Before I get into the meat of this review, I want to talk about flowers. Yes flowers. In Calico, there’s heaps of flowers across the main area and from a distance, they look quite pretty and cute.

Get closer however and reality rears its ugly head. All of the flowers are exactly the same with no variation at all and all of them are missing any sort of stalk or leaf and all are 'just' a little too high off the ground which ends up making what was 'Cute Flowers' turn into 'Floating Litter'.

And that fits Calico quite well. The game as a whole looks incredibly cute and sort of fits that weird Tumblr aesthetic to a tee where everything’s pastel coloured, round, fluffy and about two steps away from swerving into some incredibly niche queer porn art. Its certainly a creative choice and in still screenshots it works a charm.

But then when you actually start playing, everything falls apart and the lack of technical prowess and graphical detail just hurts. The ground and tree textures are flat, your character routinely breaks limbs when trying to pick up things, animals repeatedly get stuck inside items or just SPEEN in circles for no reason.

There’s clipping through items, walls, chairs, trees and the floor. Character animations are jerky and clumsy. Movement feels floaty and uncoordinated. Sitting characters have no animation at all so they just look dead-eyed and glassy at all times.... Unless they happen to be roaming cats who eat at the cafe. In which point they'll just phase through whatever they are supposed to be sat at because the sitting animation hasn’t loaded properly.

I could literally go on with the absolute mess that this game is in and its honestly a real shame as there’s a cute fun little game buried under mounds of broken animations and flat texturing. Its rather charming racing around, doing little fetch quests, petting animals and working out some of the quirks in the game world and while it isn’t the longest game going, the more charming elements does help prevent it from becoming a total write-off... But its still a bad game that’s just in desperate need of clean-up. Its crying out for help.

This is easily one of the worst games I've ever played. It may be the worst game I've played that doesn't have some sort of moral failing, like a David Cage game. I love cats and I like management sims, but calling this a management sim is a stretch. There's no sense of progression or gameplay most of the time; sure, you find animals and learn new recipes, but you only ever need to find animals once or make a recipe once, and then you never have to interact with the mechanics again.

Character writing and questing is the same way. There is literally no way to interact with NPCs in the world outside of main story progression and asking them for quests, and no NPC has more than three sidequests for you. Sidequests often involve passing messages between two NPCs who are standing within each other's view. I've felt more empathy and comfort from Bloodborne NPCs than I have in any of the quest-dispensing fashion dolls that make up this game's roster.

So, the gameplay is nonexistent, the character writing is nonexistent... what's left? The art is... fine? Though it is frequently poorly executed, with animations that make animals feel less like cute pets and more like lifeless ragdolls and a player run cycle that, for a long time, looked like an embarrassing toddler about to fall over. And if I wanted to play a game just to look at nice art, there are a lot of games I'd come to before this.

Overall, it's a game that aspires to be a little world where you can create a nice home to escape the harshness of reality. But that world is thinner and more fake than The Truman Show, leaving me cold.

It hurts to give this game a negative review but.....like.... I mean.........

I couldn't even make it half an hour into this before the clunky controls, glitchy environment, sore lack of lore, loud neon pastels and horrible grammar ruined the fantasy before it even began. I'm so disappointed.

I don't understand setting out to produce media like this but not having the self-awareness to know you should probably......hire an editor?? The game doesn't read like it was taken very seriously as a project. The vibes are...unprofesh and I'm so confused about how this was picked up and published?? No one's expecting triple A production value from a two-person indie dev team but polished grammar is the absolute bare minimum in any form of media?

The concept is everything. The ultimate cozy game. But that's all this felt like?? A rough outline of an idea.

I'm honestly crushed because this game has been hyped amongst Cozy Gamers™ for ages but.....I honestly can't see why. I'm genuinely SO thrown. Maybe another year or two of development and this could've been good. :(

First off let me say that I am from New York City so I might be a bit biased but I think this game is amazing. It really does capture the "no one cares about you" attitude that the city has, which meshes really well with the Rockstar world design that is centered around making you feel like an observer in a living breathing place. I should also note that I played the majority of the game using the first person mod for PC. I think this really increases the immersion factor so if you're someone like me who doesn't like third person games still give this a try with that mod installed.

The writing is amazing, as to be expected. You really do feel like an immigrant who works their way up to the top, from doing small time gigs for a local mafia boss in the early game to carrying out full scale bank robberies later on.

I've heard people describe the game as "gritty", though I think a better descriptor might be "unapologetic". The writing prioritizes the strength of its absurd, slapstick, humor above being sanitized/politically correct. Some of this humor draws on stereotypes that should certainly be shunned today but I think going into the game with the expectations that these kinds of things are exaggerated for an artistic vision and are not a reflection of the real world makes them acceptable. The narrative simply wouldn't live up it's hyperbolic depiction of life in the city without this kind content.

I criticized Rockstar's game design in my review of Red Dead Redemption 2 for not giving the player the creative freedom to approach mission objectives. I wouldn't say that GTA 4 goes out of it's way to encourage player freedom but it certainly doesn't obstruct it either; there was never a time where I failed a mission because of something I thought was unfair (like walking out of bounds or something). For example, in one mission you need to assault some enemies hiding out in a hotel. The game gives you the waypoint of the hotel but doesn't explicitly say to go through the front lobby. I decided to look around a bit and found a window washer's elevator that I could use to travel to the top floor. I was then able to walk over to the skylight over the room with the enemies and begin my assault from the high ground. It's stuff like this that I think needs to be emulated in more Rockstar games missions. They have this fantastic world with tons of interactive elements. Why not let the player use them?

Overall, a real classic that I suggest everyone play at some point. I started it back in January, played a couple missions, got busy with school, picked it back up this fall, got hooked, and binged the entire 40ish hour main story in like 3 weeks.

Completed with 100% of achievements unlocked. Simple and short, but really great fun. Refunct is a first-person platform game, with the primary goal simply being to reach a series of target points in an environment that gradually develops in complexity as you progress, seeing new sets of blocks/pillars rising from the water that surrounds the area. To keep things interesting, there are a few special block types - primarily to give a boosted jump - and a wall-jumping mechanic allowing longer and higher jumps to be achieved. A few collectibles scattered around the environment give a satisfying secondary objective, never being particularly hard to find.

Taking only about 30 minutes to an hour to complete, Refunct is undoubtedly a short experience, but its price takes account of that, and means that the limited gameplay mechanics remain fun and satisfying rather than becoming overly repetitive.

The concept of “wholesome” media is a complicated one and it’s an idea that I feel like people are turning against. Sometimes I think I might be one of them. It makes sense how the trend would emerge. After a lengthy decade of edgy sad dads in Prestige Games, it was inevitable that trends would flip to something more chill and friendly. And so you get things like Wholesome Directs, which seem to be filled with announcements for twenty identical farming games starring animals. These games are so focused on being sweet and cozy that it’s hard not feel like there’s no meat on the bone. That in its pursuit of being “wholesome”, the text ultimately ends up feeling hollow.

So what’s needed for the “wholesome” media to work? It’s possible that this is a primarily American problem. I don’t think that there’s a lot of mainstream American media that focuses on providing a restorative vibe. The ones that are intended to be affirming tend to feel very… white. I understand why people assume Ted Lasso is just about white people hugging, but I think it’s a disservice to how that show understands the idea of narrative catharsis. You build flawed characters which realistic problems and you make your end goal the catharsis of them choosing self-improvement. It’s a fulfilling show because it makes the journey feel earned. Video games are highly centered around catharsis. Taunting players or dangling new things just out of reach.

A Short Hike is about a young girl climbing a mountain. There’s no real larger plot or narrative. There’s no dramatic secret waiting around the corner, it’s not as emotionally weighty as Celeste, it’s just about a climb up the mountain.

The catharsis in A Short Hike emerges from the small ways the player improves. The mountain contains numerous hidden sidequests. A man’s lost watch. A painter working on his masterpiece. A woman searching for her lucky headband. Cute little conversations and simple little anxieties. No one’s in any particular rush, they’re just sitting with this minor problems that give them emotional discomfort. You fix these problems, and you get a little better at climbing the mountain. You’re rewarded with stamina upgrades, which let you explore more things around the island. You took chosen to help someone and your life got easier. You earned more exploration, more gorgeous visuals, more chill music. You’ve earned the Catharsis. The spectacle of the game is in the quiet intimacy. Drifting in the wind for longer and longer stretches of time. The catharsis is more opportunities to relax. To play. To climb.

Sometimes it’s hard for me not to go into a game like this with expectations about its intentions. Something that’s marketing itself aggressively as “sweet,” to its detriment. I think why a Short Hike works is that it never feels like it’s trying to evoke a single feeling. It’s not aggressively courting this idea of being “wholesome” or “pure.” And that’s because there’s a sincerity here. Just a genuine love for video games and a genuine love of the craft. And that passion and care speaks through every single aspect of the game’s production.

It’s the kind of game I just really needed at 4 am after failing to get to sleep.