There's an in-game bookstore in The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa which predictably sells books which Ringo can read. They all have slightly parodic, possibly copyright dodging titles but are all clearly based on existing words of literature e.g Odysseus - > Ulysses, Brothers -> Brothers Karamazov etc.

Reading each of them involves figuring out the slightly obtuse method of finding a bench and using the right shoulder button and letting the slow progress bar fill up. If you've read the speed reading books in the school library you can speed the process up but it will take a significant amount of ingame time to read through the longer novels like Ulysses and Anna Karenina. There is basically 0 mechanical benefit in doing so, negative, if you factor in opportunity cost. Well, there is one female friend of Ringo's who has unique dialogue if you've read any of the russian novels but other than that (and the achievement for reading them all I suppose) like in real life you basically have to read for shock horror its own sake.

It is perhaps silly, but The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa's particular roleplaying, simulation charm had such a grip on me on replay that I sat on a bench in the park on a sunday and would periodically pause reading The Brothers Karamazov to light up a cigarette and continue where I left of, then stopping to put it out. I can't even really put my finger on why, perhaps its because for all the maturity of the subject matter and perceived adult-ness (which is even addressed in one of the conversations with Ringo's bookworm friend declaring that Adults didnt watch anime) its the kind of thing that taps into that dormant desire to make up stories of our toys of childhood; when play and learning went hand in hand.

Its also because smoking in a game is as close as I'll hopefully ever get to it IRL after giving it up a few years ago. Reading whilst smoking brings a nostalgia for one of the worst years of my life when I was 18 and had just started university in a different country.

I don't smoke anymore, but I've been getting back into reading. Reading Rumble Fish recently it was hard not to notice the influence in Ringo's story, a tale of a troubled teen gang leader's deep existential emptiness and misplaced idealism about the "rules" of chivalry supposedly involved. Even the scene in RI of Goro staring off into the lit up city across the river wondering if there's anything greater out there, a naïve hope of escaping the ennui of their hometown into a mythical "other place" smacks of a particular chapter in Rumble Fish; seemingly the only time at which the main character is comfortable is when drunk and surrounded by the pretty lights and party atmosphere of the city, shortly before being mugged.

I'm currently reading through Winesburg Ohio, I suppose I could have waited until i read through all of the books to come back and replay Ringo and do some kind of overlong comparative analysis of the influences, but I can't be assed right now. Maybe I will do that in the future. In replaying Ringo there was the unfortunate realization that the combat is kinda shit compared to Fading Afternoon and a few bugs got a bit annoying, as well as the confirmation that the pacing of the final few weeks was as weird as I remembered it, but everything else about the game was stellar, and I think I enjoyed it even more than last time. Ringo is a bit like Paprika and other works I love to revisit in that it feels like you're finding something new every time. For as obtuse and even abrasive as the design philosphy of Yeo's games can be, they are equally mesmerising.

For example, I discovered upon replay that you can squat to recover health. I also learned that story events do not trigger if you have your gang with you, which is both useful in setting the terms of the progression but thematically appropriate: Ringo's friends are coming apart, him seemingly the last one to realize this, and his various activities calling upon him to be alone and not keeping the gang together accelerates the process. That ending still hits fucking hard man. God. Y'know what? Fuck it, for all its faults, this is a 5 star game for me now. I don't think it will be most people's cup of tea but I humbly ask for everyone to play it at some point, even if just for a few hours

I played the demo for this game and was blown away. It seemed like a fun take on a typing game, but when I got the full game the ideas presented to me in the demo just got vary arduous soon after the demo ended.

Cryptmaster is a dungeon crawler mixed with text adventure, with a typing game also. There are many puzzles and dialogue things where you can just type whatever you want, so things are very "open ended"(?) kind of? This could be cool, the allure of text adventure games is the freedom you could have from being able to "do anything", but that is the same allure that falls short in this game.

There are a lot of mechanics that feed into each other so I kind of just have to start explaining them all. Let's start with the memories of your 4 person party. At all times your party will have a blank word that will gradually fill up as you gain letters. Letters are gained from fighting enemies, doing riddles, or opening chests. The more letters you have, the easier you can guess the word, but you can type in the word anything once its the one on screen. These memories can either be lore, or moves to use in combat. There appears to be like 40-ish for each person, mostly consisting of lore from what I could tell. I beat the game and ended up with like less than 20 on each character.

Chests are puzzles in which you ask the Cryptmaster to describe a mystery item (look, touch, remember what it did, taste, etc.). Limited number of guesses, and when you solve it all the letters get put into your memory words. There are skulls that give you riddles to figure out, and similarly if you solve them, the letters get added. The problem with these is purely a chance thing where maybe none of the letters actually help you, or you already had those letters, just fucking annoying i think.

Fighting enemies gives you 1 letter of your choosing from their name, but I find the combat fucking annoying. The combat is recommenced to be in real time (more in line with most typing games), or you can do a version of turn based combat. In real time, you must type your moves fast while a timer counts when the enemy will attack. However, you have a cooldown after each move (per character), and this feels so ridiculously long compared to enemy attack speed. Also the fact you have to remember every move for 4 characters in a high speed fight, that was just not feasible for me, so I went to turn based. Turn based isn't traditional turnbased, it just makes every letter typed advance time. Enemy attack timer goes down per letter, and when a party member is on cooldown, each letter takes away a segment of cooldown. This slows it down so you can think and you can actually look at your list of attacks, providing more "strategy". Turn based was a band-aid to finish the game because I don't think the combat is good overall. I will say its mainly because the moves all kind of suck too. idk none of them felt really good to use, but maybe there are cooler moves i didnt unlock even though i beat the game! Maybe if I could get memory words faster, combat would be better, but even then combat just woudlnt be fun until "late game" so it seems not very good.

Then the other part of this game besides combat is the mystery object and riddles and boy FUCK do I hate word puzzles. I didn't think this game would be so full of them, so fuck me i guess. Im just not good at them. I can't solve riddles, and I cant remember words when I need to. Then it just pisses me off like really bad man. If you like word puzzles you might be happier than I!

Also, there is a card game in this, and I also think it sucks. Maybe thats just me not understanding how I should play it, or not understanding how to build a deck, but you dont get a lot of cards to even build one. Most cards you get from beating opponents, but you have to beat them with your crap cards.

The card game has you draw 4 cards, and a whole row of random letters (maybe like 20ish?). You pick 2 letters at a time, and if any of the letters are in the name of the cards in your hand, you deal damage. If you get all the letters in a card's name, its effect will happen. You can also skip your turn to mulligan your letters. This is heavily reliant on you actually getting letters you can fucking use in your hand, which I barely ever had. From what I could piece is that deckbuilding would revolve around either picking cards with a variety of letters so you can have more letters that are useful, or cards with a small variety so letters do more damage per pick. Again, you don't really get a lot of cards to do either of these I feel. Maybe I just fundamentally did not understand this card game, but I dont think its very fun at all.

Mainly just every mechanic frustrated me and it just did not gel with me, im sad it didnt, but oh well.

I want ALL licensed games to be this weird.

"So what if we did a game based on The Office, but Michael has to fight aliens with a stapler while collecting glowing reams of paper???"

The gameplay is ...fine, I guess, but really it's the game's bizarre setting that makes it remarkable.

Games that tell stories only capable of being relayed through the medium of gaming will always hold a special place in my heart. Since my first encounters with video games as a whole, I've never quite found any method of storytelling to even compare to it. Sure, the occasional film or manga or what have you might catch my attention, but those I hold at the peak of any other medium don't really come close to the experiences I've had with gaming.

Return of the Obra Dinn has once again solidified this idea for me, and it does so in such a way where I feel that everything within the experience is deserving of commendation. The actors, writing, art, music, and everything all together unite for an extremely fleshed out and cohesive experience that held my attention the whole way through. I believe this holds true for much of the game's playerbase due to the incredible completion rates seen on each of the achievements. Return of the Obra Dinn manages to create a very unique gameplay loop I haven't quite seen elsewhere, it's an incredibly fresh and engaging experience that I feel anyone with a brain could hold appreciation for. It might not be a grand story in comparison to other titles of today, but it sure as hell is a good one, a GREAT one.

A game that will constantly have you thinking, theorizing, trying new things, finding new angles, and most importantly, keeping you engaged following through its bizarre and beautiful storytelling. This is a game that I believe couldn't and shouldn't be passed up, if you're interested, play it. You won't regret it.

From the cover alone, you can probably already tell what you're in for with Little Kitty, Big City, and yes, it is exactly as charming, delightful, and obnoxiously cute as you want it to be.

That said, as ridiculous as it sounds, I did have some slight apprehension going into this, given what kind of game Stray was (or, in this case, was not).

Thankfully, underneath all the sweetness, there is a fun lil platformer to be found in Little Kitty, Big City and it's not merely a cute cat simulator where you run around doing cute cat things. I mean, it is very much that as well, but it's also a half-decent collectathon with some simple but engaging puzzles and side quests for the titular little kitty to embark upon.

Really, 'simple but engaging' is perhaps the best way to describe this game. It doesn't try to be anything more or less than it needs to be. The entire thing can be finished in less than 6 hours, and outside of some wonky catforming controls and animations, it holds your attention the entire way through.

With fun platforming, endlessly delightful little touches to the cat's behaviour and animations throughout, an upbeat, jazzy score and a delightful sense of humour, it's exactly the kind of game you need to take a break from the 50+ hour narrative-heavy, live-service AAA games that inhabit the space.

Sometimes you just want to reject modernity and embrace kitty.

7.5/10

ethan: urgh…damn it…what the FUCK is happening in this village…

heisenberg screeching over the intercom: ethAN wintERS. have you ever desired a man carnally?

three years late but whatever. stinks. simultaneously the least charismatic and most self-serious entry in a series that usually threads a better needle with respect to its tone than whatever’s presented here. ethan is an unlikeable psycho, thoroughly unenjoyable riff on the ‘it takes a village’ proverb. forgets to be an action game for half the game and then when you get to that part you’re mostly doing a bunch of eighth gen arena strafing with minimal target feedback. semi-competent machine games campaign but lacklustre resi title and every insistence the game makes on deriving aesthetic and mechanical inspiration from re4 falls totally flat while the rest of the game is too much of a ‘greatest hits’ reel to really have much of an identity of its own. between resi 7 and resi 8 the guys over at capcoms resi team need to seriously consider couples therapy. may have been more charitable if i was from eastern europe 👍

Astonishingly incredible. The idea of a puzzle-metroidvania is fucking genius. From the handful of experiences I’ve had with the genre, the combat has always been the worst part of the package. These games demonstrated engaging puzzles and encapsulating atmospheres, but dithered about with lacklustre combat; combat that is somehow presented as a third pillar of the game, as an equal to its atmospheric and puzzling counterparts. Neglecting this element to the extreme brings out the best part of metroidvanias (and is really, really fun to play).

Becoming intimate with this huge web of puzzles, slowly unravelling it yourself, and reaching the bottom of the rabbit hole. It’s an incredible concept, yet is so simple and so naturally delivered that it's hard to conceive how new this game feels. As both a publisher and developer debut, this is an explosive arrival to the scene, and hopefully a sign of great things to come for both.

Much has been said about the historicity of Tetris and its many iterations, but I find the very original text-based graphics version from 1984 to be the most charming. If I was committed to grinding this as a pseudo-sport, to improve my logic center and simple problem-solving speed, I'd likely opt for one of the later titles, probably Tetris 2000 or something based off of that for what little I know; but I don't really care to, it's just an extremely fundamentally well-made puzzle game with a background that frequently births inspiration. Bored, and a few lines of code later... Tetris!

You can play a recreation of this 1984 original here,, as well as Tetris Holdings' tribute to the original. I prefer the presentation of the first here, but the second is good too.

Featuring Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles!

I love Sonic 3K, and I can see why it's widely regarded as one of the best games in the series, it really feels like the full package of 2D Sonic (...and Knuckles).

While Sonic 2 rewarded speed in the level design, 3K emphasizes exploration again in a similar fashion to Sonic CD; the player needs to track down hidden large rings in a level to gain access to the special stages, where Sonic navigates across a maze-like board to activate blue orbs, while steering clear of red ones. Simple in theory, but certainly tricky at times. I would absolutely recommend going out of your way to do these special stages, because you'll unlock the ability to transform into Super Sonic after getting all seven Chaos Emeralds, and blazing through later levels in the Super Saiyan form is a joy. That's enough talk regarding the special stages though, as the actual main level design is the meat of the game.

With over a dozen different levels with multiple acts, Sonic 3K is the longest entry from the classic 2D games, and it's very nice to see how consistent the quality remains throughout its runtime. I'm not going to bring up every stage here (like in my Sonic 1 review), as I don't have extensive thoughts on all of them. There will also be a bunch of inevitable comparisons to other (Sonic) games, as I bear the curse of only recently becoming a fan in 2024 and those games just happen to be fresh in my memory.

Angel Island Zone is an amazing opening level, as it introduces the player right to the design philosophy of 3K and has many easily accessible special stages and multiple of the newly introduced elemental shields. For those who don't know, the elemental shields replace the shield power-up from the previous games and all are special in their own way. The lightning shield allows Sonic to double jump and attract rings, the bubble shield provides a move similar to Bounce Bracelet in Sonic Adventure 2 and allows him to breathe underwater (so the bubbles aren't required), while the fire shield gives immunity to fire (including lava) and a mid-air dash. In Angel Island Zone no shield is particularly better than another, so it's a good place to try their abilities before using them in later levels which make extensive use of their specific traits. One of those levels is Hydrocity Zone, which follows directly afterwards - here the use of the bubble shield is encouraged, as the bubble placements in the levels are only at certain spots and the ability to freely navigate underwater is very important if you actually want to explore there to find special stages without a rush. Marble Garden is arguably the longest and most confusing stage in the game, but it's still enjoyable in its own way. Carnival Night is plenty of fun to rush through too and has some nice underwater segments, while Ice Cap Zone is one of my favorites in the game with the snowboarding intro and overall satisfying level structure - this is particularly cool, because I was already very fond of Ice Cap in Sonic Adventure 1. Meanwhile, Flying Battery Zone is the result of "what if we made Wing Fortress Zone but actually good", taking the airship aesthetic of that level and making it more fun and sightreadable and Sandopolis is an innovative desert level, where the second half reminded me a lot of Pyramid Cave in Sonic Adventure 2. Afterwards follows Lava Reef Zone, which felt very reminiscent of Celeste's Core to me, but also stood out from the rest with its more vertical level design and great soundtrack, causing it to quickly become a favorite. Everything is rounded off with the Death Egg Zone, which gave me huge SA2 vibes again, as the atmosphere felt quite similar to the ARK levels in that game, same with the gravity switching mechanic. The final boss for 3K was also surprisingly fun compared to the other classic 2D entries, and Doomsday Zone is a great bonus for players who got all the Chaos Emeralds. Man, I love Super Sonic, no matter how basic the idea behind him is.

Sonic 3's soundtrack is an interesting one to discuss, as I completed the game through Sonic Origins, which uses the prototype versions of a few songs, as I believe the licensing for Michael Jackson's songs ran out (don't quote me on this). I don't think those prototype versions are as horrible as some make them out to be, and I actually prefer Carnival Night's prototype rendition to the original. Can't say the same for Ice Cap though, the original song is iconic for a good reason and I love how it ties in with the snowboard section at the beginning. The prototype version just sounds a bit too upbeat for my taste here, considering the original track conveys the gloomy feeling of an icy cave perfectly fine. Putting the differences of MJ and prototype songs aside, some other songs I thoroughly enjoy are Angel Island Zone, Hydrocity Zone (Act 1) and Lava Reef Zone (Act 1).

Even 30 years after its original release, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles managed to provide me with a surprisingly good time and I hope that many more people will continue to play it over the years. I really wish I would have grown up with the Sonic games in my childhood...

The Party Game genre on PC is a dire one, filled with low-effort streamerbait with meme ragdoll physics, battle passes for no reason, social deduction and some basic brawlers, a far cry from what developers usually offer on consoles, even those not from Nintendo. Enter Microworks, one that actually tries a little.
What you've got here is essentially 16-player online WarioWare. If you've ever played the Team Fortress 2 mod TF2Ware, by the same developers, this is basically what it is. You play many rounds of microgames in an FPS or TPS perspective and then a boss stage that's a more complex minigame, could be racing, an FPS match, or even a quiz game (sadly unlocalized, in Spanish, at least)

This game has almost everything it needed to succeed and become a classic for Discord calls with friends all over, in a similar vein to Duck Game; a gameplay premise no one else had tried to capitalize on in this way, it became free last year, added mod support with Steam Workshop this year and still has enough of a playerbase to play with randoms, even in non-first world countries.
The problem is that while people play it, it's still not popular enough, people just don't know this game, and the developers were kind of quick to give up on it, never really adding new microgames and declaring that the mod update would be the final one, basically leaving the community that decided to purchase the premium pass to do it themselves, as you can't even play the mods without buying that pass, and the developers only made the new content as Workshop mods.
After a few hours of play, you see most of the microgames, not necessarily all the boss stages, and can't help but get a little bored.

TF2Ware actually had a larger number of microgames with some that didn't make it to this game, those that used TF2's mechanics like rocket jumping or swimming. Although those aren't here, there are lots of brand new stuff possible now that this game has been made from scratch, but the potential lies untapped. There's an extra screen you use for a stacking microgame that could easily be used for more microgames closer to actual WarioWare stuff, which would've been an easy solution to adding more content without incorporating whole new mechanics that then have to be taught in the tutorial, but I think it really is only used for just the stacking microgame and the larger quiz minigame.

Next time you wanna play something simple and silly to laugh with your friends, give this a try instead of another soulless game about untextured little guys ragdolling on each other with one single gamemode, you might be surprised. You won't be playing this forever or anything, but if at least some of my followers find out that there are developers actually trying to make something with substance on PC and check out whatever Agiriko have cooking next, I'll be satisfied.