Although mechanically superior and more fun to play than Alwa's Awakening, it nevertheless falls short of its predecessor.

Being a throwback NES game, Awakening's design flaws felt intentional and charming. Its simplicity was its greatest strength.

Legacy's design flaws on the other hand slowly reveal themselves to be rather tedious. By introducing more complexity - more characters, story, items, magic upgrades, and abilities - my expectations rose dramatically. But Legacy never fully meets those expectations. The new magic upgrades are neat but never feel essential. And while there is some clever use of the new abilities in certain dungeons, they more often seem to trivialize the platforming challenge.

Still a solid little metroidvania and I hope we get a third game in the series.

Very fun when you're a spider doing spider things but spiders weren't meant to connect pipes and do physics stuff. Please stop making me connect pipes and do physics stuff instead of being a spider, it's like school again.

I get what they were going for, especially when building the balloon but it's extremely awkward and I kept feeling like I was wasting my time weaving tons of webs just to move one item. Vibes are very cute and nice and good though and the part with the bees where it lets you just swing about and explore is great, wish they focused on that more.

saved my gay spider lover, pretty happy with that

a LOVELY puzzle game, oh wow. This game has changed my perspective on how good a NES game could be.

The devs found a simple mechanic (the ice wand) and never wavered from it. It allowed for so many clever puzzles with only one new twist every world or two. The way they introduced the mechanics was perfect, forcing you to run into the scenario that teaches you how a new piece of the puzzle works before sending you off to solve the rest of the world on your own. And you can skip around to any (non-boss) puzzle in ANY world, anytime you want! I can't believe how much this game got right, all the way back in 1992. Even the boss levels, with moving elements, were remarkably well-done, if somewhat repetitive.

Round 7-2 is perhaps one of the best puzzles in the whole game. Knowing it was possible, knowing there was no jank, made it so fun to figure out and so rewarding to get the solution.

The spritework is cute and awesome. The cutscenes and story were unexpected but welcome. There was a new song for each world and they were all bangers.

This game even has a level editor! I mean come on, this has to be one of the most impressive puzzle titles for the NES. What an absolute masterpiece.

Out of the 29.8 million people (fresh stat from Google) that have bought and played Breath of the Wild, I might be in the top 5% of people in terms of just how much I dislike it. I think it’s an okay game, but I despise it. I feel like Nintendo took Kylo Ren’s advice a bit too seriously and completely blew up everything I loved about the franchise, gutting everything fantastic like some of the excellent level and visual design found in the dungeons to the timeless music in favor of “look, if you burn the grass it creates an updraft!!!” and music that sounds like someone accidentally sat on a piano aside from a few cases. I get that it “redefined how you can approach exploration in video games” and [INSERT IMPRESSIVE SOUNDING PHRASE HERE] but that meant nothing to me because that wasn’t what I was looking for. I just wanted a 3D Zelda game and as a traditional 3D Zelda game, Breath of the Wild was absolutely joyless and devoid of soul in my opinion. I still remember how crushingly disappointing the divine beasts, the very thing that was put in the game to “please traditional 3D Zelda fans,” were to this day.

Tears of the Kingdom does a decent amount of work to alleviate that feeling, but part of why I enjoyed it a bit more is because I accepted that 3D Zelda is never coming back. I will never feel the same type of wonder I felt while exploring the Ancient Cistern again, not from a Zelda game at least, and that’s okay because going forward, 3D Zelda games are going for a different type of wonder that does nothing for me but checks other people’s boxes.

That’s not to say I like it more just because of that, though. Not at all. The big one is that yes, Tears of the Kingdom has dungeons. In actuality they’re “””dungeons,””” nowhere near as elaborate or as good as the ones found in traditional 3D Zelda titles in general but much better than the divine beasts. They’re themed, have puzzles you can’t break, have central gimmicks that aren’t boring or annoying and have actual boss fights at the end of them. There’s actually a good story this time around as well. Most it is, frustratingly, told through flashbacks again but the way they tie them into the present day events is actually very, very smart. Just like BOTW, most of the flashbacks are optional but they are much, much easier and a lot more fun to find. Shrines also make a return and they’re basically the same, but the puzzles are a lot more creative by virtue of the new toolset.

The new tools are honestly pretty incredible. Ultrahand alone is more impressive than the entirety of BOTW’s mostly boring toolset, and Fuse is also mindblowing at times. Recall and Ascend are mostly situational and are just there for the most part, but they’re still impressive. I constantly forgot about Ascend though, but that’s probably just a me thing.

The open world is mostly the same, but feels a lot more…intentional this time around for lack of a better term. There’s a sense of direction there that simply wasn’t in BOTW and it makes it feel a lot more well designed. It might be due to the addition of the sky islands (which are pretty great) as well as other areas, but I honestly can’t really put my finger on it. It felt like there was a lot more to do this time around as well, as I was constantly stumbling upon caves and the like.

Most of my issues with the game are unfortunately carryovers from BOTW. The weapon durability system is still frustrating and the fuse function doesn’t go a long way to help with it, the music is once again mostly ambient/nonexistent aside from key story moments, the horse controls are still really weird and traversal in general isn’t as fun as it can be, and the combat just doesn’t feel as fun or snappy as it does in the older titles. The English voice acting is once again not the greatest and genuinely dampens some otherwise great story moments, which is really disappointing. An issue that’s unique to this game is that there seemed to be a larger focus on resource gathering this time around which led to some infuriating moments here and there, especially when it came to bombs. TOTK fixes a lot of what was bad about BOTW, but there’s still plenty of glaring issues that were just not touched on at all.

As a traditional 3D Zelda superfan, BOTW left me absolutely hopeless, so much so that it knocked the franchise out my top 10 and down to…God knows where. TOTK, on the other hand, has given me hope. It’s just a small glimmer but maybe, just maybe, Nintendo could merge the best parts of those games with modern 3D Zelda successfully. I couldn’t see it before but I can see it now. We’re not there yet and we won’t be there for a very, very long time, and it’s going to take a lot of refinement and a few games until we potentially get there but…maybe it’s all going to be alright.

Stylish retro survival horror. I think it's a call-back to Resident Evil but I've not played any of those games so I'm not sure.
This one starts well with amazing atmosphere and great puzzles. The story is pretty confusing but interesting enough.
Unfortunately, the combat is annoying which was fine at the beginning because it incentivises avoiding enemies but later on the game turns into an enemy-spam fetch quest. This was a real let down because the immersion was so good at the start but the frustrating combat really hindered that, and when you take away the immersion you are suddenly left with not much worth praising.

Liked it but many things didn't completely click for me.

Combat is really busy most of the time, you are maximizing combo damage and points + blocking enemy attacks + calling between 3 teammates and checking their cooldowns + using special attacks + using team finishers + using your grappling hook. All of this while keeping up with the rythm. Even with all of that, it could be very manageable if it wasn't for enemy attacks, which mostly come from off-camera and are very much not going to the rythm of the music, even if the game tells you that they do. Sometimes enemies will accidentally de-sync their attacks in a way that it makes it impossible to block them. Many of those give little reaction time and it's impossible to block their attack patterns until you've been hit by them a couple times.
All of this can be avoided by playing defensively and taking time to learn enemy attack patterns, but I think that very much goes against the core of the game.

Sections between battles aren't very interesting. They are fully plataform-based, but the jump's speed and horizontal momentum don't feel designed around it and it doesn't feel right. It also does very little with the rythm part of the game, so they weren't really interesting either. I also expected the game to mix up the tempo of the songs a bit more, but it ended up just going faster as you progress each level.

Most of the upgrades felt way too expensive and not very useful. There were like 30-40 chips and I used 2 of them because the slots were so expensive, and it really felt like a waste. Other than buying combos and maybe special attacks, I didn't feel the upgrades were a worthwile addition.

Finally, the game's design and dialog felt a bit plain at times. The game not taking itself too seriously helps with making it less cringy and more fun, but makes me not feeling like I should care most of the time. Humor is hit or miss, but when it hit I was grinning like an idiot. The cast ends up being pretty endearing too, even if they're a bit one-note.

All in all, pretty fun, but it's a shame it didn't try to focus entirely on making the rythm core of the game feel right for all gameplay sections and smooth some of the combat's rough edges.

Had an absolutely wonderful time with this game. Although at it's core it's "just" a 3D adventure game, it has so many features unique (as far as I know) only to Tunic. Providing a digital game guide highly reminiscent of those found inside Game Boy games is cool. Having it written in a constructed language system so it's (at first) impossible to read, but possible to interpret is clever. Having the pages of this guide scattered throughout the world is genius. And it doesn't stop there, but in a game built of secrets it's more fun to let them stay secret.

I generally liked the combat, although I found that I had to rely on the most powerful weapons and lots and lots of dodging to get past the bosses, as parrying is not worth it most of the time (and can be a bit fidgety with the button combo requires). I also abandoned most of the unique weapons early on as they didn't quite hold up to the sword, and magic was extremely hard to come by, or requires saving up precious blue berries to try to consume mid-fight.

The ending (B ending) was refreshingly painless (unless you consider puzzles a pain but come on). I later watched someone complete the A ending and yeah wow, no thanks (for multiple reasons). I think the lore of the world is actually pretty remarkably compatible with the gameplay itself and was awesome to unravel. For example, the lore behind the Lost Echoes is quite interesting, and makes them an especially cool enemy concept.

And yeah, Tunic is absolutely beautiful. It plays on the isometric view so extremely well, the game simply wouldn't work any other way. I love the locations and the constant uneasy atmosphere that something taking place here is wrong.

So so so clever and wonderful. Probably my favorite game of 2022 as of yet.