This is a fanmade recreation of Dungeons & Diagrams from Zachtronics' Last Call BBS and I'm super glad it exists as it's much easier to launch this in work than a fully fledged game launcher!

It scratches the same itch as Picross and has a vast quantity of puzzles to solve, most of which are honestly too difficult for me.

If I was to suggest any improvements, a way to sort the puzzles by difficulty so that I can ramp up on a difficulty curve would be great, but I'm assuming the puzzles are all procedurally generated and so this may not be possible. Still, overall a great little package!

Breath of the Wild walked so Genshin Impact could soar.

The production values may be fantastic for a Wii U game, but the experience of actually playing it was deeply mediocre. This was especially the case for me as I only played it after having played other games that improved on the formula.

The "climb every surface" traversal is satisfying, albeit a few notches too slow. I've got places I gotta be, but Link is in no rush to get there. This is exasperated when the weather turns to rain and the entire game comes to a screeching halt. You can no longer climb anything but the smallest surfaces and many side quests - such as carrying a flaming torch from one location to another - are effectively shut off from completion until the weather improves. Some of this stems from my overall dislike of games that necessitate the player to "make their own fun", as perhaps there were ways to use the physics in unintended ways to traverse more quickly or protect my flame from the rain, but without a nudge in that direction I tended to find something else to do, such as making a sandwich and hope the clouds pass soon.

The combat is clunky and unpleasant in the way Zelda has been ever since Ocarina of Time. It may have been revolutionary at the time, but 20 years had passed since the release of these two games and it doesn't feel any better.

Weapon degradation had the potential to be a positive way to encourage the player to use other types of weapons that they won't usually use, but the reward for fighting is usually so minimal that there's no reason to engage at all. For most encounters, your reward is a treasure chest containing either a duplicate of the weapon your broke to earn it or something worse.

I feel like I'm missing out on something special given the immense praise that Breath of the Wild receives but my emotions while playing were basically a flat, steady line. I didn't grow up playing Zelda and don't have the excitement and nostalgia for exploring through a new take on Hyrule, meaning what I played was just an open-world adventure game with observation towers and dodgy combat.

Hitman displays that its foundation is fundamentally solid as Hitman 3, despite being the weakest entry in the trilogy, still proves to be a fantastic game.

Everything you expect from the previous games is still there - well-thought-out map design, clockwork NPCs that are fun to exploit and a wide array of options to either get the perfect stealth kill or create absolute chaos. There's one major new item in your inventory: a camera that lets you scan select objects in the game to get a bit of commentary from your handler or to hack doors. I seemed to keep forgetting it was there unless directly prompted to use it, as it felt a bit out of place as a way to interact in the world versus more understandable tools like lockpicks, keycards and crowbars.

Rolling all the previous games into a single launcher is a massive boon. Those old levels are still a lot of fun to dip back into, so not having three separate games installed is super helpful.

However, Hitman 3 doesn't quite get there in capturing the same memorable feelings of the first two games. Two missions lack any of the usual Mission Stories to help guide the player around for their first few runs, making the game feel a little smaller in scope than in previous entries. Hardcore players may prefer to run every level ad-hoc but I've always been a fan of the hijinks that the Mission Stories let you get up to so the lack of them gives me less reason to go back to some of those levels for repeat playthroughs.

Despite these shortcomings, Hitman 3 is still a lot of fun. The maps are detailed and intricately designed and there are plenty of opportunities to take out targets in bizarre and creative ways.

Muv-Luv Alternative is a hugely memorable piece of media that I will have fond memories of for a long time... and one that I don't think I could recommend to anyone!

If you can think of a theme that you might possibly want to explore in a game where you are isekai'd into a giant mecha war against space aliens, Muv-Luv Alternative covers it in excruciating detail several times over. Nationalism, fascism, pride and shame in your country, duty, fear, what it means to be human, quantum causality, iyaa uguu hidoi Takeru-chan - be ready to have the protagonist experience a full range of emotions and ever-changing opinions on all these topics. It all feels very unfocused and stream of consciousness, but that might be the point. Takeru is meant to be lost and confused. Most of the game is about him trying to find a "guiding light" and solidify his views rather than running with whatever emotion comes to him first.

Unfortunately, this also means that you will be retreading the same ground over and over again. Coming to terms with your world being torn apart isn't going to happen overnight, but the sheer repetition kills the pacing too often. A good editor could easily cut 20 hours from the total play time and not lose anything important.

The last few hours contain the highest highs and lowest lows of the game by far. A daring final mission with some real fist-pumping moments is sandwiched between an unsatisfying and much-too-tidy ending and an H-scene that was entirely unnecessary. It was as though the author thought "visual novels are supposed to have scenes like this" and lazily wrote in an excuse to linger on some gratuitous unpleasantness.

I'm glad I played through the main series of Muv-Luv to gain a greater context for visual novels outside of one-shot adventure games like Ace Attorney or Snatcher, but the sheer length coupled with the constant repetition and ecchi/full-on-hentai makes it impossible to suggest anyone take the plunge unless they're already pretty tolerant of all that.

Alba was a short little experience that I found to be a pleasant way to pass a few hours, just chilling out in a small Spanish village and taking photographs of birds.

There's been an explosion of "wholesome" games lately which this game certainly falls under, but I didn't find to be sickeningly twee in the way a lot of them do. The characters are all quite likable, with the only "zany" one not going overboard and acting as a contrast to everyone else in the quiet village.

My only complaint was that some birds only appear at later days in the story, but with no way of knowing this you can spend quite a while exploring trying to find them. A big "bird not yet unlocked" message may have ruined the experience, but there could have been some hint in the wildlife manual to hint that maybe you should try again later.

Still, the game never felt frustrating so long as you're not trying to get a 100% collection rate and it knew when to wrap things up. A nice way to spend an evening winding down for the night.

Inmost has amazing sound direction and a visual atmosphere, but with very little underneath.

It's an indie pixel-art puzzle platformer with dark and moody aesthetics that is more focused on storytelling than it is on the gameplay, which I feel is well-worn territory to the point where you likely already know if Inmost will be for you or not.

From chapter to chapter, you swap between three playable characters. A young girl who moves painfully slow and must solve simple puzzles in her house, an older man who moves slightly faster and must solve equally simple puzzles in a semi-Metroidvania-style environment and a swordsman who at least moves at a good pace but has simplistic and unengaging combat mechanics.

You get the occasional cutscene where a narrator will talk about how dark and twisted the world is in a way that I would have lapped up as a teenager but as an adult, it feels shallow and immature. I can't blame the game for this as there's a good chance I'm not the target audience. There are occasional attempts at humour that feel out of place and fall flat.

In all, Inmost takes around 4 to 5 hours to complete which sounds short but can still feel like a slog due to the slow movement and repetitive nature of the gameplay.

It feels as though this game was designed from an art and story perspective first and then had puzzles added to justify itself as a video game. Perhaps if it had fully committed to one direction, either as a mechanics-heavy exploration game or as a purely narrative-focussed adventure, it could have worked.

Titanfall 2's single-player campaign is beloved by many and I wish I could see what everyone else does. I enjoyed it well enough but it's... fine? The day after finishing, I couldn't tell you much of what happened in the story. I went to lots of places and picked up lots of things, but outside of a single level built around a quite interesting one-off mechanic, none of it stuck with me.

The movement and shooting all feel solid, although the stages are regularly split into "platformer segment" and "shooting arena" and aren't always particularly well integrated. As long as you have a few walls to run on you don't need to do much else during combat. The fast-paced action sequences and parkour platforming are split up with areas where you control the Titan, your robot exo-suit buddy, which unfortunately feels sluggish and unpleasant to control. It's a real shame that every boss fight in the game required you to fight in your Titan.

Titanfall 2 isn't a bad game at all, it's a perfectly reasonable first-person shooter campaign, but I just don't get why it's lauded as one of the best campaigns of the generation.

The concept of a visual novel where your character's mood is a mechanic to be managed and allows access to different dialogue choices sounds interesting, but the writing doesn't live up to its potential.

Any anti-corporate game in this day and age is going to feel a little bit obvious and heavy-handed, especially in the shadow of certain other juggernauts that really got it right, but Neo Cab felt even more surface-level than Ubisoft's Watch Dogs 2 to me. Most of your customers never stop trying to sound performatively clever or witty, like the guy who desperately wants to come off as the smartest person in the room. Then there's the scheming of the all-encompassing corporation that runs the city. They've put countless taxi drivers out of work and hold huge control over society, but targeted advertising seems to be where the player draws the line.

Politics aside, there were a few moments where the player character was shocked by revelations that she should have known from previous conversations, although with a seemingly quite large number of branching paths I can forgive that for an indie game. However, the game never really convinced me as to why the protagonist has uprooted her entire life for her "best friend in the whole world", a person who is a selfish prick that you regularly tell people that you hate.

I was excited to see Neo Cab's depiction of a cyberpunk capitalist dystopia from the perspective of regular people on the ground, but in the end it had very little to say.

Go Go Nippon is a short visual novel that serves as a surface-level travel guide to the main tourist areas of the Tokyo region. There's a romance sub-plot with the two sisters who are hosting the player character on his trip to Japan, but the focus is mostly on showing you trivia about the local attractions.

It's not necessarily a bad way to have a simple travel guide to give you ideas of where you might like to visit for real, but it's limited in scope and the writing isn't great - especially with how weird it is for your character to be obsessed with Japan, become entirely fluent in the language and then somehow be clueless about how toilets work.

You're in a car, teetering on the edge of a cliff, while you ruminate on life with a talking deer... and yet somehow this is not engaging.

If you've never taken the time to think about basic philosophy there may be something to be gained by playing Far From Noise, but everything presented is so surface level that it ends up feeling shallow and unsatisfying. A conversation about epistemology goes no deeper than "it's impossible to tell if you are hallucinating so you have to assume the talking deer must be real". Thoughts like this and "it's freeing to know that the world continues to exist after I die" are conclusions I feel most people come to when they're thirteen years old, so for them to be presented here as revelatory is baffling to me. This isn't helped by listing the philosophers this game was "inspired by" in the credits.

Despite the intention of this game to be slow and contemplative, even its total time of just under two hours outstays its welcome. It's relaxing and I was ready to settle in for some serious thinking, but Far from Noise just had nothing new to say.

And honestly, if a talking deer came to my car hanging precariously off a cliff and decided to read a few poems to me, I think I would shift my weight forward.

The Silver Case is a game whose strengths are based on "vibes" rather than plot or intrigue.

There is a story that's happening here - you investigate a series of murders happening in the fictional Ward 24 of Tokyo. Yet none of it feels important and I think that's intentional. When dramatic events occur it never feels shocking. Instead, it's all part of a relaxed and meandering mood where you just let it wash over you. I don't know if this is a good comparison, but it's similar to how I felt with Serial Experiments Lain. You don't need to follow the specific events of the story or even the lengthy infodumps that both The Silver Case and Lain drop on you to enjoy what's on offer.

The writing is clunky in a way that evokes the charm of late-90s localised games. Thankfully it's not difficult to parse, instead helping drive the atmosphere of a city where everyone and everything is odd in some way.

There are some puzzles that I found to be unengaging, but the game offers you the choice to skip them and it isn't long until they just stop appearing altogether, the game instead focusing entirely on its tone and narrative.

The Silver Case is tricky to recommend but for those who it will click with, it'll click hard.