How can I explain a game that I got the platinum trophy for and found every item, egg, candle, and everything it asks you to get yet still have no idea what’s going on story wise and barely scratched the surface as far as finding all the secrets? A game where I feel like I know so much about yet somehow know very little. It is hard to explain but I also think most people that have completed it will understand.

Animal Well is a uniquely wonderful experience that was made for serious gamers as it doesn’t tell you anything and refused to hold your hand or coddle you. If you’re new to Metroidvanias this is not where to start but if you are experienced in the genre I can’t recommend this game enough.

The number one thing that in my opinion this game does better than anything is it’s very unique clever puzzles. Very few games have made me think to myself “damn that was a clever design” but I felt I was thinking that in every few rooms in Animal Well. The puzzles and traversal forces you use not only your brain but every item at your disposal. Some puzzles make you use multiple in quick succession at the proper timing. Some have many solutions. Some will have you so stumped you start believing you don’t have the correct item yet. But every single one is designed wonderfully. The mystery in this game is unbelievable. Every single small detail seems to have a rhyme and reason to it. Nothing is wasted. Yet still the game remains a mystery even as the credits roll. The maker of the game has said it may take years before everything in this game is figured out and while that sounds crazy I believe it. Another thing that stood out to me was the art. I understand it is devolved graphics but that doesn’t mean anything to me. It just feels right for some reason. It fits with the mystery and I honestly feel like better graphics could possibly take away some of the things that make this game great.

The only real negative I have is a few of the items are absurdly difficult to find. But at the same time it adds to the mystery so can I really count that as a negative.

There are many games better than Animal Well. There are even many Metroidvanias that are better than Animal Well. For me this a rare case of a game though. It isn’t so much about how good of a game it is. It isn’t about the gameplay, or the art, or the music, and it surely isn’t about the story, as again, seriously wtf is going on. What Animal Well should be judged by to me is less the game and much more an experience. I know a lot of my feelings on this may sound like a mix of cliches and confusions. I hope I’ve made some sense. But it really is a game that’s a lot easier experienced than explained. One thing that I am certain of is you owe it to yourself to experience Animal Well.

Having these games on the Switch is nice. Well, it would be nice if these games were the games I wanted to be on the Switch. But not only are these not quite the games I wanted Battlefront on the Switch, they're barely even these games at all.

Conmanese to English translation: The experience of playing this is too kneecapped to say this is anywhere close to being Classic.™

Edited for clarity.

While Pikmin 3 Deluxe is outdone by other Pikmin games in specific areas, like 1's narrative, 2's sense of humor, or 4's level design, it remains my favorite in the series. There are a few reasons why, but more than anything I think it's easily the most fun to master.

Pikmin 3 is, in my opinion, the fully realized version of Pikmin 1's design ethos. It's an exercise in learning the mechanics, learning the levels, and finding out how to do everything as quickly and efficiently as possible. Every Pikmin type remains useful both when completing the main objectives and when revisiting areas for cleanup. The increased size of levels and variety of objectives gives the player plenty of room to figure out what to tackle and when (Tropical Wilds especially is really fun to optimize).

And of course, the introduction of the "Go Here" command is quite possibly the best thing to ever happen to the series, opening up a world of possibilities for multitasking. It allows for simultaneous completion of multiple objectives and management of special objectives requiring multiple captains. All this, on top of managing Pikmin counts and Spicy Spray, gives Pikmin 3 a feeling of "Dandori" its prequels couldn't match and its sequel ironically refused to. It's not perfect; the timer's very lax, the balance scale puzzle in Garden of Hope is a little annoying to speed through, and placing exactly two fruits underwater in Twilight River is a bit of a dick move. But I think it comes closer than any other game in the series.

On top of all that, it has some absolutely phenomenal extras. Mission Mode is a fantastic addition that pushes your time management skills to their absolute limits. Bingo Battle is a really fun multiplayer mode, though I haven't played much of it. The option to take photos is a neat extra, especially with a game this beautiful. And the stuff Deluxe adds is no slouch either. The Piklopedia's back, complete with Louie's cooking logs. Co-op in the main campaign is a blast to play with a buddy (and is such an obvious addition I question why it hasn't been a thing since Pikmin 2). And there are so many charming Easter Eggs and little bits of dialogue that add so much to the experience. It's really good! I don't know what else to say.

the intro being a watered down halo CE knockoff put a bad taste in my mouth and made me think this was gonna suck, but honestly I loved this game. I think I like it more than fusion, although I think I like fusion's tone more (this one kind of felt like an action movie, especially whenever the federation was on screen) but this game felt more free and explorable. It did at least something with having other characters, the other hunters had pretty cool designs and it was cool to see why samus is the best. I think another reason of why this one felt more free was because of the length. It's about 9 ish hours compared to fusion's 4, and if there was 30 minutes of dialogue in fusion and 30 minutes of dialogue in corruption, it feels less suffocating in corruption. Think of it like this. You get a 20 on a test. But the test is out of 20. That's 100%. but if the test is out of 100, that's a 20%. which is a failing grade in most countries.

This one's gonna be a bit of a shorter review cause I gotta step out for a smoke and mentally prepare for Other M. Few last things I wanna quickly touch on. One, I liked the hypermode in this. It makes this one a bit harder than echoes (thank god) because the enemies have to do damage balanced around your potential immortality. But it also helps you choose when you wanna clear the room of bulletsponge enemies. It was a cool addition. I just wish less upgrades were focused on it. I'm not gonna be in it all the time, and upgrades like the electric wave when ur in hyper boost ball feels gimmicky and designed only to add another puzzle type. Goes onto my next point. Something I love about the other prime games is how once you get a hold of the controls that's all there basically is. Every action you get is an extension of your base movement. There's no buttons to press because you scan with your lock on or jump into it with your morph ball. The grapple hook is also an extension of your lock on, your super missiles are an extension of your charge beam, etc etc. This game has button prompts to get awkward fallout 3 conversation cams with npc's, levers where you gotta pull the wiimote to pull the lever (i played on primehack kbm so all of those puzzles were replaced with the button W) or something. It just kind of breaks immersion when you try to open a door and you see a huge text popup saying MOVE THE WII REMOTE TO THE RIGHT TO OPEN THIS DOOR. Speaking of wii remote, the grapple hook in this game is front and center. You grapple to pull shielded enemies' shields off, you grapple random debris, you grapple everything. It unfortunately also feels kind of tacked on and not like the rest of sammy's natural movement. You see something glow yellow or an enemy pop up with a shield and think "oh yeah." Okay, last point is the scavenger hunt. There is one in the game. But I think they finally got it right? By the time I was ready to head into the endgame, I had all of the keys but three. And this game is pretty linear, one planet to the next, so I hadn't been to these places in a while. The whole point of the scavenger hunts in these games is to encourage the player to do one last sweep/victory lap around the world picking up spare e tanks and missile expanders before they can face the final boss. But in prime 1, it was kind of redundant because I'd been to all these areas over and over before and gotten all the shit and I was only there for the keys and in prime 2 it was annoying because the game sucked and I didn't wanna play anymore (im just playing. but the prime 2 one was a SLOG I legit almost abandoned right there.)

Anyways, yeah that's about all. Thanks for reading. Sorry I was so serious this time. I've been having a lot of problems with the wife. I'll be writing serious reviews with no jokes for the time being.

EDIT: i played metroid other m for 12 minutes and got to a part where it told me to turn my wiimote sideways. there is no way to play it with keyboard sooo i guess ill have to skip that one and move onto dread oh noooo oh nooo thats awful

I'm not one to blindly want 'More' from something, and I actually quite like endings.

Racing games are my one exception though. With them, I love 'more'. I'll take anything, dude. Courses, cars, characters, music, whatever. With racing games I tend to rack up triple-quadruple digit hour counts with ease, because they're what I play to get my mind going when I need to draft a story or a review or yet another piece of Honkai Star Rail fanfiction. 'More', then, benefits me in multiple ways.

And what game was begging for more than Mario Kart 8? A game so excellent it's borderline ubiquitous and so popular that describing it is a waste of words. MK, after all, did make Kart Racers into an accepted subgenre.

The Booster Course Pass, then, is more. More courses and more characters. There's really not much of a need to say much else, honestly. Quality is consistent with the base game and its own DLCs (back on the Wii U), though I would've liked more anti-gravity tracks personally. And hey, there's an added bonus of having Tour tracks, meaning you don't need to play a bad mobile game to experience some otherwise stellar course design.

Really, in an age where DLC tends be to deceptive, marketed vaguely/not at all or just plain bad, this pass stands out for being decidedly upfront. The developers promised to double the amount of courses in MK8 and they did that with no catches, and even threw in 8 new playable characters to boot - though I exclusively play Daisy, so they're moot to me.

I don't have a funny signoff for this one. I really like racing games, dude.

“THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES TO YOUR CRIMES AGAINST DRACULA…”

Honestly I don’t know what to say about this one. I don’t know how I’d give it a score.

At its best, this is like the side-scrolling sections in Zelda 2 but not nearly as mean, and it usually only sends you back a few screens if you die; at its worst, it’s trial-and-error, projectile spam, and a good amount of RNG.

The first half of this game is classic NES stuff. I’d recommend playing Castlevania for the first nine stages alone. It gets tricky starting on Stage 10 but nothing impossible. Stages 13 and onward are painful.

For the record, and I feel the need to disclose this whenever I’m playing a game on anything besides its original hardware, I did not use save states until Stages 13-15 specifically because the stage is very long, and the boss is very hard.

The final stages up to Dracula are difficult, but short. The game is also lenient enough to give you a checkpoint before Dracula that persists even if you Game Over. This was a huge relief.

Dracula’s boss fight feels like an interesting microcosm of the entire game. On one hand, it’s not particularly hard once players understand what they’re doing and what’s expected of them. It’s the fundamentals: positioning, timing, reflexes, etc. On the other hand, there’s some stuff in here that feels half-baked and is a lot more annoying than challenging.

Stuff like, for example, how Dracula will teleport on top of the player, giving them half a second to react before taking damage; or how you can only dodge Dracula’s second phase when he does a high jump, but during my numerous attempts, I couldn’t get him to activate this move consistently. The move seemed to occur at random.

I say, “seemed to occur at random,” because I don’t really understand if there is a random element to this fight, or if there’s actually some method to get him to do the high jump consistently. The easiest strategy for me personally was to stay close to him in his second phase, and whip him in the face when he started to shoot fireballs. I could hopefully hit all three fireballs at once, but otherwise I would usually be able to jump over the fireballs consistently.

So, it’s good that I could block that one attack consistently, more or less. But sometimes Dracula would just corner me and not do the high jump, and I’d end up taking – what felt like, to me – unavoidable damage. If he alternated between high jumps and low jumps, maybe that would’ve been easier to discern and plan around. As it stands, it just seemed like I kept loading a save state and hoping that he would Just Do The High Jump This Time.

I’m not really sure. It’s one of those things where I’m not sure if it’s a skill issue on my part, or the game being genuinely obtuse, or an issue with emulation or something.

I still really enjoyed my time with Castlevania and I’d like to play through it again at some point, but I am beginning to notice a trend that most NES games really ramp up difficulty-wise to a frustrating degree towards their conclusions. Obviously I believe games should have a difficulty curve but some of this feels far too demanding of most players. Also Castlevania isn’t the worst offender by a long shot.

There was a trend throughout most of the 2010s to call certain games “The Dark Souls of X” where X would be a series, or a genre, or a subcategory of some sort. Although it might feel like a cliché now, I kinda understand why reviewers flocked to using the expression. It captures the spirit of games that aren’t particularly concerned with concessions in the player’s favor, offering little in terms of accessibility or alternative difficulty settings. There is one experience. You either meet it on its own terms, or you don’t advance.

I’ll say this: the final level didn’t sap my enthusiasm for the title in such the same way as Mega Man, and for that I think it’s at least pretty good. You should probably play Castlevania at least once before you die!