Deeply silly but genuinely joyful puzzler-slash-playground from the creator of Katamari Damacy. It's tough to describe this one accurately while successfully selling it, but if the thought of a game with dancing anthropomorphic apples and pencils, a smooth and happy jazzy soundtrack, and boatloads of child laughter doesn't appeal to you, go right ahead and skip this. My complaints here are all related to the controls and the framerate - it just felt clumsy and clunky, especially late in the game. Otherwise completely delightful!

Delightfully weird narrative puzzle game. Big Katamari vibes - you gradually suck up objects and people and grow larger and larger, but this time you're a hole and not a ball. My biggest complaint here is the brevity and slightness. I wanted more than like two or three hours of this fully realized art design, and I felt like the levels were only just starting to get creatively challenging by the end of the game. Still a real treat and I'm looking forward to the rest of this Annapurna Collection.

It's cute, fun, and quick, but it's missing an absolutely crucial feature: online co-op! The gameplay consists of controlling a circular spaceship traversing its way through bright levels and blasting enemies to pieces. There's a pilot's chair, there are four gunner stations, and there are three other special stations that control shields, navigation, and special weapons. That's eight total stations, and you and up to three companions are meant to scramble around the ship handling everything. That sounds very fun, and some (okay fine all) of my friends were down to try beating this thing in one night the other weekend. Alas, no online co-op! To enjoy the game together we'd have all had to gather in person, Xbox controllers in hand, on a couch. Even before the pandemic that was never going to happen! So instead I played this alone - you get one animal companion who you can move from station to station - and it was just so much more cumbersome and less chaotic than it could have, should have, and would have been with online co-op play. You just hate to see a missed opportunity like that!

I should have listened. Reviews for this game were more or less universally terrible with the same critique showing up over and over again - that the game is immediately convoluted and complicated and confusing. Well, add my voice to the chrous. What sucks is that this game really should have been playable and enjoyable! The goal here is "guide a troop of humanoid ape creatures through the process of human evolution over several generations" and you accomplish this by exploring and investigating, mating, fighting off animals and other threats, and growing skill trees meant to propagte down through your future lineage. It's a cool concept, the game was pretty, and the controls weren't terrible to use. A winning formula! Except that the game doesn't explain anything whatsoever. This is not an exaggeration. There's no tutorial at all, and you're thrown immediately into the game with no guidance and no clue how to progress or succeed. The makers did this intentionally, citing that human evolution itself only happened through a series of trial and error. Well, yes, but that's a terrible way to design a damn video game! This game would have been immensely better and more playable had it walked the player through even just one day of this explorer-evolver simulation - it's time to eat, maybe go have sex with that ape, hey what's that sharp stick do, etc. Instead it's just confusing and hard to understand. A shame, since all the other elements of an interesting game seem to be here!

Short and beautiful puzzle game that played a lot like Braid. Most of what you do here is advance and rewind time as two characters traverse a predetermined path, solving increasingly difficult but never super-complicated puzzles that have to do with light orbs, switches, and orders of operation. Really dug the soundtrack and art direction here - these levels really feel like little dreamscapes and the story, though incredibly simple and predictable, tugs at the heart surprisingly well when all is said and done. Little puzzle game like this won't be for everyone, but I enjoyed my time with it just as much as I enjoyed how brief that time was.

Gorgeous little Studio Ghibli-inspired JRPG that plays like a real time blend of Dragon Quest and Pokémon. I played this on the PS3 I still have hooked up and it looks astonishing ten years later. So what left me a little cold here? Standard JRPG complaints - fetch quest mechanics, repetetive battles. I just don't have all the gaming time in the world these days, and can't help but feel that forty or fifty gaming hours were better spent distributed across a variety of games. Your mileage (and free time) may vary!

Only just finally got around to the campaign on this thing some five years after enjoying online multiplayer for a good month or two. The multiplayer was fun! The campaign was a tremendous pancaking fart on a concrete bench.

Fun little phone game, insanely slim "video game." No knock intended on what this is, but one thing this isn't is an experience that will hold up in like two years.

Was all kinds of geeked up for this remake - why did it fall so flat for me? Somewhere around the fifth or sixth hour of collecting S-K-A-T-E two minutes at a time and chaining reverts and manuals together, not only was the nostalgic sugar rush long gone, but I was beginning to wonder if single-player Tony Hawk had always been such a grind to progress through. (No pun intended!) I guess what I liked about these games at twelve were the moon physics and playing as Spider-Man or something. Obviously I'm growing older all the time, but sadly this did not make me feel younger in my mind!

Pretty much as dark and depressing as the medium gets, and the overall tragedy of this story and these characters will stick with me for a while. (Cards on the table - the first game's ending rubbed the wrong way and the inciting incident in this one made all kinds of sense to me.) Just an almost overwhelming sadness stemming from moments both big and small, which, yeah - well done, Naughty Dog. Gameplay's a secondary concern here and was, I dunno, adequate? (Survival horror still isn't my bag; your mileage may vary.)

Exceeded all my expectations by actually living up to all my expectations. Now let's get that sequel.

Love this franchise. Amazed at how well this worked on the Switch, but can't shake the feeling that this particular expansion was slight and goofy.

Me, ten hours into New Horizons: This is awesome!
Me, twenty hours into New Horizons: This is kinda awesome?
Me, forty hours into New Horizons: This is NOT. AWESOME.

My PSP-less ass had been waiting ages to play another Valkyria Chronicles game and holy hell did this deliver. Honestly improves on the original game in every conceivable way. The gameplay is identical or perhaps moderately improved by the addition of a grenadier class; the art style is identical and as such the PS4's graphic capabilities make for a prettier picture than the PS3's; the characters - from mains to secondaries to villains to troops - were so much more memorable this time around; and the story was more moving. You gotta love it!

Gorgeous game, impeccable detail. Would love to see more dumb war games do campaigns like this one - simple little vignettes that highlight forgotten or underexplored chapters from overstuffed wars, providing the barest skeleton of a historical lesson. That said, where's the Eastern Front? This game's got a level in which you take control of literal Nazis, killing at least two hundred American troops pushing forth over the Rhine into Germany. Give me Leningrad, give me Stalingrad, give me a glimpse of the side of the war where 15 million soldiers died instead of a fourth chapter from the Western Front where I play as the goddamn Nazis! Sheesh.