ok lets see, this is one of those temtems yeah? cyber sleuth? …palworld? no guns in this one?

i was a bit optimistic when starting the game up, despite getting jumpscared by a botw stamina bar when hitting the run button. never do this, please. but the tone was ultimately set by the soothing vocal song signalling everything’s going to be alright. sure, i believe you, game i’ve just met for 10 minutes. on that note, there’s a gimmick here where vocals come in when you do the obligatory mega evolution/z shmove/dynawhatever mechanic. or limit break if i wasnt trying to pigeonhole this into pokemon so badly. other jrpgs learn from this please! im deducting points tho because the audio is clearly too high quality to be coming from a cassette player. da diegetics...

upon setting out, you realise you’re going to spend a lot of your time in a fairly humdrum open world, encountering wooden npcs, getting into double battles (colosseum/xd fans eat your heart out) where your monsters have like 8 moves each (half of them unusable while you watch your AP bar filling), being rewarded with like 5 different currencies stuffed into the same menu as your level-up moves. a type system where hits aren’t merely “super effective”, they cause shit like stats dropping, contact damage being taken, induced type changes, leech seed, you name it. and you get some bonus AP? did that sound overwhelming? should pokemon be overwhelming?

a looooot of thumb twiddling in a game where i had both difficulty sliders turned all the way up anyway. i think pokemon is smart in being dumb. you get 4 moves. they are always accessible (unless you have 0 pp. but then you just have to get it up) and predictable. you only get exp and money. i didn’t find the strategising in this game particularly rewarding or necessary, so a lot of the complexity just felt a headache to trawl through. your tms can only be sorted alphabetically, and you get so many of them that i just… stopped wanting to look there. yes my room is still messy.

idk. id probably forgive the excess here (it is an open world game) if i had a stronger reason to keep going. i found the writing somewhat stale, but the political bent funny. area music unmemorable but still vibey. quests sorta boring, but passable. the monsters are cute. i like them. i could finish this and have a decent time. but i probably wont! (it is an open world game)

oh also they added scald to this game. and made it 90 base power. im just saying.

(try playing this at https://neal.fun/password-game/!)

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the password game takes the ripe joke of having to obey increasingly specific password requirements when signing up for a site and runs with it. it is divided into levels - “rules” - that you have to follow, a new one revealed once you fulfil all pre-existing ones. at least 5 characters? sure. a special character? you got it. an emoji for the current phase of the moon? uhhh… the notation for the winning move in this game of chess? uh oh….

if i was meaner i would be assigning this a rating and docking it some points. this was definitely intended to get increasingly ridiculous to play into the joke, and not as a game structured for anyone to beat. the dev admits as such on twitter. theres an entertaining level of entropy to the whole game the further you get in due to how the “rules” all have to be fulfilled at once - i had to start accounting for boron in my answer because i was forced to move my bishop during a previous level (the algebraic notation for this beginning with a B). lets hope that youtube url you need doesnt contain a C, M or X because youre going to fuck up your roman numeral multiplication that way!! and you can pad your answer with special characters if you know the fire is coming…

its a decent quick laugh. again, i would most likely be rating this negatively as an actual game due to an unsatisfying luck factor (rule 24 is so unfair!!) but theres enough novelty here to be funny to show friends and gauge reactions as they delve further. and i had a fun enough time trying to optimise an “ideal run” through it. so i bear no ill-will

not going to give a proper review for this. i typed up my delirious shopping list and am not going to edit it. sorry. the ultrahand glue fumes got me.

as someone who dropped botw after a few hours, this still does a lot of the same stuff i dont like but i kinda kept playing it anyway. no real reason. im just a fan of retreading stuff out of peer pressure

leaving this as “complete” even though i still have to do some endgame stuff please dont tell the backloggd police. itll be accurate by tomorrow i swear. (its all good now)

things i liked:
Sound Design - he goes pitter patter!!
Graphed icks - i think this “cel shading” thing shows promise !
Polish - theyre juggling all of the variables. x, y, z, omega, backwards w, all those letters. other games fall apart when you click to fire the gun. which is more relatable to me but we cant have that now
Music in the Towns - cool stuff, heard an erhu in there a bunch. good instrument, checks my box
Main Abilities - the phys gun thingy is a good gimmick to centre a game around. the other 3 are also good like the rewind time one. now i finally understand king crimson kinda. the botw ones are lame and i cant pretend im jojo in that one
Moon Logic needed to get to the Dungeons - this is good it feels like im really in a legend of

things i kinda liked but kinda didnt like:
Combat - yeah i could do something GOOFY with the phys gun or i can just mash Y a bunch with the weapon im already holding. “weapon durability” is not real anyway you get 1000 knives (rip goat) you can all fuse together with the 5349022 different body parts looted in your backpack. the mokoboboblins all act the same, the like likes spit a few balls at you with the energy of a pensioner. but hitting things with a stick is visceral and timeless so its all good (i do not beat pensioners with sticks)
Sky Islands - theyre samey but a good change of pace. i would see them and have to open the map to be like “have i actually been to this one” because theyre just not visually distinct.
Devices and Gadgets - this is like fine but my approach to anything is never going to be to open a huge ass menu and sift through it, if you already give me the planks and wheels i need to do [TASK] at [LOCATION]
Story - the “memories” part of this game actually gets cool once it gets going. but until then its all just kinda monotonous and i dont care about any of these people. sorry for your kingdom or happy that happened
Dungeons - some of this is fun but if i wanted to visit 5 rooms and call it a day id go to a museum
The World - its too big but theres some cool stuff. this doubles for real life

things i didnt like:
Shrines - you didnt need to make them all look and sound the same. only 10% of these are actually really any fun, im not a preschooler anymore. come on guys i thought people were telling you this 6 years ago
Music Elsewhere - not against a minimalist impressionist thing but both this and the botw ones still just go in one ear out the other
Depths - not fun to navigate, the rewards arent cool, it all looks the same. i see why it wasnt advertised much lol
Cutscenes - hmm this is a non linear game so to ensure people get the memo we will give the same speech at 4 different mandatory locations - “game design” and “narrative effect”. im good
Voice Acting - you can switch to japanese though
Quests - kinda boring
Materials Menu - this is soooooo big lmao. the up button menu is unusable if you dont sort it by “most used”. there was something better that couldve been done here. sorry ill end the review now that its getting to nitpicks


it may have strayed from the series roots, but theres still a bunch of different collectibles and you can make wheely cars that go FAST so whos to say if banjo kazooie: nuts and bolts is really bad. also im pretty sure they play the among us theme in the shrines so i see why the kingdom is malding