This is, and I cannot stress this enough, the Advent Children of Undertale on every level. Passionate, technically impressive, generationally cool and detrimentally reverent to a source material I'm not totally sure anyone involved in the development has actually played. If Undertale fans had their way every single video game ever would be Disbelief Papyrus on repeat, maybe the best thing I can say about UTY is the divine restraint it took to not just cram three different Megalovania mashups on the soundtrack and I can't be sure they didn't try.

I'm glad this exists, I'm glad I played it, but boy am I glad that Undertale 2 turned out to be Deltarune and not this.

Knuckle Sandwich is REALLY close to being an absolutely perfectly uneven game. If it pulled one or two fewer punches near the end I'd totally forgive it for how much the plot meanders from one rushed plot thread to another rushed plot thread, hell I'd even see the game's sometimes clumsy sometimes downright abrasive design as a plus not a minus. It's like, already in the range of simulating the confusing absurd agency-killing sometimes brutal mundanities of service industry life, if it could just take that laaaast stretch over the whole thing would fit like a glove and I'd call it a miracle game whose disparate pieces somehow manage to line up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Christ, it's not like the game doesn't deserve it, every bit of it is brimming with this loving attention to detail, all these new and fun and lively bits that just keep winning you back in every time the game feels like it's daring you to lose interest in it outright. I want for nothing else than for Knuckle Sandwich to be the kinda sleeper hit that filters everyone but the Realest Kinosseurs of true Ludonarrative Mastery.

... but the future refused to change.

That half star is for Week 2. I considered legitimately taking off half a star for the way Tsugumi is handled in the plot after a full decade of cockteases, but if I'm being honest with myself that's more my own expectations than a flaw with the game itself.

Anyways, NEO TWEWY feels pacing wise like a direct inversion of the original- while TWEWY starts slow, sells you by the end of Week 1, then explodes into a gorgeous defining Week 2 that nicely pairs with a more subdued by emotionally satisfying Week 3, NEO TWEWY starts strong, feels a little bit directionless by the end of Week 1, then just kinda tells you to go fuck yourself with just an absolutely pointless and dragged out Week 2 (NEO TWEWY's battle system does not work with less than 4 party members, it just doesn't). Still, it recovers with a really strong Week 3 that builds and builds until you get a climax that honestly I much prefer to the nonsensical clusterfuck of TWEWY's Week 3 Day 7. The particular way NEO handles its W3D7 was honestly almost enough to sell me all the way back over, but I'd be remiss to not mention it.

The approach to the characters here is, if I'm being honest, kind of leaps and bounds over TWEWY. TWEWY's cast is charming and strong and has enough time to grow on you, but NEO really takes the time out to these individual character studies- you'd think the individual depth would suffer more with how many characters get shoved into the story, but somehow they wind up being more fleshed out because of how all the different dynamics shine lights on different facets of them. It's honestly a really clever and gorgeous approach.

The gameplay is... I mean it's really fun when it works, really frustrating when it doesn't work. I will say in general it feels like a more completed form of TWEWY's combat system, but it is somewhat hard to discount how easy it is for the game to just break down when a slight change in boss/enemy design forces you to play defense with six characters, none of whom you control directly, from screenwide attacks that two shot you.

But I mean, hey, you saw my score. This isn't really a review for onlookers- given the choice between TWEWY and NEO, I'd recommend TWEWY any day of the week. But if you have beaten TWEWY, you have basically zero reason to not play NEO.

Yeah it is, pretty much just Portal with the other kind of CBT, which is a quaint bit but it feels important to reframe your perspective accordingly. The biggest wow moments are overwhelmingly linear, while the interactive sections always feel just a little too on rails to feel super satisfying, not that the game ever takes the concepts too far to begin with once each idea is established.

... but it is a genuine and sweet experience, I can't give it fault for having a lame or halfbaked message it is clearly on its point, it's just that point is wayyyy less ambitious and more self-contained than its wilder weirder goofier and ultimately more interesting inspirations.

EDIT: I'm sorry I can't not smile about Superliminal it is a game that genuinely means the best, very few times does a message in a game mean that much to me but I can't help but wish good things to games about the simple mundanities of mindfulness, I'm a sap sue me

"Do you know what a majority vote is? Neither do we!"

Your Turn To Die is just peak Japanese detective game content, it's all the death game puzzle mechanic social navigational bullshit of a Danganronpa or a Zero Escape but stripped back to the cleanest points, with one of the most easily likable casts I've ever gotten out of one of these games.

Honestly I don't have a ton of meaningful commentary to give here, if you're playing YTTD you probably already know the genre and titles it's taking influence from, and trust me it's an absolute slam dunk in its aspirations. Keeping some things hesitant because it has yet to finish at the time I'm writing, but even what's here already is leagues and bounds above most of its genre.

Big fan of Sou :)

The dumbest fightan on this bitch of a planet.

In its current state it's a little too barebones to give the most lavish praise to but it's honestly shocking nobody ever seriously approached the ideas here before- every piece works so well it feels like a game that should have existed ten years ago.

The visuals are simple but flashy, the moves you have at your tool are inhumanly satisfying, and despite the game's imposing exterior it's shockingly easy to just slam right into a 15 minute game and have a blast. I'd love to see where this game winds up a year from now, there's so many places you could take a concept like this.

3 stars is the perfect score for Helltaker, because I feel bad for not giving it 2 and worse for not giving it 4. It's not really a game so much as a segway to demon girls in suits with easily digestible personalities, and because I'm subhuman I am easily lured in by flashy visuals and boobs.

Keeping it real, there's something to be said about the power in a game that has to run everything on quick two three line dialogue exchanges and a handful of cool key art designs. Like, most visual novels have hours and hours just to sit with the cast before story starts happening, Helltaker just says go go go go go you have to like this girl NOW, and if you don't whatever, new puzzle next girl, next girl, and then 30 minutes later the game's over and you're left going "well I mean it was alright, Pandemonica is the air I breathe and I will die on this earth miserable for not having tasted the boot of her heel but it was alright, nothing special.

The fucked up part here is I think Dan Salvato actually LIKES visual novels. The fucked up part here is that whenever he and his team come up with another visual novel I will be actually excited, because I genuinely think that for what it's worth DDLC wasn't meant to be a middle finger to VNs so much as a very clumsy attempt to do the sorts of navel gazing that pretty much every VN of note does. The tragedy (?) of DDLC is that it came out in 2017 in the United States of America, which could only process visual novels as cheap dating simulators for losers and only interpret short 3-5 hour games through the lens of "weird crazy jumpscare fest for youtube clicks".

My only real wish, honestly, is that DDLC had been able to open the door to things, be a stepping stone to deeper and further explorations that don't, yknow, kind of sort of suck. Hell, I feel weird saying that in the past tense- it's not too late Dan, your Higurashi-lite might have been a bust but goddamnit I'd kill a man to see you try and riff on Umineko.

It's crazy the kinds attention you can pull with a couple of cutsy chibi designs and some words about them feeling really really sad sometimes

Bad End Theater is a pleasant little trip of a game built around an extremely fun central mechanic that rewards taking wrong paths and bad endings to discover new facts that open up new paths. I guess it's not the first game in the world to do something to this extent but I feel the game's brevity and density of webs makes the process a lot more fun than the exhaustion it could create on a larger scale. The way different routes interact with each other creates almost a weird puzzle game scenario, where you replay one route to mess with a different route and slowly thread the needle through the minefield of bad ends to the one possible theoretical good ending waiting at the end.

The story itself is... okay I'm gonna be real the story is lame. It's going for a cutsy fairy tale vibe but the way the story randomly and abruptly juts from one melodramatic end to another is... it feels like hurt/comfort fanfiction for a base property that doesn't exist, and without that built trust and investment it just kinda feels dumb. I do want these lovable idiots to find their happy ending, but god damn there are only so many "and you feel so miserable and sad and bitter forever and ever and ever :(((((("s that I can sit through.

Still, it's a short creative game for what it is, and I'd fuckin love to see the dev try their shot at a game with this kinda framing structure and with this sort of charming presentation that has a, uh, real story.

Also the true ending is straight up nonsense, actual honest to god Five Nights tier lore gibberish.