Sucker for Love was an interesting concept buried beneath repetition and an overly saccharine story rammed with anime cliches. Date to Die For is an improvement on a lot of levels, but inherits many of the same core issues, chiefly, it's still weeb shit.

Let me qualify that statement: I like anime. Well, some anime. Like any other medium, it has its standout examples as well as its bad tropes. The same goes for visual novels, a lot of them are brilliant and a lot of them suck donkeys. The problem with a lot of indie, heavily anime-inspired VNs is that they're too focussed on delivering an experience that feels like their inspirations to find a truly original and interesting angle. Games like 2064, Murder By Numbers and Hatoful Boyfriend sand off their edges to such an extreme that they become incomparable to the greats that they were aping in the first place.

Hatoful Boyfriend might be the most apt comparison to Sucker For Love, given that it is also lampooning dating sims specifically. It also had a great, or at least very funny concept and starts out strong, but soon gives in to overly sentimental fluff and incomprehensible twists. Don't get me wrong, I generally liked both Hatoful Boyfriend and SfL, but I eventually found that they both grew fairly tedious and eye-rolly. Date to Die For shares a lot of these same issues, but does improve on them in a few key areas.

First, the gameplay is a lot better. Being able to freely explore a full house rather than a one-bedroom flat feels liberating and enables much more creative horror sequences. The visuals are better too, in fact the presentation all round is great. Stardust, your protagonist, is much better than the last game's PC, if only because she's far less singularly obsessed with the idea of seducing the Elder God, but that can leave her motivation muddled at times. Still, a boring character is usually better than a slightly creepy one, so definitely deserving of the "most improvement" award there. And overall, I found this game a fair bit creepier than its predecessor, but it still wasn't exactly scary.

All of that is to say though that I just wish Date to Die For was more gratuitous. Normally shock-value and fanservice are black marks against a game, but here their absence is missed. For a game seemingly about trying to kiss a giant breasted goat Mommy, it's shockingly tame, with barely a swear word in sight and no nudity to speak of. The game almost seems to resent having to depict any violence or gore too, so while many of its creature and character designs are great, it just doesn't utilise them well enough.

It's just that when you're going into a game about doing horrible rituals for an Eldritch God with huge boobs so you can kiss them, you expect something pretty full-on. I don't want the game to be porn, god there's plenty of hentai on steam now, we hardly need any more. But I did want it to utilise the potential juiciness of its concept more, rather than deliver something as tame as this. The new spray bottle mechanic is a fantastic example, this allows you to spritz a character any time they start to get flirty, usually to chuckle-worthy effect, but this only comes up a handful of times. At the end of the day, Sucker for Love is too afraid to take big risks, leaving you with a generally charming if slightly dull experience. It's better than the first game, or at least more fun, but there's so much unused potential here.

This is a really, really strong proof of concept, but I was a little disappointed that some of its potential went unfulfilled. Home Safety Hotline has a great art direction and creeped me out quite a bit. It's possible that I just have a big weakness for admin/tech support games like Papers, Please and its ilk, but this game was a lot of fun.

Normally I'm the first to praise a horror game for brevity, but here I felt like it was missing just a little something to take what an interesting idea and send it to the moon. The setup is subverted a little bit here and there throughout, but it never really reaches the crescendo that truly great horror demands. The gameplay too needed an extra wrinkle or two, as at the end of the day, you really are just answering a series of questions with no time limit.

Home Safety Hotline is definitely a little underbaked, but I like so much of it that I find it hard to hold that against it. Instead, I'll say that those potential points of criticisim make me want a sequel that can iterate and improve upon the already great stuff that's here and flesh it out into a truly brilliant experience. For now though, Home Safety Hotline is a surprisingly spooky way to spend an evening.

Halo: Spartan Strike is the long awaited (ha) follow up to 2013's Spartan Assault.

Honestly that's everything you need to know about this piece of shit. It's not really that bad, but it's so painfully, totally mediocre that it's worse than a truly bad game. While it's only two or three hours long, every minute drags on and on as you complete the same dull objectives over and over. What's even worse is that the biggest change here is the inclusion of the Promethean enemy faction from Halo 4. Yay. Those boring fucks. So happy to see them again.

It annoys me so much because this idea has potential. Why not do a top down remake of the first Halo, or even a new full length entry in that vein? The mainline Halos basically operate on a flat plane anyway, so why not give it a go and see what happens. But no, instead we have this pair of half-arsed mobile games. Hooray.

While I could excuse its short runtime, its boring plot and uninteresting gameplay (I'm lying, I couldn't excuse those things but just accept the premise for now), where I draw the line is after fighting immense boredom to see the end of this game, it then turns around and says "Nope, you haven't gotten all the gold stars on all the levels yet. Piss off and do it right, then you can have the last 20% of the game" How dare you, Spartan Strike. This is the gaming equivalent of a hookup who spits in your eye and shits on the floor then has the arrogance to think they can edge you. Fuck off.

Whatever your opinions may be on the low points of Halo, 4 is nothing compared to this. Here I was thinking maybe I'd find an interesting forgotten gem, but no, the Halo Spartan games are dire. Cheap cashins thrown together to try to convince you to actually use Windows 8. Phooey.

Recently there has been a rise in games that are more compilations than single works of creation. Things like the Dread X Collection show that there's a lot of value to be found in a taster menu approach to indie games. It's a trend I've been happy to see, as many genres benefit greatly from brevity (particularly horror) but at the same time need to provide players with enough of a value proposition to justify their purchase.

Applying this approach to a puzzle game instead is, on paper, a fantastic idea. There are many concepts and mechanics for puzzlers that are amazing for a little bit but soon become tiresome, so collecting a few of those together and making them an hour each sounds great, but unfortunately, Please, Touch the Artwork fails its premise on a few fronts. Its most grievous sin is making it pretty obvious which puzzle selection (or "gallery", as the game refers to them) was thought of first and making the other two feel like tacked on filler.

It's a real shame, because the gallery in question, the De Stijl movement, is great stuff. The levels gradually introduce new mechanics to a simple idea, eventually combining them to produce some surprisingly tricky problems. Your reward for beating a few levels is another factoid about the movement that the game's aesthetic is born of and the artists behind it. Don't get me wrong, it's nothing revolutionary, but in that first hour of gameplay are the seeds for something interesting, a way to make art education truly immersive and involve the player in the creation process that they're studying.

Unfortunately, the other two galleries are, not just worse than De Stijl, but actively bad. The Boogie Woogie levels are dull and ugly, the type of puzzles you play on your phone on the toilet paired with a nonsense narrative. The New York gallery is the most insulting though, an overlong selection of mazes that barely qualify as puzzles. While it's better looking than Boogie Woogie, it's a real exercise in wasting your time and I found all goodwill built up by The Style completely burned away before even the halfway point of New York.

I'm disappointed, as I think modern art is greatly maligned and something like Please, Touch the Artwork had the potential to recontextualise it in a varied and fun package. While an attempt is made towards this goal, two thirds of the three hour game is dedicated to generic crap. There's definitely something here in this idea, but it's not executed upon half as well as it should be.