Life After Magic is a charming sapphic visual novel, with beautiful pixel presentation, lively music, and lovable characters. There's really a trope for every sapphic out there, from the leather-jacket wearing KJ, to the rival ARA, to my favorite, the sweet jock Jackie. Each character is lovable and with such a short game, it's easy to imagine re-playing it multiple times to see different character's arcs.

I also really appreciated how every member of the cast was affected in different ways by their magical girl group falling apart. All of it felt emotionally real, drawing on experiences many of us have with trying to reconnect with former close friends.

I appreciate that you can play this game non-romantically, and that even if you play out a romantic scenario, that doesn't mean the characters will end up together forever.

A small negative is that I really don't know what I missed to get Jackie's romantic ending, so when I didn't trigger it at the end it was a little frustrating. Overall, though, I was so happy with how her storyline came together that I could overlook this problem.

All in all, a no-brainer for lovers of other sapphic visual novels. I'm so excited to see what this team puts out next!

I loved so much of this game: the art design, music, level layouts, and combat all worked for me.

However. The heart of all RPGs, for me personally, lies in its cast, and the core three in Sea of Stars were not well characterized. I cannot think of a single thing that really distinguishes Zale and Valere from one another, and Garl is a saint. Friendships made of threes are often awkward and complex. Doubly so for childhood friendships where two are pre-selected to play a special role in their society. But they are all so unfailingly perfect and kind that it took me out of the high stakes of the story. The side characters were wonderful, but made how flat the core three were really stand out.

On the other hand, this was the perfect game to play when I came down with a bad cold! So I can definitely recommend it for that!

I've been reading tarot cards for myself (and on request for friends) for over seven years. This made Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood incredibly appealing. Who doesn't want to be a cosmic witch reading cards for your coven?

There's a lot that I loved about this game: the atmospheric music of fingerspit, the strong writing of nuanced relationships, and the minigame of creating your own divinatory cards was spellbinding. Honestly if the whole game was creating cards, I'd still play it.

Where it fell apart for me is the integration of the interpretation of the cards when Fortuna does readings. I never felt like what cards I pulled influenced the dialogue options. I'm not sure a game could really make interpreting tarot or other divinatory cards a mechanic because it's so subjective.

When I read tarot, I pull from my meanings of the card, the question, the spread, and the way that all of those things interact. I usually describe the imagery in detail as a way of connecting the question to the cards pulled.

When you interpret the cards in Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, the cards and what you say seem to have nothing to do with one another. Fortuna never references the titles of the cards or even the keywords that the game assigns them. I imagine coding something like that would be an absolute nightmare, and was probably outside of the scope of the game. I also don't think this will bother most people, but with my particular interests this got to me, pretty quickly. Like, sure, I'm enamored with my cards, but what do they mean? Does it matter which ones I pull? Fortuna seems to believe so, but the game, mechanically, doesn't align with that.

Still, a perfect Halloween game with flaws that probably won't bother many players.

Combat and music in this game ruled, and I loved making Serenoa's choices entirely based off of what his wife thought was best.

However. Whew Boy!!!! The orientalism was off the charts with this one!!!! That scene where our European-coded characters are in a desert city (a scene that not all players will see, given it has branching paths) and are startled and horrified by a daily call to prayer that is very reminiscent of Muslim calls to prayer was wild. How is it scary when Muslims have daily calls to prayer but not when Christians drink the blood and eat the flesh of Christ? It's classic Edward Said Orientalism all the way down in this one.

To quote from the article on Said's work from Wikipedia: "These cultural representations [of the Middle East] usually depict the 'Orient' as primitive, irrational, violent, despotic, fanatic, and essentially inferior to the westerner or native informant, and hence, 'enlightenment' can only occur when "traditional" and "reactionary" values are replaced by "contemporary" and "progressive" ideas that are either western or western-influenced."

I finished the game largely to see just how islamophobic it gets and it is rough. I was pretty unsettled not to see it mentioned in most critical reviews of the game, either.

The tactics were great and I loved most of the characters, but I cannot forgive them for that.

Really don't know what else to say except I love Kirby. I tend to play Kirby games when I'm in a rough mental place, and I started this one for that reason. I had an absolute blast, and actually was compelled enough to go back and 100% levels, which is not something I typically do with any games. I even played minigames! Me, a professed minigame hater!

I do feel like I was spoiled, in a way, that my first two Kirby Games were Epic Yarn and Forgotten Land, while this one feels more of a predictable Kirby Game. But god, it was fun, and it made me smile when very little else could.

I decided to save the Magolor levels for the next time I need a pick-me-up, so I look forward to checking those out in the future!

This was my first WarioWare game, played using the Nintendo Switch Online GBA system, and I had an absolute blast!

This game embraces chaos and absurdity from its music to its game play. I loved how goofy the cutscenes were for each of Wario's friends, and how they all ended up hanging out at the gelateria. I especially loved Kat, Mona, Dribble&Spitz's minigames!

The highest praise i can give this game is that I showed Mona's minigames to my partner who had no context for what WarioWare was, and first they laughed until they cried, then asked for the switch so they could mercilessly crush my high score on their second try. It's compelling in its commitment to the bit.

My feelings on it might be more positive because it's my first Warioware game, but it definitely won't be my last!

I enjoyed so much about this game, but some of the writing problems took away from my overall enjoyment.

First, the positives. The loop from fishing to restaurant management was a time suck. The fishing controls were appropriately tricky to master and the restaurant brought the kind of adrenaline I haven't felt since playing Diner dash. Those two elements are only the start of all the content in this game, which is both blessing and curse.

The benefit of so much content is that the game is bursting with ways to express yourself as a player. Want to invest in farming? In restaurant staff? In minigames? All of it is here and so much more that would be a spoiler to discuss. On the other hand, there is so much content that I felt like I barely had a moment to breathe. I often wanted a button I could push that would push deadlines for special events back a couple of days, not because they weren't interesting, but because I wanted to chill with this game rather than rush.

The problems in the writing is where I got stuck. Dave is an atypical protagonist as a fat, middle-aged man who is not macho. I loved that about this game from the start. However, the writers see him as a joke. At least, that's how it feels. Every character has to comment on his weight and emasculate him for being a relatively timid fat man. At first, I assumed that the side characters who mocked Dave would learn that they were wrong, and that this non-traditional game protagonist would be respected. This never happened. He was consistently the butt of the joke.

The other criticism of the writing that I personally have is how the few female characters are written. I noticed that every woman are characterized as nagging or foolish, with perhaps the exception of the recruiter, who still has to learn a lesson. All major sympathetic characters are men.

After a dozen or so hours (I got to chapter 6), these flaws got to me, and I shelved the game for the time being. It's a fun and generous game, but I wish it was more generous with its women and with Dave himself.

I did not expect to love Pikmin 4 as much as I do.

I have not played any Pikmin or RTS prior to playing Pikmin 4, and it was a bit of a slow burn for me. Given that this game is meant for a family audience, the tutorials are slow and detailed, cluttering up the opening couple hours of the game. I ended my first play session thinking "that was alright." The next day I played for three straight hours.

The delicate music and gorgeous environments of the opening areas invited me into the world of Pikmin. The strategizing of careful use of my little guys and my big puppy kept me longing to just play one more day or one more sublevel of a cave. I appreciated the variety between caves, traditional areas, dandori challenges, dandori battles, and night expeditions, though I do think that night expeditions are the weakest element, gameplay-wise, too short and too easy, on the whole. I hope that Nintendo iterates on the night expeditions in future Pikmin games!

I docked half a star because the writing is, well, serviceable, if occasionally scenes go on too long, but I wasn't really there for the narrative. I was there to painstakingly plot out my routes through a level to achieve the greatest possible amount of dandori.

Truly, I think this is a great place to start with the Pikmin series, just skip cutscenes if you're bored and know that the tutorials stop around day 9. I can't wait to play the rest of the series!