the story of this game is like no other one. in 2016 the company responsible for some of the most strange and heartfelt interpretations of videogames i’ve seen decided to make a game using some of the most evil, exploitative monetization tactics ever devised. it feels surreal at times. it’s like watching papyrus and sans trying to sell me nft’s or something. granted, the game was rereleased in 2019 as an actual videogame that you buy once with money (this is the version i will be effectively reviewing.) despite a few hitches i think that it made the transition into real-game-hood quite elegantly all things considered and i praise the efforts of any studio willing to convert live service games into something that can be meaningfully experienced past the game’s lifespan. it’s still weird as fuck though.
i’ll tell you right now, the game is good. if you like the writing in moon and chulip, this game has it in spades! it is a game about a game developer that is written by game developers, and if 90% of studios try some shit like that it looks pathetic. onion is an easy exception though. they nail it. the gameplay might not be for everyone, but as someone who loves small form puzzles and long-term roguelite progression, this game is crazy good. if there’s one thing i genuinely appreciate about the game’s exploitative roots it’s how extremely grindy it is. it will b grating for most people, but i love running something small over and over trying to get the drop i need. some of the bigger dungeons end up requiring a little too much focus for my taste, but for the most part it’s so fun to turn my brain off and blast yamada through a room full of slimes and skeletons over and over until i get a sword with 5 more attack than my last sword.
so, as someone who briefly looked at this game at launch and only relatively recently learned it got rereleased as an actual game a question plagued me: how the fuck does all the pay to win garbage work? if you haven’t seen the game in either state, the main “pay to win” element of the original game is the rice ball. an infinitely reusable revive item. well as infinite as your wallet anyway (<- if any article written about the game from the time of its release uses this line, they stole it from me in the future right now. nobody else thought of this it’s my original thought.) it should also be said that using them makes you ineligible for leaderboards if you’re some kind of loser who cares about that. as well as your 99 cent continues theres also basically cheat armor and weapons you could buy. my knowledge of the game’s microtransactions ends there because i deleted the app pretty soon after seeing that shit and haven’t investigated much since. the current game replaces real money purchases with “clovers”. rare drops from the game’s metal slime equivalents (as well as a few other sources.) and honestly, clovers are pretty damn easy to farm for! there isn’t much stopping you from farming 999 1-ups and slamming your head into every dungeon until you win. one might stop and wonder why they didn’t just do away with at least the revives entirely. maybe the armor sets could just be drops from levels or something too. well… from my understanding of the late game content (which i haven’t cracked yet in my playthrough, my context is mostly walkthroughs i’ve skimmed for bits of info) the game content kind of needs cheat revives! which is such a massive endictment of what this game was as a live-service, but makes rice balls new place in this game’s economy an actual mechanic instead of shameless exploitation. do they deserve a point for that? i don’t know.
ultimately i feel weird about this game. this game used to be Bad. even if i like the writing and the studio that made it, i do not think making games like the one they made is ethical. i like it as it is now a lot, but would i have like it if it was just a normal game from the start? or is the part of the hyper-grindy gameplay loop that has me so hooked intrinsic to it’s fucked up microtransaction pinching origins? i don’t think i’ve decided that for myself yet, but i think it’s something worth considering if more live service games get rereleased like this in the future. i don’t see it becoming a big trend or anything since ultimately letting a live service fizzle out is a lot cheaper than turning it into an actual game. that megaman gacha thing nobody played is getting the same treatment though. how should we feel about games like this knowing they wouldn’t exist without taking advantage of people? if nothing else, onion games made one hell of a moral dilemma with this one. 5 stars.

when i was a kid my favorite thing in the world was kirby. i was obsessed with kirby. i played all the games i could get my hands on, i watched the cartoon (whatever episodes were on my cable’s on demand service, which wasn’t as much as i liked), the movie showed up in the red box at the grocery store once. i didn’t even know there WAS a kirby movie. i begged to rent it and getting to see it, i was definitely not disappointed. when water kirby showed up i took a picture of the screen with my hand-me-down flip phone and made it my wallpaper.
when i eventually get unfettered internet access in my early teens i research kirby and i find out about an unreleased kirby gamecube game. 3d movement, full multiplayer, THEY EVEN HAVE WATER KIRBY! FROM THE MOVIE! this game seems like it’ll be THE videogame. my imagination ran wild. what else could this perfect kirby game have? it’s gotta have the power combinations from 64, the animal buddies from dreamland 2 and 3, gotta have playable metaknight and dedede too. of course, by the time i had found out about this, the game cube was long dead. any hope of this game existing was gone before i could even hope for it. i could imagine though.
eventually came kirby return to dreamland. i felt the pull in my heart. this was it, right? it’s a kirby game with full multiplayer, dedede and metaknight are playable characters! WATER KIRBY IS EVEN IN IT! but it’s not quite right. no 3d movement, no power combos, it couldn’t beat that game i imagined as a child even if it came close.
more kirby games came and went. nothing that really amazed me if i’m honest. lots of little side games i tried and got bored of. triple deluxe was underwhelming. i was too broke to try robobot (until much more recently when i played and loved it) or star allies. i don’t know if i could even be considered a kirby fan at that point. it was something so defining to me as a child and now it felt like a stranger. then, kirby and the forgotten world was announced. a 3d kirby game. with customizable powers (not quite crystal shards but still). and multiplayer.
ok, thanks for reading this far. now i get to the actual review. i’m not just reviewing this game as it is or as how much i enjoyed it. i’m reviewing it as the game i dreamed of when i saw those low quality screenshots of that unreleased game cube game. this is unfair to the game. but i wouldn't do it if it didn’t come so heart-wrenchingly close.
it plays like i always dreamt it would. kirby’s move set feels so adapted to a 2d platformer, but with the level design it fits seamlessly. the ability customization is straight up better than crystal shards. maybe not with as much variety, but the thought and design put into every variation more than makes up for the quantity. the multiplayer is fine. i wish it had online, but the game i imagined didn’t so i can’t fault it. the story is the thing i never would’ve cared about in my dream game, but i know if i could’ve imagined it i would’ve wanted it so bad. i was insufferable about kirby lore then and this would’ve had me pacing and rambling to nobody for hours. i loved this game. this is almost certainly as close as any game will ever get to reaching into my imagination and pulling something out and i am truly grateful i got to experience it. it’s the reason i 100%ed it within a week of getting it. but no water kirby. 4 1/2 stars.

pizza tower is perfect. it is the most perfectly realized version of what it set out to be. its like a dream brought to life. all the movement feels so perfectly aligned with the level design. it can be demanding, but learning a stage and being able to traverse it quickly and smoothly is the best i've ever felt playing any platformer. it makes it a little frustrating seeing complaints about having to replay levels when you miss things.. the game wants you to replay levels! every time you play a level again you learn a little more, you can carry your combos a little further, you can find a new secret or a new shortcut. the game's level count isn't massive because of how meticulously designed and dense each level is. the other big thing i love about the game is that it is incredibly funny! it's one of the funniest games i've ever played! it has a great cartoon slapstick sense of humor that runs deep. i still laugh when i charge toward an enemy and they let out a scream of horror at the scary italian man barreling toward them.

overall, this is a game i would recommend to anyone and everyone. it might be a bit of a challenge if you don't have any experience with games like this, but if you're able to put the time into it, it's rewarding and fun! and even if you're bad at it, i think it'll still make you laugh!

without a doubt my favorite jrpg i've ever played. an amazing job system, a great story with a better postgame, an endless dungeon crawler, and seamless multiplayer. this game showed me what rpg's could be and every one i've played since pales in comparison.

honestly, i often think my jrpg days are behind me. i'm too busy and too easily distracted to give these games the attention they need. the same is true for dq9 at this point. i've tried to start new playthroughs, but i'll never be able to immerse myself in this game like i did when i was younger. i hope some day i can find a game that makes me lose myself in it the way this one did. or they could just remaster it. i'd buy it again in a heartbeat if they remastered it.

bravery network online is one of the best games i've ever played. i loved every second i spent playing this game. its art is gorgeous, i could listen to its soundtrack all day, it has what is quite possibly my favorite setting i've ever seen in a game before.

thinking about this game fills me with melancholy because it is an online early access game that has not received a major update or any news for over a year as of six days ago. i've thought long and hard about what that means for how i feel about this game. i loved this game for what it is, but more than that i loved its potential. with the radio silence i didn't know what to expect. then i went back and replayed some of the story. the scene with odette specifically. very few games have pulled at me the way that scene does. it paints a vivid, scary, hopeful picture of this world and it inspires me. it makes me cry and smile and fills me with a need to create something. the best art in the world to me is anything that gives me that feeling.

i don't know if this game has a future. if it does i'll be thrilled. if not then i'm still so grateful for what this game already gave me.

sea of thieves has given me some of my best experiences in multiplayer games ever. it is a game so well tailored to going on adventures with friends and even with how formulaic it is, not one of them feels the same. at the end of the day though, that's a tragically small amount of the time i ultimately spent on the game. the majority of my time with this game was being slowly sunk and killed by griefing players for hours at a time.

there's some good quest variety, but ultimately it's all the same formula. get a location, go there, do a thing. whether that's killing skeletons, wrangling wildlife, solving riddles, etc. and this loop is perfect. manning a ship with friends is something that seriously never gets old. they found the perfect balance of actual complexity and making stuff Just Work so you can feel competent while still scrambling around not really understanding anything. the quests are fun. some of the skeleton fights can drag a bit, but besides that it's all varying levels of fun. last time i had a group of friends playing this game we tried doing one of the bosses with just 4 of us (they usually require multiple crews), and we somehow cheesed it and got so much loot it took us nearly half an hour just unloading it. and toward the end we got attacked by some other pirates, but just barely made off after selling it all. that's the height of the game, but the lows are bad enough that i'm never going to play this game again unless they seriously restructure how pvp works.

light pvp is fun. tangling with another crew, maybe sinking them and nabbing their loot occasionally is all in good fun. what makes them so painful is how slow they are. it can drag on for literal hours. slowly trading blows. just trying to repair your ship while damaging their's a little bit faster. the battle isn't about skill or resources really, it's who will get sick of playing first. and that is terrible design.

i know this game is getting a pretty big content update. and i want to get excited about the customization and stuff, but until they fix the whole pvp thing for sure, i just don't think this game is for me. and also i never played the pirates of the carribean dlc thing bc god that's fucking dumb why did they do that

kingsway is such an ideal roguelike. i really bounced off this game the first time i played it. the ui seemed dense and hard to keep track of, the mechanics felt obtuse and confusing, i often felt incredibly overwhelmed and weak compared to everything i was up against. then everything just... clicked into place! i knew where i liked everything, i knew what numbers i wanted to go up and what items i needed and didn't. i started relishing certain events and areas, getting excited at a new modifier on a weapon that complements a build i'm doing perfectly. even if it all seems impossible at first, eventually it all just comes together!
this game has some incredible endings as well. the writing and story itself isn't too interesting or unique by my standards anyway (at least the original ones, the more recent update added a real fun one) and i really love how easy it was to figure out how to reach different endings without resorting to looking anything up. even the most esoteric one makes itself pretty clear after a handful of runs.
anyway if you like roguelikes and think this ones gimmick looks charming, give it a shot. the game is cheap. also the game has a little picrew customizer to make a little face for your character, but you can also upload custom images to it and it's obviously a very small thing, but i just think that's very cute and fun.

when huniecam studio came out i saw some youtuber play it and thought it looked fun and pirated it. i spent the next week engrossed in getting perfect runs over and over. i got every unlock, got the highest tier victory on hard mode and i loved it. then i deleted it and forgot about it for several years. then, last year, i saw this game on steam and it seemed like something similar. i thought i'd pirate it and play it for a week then move on. i ended up playing a while longer than a week, and actually buying the game too.
to start off with, as a management game its perfect. i loved management in huniecam studio, but this puts it to shame. great sounds, ui, and gameplay. if the game was just this, itd be amazing.
the narrative, at first glance, is what you'd expect. the kind of humor you'd expect from a game like this. lots of 2012 "epic gentleman" shit, the kind of stuff that feels like its there to make youtubers make react faces at, that kind of stuff.
the thing this game does that so few do that makes it genuinely one of the funniest games i've ever played is that it says "yes, and" to every dialogue choice it gives you. there's some exception, but usually only in service of some greater joke. i found myself actually getting really invested in the dialog choices (which all have no bearing on the actual story) just to find the funniest options available and see how the game would justify them.
i really like most of the characters. i found a couple of the guys kind of flat, but its a dating sim and i'm a lesbian so that was always going to be hit or miss. i like more of them than i thought i would which is something! my favorite character is probably pip. shes a funny little detective and her storyline probably made me laugh the most.
as far as the sex parts, i think the ones i read were pretty good. the game cares a lot about consent and giving content warnings for stuff that will show up. there was an option for police roleplay in the pip sex scene that you could opt out of and i thought that was a nice touch. it also makes every character openly bi or pan and queerness always feels like a part of the conversation surrounding sex in a way i think is done well. being a game about being a victorian aristocrat, the game has generally very good politics. it is aware of classism and racism but manages to keep things lighthearted still.
my biggest criticism of the game is that there is a lot more body type diversity among the male characters than the female ones. theres no fat women at all. theres smaller women and kind of muscular women and thats it. it felt like a trans character was missing too. theres so much conversation in this game about queerness and body positivity, so not having characters representing that makes it feel like something is missing.
all that being said, i think the game is good. i like going back and just doing runs of it with new characters and strategies. more than anything, i hope there's another game in this series.

i'm still not sure if i'm going to play this game again. i'm sure there's probably some true ultimate ending i can get if i bang my head at it for a few more playthroughs, but i loved the ending this game gave me too much to do that i think. it's a good game. the kind of game only the people who made it could've made. it's one of those games where every time it comes up in conversation, the people who have played it before will say "dude, you gotta try it. go in blind. just trust me." and that's a sentiment i will echo here, if you haven't played it i think you should!
in formula, this game is a lot like something like the stanley parable or there is no game. you are being directed by a snarky narrator to do something and given the power to either bark along like a good little dog or be a little shit and do what you want. the premise is simple: there is a princess in the basement of a cabin. if the princess leaves the cabin the world will end and everyone will die. you are here to slay the princess. past this point i'll be spoiling the basic twist of this game.
there are a lot of ways you can act when interfacing with the princess. generally, no matter what you will die. then you are back where you started and you notice what's going on. it's a loop. things are a little different though. in the first encounter, the only voices that spoke were the narrator and the voice of the hero, which could easily be understood as the voice of the character you embody. generally this voice was hesitant to harm any princess, but when it saw the princess behaving strangely became concerned. on the next loop though, you will be joined by a new voice. and holy shit there are so many voices it could be, all depending on how you acted. were you skeptical of everyone and everything? meet the skeptic, here to be accusatory and untrusting of everything around it. did you wait until the princess turned her back to do the deed when nobody looked? well let me introduce you to the opportunist! a smarmy, fence-sitting asshole willing to side with anyone or anything that looks remotely advantageous. do you believe every word the princess says and do anything it takes to save her? well now the voice of a dumb asshole desperate to fuck her lives in your ear. it quickly started to remind me of disco elysium, with these different voices giving me new ideas and dialogue choices. it's a really well done system and i'm impressed they pulled it off so seamlessly. also props to the incredible voice actor who plays all of them as well as the narrator, jonathan sims, who i guess did some kind of magnus chase fan-podcast or something.
you're not the only one who changes each loop though. the princess remembers everything each time too, and the way you chose to treat her changes her. stabbed her in the back? she hides in the corner, baring her fangs. saved her like a damsel in distress? now she lays with a hand to her forehead waiting for the brave knight to come rescue her. you get the idea. it makes for a story you always feel like you're steering even if you can't be sure where it will end up. these loops will end though. as soon as you see the princess leave the cabin. to explain further would give away the grander meta-narrative of the game and i don't want to delve into that, but i promise you it's very interesting.
as much as i enjoyed this game, it did almost lose me a couple of times. it's biggest issue is it can come across as far too cute. the player's relationship with the narrator can veer pretty far into stanley parable territory, and as much as i love this game i would get really frustrated at every argument with the narrator turning into comedy bickering of the same tone. i wanted to immerse myself in this game in a way that felt counter to that. at the end of the day, this content only showed up because i chose the "obstinate video game player" dialogue choices, but i think often the game is worse for including those choices at all, even if they can lead to some pretty interesting places.
the thing that assured me i would love this game were some of the first words on the screen.
"Whatever horrors you may find in these dark spaces, have heart and see them through. There are no premature endings. There are no wrong decisions. There are only fresh perspectives and new beginnings. This is a love story."
it makes an impressive piece of prose and a genuinely useful guide for how to play the game. you don't have to worry about wrong choices or missed opportunities. you will have time to explore and make mistakes without severe consequences. but you don't have forever. in the end, it's not a loop. it's a spiral.

this game is aesthetically and narratively an absolute triumph. i'd say the same for its gameplay at least in a bubble. the game is fun. the critical issue that makes it come apart at the seams is how in conflict the narrative is with the gameplay.

if you havent played, this game is a fast paced stock market simulator where you accept requests from people looking for organs and buy them off a market with fluctuating prices, trying to turn a profit. the game's several endings are gotten through fulfilling the requests of different characters in varying ways. the issue comes into play because these wonderfully written requests that serve as the game's main narrative are something i barely looked at. i had a tight time limit to buy and sell enough organs to turn a profit so the only thing i'm going to have time to look at is what organ they want and when. its a tragedy.

when i got my first ending i was completely blindsided. i was just desperately slinging organs and doing requests when boom. black screen, dialog, cool art, the end. and none of it made any sense to me at all. that moment killed me. i wanted so bad to love this game, but i knew that playing it as intended and enjoying the narrative would be impossible.

i can understand what they were trying to do. this game is about doing something unethical for profit. moving so fast, you don't have time to consider the damage you could be doing providing organs to mass murderers. but if i dont even have time to read it it's not gonna work.

there are options to slow down the game, but at slower speeds the stock market becomes a total slog. there's no challenge just find the lowest or highest number and buy or sell. and switching the speed requires going through 2 menus so you cant slow down to read requests, then speed up to play the stocks very easily.

i want to love this game so bad, but it feels like there was just no way to make this game concept work in any real way. im glad it exists for its beautiful music, art, ui, and the idea at its heart, but this game feels like a failed experiment

this game is basically everything i wanted pokemon to be when i was a kid. i think as just a pokemon game, its not great. dynamaxing is a bad mechanic. i think the open world element is really shallow. the story is dumb. luckily those things dont matter very much to me at all.

what i love about this game is making curry for my pokemon, wearing cute outfits, customizing my trading card, playing the tag championship in postgame, the battle tower is good. thats not much of the total game, but i liked that much of it.

also i honestly don't understand the complaints about graphics. i don't care if a tree looks polygonal. it looks fine.