Somehow managed to put off playing this when it was popular, and now I'm just kind of baffled as to how it was so popular for so long. Obviously playing without a big group of 10 people in a discord call does take the kick out of a social deduction game (especially when my fellow comrades are a guy who barely speaks English and a couple 10-year-olds) but I just don't think the actual core of the game is particularly satisfying either. It's extremely easy to cheese and the 'meta' is so set in stone that there's no wiggle room to really have fun and experiment. Every single round feels the exact same.

The PC port is also really cheap. You'd think a game that raked in god knows how much last year would at least have high-resolution menu buttons and controls that aren't just the mobile ones copy-pasted, but hey, I guess that's too hard.

Played this with my very drunk friend, which probably wasn't a great choice for a partner but we managed it (just). Very ambitious for what it's going for, and because of that it does feel stretched thin, despite the short length. A lot of creative mechanics for puzzles are thrown to the wayside in favour of yet another sliding block puzzle, while everything else is seemingly missing an entire layer of polish. It's still really fun though, a higher budget sequel with a control scheme that doesn't suck ass would be very much appreciated.

The biggest problem with Dorfromantik is the lack of progression, after 2 or so hours you've pretty much seen everything the game has to offer, but that simplicity also works in the game's favour. It's very easy to spend an hour or so slowly building up your little piece of countryside, erecting vast forests and idyllic river-side towns, with a giant railway network that goes nowhere and serves no purpose off to the side. The game has a very natural way of encouraging you to make things look as pretty as possible, and even if it deals you a 10 card set of 3-way railway tracks in a row, the visual style still manages to make it look sufficiently pleasant regardless. If anything, the restrictive nature of the game's building system encourages you to be as creative as possible with your approach, which often leads to stuff that's even prettier than what my ape brain could have come up with.

Absolutely adored this. Rolling up small household objects before you graduate to full-time continent relocator is already inherently wonderful but then you throw in a bizarre plot and art style and one of the best soundtracks ever made oh my god it slaps so hard. This thing revels in its weirdness, it knows exactly what it wants to be and goes all in, from the control scheme to the characters. Surreal that this even got made in the first place honestly; there's nothing else like it and I love that about it.

The presentation is absolutely impeccable, the ridiculous commitment to the paper aesthetic, the writing, the music, all fantastic. I really loved Colour Splash's attention to detail, and they've managed to capture a similar level of polish here. At the same time though, they've somehow managed to make the gameplay even worse than the deflated kiddie pool of the last few games. I don't know why Nintendo are so committed to keeping Paper Mario as far away from its RPG roots as possible, but I'd be fine with it as long as the new gameplay systems they introduced were better, or at the very least on par with what came before. But they're consistently worse, the ring puzzles are a tacked-on excuse to try and make the battles palatable, but they somehow managed to make them even more boring than they were before. Instead of being able to quickly get them out of the way when I accidentally walk into a goomba, I now have to spin some rings around, solving the same 5 copy pasted 'puzzles' over and over again for no reward. How have they not just removed turn based combat at this point, it would make the games so much better.

The interconnected world is cool on paper, but it just ends up making the level design ridiculously dull. Instead of the tightly designed, distinctive areas of colour splash, you've got these large open areas with nothing in them. The glorious 'filling in pieces of the map that are missing' mechanic returns, even though it adds nothing whatsoever. The boss fights are thankfully not quite as bad as before (honestly though a dead rat would have improved the pathetic excuse for bosses in the last game), but for some reason Intelligent Systems decided to give the bosses a completely different gameplay style from the regular battles. Cool conceptually, but there's again nothing here that justifies that change, it's still boring and never feels remotely satisfying to pull off anything.

Crucially, the game is also missing a hell of a lot of the same charm that Colour Splash had. That game was deeply flawed but also had a boss fight where you grilled a giant steak to perfection. In Origami King... you fight some pencils...

Completely bored throughout the 10 hours I played. Nice looking water though... so there's that.