Enjoyed it to start with but the 'teach as you solve' didn't quite play out thanks to jumps in logic within puzzle sets and a few too many cases of overly complex rules.

I appreciate it trying to evoke The Witness (a great game with a shitty creator) but it being top down meant that the open area didn't live up to its potential, as you're unable to be guided by natural landmarks or structures to the best place to solve/learn the mechanics.

On the positive side, I did like the mansion location which acts as an exam of the rules you've learned combined with art pieces and the environment, and the art style itself never felt like a hindrance to legibility. It also sounds silly but the water sounds were really relaxing when you're standing next to a waterfall trying to work out how flowers or diamonds are meant to work.

Ended up completing 6 of the main sections with some optional puzzles - I might come back to this in the future but my attention span waned pretty fast.

Usually very relaxing but I found it weirdly frustrating at points, likely due to using a controller to play - there is a 'snap-to' function using the shoulder buttons but the cursor itself can be a bit haphazard.

Some of the puzzles can also feel a bit off as well, either due to the solution leaning too hard into trial and error or because they fall a bit too far into the nebulous idea of tidying - does adding stars to a constellation really work thematically for what is in reality a game about tidying a house up and your cat getting in the way?

Truly wanted to love this but just didn't land. Didn't mind a chunk of the game being live-action cutscenes (it's still quite a fun concept that has potential) but the story wasn't interesting enough for me. The moment to moment gameplay during combat starts of quite fun and you can really see the origins of what Remedy went for with Control here - but because you get doled out abilities so quickly, it gets a little repetitive and doesn't really provide much challenge until the very end (at least on normal difficulty).

In fact the hardest part of Quantum Break is actually progressing through the game. Playing on Xbox Series S, the game crashed 4 separate times and required me to play through almost the entirety of Acts 2 and 3 not once, not twice but three times. And it was hard to maintain enthusiasm during that time, constantly thinking any non-in-universe stutter was a precursor to my own personal groundhog day.

'Endless' games don't always gel with me so I was pleased when this turned out to be mission focused. I think they could have been slightly longer but it was nice having mechanics chop and change continuously to keep things interesting. Most levels felt pretty fair as well, even if you have to occasionally deal with enemies suddenly spawning just off-screen directly in front of you, giving you very little time to react due to the screen size.

The crank here steers your ship in a similar way to Hyper Meteor (direction dependent on the exact crank position), but there's also an option to change this to be relative to the ship's position on screen.

The Short Message looks great and the cherry blossom monster design is actually really well done - it looks like a Silent Hill game (despite not being set there at all) and it gives me that grimey feel to the world that the trailers for the upcoming Remake feel like they're cleaned up a bit too much. Sure there are some framerate dips but I'm rarely too fussed by them and they didn't really distract from the experience. It also mostly sounds good - there's another great Yamaoka track in the credits and the intermittent background audio throughout does its absolute best to keep you on edge. It is unfortunately let down a little by less than stellar voicework and an especially unconvincing dub on some live-action cutscenes - not sure if this was meant to be intentionally ethereal but it ended up just looking and sounding bad.

It's major problems come with just about everything else though - the story, script and I guess the Short Message we're getting are eyerollingly blunt and really doesn't tackle any of the themes it mentions with anything more than a puddle's depth of thought. In general, wandering around an abandoned tower block isn't inherently bad but the lack of any kind of tension or real environmental storytelling while you're doing so just makes the experience a bit dull. I think it's trying and I appreciate that, but it just doesn't quite get there in execution.

There are segments with the aforementioned cherry-blossom monster that do give you something to think about, but only fleetingly - you're put through Otherworld maze sections where you're chased until you reach a magical exit door but these sections are mostly pretty linear until the very end where you find yourself wishing they had stayed that way. You're thrown into mazes which are likely meant to disorientate you and ratchet up the tension, they only really succeed in the first point. Chase sequences have been a staple of the first-person horror boom since Amnesia Dark Descent but this feels like another example of something being implemented because it's a genre thing - there's no thought as to how or why this relates the story or characters involved. It's a chase through a maze because that's what horror games do.

It's a very large map and so easy to get lost through doors and hallways that all look very similar, having to collect four items and then an exit all while being chased, with one wrong turn meaning you could run into the monster and need to start again. Less scary and more frustrating, and eventually pretty boring.

Even for free I don't think this is worth your time, even for Silent Hill fans. There are some nods to other games in the series but they're just reminders of better games. I've seen people say you can't be too critical of something that's free but I absolutely disagree - yes, I'm sure a lot of work went into this but it's still a finished product at the end of the day.

Pleasant point and click adventure where I grew to like the main character more than I thought I would. Some puzzles fell into trial-and-error trap but generally it made sense what needed to go where and why, as long as you're in the point and click mindset.

I was a bit put off by the controls, having to press a trigger button and the d-pad before I could even choose what interaction I make with anything felt unnecessarily obtuse and the stiff animation is also an acquired taste - I didn't dislike it but there were cutscenes that did look a bit jarring and some technical hitches.

I do love a puzzle game all about learning rules through doing, rather than having thins spelled out to you, and Lingo fulfills the brief for this very well. It's all about words and the (mainly) cubes you have to fill in have a bunch of different rules attached to them based on pretty much everything about them.

Some of the puzzles are a bit hit or miss, either with multiple solutions or answers that don't quite fit the rule but I suppose that's kind of to be expected with around 2000+ puzzles across multiple levels. Generally it's a good time, and presented a number of Eureka moments when away from the game.

The game does have a big downside though and that's the map. Portals I can deal with, non-Euclidean geometry I cannot - too many times you're thrown around in circles or ending up back where you started just from a little exploration, and for me brought about a very uneasy nausea. It's worse in some levels than others (and there's one at the very end that I immediately noped out of) but it left such a sour note as even with basic colour blocks and cubes, I think it would have been a fun map to just be able to explore normally.

Was initially really into this but that feeling faded as soon as the games repeated themselves. It's not that they're bad, there are just too few of them and the emergent nonsense you get in games like Fall Guys (which is a clear inspiration here style-wise) doesn't exist as you're pretty set in what you can do in each round.

That said, I think these pigeon characters are more fun and charming than the Fall Guy beans, and the challenges to unlock costumes is pretty neat. I haven't played Fall Guys since Season 2 so maybe that's already a thing there, but I appreciate that attempts were made to make getting some of these costumes a bit more interesting than just buying them in a shop.