Kept thinking how much this reflected Toree's whole "cutesy platformer with dark undercurrents that are kind of just there without any elaboration" and only found out after beating it that it's the same dev lol oops!

Feels like it compromises the pretty empty worlds with a moveset that makes it really easy to quickly get around, reaching the tops of places and scoping out everything below is satisfying and all the levels are small enough that it's easy to map them out in your head.

It's half an hour of very nice feeling easygoing platformer collecting which seems to be the dev's entire moniker, hard to knock that especially with how quickly they seem to get made.

Almost paradoxical how much this feels like a project started in the early COVID era but isn't.
Not that character-driven visual novels dealing with isolation/depression weren't dime a dozen even cutting it down to just the Western ones but the main crux of the story hinges on how 2 different people handle being mostly by themselves.

Your choices ultimately leading to very drastic outcomes is obviously overdone but it works for the very brief runtime, there's also a bit of a timeloop thing implied but I'm assuming that's just to incentivize multiple playthroughs since the first thing I instinctively went for caused definitely the worst result.

Evidently overhated as another le epic cringe video game about young people with their dumb slang in the tune of Life is Strange which is funny in this case because this one literally costs you nothing except half an hour at most and 50 MB.
I have to wonder what it is about games like this that keeps drawing in dolts that can't put down their guard for even a second or worse just preemptively decided what they'd think ahead of time, it'd be funny if it wasn't mostly sad.


Also possibly the only work that'll ever exist to say trans rights and namedrop Harry Potter, this actually could not have happened at any other time.

It feels very indicative of Pikmin 4's overall gentleness that the game feels like it ends at what seems to be the halfway point content wise, the immediate post-game feels like it opens things up far more but it's completely confident it's done its job if you wanna wrap it up having finished the "primary mission" as it were.

I should probably preface before going further that I have not played any other Pikmin games prior to this, I saw let's plays of Pikmin 1 and 2 over a decade ago and was intrigued but never quite enough to give it a firsthand shot.

I don't think I would've really liked them at the time anyway, it was a bit too esoteric for my taste at the time even as someone who grew up with RTSes, it doesn't fit that mold nearly as cleanly as people make it out to be (mostly considering that the player has to physically exist in tandem with the Pikmin and can't just be an omnipotent commander that can effectively teleport wherever to bark orders).
Also I still had a pretty strong aversion to game timers and Pikmin being able to die felt very jarring for a Nintendo game. They just seemed like they'd be too much pressure to really have any actual fun with.


So a new Pikmin entry that's meant to be as accessible and open-ended as most of Nintendo's other outings sounded like a good place to start if any, finally putting a wrap on having at least tried every major Nintendo franchise, and honestly I don't think there could've been a better time and place for this.

There's a real zen to organizing the tasks of a couple groups of separated Pikmin and then coming back and forming them back up for the full squad, it probably doesn't come as a surprise then that the solo Dandori Challenges were easily my favorite thing in the world.
Stuff is constantly just getting done and when it isn't, the wait is not long to get some Pikmin back and give them new objectives.

In any other instance, a game like this would exhaust the hell out of me or make me feel like my setup or planning isn't good enough to keep going (apologies to Factorio, Satisfactory etc, I've tried and failed this subgenre often) but I don't know, it wasn't happening this time.
Even when I was very conscious of me not doing things optimally, notably the bosses, there was never any internal pressure to do it better even when the game gives you a chance to try again.

I think this more than anything makes me incredibly curious to try the previous games just to see if this was just result of the new design ethos Nintendo's been etching onto their games since the Switch's launch or if Pikmin has just always been like this, albeit definitely less lax and more off-kilter aesthetically. The suburban garden aesthetic of this one was very nice but there's no denying it makes everything feel very different compared to the feral almost jungle-y vibe of 1 and 2.

I wanna get as far as I can with this one and then I guess I'll find out how it stacks up when I inevitably play through the others. Heavily betting they'll just feel different as a result of different design goals but we'll see.

A while before the Wii U came out, I had sort of a feverish obsession with the crumbs of information we'd get on Miiverse, it came out 2 weeks later in Europe than in the US so I'd do a lot of digging through what it was like through YouTube demonstrations.
I already had a fascination for system UIs and I missed out on Flipnote so despite how drab and boring the idea must've been to average PC forum users that already had access to these things and then some, all of this was radically new to 12 year old me that was conditioned to be wary of befriending people online.

Maybe it was the assurance Nintendo could never pull off something like this without enforcing some pretty serious rules and moderation, something which proved to not really work out.

In retrospect it's not like there hadn't been weird things going on with Swapnote either from a year prior. Tough to forget the one weird incident I had where I asked someone how to get what I found out later was a US-only feature only to get some snarky Foul Language:TM:-filled response, I don't even remember what they were because I didn't understand them, I just intuited the meaning.

I guess the point is is that experiences like this stick with you, and I do get the want to revisit this weird fragment in time where mostly sheltered Nintendo kids clash with a niche novelty social media specifically made with them in mind, I mean I was sold on that premise alone as someone who was there but quickly drifted off of it, but it thankfully runs quite a bit deeper.


The Hypnospace Outlaw comparisons have already been made and I get it, but it feels like a serious disservice to how different this feels and especially the stories they tackle.

Hypnospace sees you as an omniscient lurker with authority above all else, there is no interacting with any of the subjects you're presented with, Videoverse however wants and practically pleads you to talk to other people, it borders on emulating the feeling of being 15 and trying to play as everyone's internet therapist because that's just kind of how it was for a not insignificant amount of people.

The Miiverse nostalgia is there but it's mostly to get you comfortable until it starts dishing out moral quandaries and questions of privilege and class, the things that sheltered above middle class Nintendo kids might never think about otherwise (I know who you are, I used to be you,, at least more than I still sorta am!!)

I would never call it aggressively confrontational or bitter about any of it though, there's a gentle pace to it and it's certainly not the kind of VN to just pull a bait and switch and have that define its entire identity.
It's not interested in villainizing the protag for not understanding the wider problems hitting his friends, there's too much kindness injected into Emmett for that to be the case, at least in my playthrough.

It's very hard to not feel for him because most of what I like to think I do is help people through talking but the barriers between make it really hard to do anything substantial besides being there. It's evolved to being there financially for people too over the past 2-ish years but it's not out of any higher-class guilt on my part, most of the time I wouldn't know what to do with it otherwise.

I'm sure all of this is making this game seem like a hodgepodge lesson in people having problems, truly shocking and riveting but I just needed to get that all out of the way because above all else, the character dynamics really grabbed me. There were multiple times it would remind me of actual conversations I've had with people, times where I or someone else was down or even just talking about interests and weird tangential things, there's a realness to it that feels true to the era it's depicting and it's just really really nice that a game like this manages to balance the dorkiness and raw enthusiasm of video game fans with the emotional reality of having life happen around you and everyone else.

It brought me back to the things I really wish I could've had, to go to cons with friends that care very passionately about the same dumb things I do, warts and all, it really really made me want to draw again which I've already been having a go at for a bit but this uplifted that so much more, the experience of having a bunch of ragtag friends to make art with, original or fan-made has always been the ultimate dream and even if I didn't manage to connect with everyone in Videoverse (as it felt about as situational as it does in real life), the ones I did were amazing, and they felt very real, because it's hard not to see my own friends in them.

I went all-in knowing there was jank but it was the kind of jank folks with my kinda taste could at least appreciate and considering I skipped Sonic Forces, it had been a noticeable several years of no Sonic (ig excluding Mania which I thought was okay) and as an ex-sonic hyperfixation babychild, that wasn't gonna do.

I think genuinely the #1 thing you gotta do to get the absolute most out of Frontiers is to ignore the default soundtrack and just shuffle through everything you got atm.
The original OST is alright and all but the actual island music is way too dreary for how frenetic and fast running around actually is, it's trying too hard to match Breath of the Wild's contemplative and mellow solitude when the gameplay just does not reflect that.

Granted that may come from me getting in on this right after Bomb Rush Cyberfunk which also invites you to play its music however you want but honestly games should just do this more, doesn't matter if they're old tracks, it's a freeform open-world game, the music matching the vibe is what's gonna matter especially if you're going for 100%.

I was pleasantly surprised to find there's more attention placed on the character dynamics that hasn't really been present since like, maybe Adventure 2?
Amy and Knuckles' voices are weird as hell idk what happened there but everyone else is good, Mike Pollock sounds kinda bored to be there though which feels odd considering Eggman gets more of a legit character arc than anyone else this time.
Sage as his AI-generated daughter is probably my favorite new character in the series in years which only made me wish she got to do more. Her character design does stick out a lot considering everyone else is either familiar faces or have more abstract non-human designs.

Speaking of, I have no clue what the deal is with the Kocos, I already figured it was something you'd have to really dig for to get a full grasp on which is pretty rare, I've gotten very accustomed to just getting all the essential info spoonfed so having such a big part of the game be an actual mystery you have to look into is incredibly interesting. I mean I'll probably just look it up later but it's the thought that counts, right-


The actual game is shockingly lax compared to the more stringent BotW, practically every resource can just be bought off of Big the Cat's weird lo-fi fishing black market, I maxed out my speed and ring capacity practically by accident as a result but I wouldn't necessarily call it a design mistake. Most of what you'll collect isn't really hardfixed to any set value and you aren't given dung as a joke for collecting Every Single Koco on every island. Grinding Big's minigame just serves as an alternative method of progression in case you're stuck fetching dozens of the same thing at a time. (which in the case of Friend Tokens got particularly tiring in the final island)

It feels like this game's already found its most dedicated audience through the people that are really into teching around its occasionally wonky control scheme and I can't really think of a better demographic than that. It's mostly fine and sometimes infuriating as a casual experience but when you get into its rhythm, it works.

Also a lot of the game was supposed to be in cyberspace which is aesthetically barely taken advantage of, apparently there were budget and time constraints which makes sense, still wish they could've leaned fully into it instead of them just working as portals to mostly short levels that are mostly lifted from previous games lol.


I guess tl;dr running fast to Crush 40 good as usual!! could've been a lot better in a lot of places but I trust that whatever Sonic Team's got cooking next will learn from this.
Honestly they should just make a Sonic THPS, bring back Sonic Extreme babey-

Feels like Parappa's Scandinavian zoomer son with a Beatmania influence.
Notably the only rhythm game I've ever played where the track is sequenced to loop if you don't FC which is rly interesting and makes a lot more sense for the bosses but makes actual stages end pretty anticlimactically.

The humor is very "love it or hate it" depending on your tolerance for what feels like a mildly modernized version of the late 00s-early 2010s let's play scene, the charm of it alone never made it cringeworthy though and there are some legit good bits in there.

For a game that looks this newcomer-friendly though, the skill ceiling does extend pretty far, about on par with Parappa 2 when you factor in the unlockable harder difficulty. It's incredibly generous with its health system but making mistakes at all (including any inputs that aren't on a note) obstructs your view and it's probably very easy to panic if you're not used to games like this.

This and the prequel sidestory took a swift 2.5 hours which if it appeals to you enough I'd say it's worth the full $15, 100% would def take at least 10 hours assuming you're more consistent with your fixation on rhythm games than me lol

Genuinely took some kind of possession of me for the past week until I beat it, could not stop thinking about it even while doing literally anything else.

It doesn't even feel particularly like this has been my "gateway drug" to visual novels or anything since I have gone through a couple other acclaimed ones, something about this one just really struck a chord somewhere.
I think a lot of it really just comes down to how well it maintains its tone, every protagonist ostensibly gets their own genre determined by their situation until they all merge in one way or another, it's a very Yakuza/Like a Dragon balance of themes and tones though mostly carried by the crime drama nature of the main mystery.

And again like Yakuza it's not satisfied letting minor characters go without getting some proper development, joke characters and villains do get legit really moving moments and it all drives home how much this game truly does believe in humanity despite their irrevocably chaotic nature.

Most of the issues really just come to the fundamental problems that come with the multiple potential timelines, it was never really a problem for me until the last chapter when it stops giving you hints and my reason getting stuck was just that one of the characters just assumed the wrong thing about someone's intentions lol. It felt pretty silly and didn't make a lot of sense but with a game that's scattered with this many potential bad endings, it kind of comes with the territory.

Feels unfortunate this seems to be one of a very scant few live-action VNs, playing this on a daily basis really did feel like I was just tuning into another episode of a really good J-drama book, thing. Maybe I do really 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 like VNs more than I thought...

Sort of an eclectic mix of Dimps' Sonic Advance games and Kirby, it's p good! The dash giving you brief invincibility is also a very cool addition, makes half the boss fights feel really tight-knit even if it's very easy to dash by mistake with an analog stick,,

I'll admit I got the entire Spark trilogy mainly to get to the 3D ones but this was cute, there seem to be 2 extra campaigns too so if they're as long as the 4-hour main one, you're certainly getting your money's worth. The main one's already one zone longer than S3&K which was certainly a lot more than I expected.

It's tough to even know where to start but I guess I'll give a quick clinical summary.
You work as the live editor of a TV news station, most of the game happens through 4 cameras you have to micromanage alongside a variety of other tools and mechanics that you'll use to keep the show going as smoothly as possible.
The station has standards on what to censor and what to promote, but they're not the ones in control of what gets shown, you'll have to come to your own conclusions on what is right to show the public.

The premise is going to sound incredibly boring to some on paper and if you aren't into the political drama, you aren't entirely out of luck, the game on its own is also just, genuinely really funny.
I'd compare it to Tim & Eric or most other live-action Adult Swim stuff except with, I don't wanna say "actual restraint" but it's got a unique pace in coherence with the game's design, all of it's done in 4 separate takes and the only "cuts" are between commercial breaks, I couldn't help but be astounded over how much planning and communication had to be done to get everything right over every session.
I'll have to check the documentary they made alongside the game to get a proper idea which I'll undoubtedly do soon but in my head, all the potential work is a complete headache to even imagine.

I don't think it can be underestimated to say how much of a behemoth this game is, by the way.
At a staggering 50 gigs and 43 hours of footage, it's got the world record for the most FMV in any game ever. Divide that by 4 and you'll get an average playthrough of the campaign, I'm not entirely sure how they calculated the length since there's definitely more than that but whatever, point is it's as long as you can get for an FMV game right now and that is seriously something given how outright experimental the whole game feels, it's got an almost theater kid feel despite being done very professionally all things considered. Maybe it's cuz of the musical stuff, idk.

It's so detached from any kind of gaming niche I'm aware of aside from the revitalization of FMV games that's been kinda on and off for the past decade (Roundabout and Her Story seem really good but I've heard a lot of mixed things about Late Shift) that it's hard to make any comparisons that'd feel right, but that really speaks to its uniqueness more than anything.

I've heard comparisons to Papers Please from a gameplay standpoint and I can get behind that, though managing your home life is relegated more to visual novel decisions. (which on their own get colored by your performance in the main game)
You won't have to choose between paying for electricity or food for your family but you will get asked if paying for immediate small pleasures or distractions instead of a safely budgeted vacation next year is worth it.
They're story-driven, as opposed to Papers' clinical and mathematical money management.

Anyway, if any of this sounds interesting in the slightest, I implore you to check it out. I really don't know if there will ever be a game like this made again but if it does, I'd play it in a heartbeat.
The team's obviously been passionate as hell about this game throughout its entire development and it shows, the dynamic they got here is way too good for them to not do another project together.
Whatever happens, I'm seriously grateful they stuck with this until the very end because this is a genuine achievement of a game.

Potatoman seeks the Troof. We are not sure what the Troof is but we're hoping to find out. Potatoman is simply a man of potato, an oval-shaped, vaguely pink little creature who only wants the Troof, despite many people's warnings against seeking it.

He gets scolded and taught the cost of seeking the Troof by cowboys, other potatomans that occupy the city, aliens, non-city potatomans that have relegated to alternatives to the Troof or just invent it on their own accord.
It seems no one really knows the Troof or what the Troof even could be. Potatoman certainly doesn't, so why does he seek it? What is the point of seeking something you don't even know exists?

Regardless of how important his quest may really be, Potatoman's journey requires a lot of quick thinking and cautiousness. The world is scary and will kill you at most opportunities, leaving future Potatomans to continue the search, there are only so many Potatomans you have until you have to restart the stage, starting fresh with a new bundle of Potatomans, it's a good thing they all share the same goal or this would be a very complicated game.

After various perils and dangers, Potatoman makes it into a UFO and collects various shiny triangles. He becomes obsessed with them and seeks to collect every single one in a trippy frenzy against everything he's had to get through before. His presumed potato mind becomes jumbled, it's being stimulated more than it ever has and it messes with his perception of reality, how will he seek the Troof and know what it is in such a state? Maybe this is the only way, or this in itself is the Troof, we have no way of knowing for certain.
Potatoman grabs all the three-dimensional shiny triangles and presumes he's done it, the Troof will reveal itself now, it has to! He worked so hard to get these triangles, they're all that he's ever had that he knows for certain won't hurt him, so,, why is nothing happening?

Potatoman slips out of his almost manic display of happiness upon slowly realizing this isn't the Troof, and becomes sad. He has only been alive for approximately 15 minutes but this was the only affirmation he had that the Troof might be out there, that he could do something to make everything feel okay or normal, but it doesn't. There's still nothing besides the chaotic and frenzied nature of life that he's found himself in, it's all been too much for too long for a Potatoman to take.

He rests for the very first time, feeling that there's nothing else that can be done. The Troof was a lie, or maybe it wasn't, but Potatoman never found it, and he's tired.
He dreams of blocky space spirals that move in beautiful patterns, accompanied by deep and soothing synths. Maybe this kind of thing is what the Troof actually is. It can't be relegated to some singular thing, if the Troof exists, it has to be something that's in every object, every lifeform. The Troof is and has always been everywhere.

We are not sure if Potatoman makes this realization or any kind of realization because afterwards, he molds into an actual potato, like pixelated clay. He's then teleported back to where his life began.
Potato desperately moves and nudges around until he can make it past obstacles the way he used to but he's then picked up by a farmer and left at their barn.

Potato can do nothing but aimlessly wander with the little mobility he has left, but it's quiet. He has never known such peace before. It is as beautiful as the space spirals, even if it's a lot less extravagant.
He only has so much time though, his movements get slower until he's stuck to the ground, becoming soil for a bunch of sunflowers.
Potatoman as we knew him has died, but his material existence still resides in this Earth through what his chemical components have broken down into.

With time, people may forget Potatoman and his life, he never seemed to make any strong connections with anyone besides himself, after all, but the world will never forget him and what he tried his damnedest to find out, because he's still here, and he sincerely tried understanding and finding the Troof even if it took him his entire sentient life. He lived as honestly as he could given what he knew and the conditions he was born under and that raw passion to seek out what you want in life radiates through him.
Potatoman believed in the Troof and wanted it more than anything else, his approximations on what it would be were the only problem. Still, I suppose none of that matters now, he doesn't carry the burden of sentience anymore, he simply is.
Well, I guess flowers might have some sentience since they're alive and all but you get what I mean.

Basically an endless runner with a story mode, almost definitely one of the best I've played from a purely gameplay perspective.

The story's just really wacky cute nonsense with anime girls, it's fun, even if some of dialogue is a bit awkwardly written.
It makes up for that by just being really charming in a sort of scene pixel-art weeb kind of way, reminds me a lot of VA-11 Hall-A in that respect. I wanna say it's just "pixel art anime" but I feel like it's a bit more specific than that, it's a pretty distinct vibe.

The first couple stages are pretty easy but it really crams up the difficulty by the latter half, to give you an idea, only 18% of players have actually beaten it. It seriously demands some pitch-perfect play at times which may be because every level is technically randomly generated and the goal is more to just last the time it gives.
Art's cute, the music's dope as hell and it just plays really well for what it is, good stuff.

I wound up getting this one at the winter sale's last couple hours on the look-out for more shmups/bullet-hells to try out cuz I've been getting really into those. The screenshots were utterly incomprehensible and it only made sense to me once I checked the trailers but I was already on board given how utterly confused I was beforehand, it's very rare for me to not know the gist of a game based off of screenshots.

The description cites Super Hexagon and Touhou as inspirations and I think calling this a combination of those is probably the closest approximation you could make to any other game, besides that, this is completely its own beast.
You move automatically on a circle in the middle of the screen, all you can do is click a button to switch from clockwise to counter-clockwise and vice versa, p much exactly like Super Hexagon but without being able to stop your motion.
Projectiles come in from all over outside the circle and depending on the type, it will either disappear once it reaches the middle or phase through it.
There's also enemies which is where your attack comes in, you slash at whatever is close to you every time you turn and automatically shoot at whatever is closest by. You can also adjust the aim by holding the button which slows down your movement, it's undoubtedly a lot to get a total grip on and it's great when it actually works out.

Despite having stages that are divided into three Spiral chunks, the whole game is contextualized as a series of puzzles that need to be solved one at a time.
You get a checkpoint for each one you clear (the goal condition is either to just last long enough or drain the HP of whatever boss is looming over the level) and can immediately start over when you die, it's a really neat system and it shows how much work is actually put into making shmup level design work and look so visually dazzling at the same time.
The music's very Touhou, all super symphonic melodies accompanied by some guitars and piano, it rules.
It also lifts from Filipino mythology as well as some Greek mythos which is really neat, I'll have to look into some of the bosses later and see what their deal is cuz they got really cool designs.

It's still in early access and I haven't beaten it yet but there's a decent chunk of stuff already here, the campaign seems like it's about 5-8 hours long but there's a ton of difficulties to unlock which I might check out afterwards.
Regardless there's obviously a ton of passion being put into this and you can feel it, it's absolutely exhilarating. Reminds me a lot of the kind of passion I feel from Silver Dollar's games where they just put out what is at its core a fairly simple game that is ridiculously hard to master and just cram it with stuff, I love it and I really hope to find more devs with this kind of vibe.