Even though it was free, Sheepy: A Short Adventure felt like it should have come with a price tag. Its quick runtime offered a thoroughly enjoyable experience, with a handful of chapters that had their own platforming challenges as well as powers to overcome them. There were even some collectibles and secrets to find. It had the whole package, albeit a condensed one with a confusing narrative.

What added to it was the seamless integration of music into the gameplay, one chapter in particular going all out on being epic. It's hard to believe it was developed by one person.

although it takes second place in order of my favorite video games of all time, Outer Wilds is without a doubt the BEST game i've ever played. for many other games, like my favorite of all time, i love them despite acknowledging their flaws - in the case of outer wilds, i can't see any flaws.

from beginning to end this game is an absolute masterpiece, and saying anything detailed about this game could impact someone's experience by not letting them go in blind. i know literally everybody says that, but it's absolutely true - if you are interested at all in puzzle games, solving "mysteries", space, or just exploring a game world completely freely, you have to do yourself a favor and at least TRY this game without having any knowledge of it. even the steam trailers reveal too much, in my opinion. it's less than half the price of triple A games and a thousand times better than most of them.

just let your curiosity carry you along, and you will undoubtedly find something to love about outer wilds

A lost platformer from the original Gameboy with a focus on collectables and secrets. Initially I found this to be great, playing somewhere between Donkey Kong Country and Wario Land - however as time went on I found myself souring to both the weirdly incoherent world design and the core platforming. A large part of this was due to the literal framing of the action - the game feels far too zoomed-in for the type of game this is - meaning complex jumps are harder than they need to be and collectables are obscured just because you can't see that at the bottom of a hole there is a ledge.

I finished the main set of levels, and a large chunk of the secret content, but the bulk of this game is hidden behind layers that the majority of players, myself included, wont ever experience. This is a bit of a shame, as I suspect the more interesting levels are obscured in this way, but ultimately the core gameplay was not strong enough for me to put in the required effort to find out.

Easily the best 2D Mario game I've played. I love how cartoony and painted all the characters and backgrounds look. The new art style was what convinced me to actually pick up the game in the first place and every new world looked beautiful and interesting in a new way.

In terms of gameplay the basic platforming is solid but each level has a "wonder effect" which mixes up the level fairly substantially. The wonder effects are easily the best part of the game and it seems crazy that almost every level has a unique control scheme or gameplay twist.

Each level has a difficulty rating, however I found the difficulty to be very all or nothing. Most levels I breezed through with zero challenge whereas some were extremely tough and required many, many attempts.

Overall Mario Wonder made me more certain that 2D Mario isn't for me. The fact it requires perfect execution when it gets hard makes me just prefer the freedom and forgiveness of the 3D games. Despite knowing it's not my thing I can appreciate the ridiculous level of quality and craft. The fact I still enjoyed it as much as I did is testament to that.

A nature documentary visual novel with beautiful art and music that evokes a keen sense of place, firmly submerging you in its aquatic alien world. Following a new-born whale over the course of it's childhood years, the narrative is both touching and informative. The world building here is excellent, offering just enough intricacies and tangential information without overwhelming or distracting from the core tale.

The entire run-time is about an hour, and crazily it's also free, so I would strongly recommend anyone gives it a try. One of the most engrossing pieces of video game world-building I've experienced, and certainly the most I've connected with a visual novel. I can't wait to see our whale calf mature into adulthood in Part 2.

In 1904, game designer, writer, reporter, Georgist and feminist Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord's Game: a scathing review of the contemporary trends of rent and land ownership (in the form of a board game). The idea was that players could understand the complicated web of "The Rich Get Richer" from a more simplified point of view. Fairness could be instilled in children when they play this game and realize how cruel the world could be if we let it. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, this did not work out. The world is still cruel because we have let it. Even more unfortunate for her, Parker Brothers made Monopoly in 1935, a game very much like The Landlord's Game, that quickly took the world by storm and became commonplace in American homes. Monopoly probably came to be due to some perfectly legal patent loopholes, but it's clear that a piece made to criticize greed eventually became a vehicle for it.

Perhaps Monopoly took off the way it did because The Landlord's Game is from the point of view of the owners of money and land. But what if it was from the point of view of someone who has no money?

Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland is a scathing indictment of greed and the acquisition of money, more ferocious and toothed than anything The Landlord's Game could conjure up. It is made to inspire the soul crushing feelings of a minimum wage 9-5 and it does it very well. Most games demand you grind to work your way up. Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland demands you grind to lift your pathetic leg up on the first rung of the ladder.
Everything, down to talking with npcs, costs money. And you, as the titular 35-year-old virgin Tingle, (who has very, very little to do with the series he originated in) have none of it. Want to look at things in a store? Want to ask someone a question? Better clock in and beat up some animals to do an imaginary coin flip to get an item so that you can sell it for a paltry sum of rupees.

Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland works so much better as a piece of critical art than The Landlord's Game because it is terrible. It is boring, it is bland, it is repetitive, it is exactly what having a job is like. And brother? i quit this job after two days.

I hate this game. I recommend it to not only Zelda fans, but anyone who enjoys art.