I got this one alongside THOTH which grabbed my attention enough to get to this one asap. Am in absolute love with how relentlessly dedicated Carlsen Games is to putting pure game design before anything else, both of these games are so compact and fine-tuned that you tend to forget just how weird the game mechanics actually are.

This one's a super simple platformer, move left/right and jump and that's it, baby! The stages themselves are where things get interesting, all of them have their own set mechanics that switch around and do stuff along with the timing of the BGM.
You'll have to consider puzzles mostly in when to do what, everything basically loops around again after 1-2 bars but what's important is figuring out where in the bars you need to move/jump.
There's also a 'boss' at the end of every stage that works more as a minigame that uses a different control scheme, they're alright, the first one is kinda like a rhythm version of Buster Bros. which is cool.

I'm really excited to see what else these guys will do because this is still very much my kinda thing, cool looking shapes is eternal, babey

It's pretty good! Conceptually I should probably like adore this given how it's meshing together 2 very big fav genres of mine but it's decent fun as of right now.
Feels a lot like playing through someone's fan-made Adobe Animate music video, also maybe it's just the custom levels I downloaded but occasionally, lethal objects will just suddenly appear without any warning which isn't the greatest. I like what it's going for though, the actual game's still not finished but I'm interested to see what the final build'll look like.
I like how it's seemed to garner this fanbase of artists that just make the scenest shit in the world out of it too, some serious Battle for Dream Island vibes despite the actual game seeming to go for a primarily anime artstyle. I guess that's what happens when you give simple shapes simple chibi faces.

Pretty much exactly the kind of game I'd expect Saturn/Dreamcast era SEGA game designers would create in the wake of mobile gaming (despite me playing it on PC).
Okay, that's a bit of a weird comparison considering this game's tone is far more isolating and minimalist than what they'd ever do (REZ is the best comparison I got but that still has a far, I guess "brighter" vibe?) but I couldn't stop drawing those kinda comparisons. Considering the B&W vector graphics, it wouldn't surprise me if this took inspo more from 70s arcade games than anything, at least aesthetically.

The whole game is basically a 2D first-person runner with one button/input, hold to run, let go to jump. You can also let yourself land faster by holding a button while airborne so it's more of a routine of figuring out when to assert pressure onto your character.
I'm really curious as to what it would look like if it were actually 2D, the whole thing feels like playing a Sonic level with only several branching paths and bottomless pits outside of that, so I guess exactly like Sonic Advance 3!! (I don't actually remember that one well at all, I just hear people complain about the pits a lot lmao)
It wouldn't surprise me if this picked up a decent amount of traction on mobile, it should, at least. The endless mode feels perfectly catered to subway/train rides, it's zen as hell. The music's also pretty swell,

I only made it half an hour in but I get the gist, I think. It's just a cool little game and I'll probably come back to it every once in a while, the camera bobbing when landing is kind of disorienting (I'm sure there's an option to disable or make it less rough, just haven't checked yet) and sometimes the non-platform vectors kinda clash with the actual platforms which makes it hard to tell where to actually land but other than that, it's all good. Nice little game, this one.

WarioWare is easily one of the most artistically influential franchises of anything I've gotten to experience and the only reason I hesitated to not get this one while it was hot is cuz of Nintendo getting particularly bad on the biz side.
And I really don't feel like shilling out 40-60 bucks on games that are undoubtedly excellent and polished as hell but generally fairly short for that price, I'm just too used to getting stuff on sale and actively (trying to) support indies to the best of my ability to pay that much for games that are usually really interesting by design but also are just, on this console I have for those exclusives and nothing else.
The lifestyle of a Nintendo devotee was mine for years but it's hard to justify it to myself these days.

Depressing guilt trips over the realities of the AAA industry aside, this one's pretty good. Takes about 2-3 hours to beat which is very standard for WarioWare and there's a decent chunk of extra knickknacks if you wanna stick with it longer, being able to play through the entire game with 2 players on top of the varying characters and their distinct control schemes is really interesting design wise.
You'd think it'd be a lot more messy than how it actually is in the final game given the dozens of variables they just tossed into how they fundamentally make the microgames work but it works! For the most part, at least.
I've seen a lot of complaints about the constantly moving characters which is understandable, it is pretty tough to get a proper grip on them, particularly when you're shuffling between them and others that move completely differently.

But uhh yeah, it's WarioWare, and it's good! The callbacks are cute, seeing Pyoro again rules, it's easily the prettiest WarioWare there's been while still retaining the chaotic meshing of art-styles in the games themselves (I particularly love the Amazing World of Gumball-style real life meshing they do with animation for the "real world" cutscenes) and Penny's song is one of the greatest things to have struck this Earth last year.

I'm glad we got Gold but I am very stoked that this series is back proper, I don't expect we'll get another one until the next console gen (we're like 65% through the switch's lifespan rn, fucked up!!) but I don't care, this was good. Definitely gonna be the one reason my Switch will not be dusty as hell for the next couple weeks-ish. Okay maybe one week.
.. maybe like 4 days- (I wrote this back in like February. It barely lasted 4 days)

"Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk" was a game I stumbled upon back in December '20, I forget if it was through Steam's discover queue or whatever but it looked like my kind of thing and it turned out to be that and a good deal more.
It gave me vivid flashbacks of when I was made to go grocery shopping for milk when I was like 6-7, just forced out there on my own with a bill of what would be roughly 10 USD. I was still too shy and nervous to know how most of the outside world worked so I just ran out in a panic when the clerk tried giving me my change back.
I live about as north as you can get on the earth's hemisphere and I'm pretty sure it was winter so it was pitch dark despite it being like 4-5 PM, I was raised on land where complete darkness is a constant for half of the year, it fucks with your head.
It's odd too because it sounds like the kind of thing that would scare a kid but I was just used to it at this point, most of my memories back then took place at night, the sun might as well have not existed in my mind.

Apparently it only took me 15 mins but it stuck with me hard, it felt like a conversation with someone that sincerely understood and it just kept mentally replaying and I was just so grateful to have had it.
Nowadays I feel kind of ambivalent towards how open to be with being into niche indie psychological horror(?) about mental illness, particularly considering how closely it is to the whole "lain/asukapilled" NEET idealization shit but it is still an incredibly important part of why I go through any of this stuff to begin with. It's hard to not be drawn to it when you feel like you get it and the struggle of being a person that has to exist and take space and resources. I also loved how it uses its blood red and violet palette along with pixelated imagery of places that feel like they might exist (cuz I mean, they kinda do).

So naturally I was really eager to see what a follow-up would be like, I figured it'd be bigger in a very straight-forward Sequel sort of way and it kind of is but it's still really damn good. The plot of the first game gets animated as an opening to this one (which looks really good btw, seriously good direction) and it jumps about an hour from where it left off.

There's a noticeable uptick in graphical fidelity but the color palette is still minimized, this time to slightly more vibrant reds and shades of black due to the change in location and the way the protag navigates it through mental memory alone.
It becomes a bit more of a traditional VN than the last game given the portraits and facial animations but it works, it gives a lot more emphasis on the actual back-and-forth going on. I'll probably write more about it proper and I really didn't mean for this to turn into more about the last game than the one I'm actually going through but I guess it helps I'm using this more as a freeform writing thing than giving myself the burden of writing complete essays.
If you haven't played through Milk Inside, I'd say check it out, Milk Outside is a continuation in the most bluntly direct ways possible but if either of them look cool to you, you aren't losing much time or money with the first one. Not sure what else I can say, shit's just cool.

This one's pretty neat, I initially described it as if aliens tried making a twin-stick shooter which is still pretty true but it does a lot of really cool things that I haven't seen anywhere else.
The stage progression is put in the context of 64 single-screen trials, all that have sections with their own gimmicks which finally combine at the last couple levels and that's about as conventional as it gets.

Most of how you'll learn how everything works is through intuition, practically everything is just close enough to what you'd expect out of a game of its genre but it's all twisted up enough that it feels like something else entirely.
Enemies demand your full attention at all times and don't die in one hit, and usually killing one will affect some other mechanism in a level, it's an incredibly interesting and open-ended concept that could have even more done with it but THOTH knows when to end, which is after some rough patches but eventually pulling through. Or maybe not, that's just how my playthrough went.
Menu navigation took a minute to figure out but it's chill, I forgive it entirely on the basis of having little to no actual text, love that. Always thirsting for more games that convey everything through anything besides the burden of textual language.