Deconstructeam strikes again! I found this game deeply disturbing. I have a deep fear of cutting and dissecting, but the narrative had me hooked and made me endure, along with the character, the depiction of self-harm. The use of absence in how this game creates its story is fascinating: both what happens in the game and what is not told at all are key to understanding what is really taking place in this plot.

Choosing the different paths, guessing and even deciding for a narrative that made sense to the player was ingenious. Every option and path were secretive, with disturbing ramifications. I was blown away by the possibility of building a story from memories I was building in the moment.

I have personally had issues with both my body and mind seeming either someone else’s or just not mine at all. Finding a videogame that explores this idea was moving.

Thank you raccoons4444 for the recommendation.

Not usually interested in Rouge-like/lites, but this one caught my attention. Dicey Dungeons oozes charm with its absurd setting and characters. I always enjoy it when a game has a crazy premise and just runs with it. Great fun mixing and matching different decks and each playable character feel completely different adding even more depth to the gameplay. Perfect game to play if you have a bit of time to kill. I will definitely be coming back to it every now and then.

The best thing I can say about Moonlighter is that its pixel art is incredibly detailed and textured. Everything else about the game feels like video game comfort food.

The core loop involves selling items in your shop, to upgrade your equipment, and then find new items in dungeons to sell in your shop. Both the selling items and running through dungeon halves of the game are quick and rewarding enough to make you want to always do the next step. It feels very similar to the "just one more turn" feeling you get from being in the middle of a game of Civ. Unfortunately, one of those halves lacks enough teeth to make it interesting, while the other progresses way too slowly in complexity.

Combat in the game is an uncomfortable mix of modern 2d action game verbs (dodge rolls, switching weapons, elemental damage, etc) and classic Zelda action verbs (you attack the direction you're moving, no animation cancelling). It's a serviceable set of systems, but it never feels great to play. Often it feels like enemies are simply more nimble or versatile than you. All you can do is rely on damage output to compensate, which is easy enough to do. It's just not very frenetic or strategic, unlike a more thoughtful 2d action classic like Hades.

The selling systems are the real highlight of the game. It is extremely satisfying to find the right price for an item you're selling, then selling 10 of them at once for lots of money. There is a progression of more interesting mechanics than price setting as the game goes on. You can sell items for a high price with higher demand in display cases. You have to stop thieves from stealing your items. Customers can put in special orders. But i found this progression a little slow for my liking. By the time I got to the more interesting mechanics, I was making enough money to avoid penny-pinching, giving all these new systems way lower stakes. Your mileage may vary.

Here are other things I neglected to mention. The weapon upgrades are fairly shallow, making it less satisfying as time goes on. The townsfolk don't really do much aside from telling you canned phrases. The backpack mechanics are fairly thoughtful, and packing your bag while dungeon diving is usually a fun puzzle to engage in.

All in a, the whole game feels like indie comfort food. If you want a low low difficulty roguelite, this is a good option. Otherwise, I'd recommend Hades if you haven't given that a go.

This is one of those great GamePass stories, where a game I didn’t even know existed before Wednesday quickly became one of my personal favorites of 2022, as Escape Academy oozes over with the kind of Escape Room charm I once thought could only be achieved in a physical space. The premise of this game is simple—you are training to become a great escape artist, and find yourself in increasingly violent scenarios from which you must escape during your training. The characters and story are not what this game is about, but they were fun and had some clever contrasts in their characterization. However, this game shines most in its puzzle design. This game was actually created by Escape Room designers who feared for their future when COVID hit, so the puzzles all have that unique interconnectedness that I’ve only experienced in physical escape rooms. I loved finding out which element of the room was necessary to solve the next sequence, and I always felt clever when I found the solution that the game clearly had designed for me to find. The only thing this game lacked was the maneuverability of objects in real space… You don’t even have the ability to to rotate items to find hidden crevices or anything, which means the puzzle solutions must present themselves to you a bit more obviously from the first glance at an item. Still, I’m so glad this game came to GamePass, because I probably would have never heard of it otherwise.

nirvana initiative is some of uchikoshi's strongest work, but never seems to transcend or challenge his style or abilities as a writer. coming off of the far more character driven somnium files, i had anticipated that this would further break the mold and defy expectations that the author had previously set. thankfully, what's here is incredibly good because it's just more somnium files.

starting a bit after the first title, nirvana initiative almost immediately grabs the player by showing a shocking murder that seems to be unstuck in time. as early as the scenario of two halves of one corpse appearing at different moments of time was revealed as the set up for the sequel, i was very hooked. so hooked it made me play the original just to see where it went. i don't want to divulge too much narratively, but i found myself very satisfied with how the mystery played out.

the game plays pretty much 1:1 with the previous release, just with some obvious budgetary and QOL with a brand new perspective on the puzzle design. uchikoshi only wrote this game, so his trademark esoteric puzzle design isn't here. the somniums in this title are all much more varied than the escape rooms from the first title, ranging from a riff on pokemon go to stealthing around a secret lab to literally diving deeper and deeper into a cult leader's pyschosis. none of them were particularly challenging, but they all felt very inspired. only a few hours in and i could tell that what the actual mindset of what somniums are designed to accomplish in the story is entirely different than before. there are good things about this, like how they don't feel so samey in terms of how to execute them, but i had a hard time justifying why we were diving into this character's pysche at this point in the story pretty frequently, especially in Mizuki's half of the story.

the story is split (as are many things) down the middle between a few months after the first title, where a new member of ABIS and his new AIBall Tama are tasked with hunting down the half body serial killings. new victims pile up and ryuki, our hero, begins to sink deeper and deeper into an obsessive psychosis regarding the killings. after that route ends, we just six years into the future where the other half of the other victims all start popping up. here we play as Mizuki, my favorite character from the last game, who is joined by Aiba. both duos have great chemistry, but i shockingly found myself way more invested in tama and ryuki than mizuki and aiba. in keeping with the first, the game also has a downright fantastic new cast of characters along with returning favorites. greg chun is having the time of his life playing Date, and new characters like komeji and gen really hit it out of the park with a shocking amount of pathos. i only really didn't care for kizuna and lien, but they ended up being tolerable by the end so it's fine. i guess.

part of me hates to say that i was a little disappointed with the increased scope and the return to a more twist-driven story, but it thankfully doesn't go full zero escape in the ways that annoyed me about that series. there's a lot more brainy pseudoscience in here than there was in somnium files but it thankfully never drowns out the amazing character stuff or murder mystery at the core of the story. it threatens at a few points to buckle under an increasingly "unsolvable" feeling mystery, but manages to stay the course but handwaving the details away in service of letting the characters have the spotlight.

also i think more games should just end on big dance numbers. uchikoshi is unbeatable for doing it twice, that's true Playa Mindset.