It’s really a shame that reactions to Stellar Blade are more focused on the fanservice or the coomer reactions. You got one group of people who just focus on the fanservice and hail the game to be the savior of sexualized women in gaming, and then you got the other group who view the game in a negative light because of the first group. And you know what? I can’t even blame them because the first group is really insufferable.

I don't care in the slightest about Stellar Blade having a "sexy" protagonist. I saw a trailer for it once and was immediately interested, because of how fun and unique it looked.

But coomers saw the female Protagonist’s butt and were obnoxious about it ever since. Like come on, it’s bottom of the barrel fanservice you’re going all crazy for. Literally everything I've seen about this game online is people with underaged anime character avatars cream their pants over how this game is "destroying wokeness" or whatever. Nothing against Eve, because she is really pretty and I actually really like her, but she looks like every female character in every korean MMO ever made. It's like people going to war over white bread. Apparently, these guys are now whining about censorship, signing petitions, and making videos of themselves (they look about as you'd expect) about why their cause matters lmao. These pathetic gamerbros will never not be incredibly annoying and cringe to me.

Because Stellar Blade is just so much more. Picture all those apocalyptic gachas and their really great world-building, fantastic atmosphere but really cheap and dull (chibi) gameplay, then amp it up to AAA levels – that's the magic of Stellar Blade.

The environments are beautifully crafted and the atmospheric soundtrack is another aspect I deeply appreciate and thoroughly enjoyed in this game. There's nothing quite like losing yourself in a captivating melody as you journey through vast, lonely landscapes and cities. Just like Nier, Stellar Blade really nailed its soundtrack.

The gameplay is just so much fun and showcases an exceptional level of refinement and polish. Every movement, dodge and parry hit the mark perfectly. The more skills you unlock, the cooler and more fun the combat gets. There's never a dull moment - the gameplay remains consistently exciting and stylish from start to finish.

I found the plot to be really intriguing, and I really enjoyed uncovering plenty of secrets and snippets of lore. But what really surprised me were the sidequests. Sure, some were usual filler content, but most served to make the world feel alive and deepened the lore. Completing them was enjoyable, they never felt like a chore. So good job there.

Oh, and I'm pleasantly surprised by Eve! Initially, I expected her to be the typical "waifu" (ugh, I hate that word), merely there for visual appeal with little personality beyond conforming to generic “anime girl” tropes. Most of these tropes revolve around being “innocent”, "naive" or a "sweet flower girl." But Eve defies those expectations, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Even though Stellar Blade took huge inspiration from Nier and other apocalyptic gacha games, it's still an extremely unique and fun game that everyone should give a chance. Don't listen to the manchildren throwing tantrums or all the buzz about the “fanservice," which is honestly vastly overexaggerated due to some optional skins. Honestly, aside from the optional skins, there are absolutely no horny aspects present in the game.

There are just so many little touches to the point where you can tell the developers really cared about making this game great, and they succeeded. Stellar Blade is simply a beautiful game.

As of the time of writing, I have just finished the game's story, and postgame still awaits.

Warning: Though there are no story spoilers in this review, it does explain one mechanic not accessible at the very beginning. If you care for that, do not continue reading.

Personally, I largely enjoy the way Atlus straddled the line between a more dedicated story and the more dungeon delve-focused experience of past titles, with a "frame" for your actions being provided by what's guaranteed to happen in the game and your party getting a little bit of character added to them by various small events.

Examples for such events include, but are certainly not limited to:
- entering a particularly pleasant-smelling room and deciding whether to stay or not, for it could be restful or a trap
- unexpectedly finding a cat and deciding whether or not to pet it and how long
- stumbling into an ambush and figuring out how to prepare for it

While admittedly, a fair amount of these choices can feel rather binary, and the overwhelming majority of them are partywide, this gives you the opportunity to characterize your guild as a whole through these events, but leave individual members' personalities to you. Leaves room for RP without being too intrusive to people uninterested in that, I like it.

In visuals, the game is certainly an upgrade to its predecessors; in terms of music, it's considerably more subjective - admittedly, I like EO5's music a little less than most of the other series entries, but it's still great music to my ears. Your mileage may vary.

In gameplay, it's more or less the usual Etrian Odyssey fare - this means delving into and manually mapping out a sprawling dungeon of many, many floors, carefully navigating around puzzles and minibosses referred to as FOEs in the process while ensuring you manage your resources well enough to return to town outside of a casket - though individual floors feel as though they were designed more with returning to specific areas in mind compared to other series entries, and I am of the opinion that the floor puzzles tend to be more heavily based on FOEs than usual.

There is one caveat to this with character creation and building, however: though EO5 offers perhaps the most in-depth customization the series has had up to its release, it splits classes among four different races, which are exclusive on character creation; and skill trees are split into the base class, the class' legendary path and the racial section. This, alongside with class design, results in two noticeable issues for me. The first of these sounds like a nitpick, but please bear with me.

Warning: Wordy, in-depth explanations ahead. Skip to second bolded line for conclusion.

The game has ten classes, four of which are available for the Earthlain race (basically humans), and two each for the other three races - Celestrians (elves), Therians (beastfolk) and Brouni (gnomes, sort of). Each class has access to two different legendary titles, which take one of the two things the class focuses on and specialize in that further.

Without delving too deep into the specifics of race choice, the races do provide different stats. Earthlain are bulky, but mediocre mages, Celestrians are excellent mages, but fragile, Therians are fast and fragile physical bruisers, Brouni are well-rounded save for awful STR and excellent WIS, rendering them best as supports.

However, this does not mean that each race is necessarily best at the classes it has access to. For example, Brouni are better Warlocks than Celestrians despite it being a Celestrian class, and the Brouni's Botanist can be better in certain aspects if wielded by a Celestrian. The Earthlain-exclusive Fencer actually synergizes better with Therians.

Overall, while it doesn't make for specifically bad choices to keep the original races, it makes optimizing a bit of a chore because you have to deliberately create a character of the wrong class, then immediately reclass them, and given that the Etrian Odyssey games have never been designed to be innately easy, dealing with this would likely be a daunting task to most newbies.

It's also counter-intuitive - frankly, I would've rather just been told that the game doesn't have a portrait for combination XYZ and been fine with it. As mentioned, this seems like a nitpick, but the game doesn't pull its punches, and chances of the player having to adapt their party and reselect classes here and there are fairly high, especially due to the second problem.

The second issue is rather more problematic in my opinion: Despite the game technically having the largest variety of classes in the series if you consider Legendary Titles separate entities (20 vs even Nexus' 19), all of them are extremely specific in their usage, causing the game to feel as though it has the smallest party-building variety in the series as well.

As mentioned earlier, every class has two Legendary Titles (Legends for short from here on). Unfortunately, nearly every class and/or Legend comes with a major caveat to throw a wrench into variety. For just a few examples:

Even before Legends come into play, Necromancers, Rovers and Dragoons all have abilities that create summons, but there are only three summon slots. Rover wants two of them, Necromancer ideally wants all of them - Dragoon can live without, but this effectively means you can only have a Rover or a Necromancer without self-sabotaging.

The Blade Dancer Legend, if played as intended, is extremely squishy and can be outright one-shot by many enemies throughout the game. It necessitates damage mitigation and/or enemies being directed elsewhere, which only three of the 20 Legends excel at.

The Impact Brawler legend will necessitate direct healing due to its skills actively consuming the Impact Brawler's on health, which is extremely difficult to provide with anything that's not a Botanist.

In-depth section ends here. TL;DR and conclusion below.

Overall, I am simply of the opinion that a lot of teambuilding in this game involves factors that feel outright mandatory, which feels overly restrictive compared to all other games in the series in my personal opinion.

To sum things up for the entire game, the rating I gave is for someone already intricately familiar with the Etrian Odyssey series, and looking for more. Despite my issues with class design in EO5, it's still what I would consider a very good game and a worthy successor. To anyone else, I would strongly recommend starting with literally any other game in the series, maybe excluding Nexus, because the restrictions on teambuilding could lead to repeated frustration.

Admittedly, I’ve lately been struggling to find a game that fully captivates my attention. Luckily, this all changed with an impulse buy - Kenshi - during the Steam Winter Sale.

Kenshi was made by Lo-Fi Games for PC and is their only product to date, although Kenshi 2 is confirmed to be on the horizon. It was released into Early Access in 2013 and then as a finished game in 2018. It was also, to my understanding, largely the effort of one person. Kenshi roughly translates to swordsman in English, but at the start your character will likely be either a punching bag or food. Yes, food…

Somehow Kenshi has achieved being a rather inspired blend of a single player Runescape and Fallout (no, not the modern ones: I mean, 1, 2, and Tactics).

Perhaps the true beauty of Kenshi is that it is an open Sandbox. There is no main quest, side quests, essential characters or overarching plot to follow; no no no, just like every day life, you are stuck on a rock with what skills you have and make the best of it… Or you can do what I did, and make things worse for everyone else! Of course, that’s not to say there isn’t a history. There is, should you choose to seek it out. There are some characters, books, and even environments that will enlighten you as to what came before.

There are also optional house building mechanics where you can build up your own base, trade hub, or even city. Furthermore, you have crafting which allows you to make your own clothes, armor, weapons, and food. To try to give you some idea of how expansive your options in this game are, I’m going to list all of the skills that I can think of off the top of my head without looking them up: Weapons, Athletics, Swimming, Cooking, Engineering, Armorworking, Weapon Smithing, Science, Assassination, Stealth, Robotics, Lockpicking, and Thievery. To further illustrate, you know the Weapons skill I just mentioned? That’s not a single skill, it’s actually 8 or 9, I couldn’t remember them all without looking them up.

On the weapon side of things you’ve got: Polearms, Bare Fists, Katanas, Sabres, Giant Cleavers, Crossbows, Turrets, and more. By the way, if your strength is high enough, it is entirely possible to punch someone’s arm off… It’s… pretty crazy.

There’s a multitude of stats that affect how good your character (or characters, should you decide to recruit/travel with others) is at combat; there are a few hidden ones too like what species you choose for them. That said, like I stated earlier, you will start the game out weak - regular goats will give you trouble. Somewhat ironically, getting beaten to a pulp - which will increase your toughness stat, should you survive - will make you stronger and more effective at combat. You level up your stats by doing them over and over, although there are some caveats to what works and when.

The combat is really simple, your character handles all of it theirself; no abilities, specials, or anything like that. All you can do is click on who you want them to attack or click away from them to have them flee while praying that they don’t get cut down in the process.

The health system in Kenshi is REALLY interesting. Each extremity has its own health bar and when a certain threshold is reached your character will go unconscious (it’s different for each species). The best thing about this, and I won’t let anyone convince me otherwise, is that it is possible to lose limbs from combat or lack of treatment. Fortunately, it’s possible to get robotic replacement parts should you be skilled enough to buy, steal, or make them!

Also worth mentioning is the inclusion of a blood/oil (depending on if you are a robot - err, sorry, the game calls them Skeletons) and a hunger bar, so it’s entirely possible to bleed out or starve to death as well. I’m going to be real with you, when I saw that there was a hunger bar, I was worried this was going to be The Sims in the desert, where I’d constantly have to stop what I was doing and search for food, but as luck would have it you can actually change how frequently your character or characters get hungry at the start of the game.

Although cruel, Kenshi is generous in the aspects that matter. You can tinker with a lot of settings at the start of the game, like the aforementioned hunger frequency, you can also change the frequency of dismemberments, enemy base spawn rates, squad size, global population, death chance, and things to do with towns you might build like their raid frequency.

You are also provided with a large list of starting states during character creation. These don’t lock you into any one playstyle, but can make for an interesting intro or help you get started toward something you are hoping to achieve with the character. For example, you can start out surrounded by hostile cannibals, traveling in a group, traveling with a dog, or as a slave; just to name a few.

I’ve had a lot of harrowing and funny moments with Kenshi. I think the one that stuck out the most to me was when I tried attacking a wild animal to level up my combat skills, only for it to completely wreck my character. As fortune would have it, it was merciful and left me to bleed out in the middle of the desert. After regaining consciousness and bandaging up my legs to prevent bleed out, I had Stork - my character - begin to crawl to town (his legs were broken), about halfway there I was reminded of the SeaBear from the Spongebob Episode ‘Campfire Song’ as it came back and attacked me again… FOR NO REASON!

There was also a time where Stork was traveling through cannibal territory and after knocking out and mortally wounding tons of malnourished cannibals, he was knocked out by a cheap shot, but luckily his vitals were fine and he was going to make a full recovery… or so I thought. You know what that remaining cannibal did? He picked up my unconscious character and started carrying him back to his camp to eat him. By complete happenstance, a traveling nomad saw and killed the cannibal; thus granting Stork another day at life.

There was even an instance where Stork came across a slave trader colony in the desert and witnessed some bandits that wandered too close to the colony’s wall get set upon by slavers. Taking advantage of the slavers' impending victory, Stork patched up a few of the bandits to prevent them from bleeding out, and he and his companions carried them into town and sold them into slavery. Hey… building an army isn’t cheap!

So yeah, Kenshi is a lot. It’s ultimately what you choose to make of it and how you decide to play. There’s also an active and very healthy modding community whose mods are easily accessible through the Steam workshop.

My praises having been sung, there are a couple of things to be aware of. Firstly, while you can interact with every single character/creature/whatever in the game, it is important to note that you cannot talk to every single one. I’d say that dialogue is limited to a select few characters in each area; somewhere between the 10’s and 20’s, but I wouldn’t necessarily consider that a negative. It just means that the characters that can be conversed with tend to have something of actual substance to say or some sort of purpose behind their words, whether that is segueing into selling you something, being recruited, checking you for illegal goods, or something else.

The other thing probably goes without saying as to the open-ended nature of the game, but it can be buggy at points. I haven’t run into anything gameplay ending or egregious yet, but I did end up having to leave behind a companion because he got stuck operating a turret and wouldn’t get off it. Granted, I could have reloaded an older save, but his stats were garbage and overall I didn’t deem him worth the effort. There is another answer of sorts, game importing!

Game Importing was made as both a work around for bugs and a new game plus of sorts (should you check the right options). Importing keeps all of your characters, gear, and stats, while also giving you a wide range of optional things to import like: research, buildings you’ve made, major NPCs statuses as alive or deceased, and relationships with factions.

For a game that I’ve seen go on sale pretty frequently for around $15 and having managed to dump 30 hours into whilst barely scratching the surface; I’d say the Kenshi was definitely worth it and I am looking forward to diving further into it after I clear away some of my backlog.

From roving cannibals to beings that emerge from the fog, a variety of enemies await those who attempt to tackle the world of Kenshi!

Night Cascades is an interactive, kinetic (single route, no choices) Visual Novel that was released in 2022. It was developed and published by Hanako Games of ‘Long Live The Queen’ fame!

Night Cascades is a cult-themed mystery thriller that takes place in the 1980’s and features a pair of women protagonists who not only have a series of crimes to solve, but also must tackle their relationship issues from the past. Perhaps the real mystery is will they or won’t they get together!

I found the writing to be very solid and enjoyable. The mystery is good and there is a logical progression in the investigation as well as the overall plot. All of the characters, both major and minor, had a distinctive feel to them; everything they said felt right, like it was something they’d say. There are a lot of times where you can read the protagonists’ thoughts, which helps add to their characterization, giving them a more personal feel to the reader, and also gives a sense of having walked in their shoes.

Speaking of the characters, I thought that the models were positively fantastic. The models lean very heavily into realism yet all contain this refined, beautiful edge to them that keeps them from looking gritty or too realistic. Furthermore, the backgrounds are all handmade and have that same aesthetic of pseudo-realism. Truly, the game is very pleasing to look at.

At first, I found the font a bit hard to read but as I spent more time with it I got used to it and it wasn’t an issue at all, so maybe that was a me problem, but I thought I’d mention that for clarity’s sake. The choice of yellow text was a great choice and fit the text box well.

The textbox of whomever's point of view you are currently reading from has a nice oval-shape that reminds me of a rear-view mirror (which is appropriate because the characters spend a decent amount of time in a car) and is see-through so you can see the background/character models on the other side. I wish more visual novels had text boxes that allowed me to see everything that’s on the other side of them. I really hate missing out on parts of images when there is no reason for it.

The music was amazing and really helped sell the 80’s vibe to me. I’m of the opinion that it has a very jazzy feel to it.

Transition screens are handled in an intelligent and creative way. Whenever traveling to a new location, the game transitions to a map of the town and shows a dot traveling across it until the destination is reached, which it then changes to.

Perhaps the only part of the game that I felt wasn’t as great as it could have been were the interactive elements that I had previously mentioned in passing. The interactive elements/minigames are unique to which character you are playing as. One of them has you clicking whatever you see that you think is relevant to the case for clues and it tells you the number of them you need to find. There’s even a handy hint that you can click on if you get stuck.


The other character has what is called intuition mode which has a wavy thing it wants you to follow and then click when you see an eye icon. Following the waves was such a pain for me and I didn’t fully understand it, so I just opted to click everywhere until I saw the eye. I also didn't see any rhyme or reason to where I'd click giving the results it did. For example, there’s an instance where I had to click on the street and it follows up with a conversation about a character being a boy scout, great, but what does that have to do with the road I just clicked on to get that intuition?

The minigame just felt tacked on. It wasn’t awful and I appreciate the attempt to do something new and immersive, but it just didn’t work for me.

It took me three and a half hours to read through it and it regularly clocks in at a price point of $10. I’m a pretty quick reader so it might run most people around four or five hours to get through the entire thing. That might be a bit of a turn off to some, but I’d gladly take a tightened and well-paced experience rather than a rambling slog.

Really though, if that one small, insignificant thing is all I can find to rag on - and it is - then I have to say that this is a very solid visual novel and well worth experiencing!

another shadow drop i'm positively impressed with! i really adore the showa era vibe and sound along with japanese folklore and i love how detailed everything was, i absorbed the whole atmosphere and read all the files i got along the way. also another thing i really appreciate is the sprites, they're really expressive and not repetitive like it can get in most visual novels. the characters are very good, i enjoyed what i got out of them!
the only thing i didn't like was that at moments the game got a bit predictable and some plot points were a bit rushed but honestly this game got me seated and engaged for a fair bit of time so i won't be getting too critical of it. it's fun, it's got a vibe going on and it's neatly packed and wrapped up :) a recommendation for anyone who likes zero escape!

Wow, wow, wow. I started the game not expecting to be swept up in the hype, and then every 10 minutes some new cool thing happened that had me excited and gobsmacked. The atmosphere is immaculate, the mystery is compelling, the characters are appealing. The visual style is really distinctive, though I worry about accessibility for those who experience eye strain. I really appreciate the acuity of the characters, putting details together and working cooperatively, not cluelessly dragging out a mystery for a long time. The metanarrative touches are also extremely, extremely cool. The game's a little short, but that helps with the brisk pacing, and the game is priced accordingly.