Love any game that reminds me of Pikmin. This one's pretty okay. A lot of greek philosopher and god lore, most of which I'd never even heard of, didn't really expect that. Great game for Mythology majors, if they do indeed exist. Wish there was a bit more to it, gameplay wise. I know it's ostensibly an angry mob simulator, but some of the combat feels a bit too chaotic even so. That stage one theme is a bop though, can I just say. Whatever stringed instrument that lead is sounds fantastic with the chiptune accompaniment.

Pretty dang decent little indie fighting game. Aesthetic is on-point, love the flat colors and smooth animation. Reminds me of Samurai Jack. Music fits well, but I kinda wish there was more than the few minimistic tracks currently offered. Mechanics are rock-solid, emphasizing spacing (footsies galore) and cancelling out of any move using a special meter in a very similar way to a SFIV FADC. Unfortunately the community's pretty small, despite the GGPO rollback, and there's very few characters and even fewer stages. Hoping they continue work on it, I'd love to see this stylish little fighter get popular in the future.

(Content warning: rape)

A hentai gacha game with a dark magical girl theme. Aesthetically and plot-wise it liberally takes a lot of inspiration from Madoka Magica. There's actually two versions of the game, Magicami, the "safe" version which does not have sex scenes, and Magicami DX, the nsfw version which does. This review is for the DX version, since I imagine most people play that one, obviously.

Aesthetically, the game looks pretty dang good, especially for a browser game. The girls are cute and they have a sizeable variety of magical girl outfits to wear, and roll for of course. I actually quite like the monster designs. Since the theme is dark magical girl porn, the monsters accordingly are also sexy demon creatures, some of which have been horrifyingly transformed into pretty disturbing abominations. You can see the spider demon in the cover art here I think, where she has like sexy human legs instead of spider legs, it's frankly disturbing but also kind of rad, not gonna lie.

The characters are pretty cute, and personality wise actually rather likeable, a lot of which I think is owed to the quite decent voice acting. The goal, I think, is to endear you to the characters so that you can be adequately horrified when they, in accordance to the plot, horribly lose and then get tortured and uh, raped, by the monsters. A lot of the sex scenes I'm pretty sure are rape scenes by the way, so if you were looking for something more Jun'ai or vanilla, there's probably better games for you to play. And let me tell you, for better or worse, the voice acting is horrifyingly good during the rape scenes. They, uh, really sell the tortured screaming, I guess. Even the guy main character has some pretty gnarly screams of despair. The performances as a whole are like, genuinely disturbing and don't exactly put me in the mood, personally. I'm not really sure why these are in a porn game? Though I guess if you have a rape kink, that's like, part of it, probably. They're thoughtful enough to put a content warning before the scene happens though, so that's nice.

Gameplay wise it's actually not bad, if you like jrpg combat. The animations are snappy and the dynamic camera angles combined with the clean Persona-esque UI make battles rather nice to look at. The battle music also reminds me of Persona, to be honest. It's nothing too especially interesting though, and you can just auto-battle once you get sufficiently strong enough anyway.

Overall, a pretty decent game if you have a rape fetish, but probably not worth it otherwise.

Well-made gacha auto-battler with an extreme emphasis on cuteness. Gameplay is typical of the genre, where the only real decisions you make are team composition, and which gear to grind for with your daily stamina. As usual, there's pretty much never any reason to turn off the auto battle and fast forward buttons.

What sets this game apart is the fully voice acted story, fully animated anime style cutscenes, and legitimately banger music. Cygames puts a lot of thought into making their games look extremely polished and professional, and they put more effort than I would expect for a gacha game.

For example, every time there's an event, you hear an instrumental of the main event theme on the main event page. There's a different version of the same theme throughout the event stories. And by the time you get done with the event quest, you get presented with a fully animated musical credit sequence where the theme now has lyrics, sung by the main characters featured during the event. It's cute, and indicative of way more time and effort put in than I've seen in other games in the genre. This amount of polish is even more apparent in their latest game, Uma Musume.

The biggest criticism I have (outside of being a gacha game), is that the overall tone of the game is waaay to cute for me, personally. As much as I love wholesome cuteness, most of the dialogue seriously makes me feel like I'm losing IQ points. There's kawaii, and then there's saccharine, and somehow this game has managed to go even beyond that. All the characters are just SO DUMB and since they're trying to appeal to otaku, they of course are all in love with the main character and do the same blushing stammering bits where they don't want to reveal their true feelings to you, yada yada. I really like the character designs though. they're all pretty iconic and fit their respective character personalities while consistently being cute-sexy, which seems to be what they're going for.

Overall, this actually one of the better gacha games I've played. Gameplay is braindead as usual, but the characters are cute and the story's perfect if you find yourself really needing just like a huge dollop of kawaii anime bullcrap.

Chinese porn game. It's fine. Gameplay is just simplified QTE punch-out. Not much going on there, really. Story's marginally funny. Thankfully it leans more towards slapstick rather than male vindictiveness, as I assumed it would from the description. You play as incel Ryu, fighting off against five fighting game girl parodies (just five, it's pretty short). Throughout the fights, their clothes get torn off, as you would expect. There's a couple of CG sex scenes each; full mandarin voice acting too, which is nice. Art's actually pretty good. It's probably the best thing about the game honestly, and I'd love to see more of it, perhaps in an actual video game next time.

It's a monster catching gacha game with pretty decent turn-based combat that actually has some unique mechanics. Unfortunately it has one big issue: the two main gameplay features - monster catching and gacha - literally oppose each other. Why on earth would you ever use a 2 star monster you caught in the field when you could just use the 5 star character you just rolled in the gacha? After you roll a few times there's literally no reason to ever again catch a monster in this monster catching game. This is actually a perfect example of what could have been a pretty ok little phone rpg being absolutely ruined by its gacha mechanics. Shame.

Amplitude Studios' Endless series of 4X games, to me, have always been characterized by visually striking, high concept civilizations and incredibly evocative lore writing. Big picture world building has always been the series' strength, but I've always found the smaller details and character writing to be just a bit lacking. This is, of course, completely fine in a 4X game, where you're managing entire armies and building massive superstructures. But in a more intimate setting like a dungeon crawler, where individuals are the focus, I couldn't help but want a bit more out of the heroes' colorful personalities. While the between-level elevator conversations are fantastic and give a tiny glimpse into who these people actually are, the more interesting ones are unfortunately relatively sparse as unique dialogues aren't even guaranteed to happen unless you happen to have a specific combination of characters. Even then there's only so many elevator rides before a run's over.

I understand if the focus is on the gameplay, but to be honest, while the series' games do fulfill a niche of providing fun, unique spins on 4X archetypes, they never quite reach the same level of depth and replayability that classics in the genre, such as the Civilization games, are known for. I find the same problem to be true for this particular foray into the tower defense/dungeon crawler genres. And while there's definitely a lot of polish and some pretty interesting interpretations of the mainline games' 4X mechanics, for some reason I just never found Dungeon of the Endless to be as addictive as the many other roguelike dungeon crawlers on the market. A lot of cool ideas here though, so hopefully they'll improve upon them in Endless Dungeon, the slightly confusingly-named spiritual sequel.

Currently imagining a world in which all mobile games were like this - simple, elegant fun prioritizing the player’s enjoyment instead of their wallets. Games that seek to provide a new, unique experience to players on the mobile platform instead of cynically trying to deceive them with skinner box monetization tricks. Take me back to the dawn of smartphones, when touch screens were seen as a visionary input innovation brimming with countless game design possibilities and not just a place to put an ugly, unresponsive virtual gamepad to the utter displeasure of handheld gamers everywhere. Why are there so few mobile games where moving around actually feels good and has a genuine tactileness to it, rather than just being a constant annoying battle with your fat thumbs for visibility? Was gosh-darn Fruit Ninja really the apex of mobile games that actually feel good to play?

...Mobile game diatribes aside, the central idea of this mobile game, Ordia, is pretty simple - you take a ball-like character that has to be flicked around like an Angry Bird to move but put it into an upwards scaling precision platformer like Celeste. The result is a short, polished 30+ level experience that feels absolutely smooth and buttery to the touch, thanks in no small part to the LocoRoco-esque minimalist art style and similarly bouncy, responsive animations. The level design in particular feels meticulously crafted. Every tunnel, peg, and wall bounce lands your little green dude pretty much exactly where it needs to go a lot of the time, owing probably to several level iterations and playtesting to ensure a smooth and guided user experience free of any major annoyances, much like an iphone’s UX philosophy. The game mechanics themselves are introduced gradually and deliberately, and build upon each other in fun ways. I wasn’t kidding with the Celeste comparison. There are even multiple mechanics that I swear are directly lifted from the dang thing such as: collectibles that only count after you land, midair nodes that give you an extra dash (or flick, rather) and are often chained together, differently colored evil clones of the protagonist that follow your movements to add time pressure, the list goes on. And while the game can be a bit frustrating at times, especially in the bonus levels, the wonderfully soothing electronic soundtrack and ambient Pikmin-esque nature-inspired sound design keeps the head relatively cool and the overall vibes chill.

I do wish there was a bit more to it though. Precision platformers like Mario, Celeste, and Meatboy thrive due to the sheer amount of ideas the developers cram into their games. 30 or so levels is just not quite enough time to layer and develop all of its mechanics to the same extent. And while the game certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, it also doesn’t give itself enough room to reach its full potential, in my opinion. That being said, this little game was certainly a nice surprise that wanted nothing more than to provide a fun, pleasant experience, and I honestly wish more mobile games followed this design philosophy.

A fun free game that the developer himself admits is pretty much just fanart bait. The art is cute and stylish, and the characters themselves are excellent at appealing to a very specific taste. I'm actually pretty impressed by how the designs manage to feel cool and sexy without being revealing at all or feeling fanservice-y. I almost feel like I need to hear a fashion designer's insight on these outfits. The puzzle gameplay is quick and snappy and the main music track is infectiously bouncy. Pretty much the entire experience feels quick, polished, and to the point which is a great way to make a free game like this go viral for a bit, but also causes a lot of the new fans to want a bit more. And while there's not much to the game, what's there is quality. It really is amazing how much I ended up liking all of the girls despite them having such few lines of dialogue.

A pale imitation of Parappa the Rapper, and yet I cannot deny the funkiness of the beats. When I first played the game, it kinda ran like garbo, but over time it seems like they managed to tweak it enough so that the timings aren't affected at all anymore, which is great. The art style obviously continues the sort of blocky, flat look that many of the old Newgrounds mascots all seem to have. In fact, the very inclusion of those mascots into the game don't even feel that out of place here and also gave me some unexpected nostalgia. It's a little weird to think that kids nowadays will only know Pico and the Tankmen from this game instead of y'know, Newgrounds, but I digress.

The music of course, is actually really bumpin', which is good because otherwise the game wouldn't work at all. The use of chopped up Banjo-Kazooie-esque electronically manipulated voice beeps works flawlessly into the mix and the gradual transformation of the simplistic turn-taking rap battles into blossoming simultaneous duets is a welcome innovation to the Parappa formula I wasn't expecting. The genres start off as hip-hop-ish but over time takes cues from increasingly higher-bpm electronic stuff with some dance inspired tracks as well as, unexpectedly, some gabber type beats? It's all pretty danceable really and I found myself swinging my head to most of the songs.

I'm not too familiar with the fan community, as I'm probably at least a decade too old for it, but it seems like there's a pretty big modding and youtuber scene associated with the game, which is good news for the longevity of any rhythm game, really. It also seems like mods will be fully supported in the full game, which is always nice to see. Overall the developers seem pretty capable, so I'm looking forward to the full release, whenever that happens!