This might be my favorite puzzle game of all time. The puzzles get super hard (especially if you go for the optional ones) and you just get so many of them. The mechanics are all novel but it doesn't overwhelm you with too many of them, and the interactions between them keep you surprised until the end.

I'm also a big fan of the plot and atmosphere. The mystery slowly unravels at a pleasant pace and it never gets in the way of the gameplay. When I first played it years ago it gave me my second major existential crisis that lasted like a month so it must have been doing something right

Hear me out: this is the best puzzle game of all time

Ok not really. But it is way better than I was expecting. I'm not really exaggerating though - there were times where I felt like it was the best puzzle game of all time. Some of these individual puzzles are blindingly creative and the way all the mechanics work together is incredibly well thought out and fun to decipher.

Heavily inspired by The Witness and Antichamber, but I really wish it was more of the former and less of the latter. I don't think the non-Euclidean layout adds anything to the game and serves only to frustrate the player. It doesn't work with the word puzzles in most cases and just makes it difficult to navigate.

My other big complaint is that your objective is kind of unclear the whole time. You basically spend your entire playthrough running around aimlessly in search of new areas and puzzles, which isn't the worst thing ever, but it's a little worse than if I knew what I was working towards. Compare the lasers/mountain from The Witness; there's nothing like that here, not that clear anyway.

But I seriously can't stress enough how good the puzzles in this are. The extremely simple clue/answer word puzzle format is pushed to its absolute limits and I'm genuinely in awe of the creativity on display. I haven't even really dug into level 2 (a post-release expansion that stands alone from the original game, but is included in it), but what I've seen of it has been very clever as well. I want to try out the community maps too.

If you like puzzles, I really strongly recommend this game. If you liked The Witness, I recommend it even more (but don't expect something quite that good).

I already love Banjo-Kazooie. It's not really nostalgia, maybe a bit, but I do think it's pretty fun the whole way through, with some clear flaws. Tooie fixes every problem the first has, and expands on it in so many ways it's kind of hard to believe.

Tooie is a very ambitious game. Everything about it feels bigger, which is impressive considering it's smaller if anything: only 8 main worlds as opposed to 9, the sizes of which are comparable to the worlds from Kazooie. The overworld looks bigger because it's out in the open - in reality I think the actual traversable parts are smaller, and there's less to do with the removal of the witch switches from the worlds. But through pure world design they've managed to make a world that feels more grandiose, and at every point until the end it really felt like anything could come next.

The fast travel systems are great and are a welcome addition. I think this is part of why it feels so much bigger - it takes under a minute to walk across most levels, but when you can warp there instantly you feel like you're skipping a lot. And to be fair, in a game where exploration is a focal point, the saved time adds up.

I don't think this game is flawless but every complaint I have is a nitpick. It's hard to find your way around in the FPS areas, but there aren't that many of them and there isn't much to do in them. The Hailfire Peaks transformation is annoying to control (especially if you have health regen), but its usage is pretty limited so you don't have to deal with it for long. Ultimately these nitpicks don't matter because this game is packed entirely full of creative ideas that all work well to some extent. Fantastic sequel, fantastic in its own right. I can't wait until the next time I get to replay it.

yup, just as awesome as i remember. rusty bucket bay stands out as a sore spot but mostly because you lose notes on death and its easy to die in the engine room, its fine other than that. click clock wood was a bit too ambitious too i think but it was a lot better than it could have been. other than that i think i have no complaints other than small stuff like jiggy animations being too long. it's a bit rough around the edges in those respects but overall a fantastic title.

edited to add that the music completely slaps but i feel like that goes without saying at this point

I think I liked it? Idk, something about it just feels off. I think it's because it's SO similar to Super Metroid that you can't help but compare them, and this is nowhere near as good as Super Metroid. But if I force myself to judge it on its own merits, it's fine.

Combat kind of sucks. All the different weapons are fun but ultimately pointless since there's like 2 that are so much better than the others that you won't ever use anything else. Most enemies either pose no threat or deal you unavoidable damage. At least save/heal rooms are plentiful, but that just takes it from frustrating to too easy, and I don't think it could have pulled off a good in-between.

Exploring also kind of sucks, which is ostensibly the point of a game like this. The world design was lacking and I found it impossible to get your bearings in the world. You have to run through areas you've been already several times with barely anything new to do in them, and (probably because the combat is bad) it just isn't fun.

But there's a lot of good about this. The story and aesthetic were great. Very reminiscent of old school FMV games like Darkseed or Harvester and it's pulled off super well. I do think the story was a little opaque but it's clearly written with a sequel in mind so I'll see how it all gets untangled in the second one. It's interesting enough to keep me on the hook.

I think the movement gets fun pretty late, but it at least does that. The upgrades you get are creative and unique, which surprised me for a game so clearly inspired by Super Metroid. Early on I kept expecting to find a morph ball analog, but no, you just get a remote drone instead. There are lots of good ideas in the upgrades and I think for the most part they're implemented in a fun way.

And for how much the combat is kind of frustrating and annoying, I think most of the boss fights were fun.

I think I expected to like this a lot more due to its being one of the more popular indie Metroidvanias, and a long-standing one at at that. Maybe a little overrated? But I still liked it overall and I hear the sequel fixes all the problems of the first so I'm definitely looking forward to that.

still owns. noticed some cool design stuff this time around, like how you spend a while being annoyed by darknuts because you can't hit them from the front and they mainly walk towards you, then when you get the ladder it gives you a room of 1-tile walkways separated by water so you can just kill them from the side. hasn't aged well in the sense that audiences today would never put up with so much cryptic shit but back when this was all you had for 6 months and you could call the nintendo hotline it must have been great. i still have a blast every time

I love this game, I just wish I could love it more.

Its lore and world design have so much charm it's mindblowing. I could hang text from any of the ingame tablets on my wall and it would work. It manages to convey a feeling of mystery so naturally and effortlessly, and it matches the tone of the game perfectly.

Unfortunately the puzzles are just too obtuse. I'm a puzzle gamer. I love puzzles that are too hard. The puzzles in this game are borderline impossible. It's just a few, to be fair, most of the puzzles are accessible if difficult. But those few kind of ruin the experience when you just get hardstuck and end up having to look up the answer. If I could clear my memory of this game and say "look, these puzzles are really hard, just keep beating your head against the wall until you figure it out because that moment will be extremely satisfying", I would. But I don't think there was ever a world where I would have put in the time the first go around.

The best way to play this game is to have a friend with you to give you hints. There's a nice guide on Steam, but it's really easy to just reveal the real answers right away because you're frustrated. That's what I ended up doing, and I basically breezed through the last couple zones because I couldn't be bothered with the puzzles. I regret it, but the alternative probably wasn't much more fun.

Despite its flaws I still really love the game. I absolutely recommend it, although you should probably abandon the idea of playing through it without hints for the puzzles. But if you're a fan of puzzles I do think you'll like it - just make sure you know your limits.

La-Mulana 2 is not as charming as the original game. In every other way, it's better.

Most notably, it's way more polished. The controls are slicker, the menus are easier and nicer to navigate, and there's more quality of life features than the first time. Playing through La-Mulana (which I also love, by the way) can feel like a chore at times. La-Mulana 2 rarely does.

But the games are really about the puzzles, and LM2's puzzles are just better. The first game's puzzles are iconic, but a lot of them are borderline impossible to solve on your own without being heavily hinted at the right answer. It's often due to a lack of information rather than a difficult but reasonable logical leap, which just leads to frustration on the part of the player. This game has very few of those - its hardest puzzle is for a completely optional map showing the location of some items. By the time I solved it (with hints from online) I already had all of the items, so it was completely worthless. Oh well.

It's a bit of a shame it leans so heavily on the first game for its lore (and some puzzles) because it's a much nicer entry point to the series. I wouldn't recommend you play this without playing the first game, but I wish I could. If not for the reliance on elements from LM1 I think this would be a much nicer experience for someone who has never played either game. All that said, it's entirely possible that the reason I feel that these puzzles are more accessible is because I played it after the first game. It's hard to tell.

This is a great game and an even better sequel. If you liked the first one you will love this. And if you haven't played either, what are you waiting for?

I had a good time playing this but it was rougher around the edges than I would like. UI is pretty broken and unintuitive, along with being low-res. All 9 sections of the main areas had identical missions which was pretty lame, but most of them were kinda fun. Climbing is a little busted in some areas. The end was basically just "fight 10 hordes of enemies in a row" which kinda sucked but at least the fighting is kinda fun and the story is good.

Didn't even consider going for all the flags/templars even though I usually love things like that in games. There's just too many, the areas are too big, and there's no way to know which ones you got already. Apparently the designers put them in this game as a "statement" that collectathons suck. I guess that explains why this one does.