Charming little game that left me wanting more.

I could spend just a little more with these silly townfolks

It's hard not to compare this game to Katamari, it's a bit unfair due to the scale of the games but they do play on the same ball park.

Donut County is definitely inferior to Katamari in pretty much every way but it short length keeps it a sweet experience that stands on its own instead of dragging as a Katamari clone.

Maybe I spend just the right amount of time with these townsfolk.

Telling lies is a game that hates its players. It's an expensive version of Her Story with a basic ass plot zero catharsis finale.

Players leave Her Story after an arc, you get your answers but there are still a few questions that remain open to interpretation, it's fun storytelling done well using a very minimal and limited technique.

Telling Lies forgoes the interrogation setting for two sided (but seperate) video calls between David and the rest of the cast. There are a lot of silence in these calls, a lot of them are barely relevant fluff.

The acting is generally pretty good, the main guy is annoying and seem fake the entire time. It kinds fits the character so maybe they're actually brilliant.

The game keeps the backwards search system but it makes less sense on a modern 2019 laptop than it did on an 80s PC.

The scrubbing system is horrendous. Playing videos starts from when the searched term is first said and not from the start. There is no official way to play them from the start and the scrubbing, with its three speeds l, is painfully slow.
I was about 20 videos in before I realised this. And around a 100 before I found out there's a perhaps a bug perhaps hidden feature to skip to the start. You need to hold rewind as soon as you hit play and after the soundclip ends it will play the clip from the start.

These clips amount to hours upon hours of blinks and silence. The constarct is flimsy and despite the plot being simple and straight forward its so broken and drowned in noise and silence that makes it hard to follow. It's a hollow detached experience.

Did I mention this game has multiple endings? That don't contradict each other and are very short and could easily just be a part of an epilogue? They're determined by the character you spend most time with, what significance does this have in a game like this?

None of them are very good, they're just a couple bland blurbs about the main characters' fate

There are three women in the game, one is a sex worker, one was is a victim of harassment and abuse and the other was sexualy assaulted.
All of them perform a striptease at some point.

Every aspect of this game feels like trolling.
The game has a solitaire mini game that's missing a card. Why? Because fuck you

The time I spent playing Telling Lies I could play Her Story like three times, and it was time better spent.

Before anything else, everyone needs to know that: (1) Pentiment is beautiful in every sense. (2) Pentiment is one of the greatest samples of writing in the video game medium.

Pentiment is all narrative, all character exploration, and all player choice. Yes, it's "a lot of reading," but the passion behind the writing is so immediately clear that I couldn't help but find myself engrossed within 15 minutes of starting the game.

Pentiment is an expertly written, tight narrative with a shameless adoration for its setting and characters that's driven forward by its unique and well-executed art style. I cannot recommend this enough, and I will forever be thankful for Game Pass for allowing big studios to make something small and experimental like this.

This game, oh my god. It's another game I got on a whim, this time because it came in a 2 for 1 pack with Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger ix 2, I don't recall seeing anything about it aside from a trailer some months back and maybe some screenshot, but I got it just because it looked good and I'm VERY glad I did.

First of all the sprite work is beautiful, this game looks amazing, it's colorful and flashy, with plenty of character, and I loved every bit of the game's design. If you're familiar with the type of work Inti Creates does, then you'll love the work GemDrops did with this game because it's very close to it in a lot of ways.

Music is very Mega Man X-like, it's really good and keeps up well with the pace. The voice acting sadly is japanese only, despite it sounding well enough, I really would have liked to hear an english dub of this game.

The controls and the story kinda go hand in hand, the rewind feature in the title is not only just for gameplay, but is also part of the story. For the gameplay, you have one hit until you die, but you are given a 3 second rewind to fix any platforming or combat mistake you made, something like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and I'll say the game does ramp up pretty hard in the second half of the game, so you'll need to learn patterns and keep them in mind.

The only downsides of the game I feel are, it does kinda suck that you do find yourself repeating the same set of levels twice for a story reason, though it's made much harder, but the game doesn't have a lot of levels to begin with so that becomes a slight annoyance, and DLC could fix that, but the DLC out at the moment is close to $8 dollars for an extra character each two extra levels/story bits to them, which I can't really say is worth that value for me.

Despite all that, I absolutely loved this game, would have loved more levels instead of the repeats, but it was fun and quite the challenge.

Yeah, it kinda falls off towards the end, yeah, the game isn't as scarce as I'd like it to be. Sure, it could be easily improved with some edits, but this game is something else. Citizen sleeper is about being a cog in the machine, a speck of light in an infinite night sky. But rather than sulk about this feeling, Citizen Sleeper emphasizes the humanity in the little things in life: the wordless familiarity you have with the barkeep, the gentle friendship you form with your coworker. The game isn't infinite, and it will run dry, but those precious few drops of life this game has to offer are worth the world.

I'm trying to understand why I didn't enjoy this one. I'm a chess nerd, so I thought this would appeal to me. Then I thought about FTL, the previous game from these devs, and I realized that i felt more in control over my winning and losing in that game than i do in this one. Into the Breach masquerades as if it has a huge learning curve, flaunting in your face how, if you're smart enough, you can do things like redirect the enemies' attacks against themselves and block them from spawning, but in practice it's almost completely random if these strategies are open to you. Since your characters can do so little every turn, it feels like the battle has already been decided and all you're doing is mildly suggesting the battle go one way or the other.
The first time I realized that my best move was actually to cut my losses and sacrifice a mech or move an enemy out of the way instead of attacking it, I thought it was cool. I thought "wow, this game just made me make an interesting decision. Nice". But now, after playing it for a bit I learned that when I'm forced to do that, I've already lost. Into the Breach has a really bad death spiral problem, where either you're easily winning or limping yourself over the finish line, knowing that you can't handle the next fight.
In summary, the moment to moment combat calls itself robot chess but its not. Chess is fun because both players have a lot of options and the point of the game is closing off those options little by little. In Into the Breach you begin with very few options, and when those options stop working, everything goes to shit. It's still fun and works as advertised I guess, but it just doesn't feel satisfying to play.

Mordheim: City of the Damned made me realize that insane RNG is only fun when you play against other people, the lucky or unlucky rolls that make tabletop games exciting don't have the same effect when playing against a cold, emotionless machine. Most of the fun from good/bad rolls comes from the reaction of the other player rather than the numbers on the screen.
Besides that I think the adaptation of the tabletop to the computer game medium is pretty good, reminds me a bit of Valkyria Chronicles, only with fewer anime girls and more giant humanoid rats. The story mode is a little disappointing, but the skirmishes are very fun and the different factions offer some variety. You can even customize your units, but I wouldn't get too attached to them if I were you.
I probably won't finish all the content because that would take me like 300 hours, but I had a lot of fun with Mordheim nonetheless.

Sigh. I hate to be the resident Backloggd Bitch™ this time around but there just isn't enough to love here. The music's good, keyboard/mouse controls feel perfect (I'm not a fan of the controller, especially with the camera,) I like levels 4 through 6, and the aesthetic is all right there... but like, that's it.

The gameplay feels a bit dry, I suppose. I don't mean the simple moveset, nono - that's all fine and dandy, plus the game knows how to make it interesting in a few cases - I mean the levels. There's not a single nook or cranny, no real scavenger hunt, a grand majority of the powercells are in predictable places and it ends up feeling more like a to-do list as a result. There's enemies... I guess? They're big hunks of metal that never attempt to attack you with a walk speed slower than Patrick Star's pet rock. They present no remote challenge, in-line with most of the game, which otherwise (aside levels 5 & 6, though they're not really open-world) have no obstacles to speak of.

Now there's nothing wrong with a game being a cake walk if it's putting something interesting or engaging forth, but Super Kiwi 64 (again aside levels 5 & 6) doesn't do that. MACBAT 64, a Siactro game from 5 years ago, gets creative with its gameplay far more than this does. Super Kiwi 64 only really mixes it up with the addition of keys or the occasional level gimmick like lava, switches, or when you get extra speed for no explicable reason from your dog pilot partner. I won't nitpick the lack of explanations or plot - that part's fine, good games don't always need good writing, though it does feel like Siactro tried to set one up and left what he had in after deciding against it.

It's a shame, really, because Siactro is a talented guy (Toree 3D is damn solid and I need to raise my rating for it) and there are definitely the makings of something great here - enough so that the game is, honestly, not bad. Enjoyable, even. It just needed more love, more soul, more time in the oven. It's almost there.

Also, Siactro forgot to put in a Quit button on the PC version; an inaction that says a thousand words.

The entire game kind of fits the generic mold of 2D Indies, with walking around a nameless world, simple puzzles, and a story that symbolizes depression or grief or something. However, it does it much better than the vast majority of so many Indies. The entire color scheme has every moment in it looking like a painting. So often I wish I could stop and take a picture of a specific moment. The way colors come back into the world and blend with the narrative is great as well. Finally, the music is just so so top notch. As the music rises up, you can really feel a type of vibe wash over you that is impeccable. However, having said that the actual gameplay could have had more depth and there could've been a stronger emotional hook. Nothing will really drive me to replay it.

A surprisingly disappointing game. I had incredibly high expectations for this after recently playing and loving Max Payne 1 & 2, but this feels like it lost a lot of that Max Payne identity. The improvements to the gameplay were incredibly fun at first and I was having a blast, but it quickly got boring. I think it’s partly due to the level design of this game. It’s completely linear and enemies are in predictable spots, making it less satisfying to clear a room of enemies. Another big problem I have with this game is how forced the story is on you. That would of course not be a problem at all if the story was interesting, but instead, it’s awfully generic and cutscenes last far too long and show up far too frequently. Simply moving from one area to another feeds the player an unnecessarily long and uninteresting cutscene, which kills so much of the fast-paced gameplay.

Nevertheless, I still liked the game overall, because it’s that classic Max Payne gameplay with plenty of interesting mechanics added on top of it. I just know that if Remedy were the ones to make this, it could’ve been much better than what we got here.

I really don't have a whole lot to say about this game. Rogue-likes aren't really my cup of tea, every time I play them I personally feel like being pushed back so far from progression so often feels like a waste of my time that I don't have a whole lot of.

That said, this game's graphics and sprite work are beautiful, the writing is actually the kind that make you snicker at the sort of dead-pan humor that's kinda dark, but the situation is made light in a sort of way.

The music for me is where the game best shines at, you can either let the original music play or change it to "8-bits" soundtrack and they both sound amazing.

I'm sure this game is better than I'm making it out to be, I gave it the most try that I can muster, but I just wasn't into it, I'll admit it was fun for the first few hours finding new weapons and trying to make builds to see how far it takes me, but it can only take me so far before it starts feeling dull.

I'm not going to rate this simply because I did not put enough time into it to give it an honest rating. But I can say that unfortunately the Overdrive combat system is not clicking with me. I know it's an added strategic mechanic to the combat but I feel it's limiting how I want to play the game, and I'm just not feeling it.

I'm reminded of CrossCode, a game with high praise from players and critics. On paper, it should have been right up my alley. Beautiful pixel art, inspired by the JRPG classics I grew up with it. But I did not like the puzzles in it, at all, to the point where it dragged down my inspiration to see it through.

I like the art and environments of Chained Echoes. Story and characters seem okay so far, but I wouldn't say I'm attached to any of it. Time is precious and I'm going to move on to something else that I'd like to play (maybe I'll finish one of the 8 other games I'm currently playing).

I'm gonna shelve this indefinitely and maybe I'll revisit it someday...but it's unlikely.

DISCLAIMER: This review is incomplete. I will update it upon finishing with my final thoughts.

Pros:
+ Surprisingly comical dialogue and story-telling along with a pleasant soundtrack
+ Having health and action points restored after every battle is great; encourages using your resources and it's refreshing not having to hoard and expend items between battles
+ Lack of RNG encounters makes the world and combat feel purposeful

Cons: