It's far from perfect but by the end I was enjoying myself too much to care.

I wish they'd done more with the drinking mechanic. I thought they would let you be strategic about your drink choices depending on what attitude would be most helpful in a given situation, but ultimately the different drinks seemed more like a novelty option than anything else.

There's a lot here that Oxenfree did significantly better (it seems to matter if characters like you, but I didn't feel my choices shaping relationships in the same way and I missed that) but I still had a great time with it. I loved exploring Hell and I loved the story. Whatever faults the rest of the game had, the last half hour was fantastic and the ending I got left me delighted.

What a fantastic game. The story was exactly my kind of thing and had me telling my friends that SOMEONE needed to either drop everything and play the game right away so we could talk about it, or they needed to give me spoiler amnesty so I could just get everything I was feeling off my chest.

I don't generally care too much about combat but there was a lot of interesting stuff going on here, and I appreciated the way it pushed me outside of my comfort zone while still having things like limiters that I didn't have to try but could if I wanted. Left to my own devices I would have used nothing but Breach (with Mask and Jaunt in the upgrade slots) the entire game, but occasionally losing a function meant I had to have a deeper strategy and tying profile unlocks to function use meant I had to try everything if I wanted more story, which was a great trade-off.

My one minor annoyance was that I wish it were clearer sometimes which interact point is the one that leads to a new map area. I'm particularly sad I didn't get a better look at the top of Highrise because I chose the exit without realizing it.

I think this one just wasn’t for me. I needed save points to be more frequent or oil to be easier to come by or to have a clearer idea of what was going on with my stats or SOMETHING to ease the way. I just wasn’t enjoying myself constantly repeating the same path from a save point, then eventually dying because I sustained too much damage over time. The game wasn’t necessarily too hard for me to progress - I was learning all the time and figuring out how to deal with each room’s enemies - but I do think it was too hard relative to how much satisfaction I was getting out of it, which made it hard to want to continue.

Easily my favorite of the new-to-me games from my Zelda playthrough so far. Storywise I absolutely adored the middle stretch of the game, and while what came after never reached those heights again it was still a fantastic experience. All my complaints are minor (some temple-specific mechanics are frustrating, the Ghost Ship was a letdown, and there's a story choice I didn't love).

Overall I had an absolute blast with this - I lost myself in exploring the sea for hours, and the main quest had some fantastic set pieces that hit me right in my Zelda-loving heart.

Pyre does a masterful job of intertwining gameplay and story. Structuring the game so that you'll progress regardless of your win/loss record raised the narrative stakes for me by making the story more immersive - sure, as the player I would reach the end of the game whether I won the Rites or not, but as the Reader my goals could be completely derailed if the Rites didn't go my way. Knowing I could fail and the game would play out the consequences of that loss made victory feel much more important.

There's also a really great balance here between the amount of control I had over the story vs the choices I was forced to make - I had to make some really difficult choices about which characters to anoint and which to keep. It's the difference between a different game saying "you can't do X because we didn't script that" and Pyre saying "you can't do X because that would be too easy." The agony of loving a character who can hoop...you want to grant their freedom but you need them for the rites. I missed my friends when they were gone, but I knew it had been my decision to let them leave.

Put it all together and I don't remember the last time I was so invested in a game's story. There were rites that felt like Finals games to me because so much was on the line, and then there were routine rites that might as well have been for liberation because I just hated the other team so much I didn't want to give them the satisfaction. There were rites I considered throwing because I was won over by my opponent's story.

On top of that, it's a gorgeous game with a signature Supergiant soundtrack. I'll be coming back to this one a lot.

This was fun! My playthrough was a bit anticlimactic - not sure if it’s supposed to effectively end at Angel Yards, but that was the point where I decided to take a chance and see how far my existing food and water would get me…to the end of the game with loads to spare, as it turned out. I still had a blast with everything up to that point, and I can see myself revisiting on Endless mode sometime for a more involved challenge.

The inventory system could use some QOL improvements - it’s frustrating to have to move stuff around between multiple inventory sets all the time to stack them or because you can’t consume items directly from raft inventory even when you’re within range of the raft.

Loved the soundtrack, though the way it was deployed felt random and sporadic.

This game is absolutely stellar. Justice For All left me feeling a little burned out on the series. I got sick of being penalized in court for not being able to guess exactly what the game wanted from me, whether that was to press on statements in a particular order or to hold off on a particularly glaring contradiction until the second day of a trial.

There's still some of that in this installment, but for the most part the cases weren't as frustrating, and even when they were, the story's momentum was strong enough that I wasn't taken out of it in the same way. The Stolen Turnabout did get on my nerves a bit, but everything after that was great.

The final case in this one absolutely blew me away - the game does an incredible job of weaving together a lot of threads from previous cases. There were some "reveals" that only came after a solid fifteen minutes of me BEGGING the characters to connect some extremely obvious dots, but it seemed like I was always so preoccupied with what I knew was coming coming that I would be completely taken by surprise by two or three things that were revealed alongside it. It was absolutely bonkers in the best possible way.

After JFA I was thinking this game would be my last for the franchise, because I love the story and the characters but found the format so frustrating, but T&T was so strong that it really has me reconsidering.

This was fine. I had fun, but I wasn’t particularly impressed or engaged. This almost felt like a mobile release; it’s still Mario but it feels watered down.

A better difficulty curve would have been nice - I was racking up extra lives like they were coins until suddenly at the very end of the main game there were a couple of tougher sequences. I appreciated the challenge, but it was too little too late.

I played a couple of the Special levels, but by the time they showed up I was just ready to be done with the game.

Precise timing in games is really not my strong suit, and the combat in this game puts a HUGE emphasis on timing, so it's honestly kind of a surprise that I still mostly enjoyed myself. (I gave up on Bros Attacks maybe six hours in, and got by surprisingly well without them until I ended up utterly outclassed in the final Cackletta fight.)

I liked the abilities and the game's creativity in pushing you to make regular use of them all, although it could get tedious at times - when I was exploring I enjoyed figuring out how to traverse a section, but when I was just trying to move quickly across a couple of screens to get to my destination it could be a pain to have to switch between abilities. They also got unwieldy once I'd unlocked them all, since I tended to keep the minimap open rather than using the Moves screen.

Overall it was a fun time with a lot of little touches that I loved (the Dr. Mario viruses in the Hooniversity were a particular standout). I'm pretty sure I originally got this game because someone somewhere made a Super Mario RPG comparison, and the game absolutely has that vibe even if it doesn't reach the same heights.

Bowser's Minions was fine for what it was, an optional add-in. I played through maybe a section and a half just to try it out, but I didn't feel a need to go any further.

Revisited this because recently I’d seen a lot of references to it being really difficult. “What are people talking about? I loved this when I was a kid and I don’t remember it being super hard.”

Then I died fifteen times trying to get through Snow Barrel Blast before accidentally falling into the shortcut barrel.

Anyway, still a great game, but I did miss the relative polish of DKC2 - the foundation is here but the sequel really perfected things.