Not fun airport color sorting puzzle "simulation" type thing that I did not enjoy very much at all. 30 minutes or so with the game was all I needed to figure that out. I've been trying my best to play all of the Guild series as unspoiled as possible, and I was a bit surprised to learn this game was puzzle based. I assumed it would be some kind of airport management stuff, and while the game tells you that you are the new manager of an up and coming airport, all you really do during gameplay is sort differently colored bags into the matching planes. A lot of complexity is dumped on you pretty quickly, from simply more lines and thus more planes with luggage to manage at once, to several challenges, like VIPs wanting their luggage to be placed in the plane first to actual bombs you have to send to get disarmed instead of into a plane. In theory this sounds cool, but this game quickly reminded me that I fucking suck at multitasking. Having to babysit all the luggage going into different places all at once while having their correct destination in mind plus whatever daily objective was an extremely frustrating, slow and maddening affair, and it might be copium of the highest degree but I didn't always feel like it was my fault. Luggage has weird hitboxes, and sometimes there seems to be a coin toss if they drop or go up to the line you want to when you want that. Presentation is very minimalist, but the airport sounds do add a lot of atmosphere. I really tried with this game, but could not stand to play it for very long. I didn't get to unlock the garage feature, which just seems to mean that you can customize a plane and then send it to other players via Streetpass. Who in the absolute fuck gets Streetpass hits these days? Especially god damn Aero Porter ones? Yeah I'm not very sad I missed on that. I hate just dropping games, but I'm thinking this is one I'm not seeing the end of.

Fun campy anime 3d shooter bullet hell type thing (?) by Grasshopper Manufacture and Level 5. I think it would be fair to call this game the flagship of the Guild series, as to my knowledge it was the first released, and has the very well known Suda 51 and his team behind it. You play as Shoko, who after the death of her father, the president of Japan, gets elected as President and has to get on a flying mecha to liberate Japan from an opressive totalitarian government that is totally not China. It's all very dumb, and during the game itself that is just about everything you learn via a couple of admittedly well done anime cutscenes and the briefings between each mission. All the lore is hidden away in the gallery, which you unlock by doing random things while playing. The game is fucking ridiculous, but it takes its dumb story very seriously, and the resulting tone was pretty enjoyable. Though maybe hearing Shoko ramble on about Japan being beautiful would have gotten tiring on a longer game. There is only 5 stages here and beating them back to back took me less than two hours in normal difficulty. There is decent replay value in getting better scores, playing on hard difficulty, and unlocking all the stuff in the gallery, at least. The gameplay was nice, but kinda lacking variety. All 5 stages work the same, you need to destroy 3 identical towers to open the way to the stage boss, with random objectives peppered in between, usually destroy X of something. Bosses aside, you fight the same enemies every stage, and their tactics never evolve. There is also a single extra weapon you unlock by starting the second stage. No kind of upgrade system, no more powers or weapons. Two kinds of gun and a screen clearing attack that takes a while to charge is all you're getting. At least the game has a rather interesting gimmick in that your shield is also your ammo. Charging attacks depletes your shield but it recharges quickly when not aiming, but while you're doing it you are pretty vulnerable. Receiving damage makes you effectively weaker, so you have to be pretty aggressive. In theory, at least. In normal difficulty, regular enemies are pretty much a non threat, I don't think I ever got damaged by the slow ass tiny lasers enemies piss out, and the only thing that can deal decent damage to you outside of bosses is missiles, and those are fairly easy to counter with your own homing missiles. Bosses can fuck you up pretty fast if you are not careful, but the attack patterns aren't too complicated. I ended up not dying once during my playthrough, and I'm definitely inclined to replay this game at some point on hard, normal was too easy to really make the potential fun of the combat system show through. I wish more games did something similar, too. The shields as ammo thing is a very cool idea I want to see expanded on. Graphics are kinda muddy, but fair enough. A lot of 3ds games look like that. Seeing how short this game is, I really tried hard to play as much of it as I could with the 3d on. Whoever was the absolute genius that decided that having a gimmick that required holding a fucking portable console in place does not deserve to ever make consoles again. I was constantly having to fiddle with the system cause even moving it a tiny bit would mess up the 3d effect. And even when it was presumably working as intended, I didn't get any advantage and it wasn't very impressive. If anything, it bafflingly made it harder to judge distance in a particular boss fight, and made me take a laser to the face I feel like I would not have without the dumb ass 3d. I eventually gave up and played the final stage on 2d like god intended. The game does not have many tracks, just one per stage and boss. But all of them are pretty all right, especially the bosses. Those tend to slap hard. While overall having some nice qualities, the game is pretty barebones. It is an 8 dollar budget title, but even then I dunno if it has enough stuff to justify that price. What is here is definitely good, at least.

Level 5 is a pretty interesting developer that seems to fly under the radar a lot, despite having been making stuff for over 20 years. They were very prolific during the 3ds era, and the Guild series is a bunch of budget titles released by them that cover a wide variety of genres. Starship Damrey is one of them, and it is a puzzle survival horror type thing (?) that doesn't quite work for me. To its credit, the start of the game is genuinely cool and immediately caught my attention. You wake up inside a futuristic cryopod inside a spaceship with no memory of anything and are unable to get out, so you connect to the spaceship's OS and start remotely controlling a work robot to explore the ship and solve puzzles. The robot is a slow clunky piece of shit that can only carry one item at a time, but that was never too much of a bother because the game is designed with it on mind. Exploration is all right, I guess. The ship is actually pretty small, and kinda boring. It's a space you can feel was made with purpose in mind more than aesthetics. There's not really many interesting things to see or find, though the atmosphere is not bad. You can feel the emptiness, and the occasional sounds keep you on your toes. I think the game wants to be a horror game? The setting is there, and there are relatively frequent jumpscares for the 3 hour duration, but I think the game really misses the mark by having no fail state that I could find. There is no way to get a game over, and it makes all of the jumpscares lose their impact because you know you will always be safe. So if it doesn't work as a horror game, maybe it does as a puzzle game with horror elements? I'd say not particularly. The starting screen saying that the game had no tutorials or explanations left me hopeful. My mind was left to get hyped wondering what kind of free form puzzle solving that could entail, and the previously mentioned very interesting start of the game seemed to indicate something good. But in practice, I was really let down. Puzzles only have one way to be solved with no room for creativity, and there's not really many things to interact with, so the answer tends to be obvious just by exploring, and only one puzzle where you are required to mix some ingredients together to make something explode has what I'd call experimentation. And even then, in basically the next room over there is a very easy to find document telling you exactly what ingredients to use. So puzzles are lame and easy, the horror is almost only jumpscares with no payoff, and while the setting has a decent atmosphere, it started to feel samey and like it had run out of ideas pretty soon despite being a barely 3 hour long experience. The narrative has cool ideas, but like pretty much every other facet of the game, it stumbles. It tries, but besides the fun twist right at the end that I did not see coming, It's mostly kinda dull. Story is not very overtly present throughout most of the game, existing only as documents you read and environmental storytelling like things on a crewmate's desk or just corpses, killed by unclear means dotted around the ship. The crew of the Damrey had complex relationships with each other, but in the end it doesn't really feel like any of that matters in the game, it's all just set dressing that would be a chore to read if it wasn't just a couple of lines each. Having said all that, the game was a budget release, going for 8 dollars. I guess you get what you paid for? But I can't help but feel like there was a lot of potential here that is wasted.

I've been thinking about playing this game for a while, and I'm glad I did. It's a wonderful visual novel. The cast on each case is pretty fun, and I found that the comedy really landed for me. It's a formulaic game, but the cases are all pretty different from each other and unraveling the mystery bit by bit was fascinating. The last two in particular are brilliant. Final case was actually added on the ds rerelease, and It adds a lot of mechanics not present in the rest of the game that add a lot to the investigation, and it's probably the best one, and definitely the longest. There is a twist at every corner and it all kept me very engaged through the 20 or so hours that this game took me.

A fairly interesting short game. I dunno why but a lot of indies go for basically pennies on the eshop, so I grabbed this for 2 bucks. At that price point a game would have to eat my dog and shit on my cereal to not be worth at least a try, and this game is indeed worth one. The atmosphere is thick and overpowering. You are a child, in a world so much bigger than you full of things you don't completely understand, where almost everything wants you dead or doesn't care. You travel through a lot of desolate places, where you can tell something horrible happened, but the game leaves it all ambiguous enough to make your own conclusions. The narrative is also like that. If I remember correctly there was no spoken or even written dialogue, and the only text in the game is on menus. Nothing like documents to read or audiologs, it's a pretty linear experience. There is one series of collectables that unlock an alternate ending once you get all of them but I believe that's it. As for what passes for gameplay, there's a lot of puzzles to solve. Maybe you need to get an item on fire from one place to another without the flame going out from water, or maybe you need to get to a high place. Every puzzle is piss easy to figure out and usually just as easy to complete, but they can be tedious. There's also a lot of trial and error. Sometimes dogs chase you, or it's a stealth section and you get instakilled if detected. Point is, you can die and have to repeat stuff a lot. That's how it be sometimes I suppose. Whatever issues the game has on the gameplay side, it did stick on my head for a while just based on the atmosphere and imagery.

The Prototype series, for better or for worse, is one that I feel attached to. Prototype 1 is a game I've replayed quite a bit, and the sequel was one I had been thinking about replaying as well for a while. And now that I have done so (while also forgetting to add this here for over a month) I think I still like it. Probably the biggest issue of this replay is that the ps4 version is absolutely fucking horrendous. Somehow it runs a lot worse than the original xb360 release I played, there were constant stutters and frame drops, and even a couple of crashes. Fortunately, the game does autosave enough that I never lost too much progress, but it was always annoying. The performance is so terrible I had to play this game in chunks with quite a while of time inbetween. But even so, I don't feel like I missed too much. The story kinda sucks and didn't really keep me that engaged, though Heller is a more fun protagonist than Mercer. He is literally a man too angry to die, but is still able to crack jokes and the moments with his family and the few allies you meet humanize him. Not like any of that pussy ass characterization means anything during gameplay when being a total fucking bastard is so fun. Heller moves fast and is incredibly lethal, to the point where it's actually hard to not kill civilians as collateral damage. The game even incentivizes you to kill them a lot, as consuming people and monsters are the main way you heal. It all makes for hours of joyful sandbox fucking around, and with the way collectibles are streamlined so that they are very easy to find, this game is a very easy one to 100% complete for those weirdos who like that. I grabbed every collectible, but the optional challenges are boring for me, so I didn't bother even when they offer a couple of fun rewards, like making of videos and cheats and an Alex Mercer skin. The gameplay is markedly easier than Prototype 1, however. I remember one of my major sticking points with the previous game was how many things just staggered you and there wasn't much you could do. Now, Heller can do a pretty cool summersault that is also extremely easy to execute in order to avoid damage. But when you can't even be bothered for that, there's also the shield, which is massively improved from prototype 1, where it might as well have been made of wet paper. Here you're functionally unkillable while pressing the button, and with a bit of timing you can counter any monster attack and even return missiles aimed at you. These options are great, but I feel like they are too easy. I wouldn't have minded a bit more restriction of some kind, but I suppose they do add to the power fantasy this game offers. In conclusion, this is a fairly condensed open world game with a pretty enjoyable gameplay loop and a forgettable story with a protagonist fun enough to make it kinda work. It's good enough for a couple of fun afternoons, though preferably on a platform where it actually runs like it should.

I once played this game when I was a young little shit, and it suddenly came to my mind not too long ago. I started replaying it that day as a very spur of the moment thing, and today I beat the game again, while also doing all of the endgame fights and collecting almost every robo part, both of which are things that I didn't give a shit about last time I played this. I'm still kinda surprised I got through this game back then, only looking at a guide once that I can remember even with my shitty english level, as there is a fair bit of text and characters tell you to go do things a lot. The story is very generic, predictable and almost condescending stuff for kids, though I found some of the characters enjoyable. The combat is really where this game loses me. Firstly, the ds can barely keep up. There's constant slowdowns whenever there's a lot of shit onscreen or just from the stage moving in any one with lava or water. Making a 3d brawler for the system was pretty bold, and I can admire how hard the developers tried, but perhaps the efforts would've been better spent in making a 2d brawler that ran well instead of a 3d one that runs like shit and plays like crap. The combat itself kinda blows to be honest, there's a lot of guns, bombs and pods (which basically also drop bombs) that work very differently, but easily 90% are total gimmicks that aren't worth the effort required to use effectively when there are several easy to use and low risk alternatives with good damage, and once I found a loadout that worked well together I had no reason to change it as I basically never lost in any story fight. Doesn't mean it was fun to stomp either, I swear every single enemy loves to run around like a headless chicken so killing them tends to take a while, and every single motherfucker can do a sort of tackle that hits like a truck, has a near instant startup animation and seemingly at random it's uninterruptible. Only the AI can do this by the way, not the player. You eat shit and take that 200 damage because fuck you. The combat themselves just don't feel great, there's a certain clunkyness to it all. Your jump leaves you unable to move for a bit when you land, though there are certain leg parts to alleviate this, and getting hit stuns you pretty easily. I could never really figure out why but some attacks seemed to stun for a lot longer, even if they were not freeze bombs or pods which are supposedly made for that. Still, I think dealing with all of the bullshit challenges and grinding for the endgame fights with annoying requirements left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. I really think this series could use one more entry, it has been over 10 years, a lot of things could be refined. Hell, I'd even take a spiritual successor at this point.

Dark Souls but Star Wars is a very intriguing concept that definitely attracted a lot of people to this game, me included. Having finished it, I think Respawn did a pretty good job making said concept work, even if I have some issues. Biggest problem by far for me was the constant performance issues. Frequent and very consistent frame drops (some jumps in particular scattered throughout the game always slowed down the game massively for some reason) plus a lot of bugs and glitches and a couple of crashes to top it all off give this game an air of being unpolished that perhaps some extra months in the oven could have fixed. Granted, I played it in the now ancient ps4, but this game came out before the new gen consoles, surely they expected people to play this on the piss 4 and xbone. I've heard that it has similar issues in pc as well, so it might be a game problem more than a system one. Combat wise, I feel like Cal was a bit more sticky to control than he perhaps should have been. His animations frequently lock him in place, and it felt like he took longer to actually react to my button presses than he should have. Exploration was kinda cool, there's a lot hidden collectibles around. Though the majority of them are fucking lightsaber pieces when the thing is miniscule on screen 90% of the time and hidden by Cal's sweaty hands. Music was orchestral Star Wars stuff, which usually has a pretty unique feel compared to other properties, though it all kinda blends together in my head. The story wasn't bad, I liked how traumatized Cal seemed from the jedi purge and how he slowly healed from that and became a stronger person, but knowing how things happen between episode 3 and 4 and thus it can't really change the story in those movies makes it all feel pretty pointless. Sequel got announced around the time I was playing this, which was neat. Hopefully I found a ps5 by then, I would like to see this game improved upon.

Fun little game, though I can't say that it stuck much in my memory. I kinda forgot putting this here, and it took me a while to remember I'd even played it. No puzzle was difficult in the slightest, for most I was able to figure out the solution immediately, and the story is just an excuse for fun setpieces. Music was generic, bubbly and upbeat songs that left my brain the second they were over, and the graphics have this simplistic, cartoon look to them that I enjoyed, but also didn't left much of an impact on me. This game is just 5-6 hours of fun content, but not very remarkable, the kind of stuff that lives as steam key bundle padding or constantly on sale for very cheap, which is how I got it. It's an alright purchase at those kinds of low prices, but not much more than that.

Tough as fuck platformer at times. The story didn't quite resonate with me, but I can totally see why someone else might love it. The pixel art is very nice, and the music was a bit more subdued than what I would've liked. Though it was maybe on purpose to not be too distracting. The gameplay was pretty enjoyable, they give you just enough tools that are complimented by whatever gimmicks the level has. If you only try to move forward it's all very doable even with no assist mode, but getting all the collectibles is hell. Some of the jumps for getting strawberries are the antichrist. Might circle back to this game at some point to collect what I missed and do some of the harder levels.

An interesting adventure game that made a real emphasis on your choices and their consequences. I started this game sometime on November and it took me until today to actually continue it. I found it a very stressful experience, and it makes sense. You are the king of a small nation, and you have to deal with several major threats while balancing everyone's needs and wants. Just like in real life, it is straight up impossible to please or help everyone. Your puny little kingdom does not have the resources or the manpower for that, so you have to compromise. You play as a very well defined character, and the solid writing made me attached to the rest of the cast, and I often found myself making choices based on what I thought Henryk might do. While there are a lot of possible ways to get there, the ending appears to be always the same, which is a bit of a letdown. Still, I don't regret playing this game, and was a bit sad when I was done with it in around 5 or 6 hours. There's some replayability in making different choices, at least. Visually, this game has a pretty chunky pixel art that looks really nice, and the characters can be surprisingly expressive despite not having any faces and being fairly small on screen. Also, I was not expecting the soundtrack to be such a banger. There's no song I dislike, and some are a very interesting type of polish folk-metal core type thing that I want to listen more of.

Finally got around to this game after playing uncharted 1 through 3 back to back last year. I'm still not a fan of the kind of cover based tps Uncharted does, but I can say I had fun sometimes. I've played every game in hard, and there is always some very fun and engaging sequences, and some annoying ones where I kept dying because of how many enemies there were. Armored enemies are particularly annoying, they just don't give a shit and will rush your ass, and unless you're in stealth mode you can't kill them with melee. Speaking of, this game adds stealth, and it's very superficial. In some fights, you start out hidden and can take out some enemies without alerting the others, but in my experience it is incredibly hard to not get noticed, and even on one occasion I managed to stealth kill all but one enemy, and I decided to shoot that last one. The moment I did, another group of cunts showed up, already alerted and I died. Also they took out throwing back grenades, which is a shame. Now, the story. I severely dislike Drake. It's not just that he's a sociopath who murders hundreds of people per game, that's standard procedure for a video game character, but he also never shuts the fuck up. Always has to drop a quip, no matter how awful or drawn out. He's not the only one, Helena and Sully also do it, as well as the asspulled brother Sam. I'm fairly certain Sam is a big ass retcon, and he's just as unlikeable as Nathan. Speaking of him, he's basically the exact same he was at the beginning of uncharted 4, just a bit older. Despite all his adventures and misfortunes, Drake remains the same arrogant smug asshole and never learned anything. He alienates his wife and father figure basically every game, and they always come back to save him near the end of the game regardless. He has suffered virtually no consequences for anything that has happened, and it does annoy me how the fact he has killed thousands is never acknowledged ever.

Very solid metroidvania, though it doesn't do that much to separate itself from others. The combat was fun and the biggest focus of the gameplay, the platforming in here almost never matters and remains really basic the whole way through. Combat consists of juggling 6 of your spirits around and can get pretty hectic. Enemies are fast and hit really hard, but your character is really agile and your dodge gives you a lot of invulnerability so it's usually very doable. I particularly enjoy the bosses, they all feel impossible the first try but as you start getting the patterns down it becomes very doable and fun to beat their asses and looking cool while doing so. The music has some nice moments, especially when Mili comes in and sings some lyrics, but that's not often. Most of the time it's very generic and honestly boring at this point sad piano. As soon as I finished this game I completely forgot every track that wasn't Mili. Visually this game is a treat, the enemy designs are gross as fuck and interesting to look at, as well as the rest of the world. Everything looks cold and dirty, which makes sense for the setting, which is a ruined kingdom. Speaking of which, I found the story very unengaging. Most of it is told through documents you find and read, but there was something about it that really failed to get my attention. I already don't remember much, and even the cutscenes felt bland. Like I said at the beginning, this game is very well made, but there's not much here that I could really call original. And you know what, that is perfectly fine. I don't regret spending around 22 hours getting everything in this game, some very annoying to get collectibles aside. The map always tells you if a room connects to another, a vague direction where that connection is, and if there is a secret there. Some more detailed room layout might've been useful, but the game tells you just enough so that you don't get too lost and secret finding remains satisfying and not irritating.

Over 300 hundred hours clicking the cookie make this my most played game on steam after less than a month of buying the game. I've always enjoyed clickers, and out of all of them, this is probably the best one with the most depth. Very original setting, with a lot of fun flavor text, though it repeats a fair bit. The game also has modding, which is always a big plus, though I haven't touched any mods yet. Despite 300 hours, I don't feel like I have seen everything this game has to offer. For 5 smackers, this is a pretty solid purchase, can recommend.

This is not a perfect game. Honestly, I'm not sure if I would even call it a good game. And yet, something about it has made me replay it about four or five times, probably more times than any other game I've replayed ever. The movement system is fluid and it's a joy to go from place to place in the city, Mercer has a mobility that not even Heller in Prototype 2 reaches, and fucking around throwing cars and old ladies is pretty cathartic sandbox fun. I don't think there's any aspect of this game I don't have issues with though. Game looks like shit, the story is shit, there's no sidequests other than shitty challenges and stupid collectibles that I refuse to get because there's like 500 of the fuckers around the single ugliest depiction of Manhattan I've ever seen, somehow even uglier than the real thing, I don't remember a single track of the soundtrack, and while the movement system is fun, it just breaks down in small spaces or when you need precision.

Gameplay in general has a fair bit of issues, in my opinion. Way too many soldiers with rocket launchers that can stun you, and the hunters, the beefiest type of infected, are incredibly irritating. They have this one attack that's a flurry of claw swipes; It's unblockable, uninterruptible, interrupts your own combos, it's first few swipes stun you a bit so you will always take some hits, and it does a shitload of damage. And naturally, they spam the attack all the fuckin time. They are also capable of outrunning you even at the highest running speed possible, and love to claw you in the ass while you're trying to flee. Terrible game I hate it. Will replay again next year.