Lovely little game that I enjoyed a lot. Simple but relaxing gameplay mechanic that I enjoyed as someone who likes to organise & line things up. The background story was extremely well done and I think it demonstrated how objects can represent stages of our lives, how others influence us as well as displaying the humanness of attachment to certain objects and how we hold onto things. I really resonated with the concept of this game as someone who has moved a lot and had to unpack my own life many times and has always wondered how people would perceive me based on the strange objects that follow me around on my life's journey.

beautiful art, great music, meh characters and story. shock value: the game. natsuki best girl.

i have a silly attachment to this game, as it was the first horror game i was ever able to play in full (i am a pussy when it comes to scary games). that said i definitely have more criticisms than praise, and the score is only as high as it is because of that sentimentality.

the scares and twists are gimmicky and purely for shock value with very little to say beyond that. each character has one or two character traits and a "dark" twist with very little depth. the writing just feels very shallow to me. it almost entirely relies on the twist that it's not actually a dating sim, it's a HORROR GAME! the twist is ruined if you look at the steam page. it's not creative or even especially well-executed.

when it came out i saw a lot of people praising it as a unique, subversive, horror experience, or even a "deconstruction" of visual novels/dating sims. it's not. it is only interesting or subversive to a western audience who has little to no experience with those genres. horror visual novels and dating sims have been done a thousand times, there's nothing subversive about the simple act of making one. DDLC does nothing that hasn't been done before, better and with more heart.

the music is good though!

that's all for now.

After trying and failing to get into this game a couple times in the past, I finally hunkered down and finished it. As much as I want to love this game, it just doesn't quite get there for me. The music is stunning and the pixelated visuals are so, so pretty. Despite no words being spoken, the game is able to quite effectively tug at your emotions from time to time. The combat is extremely fun and fast paced, the mix of gun and sword play is something I really enjoyed. despite that, some deaths can feel a slight bit unfair as you can be stunlocked and take damage from consecutive attacks due to a vanishingly short invulnerability window. There is also some awkwardness with the 2.5D art style where you will collide or get hit with things that visually shouldn't be able to from that far away - especially when positioned above them. These two gripes are mostly minor though, my main problem with this game is the sheer amount of secrets that I feel don't really respect the player's time. There are some areas where you'll just want to run up against every single wall to see if there is an invisible gap you can pass through. A good amount of these passages contain items necessary to progression as well. This is somewhat alleviated by there being 8 total, and only needing 4 in each area to complete the game. However, it can still be time consuming and frustrating if you don't know the tells, which are not necessarily obvious and left for the player to figure out. The sheer number of them also deflates the feeling of discovery a bit, especially when the rewards are usually just 1/12th of an upgrade. Overall, I still think it's worth playing simply for the amazing art and fun combat, but don't stress too much over finding every single secret unless you really care about a recolor for your player character.

I'm a big fan of Tango's games so I was excited to check this out, I finally played it just now, so my first run is including the Spider's Thread update and it's additional cutscenes, enemies, quests etc so keep that in mind in my review.

Let's start with the good:
The sidequests are charming and interesting, the map of Toyko is made with so much love and care and honestly its kind of a relaxing and meditative game in the downtime. The dub is also fantastic as that is what I personally played with. It's not a very scary game its just a horror themed action game (outside of one more traditional horror side quest added with the DLC). It's very much a collectathon too which honestly I really enjoyed it probably has...too many collectibles for too little gain but hey I love checking things off a list what can I say.

The negatives:
Oh boy the combat...is actively harming the game I think. It's almost fun? But enemies are extremely common, extremely repetitive and have way too much health. I love a challenge in games but the game is incredibly easy and fights, even with everything maxed out, can just drag on and on. I'd have enjoyed hte game more if combat was either touched up and more fun or used more sparingly. This is sadly made even worse by Spider's Thread which adds extremely annoying enemies to the game including one that loves to spawn quite frequently towards the end, has tons of hp, and can dodge all normal attacks making the fight drag.

The story is also surprisingly safe and simple. I wouldn't say its...bad? It has kind of interesting characters but it is extremely safe and by the numbers which is really dissapointing coming from the people who made The Evil Within and Hi-Fi Rush, the former having lots of interesting lore and the latter being a lovely character driven narrative. I rarely ever feel burn out about anything but by the time I finished this I was kinda glad it was over. I don't know...if they ever made a sequel and punched up the story, added more characters to interact with and made the combat more fun and less exhausting I'd be all in but as it is now its a beautiful game with a lot of heart that is unfortunately kinda forgettable in some places.

Midnight Suns is a fun if unpolished tactics game. It has a lot good about it, like the tactical combat and the writing while not for everyone is straight from the comic books and interesting when it needs to be. By the end I was pretty attached to my little Suns family!

Overall the game is pretty balanced and fun, it really wants you to engage with the mechanics which is great, but a few of the characters (Deadpool especially) feel weak and undertuned. Which leads into my main issue: the game needs patches badly. As of this review, the Deadpool dlc recently came out and while the character is fun he is extremely weak compared to a few other characters. Some more spoilery cast members also suffer from this. Its also quite a glitchy game, I had one crash in my run which isnt awful but I had trophies not pop, the camera glitch out many times, texture bugs and a recurring glitch where the box retrieval mission is incompletable about half the time.

Overall if you like tactical games or marvel comics give it a chance but until some patches come out get it on a sale, i got the game and dlc for $35 and that feels right.

I'm going to revist the game after the final dlc and maybe update this.

Oh man where to begin, like a LOT of people are saying this feels like a long lost game from the PS2/XBOX era. It is absolutely filled to the brim with love and confidence. It's the absolute perfect marriage of rhythm and character action gameplay, in the first level or two things get pretty simple but as you progress the game unlocks more and more gameplay elements and it feels just so satisfying to get those S ranks. It somehow manages to be very busy and fast paced without feeling overwhelming or clunky, I occasionally see some people complain about the lack of a sprint button but everything is done to the beat, try DASH DASH DASH LIGHT ATK, you will move extremely fast and can do that infinitely. For anyone curious I played on steam swapping between my desktop (on surround sound) and steam deck (headphones) and I got a solid 60fps on both the entire game with default settings, the game is insanely well optimized.

The character writing is just absolutely great, every cutscene had me smiling and one cutscene actually made me a little emotional, this cast is absolutely solid and the voice acting is top shelf, Chai is one of my favorite protags in AGES. There are a lot of references in this game, hearfelt references the game wears proudly on its sleeve that brought me a lot of joy when I'd find them hidden around a level or in a cutscene. The game is built on the inspirations of a lot of games and other media that came before it and its proud to display that love in very caring homages that are great without ever taking you out of the world of Hi-Fi Rush.

Without going into spoiler territory there is also quite a lot to this game, there are three difficulties with a fourth unlockable, each has its own challenges and scores, completing challenges gets you unlockables in the post-game in the form of lots of character customization. There's also quite a bit more to the game after the credits roll it seems but at the time of writing I haven't completed the post game just sampled a bit of all of the unlockable things.

As you can probably see if you check my profile, I play a LOT of games but, at the same time, I am quite poor and I have to be very picky with my purchases and Hi-Fi Rush delivered in spades. I can't recommend it enough, it's a new favorite, between Hi-Fi Rush and SIGNALIS I am starting to feel as though we are entering an era of games that captures something completely new while being a love letter to classics of various genres. I sincerely hope there is a sequel in the future I wanna see these characters again, in the meantime I'm going to chip away at getting every achievement! I might edit this review with feelings on the post game and higher difficulties down the line :)