extra ally, causing enemy to cramp, a free hit, etc. After you roll, you can use Tchaks to affect yours or the enemies die. You can half them, subtract from the total, or other things in various shapes. The idea is kind of cool, and I like the strategy with the Tchaks, but it is also heavily rng dependent. You could just roll like shit and the enemy could roll great, or all you die could land close to eachother, or in a line, or in 1 quadrant for the enemy's Tchak to just obliterate you. You also don't really need to play the game by the halfway point I think cause you will be able to just beat them up without any help, and they can't have any buffs cause you didnt play it.

The exploration is kind of cool, a little tedious cause there is a daytime/nightime versions of the map. In the night you play as a like a "dream" you and there are "dream" enemies. There are thorned bushes that only the dream form can go through and you need to go through them to open them up for the day mode. Along with Night Time variants of the bosses and armor you can only find at night, there is a lot of exploring the same areas twice over.

There is also a bunch of pickupables everywhere, things like crafting materials. They don't have highlights so its a lot of spamming the pick up button while exploring, not very optimal I think. Some materials are used for trading merchants, no currency, just trade items for them to craft the stuff. The other stuff is used for mixing your estus's so their heals are actually good and maybe have a buff.

The story is a classic father/son adventure thing. Pseudo meets a boy, everyone wants the boy for his powers, Pseudo decides to protect him. I like Pseudo's voice actor, just a good voice. There is some connection to the previous Zeno Clash games, but idk what they are cause I can't remember the first game besides 1 character that shows up; and I didnt play the 2nd game.

Overall, I think it is kind of a messy game, but its definitely cool.

This game has great visuals, and the music that (usually) accompanied it combined for a great Experience™, but the Marble physics completely detracted me out the game so much as to not feel good anymore.

The first two levels are great showcases into the beauty this can show, then the third level rears its head and shows you this will be long and frustrating. I just decided I was gonna be extremely pissed at how this ball controls for the entire game and stopped playing. It asks for precise platforming on a momentum based ball that feels bad. (Also the music cut out and it was completely silent, idk if that was intentional or not but the lack of the music was also pissing me off).

I don't even particularly hate the ball being a hostile entity to control because it leans more into the alien (much like the UI being almost non-readable); it all fits into a vibe. But, it's just too much for me to bear.

Prodeus is a fun Doomer shooter that I think feels like a mixture of classic DOOM and NuDOOM. There are like 15 weapons, and I cycled between most of them regularly. There is a 3D map that shows the whole level (gotta get the auto map for the level first) and thats really cool, but I do find it very overwhelming to look at so I didnt. I think the main complaint I have is that for like 50% of the game (the beginning half), the maps are mostly same-y and only does the later half switch it up. Also you don't get another punch/melee weapon. The weapon chart makes it seem like you could get one, but thats probably so it looks uniform, disappointed me.

The game also has a built in map editor and community section so you can just play community maps and its very simple to do so thats neat. The tag searching functionality sucks though.

Corn Kidz is an very accurate take N64 platformers (limited experience so laugh at me if wrong), down to the incredibly anger inducing frustration I feel trying to do platforming. It also has plenty of other shit (accurate) that usually makes me groan like timers and aiming timed bombs with no reticule.

On my second session I just got like immediately tired and wanted to get to the end and was met with a boss that I fucked up and died, so I'm sent to the checkpoint which is before some platforming I would really not like to do again to get back to the boss. I just quit right there, I'm an adult and I can stop doing stuff I do like anymore.

Besides my frustrations, I really do enjoy the art style, the main character has such fluid animations it looks so cool. It also has a 2000's Hot Topic Invader Zim vibe that of course I'm rocking with. The girl goat goes hard.

Aces & Adventures is a fun card game. You draw from 2 decks, one is a normal ass card deck and you attack/defend with poker hands; the other is your character's abilities. There is a story mode that lasts about 4ish hours and you get to build your ability deck to fit what you want. It's very similar to the Hearthstone adventures. There are 4 difficulties and you gotta start on the easiest, in which deck building probably doesn't matter to much.

In between the chapters of the campaign you will get mana and fill up a tube. Half a tube gets you a card pack for deck building, and a full tube lets you go level up whatever character you want. Characters go to level 30 and get just base stronger, and let you pick different upgrade paths in the chapters for different builds.

There are also 2 other game modes besides campaign, and they are both Slay The Spire-esque roguelike modes. One you play with a deck you build yourself, and the other you start with 10 cards and it's pretty much Slay the Spire.

I played one round of the Deck Building one and my deck sucked ass but I still got through it. I'm not much of a deck builder so I don't really see myself doing that. I beat 3/4 difficulties for the other one though and it was fun until the last one. The last difficulty is just very insanely hard without getting incredibly lucky. That's probably the point of hard difficulty roguelikes i guess?, but it felt even more exacerbated by this being a card game and not something you can skill your way out of.

Also I hated every class but the starting one, none of them I vibed with.

I love the main menu though, the visuals of it give off a very 90's PC vibe to me.

Small Saga is about a mouse who wants to kill God (Human). Along his journey he will join up with a mole who doesn't quite like their royal upbringing, a squirrel desperate to see his ancestry, and another mouse also spurned by the Gods. These characters are pretty dope I think, a pretty quiet kind of "damn, i liked those characters." The dialogue in this game has a bunch of modern language quirks in it, but I found it to just be like real. Someone called someone else a "softboi" and i was like "yeah okay, that fits".

Every party member has their "LGTB Agenda" and I was loving it. Main character might be Ace, the mole doesn't won't to be refereed to as a girl anymore, the squirrel is gay as fuck with his bf, and the other mouse is bi. I think its dope, its kind of just casual about it, because it is casual! Its just how these people are! If you gotta problem you are weird!

There is a whole section about fighting fascists, that segment is kind of cool. You can just tell how pointed these depictions are in this game; one of them is even like "Bro, debating me would have been more noble than violence".

The combat is cool, its fun. It's very easy though so I don't feel like there is too much to like get in depth with, which is sad. The game is also quite a bit shorter than I thought it would be. I think it could have stand to have a couple more hours but its chill.

I also like the visual style, it really reminds me of a isometric Gameboy Advance game, or even like a Mobile game of the Flipphone era (like the mobile port of Oblivion).