A monumental effort for a small team. The environment design is spectacular and one of the clear highlights, and I cannot begin to imagine what a deceptively difficult challenge it must have been to get movement to feel good, with how the cat is animated and how few times I found myself moving to the wrong platform with its simple controls. The music also deserves praise, and I'm starting to get sick of how good the music is in every professionally made game that I play. I can only type "compliments the action perfectly" so many times.

Of course, there is a drawback to having a small team. The game is short, I clocked in at just over 4 hours (keeping in mind that I tend to go through games much faster than the average player). Steam achievements show that 3 days after release, 17% of players who have started the game have already finished it. That's fine, but those who prioritise quantity may feel a little let down if they expected more from a Sony-backed game. In addition to this, the puzzles are fairly simple and none of the action scenes took me more than 2 attempts to complete, so those looking for a challenge may also not particularly enjoy this one.

But come on, you're playing as a cat doing cute cat things in a lavishly decorated crumbling city. I really enjoyed exploring the city, and some of the action scenes were very striking. I enjoyed my time with this one, and I cannot understate how impressive of an achievement it is.

This is largely spoiler free, but I do spoil some aspects of the game you might want to discover for yourself.

Half the time that I see Pentiment discussion on the internet I see a phrase tossed around. "This game was designed specifically for x amount of people and I am one of them." I am not going to say that, because I actively try to avoid most discussion of ye olde history. I get it, everything sucked back then and all the rulers were entitled pricks. Those poor farmers performed manual labor for 17 hours a day until they died of dysentary and a very sore back at the elderly age of 32, survived by their 17 children. "They were very productive back then, as being productive was a matter of life and death", I think while I sit here writing an overly lengthy review of a video game with no real reward or consequence. I've gotten off track here, but my point is that the setting did not remotely interest me. Neither did the pedigree of Obsidian Entertainment, who have made a bunch of critically acclaimed games that I got bored of pretty early on.

It should be obvious by now that I am not the target audience of this game, despite my liking of story-driven games. However, I was intrigued after seeing the art style in trailers and deducing that it was being made by a small team. "What the hell, I'll give it a go," I thought. I'm glad I did, because Pentiment is an extremely well made game.

As I expected, the art style is the first thing that hit me from the somewhat confusing opening scene. It's an absolute treat to look at, and I can only imagine that the only reason I haven't seen this unique art style used for any games previously is because it looks like a paper-cut pain to animate and a stubbed-toe pain to research.

The next thing that hit me was the writing. I found it very interesting that so many characters took issue with particular aspects of society or religion. The first I remember was a character who preached the writings of Martin Luther. Other memorable viewpoints included a character who hated organised religion and a nun who had been forced to become one against her will. Each character in this game has a unique perspective. And interacting with the children is, for the first time in any video game, a lot of fun. The way they wander around misbehaving in the background while the grown-ups are talking was hilarious.
I haven't even talked about what you actually do in Pentiment yet. It's a good thing that I don't do this professionally or I would get fired. Pentiment is a 2D side-scrolling murder mystery where your actions and dialogue choices will impact the story and future interactions with characters. Sometimes within the same act, sometimes in a later act, and occasionally in the epilogue. Accompanying this is a character building section towards the beginning of each act where you decide what your character's background is. These choices will open up certain dialogue choices throughout the game and I always found it quite rewarding when they did pop up and help me discover some more evidence. Pentiment also has a Persona-style time management system where most tasks you undertake do not pass the time but some others do. The time consuming tasks are signposted so, unless you're an idiot like me, you should find it easy enough to discover enough about the murder to find a suspect. However, you won't find everything, and the mechanic-enforced open endedness of each case initially frustrated my want of closure. In hindsight, I think it was the right choice. My reasoning for this goes in spoiler territory, so you'll have to trust me on this one.

Lastly, it's difficult to talk about without spoiling anything but I should give a glimpse into my thoughts on the story. I thought it was satisfying to watch the characters who did have a plot arc in each act. And cleverly enough, with time skips taking place between the acts, it means that all the minor characters have a small arc as well. You watch them grow up or grow old or watch other characters come to terms with their death off-screen. A lot of effort went into world building and the overarching story of Pentiment nestles into it very snugly. Overall, it's a very tightly written experience. The only negative I can really conjure up is that the main character's arc doesn't fit particularly neatly into the story. It's a minor and perhaps arguable quibble, though, and really only something I'd mention if the rest of the game was absolutely excellent.

In conclusion, ignore what people say about this game being designed for them. Pentiment is designed for everyone, and you should play it. No seriously, I'm giving this a rare unconditional recommendation. Not only is it really good, but I really want this game to succeed. Obsidian currently have a great track record for letting small teams make smaller, niche, interesting titles while the A-team work on games with a broader appeal. I'd love to see that continue, and I'd love to see more Triple A developers follow this path of giving their proven creatives the keys to the bus and not stopping them when they go off-road.

Road 96: Mile 0 is actually a pretty fun expansion on the first game. We got plenty of backstory that wasn't in the original game, and I think it definitely enhances the Road 96 experience with a nice tale. However, there are some pretty glaring flaws, both to do with the story and otherwise.

The runner minigames are very silly, but it's clear they had a vision for them so I'm willing to discount their silliness despite everything, and it is short break from the constant exposition. However, some of the hitboxes in the runner sections are pretty inaccurate so you have to give everything a wide berth and that's not always possible. Sometimes you have to keep going until you figure out where the hitbox really is through trial and error. Frustrating.

And while I mentioned how much I did enjoy the plot, I had to overlook some things. For starters, the moral choice system undermined the story. What's the point on including one if the character you're controlling will contradict your actions during the cutscenes? I would've preferred it if they just railroaded me a bit more, so they could tell the story they wanted to tell instead of giving me the freedom to contradict the plot. My other real gripe is that the climax is very goofy and sucked all of the emotional tension out of the moment.

Otherwise, I enjoyed this. You may miss the road trip vibes of the original if you were a fan, but I think the fun exposition will make up for it. And Colton. I actually ended up liking that little ratbag in the end and I hate myself for it.

Planet of Lana is an extremely easy puzzle platformer with a gorgeous art style. The setting looks to provide what the difficulty does not but it seems... simplistic and the faceless robot enemies are pretty bland. I don't have the drive to finish this one. The trailers show that there are new environments and story beats later on that may be more enjoyable but it feels like a timewaster. If you're a fan of the small-child-scary-world-2D-puzzle-platformer genre or cute cat-blobs then you might feel more engaged than I was.

Part of me can't believe that it's gone for good. Blaseball hasn't been particularly present in my life for close to two years now, but until today there was at least a chance of it coming back in some form. Some of my favourite moments in gaming happened in this silly baseball simulator and we won't get that chance again, and no-one will ever experience those highs like we all did. For all its flaws, there aren't many games that have brought a community together so thoroughly and meaningfully. But alas, it was a relic of 2020-21 lockdowns and there it shall stay.

This is a really solid effort for one developer, two artists and a musician! The characters feel a little archetypal but the romantic scenes were very sweet, and I did like the undercurrent of wrongness sprinkled in here and there. Some group scenes feel like they're going through the motions but I appreciate that it was a very fast paced VN, none of those scenes lasted for very long and I liked that a lot of them referred to events from the previous day instead of each event being separate. On the technical side, this desperately could've used some scene transitions and music transitions too. The bad trumpet playing at the start of the game was funny but I mostly didn't really enjoy the music too much either. But in the end, it's a free game from a tiny team. I enjoyed my time here and that is all I could ask for.

First of all, do NOT play this game without playing the original. You won't have any idea what's going on. It's extremely cheap right now or you may have gotten it in a Bundle somewhere, just play it.

It has to be said that this game has a lot of the same pitfalls as the first one. Moving around is still a little tedious and standing around flicking through frequencies is sadly still present (I hoped that they would add a bit of puzzling to allow me to figure out the frequencies faster but no dice). I don't think they matched the atmosphere of the first game either, I found the horror a lot less compelling since we got a pretty good idea of how it worked in the first game. But even with that, I still loved my time here.
Dialogue is the main highlight of any Night School game, and they've made it so you don't have to be worried about cutting much of it off this time around (in the English version, at least). That problem was rife in Oxenfree 1 and Afterparty, although I will say that the dialogue in this is a lot less witty and a lot more... grounded in the characters' problems than those two games. It's here where they've made their major strides. The main characters of Night School games keep getting older, and the two fully fledged adults at the helm in Oxenfree 2 had character writing that resonated with me a lot as someone also going through that stage of life. The writing is a lot more grown up this time, and I found that it made up for the less scary atmosphere.
Oxenfree 2 certainly treads a lot of the same water as the original, and while it doesn't hit the mark in some aspects, improvements elsewhere made this a worthwhile play for me.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is everything I thought it was going to be, from its great aspects to its flaws.
The way it looks and the way it controls are perfect and exactly what anyone could have expected going into this. The soundtrack was put together by people with very good taste and is extremely danceable - what you want in a game where you can make your character dance whenever you want. The missions are a little formulaic but they don't keep you in the same area for too long which I think staves off the tedium. Everything is also pretty easy aside from some post-game content, but I think that plays into BRC's favour since it's another element that ensures that the game doesn't get tedious.
The only element I think could definitely have been improved is the writing department. I did enjoy the broader plot and its tendency to get weird, but despite some distinct and memorable character designs, the characters don't feel particularly distinct or well characterised. They have attitude (good!), but no depth (not so good!).
Ultimately, BRC is a game with lots of style, is a little thin in the gameplay department while still giving you enough to have plenty of fun, and a little thin in the writing department while still keeping you interested. That's a great game, right? I'm describing a great game. It's an instant favourite for me.

There is a lot of potential here. It feels great so far - movement is a little weird but I'm assuming I'll get used to it, and shooting feels better than it did in GO. As it stands, though, CS2 only has basic content (even this couldn't escape the main issue plaguing multiplayer game launches) and their method of stopping the playerbase from going back to GO means that it is currently impossible to access CSGO's rich history of custom maps. I'm assuming that this is temporary - as well as CS2's current lack of a workshop to share maps and UI to play them - but even then, it sucks that they're inaccessible and might be for a long time. It also looks like achievements in CSGO were wiped, which is a bit of a bummer.
CS2 will likely be a great (maybe even the best) addition to the Counter-Strike series. In the meantime, we have to wait.

Laika: Aged Through Blood is an incredible game. For starters, you can see via trailers why you may enjoy its gameplay. The systems all fit together in a way that makes you pull off absurd shoot-spin-backflip-gunswitch combos while mid-air thanks to all of the moves available to you. The controls do take some time to get used to, and during that period of adjustment, you will die a lot. But from each attempt, you'll learn. Soon enough I had a really good grip on everything and felt like a badass sweeping through difficult rooms on my first try. Most of the difficult rooms in the game are boss fights, and I was surprised with how much I enjoyed them. Nothing ever felt impossible, you just need to figure out the right strategy and pull it off by using every aspect of the combat system. If you do die enough times without getting close to your previous dead bodies, you will start losing large chunks of viscera (LATB's very grim form of money). The first time this happened to me was actually pretty devastating, but you build up your viscera very quickly by traversing the wasteland and killing more birds. If anything, it convinced me to spend more money on upgrades instead of hoarding it all. To help with this, as you get further in, more and more enemies will spawn in the game world and more enemies to kill means more money. This has the added benefit of changing areas that you've already visited several times, and sometimes you'll have to rethink how you traverse the map as more elements get added. Everything in this game just fits snugly together, and it's a great demonstration of game design.

I really enjoyed the writing in LATB. Laika herself is a very compelling character. You'll see a lot of her past and what drives her to go to the lengths she goes, and how her dysfunctional relationships with both her mother and daughter shape her perspective. These relationships are very well written and I think most people will probably adore Puppy. Laika also has a past with the other residents of Where We Live (almost all of the locations in the world are named like this and I LOVE it) and you'll see of that all on display in their everyday conversations. The world itself is a dark, horrible place as Laika and other denizens of the wasteland try to avoid the genocidal birds. Some really effed up stuff happens across the course of the game, the fact that the character designs are all anthropomorphic deadens some of the blow but it didn't stop me from being saddened by events that occur. The ones I found most interesting were some of Laika's actions. Moral grey areas are a difficult thing to pull off in media: a lot of the time you'll see writers struggle and write characters inconsistently in an effort to avoid simple black and white morality in their stories. This wasn't the case here, and the LATB writers should be proud of that.

The game is also presented really nicely. Bugs were few and far between (some I noticed have already been patched) and, I mean, just look at it. The artstyle is consistently great throughout and there aren't many instances of it interfering with the gameplay. I will say though, I played this on a computer monitor, so people using smaller screens may struggle to correctly identify everything they need to look for in the hectic combat. Lastly, the music is really important for setting the tone of the game. Certain areas have set music, but for most of the wasteland you'll be playing casettes you collect and Laika plays on her casette player, performed by Spanish musician Beícoli, who herself is a character in the game as the person who performed the songs. Despite all the screwed up and badass things happening on screen, the music is very relaxed and chilled out, and it does wonders for the vibe of the game. Towards the end, I think I started to feel the short playlist of these songs even though I had collected all of them, but that's only a minor annoyance and they are still great songs (I just need a little time away from the music before I can listen to the soundtrack by itself).

With combat systems that work together beautifully, a fleshed out game world, enthralling character writing, a gorgeous art style and a killer soundtrack, Laika: Aged Through Blood exceeded all expectations I had for it (and I was pretty pumped for this). Some criticism will be (and has been) levelled at its difficulty but I found the quick restart combined with the amount of tools you have at your disposal meant that it was easy to try new things and eventually succeed. I had a blast and it's quickly become one of my favourite games. If you've ever enjoyed a challenge in video games and a good handle on game controls, I'd recommend at least trying out the demo and seeing how much you like it, because this is a banger.

Yes, the skateboarding is floaty and imprecise. But you can mostly just ignore it! Yes, there are a lot of QTEs, but they aren't inherently bad, and you can turn up the difficulty on them if you want! Yes, the turn-based battles are easy, but using them as a physical manifestation of the arguments Jala has with all the people she has wronged in the past is genius! I love the writing so very much, and this is one of the most lovable casts in a video game I can think of. Jala was a horrible person, wracked with guilt and without the emotional maturity to realise it or deal with it in a healthy way. Her trying to make up with everyone (and herself) was a journey I absolutely adored and I cannot recommend it enough to people who love interactive fiction.

Puzzle platformers aren't really my thing, so I'm shocked to announce that American Arcadia kept me very engaged for its 6 hour runtime. The key factors that contributed to this were the engaging story, the great dialogue writing and the variation. Each section of the game had something different going on, and the first person areas did wonders to spice things up a bit. Some plot beats were a little bit contrived, and some puzzles could get a little frustrating (especially one or two that couldn't be solved without seeing an easily missable clue), but ultimately I really enjoyed this one.

One last thing worth mentioning is that they nailed the difficulty. While it isn't a hard game by any means, there are some sections where it's incredibly easy to stuff up. Thanks to the quick restart, you get back to it pretty quickly, and thankfully not many areas were such a cinch that it got boring. That, I think, was key to keeping me engaged.