A characterful metroidvania with unique pixel art, that feels like it was designed by someone who is obsessed with level design and spent many hours of their youth filling notebooks with miniature dungeons. This isn't to say it has The Best Level Design of All Time, just that its map is designed with a sense of care and attention to detail that is absent from much of the genre. Batbarian feels more like an old school dungeon crawler than most metroidvanias. It's not really like La-Mulana, because nothing really is, but in the intricacy and challenge of its dungeon, it’s more akin to La-Mulana than to other genre entries. The use of light and darkness is also unique among metroidvanias that I’ve played, and adds to that feeling of a dungeon crawl. If you want to explore a vast network of caves riddled with secrets, clever puzzles, and challenging enemies, this may be the game for you.

Of note are the assist options which let you tweak difficulty to your liking, and can be turned on and off at any time with no penalty. When I got sick of a certain boss, I just turned on increased defense and increased attack, beat the boss, and turned them back off. Excellent for people with, like, jobs, who can't spend an infinite amount of time on every video game challenge.

Should be said that I didn't actually finish the game. By the time I was about 90% through, finishing the game started to sound exhausting, so take that as you will.

Never really succeeds at being more than just okay. It's not exactly a bad game, it was just consistently underwhelming in every aspect. The genre is so well-trodden at this point that I kind of expect more from a metroidvania in 2022. The level design is definitely the low point, but most of the abilities are kinda bland as well. Combining smaller maps into one bigger map and unlocking new paths is a great idea, I just wish the game surrounding it was a bit less lackluster. It's also extremely easy, which isn't necessarily a downside... it's just that I played the game on hard mode and it was still easy.

Ugh… MMOs. The genre I initially hated as a teenager, that I allowed to win me over in some ways, that I now have extremely mixed feelings about. I probably should’ve just stuck with that initial dislike of them. First, they’re designed to take up time, which I find especially heinous in this age where the majority of video games expect me to spend a huge chunk of time on them. Even a relatively short game now expects me to spend 30-40 hours on it, and genuinely short games are extremely rare outside of indie games. It’s not that I want every game to be over in 5-10 hours, I just think there must be a better middle ground to be found between 10 hours and 100 hours. “Over 100 hours of gameplay!!!” now feels obligatory, rather than a specific design choice. The big problem is that an MMO wants to be a lifestyle, not a game. So, even if I think an MMO is a good game, I still have a hard time liking it because I know what it wants is to eat up all my time. The thing is, I know myself. MMOs turn me into my own worst enemy. When I played Destiny, the only game I wanted to play was Destiny. The reason I quit Warframe after breaking the hundred hour mark, even though I really liked the game, was that I could see hundreds, thousands of hours of Warframe stretched before me, and I didn’t want to be a person who only plays Warframe, just like I didn’t want to be a person who only plays Destiny, especially when there are so many other interesting games to play out there. I feel like my thoughts about games are more nuanced, interesting, and beneficial to myself when I play a wide variety of games. I like Destiny and Warframe, but I don’t want them to be a lifestyle, and that’s really the only way to play an MMO as it’s meant to be played. That’s the core reason why I can never really be a fan of MMOs. Like the quarter munchers of the past, they’re just designed to consume something, and that thing, time, is something extremely valuable to me. When I played Phantasy Star Online 2 a few times over the past week, I could feel that MMO player tendency rising up in me, that insatiable urge to complete every quest and tick every box and gain every level and collect everything and just do for the sake of doing. No matter how cleverly it’s disguised in an MMO, you’re not really doing anything. It’s a game that would eat up my life if I let it. This is why to me MMOs feel… oddly predatory. My second big problem with MMOs is this: when it’s well done, I really like that sense a game can give you of inhabiting a different world. In MMOs, I can’t help but feel that it’s a world made of cardboard. Even outside of microtransactions, everything in an MMO is transactional, everything is a thinly veiled coercion, everything is nagging me towards inevitable and meaningless progress. The end goal of an MMO is to make you feel like playing an MMO some more. I resent it. I resent it enough that from now on I kind of just want to stay away from MMOs on principle. It has game mechanics and classes and monsters and items and systems, but it seems pointless to go into any of that, because I feel like all I have to say about PSO2 is that it’s an MMO. You put time in and nothing comes out.

This is another of those games that feels like a place to inhabit. In the category of games for peacefully whiling away the time, there's almost no match. It's the game I always wished Harvest Moon or Rune Factory would be. One of my favorite things about this game is there’s absolutely no way to fail, and you’re never penalized for allocating your time however you see fit. Even if you die in a cave, the punishment is practically nonexistent. Also, you never have to go in there. If you waste a day going to bed at 1pm, it literally doesn’t matter. If you wanna spend all your time gathering berries and hanging out with a wizard, go ahead. If you have a burning desire to become an exceptionally wealthy melon and truffle oil tycoon, no one's stopping you. If you just feel like catching fish and falling in love, do it. You could also just do it all. It’s wonderful.


Good games made by a single person or a small team aren’t extremely rare these days, but rarely do they get pretty much everything right. In terms of art and music, it’s a beautiful game, but never ostentatious. It’s beautiful in such a warm and inviting way. The art is cute and humble in a way that perfectly matches the way playing this game makes you feel. The music always feels seasonally appropriate and provides the perfect backdrop for your new life. There are few things I've seen in games quite as lovely as your first time watching the seasons change in Stardew Valley. “Labor of love” is an understatement.