The Many Pieces of Mr Coo is a game I found through a YouTuber I enjoy watching, and hoo boy. What a surreal little adventure it was!

This stylish point and click has you taking control of a small yellow dingus named Mr Coo, solving a series of surreal puzzles to get to the end. The beautiful, hand-drawn levels are accompanied by a neat jazz soundtrack, and the puzzles require you to think and multitask, controlling Mr Coo's pieces to get them to work together and solve the predicament they're in. This took me a little over two hours to complete, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

I bought this game back in 2022, and it lay gathering dust in my backlog for 2 years before I got around to playing it. No fault of the game, really, the order in which I play things is rather arbitrary.

Wytchwood tells the tale of a witch with a cauldron for a head, who must collect 12 souls for a goat in order to fulfil her contract with him. To do this, you must collect ingredients and craft a range of reagents and thingummies in order to progress the story. Some craftables are collected to give to someone or something for the story, others are made as a means of getting more ingredients.

The art style is charming, and the music does a good job of setting the tone for each region. The witch herself is a snarky old bird who goes about her business with exasperation at every nitwit she comes across, and I found myself enjoying her character quite a bit.

However, while this game is entertaining, it suffers from a chronic grind that I was not expecting, especially towards the end. I found myself running all over the map collecting ingredients from different regions all over again to craft some of the late game items, and for that, I knock off a point from an otherwise amusing 12 hour experience.

A soothing game about packing bento lunches. You follow the story of a mother cat and her child as you pack lunches through 14 chapters of 9 levels each. Confronted with tiles of food to place in specific patterns, you must determine the order and rotation of the tiles to form the pattern in the lunch box. The game is extremely cheap, providing you with a couple hours of relaxation for peanuts.

My one criticism is that the music loops are a bit short, so you end up listening to the same loop over and over again per chapter, which can get somewhat repetitive. The visuals, however, are perfectly calming, and I found myself delighted by the little images that tell the story of the cats.

4/5, with a star knocked off for the music irritating me a bit at one point. This is, however, a problem easily remedied by muting the music and playing your own tunes in the background.

Archvale was my first bullet hell. And oh boy, what a wild ride it was.

The premise is simple. You are a child with the ability to kill the undying, and you must reassemble the Arch. Fight your way through rooms of enemies, dungeons, and bosses to eventually reach your objective. You get three classes of weapon to choose from, though I stuck to magic almost exclusively.

Here are the pros:
- The game is honestly pretty accessible to people who haven't played a bullet hell before. (like me!)
- The world is vibrant, with unique enemies in each area and different vibes throughout.
- Upgrades are not unbearably grindy to get. If you clean each room out of useful resources on your way through areas, by the time you reach the town of the area, you'll have enough to upgrade your armour and buy health upgrades and badges.
- The soundtrack is great - most of the area themes absolutely slap.

The cons:
- The trials. Most of the trials are fine. They're not too hard, you can dodge the orbs easy enough. Then you get to some that just spit tons of them at you with no rhyme or reason and before you know it, you've touched one and have to start over. These were easily the most exasperating part of the game for me, and I'm not usually someone who has to step away from my system in frustration.

My overall opinion of Archvale is that it's a solid little bullet hell, well-designed for the most part, with a few balance issues here and there. 4/5 stars.

This game is chock-full of goofy monsters, and they're hungry. Your objective is simple - guide the delivery workers to the monsters to feed them all, with each worker having a different amount of food, and a different number of steps they can take. The puzzles vary wildly in difficulty - some of them are quite far into a region but pretty simple, while some early puzzles had me scratching my head. The music is delightfully goofy, and the art is bright, bouncy, and cute. An excellent way to while away a couple hours of your time!

An adorable puzzle game where you slot cats of a variety of different shapes into the board, so that they fill in all the spaces. Cats Organized Neatly is a cute spin on the classic block placing subgenre of puzzle games, and doesn't overstay its welcome. It provided me with two hours of relaxed play, with the difficulty amping up as the chapters went by. Not super challenging, thinking and visualisation is key to solving the later puzzles. It has a dark mode for people who might have issues with eyestrain, and charming, relaxing music. The cats meow and purr when you interact with them, but not in a way that causes irritation.