A decently enjoyable puzzle game that just didn’t manage to fully pull me in. The environments are gorgeous, but they’re also frequently a pain to navigate. (Why does fast travel only work from the shuttle?) The story is intellectually interesting and the voice actors do a solid job (I was impressed by the wide variety of accents on display), but I never felt particularly emotionally invested, and even though the characters do have distinct personalities they wound up feeling first and foremost like mouthpieces for their respective philosophical positions. And as for the puzzles themselves, I generally had a good time solving them and there were some that I found particularly clever, but for the most part they just didn’t hit the highs of my favorite puzzle games.

A simultaneously brain-melting and brain-expanding puzzle game about manipulating and corralling rudimentary pathfinding AIs that hides shocking levels of complexity beneath its cutesy exterior and simple early stages. I don’t want to spoil the specifics but there are some discoveries that massively expand the scope and possibility space of the game to a genuinely overwhelming degree—to the point that I consider everything up until the credits roll to still be part of the tutorial.

If I had one complaint (though I believe there are plans to improve this), it’s that I wish there was more clarity on which [REDACTED] are actually possible, since it’s currently all too easy to spend ages trying to puzzle out something that can’t actually be done. For my part, my brother and I looked up a list of all known [REDACTED] and put together a spreadsheet to track the ones we’d managed to find, which made the whole process actually manageable while still being plenty challenging (and then my brother did even more spreadsheet crimes to help us figure out the most promising possibilities for a certain achievement).

In any case, I’m really looking forward to both the promised free additions to the game and the upcoming DLC—I’m so ready for them to finally do something with [REDACTED]!

A visual novel about an exiled fortune-telling space witch that I wanted to like more than I actually did. I really loved the art and character designs and there's lots of interesting decisions to make, but the game just didn't grab at me that deeply. The card-building mechanic was kinda fun the first couple times but the game doesn't really provide much reason to keep engaging with it, especially since the relationship between the cards and the choices they make available to you is so vague. The act of actually performing divinations with the cards was more engaging, but at the halfway mark they get kinda sidelined for some new mechanics and story beats that were much less interesting to me, there was a lot of picking the same few options over and over just to advance the story. I'm also not a fan of the gender-essentialist world-building decision that men can't be witches. Like, it's cool that there are trans witches, and there's a throwaway "women and non-binary people" line, but it still feels extremely arbitrary (and downright silly considering the existence of alien witches and a witch who's literally a tree) and the fact that the protagonist has the option of saying that it's kinda bullshit doesn't make it any less bullshit. If they wanted to make a game exclusively about cool witchy women/femmes then fine, but I think I would've preferred it if they just literally never acknowledged the lack of men rather than opening that particular can of worms.

A really neat game that combines sokoban puzzles with Zelda-style exploration and secrets and unlockable abilities. Had a great time playing this with my brother, the puzzles are pretty clever and there’s lots of really fun mechanics to play with. My only real complaint is that the game doesn’t do a great job signposting if you have the necessary abilities/unlocks for a puzzle to be solvable, and even worse, there are several extremely conspicuous places that I wasted a bunch of time looking for secrets in only to look it up and find out there’s nothing there… yet. Turns out they’re related to some planned future content for the game, but for the moment they’re just annoying red herrings that occasionally get in the way of the otherwise very enjoyable secret-hunting.