Proud backer of this on Kickstarter. Played through all 3 of the currently available routes (I think there are a couple more still in the works) and found the whole thing really engaging. The relationships run the gamut from sweet and wholesome to textbook emotional abuse and all make for interesting stories, the lofi soundtrack is great, and I loved the ways the game plays with its presentation and interface during certain key moments.

My only real gripe (other than the unfortunate number of typos) is the semi-blank slate player character. Partially it’s just personal preference; being prompted for my name and pronouns at the start of the game gave me real bad “I do not want to be perceived” feelings. But also, I feel like there are so many central details about the player character (friendships, sexuality, upbringing, choice of major) that are out of the player’s control—not to mention the story beats where the player is specifically denied agency—that it ends up kinda at odds with asking the player to define and take ownership of the character.

Tears of the Kingdom feels like a magic trick: an open world game that reuses its predecessor’s setting and still manages to feel novel and exciting to explore. Going in, I was skeptical about how much they could possibly add when we’re just back in the same Hyrule again, but between the sky islands, the caves, and the Depths, there’s an incredible amount of new sights to see, not even counting the familiar locales that have undergone significant changes in the years since the events of Breath of the Wild.

The new abilities are fantastic as well; as much as I kinda missed abusing Remote Bombs, Ascend and Recall are incredibly useful, Fusion is a clever improvement on the weapon durability system, and Ultrahand basically completely transforms the way you play the game if you let it. Need to get to the top of a mountain? You could always climb it like BotW, slowly and painstakingly scaling a cliff face looking for shallow enough inclines to briefly stand on and recover stamina, or you could construct a flying machine with a couple fans, a hot air balloon, or a rocket and reach dizzying heights with ease. Plus, even when your contraptions fail to work as intended, the consequences are usually hilarious.

I do have a few minor quibbles with the game, but my biggest complaint is that the 4 main quests do basically nothing with their principal characters. I’m not asking for anything deep, just an arc of some kind or literally anything for them to do beyond follow you around. As is, they feel kinda disposable and interchangeable (doubly so for the faceless ancient sages), and hearing a bunch of the same exposition each time, sometimes word for word, gets old fast. (“The Demon King? Secret stones?”) At the end of the day, narrative and character just aren’t the game’s priorities, but I still feel like they should have done more just for the sake of making the main quests more distinctive and memorable. (Though that’s not to say they’re completely uninteresting; the ascent to the Sky Temple is incredibly cool, for instance, it’s just that Tulin might as well not even be there.)

Absolutely brilliant Sokoban-style puzzle game. The controls are difficult to get used to but their limitations are extremely deliberate and used to great effect—sometimes figuring out how to awkwardly maneuver your 1x2 character through a tight space with tank controls is the puzzle. Much like A Monster's Expedition, it's a game that rather elegantly does a lot with as few unique elements as possible; rather than constantly introducing brand-new mechanics, each set of levels is based around teasing out some aspect of the existing elements that was always technically present but only reveals itself when you arrange or interact with them in a certain way. I'm being vague about it, but that's because those moments of discovery (either when you reach the point where they become required, or if you stumble into them slightly earlier as I did a couple times) are really cool and absolutely worth experiencing for yourself.

As a certified horror-game wuss, I'm admittedly not terribly familiar with the games that Signalis draws inspiration from (the closest thing I've ever played genre-wise would probably be Alan Wake), so I'll leave it to others to decide how derivative it is and whether it's able to stand alongside or even rise above its influences. All I can say is that from my narrow perspective, Signalis is cool as hell. Its bold aesthetic and cryptic presentation had me hooked from minute one, and even though the frequent need to backtrack in order to free up my extremely limited inventory space for new key items could sometimes be frustrating, I really enjoyed my time with the game.

An incredible historical murder mystery narrative set in a 16th century abbey. Phenomenal lettering work, which feels like a strange thing to fixate on in a video game, but the way different characters' dialogue is presented in different scripts or print based on their occupation or background (or more accurately, your character's perception of them—there's at least one instance where the font changes when you learn that a character is more educated than previously thought) is some fantastic attention to detail, as are the occasional appearance of typos that are then crossed out and corrected, and references to Jesus/God that are filled in after the rest of the sentence as the writer switches to red ink. That attention to detail extends to the narrative as well, which does a great job laying out the rich social fabric of the abbey, from the monks to the peasants, and the slowly brewing class tensions between the different factions, and the story goes to some surprising and genuinely heartbreaking places.

Also, slight spoilers here, but I loved how the game refuses to let you off easy when it comes to solving the murders and accusing a suspect. This ain't Ace Attorney; the evidence is never decisive and the suspects don't break down and confess when confronted, so there's this awful lingering feeling of "what if I got it wrong?" that you just have to sit with and live with as your meddling costs people their lives, and I think that rules.