Played through with my daughter. We took rather too much time as we missed getting one of the items from the vending machine and she insisted that we absolutely did get them all. We had an entire chain worked out, but couldn't do the first part because of that.

She complained that it wasn't as much fun as Spy Fox 1, but I think that's just because she doesn't remember Spy Fox 1 as much. She's now insisting that we replay that one, but I might just let her tackle that one by herself and see how good her inventory puzzle adventure game skills have progressed

There's something that I find so delightful about these lofi games that Sokpop create, especially the city builder/sim style ones. There's that joy of trying to figure out the game with limited explanation.

This one sees you build up a civilisation on an island by plonking down various buildings mostly resource gatherers while also fending off viking raiders.

You can upgrade your cities so that they're better at things and there's a trade mechanism between them.. though I'm not sure I used it very well.

If you can build up your resources enough and not kill all your people then you can put on a coronation to win the game.

An enjoyable quick little game.

Completed playing all levels with Peach except one that I played with Toad.

It's strange how much of this game is subconsciously stored in my brain. I played through and knew where the warps were having not played it since I played it on the NES what feels like ages ago.

And I certainly recalled 7-1 but had no memory of 7-2... so I assume that I've never beaten the game before.

7-2 though is pretty rough to get through. So many lives lost. And it all ends with Wart dying from vegetable poisoning? Poor guy.

I'm not sure if it's the NES Classic that's the issue, but there's some hideous slow down when there's too many sprites on the screen.

But I like this game. It's kind of calming not having a timer constantly judging you and it gives you time to explore and see what you can find. I'm pretty sure I found some new short cuts that I hadn't known about before. And the soundtrack is super boppy too.

I really like the games that Wadjet develop more than the games they publish. This one sort of mixes up Blackwell with Maniac Mansion. At the start of the game you get to pick which character to play as (from a police officer, a barista and a DJ). I picked the police officer and during the game there were specific interactions which were for that character.

The game takes a lot of the spooky elements from the Blackwell series (and there are a few call backs to it), though isn't just limited to the dead this time.

Instead you end up joining the secret supernatural police (not affiliated with the police though) who have been protecting New York. I've been enjoying the Peter Grant series of books of late, so this fit nicely into that.

The game is split into episodes, each episode being dealing with a specific person or group of people but tying into an overarching story (hmmm.... also very Blackwell). And during each episode you decide which two partners will accompany you. How you solve the episode is dependent on this and some characters seem to open up about their lives depending on what's going on the episode. There seems to be at least one episode where the game seems to need three partners though and so it does a little awkward thing where one of the partners says "oh I have an appointment that I need to go to, I'll get so-and-so to come" but generally all of the episodes seem to be able to be done with any two.

The issue though is that you get to see the bits of the puzzle that can be solved with other characters and it can sometimes throw you "if only I had so-and-so, I'd be able to get past this easier". The partners you're with are in your inventory (as well as physically walking around) which is a bit strange.

Sometimes getting your partners to do things that you want isn't always obvious. Normally you select them from the inventory and click on the thing you want them to interact with. At one point I wanted one of the characters to give an item to an npc. To do so need to give the item to my partner and they just knew what I wanted.

That said there's often very few items to deal with so the puzzles aren't overly complicated. There's quite a few password/keypad puzzles. There's nothing that is going to have you pulling your hair out.

The partners also occasionally talk to each other unprompted. Annoyingly though if you change screens or interact with anything they'll stop their conversation and not pick it up again. So you're often waiting for them to finish before doing anything.


At the end of each episode your faced with a choice of how to deal with the supernatural entity. The final episode seems to rely on what choices you made, but it seems to have some flexibility if you choose wrong a couple of times. I'm not sure if you can end up not being able to finish the game though. And there's a couple of different endings depending on how you deal with the final entity. Had a few reloads on that one before I figured out the best way of dealing with it.

The story is quite good and there's a nice twist near the end.

Wandersong is very good and you should go out and play it. A lot of it is about what it is to be a hero and saving the world without hacking and slashing.

It has many great characters in it (having given up coffee, I especially liked the pirates). The music is delightful and the story line zips along nicely.

And you think it's shown you all that it can do mechanically and it comes up with something new.

There were some boss fights that I felt could be shorter and one or two points that I got a bit waylaid, but overall it's good.

And being able to do goofy dances and sing at inappropriate times was lovely.

I enjoyed this more than the hour or so I spent with Bard's Tale. Best barding game I've played to date (though maybe I should go replay The Bard's Tale (2004)).

This was an enjoyable romp. Missed out on getting on of the first two companions due to an unfortunate incident, but was nice and fun.

I played on normal difficulty and found it a little too easy for the most part. There were a couple of times that I died multiple times in one area, but on the whoel was a bit of a cakewalk. I did focus on sneakiness, dialog and tech and so tended to avoid a bunch of fights that way.

There were a few quests I messed up due to not paying enough attention to what was going on, but eh.

It's full of fun stories and moments, there's some very funny bits in it, but it doesn't undercut the gravity (pun intended) of the situation as a whole.

I don't know if I'll play it again though. I'm not sure that I'd spec differently or pick different choices, so would it be worth it.

So glad that they've added the option to make the text bigger. On our smaller tv it was quite tricky to read the notes or the computer screens without getting closer to the tv.

Recommend it.

I really like some of the quality of life changes made to the game like being able to look at the details of evidence without presenting them and the animated sequences are fun too.

One of my main gripes I think is that there's too many gimicks thrown into this one. You've got Phoenix's "let me think this through" multiple choice minigame thing, Apollo's bracelet and Athena's emotion analysis with widget and some of the cases of the chapters will hit you with a mix of them. I guess I can't really complain about it given the title though.

Some of the chapters (about half) I knew what had happened fairly early on while others were completly mysteries as the cases went on. The latter seem full of bluffing and twists and that's OK if you're like "aha!" when prompted to present something, but some of the time I was like "I know this is the right piece of evidence, but I don't know what that means".

But in general, I liked the characters and how their lives intertwine and the unravelling of that (though I might have to play the first chapter again to see if there are any clues about that).

And I 100% think the DLC chapter is worth it. It's ridiculous and it's great.

I quite liked Life is Strange 1 and this one... I was fine with the characters, the Dad was likeable enough and the brothers seemed interesting enough, but thing happens very early on (which isn't a spoiler as it's in the game description) and then they're on the run (or walk in this case) and it kind of went downhill from there.

I think I prefer adventure games that have limited locations. If there's a town, I want to explore the town and get to know it's inhabitants. In this one though, it presents this lovely town and bang, it's taken away.

And I get that taking away something nice is putting me in the characters shoes but eh.

There's some "he'll remember that" that has very quick consequences, but I wonder how much will impact later episodes.

Finally got this one finished. I think I spend far too much time in Forza Horizon games just goofing off and seeing how much damage I can cause.

So mixed feelings on this one. It's set in my home country and so it's lovely to see our country realised in a FH game and be able to hoon around. But the layout, urgh.

Like I get cramming bits of the country together to make it more scenic, but at least put them roughly in the right spot. To get from Byron Bay in the game to Surfers Paradise, you need to travel past the Twelve Apostles. the Apostles are 20 hours south of Byron and Surfers is as an hour north. Does not make sense.

I can forgive that, but the range of cars just dropped from the previous outing for me. I feel like the hatches and the retro rallies weren't strong enough in this one (and that's what I'm here for). And it really didn't feel aussie enough. Like sure there's a bunch of Fords, but Holden is pretty underrepresented. Where's the VN Commodore and the Monaro? Maybe they're shed finds that I haven't found yet.

And why don't the license plates look like Australian license plates?

I'm not entirely convinced about the change to the structure of the game. On the one hand it gives you a lot more freedom to control the game, but I felt I just didn't know what I should do next to get more fans to progress the story. Changing it so that you don't get fans from goofing around is probably a smart move (much of FH2 I spent doing that).

But also I'm the person that's organising the Horizon festival but I'm not the one deciding what these showcases will be? Seems a bit strange. And it felt like I just managed to win almost every showcase by a cat's whisker. Hmmm... feel like the opponents always let go of the accelerator just at the end.

The spinning wheel is just taunting. Oh you could win this amazing car this spin, but... oh you just won 2,000 CR instead. Hmmm.....

Now I started playing FH4 sometime during my FH3 playthrough and I suprisingly like it more than this one. And I don't know why. I can't put my finger on it. Anyway, my advise is to skip it.

So this fixes a lot of issues with the original Dragon Quest Builders both mechanically and story wise.

It feels like the story in the first game had very vague reasons for going from one place to another, where the framework built into this one makes it seems more reasonable why you'd go to different islands. And the fact that you're not loosing progress on your main island (and can go back to the islands that you've been to before) is great.

There's a restriction on how much stuff you can carry, but it's so large now that it basically doesn't exist. And maybe it's because I've played through DQB1 before but it never seems to leave you hanging, while still not nagging you as much as DBQ1.

It's often easy to get ahead of the game. It generally handles it well. Like an NPC will have a quest of "oh I need 5 mushrooms" and in getting the quest if you already have 5 mushrooms they'll say "oh you've already got them. Can I have them?"

But sometimes you miss the fact that an NPC is standing next to a wall with a quest, because you've already broken down the wall and moved on, but the game won't throw the next quest at you until you go talk to them (thought the game had glitched out, but no just had to go back and talk to them).

The whole game is effectively a tutorial, with each island teaching you a different focus of the game. And then you take what's new (both items and knowledge) to your main island to make it better.

It's fairly obvious where the story is going to end, though there are still surprises.

The worst thing is how slow the disembodied voices are. You can't press a button to skip through them and they just hang on the screen for far too long. I got the 7 year old to read them and even she had excessive time to do so.

But it's really good. And it's amazing how good some of the stuff other people make is.

This one is an enjoyable FMV police detective game that feels a lot like Midsomer Murders (possibly because of the detective and the fact that it centres around a club). But game wise it's a bit like Phoenix Wright meets Her Story

A woman has drowned and while it's probably accidental, you've got one night to prove that it wasn't. You're basically bumbling around the village, talking to the suspects, finding things on the ground, challenging people with contradictions in their answers to get more things to talk to other people about.

Plays out in chapters, which are represented by the passing hours, though it's not real time, the hour will only click over once you've discovered all you need to discover in that hour.

I enjoyed the game on the whole (though I played the second last hour very late at night and was getting frustrated at the game, purely my fault).

However the ending felt a little like they ran out of money. It just kind of ends. Perhaps it was the fact that I didn't think that the person wot done it actually did it. But there are so many open questions that seem like they wanted to make a sequel... but given that it's four years old and there hasn't been any word of a sequel in a while, I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.

The acting is genre appropriate and while it's not a AAA game, it certainly looks nice. There are some ludicrous parts of the game, but this is FMV, it's to be expected I guess. The actor who plays Jenks does a fine job of it. Given that he's often asking the same or very similar questions to different people, his personality is odd enough that it doesn't become dull.

There are no moon logic puzzles here. Generally if you're stuck it means you have to go back and make sure you've asked everyone everything, called your chief and walked through the woods (were many unexpected scenes occur). And failing all that it means that you need to find a contradiction in someone's answers (though the chief will generally point you to who you should be talking to in order to find it or what topic it's about).

The last contradiction I missed because it involved looking at something harder than I should have, but eh...

It's a good game and well worth your time if you enjoy British murder mysteries of the 90s and 00s.

This is a delightful (sort of) look into the funereal industry and contains lots of interesting details. Really might make you stop and consider what you want to happen to you once you pass.

But it's not very long and there aren't any choices, so once you're done you're probably done. But I picked up on sale at a very decent price, so I'm fine with it.

But your mileage may vary.

I'm not sure what I can say about this one.

This felt much more than Her Story, there's multiple sets, many more characters and more story threads to chase down.

And as it's set more recently than Her Story (which just uses a fixed camera in an interview room), there are different types of camera being used liked mobile phones, webcams. It makes the game feel more lively and more real. My wife wanted to know if they game had just come out as it seemed weird to her that the characters were video chatting this much (are they all in quarantine?).

The interface is more modern too, though beyond the astethics there's not too much different. You can bookmark and now tag clips. Probably the biggest difference is that you get very long clips, sometimes 8-10 minutes long versus the very quick chunks in the previous game. But weirdly you only get that person's side of the conversation (if it's a web chat) and need to find the other person's side of the conversation to understand the full clip. There's no option to play two clips at the same time, which would have been handy when you find the matching clips. Instead if one of the characters goes on a bit of a monologue you'll need to fast forward through the other character nodding and eyebrowing.


It took me a while to realise this though. I'd often hit keywords at the end of a clip and not understand that I could rewind it. It's a shamne that there's not a "Play from start" option.

I think the mystery and aha moment in Her Story was much more impactful than here. I feel like there's supposed to be a couple of twists in this one but the first one I got to maybe far to early, so it wasn't so much an "Aha" moment as "oh right, so".

But while the story isn't as clever, it feels more relevant to things that are happening now... so...

One part was quite shocking (I suppose two parts are), but the way at least that I moved through the clips I always could follow the story, so that's good right?

I dunno, I'm a sucker for these and so your mileage may vary, but if you liked Her Story, then I can't see why you wouldn't like this one too.