The puzzles of ‘The Last Campfire’ reminded me of the shrines in ‘Breath of the Wild.’ Each one a simple and singular puzzle to allow the player character, Ember, to reach the (close by) goal. I appreciated that it was a short and relatively gentle experience. I only got stumped once early on before I really understood the control language of the game. The Icelandic-flavored narration was far too twee for my tastes so I found myself trying to read faster than the narrator, so I could skip the audio. Despite ‘The Last Campfire’ being all about death and fear, I did find something comforting about the ending as, I suspect, was intended. Dying is scary, yes, but everyone else is also dying, so we’re all in this together. I don’t think ‘The Last Campfire’ is a game anyone needs to make a priority but it’s worth playing, especially when it goes on sale. I paid $2.99 for it and it was certainly worth it.

For a small indie game like this, it's insane how well realized this world is. How well written the characters. How good and how diverse the play controls. I felt joy just running (and climbing, water skipping, ground surfing, ragdolling, etc.) all over the island, accomplishing simple quests but also making connections and building toward something special. 'Lil Gator Game' recalled titles like 'A Short Hike' and 'Alba: A Wildlife Adventure' but it has play mechanics and a story all of its own.

'Lil Gator Game' is a LARPing adventure for the player character and also a story about games and the different ways people interface with them. One thing I really loved about 'Lil Gator Game' is how it helps the player to 100%. You need to make 36 friends to get the credits to roll and I considered finishing it there. Without an in-game map, 100% seemed too daunting an ask. But post-credits, your friends hook you up with everything you need to find absolutely everything you missed. So satisfying. Joyful all the way to 100%.

So very short for $30. I played the entire campaign, at a leisurely pace, in under three hours, certainly. Maybe under two honestly. But I really did enjoy my time in there. For a 'Star Wars' fan, you really can't beat some of these experiences. A light saber duel with Vader, using force powers to defeat a raging darkghast, flying a ship into Vader's castle on Mustafar, commanding droid troops with light saber swipes. It really is something. And I like the story too. With both this and the 'Obi Wan Kenobi' series, I love learning about the different ways that Darth Vader...cares. His objective here was shocking to me. And indeed I was also surprised by what we learn about the geological history of Mustafar. I'm keeping the star score reasonable only because it's a steep price tag for an experience that's no longer than a feature film. But if you like 'Star Wars,' you really should play this. I played on PSVR and if you care about visuals, this game looks demonstrably better on PSVR than it does on Meta Quest 2.

I'm glad to report that nearly every complaint you might have had about the original 'JWE' has been corrected here in the sequel. And the new features, including botanical feeding, staff management, dinosaur herding, and medical services, are truly additive. The content distribution is unlike the original, in that the campaign plays more like a three- to four-hour tutorial, and the bulk of your time will be spent on Chaos Theory story maps (one for each of the six films in the franchise) and on Challenge maps. Building and perfecting in 'JWE2,' whether it is theme parks or wildlife preserves, is just FUN. I played only this game for six weeks and only tore myself away from it to move on to other games in the backlog. A very worthy sequel to an already great game.

'Alba' is a great little open-world photography game set on a Spanish-influenced island over one week of a young girl's summer vacation. I found it all to be very charming and comforting and the perfect kick-back video game for my own summer vacation. Along the way, you'll get more goals than just filling out your photo album. Alba becomes an important part of the culture of the island over the one week of game time. It's a stress free game but also one that promotes action, both political and conservational, to make one's living space better than it might be otherwise. 'Alba' is exactly what I needed in my quest for games to give me some summer vibes.

Very few of the sidequests in this open-world lifestyle sim are of any real value. And most of the time you'll spend in Rainy Woods will be tied up in fetchy side content that gives you only a marginally better understanding of the characters and the world. The controls are stiff and the graphics don't really stack up against the majority of Playstation 3 games. But all that said, 'The Good Life' is one more fascinating and trippy sci-fi horror fantasy comedy story from Swery65. I became very invested in Rainy Woods, Naomi Haywood, and the personalities around her. I think Swery is best known for his character building and dialogue writing, but his games also tend to have really interesting stories. The story of 'The Good Life' is so oddly specific that it's a marvel anyone would have thought it up. And it has a point to make too, about celebrity culture, social media, and alternative facts. I'll follow Swery where he goes, because even if the game is janky as all hell (and it often is), you are guaranteed to have a unique experience.

Smaller in geographic and topical scope than was 'LoS: True Colors,' but there is a real charm to 'Wavelengths.' Until this side-story, I never clicked with Steph. She always seemed to be trying too hard. And was stand-offy in all the wrong moments. But 'Wavelengths' helped me to understand how Steph was uniquely impacted by the events of 'Before the Storm' and the original 'LoS.' And I cared. And I warmed up to her. I love the seasonal approach to the storytelling here. Though you never leave the record store, you really feel the seasonal changes and the year slipping away. I predicted the final moment of 'Wavelengths,' but it didn't make it any less magical when it happened.

With Shu Takumi returning to the series to direct and write, this is 'Ace Attorney' through and through. Everything wonderful and frustrating about the series is back in full bloom here. I enjoyed the change of century (19th) and place (London) here in this first game of 'The Great Ace Attorney' collection. I do however think the characters here are decidedly less colorful than those of the 'Wright Anything Agency.' New protagonist Ryunosuke Naruhodo, while exhibiting some of Phoenix Wright's original trilogy clumsiness, was never quite as engaging as Phoenix. I recognize that this may have been the intention...to bring the series back down to planet Earth.

I enjoyed the story of 'Adventures' and this was especially true of cases 3 and 5. Case 3 has a resolution that is surprising for the series and sets up a cliffhanger that isn't resolved until the final moments of the game. I really enjoyed both of the new game mechanics. 'The Dance of Deductions' was additive to the experience of investigation. And the jury system and 'Summation Examinations' were additive to the experience of trials. Like many games in this series, 'Adventures' is long-winded. Your understanding of the case will almost always be ahead of the characters in the game and they will sometimes take literal hours to catch up. It took me 40 hours to complete this game. Now consider that this is a game where you, almost exclusively, read text. In 40 hours, the average reader can read ~1600 book pages. So the act of playing 'Adventures' is akin to reading a 1600 page book. Sixteen...HUNDRED...pages. I really think that's too long for an 'Ace Attorney' game or for any visual novel, really. It's the literal equivalent of four to five complete novels.

‘Cozy Grove’ makes a great first impression. Similar to ‘Animal Crossing,’ it plays out in real time, making use of the real world clock and calendar. First few days, and you'll be appreciating the cute visuals, the calming music, and the minimal amount of chores that are asked of you each day. But trust me when I say that this is a deception. The first problem with 'Cozy Grove' is that the game expands every day and the chores (all of them fetch quests) require increasingly more materials and therefore more time to collect them. Several weeks in and you'll be taking quests from ten different neighbors and each of them will be giving you quests that may take days or weeks to complete. It would be maddening enough if you were able to pick and choose which quests to prioritize, but you are not.

This brings us to the next big problem with 'Cozy Grove.' Unlike ‘Animal Crossing,’ ‘Cozy Grove’ is beatable. The story actually does resolve itself and completing the fetch quests is required to progress the story. As the story progresses, the asks get more and more outrageous. By game's end, you'll be getting single quests that ask for, no lie, over 300 items to complete. And if you don't do a quest, the story screeches to a halt. That quest will sit there waiting until you do as you're told. To make matters worse, there is no leveling. You are no more capable on day 100 than you were on day 1. So even though the requests are 100 times more difficult on day 100, you are no better equipped to complete them. It is a game recipe potent enough to put you in the madhouse.

Like ‘Animal Crossing,’ ‘Cozy Grove’ calls itself a lifestyle simulation. But because you are constantly being surprised by material and item requests, you can never just settle down and, for example, make furniture to customize your home or decorate your many gardens that unlock around the island. Does this game really think I’m going to spend 50 hardwood to build a table today when tomorrow it may force me to turnover 100 hardwood to complete a required quest? Why would I do that? Every day neighbors were demanding that I turn over my stuff to them, so my house was just a storage space for items I may need to give away to complete a future quest. ‘Animal Crossing,’ this is not.

By the time I finished ‘Cozy Grove,’ I hated it. I dreaded new neighbors being unlocked. My heart sank with each new unreasonable neighbor request. Others must be having a different experience because a DLC expansion(!) just released called ‘New Neighbears.’ More neighbors and more quests? They must be joking. I just narrowly missed the madhouse the first time around.

Haruka brings out the best in Kiryu. I love that she became an enduring part of this franchise. 'Yakuza 3' does have a now-typical game of thrones storyline like all of the previous games. But thanks to Kiryu managing a beachside orphanage with Haruka, 'Yakuza 3' adds a new city, a whole group of new children characters, and new kinds of priorities for Kiryu. Some of the most fun I had in the game had less to do with the big-city machinations of the Tojo Clan families and more to do with managing the orphanage. It was goofing off as a masked wrestler to cheer up a young kid with respiratory problems. It was having a family meeting to explain why a young girl got her feelings hurt. It was worrying about Haruka when she would run off to the city by herself.

This is my fifth game in the series after '0,' 'Kiwami,' 'Kiwami 2,' and 'Judgment.' By now, these games are comfort food for me. Each game rewards the time you invested in the previous games. Old characters show up here, especially in substories, to continue their stories. If I have one criticism of '3,' it may be that there were too many substories and they weren't as wacky as I've come to expect. I completed 106 of them and I missed a few. Minor complaint. I really enjoyed my time with 'Yakuza 3.'