me a few days ago: haha i will install a load of funny mods and see what chaos happens :)

me now: i will protect my wife ryo and daughter giulia with my fucking life and be the best husband and father i can

edit: this game has given me a fucking existential crisis

edit 2: playing too much sims may have fucking killed my pc lmao

A cozy game that's actually cozy for real.

The visuals are so unique, it's like walking through a hazy dream. It's complemented by simple but effective audio and good background music. You can get through all of the game's achievements in less than an hour if you really want to, but if you want to take your time to soak in the environment, explore for secrets, or fiddle with different interactions and items, you can do that too. It's a game that invites you to chill out and take things slow, and it's really good at it.

Also, you can pet a cat, and there's a Halloween mode, so that's two big bonuses for me.

My only complaint is that in some areas, the came seems to force you to look in certain directions for no reason and it disoriented me a few times, but other than that, there's nothing so bad as to dampen the overall experience.

Fun to play with the gf while it was on but doesn't get much more impactful than that. I do admire how often it switches things up but I still feel like it makes it feel twice as long as it is. Story stuff also ranges from mediocre to completely insufferable, and I can't believe it ultimately ends with these two characters who are clearly terrible for each other and destroy everything in their path staying together for the kid. Yawn. There is so much potential for a more interesting and nuanced story to be told here but I guess I'm expecting too much?? Which feels kinda bad to say. Anyway, it's fine, it's too long but it's fine and I doubt I'll think about it ever again.

If this game were just 8 hours of figuring out made-up languages and using those languages to solve dope language-based puzzled this would be a 5/5. But alas, it is not just that. It also has some meh puzzles, weird stealth sequences, and constant running around and back-tracking.

Aside from some of those negative quirks, this really is one of the most unique puzzle games I've ever played. The process of mastering these fictitious languages is so immensely satisfying. It scratches a similar itch for me that games like Obra Dinn and The Witness scratch. Such a rad concept for a game with a really lovely story and beautiful visual design.

+ Unique, extremely cool, and incredibly satisfying mechanic for a puzzle game
+ Scratched a good mental itch that not many puzzle games do
+ Cool story
+ Beautiful world design

- Some iffy puzzles that distract from the cool language learning
- Way way way too much running around and back-tracking
- Really needs some sort of map

Review for Mario Galaxy:

Let me say this first: I am probably one of the only gamers, who never owned a Nintendo Wii, therefore I missed some classics of which I knew I'd love them. I was really happy to get the 3D Mario All Stars Collection, so I could finally play Super Mario Galaxy after all these years.
Playing it with a decade worth of games that came after it in mind, it's very obvious that Galaxy was as influential as most of the games from Nintendo are. It is unbelievable to me, how this game is still the absolute best in its genre. It's full of creative ideas that drive every single galaxy and its worlds to be nothing but an absolute joy. I stated that already for Odyssey, there is just nothing in those games that is not a blast to do. While Odyssey is also a perfect game that manages to smoothly transition into an open world structure, the specific galaxy/world structure here is absolutely genius. All worlds are unique and evolve around sometimes single or multiple ideas and gameplay mechanics and because of that, they can go absolutely wild with creating the environments. I consistently had the urge to find every star in every area. What I also truly love about the 3d Mario games are the boss fights. While not being too hard of course, they still offer a good enough variety and beautifully animated patterns. I can't overstate how much I love the Mario games and especially the 3d ones. If there is a series that managed to stay relevant and immensely influential over the course of multiple decades, it's this. It speaks to the 5 year old kid in me getting started with video games the same way, as it speaks to me now, a 32 year old gamer who's played close to a thousand games since then. It's the magic that sucked me into the world of gaming and will keep me there forever.

This game’s music and style is #awesome. I know it was supposed to be green but my emulator played it in black and white and the screen is super zoomed in, you can’t see 3 feet in front of you and the soundtrack is just these harsh noises and beeps and screeches, there’s rooms and dark hallways with no enemies and it gets more and more frequent the more you progress and the deeper into the planet you go. I feel so unwelcome, tense, out of my depth, and on edge. Super cool af.

I hear a lot about how metroid 1’s abrasive and alien design was lost in future games and while I do like the thought of duplicate rooms, death traps, and in general just map design that is meant to trip the player up and fuck with them, (See tricks and traps from doom 2; one of the greatest videogame levels of all time.) that wasn’t what stopped me from wanting to finish metroid 1. It was just unfun to control. Moving around sucked, shooting sucked, the health economy sucked unless you were willing to grind those bug ejecting tubes for like 10 minutes, and it was huge so if you got lost (no map) you were LOST for real. This game is genuinely fun to control, the movement as well as the combat is smooth and is up to modern standards. The game is much more linear so the lack of a map isn’t as big of a deal (though, not having any colour made it hard to mentally isolate where it was you needed to be. As well as remembering all these BS normal ass blocks that you can crawl thru.) ((double also, i’m probably a little advantaged on this front cause i played AM2R))

I do feel the metroid fights themselves got old really quick and despite the mutations my strategy of just tanking it all and spamming missiles never changed. It was like the same fight but reskinned and they gradually got more and more bullet spongey. And also there wasn’t enough health recharges in the later stages cause there were so little enemies to regain hp from. I had to backtrack just for hp. Later I looked it up (AFTER I FINISHED!!) and it turns out yea that was the closest one lol

I think this game is worth playing and I had fun. At least give this one a fair try.

Honestly not a bad game at all. Good sprite art and animations. I think its downfall though is its clunky controls and the difficulty scaling. Each level is a one-screen mega map where you control two characters by switching between them and using their different abilities to solve puzzles, and each level is completed when you find 10 of that level's special item. It can be a bit tedious sometimes catching one character up to the other since you can't play as both of them at the same time.

As for the difficulty, it's almost like this where the things that you take damage from kinda just appear, at least in the later levels. Some of them, like the frogs jumping out of the water, are easily visible and you can see their trajectory. But then there's also stage hazards that spawn off screen and fall down onto you, even though you can't see where they're coming from, so you have no idea that they're even there until you get hit. In earlier levels, it's fine, and you can usually remember where they are. But in later levels, they become so frequent and mixed in with other hazards like birds and bugs that fly incredibly fast so you get double smacked. It's also important to note that only three of the four playable characters have damaging moves, and of those damaging moves, you only get one per character and they are very limited, so you can't just clear all the enemies and traverse that way. To my knowledge, different enemy types don't have specific pathways or behaviors other than maybe their speed.

But again, not a bad game. It's just weirdly boring for the first 2-3 levels and then gets way hard out of like nowhere.

this was the coziest, cutest game i’ve played so far in 2024 and it was so unexpected?? it wasn’t even on my radar. seriously i adored everything about it, it never gets boring, it is the perfect length, the mechanics are always fresh, discovering the environment reacting to your music was one of the most satisfying gaming moments i’ve had recently 🥹 (like the white flowers with the drum or the ferns) and the soundtrack was SOOO GOOODDD, especially when the character little my was on the screen~

i easily recommend snufkin to everyone who wants a short & adorable adventure!