Enough and more has been said about Disco Elysium's writing that it won't be a surprise when I tell you that yes, the game does live up to that reputation. Games are always criticised for their writing and, more often than not, people are always right. Stories are generally plain bad for most AAA games, dialog tends to be hit or miss, there's usually no prose because obviously the developers don't prioritise written prose cause most players don't care about it. But Disco Elysium bucks the trend by not just having good writing for a game, it just has good writing period. The dialog, the characters, the story and the incredible prose make for one of the most memorable gaming experiences I've ever had. There's not much I can say that's not already said but suffice it to say, this game will stick around with me for a LONG time after having finished it. Everything about the experience, the music, the writing, the gorgeous art, all come together perfectly for a storm that made for a VERY enjoyable and emotional 25 hours and I will certainly be back for more since the game is a true blue RPG with a lot of options locked off to you based on your role play and I definitely missed so much my first time

It's a shame about the whole drama surrounding the development and the company though. I bought this game far before any of that happened and just before the Final Cut was released so I don't know how to feel about it. I guess the real word on all of it will come out some day and I hope the creators make more games at some point. It would be a shame if this was a one-off phenomenon and nothing came of it ever again

This is probably the first incremental game that pretty heavily incentivises the concept of "builds". Builds are essentially a requirement since the upgrade currency is limited every run and each run you can choose to focus on a certain upgrade path for a certain set of tools which changes how you approach bashing the rock... until you get rockets which hilariously trivialises every other build

For what it is, it's a really fun, well constructed incremental game with a definitive end but has some balance issues. I think I would keep checking back in on this now and then to see how it's shaped up

There's not too much to say about this game frankly. It's mostly a VN with light "bartending" elements and a fair few hidden paths for a second playthrough (that I kind of botched at the start so didn't bother). The writing is fairly light and breezy with some dark elements that explore the "cyberpunk" mythoscape more deeply than most other media in such settings but mostly from the view of an ordinary layperson which leaves some things more shallow than others but it doesn't hurt the game much. It's fine for what it is though I wish some of the jank was smoothed out like not being able to change audio devices if one disconnects and the log being a bit of a weird thing to scroll through. Also the game is just way too horny for its own good. The soundtrack is full of bangers and is probably worth the price of admission alone

I have three medium-minor complaints about the game

1. The difficulty is quite uneven. There are late game puzzles that are easier than early game puzzles owing due to the constant flood of new mechanics in almost every single world and some of these mechanics don't carry forward that often which is a little disappointing. While the difficulty does ramp up by the end, there are still "tutorial" levels even at the late game that take seconds to complete. I understand why the game is structured as is but this hurts the difficulty curve a bit

2. A third of the Star puzzles are just "chase thing" and another third is "hunt for thing" which makes them not puzzles really. The final third which are actual puzzles are mostly disappointingly easy with one exception which I thought was a little unfair due to a puzzle element being hidden away so deeply I had to actually look up what I was missing. In the same vein, there are additional "triangle" puzzles and these are mostly all easily found if you walk on the paths save one exception and this one is hidden so well that you'd NEVER see it unless you were actively looking everywhere in the level which was annoying

3. The worlds really do get too large and it starts taking way too long to get through them. There's no map either so sometimes you have to hunt for entire puzzle levels which is less than ideal. Wish there was another layer of fast travel unlocked after you open the gates which would have let you get around faster.

4. The post processing lets this game down grievously. It's a looker but it has all the problems of an Unreal Engine game where DLSS makes the whole thing look slightly blurry, shadows flash constantly, textures and models load incredibly slowly on an HDD (making using an SSD almost a requirement which sucks) and lots of weird pop-in and stutters. The character and environment models are gorgeously detailed and heavily stylised and incredible to look at which makes this hurt so much more than it should. I hope the devs push a few patches to fix the graphics a little so it's not quite so weird looking at times.

These are minor complaints that should not take away from the fact that this is a beautiful and challenging puzzler that did stump me quite a few times and actually has an extremely engaging and intriguing story with a colourful cast of lively characters with full, high quality voice acting and amazing music to carry you through the whole way. This game really is the full puzzler package and I ABSOLUTELY recommend it to puzzle game aficionados and anyone who enjoyed the first game. I am looking forward to DLC with bated breath and I hope they up the difficulty with the DLC puzzles.

Planet of Lana is another one those puzzle platformers that are clearly inspired by Inside and Limbo. Except it adds some Journey inspirations. And makes them all intensely more irritating than I could imagine. As someone who liked Limbo but found Journey and Inside lacking in puzzles and actual gameplay narrative, this game is just so much worse.

The game is very pretty. The music is nice. I didn't face any bugs. That's about all I can say that's nice about this package.

There are heaps of small annoyances that continually add up over time. How you're essentially just holding right for long stretches. How the music doesn't quite fit in a lot of places. How your main character screams EEELOOO at the most inappropriate and pointless places. How you get a little creature you control and it's so janky and awkward at every single point. How the vision cones of the enemies flat out lies to you and some enemies don't have a vision cone at all. How most puzzles are basically just hiding from these vision cones. How you have to make the creature drop down ropes to progress at multiple points in the game and it requires zero thought. How the game suddenly adds a bunch of useless QTEs that make you button mash. How the backgrounds don't quite transition well between scenes and you go from a wide open sea to a desert suddenly and it doesn't quite make sense. How the game isn't seamless and frequently cuts to black for cutscenes and takes away control from you. How the game drops you multiple times after cutscenes into brief spots that make you hold right for literally seconds before transitioning you into another cutscene. How the character moves so achingly slowly, especially when crawling, to the point that when multiple enemies were chasing me I literally yelled "RUN FASTER BITCH" as the player character slowly sauntered their way to the right. How the story is tripe kindergarten grade school level bullshit and the puzzles are incredibly weak and barely make you think.

I'm not sure I listed all of them but this is me, unfiltered and coming fresh out of finishing this piece of garbage. There's a side of me that really wants to give the game more leeway considering how pretty and well polished it is. But the overwhelming majority of me, who just uninstalled it, wants to vent. My experience started off being bored and ended with me being annoyed and the worst sin a game can make, worse than being boring, is being annoying. And Planet of Lana was certainly EXTREMELY annoying.

What Tunic sets out to do, it does incredibly well. Rather than being a Zelda-like, Tunic is aiming to be more like Fez and if that means something to you, this comes with a glowing recommendation... with the caveat that the combat is actively shit and you'd be better off playing it on Easy.

The highlights of Tunic are definitely the visuals, the world and the exploration, the non-verbal ways in which the story is slowly doled out to you, the puzzles, the secrets that are pervasive and everywhere and the incredible music to accompany it all. Slowly exploring the map and opening up more and more pathways as you grow stronger and more daring made me feel enraptured with what was going on and I could scarcely put the game down in favor of going for just a few more minutes over and over. There was always a pathway that you'd remember you left behind and you'd yearn to go back there, only to be distracted yet again by another path. There are secrets within secrets and puzzles that slowly reveal their mechanics over time and you keep on trucking. I won't spoil some of the more wonderful elements of the game but the game perfectly merges exploration with everything else.

Except the combat. The combat is just actively bad. You have a fair few options but the player character just feels incredibly clunky the whole way through. I don't have any objective way of expressing this. The combat just felt really bad. One of the more egregious things I can point to is a lack of any animation cancel which means every swing of your sword, every dodge, every shield raise is a commitment and it's so sluggish and horrid when after you swing you raise your shield to deflect the incoming attack only to have it hit and stun you. There are bosses that were so annoying I relented and turned the difficulty down. But the saving grace is the combat is serviceable enough since most of the time you're just fighting grunts and most of your time is not really going to be fighting enemies. The game definitely prioritises the exploration factor over combat but it does feel crummy that combat wasn't more of a focus or there weren't more ways to improve it.

Tunic is far, FAR more than the sum of its parts, most of which were already stellar. The whole package comes together in a wonderful way even if the singular piece doesn't fit well enough. I'll once again name drop Fez, with all that that entails. There's a lot that I didn't actually bother with because I got the true ending and stopped. There's a decent chunk of puzzles that I didn't touch cause I'd just be reading guides to solve them.

I suppose this game really makes you "feel like an insect" the way you autopilot your way through most of it. But to be totally honest, I didn't dislike it at all.

There's something to be said about a game completely riding on vibes and Cocoon certainly achieves great success with this. The visuals are utterly fantastic with loads of detail and a beautiful mesh of organic and mechanical that is more on the shiny, metallic side of things rather than something more gory and visceral like Scorn. The worlds you go through are visually very distinct so you're never really lost and makes the transitions between them, especially in the later areas, that much cooler. The music is appropriately a blend of high synth flairs and never lets up giving another layer of high polish to my time through it. Presentation is just top notch across the board with smooth animations and satisfying sounds. And this carries the game pretty hard through the fairly dull gameplay that only really gets interesting towards the end.

For the most part, the gameplay involves very mundane and fairly rote puzzles that barely require thought with some boss battles that punctuate the end of a few chapters as you carry orbs through levels and use them to open up further areas with the single-button-controls. I was only really mildly stumped at a couple of points towards the end where the game starts to shine and use all of its mechanics in a cool way but before it builds on that it ends. It's a very short experience at about 3-5 hours depending on how fast you go through it but the game lacks in challenge which you would expect from something as mind-melting as being able to enter and exit multiple layered worlds but that was not to be. There's also far too much polish given in certain places where the developers were afraid of giving you too much leeway and actively strip away extraneous puzzle elements that are no longer relevant right before your eyes which makes it a little too obvious how linear the experience is.

While the puzzle elements are certainly lacking a bit, there's something to be said about the meditative effect it had on me as I played this little insect hurriedly going about its way to an indeterminate end with whatever goals it had in mind. Walking through the many lovely worlds was calming and the small obstacles elevated it above a bare music video. I think I could definitely recommend this to people who don't play games much or even children as a puzzle game to get them started in the genre. The hook of the pretty visuals and sounds would certainly work on a lot of people. It definitely worked on me.

I love this trend of figure-em-up's like Obra Dinn and Curse of the Golden Idol so if a new one comes my way, I will gobble them up so when multiple games media personalities I follow recommended this, I had to check it out. It's an extremely well made game in the genre but adds a lot of flavour and depth to the puzzles by making it about languages and translating them.

The presentation is excellent all around with beautiful graphics and a lovely soundtrack. The textures are mostly flat but the game still manages to leverage its minimalist art style with great effect for some gorgeous scenery. There's an almost imperceptible little hatching effect going on in the shadows which is a neat touch. The soundtrack has a fair amount of variety and is very lovely but mostly stays out of the way, only swelling in the major moments and mostly leaving you in almost silence as you figure the puzzles out.

This is primarily an adventure-puzzle game where you explore the tower you start in, slowly making your way higher and higher and meeting multiple peoples who all speak different languages. When someone talks or you see a sign or written text, you enter the characters into your notebook and have to figure out what they mean. As you keep exploring each area, you'll come across clues that help you make sense of each word. For example, if you see a lever with two marked positions and one keeps a door open and the other keeps it closed, you could safely guess each word to mean "open" and "closed". You could also get context clues from what a person is saying and the gestures they make, where they are, what they are doing and so on. At certain moments, the player makes (gorgeous) illustrations in their book and you can place each word in the slot next to an illustration so you'd place the word you guessed as "open" next to the illustration of an open door. Much like Obra Dinn, filling out a double page of illustrations with all correct words will "lock" your translations in place and the words will be properly translated. This makes for an incredibly refreshing experience each time you stumble onto the abode of a new tribe and you're completely lost trying to figure out what anything means. What the people there say will sound like total gibberish unless you properly translate the words in their sentences at which point they make total sense and the dialog flows naturally in a brilliant facsimile of learning an actual language and how improved fluency changes how you understand the person speaking it. The theming of the Tower of Babel, the exploration of ideas of plurality and multiculturalism isn't just set dressing. This is also primarily a puzzle adventure a lot like a point-n-click so there are multiple places where you need the proper "ingredients" to solve something and they mostly all strike a balance so they aren't too hard or too easy. The game also has a few stealth segments and they are annoying but aren't frequent enough to affect my experience much.

There are a few small things that detracted from my experience and they're mostly to do with the exploration. Some of the areas are pretty big which necessitated a lot of trial and error in figuring out where you're supposed to be going and what you may have missed. I'm sure playing without a map was the intended experience since there's a couple of proper mazes that will turn you around but I wish there was a Hollow Knight style simple map that gets more fleshed out the more you explore and find areas. Some areas are annoyingly too large and you have to spend a fair amount of time waiting for your character to walk across while you twiddle your thumbs for a couple of seconds. The camera is also a bit of an impediment here and doesn't show you the entrance to the next area unless you walk to it making you click multiple times to move your character when I'd rather just have them automatically walk to the next area. The difficulty also doesn't scale well because, in my opinion, the first area remained the hardest with the final area being really short and more of a victory run.

Aside from the small complaints, this was a lovely, challenging and wonderful puzzle game that has a lot of heart. Highly recommended to aficionados of puzzlers.

This is a pretty cool tiny little game that has one specific concept that it executes decently enough. Good sound, excellent pixel art and a fun fire fighting conceit but the artificial difficulty borne from simply denying you vital tools like "shoot water while on a ladder" doesn't really make for much of a difficulty curve. It's fine. It's over in a couple of hours and has some unwelcome faff but it was apparently made by a dad for his kid who loved firefighters so I'm not putting it down any more than this. It's cheap and short.