Really atmospheric for like the first hour, then it becomes a rather tedious game about constantly backtracking to discover a new room every ten minutes or so, with a somewhat generic j-horror twist, only instead of an old gothic-esque japanese haunted house this time we’re in space. It’s cool enough! Don’t get me wrong, I liked it, and I liked the experimental nature of the game and how exploring the capabilities of the medium’s storytelling potential was arguably the focus of the project, even if the story itself isn’t that great nor exciting. You can see they’re having fun and trying shit they normally wouldn’t, even if you can also see the budget constrains at every step of the way. I’m not quite sure why this gets such a bad rep in here of all places. Like, I see why IGN game reviewers could despise a 3-hour-not-so-scary horror game with tank controls, mediocre level design and a deliberately obscure progression in 2013, but in backloggd? It boggles my mind to be honest. Perhaps one day people will see this as what it is; a pretty ok and weird game. Give it a try!

An absolute beauty of a game that the developers decided to ruin by making it stupidly (not a random choice of words here) hard. If game makers had arrived to the realization that your marvelous platformer with a masterpiece of a soundtrack could be easy, Donkey Kong Country would’ve been even better remembered, which is saying a lot. But the insistence in making games hard and punishing even if it doesn’t feel good mechanically nor makes sense with the vibe you’re going for has ruined many games, and will doubtless ruin many more.

Anyway the level design is Rare fucking with you in a way that makes the fun go away. I could call it “what if design” because they seemingly went “what if the player runs up with a new enemy throwing barrels at them that they can’t see if they are going slightly fast”, or “what if we put this enemy in the EXACT POSITION the player would end up in regular circumstances in this section ha ha!”, etc. Or I could call it shit design. Because is shit.

It’s never a good signal when a short game, and I’m talking like FOUR HOURS short, feels overly long. Kirby 3 is a fun and often clever game, particularly when it’s showing you new abilities or new ways to use them with your animal pals, but just never differentiates from the rest of the series in a way that feels exciting, and if you’ve played these games recently it really starts to feel redundant. It is the best looking game in the series up until this point, and it is in my mind better than the almost unplayably slowness of the 64 Kirby, but just doesn’t cut it.

Much more tense that I had anticipated, but a great experience nonetheless. Ico explores its themes of bonding and persistence through the lense of a child trapped in this decaying castle, searching a way out amidst the ruins of a world that's seemingly hostile to that which he cares the most. To me the serene beauty of the enviroment is arguably the star of the show, but is permanently muddled by the constant threat of danger; you cannot leave Ico's companion Yorda alone for more than a couple of minutes without feeling worried, and calculating the distance between them in terms of seconds becomes a neccessity. The player is never quite free in their mind to meander around the castle and fully appreciate the artistry of its design. This is deliberate, of course, and its purpose gives your actions a weight that they would've otherwise lacked, perhaps. But here's my thing with Ico; I always had conceived it as a rather different experience, one more contemplative and calmer, one which just left you be in this magnificent place for the most part, one when you weren't rushed to solve anything by the ever present enemies lurking at every corner, and that's not the case. Sure, there's some momments here and there, but that's not the main thing the game's looking for, in my opinion, and this contrast became problematic to the mind of a person that had been wanting to play it for a good fifteen years.

Ultimately, even if I would've loved the game Ico was in my mind a lot more, it's hard to deny the merits the actual game has. It's almost like a horror game, the player's always on their toes, and while the combat is bad, intrusive and unceasing, it does gave a deeper meaning to the relationship between these two characters, makes the bond more solid. Anyway, the game's great and the sound design and the score are top notch, that alone makes it an obligatory play for everybody.

I fail to see the charm in this. The music is excellent and some elements of its visuals are at least good, but that’s pretty much all there is. It is extremely combat focused and while it isn’t nearly as reliant on tedious grinding as other big RPG’s of its time, it is mostly uninspired and flat. Mastering the timing of the basic attack is always the winning strategy, that and healing, and it never asks much more of you, and I just never felt enamored with the gimmick to compensate for the lack of a more engaging system.

I love that it’s short and simple and ideal for novices but I would’ve loved more a better though out combat.

Cheap ass level design that centers around abilities that make some levels a mere formality, but are simultaneously a fucking torture to play without them. Too hard, too filled with shit, made to be beaten by using the flying Mario costume, but if you fuck it up it’s just 50x as punishing with regular jumping Mario. And I know it’s also cheap to say that a game doesn’t feel good and call it a day, but this game DOESN’T FEEL GOOD. Mario is agonizingly slow and his jump is short and floaty and never quite feels like he does what you want to do, so you have to constantly run EXCEPT IN MOST OF THE CHALLENGING JUMPS YOU CAN’T WIND UP SAID RUN PRIOR TO THE JUMP. I think that jumping to the wall to do a wall jump instead of jumping contrary to the wall is just weird. You cannot afford a weird direction mechanic or whatever when you already feel like shit to control. “It’s not shit, is deliberate” give me a break! Plus is just a tiresome formula with scenarios you’ve seen before a million times, a rehash of a rehash, calling it redundant seems redundant itself.

For a novice studio this is sublime. A marriage between a visual novel and a management game that never completely sets in either genre and masterfully combines both to elevate its narrative. I’m a sucker for the ambiance The Pale Beyond is trying to reach, but I think that I’m also harder to please in this regard (I don’t like the book that would come to your mind if you were to think about this setting, for example), so, believe me when I say that this game is well written and very much well thought out. While the expedition is never pleasant and things go wrong pretty much from day one, you can definitely feel tedium, coldness and hunger mining your crew’s sanity and morale. You see them having their own interests and personalities, and you see them slowly letting them go as survival becomes not the most important thing but the only thing that matters. Some of the late game moments are haunting, not because they are super dramatic, but because they are not. There’s not enough energy for drama and confrontation when you haven’t been eating or sleeping well for three weeks in a row.

The only thing holding this game from being a true masterpiece is that, while an experience like this should be hard for what its narrative is trying to convey, I think is a bit harder than it should, prohibitively hard even. I can imagine people not finishing it despite being hooked by it, so that’s a bummer. It’s a hard line to establish, so I kinda get it.

On one hand this game is a truly epic (in the sense that word was meant to describe things before the internet) adventure, filled with crazy ass scenarios, designs and music, the cover here in backloggd alone tells the potential player what awaits for them there. Charisma is a word that we tend to overuse as a non descriptor of sorts when we’re out of words and want to describe something fun, and confident, and electric, but damn it, it does apply here. It’s all harmless and self conscious adolescent angst, always vibrant and absurd.

On the other hand is this sadist whiplash simulator that hates you and wants to see you suffer and fail. The mechanics are either poorly calibrated or purposeful spiteful; every time you miss a note, if there’s another one close to that, you’ll miss a second time, because you lose control of the… controller for a fraction of a second and your rhythm thingy in the middle of the screen returns to its default position, and also the notes that attack you when you’re on the defense mode seem to accelerate slightly and erratically when they’re near you. It’s all very frustrating! And that’s not so bad, I guess, games can be frustrating and good, even if for some moments (for example THE SHARK) this resembles more to those “unfair platformers” that were popular for a second fifteen years ago than what you think when you hear “tough but fair!”

The thing is, I don’t know if these two facets can reconcile with one another. Some people would even go as far as to call it ludonarrative dissonance because a game that’s all about becoming more confident with oneself and it’s all funny and cute feels like it shouldn’t be this fucking hard. If you are good at this game I envy you, for real, the vibes are immaculate.

All looks but no heart. Not only is the writing very weak, but the nature of the whole experience feels forced, academic even, with these bits of interaction that feel out of place and go nowhere, just out there to justify its game status I guess? And it is immediately noticeable, from the very firsts scenes in the game you know the dialogue is off and the little mission objectives and extra collectibles are… just wrong, I guess. Not the kind of way you want your little whimsical indie game about your childhood on rural France feel.

Incredibly cute and sweet, but also unimaginably tender and surprisingly profound. The lowkey drama found throughout A Year of Springs is something that’s not quite easy to see. Like, there are a lot of cozy games, games that in some ways have similar vibes to this one, but which couldn’t be more different in terms of the effect that cozyness has on the player. When I play something like Animal Crossing I don’t feel at all like when I played this. One feels like a neverending winter with unlimited hot chocolate while the other feels like holding hands with your favorite person on a rainy day, each doing different things but nevertheless feeling like that company is the better part of the experience. I don’t know.

I love how every chapter plays with the dialogue mechanics, from the multiple ways you can affect the story in the first one, in contrast to how the state of mind of the main character in the third one basically locks you from diverging from the one path, to the second one, which has one BIG choice masquerading as multiple little ones. But that works in service to the writing and the very human and serene way the relationships between these three women changes over the spring. I was left wanting more, but in a good way. Have you eve watch a movie and felt that you just wanted like a sitcom made out of it? Like, fine, the story is done, but you just couldn’t let the characters go? I wanna know not necessarily what happens next, but what these people do with their lives. I don’t care if it’s boring, I just wanna know. In a matter of an hour the developer made me care, made relate, made cry and made miss three people that don’t exist but I have met.

Genuinely one of the best games I’ve ever played.