The Dungeon Rules is a genre-mash of sokoban, roguelike, and dungeon crawler, which as a fan of some of those things, is pretty wild! I was surprised that this could work. The combat gameplay is vaguely reminiscent of Slay the Spire, while not holding up to that masterpiece, it is still serviceable and encourages you to put some thought into your card playing. The sokoban aspects are also serviceable, however, and this is a big however, there is a lot of potential for softlocks. Because there is no undo button, every move is final, which is typical for a roguelike, but frustrating for a sokoban. On the very first level, I got a box trapped in a corner after already clearing out most of the dungeon, and was forced to simply restart the entire level, which is discouraging at the least. Besides that, there are cards you can use outside of the combat that are one-time use and at first seem like optional goodies to help you get through some tougher puzzles/dungeons. But instead, they are mandatory for solving certain puzzles which you won't know until it's too late.

This game is currently a bit too rough around the edges for me to recommend. But I hope the developer keeps trying as there are some good ideas here.

(I received a review code for free from the dev)

Grapple Dog is polished to a sparkle. It's really a blast to play, it just instantly feels fun, and the level design is effortlessly intuitive. The pixel art is SO CLEAN too, it's kind of mesmerizing.

My biggest issues with the game lay with the gameplay itself. I've seen some other comments mentioning the motion feeling off somehow, but honestly I got used to it as the game went, although specifically when Pablo is in his rolled-up ball animation, he really does tend to fly around at the touch of a button and becomes way too hard to control precisely, which is sometimes required. My bigger issue was with the grappling hook, which unfortunately is kind of the core of the game.

The grappling hook has three angles: up, up-left, and up-right. I don't think this ever felt right. It forces you to make shots at weird angles when you'd rather just tilt it a bit more this way or that way. This is one of those things that's not really meaningful to someone who hasn't played the game, so I'll leave it at that.

One other major game design issue that I'm still confused about: checkpoints don't work like they do in... every other game. And by that I mean, if you touch a checkpoint, it doesn't save your progress, and it doesn't heal you. It only works once. This sounds like a little nitpick, but it seriously messed with my playthrough several times in ways that made me restart a level when I was 80% done with it. This is because if you hit a checkpoint, then go back and collect some gems or fruits, if you die before hitting another checkpoint, you have to redo it all. Even worse, the level might block you from going back after you die because certain gates will reset. It's also just frustrating to lose health right next to a checkpoint and instead of being able to quickly touch it and get going once again, I would often just die on purpose or open the menu to restart at the checkpoint, which just felt so unnecessary. Very odd choice that I saw no benefit from.

Other than some gameplay flaws, it's a really, really solid platformer that is so easy to get into and hardly needs any carrots-on-sticks to get you playing more.

Bewilderingly incomplete, broken, and boring.

If you asked me at any point in the last 3 years what game I was looking forwards to most, it was Sports Story. Golf Story was the first game I had played upon getting my Switch, and I will always have fond memories of how unexpectedly fantastic it was. Couldn't have asked for a better game to kick off the next gen of Nintendo games.

Sports Story, by all means, was looking to be the Silksong to Golf Story's Hollow Knight. Sure, it was originally scheduled for release in summer 2020, but it was delayed so that it would only be released when it was ready. Welp. Here we are.

You'd be one of the lucky ones if you managed to beat the game prior to the 1.3 patch, as there were several game-breaking glitches that prevented players from progressing the game. Besides that, the game has countless softlocks that can occur through completely normal gameplay, as well as sudden inexplicable crashes. While the game has an auto-save feature, it didn't do a good enough job that many people (me included) were forced to redo hours of gameplay.

The gameplay, by the way, generally sucks. Absolutely no instructions on what you are doing are given for anything. The best you will get are a few button prompts at the bottom of the screen that you must discover the purpose of as you are trying to play the sport, often when your focus is needed elsewhere. Though, if you fail a match, it hardly ever seems to matter. As far as I can tell, you can't lose any of the golf tournaments in the game, no matter how bad of a score you receive. By the way, golf is roughly 80% of the Sports in Sports Story.

And somehow golf is worse than it was in Golf Story. You can't put spin on the ball, the courses are uninspired in their layout, and besides that, constant stuttering in the game will often prevent you from tapping A at the right moment, ruining your shot. Oh yeah, the game is slightly laggy everywhere, and will randomly stutter.

Despite the trailers, the game's own description on the eShop page, and the cover art for the game, you don't really play any sport other than golf and tennis. There is one mission where you kick pinecones into a goal (which by the way makes no sense at all). That's about it you'll see for soccer. There is one minigame where you hit toasters with a baseball bat. That's about it for baseball. Cricket amounts to blocking incoming balls being launched towards a wheelie bin. You play volleyball once at the beginning of the game and never again.

What you will have a chance to play is BMX, which is generally despised, and fishing, which is actually alright though not very fleshed out.

The plot of the game is absolutely batshit insane. I seriously cannot explain what is going on. You will see emotional arcs with characters you know nothing about talking about supposedly important things that you know nothing about. The game ends with the Queen of the island declaring sports shall never change again and your character showing full support for god-knows-what reason, then some mystical looking dudes staring at you through a magical telescope implying there is something bigger going on. And then credits roll.

Everything about this stinks. I have no idea what happened. Whether it was due to internal complications with the devs, or Nintendo pushing out a game that clearly wasn't ready, I doubt we'll ever hear a full explanation, as the devs have been mysteriously silent through nearly the entire development of the game.

It is with confusion and sadness that I recommend you don't play this game.

Playing JellyCar Worlds, it feels like no time has passed at all since the original game I used to play practically daily on my iPod Touch. Worlds is built on the same solid grounding of pure fun, low consequences that the original had. It's not hard to tell each level was built with love and care while still allowing so much room for the player to push the boundaries (sometimes literally).

I wish I could try out the custom car sounds, but I don't think that feature is available on Switch. Designing my own car was a lot of fun though, especially when I found out the burger design I drew coincidentally had matching tires and an antenna to go with it. The car variety was nice too, and the different cars actually had their own little pros and cons that actually made me swap back and forth (though I think if I had to stick with one, it'd be the tank which seems like the most direct upgrade over the original).

I've seen it been mentioned by someone else, but the skull levels are ridiculously difficult compared to anything else in the game. It's fun to have a big challenge as a reward for getting through everything else, but the movement required to beat some of them is insanely precise and often fidgety. They quickly go from fun to frustrating when you fall back to the start in Getting Over It style fashion.

As of writing this there are 6 worlds with 2 more yet to come, plus a level editor. The price already fits the bill for the amount in 6 worlds, and this game is easy to step back into so I feel fine with the slight incompleteness of the game on release, if anything just because that means the fun isn't yet going to end.

Q-Beh is pure understated serenity. It doesn't presume any lofty notions or attempt to lore-ify it's world, it just is what it is. It's also almost always keenly aware of exactly what the player might want to explore, and sometimes invites exploration to places without rewards other than getting somewhere you weren't supposed to get to.

I love how each world has distinct personalities, based purely off of the music, the lighting, the color tone of the blocks...

A very cozy game that I love dearly.

Unfortunately Soccer Story is a total misfire. I'm not sure whether it was capitalizing on the World Cup hype or attempting to beat Sports Story to the punch that made Panic Barn want to push this game out before it in this underdeveloped state, but here we are.

I really wanted to have a good time with Soccer Story. I love Golf Story to pieces and don't really care about the obvious influences if it means another fun sports RPG, but the devs just wrote down all the ingredients without knowing the recipe.

In concept it's great: open-world soccer RPG that you interact with using a magic ball, playing in matches to take down the hilariously villainous Soccer Inc. who banned soccer across the land. Kicking the ball around in the overworld is actually not so bad, and wanting to see where they would take that was part of what kept me going to the third area. The stylized graphics are nice, and they make the otherwise unexciting pixel art really pop.

But man does this game give you nothing exciting, no motivation to care about anything. I think the dialogue was the epitome of this.

The characters all speak using monotonous, abrupt speech that just feels like placeholder text. I cannot read the emotion on any character. When your player loses a match, the owner guy says "You lost the match.". And your player replies "Okay!". I feel nothing. If you've ever listened to a casting audition, the speech reads like the crew feeding the lines to the actor. No emotion, just words for function.

Besides that, the endless amount of bugginess in small (text cues not appearing properly) to big (softlocks) ways, the 2 pieces of music which are by no means bad but get a bit old after the 100th time hearing them, the far, far too easy matches that feel like a chore, the boring collectibles that reward you with boring rewards, the endless fetch quests to move the plot forwards, ALL OF THIS just sours the experience to a point where I can't help but get sucked out of the game and start wondering if this is really my time being well spent. It's not.

Putting my thoughts down just after finishing so I won't forget.

Heartfelt, intricate, and full of life. Pentiment is built on meaningful discussions of purpose and truth and lets you find your way through it with as much control as I've ever seen in a game with as sturdy a plot as this. There is absolutely no way I saw even 50% of the content in this game, yet what I saw had as much effort you could expect from any other version of a well-polished game.

A game that values your time and rewards it, too. A story worth telling, a treasure.

This game has an odd difficulty curve, and unfortunately the area right after the intro area is filled with some of the hardest challenges in the game (actually i'm not totally sure about this because this is just how i played. never saw any sort of indication of areas gated based on completion though). You're not at all required to beat each area completely before you move on, but it might be wise to if you're stuck.

Twisting + pushing puzzles like PPP and Steven's Sausage Roll can easily get overwhelmingly difficult and I think a lot of that is just locking 3D motion to a weird layered 2D grid. PPP handled this pretty well but there were moments when the forced eagle-eye camera angle made it difficult to see what was positioned where.

Like someone else said here, once I was done with the main island, I was happy to leave it there. Each of the 5 or 6 main areas have a cool mechanic and the last puzzle was a really fun big finale.

Gosh. What a fantastic Zachlike! I played on/off for about 3 months, with a total of 72 hours of gameplay to beat every level in the game, and I was always looking forwards to playing more.

The core mechanic is incredibly simple: you have a tape of instructions that you can read from one end with scanners and print on the other end with stampers. Other than that, you just have conveyor belts, pipes (for intersecting paths), and most interestingly: goals and trash bins. Everything you create has to go out through one of these exits, and you have full control on where to place them on the square grid. This quickly leads to lots of possibilities!

It doesn't take long before you reach levels that ask you to do really simple tasks (reverse the tape, for example), that actually requires some clever tricks and lots more space and time than you might expect. Rarely do these tasks get too complicated that they can't be explained in a couple of sentences.

What's so amazing is that even though almost every level gives you the exact same tools and building space, each level feels like it's own mountain to climb.

The keyboard shortcuts take forever to get used to (I was still messing some of them up even at the end of my playthrough!) but they are so immensely useful in putting together and reshaping designs that once you get the hang of them, it will feel like you're a photoshop wizard employing a million shortcuts to whip up your next piece.

There is some level of plot happening in the background, but its fairly minimal and not at all necessary in understanding the gameplay. For the most part, I disconnected with it and just played for the puzzles.

And yes, the last puzzle is a doozy. But it's amazingly simple at its core and is such a great finale!

Do you like the Chzo Mythos? Do you like Return of the Obra Dinn? Can I interest you in the Case of the Golden Idol?

Love games with a mystical power dropping into an unready society and falling into the worst person's hands. Captures that same "holy shit that's gnarly" gruesomeness from Obra Dinn with even more initially inexplicable situations to try and piece together the meaning of. Short but not too short, happy with where it went and where it ended. And what art direction! Never seen anything like it.

Had an absolutely wonderful time with this game. Although at it's core it's "just" a 3D adventure game, it has so many features unique (as far as I know) only to Tunic. Providing a digital game guide highly reminiscent of those found inside Game Boy games is cool. Having it written in a constructed language system so it's (at first) impossible to read, but possible to interpret is clever. Having the pages of this guide scattered throughout the world is genius. And it doesn't stop there, but in a game built of secrets it's more fun to let them stay secret.

I generally liked the combat, although I found that I had to rely on the most powerful weapons and lots and lots of dodging to get past the bosses, as parrying is not worth it most of the time (and can be a bit fidgety with the button combo requires). I also abandoned most of the unique weapons early on as they didn't quite hold up to the sword, and magic was extremely hard to come by, or requires saving up precious blue berries to try to consume mid-fight.

The ending (B ending) was refreshingly painless (unless you consider puzzles a pain but come on). I later watched someone complete the A ending and yeah wow, no thanks (for multiple reasons). I think the lore of the world is actually pretty remarkably compatible with the gameplay itself and was awesome to unravel. For example, the lore behind the Lost Echoes is quite interesting, and makes them an especially cool enemy concept.

And yeah, Tunic is absolutely beautiful. It plays on the isometric view so extremely well, the game simply wouldn't work any other way. I love the locations and the constant uneasy atmosphere that something taking place here is wrong.

So so so clever and wonderful. Probably my favorite game of 2022 as of yet.