Prime example of a flawed masterpiece. Symphony has a lot of bloat that isn't quite as present in other hallmarks of the genre. The game's arguably complex to a fault, and it's full of unnecessary stuff. 95% of the gear you acquire will end up serving no purpose but to clutter your inventory, the long & linear hallways offer little variety in challenge and make backtracking a bit of a chore, a good amount of the abilities you obtain only have fringe use-cases that are only useful in one or two rooms of the entire castle, magic spells and familiars are kind of useless - you get the idea.

All that said, something being "unnecessary" (in terms of not acting as a meaningful addition to the overall game) doesn't preclude something from being entertaining as hell, and Symphony triumphantly fights through the aforementioned bloat to carve out a space as a game that few others can compete with when it comes to the sheer sense of wonder and sense of discovery that it has. A lot of the weird edge case equipment and goofy joke items and obscure secret rooms merely exist just to reward someone who's clever enough to snuff out and experiment with the game's outer limits. Few other 2D games do so well at creating those incentives and going beyond a bunch of mandatory and bonus upgrades. The spinning bookshelf in the library, the chapel ghosts, the clock tower statues, the dark spike room... Not everything was important, and it sure could have used some more balance, but the way in which SOTN simply & ambitiously just provides more is extremely admirable and set new benchmarks for what all metroidvania games could provide. The effects of which are still easily felt in similar games coming out today, and for the better.

I was really upset about something in my life when I started playing it. When I finished, I totally forgot what I was upset about, and I had a big smile on my face.

A Short Hike is Summer and Childhood. It is beach trips with your aunt and beautiful pixel graphics that give it a true charm. The calming music swirls around you and you forget you're playing a game, and you're just - you're just there, salty wind on your face, talking to your friends, playing silly beachstickball games, learning to climb, growing as a person.

and

It helped me mourn my childhood by celebrating adventures i never got to have

There are very few games that actively make me uncomfortable as I play through them through no intent of their own. Some of my favorite games make me uncomfortable on purpose, like Silent Hill 2. Cult of the Lamb, however, made me feel just... uneasy the entirety of my 20 hour play through. It's hard to describe why. I didn't really understand why until I got to the late game. There's one action I unlocked toward the end, though, that recontextualized everything about it for me.

In the game, as you are a cult leader, you unlock various rituals for your cultists to partake in in order to get various different buffs to the work of your cult during the time of the ritual. There's pretty simple stuff, like a vacation day that leads to your followers becoming more loyal thanks to the free time or the fishing ritual that lets you catch more fish. Ignoring the fact that these mechanics are largely useless in the grand scheme of the game since every issue can be solved with a few interactions, there's one ritual that really upset me upon unlocking it: you can marry your followers.

Sure, it's not some deeply sexual affair, obviously - it's just a weird cutesy ceremony - but it made me rethink the entire gameplay loop of the game. This game incentivizes systems of abuse and power, taking advantage of the members of the cult that you groom into loving and adoring you. It's in a similar vein to Minecraft's villagers, where the game systems themselves inherently reward you for recreating awful real-life political structures that lead to violence. The most efficient way of dealing with an older cult member is to simply kill them. Ignoring your followers is an optimal strategy since holding sermons will build their faith in you regardless of how much attention you pay to them, but making them codependent on you is important to progress through the game. You can work them to death and they won't bat an eye; murder one of them front of everyone else because the game asked you to and your followers will care for about five seconds before moving on to the next thing.

I know this all sounds very goofy, considering it's a game about cartoon animals, but to me this game represents a desire in games that I personally dislike: how we use games to recreate violence, and how that violence is designed to be addicting. These systems reward abuse and neglect and create a feedback loop of more suffering. But we keep making them.

And the game has nothing to say about the ideas it portrays. Other than, "isn't this fucked up, lol?", of course. Generic "cartoon animals aren't usually violent" humor.