Carrion was a awesome change of form for the standard "You're the hero" game. This time you are the monster (or are you?), a creature trapped in a science lab trying to escape and grow through consuming energy and killing the people that have locked you up.

The art style is great for a pixel style and the animations are fluid and spark reaction multiple times with the detailed destruction you cause. There are lots of mechanics and abilities to unlock and learn how to stealth through the map, or go on the offensive when needed.

It is an experience that I would recommend to anyone as it was a unique experience to me and I found a lot of people enjoyed it as much as I did.

Botany Manor is a fantastic and relaxing puzzle game where you play as a 19th Century botanist who is trying to get her botanical research book published. You explore her family manor and figure out how to successfully grow the various plants by collecting clues in each area.

The achievements are easy and the game can be finished in a short play session. No guides are needed as the game explains the steps needed for each flower to bloom very well.

Worth checking out if you enjoy puzzles games or period pieces.

There is a lot of influence from the Pikmin series as you play a shrunken human on an unknown world (someone's house) that is trying to return home via a ship made of various parts from around this world (household items). To help you traverse the planet and overcome obstacles, you use the help of small creatures called Tinykins.

There are five types of Tinykins, the strong purple, the explosive red, the climbable green, the electric blue, and the bridge building yellow. Over the course of 6 levels, you will obtain a finite amount of these creatures and find them in batches, making it to where you will revisit sections of a level when you get what you need to get higher or move past a destructible wall (for example). While you explore, you gather pollen to help one of the various insect peoples create tonics for you to gain the ability to hover across distances with bubbles. Each level provides opportunity to gain more and use them in further and further distances. You also gain a "soapboard" which is a small bar of soap that you can skate on to move around quicker and grind on silkworm strings as you unlock them.

So really, this feels like a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids style concept but with the Pikman assistance and a Paper Mario style design (3D worlds and 2D characters). I enjoyed playing but lost interest in the story after a while. However, I would play a sequel.

Sea of Solitude tells a story about a girl going through hardships in all aspects of her life. A broken home, a troubled brother, and a distant romantic relationship on top of her own depression and loneliness.

The gameplay focuses on exploration and platforming to avoid massive monsters. Using a boat to traverse a sunken city, the main character is not just avoiding the demons around her, but moving towards them in order to help.

There were some issues with collectables when I was trying to finish the achievements. Having missed one seagull and one message in a bottle, I had to go through multiple levels to locate what I missed with no indication of which chapter the missing items were located.

Some of the other achievements are a bit tedious such as swimming a long distance when you use the boat mainly, or dying to enemies when you normally play without dying.

Overall I thought the story was the best part of the game, the graphics were smooth and lovely. I wouldn't be opposed to a sequel, but I don't think it is needed.

Potion Craft is a enjoyable shop management game with a daily schedule of gathering potion ingredients and crafting solutions to the town's issues. Whether morally good or bad, people come to you for all forms of potions from healing and mana, to explosive and protective. While there is no major story, you get to learn about the people that enter your shop and build a reputation as the best alchemist in the town while exploring various maps using the gathered ingredients you harvest or purchase to make new potions.

The game controls better on PC with a mouse, than the joystick on controller. I had multiple issues where my selection of what I was currently holding would move elsewhere on the screen and adjust settings of my current actions which became frustrating overtime.

The game is also super challenging towards the later portion of the game where patrons ask for extremely specific potions. While selling you also get to make new salts and crystals to make fine adjustments to your options which came be destroyed with the slightest movement across the map which erases minutes of progress.

It's a fun game and worth checking out but the achievements can be very difficult without a guide.

I remember playing this for the first time in the Xbox 360 and I've always loved the story and the twist it had. The world building was fantastic and the gameplay was strong and new for many at the time.

However, the remaster edition on Xbox One is bugged and bugged bad and also doesn't allow screenshots which makes no sense. The game crashed on me three times and multiple achievements did not unlock for me when I met the requirements multiple times. I haven't played the challenges yet but will down the line, maybe after replaying to get the missed achievements.

A large improvement over the first game. I was super happy to have voice acting and better cutscenes. The overworld was overwhelming at first but then I realized how easy it was to explore with the Batcomputer's scanner. The levels are longer than the last game, but there are only 15 to play.

The platforming in the game was just as fun, collecting Gold Bricks with the various characters and abilities made the exploration lively and easy to burn through as Red Bricks for score multipliers and invincibility were obtained quickly and led me to finish this game faster than the first.

Worth the play if you are a fan of the series. You don't have to play the first title but there is a tied story at the beginning.

A fantastical story of a handyman on a crashed spaceship trying to escape an alien planet with his fellow shipmates. Stranded in an ocean based planet, Harold must assist with the relaunch plan while also befriending those around him and moving around government bureaucracy. The story is one of exploration and learning of the unknown.

The entire game is made of stop motion puppets and craft materials and is a beauty to witness. Every scene is detailed and awesome.

The story is extremely well written and has humor, sadness, and action throughout making this a great title that I hope gets awards.

I finished in 17 hours and missed only 2 achievements due to glitches, but will return later when they have been patched.