I have a soft spot for dense satire about something I don't know much about, and this is definitely that. The mix of "Papers Please" bureaucracy and life sim gives them lots of room to have fun with the satire, and there's already plenty of branching options within this one-week demo. It's paced well, too; I appreciate how the first day makes it painlessly easy to be honest, only to start to introduce home expenses you can't quite stretch on your starting salary to tempt you into just a little bit of corruption. As a treat.

It's too bad this didn't end up getting developed past the early access demo, because I think they were on to something fun.

Cute, sweet little game. Not much to it, but I enjoyed my time with it. The romance between the two main characters was understated in an honestly pretty sweet way - it's nice having a game about characters who are already in love instead of focusing on the "will they / won't they" sometimes.

I'm a sucker for incremental games, and while this is a very simple one, it still got its hooks in me for awhile. I see what they were going for with "growing flowers" and "story about a struggling flowershop owner" as the two halves of the game, but they don't really thematically connect. When I reached the scene where the main character begs her parents for money, I felt immediately taken out of the game because I had more money than I was able to spend at that point. Likewise, when she experiences the financial crush of the parents demanding the money back, I would have been able to pay it back without even thinking about it. It doesn't seem like the pacing of the incremental game portion was really considered; the way it communicates elements of the main character's life doesn't fit in with the story at all.

I feel like this suffers from the "fanfic syndrome" where "Japan" is functionally America with a couple cliched cultral details sprinkled on top. It's not clear to me why this was set in Japan to be honest; aside from zoning that let you put a flower shop, apartment, and rooftop garden in a single building, nothing felt especially Japanese about it.

Really cute little game. This is basically exactly what I hoped Playdate would be - short and sweet, unique, the kind of thing people might not take a chance on but given a platform where it can shine. The writing's maybe a little too twee for my tastes sometimes, but it's fun and I chuckled at a lot of it. Cranking to focus photos is perfect. Loved it.

My copy came unpatched so I played without a few clarity improvements, so I got stuck in a few places. I didn't realize the park existed for a long time, so I wasted a lot of time trying to photo birds in the forest that you can't possibly do with the starter camera. Looks like it's a bit clearer if you play the latest version.

I'm an Andes Komeji stan now.

Really, really liked this. I appreciate how much time the cast gets to breathe, how much I get to appreciate and care about everyone. The mystery plotting was just as interesting as the last game; played this with Jessica and Aura around, so we got to keep sharing our theories the whole time. I was a bit disappointed first at the more linear story structure, but it all clicked why it was that way late in the game - and that twist was fantastic.

PC release is a lot more stable than the original game.

Some of the most Uchikoshi-ass Uchikoshi here. The kind of game where you just want to keep notes the whole way through to keep track of your theories and waht you've figured out.

Compared to AI, the characterization feels a bit weak. Maybe it's the escape game format that means that no one has a chance to really develop as a character outside the core events. The actual mystery plotting is satisfyingly tight though.

I can't even imagine playing this on any platform that's not a DS. The end game twist depends on it.

Smartly-designed and smartly-written. Timeloop games feel like they've become a bit of a trope recently, but what surprised me here was how much it has to say with it and how well-executed it is.

Getting a 35-hour RPG out of a single dungeon the player has to repeatedly loop through has so much room for things to go wrong, for it to become tedious for all the wrong reasons, and I'm shocked it works this well. The writing is sharp, interesting enough I convinced myself I'd keep reading it every time, then eventually I started zoning out and skipping it exactly the same way the main character diegetically is as he's getting increasingly distant from reality for having seen it so many times. Mechanically it doesn't change too much, but enough things open up to make repeated trips through the one dungeon feel different in a way that still keeps it interesting while still giving you the diegetic tedium of repeating the same steps over and over.

If I have any real complaints, it's just that the ending is a bit too neat and tidy. The buildup to the ending is increasingly harrowing and tense, but the climax feels like it's over in a blink. It just doesn't quite feel like it's spent enough time on its consequences or on the experience of its entire cast.

This is a game I wish I'd liked more than I did.

At its heart it's an ensemble cast RPG Maker adventure game like Mousebusters and Bear's Restaurant. The addition of fishing is pretty cute, but it has the effect of padding the total length out much longer than those two games... without adding much more story. The result is that many of the side stories only have about as much characterization as those games, but it's stretched thin over a much longer period of gameplay time. It also makes the characterization a bit more explicitly transactional than in their previous games; it feels weird to have a story about becoming genuine friends with people, but only because you fulfilled their requests to give them literally dozens of specific fish over the course of the game.

None of the side stories are especially deep this time around, but I appreciated that Dave gets some much-needed characterization that makes him more than the cheap joke he was in Bear's Restaurant. The South American native character is a crude stereotype though, something that feels really out of character for a studio that's usually done a good job of treating its international casts with respect.

The fishing gameplay is a bit shallow but pretty cute. However, this is the first time Odencat experimented with free to play monetization and it felt wrong. Players can pay to play without ads, like in their previous games. Even if you do, though, you still get prompted frequently to watch an ad in order to increase the amount of in-game currency you earn. It's distracting, and makes you feel as though if you pay to remove ads but don't use that system, you're going to fall behind in the level curve. It's a really weird experience for what's meant to be a relaxing game.