Cave Story immediately pulls your attention with its charming retro style and simplistic, but tight gameplay. Controlling Quote feels great and through the early level design, it teaches you the very basics of Cave Story's platforming and combat. For me, it all felt very nostalgic to play a game like this again.

Although the core gameplay of the game is quite simple in execution, it revels in that simplicity through its more complex level design. While using level design to further enhance the gameplay and the way you have to utilize your movement and controls is nothing unique to Cave Story, it is one of the better examples to do it out there. This feels especially true for some of the boss fights that ask more elaborate movement than your regular levels.

And while there's not too much to say about its actual story, it's fun and creative enough to keep you engaged with its plot and characters. Through its silly dialogue and message of kindness, it's clear how this is one of Undertale's many inspirations.

For a while now, Persona 4 Golden has been in the back of my mind as one of the most special pieces of fiction for me. So this review is a poor attempt to verbalize what this game means to me.

In the middle of 2022, I was at one of the lowest points of my life. Through my own admission, I had lost the people around me. My days felt empty, my future looked bleak and I struggled to get out of bed, let alone take care of myself. In an attempt to make my life a bit better, I purchased a new PC, to delve into new games that I previously wouldn't be able to play. To at least get out of bed.

Luckily, my best friend stuck with me through these tough times. He introduced me to Persona 4 Golden, a series I had previously been aware of and been mildly interested in through Persona 5, but never got the push to quite get into it. Ironically, I could've easily played Persona 4 Golden on my older PC, but nonetheless it felt like the mark of a new beginning.

I would love to say that starting the game and playing it was a magical experience, but it was a struggle at first. But it was a reason to talk to my best friend, it was a way for me to keep going so I managed to keep going. Through the daily struggle to keep up, I got to know the characters slowly, but surely. I started to pick a favorite, get invested in their character arcs, try to figure out the mystery of the town and most importantly, feel a bit better every time I saw that friend group that had started to mean so much to me.

Of course, the characters of a video game cannot replace any real friends or any real interaction, but the bonds that were being forged in front of my eyes were enough to fill that temporary emptiness in my heart. The perseverance of these kids, to have the courage to keep moving forward when it all seems so bleak, gave me hope in my darker hours. To be able to share that with the only person close to me at the time was a special time and allowed me to keep the hope that life would get better.

And it did. Because of Persona 4 Golden and my best friend Goh, I was able to persevere myself and keep faith in the future. To me, they saved me.

I usually like to close off a review with a quote that meant something to me in the story that I experienced, but here I would just like to thank Persona 4 Golden and Goh to be there for me and I'm grateful to anyone who took the time out of their day to read what this game means to me.

Strawberry Jam is an amazing project made by many talented people in the Celeste community. The soundtrack is great and a lot of the levels are full of personality and unique gimmicks. It's also a good place to learn new techniques and practice them in the built-in tutorial sections.

Unfortunately I'll have to take a star off because some levels have annoying gimmicks or are just straight up unfun at times, but it's to be expected for a collab to have a few bad apples every now and then. Please don't let this demotivate you, as the experience in every level differs from person to person and Strawberry Jam is definitely worth your time.

Deeply impressed how well everything comes together in this game, they manage to convey the satisfaction of fromsoft games while also improving/changing core mechanics and adding other things and it all flows and works together amazingly well. i was blown away by the gameplay and boss/enemy/level design, but what i ESPECIALLY didnt see coming is the story being such a touching and beautiful, thoughtful and emotional play on Pinocchio while also adding so much interesting world building and characterization that just makes my head spin. wish it was a bit harder, but hopefully that comes in the dlc. incredible, play it

With the atmosphere and presentation of Signalis, I was sure I would fall in love with this game. In the first few hours, the gameplay was interesting and fun, motivating me to solve the puzzles laid before me through its mechanics that very much reminded me of the classic survival horror genre.
Unfortunately, the horror aspect of Signalis isn't very appealing and while everything is stunning to look at and play through, there's never a feeling of tension and that's a huge miss.
Nearing the end, those mechanics that I found so engaging towards the start, started to dwindle and became monotonous with countless times feeling burdened with whatever comes next.
I stopped caring and I dropped it.

Had a good amount of fun with this one, but something about it always keeps me from making progress. Which is weird because it has solid combat, great level design, and absolutely dropdead gorgeous visuals. But the more I look into it, the decisions it makes as a remake (ESPECIALLY visually) kinda hold it back for me. It makes me just wanna play the original more and experience that unfiltered vision that feels kinda tampered with here.

One day I'll come back to it, but for now, I might just skip it and go on to Dark Souls.

Juggling two different stories, with two different purposes, is very hard. This game does it as best as it can, while hitting a few roadblocks that don't sour the overall experience.

The real issue with the writing comes in the form of Gaiden, that was very obviously written after this. It's not referenced, but rather cleverly skirted around as much as it can. That's pretty much the biggest flaw this game has, in my eyes.

That aside, what's even harder is giving closure to a character that's been around for over 20 years by this point, while at the same time properly starting another's journey.

There's some symbolism and some scenes that really stuck with me, but saying anything about any of them would spoil it. I think this is, possibly, the best they could've done, while staying true to the soul of the rest of the series and to the soul of their message.

It pains me to say that this game was a big disappointment for me, especially after years of waiting for it to be the best game in the series. As much as I love this franchise deeply from the bottom of my heart, I feel like I've been toyed with for 80 hours. I don't want to make it sound like I hate this game, I think it has a lot of soul behind it and I appreciate it for that. But sadly RGG Studio missed the mark with this one. This game made me feel a lot of things to the point of making me cry until my nose bled, but it also kept dancing around the ideas that made this franchise a masterpiece, thus making itself stale and uninteresting. Despite all its shortcomings, I really do like what this game has to offer. And it sure packs a punch, but it fails to add the ingredients that make this franchise and ends up haphazardly throwing Yakuza tropes at your face, as if it's yelling "please like this game!!!". I wish they did better things with the perfect material they had.

Bon voyage I guess.