This game is amazing. It's one of the best roguelike games ever created. Ever since I first played the demo for Steam Next Fest I knew this one was special. Now that the full release is out and I've put in over 20 hours already, including many "I can fit just one more round" moments; I'm hooked.

The concept is so smart using poker hands and deckbuilding/hand manipulation to score. There's an awesome balancing act between going for specific hands, chips, and mult. It's incredibly satisfying building an engine and there's nothing better than seeing the number go up and up. If you get the little fire thing too? Oh we COOKING now.

You can sweat and really try to calculate hands or you can just play purely off vibes and have fun throwing cards around.

The emerging gameplay elements are fantastic. The complexity and different decks slowly ramps up and you start creating more and more busted builds. When you're doing well it feels like you've broken the game and are doing something unique. That's a feeling many roguelikes try to create and Balatro nails it.

This is up there with Slay The Spire and Inscryption as far as deckbuilding roguelikes go. We have our holy trinity. It'll only get more amazing with future updates whenever they come.

It's also an A+ steam deck game. God forbid this ever drop on mobile. I may genuinely develop a problem at that point.

Anyway, gotta go play another round.

A very tight and focused language-based puzzle. Unlike the other linguistics-oriented games out there (Heaven's Gate, Chants of Sennaar), Epigraph presents you with a much more grounded scenario and places its language in a little bit of a wider (fictional) context to provide the player with tools for eventually deciphering it instead of presenting you with words in a vacuum and letting your character guess their meaning one by one. Due to the way the game is structured — namely, all the materials being available right from the start — Epigraph also doesn't need to fall back on the crutches of magically and definitively confirming when you've made a correct deduction, leaving a refreshing layer of ambiguity stretching over every piece of text. This approach is very fitting for an ancient lost language that you can kind of grasp but never truly master. Until the very end, you work off of what you yourself have established to be correct, and not what the game has told you is correct.

And this, in my view, is a very important distinction, since pretty much the entire game is based on making assumptions. You take the given information, extrapolate, then make a guess—no matter how informed—and see how well the results fit into a puzzle. With enough attention, most of the time you should be able to quickly get the feel for when the guess is entirely off-base or whether you're on the right track. So even without external validation, there are still breakthroughs to be had—both major and minor—serving as milestones and providing confidence that you are actually making progress and not just going around in circles.

The store page describes Epigraph as a short game, but I would argue it's only short in the same way a Rubik's cube is a 30-second puzzle. That may well be true if you're a savant or immediately click with the game, but for me, a former gifted child, it had a pretty decent runtime (around 9-10 hours), so I would absolutely say it's worth the already low asking price. Keep in mind that there is no grand mystery or stealth gameplay attached — all those hours are spent directly working with the language.

The presentation is neat and functional — the minimal interactive elements provide enough tools to keep track of your guesses and quickly try them out in different contexts, but not much more; so you are likely to need to bust out a notepad (or MSPaint if you're a real one for Mother Earth) at one point or another.

If this sounds interesting, and now you want to tinker around with an open-ended linguistic enigma, Epigraph is very easy to recommend. Join today, and you too may spend a few hours of your life walking back and forth mumbling to yourself about Makudovu and Pagomaru. Thanks Qwert :^).

we were fed slop for 17 years until nintendo finally released themselves from their NSMB shackles and delivered us the current 2d platformer of the decade so far

this game fixes just about every issue i had with the NSMB series including the very outdated legacy mechanics like a timer and arbitrary score count as well as smoothing out animations to make the series feel as fluid as ever. you never feel pressed for time while exploring a level to find that one flower coin you lost, and rarely are you ever locked out of finding a missing flower coin due to how open the levels are with their progression.

finding all of the flower coins, wonder seeds, secret exits, hidden levels, and even reaching the top of the flagpole on every level never felt tedious, which is equally surprising and impressive given how they managed to combine and balance the frustrating challenge of collecting all the star coins in the NSMB series with the equally INSANE completion requirement of reaching the top of the flagpole with all 5 playable characters in SMB3DW.

my only complaint is the game rarely, if ever, encourages you to vary in your badge usage. while i think having certain collectibles or level objectives locked behind certain badges would have made the game more tedious, i played through the entire beginning of the game using the parachute cap badge, then switching to the double jump spin badge for the rest of the game upon unlocking it.

nintendo has yet again crafted another perfect "first video game" for a new generation of fans and i'm sure this game is gonna be praised and remembered fondly for years to come.

After much berating and ranting whenever the topic of Pokemon came up, I can't justify giving this game a 4/10 because this game is more than bad. It's flat out insulting.

Nintendo, Gamefreak and The Pokemon Company charging full price (about 40 to 50 depending where you live) for something this poorly optimised is astounding. What's worse is the 3.4 average it has here; what's with all the middle and high ratings? I genuinely can't wrap my head around it. If something else released with this amount of problems it'd be blasted to kingdom come but I guess gamefreak get a pass for some reason? I'm not even trying to start an argument or fight with anyone I'm just generally bamboozled.

Is there redeeming qualities? Only a small handful. The gameplay formula still has the same appeal it always has, the legendaries themselves feel cool, Tera Typing is one of the best mechanics they've added and the story is one of the better ones in recent memory (the gym plot sucks though). I get why people would see the redeeming qualities moreso than I but I'm still baffled by anyone defending it or being oblivious to the glaring problems.

Even if the game became well optimised, you're left with quite possibly the most bland reigon to date. Despite being inspired by Spain, hardly anything about Paldea screams unique or soul, there is legit nothing about it except grassfields, dirt paths, the occasional beach, boring deserts and the token snow area. To better get my point across I reccomend just looking at Paldea's Map before comparing it to any other reigons map: https://www.serebii.net/pokearth/paldea/

You'll be hard pressed to find anything actually interesting. Comparing it to Galar, even the high definition map of Paldea looks void of any distinct expression or clear cultural inspiration, whereas with Galar you can still get the sense it is inspired by British architecture with the countrysides, the chavy and rich prick towns / cities, etc. Speaking of, the towns in Paldea are incredibly forgettable with only one lame gimmick in a sad attempt to make them stand out among the barren wasteland you'll be whooshing about in (this town has a 2fps windmill and... uhhhh... this famous headgemaze!).

This game features awful quality of life features. Pokemon battles take forever as they feel the need to slowly play out the text on screen for every single stat change or status effect. Furthermore, the map feels very sluggish and janky which is awful if you're going to be using it more often than not. And finally, the Pokemon take forever to load as well when trying to view them. As you can see, these minor inconveniences build up to make the game even more frustratingly slow to play.

I could go on forever but the last thing I'll mention is the lack of features from previous games. I remember someone telling me that people complaining about their "favourite feature" not returning is incredibly petty which is untrue. A lot of the features that were added in previous games (i.e. difficulty slider) that improved on what people were wanting got shafted for no apparent reason. Basic options like being able to turn off the EXP share or cancelling move animations are just gone for no reason at all. I can't understand the defence of this decision.

I was going to mention the gym tests or the Team Star raids but what's the point? Pokemon desperately needs to stop with this 1 to 2 year development cycle because it clearly isn't working, however that's likley never going to happen because of the millions of people who still purchase this garbage. I'm thankful I'm a Mystery Dungeon fan more than the main series because my disappointment would be immeasurable if I was (reference not intended).
Small Edit: I got told that the final in this game is worth it that it ups the score of the game by a whole star to which I say it doesn't matter. If the last part of the game is the only good part, I'm not going to trudge through shite just to get to it. I'm better off playing a game that's more fun.

Persona 3 while bringing the series into 3d, is severely held back in its pacing and gameplay loop. These issues drag the game down heavily, even though the story once it gets going is pretty interesting.However by the time the story gets interesting the game ends! The gameplay itself is very fun, similar to dq4 you only control your main character, this gives a unique feeling to the game as you have to rely on your ai teamates to follow your commands, too bad the gameplay cannot match the staggering amount of repetition that is the games main dungeon, Tartarus. Tartarus is the games biggest issue, 250 floors of the same floor over 100 hours and the icing on this steaming pile of donkey ass is the enemies are reused 4 hours in with pallet swaps! While im being a bit harsh i think its only fair to not see this game through rose tinted glasses and see the great many of issues this game suffers from.

I can't justify rating this as high as I did with Breath of the Wild. While I see this as the logical conclusion to and perfect concentration of what made the first game great, the sense of adventure and exploration that I had playing the first game just couldn't be recaptured. I 100%ed the first game, I spent less than 30 hours with this one. While I believe this game is certainly a masterpiece, I don't think it can ever live up to the sheer feeling of wonder that the first game ensnared me with.