There's a sense of earnestness that emanates from the game. It can be easy to roll your eyes at times - this is a game that's ultimately about the power of friendship after all. However more than anything else I believe that Persona 3 is a game that's asking you to set aside your cynicism.

The game does a good job of getting you invested in its characters. Its a long game, and you are constantly exposed to your party. There's a large amount of unique dialogue that gradually fleshes out the group, it is practically inevitable that you'll become invested in them over time. You get to connect further in the dorm hangouts, which are a great addition, they add a lot of life to the game. The story starts out slow, but it grows over time, building up into something that is emotionally resonant. The ending in particular is beautiful.

There are some issues. The social simulation part of the game is fairly bare-bones. Some of the social links are overly stretched out and unsatisfying. Tartarus is too drawn-out and samey. But there are highlights to. Fantastic side stories: the sun social link and some of the linked episodes being the highlights. Fully voiced social links adds life to evening the most boring interaction. Fusing overpowered personas is a joy. The fantastic music and stylish presentation shines bright throughout the game.

Is Reload a worthy remake of the original? I don't know, I never played any prior incarnation of Persona 3 . I can only look on the game in isolation, and from that perspective I believe Reload stands up well on its own merits.

What I noticed right away is that this is a visual novel (VN) that actually nails the visuals. There's a lot of effort put into having numerous custom backgrounds and sprites and also having characters interact with things in the background. It feels nice to play a VN where the visual aspect is given the attention it deserves.

I also appreciate the amount of choice you are given in your own dialogue. There are a numerous amount of responses that cover what you'd reasonably want to say in response to something in almost all circumstances. Better yet, what you say actually matters. Characters will form lasting opinions of you based on what you say and their perceptions of you will actually effect the story in significant ways. Scarlet Hollow also doesn't flaunt the fact that what you're saying matters: there is no "X will remember that" that pops up, because it'd have to pop up every 30 seconds with how often the things you say matter.

The writing is pretty good, it feels smart and the characters are well done. On the whole I like the story, but it isn't finished yet so its hard to truly judge. That's my biggest complaint really, that the game isn't finished yet.

Wildfrost boasts an adorable art direction, a wonderfully vibrant soundtrack, and numerous fantastic design decisions. The combo system and the golbling enemy keeps early game fights interesting: with every different hero and pet combination comes a different strategy to maximize money on the early fights. The charm system is great, its very customizable and provides a lot of run variety. And runs themselves aren't overly long; Wildfrost isn't a rougelike that takes over an hour to get through, rather a shorter and sweeter thirty to forty minutes. Its good that the run length is shorter because Wildfrost demands a lot of your attention. Battles are quite tactical and you need to be very attentive in them or things can quickly go wrong. No matter what difficulty setting you're on you're never more than two steps away from losing.

Wildfrost's difficulty progression is also not extremely stretched out in the way other games in the genre are. Seriously, Slay the Spire is a great game but having to grind through 20 ascension levels for 4 different characters is obnoxious and a huge time sink. Instead Wildfrost has a difficulty modifier system where you pick and choose diffuclty bells that add additional challenge (similar to Hades). You only have to level up the difficulty five times before the max is unlocked, and the levels carry over across factions, its so much nicer to the player.

I can comfortable say that the difficulty is well balanced. The game starts out tougher than other games I've seen in the rougelike deckbuilder genre which I believe is a good thing, as it means I'm not having to grind my way through several difficulty tiers before actually feeling any resistance. Still at the start its easy enough that its not overly difficult to get some wins. There's plenty of resistance later on though. I've now beaten Wildfrost's ultimate challenge 3 times, and it at first looked near impossible. But now I can comfortably say its a well designed challenge that pushes the game's difficulty to its limits, but not past them.

I love the way that the final boss works in this game, its a creative idea implemented extremely well, in a way that smooths out what otherwise could've been some very rough edges. The card designs are good, using a fairly simple set of mechanics that are implemented in a well balanced and interesting way. I enjoy the timer system, it makes me think about card value in a way a traditional mana system doesn't. Enemy designs are also on point, each encounter has its own distinct flavor and tests a different aspect of your tactics and deckbuilding. Wildfrost has cemented itself in my mind as one of the best of the genre. In fact I'm brave enough to say that for me it IS the best in the genre. I encourage you to give it a shot, hopefully you'll like it as much as I did.

I only realized how good it was after I finished it. Replaying levels is where Pizza Tower's greatness really shines, and the game really really wants you to replay levels over and over and to truly master them. The first playthrough of a level isn't nearly as great as Pizza Tower can become - you're more or less just failing your way through the level as there isn't really a strict fail state. Pizza Time does have a timer but its plenty generous for a first run-through of a level. However the things is that the game clearly incentives replaying levels, its scoring system clearly encourages it. And for those that do so, they'll find out how great the game can be.

Going fast feels FANTASTIC, and playing that way is also very rewarding. Blast through enemies and blocks, slide and roll through small gaps, run up and jump off walls, it all flows together in a wonderful blur. There's quite a sizeable moveset at your disposal, and I appreciate that the game accomplishes this through the use of context sensitive inputs instead of overly elaborate input combos or through the use of a billion buttons. I think that going context sensitive makes it far easier to get a handle on the moveset. I can't emphasize enough how good it all feels, moving around through Pizza Tower is a energetic joy. I also must credit the animation work: it maintains a high level of visual responsiveness even at top speed, no matter how fast I was going I could also tell exactly what was going on, which isn't always a given in games.

So far I've P-Ranked all of floor 1, and nothing else. I started the process of P-Ranking each level by just playing it repeatedly, not trying to even keep my combo up the whole time, just trying to play through the level and play it somewhat well. By the time I S-Ranked each level, I had enough understanding of it that I felt ready to go for P. I think that the process of P-Ranking a level (keeping a combo going from the first room to the very end) is actually quite doable. There are item pickups and enemies to kill that'll refill your combo bar that are scattered plentifully throughout the levels, and even if you get hit your combo doesn't immediately end, if you find a way to quickly refill the bar you can keep things going. The combo bar actually ticks down fairly slowly, so even if you aren't going as fast as possible you should still be able to keep your combo alive. Most importantly, the levels are designed extremely well, in many ways, but in specifically in the way that there's a great awareness of the speed a player will be going at. For sections that let you go fast, objects and obstacles will be spaced out far enough to give you time to properly react. Pizza Tower doesn't really push your inputs to a extreme level of precision, not in a way a platformer like Celeste does, which I think is a good thing because Pizza Tower's challenge is completing an entire level, not a single screen. Success in Pizza Tower doesn't come down mechanical perfection, it comes down to level knowledge and proper planning of your route through it, and mechanical goodness.

I saw the credits of Pizza Tower, but I'm definitely not done playing, there are plenty of levels left for me to master and I look forward to figuring them all out. However I've seen enough to call it: this game is fantastic! I highly recommend giving it a "slice" of your time if you haven't already.

ps: some quick bullet points
- I love the cartoony artstyle, I think its great and its undeniably well realized
- I wish the criteria for getting a P-Rank were explained in game
- the second lap mechanic is fantastic design: it allows for the pizza time timer to be lenient for the first time playing a level while offering a fun challenge when truly mastering it
- the parry mechanic should've had a tutorial
- the ost is incredible, Pizza Tower was robbed at the game awards!

Ultimately a worthwhile experience, although I found myself a little underwhelmed at the end. That being said, Slay the Princess is a very cool game. It has a wide variety of routes and it plays around with dialogue options in ways I haven't seen other games do before. The pencil-drawn art-style looks quite distinctive and the game looks overall looks great. I thought the dialogue was pretty intelligent and I appreciated the wide range of dialogue options I was given, I pretty much always felt I had enough options to represent what I wanted to say/do. I had a great time exploring what Slay the Princess had to offer

However I do believe the game has some flaws on a larger level. A lot of the routes can end up feeling formulaic. I played through the game twice doing different routes, and although I started feeling this way during my first playthrough, it became blindingly obvious during my second. I think the game is somewhat aware of this problem which is which you're only allowed to see a limited amount of routes during one playthrough. I still think its a bit of a problem, but its less of one because the game has the good sense to end before it becomes a bigger issue.

I also found the ending a bit underwhelming. I can't really call it bad, but I don't really think the philosophy the ending dealt with was all that impressive. It didn't really feel worth all the build up.

All of that being said, I did enjoy my time with the game quite a bit, and I'd easily give it a recommendation to anyone who enjoys visual novels and/or games with lots of diverging paths. Do take those content warnings seriously though.

ps: I liked this enough to buy Scarlet Hollow (the other game by these devs) and its been great so far, worth checking out!

I finished Sekiro - on my fourth try. The first three attempts all ended very early on in the game. There are many issues with Sekiro that are sometimes exacerbated early on in the game. The game also presents itself as more punishing than it actually is, mechanics like dragonrot, like losing a significant amount of experience points and money on death all sound extremely punishing until you get far enough into the game to realize that they don't matter. Not that those mechanics aren't annoyances, they are, but they aren't as impactful as they'd first appear to be. Nonetheless they do feel quite menacing early on in the game, and that's not the only problem the early-game has. There are three problems with the Sekiro early-game: the bosses, the stealth gameplay, and multi-enemy combat.

Sekiro's combat works well when you are fighting a single enemy. You can focus on reading one enemy's moves and react accordingly. For the most part you don't actually defeat enemies by depleting their health to zero, you win by building up their posture bar to full and then doing a deathblow. This posture bar regenerates if you do not continue engaging the enemy. This creates a major problem in multi-enemy fights, because whenever you switch from one enemy to another, the enemy you switched away from will regenerate their posture, erasing all the progress you just made. Most enemies can block your attacks unless you finding specific openings, and that's okay for a one on one battle because you still inflict posture buildup on the enemy even if they block, but whenever you switch targets in a group fight all your progress goes away. It also becomes monumentally more difficult to deflect attacks when you have multiple enemies coming at you, attacks can overlap in ways that are extremely difficult, if not outright impossible to defend against. You are also bound by the limitations of the camera, enemies can and will attack you from off-screen, or flank you outside of the range of the camera. Oftentimes the best thing to do when caught in a group fight is to run away and go for stealth kills. Its unfortunate then that the stealth gameplay is mediocre at best. You will sneak behind enemies to perform back-stabs. Sometimes you will crouch in tall grass while some enemies walk by. There are some consumable throwables to distract enemies that you will never use. The depth to the stealth ends just about there. Its an alright system when you're just trying to evade enemies - in Sekiro you aren't incentivised that much to fight enemies so its okay to skip some of them. Some sections do even seem designed for you to not fight but just sneak by, but far more commonly Sekiro has the nasty problem of throwing a mini-boss at you, a mini-boss that is surrounded by enemies that you have to stealth-kill in order to do the boss. Unlike regular enemies you are heavily incentivised to fight mini-bosses as you won't be able to increase your health and posture bar without the items they drop. Some of these mini-bosses can be quite tricky, especially at the start of the game when you're still learning how to properly play. Having to spend time stealth killing the same packs of enemies over and over again, just to get another shot at a mini-boss is not a good experience. More than anything else, the frustration of doing this is what caused my first three playthroughs to be aborted.

Let's go over some of the early bosses and mini-bosses in Sekiro. There are multiple Ashina generals, the first one is alone so you get to immediately get to fight a one on one. He is likely the first mini-boss you will fight, and I think he serves that purpose well, with fairly basic attacks that test the fundamentals of the game's combat system. He even comes back as a regular enemy in the game's final act. However he can still be tricky for new players, ones that don't have a solid grasp on the combat's fundamentals. The next two times you fight this mini-boss he is surrounded by other enemies, for every try at him you will have to engage in the stealth system in order to take them out. This is massively tedious, and just drags at what is otherwise a fun encounter. Its the same story for the Seven Ashina Spears mini-boss, good encounter, shame about all the stealth gameplay you have to redo for each attempt. The Chained Ogre is one of the few mini-bosses that doesn't have this problem, instead the boss is just poorly designed in that it teaches players the wrong lessons, as the best way to approach fighting him is to rely heavily on dodges, which is very far from what Sekiro's combat normally demands of you. The boss would be better placed later on in the game as a change of pace, not as an introductory mini-boss that teaches new players the wrong lessons. Then there are the main bosses. The first two - Gyoubu and Lady Butterfly, have pretty significant problems. Lady Butterfly has a pretty good first phase, but her second phase has one glaring issue which is her spirit summon attack. She summons many spirit warriors that will remain on the battlefield and attack you for a significant amount of time. This move kills the momentum of the fight, as every time she does it the player has no better option than to run away until the spirits disappear. It is unfeasible to engage with the boss while the spirits are still active, its group combat again which Sekiro does not do well. You will be surrounded by spirits as you deflect Lady Butterfly's attacks and, to put it bluntly, be ganked to death. I found myself simply running in circles waiting for the actual fight to resume. The only other option is to be so relentlessly aggressive that she never gets a chance to summon, but if the only way to deal with a move is not let it be used at all, than the move is bad. Gyoubu doesn't have any problems so glaring, he's just a bit of a janky fight. His attacks from horse-top fail to reach the player about half of the time, and the horse movement was often prone to bugs like getting stuck running into walls. He's also a boss who, despite the ability to grapple close to him at some points, still has a problem where you'll be spending a bit too much time watching him run around, waiting for him to get close so the fight can resume. Its not until Genichiro that Sekiro has a truly great boss.

None of my first three goes at Sekiro made it to Genichiro, and I think that if they had, I would've been able to finish the game, because Genichiro gave me something to appreciate. He is an excellently designed boss that showcases Sekiro's combat system. It can be thrilling to get into a chain of fast paced deflections and attacks. Learning the intricacies of his parry timings is satisfying and feels rewarding to pull off. He has a nicely varied moveset that allows you to use all of Sekiro's defensive options while still maintaining room for you to punish and play proactively at times. Each attack chain blends together into one continuous exchange, tied together by your own attacks, and punctuated by an extremely satisfying and well-earned deathblow. Boss combat is where Sekiro shines, but its a shame that only starts shining with Genichiro. On my fourth attempt, I made it to Genichiro and I beat him. After that I knew that I was going to finish the game this time, because the game had delivered me a fantastic boss. There were more excellent bosses to come, Guardian Ape and Isshin were two highlights for me.

One of my favorite games of all time is Furi. Although Furi's combat system works differently from Sekiro's, the feeling of fighting a Furi boss felt a lot like the great moments fighting Sekiro bosses. The difference between Furi and Sekiro is that Furi is a boss rush game. There is nothing in Furi to detract from what the game is really about, the game does one thing, and it does it near flawlessly. Sekiro does not have the same level of focus that Furi does. Sekiro does a lot more, but it does a lot of it poorly. Sekiro's great bosses are why I finished the game, everything else is why it took me four attempts to get through it all. I can't say if finishing the game was truly worth all the effort I put into it, but now that I'm done I would not take that time back. But I would not recommend anyone who struggled to get into the game like I did spend the same time trying.

Give me a version of this game where each run is shortened down to 10 minutes. Customizing your deck and strategy is fun, but it there's simply too much time spent micromanaging a run. From mindlessly playing your
landscape cards, to hovering over every single new piece of equipment to see if its slightly better than what you already have, its just too much time spent.

There is a lot of depth in your deck customization though. Despite there being a pretty small card pool there are a lot of interesting combinations and synergies to think about. Unfortunately there are also a bunch
of hidden mechanics that without using the internet you're unlikely to figure out. There are also mechanics that are under-explained or just actually explained wrongly within the game. I do not think this level of
obscurity is a good thing, there's already a lot of figure out without hidden mechanics.

Overall I had a good time with the game. The presentation; from the music, to the graphics, to the sound design, was immaculate. The story is minimal but what is there is decent. I had a good time thinking about
all of the different combinations and approaches I could take to beating the game, and I appreciate that the last chapter is hard enough to actually push you into sinking into the depth the game has to offer.
However, the moment to moment gameplay is not at all engaging, to the point where I was lowering the game's volume and listening to audiobooks instead. I wish each run was shorter, so I could've spent more time
engaging with the good parts of the game. As it stands, I feel far too much of my time was wasted.

(the audiobook was The Fellowship of the Ring, I got through the entire book while playing this game)

Not to be overly dramatic but having unskippable cutscenes while also having cutscenes play everytime you retry a boss or a combat is a game design cardinal sin and a crime against humanity. It doesn't matter that the cutscenes are actually quite fun and entertaining, by the third or fourth time I'm watching it all joy has been sapped away and I'm just disgusted. The gameplay was alright, I was having a blast with it at the start but overtime I cooled on it. Summoning in your teammates to attack is a cool idea but it really didn't work well in practice. Far too much of combat became about summoning your teammates, taking away from the far more interesting rhythm game aspect.

I dunno, I didn't like this far as much as I hoped I would. Despite frustrations I can still say I had an overall good time, but I don't think I'll ever want to come back to this. But still the baseline level of quality here is pretty high. I grant HIFI Rush a begrudging "its good, I guess".

PS: Outside of the licensed tracks, a lot of the music ended up sounding samey, I was hoping for better from a game designed so heavily around music.

Potionomics is a shop management game, and a deck builder game, and a potion crafting game, and a visual novel all in one. With so many different elements being put together, Potionomics lives and dies based on how well everything blends. Fortunately, all of these different elements manage to work together, far more than they clash.

Every mechanic in Potionomics is so tied together that it is hard to talk about any of them in isolation. Nothing in the game is too complicated, and I dare say that on their own, each element of the game isn't all that impressive. The deck building is relatively simple, its not THAT hard to manage your shop, potion brewing requires experimentation but its hard to go far astray, and the characters in the game are interesting and likable, but not really that deep. However Potionomics is a game that is more than the sum of its parts. Every part of the game is fun, and you will constantly be whisked from one part of the game to another, keeping each aspect fresh and enjoyable. This is not a game where you can focus on one aspect and ignore the rest, Potionomics demands that you interact with everything it has to offer, and the game is much better for it.

While the game does do a good job at combining everything together, there are some cracks where it doesn't work as well. For example, the main use for hero expeditions is to acquire upgrade materials for your equipment, however these upgrades are always very small, and will be outclassed by the next tier of equipment that unlocks after a set amount of time. The only time getting upgrade materials is ever worth it is when you unlock the last tier of equipment. Another example is the competitions. Competitions are the ultimate test of your potion brewing and deck building, however if you brew your potions well enough the deck building aspect can be completely skipped. It can be very anticlimactic to build up to a competition, and then just immediately win because your potions are superior. Fortunately times when I found different elements of the game not working well together were the exception during my time with Potionomics, overall everything blended together harmoniously.

There are also some minor complaints I have. Potion brewing could get tedious at times, especially as I progressed through the game and expanded my shop to be able to brew more and more potions. I found myself forgetting the recipes to potions I had already made and having to rediscover them all over again. The game would be much improved if there was some sort of brewing history function where you could review everything that you had made and re-brew directly from there if you wanted another batch. There are also some other gripes: While the brewing menu has filtering options available, the shopping menu doesn't(1), which made it much harder to find a specific ingredient I was looking for than it needed to be. There are some other small UI issues. Sometimes the social interactions ended up feeling formulaic. But these issues were minor. They never stopped me from enjoying the game.

There's one thing I haven't yet mentioned, and its very important. Potionomics is charming. It has wonderful graphics, great character designs with stellar animations that really bring life to the characters. There is a lot of music and its all wonderful. The writing was a surprise to me, but it made me smile and laugh several times over the course of the game. Yes I have some issues with parts of the game's design, but overall, I love what's here. I respect how bold this game is, combining a lot of different elements that I wasn't sure could even could be combined successfully. I will remember my time with this game fondly. If the game sounds interesting to you at all I highly encourage that you play it, I doubt that you will be disappointed.

(1)This has since been patched into the game

Pyre is a shockingly cohesive game. When I first learned that Pyre was a "sports - virtual novel hybrid" my first thought was about how that could possibly work. The fact that it does is a testament to how well this game is designed.

The best thing about Pyre is the Rites (the sports matches). Like any good sport the rules are simple, however there is a lot of depth to the gameplay, and the game will never stop pushing you to find that depth. The fast paced and high stakes nature of the Rites makes them thrilling and engaging to perform. Part of the way the game accomplishes this is by characterizing the opposing teams effectively. The opponents will never be just a nameless enemy, they will have motives, and mostly likely a bone to pick against you. There are significant consequences to winning or losing that go beyond just leveling up, but effect the story to.

Although Pyre has virtual novel elements, the game is actually fairly light on story and dialogue. There is a significant amount of it, but its never overwhelming, and it'll never get in the way of the star of the show, the Rites. The story has good themes and is compelling, and the characters get just enough time for you care about them.

I only have one nitpick, which is the hard mode. This mode is locked until you beat the game so this won't affect the average player, but its still a minor flaw. The main issue is that the increases in difficulty aren't fun, because they change the rules of the game in a way that feel unfair. Sports matches are all balanced sides, and the difficulty modifiers tip the scales in a way that feels very much so unbalanced against the player. I'd much rather have experienced a more organic difficulty increase.

That being said, I still consider Pyre to be amazing. The game has no major flaws, and manages to be great at everything it does. In typical Super Giant fashion, the visuals and music are both excellent. The game is tightly designed and tightly paced. The only thing I'm disappointed about is that so few people have played it. The game is an extremely unique experience and deserves your attention. Play Pyre.

Transistor is an incredible game that I wish was even better. It has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a game. It also has absolutely gorgeous graphics. Those aren't what I wish was better though, its the gameplay.

The gameplay is very unique, a fusion of turn based and top-down action. However I don't think this fusion was successful. The turn based element is fun, its cool to plan out your actions and learn how to eke the most that you can out of each turn. However once the turn is over, abilities are disabled, and the player is left to flop around like a fish out of water. That's half of each combat where you're impotent! Even when not experiencing a turn cooldown, the combat outside of the turn isn't very engaging. However, there is potential to this system, and it manages to be enjoyable, however other parts of overall combat design bring it down.

Even though Transistor is very short, I felt the game had a lack of enemy variety. There is an extremely small amount of them, and the majority of them are introduced very early on. The game attempts to accommodate for this for having the enemies gain new abilities over the course of the game, however most of these new abilities didn't significantly change the way's I dealt with them. I won't delve into specifics, but even when the game introduces new enemies, sometimes they are overused to the point where the novelty wears off very quickly.

One final aspect to the gameplay is the functions system. The amount of options presented to the player is very cool, and there's a good trickle of functions over the course of the game so that the player isn't overwhelmed right at the start. There is a very impressive amount of potential builds to be created with these functions, however the games "encouragement" to experiment with them is clumsy to say the least. Whenever your hp bar empties, a function is disabled for multiple upcoming combats. This will likely be a function that was very important to your build, guaranteeing that the you'll need to change up your build. I understand the intended affect of this: to get the player to experiment with different builds, however it simply isn't fun to deal with losing functions. The game should have simply allowed players to experiment on their own terms, instead of forcing them to.

There is still a lot to love about the game. The story while for the most part is just ok, ends well, and the music and visuals are incredible. I just wish the rest of Transistor reached the same heights.

Bastion is a game with no big flaws, but it is also a game that doesn't do anything particularly impressive. It has functional combat, but its not particularly interesting. The visuals look alright, but aren't that great. The story has some interesting ideas, but there's not much to it.

The most interesting thing about Bastion was its narrator. He added a lot of important context and spiced up sections that would otherwise be very bland. The reactiveness to different actions you could take over the course of the game was also good. He was also used very well in the overarching story.

The game has a lot of different weapons available, however it actually feels like there's too many of them. Bastion is a very short game, and with the amount of weapons available there's no way the majority of them will get a significant amount of use. You also can't preview a level before traveling there, so you won't know what weapon you'd want to use for a level before you go, and although there are occasionally opportunities to change weapons mid-level, they're very rare. Since weapons are also upgradeable, you're even more encouraged to use one set of weapons throughout the game, as you won't have the resources to try anything else.

One of the game's gimmicks is that the level assembles/disassembles itself around you as you progress through it. This was introduced as a way to easily tell where you're going, but I had the opposite experience. Being unable to see the path ahead of me until I got close to it made it harder to progress, and I would frequently have to resort walking in a circle around whatever island I was currently on to try and see where the next bridge would assemble itself at.

Overall these aren't major flaws, and the game has stuff going for it. The narrator is good, the music is very enjoyable, and while the gameplay isn't great or very impressive, its fine and hard to be bored by. Maybe Bastion was more groundbreaking back when it first came out.