I bought this game based purely on the art style and I absolutely don't regret my decision! I was really invested in this game, I finished it in a week!

Eastward is an action adventure RPG. You play a father, John, and his adoptive daughter Sam. John is the one you will be playing the most, since it's him that has the ability to attack, with guns, bombs or in melee combat with a frying pan. Sam on the other hand uses magic to freeze enemies. Gameplay alternates between exploration-combat and puzzle solving, using the abilities of the 2 characters.

Like I said, I picked up this game because of it's art style and omg it's beautiful!!
The game is in pixel art, but a very detailed kind of pixel art. Characters are very expressive and over animated, backgrounds are filled with details everywhere and the colors are very soft to the eyes.
I really dig this kind of pixel art, but what makes this game even more beautiful is it's effects! The game may look and play like a 2D game, but it is actually running in 3D. This allowed the devs to create impressive light / shadow VFXs. Every sprite in the game reacts to light sources and can receive shadows according to the general shape it should have. For exemple, when trees cast a shadow on top of a train, the shadow isn't the same on the side and on the top of the train, because the surface isn't inclined the same way. This creates a great sense of depth while keeping the 2D pixel art look intact and I am really impressed by this technique!

This game is a RPG, so its story and setting are very important. And wow, once again, I was amazed by the beauty and creativity put in the environments you traverse. The story is set in a post-apocaliptycal world, where humanity is doomed by a mysterious miasm that kills everyone it touches. But post-apocaliptycal doesn't mean dark and muddy, quite the contrary in fact! The world of Eastward is very natural, with a lot of vibrant colors and filled wih strange structures and creatures. Characters all have A LOT of charm and the general mood of the game is pretty upbeat. This contrast between the looks and the real nature of the world makes the tragic events all the more impactful and brutal.
Pacing is also really good, with a great mix of action, exploration, puzzle solving and story progression. There is only one chapter that felt a bit too long, because you are stuck in a time loop, seeing the same cutscenes over and over and with pratically nothing but walking and talking to NPCs between the cutscenes.

I won't say I understood all of the plot, because I didn't (there is quite a lot of things happening at the end), but I really enjoyed my adventure alongside John and Sam. The duo really feels complementary, both in story and in gameplay! The perpetual flee in a train going toward east is a great concept, and it is well executed.
There are some strange decision here and there, like wanting to have a playable character that never talks or express anything begin to show regrets and trauma, but nothing breaking the immersion.

For at least half of the game, I was thinking that audio was the weakest part of the game. But after finishing it, I'm not as sure about that. Audio in the game definetly feels a bit weak, even more so in epic or dramatic scenes, but I think the problem mostly comes from SFXs and not from the music.
There are a lot of tracks in the game, but I had a feeling of constantly hearing the same ones in every cutscenes. BUT, it may be because I played the whole game in 5 or 6 long sessions :'). The intro and final chapter also contains some really good chiptune bangers!
And by the way I think I'm being picky: bear in mind that while I said that audio is the weakest part of the game, the rest is absolutely amazing, so it's not really that bad.

There is one final thing I would like to applaud: accessibility!
This game is pretty easy if you use all the tools at your disposal, but remain challenging for all players depending on how they choose to play. If you decide to invest a little bit of time in cooking, you can create food that heals + buff your attack or defense for 1-2 minutes. You can also buy refill items that you can use to completely refill your ammo at any time.
When exploring, if you don't like fighting you can also choose to evade monsters and don't deal with them. And during bosses, you can either try to optimize and hit the boss while it attacks you, or you can focus on evasion and you will always get a large window where the boss just lets you damage it.
I think that the game can adapt itself to a large variety of play style and skills and this is a good thing! It allows people not very experienced with action games to enjoy the story without feeling frustrated, and other players will not feel the need to abuse this because the fights are fun and engaging.
There is one boss that doesn't follow this rule. It requires to do perfectely timed parries. But the timing windows are very generous and the fight comes very late in the game, so I think even less experienced players can beat it, maybe with a couple tries.

All in all, I loved this game! It's cute, it's beautiful, it's fun, it's exciting! A perfect introduction to RPGs, without the boring Excel stats and complicated turn-based gameplay or combo systems!

Pikmin is the Nintendo licence that everybody knows (mostly because of Smash I think) but very few people have actually played it. And I'm like everybody, if a friend had not lent me his cartridge, I don't think I would ever have played Pikmin 3.
But I am thankfull he did, because Pikmin is fun and intersting!

Pikmin 3 is a RTS, and it's the first game of the genre I have ever played I think. I may have played some games that could be categorised as RTS on the DS but I'm not very sure...
When I think of RTS, I always associate the genre with complicated gameplay, precise ressource management and very steep learning curves. But I'm happy to say that I was wrong!

At first I felt a bit lost, because I am not used to this type of game, but the controls are very intuitive and it quickly became very natural to move and command the Pikmins. There is basically 2 actions you can do, call Pikmins to you or throw Pikmins on something. Every other command in the game does something that is similar but a little more efficient depending on the situation. This means that the game is very easy to take in hand!
Same goes with the "go there" command. Since there are 3 playable characters, you can have one go to one spot while you do something else with another one. This lets you be a lot more efficient and I struggled a lot less when I started using it!

The game tries to give you a sense of urgency by using a hunger system. Every day that passes consumes one food ressource, and to get more food you need to bring back fruits to your ship. It felt like a real danger at the very begining of the game, because you only have enough ressources to survive for 3 days, but it quickly became a non-threat as I learned to be more efficient, and I quickly gathered more than 30 days of food (I finished the game in 17 ingame days).

The story mode is very chill and fun, puzzles are well balanced. Fights in general are a bit more messy, but the more Pikmin you have and the less trouble you'll have to kill enemies. Bosses on the other hand are good puzzle fights, each one of them requiring you to use the correct pikmins to deal damage to them.

I love how the brutality and cruauty of the player actions is completely ignored in the game. Sending these cute Pikmins to their death is so much fun and it feels right! It's like controlling an ant colony, individuals don't exists, only the group is important. If you have to sacifice a few to reach your objectives, then go ahead! It's no problem, you can always create new ones anyway haha!

While I enjoyed the story, what really hooked me to the game were the 2 side stories with Olimar. In opposition with the story mode, you start with no Pikmins and you will have to play with the ressources you find. You get an objective and a time limit to reach the highest score possible. I found it very engaging and beat every level on the platinum rank, because the levels are really well constructed. It's like figuring out the optimal way to solve a puzzle and it feels really good! Plus the platinum rank is generally pretty generous and allows for mistakes to happen!

So once again I had a blast playing a new video game from a genre I'm not familiar with. If you are like me and only know Pikmin from Smash, you should check out the game, it's a lot of fun! And fruits. Juicy fruits. Very juicy fruits...

Well this game is definitely is "MGS1 but more modern". This description can be applied to almost every aspect of the game, gameplay, story, characters, graphics, etc.

Gameplay is very similar to MGS1's, with a few extra additions:
･ First perspective view is now a lot more important, as it allows you to aim precisely to shoot specific part of the bodies of your enemies. To push you to use the feature, the game introduces a gun with sleeping bullets, more effective if you hit the head of your target. And since there are a lot more enemies than in the first game, you will quickly realize that you have to be really attentive and aim precisely if you don't wan't to get caught! Managing to put a guard to sleep and crossing a room unseen feels definitely more satisfying than in MGS1!
･ There is now platforming in the game?? I don't really understand why they added this feature. You can now hang over the edges of specific platforms, with a gauge telling you how much time you have left until your character looses grip. This part works and I don't have any issue with it. But the second thing you can do is what I don't really enjoy. Compared to MGS1, your character is a lot more agile. You can climb small steps and do cool evasions by doing a cartwheel. This is cool, BUT, the game uses those moves to make you do platforming and it feels very clunky. At one point in the game, you have to cross a diagonal gap by climbing on top of boxes and then performing a cartwheel above the void to jump to the other side. I understand what they tried to make, but the problem is that it is impossible to be very precise with the direction you go to when doing the evasion move, plus the character automatically jumps down when he reaches the end of a platform. So I spend 15 min on an obstacle when it should have taken me 30 sec to pass. But fortunately it is the only time it happened and I think I talked a bit too much about this small issue :')

I thought the double hexagonal level design was really clever! This structure manages to create a playing ground that feels quite small and restricted, while also allowing and favouring exploration. You can always go in any part of the map relatively quickly since its constucted in a loop. Plus, this makes it impossible to get lost, because you will always end up at somewhere you know.

While level design definitely feels better than in MGS1, bosses on the other hand are a bit weaker. But, there still are some really good fights, like the one against Fat Man! His design is so goofy, and his fight is really good. having to both disarm bombs and shoot the one placing them makes for a great fight with good rythm! Quite the opposite of the RAYs boss fight that feels long and repetitive, as you have to take down I don't know how many RAYs that all have the 2 same moves that can be evaded simply by moving in circle...

Story was fun to follow, even if I'm not sure to have 100% understood everything. There are so many twists and people being double agents, but actually they are triple agent, but they are in fact quadruple agent... xD
Raiden character felt like a good protagonist to play after Snake. They are perfect opposite in terms of experience and personnality, so it was interesting to watch his evolution.
Cutscenes are top level, they always felt like a great reward for progressing in the game! And I must say that for a 20 years old game, it looks really good!
On the other hand, the codec chats have a tendency to drag on a little to much. Fortunately (I think?) you can at least play with the cameras framing the characters speaking, so you have something to do while waiting.
And also, the ending cutscene felt strange after all the action and fighting, a very bizarre way to end a game like this.

Music is very intense and it works really well with the gameplay! When you get spotted, you know that you have to fight or die, and the drum and bass stresses that point very well!

All in all, a excellent sequel to an already fantastic game! It is less perfect in every way than it's predecessor, but what it does good is definetly better than what MGS1 achieved.

I played Zelda: Wand of Gamelon and actually liked it, so I figured I could give this one a shot.

This game is more or less the same thing, but with a different map and new levels.
The game let you choose freely where you want to go and figure out by yourself how in what order you have to do things in order to progress. But I felt this one was not as good as Wand of Gamelon with guiding you and giving you hints. I felt I was doing a lot more random things before finding something that worked, and the NPCs gave very vague hints.

Also, the enemy spawn rate feels higher than in WoG, and it gets a bit tiring. Plus there are a lot more traps that will almost kill you in one shot. But since you don't loose any progress when dying, exception made of your position in a level, it's still not a big problem.

I don't have a lot more things to say as pretty much everything I said on WoG also applies here. I got through the game in about 2h, and I enjoyed my time on it!
And since in my review of WoG I linked a remix of a level music, here is one from the bazaar level, made by the same guy!