A classic puzzle game that I used to watch my mom play all the time on the family computer when I was a little kid. At the time, I didn't really understand what she liked about it. But as an adult, I tried it out, and now I understand. It's easy to get play, but difficult to master. You could probably beat it in an hour and a half if you were to get through every level on your first try, it's technically not a long game at all. But that will likely not happen. After playing the game for a while on Xbox and getting too frustrated by it's controls (not really the game's fault, to be fair), I got it on Steam. There are 12 main "worlds", each with an increasing number of levels. On PC, I'm pretty sure I beat the first 11 without losing all my lives, or even dying many times at all. But world 12 took me significantly longer than the first 11 did combined. RNG can definitely make or break your run, which can feel a little frustrating. But in the end, you can always win if you react quick and correctly. So it doesn't feel like you're getting screwed over.

Overall, a very fun and inexpensive title that I would recommend to just about anyone, even if puzzle games aren't your thing. It's so easy for it to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Simultaneously one of the biggest steps forward and biggest steps back for Pokemon. It's obviously still a Pokemon RPG at its core, and as usual comes with a solid new roster of monsters, cool characters, banging music, etc. The stuff Pokemon has been good at since the beginning. But the big difference is that now it's completely open world. Sword and Shield were the first to experiment with something like this, with a large open area placed in the middle of the rest of the game's linear map. Legends Arceus was pretty close to open world, consisting exclusively of multiple large maps. But Scarlet and Violet were the final evolution, and has one big & completely open world. Overall, it executes it pretty well, aside from no level-scaling for the gym leaders/boss battles. You could make the argument that level scaling would make the difficulty curve much more boring, which I sort of agree with. But it would be nice if the game at least let you know what the "correct" order is to do the boss battles, because for every battle that you are underleveled for, there's another that you will be overleveled for.

However, this game suffers from some of the worst technical issues I've ever seen from a video game series as massive as Pokemon. The game runs terribly on the aging Switch hardware, and the visuals range from "decent" to "complete shit." The Switch was already underpowered at launch, so the fact that it was almost six years old by the time this game came out is certainly part of the equation. But multiple other studios have proven that you can squeeze out a way better performance/visuals ratio, and with Pokemon being the most profitable media franchise in the world, there's absolutely NO excuse for how it turned out. I'm writing this almost a year after the game launched, and it still runs just as bad.

Despite all of that, the game is still playable. Pokemon is thankfully a series that doesn't require quick & precise movement. And it didn't stop me from putting in around 75 hours within the first month. I had a ton of fun with it and I'm excited for the future. But the technical issues absolutely took away a good amount of the enjoyment, and if I didn't enjoy playing this series so much, there's a good chance that it would've ruined the whole thing for me.