upandaway
1992
Cute little game with staggering production values. The story is a lighthearted comedy adventure with some fun space worldbuilding, which was overall nice, but not really the main appeal. The draw is the production values: near-full voice acting (which is great too), so many CGs that it feels like playing through an anime rather than a VN, buncha songs and characters, with a perfect crisp pixel-art of late 80s-early 90s anime aesthetic, all in a tight package of 5-6 hours. If you know to expect a pretty light story, even though it's a story game, you'll have fun thanks to the spectacle.
2015
Very fun VN based on mixing battle of wits and Higurashi-style howdunit mystery designed to be "solvable" by the reader before the solution is presented. Almost all events are possible to foresee on some level by following hints, which I really appreciate. The battle of wits was fantastic, piecing the various puzzles and whodunits was satisfying, the MC is fun and doesn't fall for usual problems of his trope. There are some weaknesses (below average voice acting, insistence on adding romance everywhere, + some spoilery issues) but I will still jump on anything sequely or similar from the devs if it comes.
2009
Pretty cute story in a setting which I think could give a good fight to one of the most romantic settings of a romance story by mankind. It's the type of story where the main act structure and most events are almost entirely obvious from the first few scenes, but it was still very comfy to see it play out to the end. (Surprisingly for me considering how vanilla it is, I feel like I still need some more time to internalize it, so it might be a bit deeper than I made it out to be.)
1995
Fun game, love 90s japanese detective whodunit stories, and the art style is so cool. A couple of the puzzles were a bit annoying, but otherwise pretty smooth for such an old investigation game.
Fun little game with staggering production values and some surprisingly progressive game design for its era. That said, the encounter rate and JRPG combat are both terrible, so I had enough after a while, but I'm glad I checked it out
2022
Great game, the sense of adventure in the picturesque locales and quality of the setting really set it apart from anything else I've played, including BotW. Absolutely 0 handholding and an extreme adherence to immersion were refreshing and fun. Also very fun to cheese and break apart, I would definitely play more like this. This is what I imagined the next Dark Souls would be like when I played the original
Very fun game. OST and story were great, super super cheesy and hilariously dramatic but in a good way. Really had a lot of fun