Heavily railroaded, the method of exploration here is to have all doors closed to you requiring an ability you don't have yet to open them, only to get it and have another door close behind you, forcing you go to to another area.

There's hardly any sequence breaks, I was able to find some power bomb tanks before getting the upgrade but it does nothing. This game only rewards exploration with more missiles and health but I didn't really find a need for those. I don't think there's an incentive to replay if you can't switch routes or try different bosses first.

Most encounters are really easy. Especially the ones that the game throws at you constantly, reskinned chozo soldier(s) which are trivializing by dashing, or by dashing and jumping. On top of that you later get auto aim missiles which just makes it a cakewalk.

Furthermore there's the counter mechanic (mandatory in a lot of bosses) and annoying in simple mobs, since you can just throw away any sense of combat, of trying to figure an enemy out, dodging whilst shooting and just stand still braindead while waiting for the yellow light to press the counter button and then instantly kill them; the game even rewards you with more loot for this.

And then there's the EMMI segments which are just flat out annoying and feel like another different game bandaged onto this one. They all also play essentialy the same except some are even more annoying when they mix clunky underwater sections and insta-detection as it's the way they thought of making these encounters more engaging. You can still 'bruteforce them' just by platforming fast enough or countering the robots which I think is more fun that having to move slowly while invisible.

The game picks up a bit when you get the Zero-G suit, as movement becomes more fun, but that's also more than halfway through the game if I recall correctly. I was surprised when I reached the final boss since I didn't expect it so soon.

The final boss is probably my favorite part since it's a pretty good fight, but the rest of this game is pretty underwhelming. I think it's a decent game but not something I'd pay $60 for, considering that it doesn't have that much replayability outside of hard mode or faster times. However a lot of people seem to be loving it.

best kirby game since robobot; the mouthful mode sections remind me of the robot ones in that they change the pace for a bit and allow you to go outside the formula. that combined with being able to upgrade copy abilities to change their impact makes it a very refreshing experience.

as usual with kirby games, waddle dee town and the game in general is full of little details and tidbits, the levels reward exploration but also looking around the overworld map yields extra rewards. there's also the many minigames (i love they added fishing) and even extra content after you beat the game.

it's a very good first entry into 3d, it has everything you should expect from a kirby game, and i'm glad they also put in co-op to play with others.

I've really tried liking this but it's atrocious design wise: 20% rpg, 10% running back and forth, 70% of shitty dialogue and cutscenes that can't even be skipped even if you are on NG+.

it's one thing to have story heavy segments and it's another to completely break every gameplay segment every 5 minutes with constant dialogues and cinematics. to start mosts quests, you'll have to go to the place where they start, interact with something, then you have go back to the office, accept the quest and go back - to the place you were at first.

the constant interruptions drag down the quality of the dungeons as well, which are not very good to begin with. simple and linear, the early game features a lot of slow back and forth where you keep running into the same lower level mons for the first hours of the game. bumping the difficulty is not more satisfying since it just makes enemies deal more damage and take less. later dungeons offer very easy puzles and put some chests in certain areas marked on your minmap to 'explore'. it's also very on rails, since harder areas are walled off by npcs that tell you to go away until the story reaches that part.

the digimon raising system leaves a lot to be desired. often it requires you to devolve them, then level them up again to evolve them, a bunch of times so that a certain stat increases and you can unlock an evolution. plus the stat requirements copuled with RNG means sometimes you can't even meet requirements on a certain digimon if they have a certain personality which does not befenit their stats. a more boring grindfest than most rpgs.

and again, the story is so fucking bad, i probably hate it even more because you're forced to sit through it.

Art direction is okay but has more influences it in than anything original to say. And the gameplay aspects are mediocre and done better already by other games. The area progression is very basic, but the map sucks. Bosses are generally trivial and some also a drag. Despite the various skills there's not much reason to switch it up rather than upgrade the better ones. Having a level is also very annoying in a metroidvania where you can rush pretty fast through the game and end up underleveled dealing shit damage to enemies and taking longer on bosses. Exploration is sometimes more of a drag than anything, and sometimes not worth the rewards, but you may also miss on game-changing items. Bloodstained, Hollow Knight, Blasphemous are a few games ender lilies is reminiscent of and likely takes influences from that I recommend picking up instead.

Started a new game to play the DLC and got newfound love for everything in it. Though neither plane nor regular levels have as many projectiles as a shump or bullet hell game, the very fluid artstyle works in favor giving the sensation of just as much chaos with less elements. Everything on the screen is full of life and gorgeous to look at, but deadly if you get distracted by it. The DLC also adds features that apply to the base game as well, and the new character, weapons, skills... are very fun to use and replay levels.

It's the natsuyasumi formula adapted to the shin-chan setting, which fits surprisingly well. There's an overarching story but it's often given the backseat in favor of the mundane, day to day activities. Most of the "goals" resolve by themselves and there's only a couple 'missable' events in the same way you can miss to catch a certain bug or fish.

I found it a great game to pick up 30 minutes a day (more or less the time to finish an in-game day) throughout the summer, took me about 12 hours to finish with most stuff 100%.

There's some grinding if you want to complete all of the 'goals' since you have to replay a rock / papers / scissors minigame like... 50 times? However, you are free to spend your time in any way you want and there's plenty of other minigames and fun activities to do.

Every day there's something new to do or some new area to explore. Sometimes it's overwhelming how many conversations there are, places you can go to. Time management is probably the hardest thing here: every time you switch areas the day advances a little and sometimes there won't be enough in a day to do everything you wanted.

The atmosphere is the best thing about this game, using the same fixed-camera style as the playstation games was the right choice, it carries just the same feel. Fishing next to another character, sitting in a bench, catching fireflies at night... even just going around enjoying the scenery and sounds is fun. Plus, there's a dedicated button for showing your butt. In general all of the shin-chan stuff feels natural to the game and not just for a quick cashgrab.

Only complaints are with the post-game and that some camera angles can be misleading as to where stuff begins and ends.

It's okay. I feel the best thing it has going is the gimmick of playing as a cat that makes me overlook many of the faults of the game. Otherwise it's just a standard causal exploration game that you beat in a few hours with barely any replayability.

But there's a lot of charm in the mechanics relating to the cat, scratching random doors and floors, rubbing against people and things, throwing stuff off tables and shelves... all the mannerisms of a cat are well portrayed and remind me of things our cat at home does. It manages to add another layer which sets it above all these other games that try so hard to be the next "Journey-like walking sim masterpiece".

Atmosphere is good whether it be the cyberpunk cities or the 'horror' segments, but some areas are really short and in all of them you feel like they had to drop stuff, and you're left with only half the things to explore. There's hardly any sense of closure upon leaving a chapter and the ending kinda half-assedly tries to tie everything in. The story is over sooner than you expect.

There's nothing special about the gameplay, it's generally easy to breeze through but there's some clunkiness in platforming and the level design sometimes has you running into dead ends. But for a game about moving like a cat it also it's disappointing in retrospect that most of the experience is "press A to go to that platform". The defluxor was interesting but dropped halfway through. Again, this game feels like it has a bunch of stuff they had to cut, but maybe it's also because it's so short.

If you don't 100% some area you can restart that chapter from scratch anytime and get it. But it can be a lot of backtracking for just a single memory, because while it keeps the memory, it also undoes any progress in that zone that you don't repeat. So for stuff like the slums where you return later in the story, I had to do a few things I already did the first time around but didn't want to do when repeating the whole chapter. The rewards for getting all of the stuff didn't feel worth it for me.

The autosave is also pretty bad, it saves whenever you do certain actions that advance the story but not all that are necessary may trigger an autosave, or certain item pickups which are not essential to the story don't either, but autosaving is the only way of saving in this game, so you may have to run around a bit after for a story trigger to save sidequest progress.

I liked it, but there's no reason to replay it, and I don't think I will be looking forward to their next game without a cat. All the mechanics are half baked and it was kinda buggy on release as well.

Yet the cat gimmick is nice and rare and makes it worth playing through once. Half of my enjoyment from this game was telling my gf "look I'm a cat" and then doing some cat stuff.

This is how I'd like more investigation games to be, instead of the ace attorney / daganronpa / zero time kinda stuff with ridiculous twists and characters spelling out stuff for you. This game feels like you are the one putting the pieces together, not just clicking on some piece of evidence and letting the main character spell out a contrived plot for the murder, which will then be followed by more unexpected and unbelievable shenanigans that you will also masterfully see through as the most logical thing to deduce, like a Columbo episode.

Also unlike the aforementioned titles, there's not that many other games that have this same kind of feel and approach, which is unfortunate but also makes it stand out more.

It's a wonderful mixture of board like action where you can stare at the map for minutes while reflecting on the best course of action (something that can mean the difference between a perfect victory or a disastrous defeat in a single turn); with roguelike elements that also don't punish you too much for dipping out of a run when it goes south, and allow you to continue with a bit more progress each time.

Even when missions go really wrong it's still a thrill to try and to overcome the odds, after all the most satisfying part of this game is finding a breakthrough after pondering for a while. I found myself resetting less and less the more I understood how the game worked.

Style is nice. It's the only positive thing I can say. Seems like every other aspect came second to selling this visually.

Terrible combat: janky hitboxes and aiming, the same 3 types of enemies all over, in the same kind of repetitive auto-generated dungeons, and horrible build variety, if you can even call it that. All the weapons work the same, melee attacks, just different speed. And the game pre-selects one for you in each run; sometimes you can find another and switch it. Spells and cards don't make a difference in your build either, so after a few dungeons you're basically repeating the same run every time which is laughable for a roguelite. Unlocking "new weapons" doesn't actually do that, it just adds some modifiers to the weapons that you find, like poison or crits, which also makes no fucking difference. You just end up with a bigger pool of possibilities that all play the same.

With combat and exploration being as horrible as it is, you'd expect the cult sim and management to be engaging, but it's also terrible. Despite being a cult simulator, you'll be the one doing everything at first, not only because you lack the upgrades for your followers to do stuff, but also because the AI is so bugged, NPCs stop doing work or change activities out of nowhere. After cleaning shit for a few hours you'll unlock enough stuff for tasks to be automated, at which point there's nothing for you to do there anymore.

You can find blueprints for new stuff on your explorations, but they're all for the 'decoration' section that serves no purpose, not only that, but you'll have wished that the chest had something useful for your run instead, like health or an upgrade for something. The actual useful buildings you need to unlock by waiting and waiting until your followers produce enough faith to unlock another but it all becomes unnecessary halfway through when you're almost done with the dungeons but still haven't unlocked half the buildings. It's very stupid for a game so short to have stuff is walled behind waiting longer than it takes.

Almost all the decorations you set up have no effect on anything and can't be interacted with, nor is there any real incentive to build them. Rather, they take up valuable space for houses, buildings, shrines... so in the end it's not even fun to decorate the base knowing you're just gonna run to the same 5 spots where you'll collect stuff before heading out again.

Unlocking some areas is tied to RNG when exploring stuff, meaning maybe you have to revisit the mediocre dungeons in order to find new NPCs. But repeating stuff over and over is a key aspect of this game, and not in a good way. It desperately needs QoL improvements, it's a waste of time talking to your followers each day, you constantly need to make food yourself, moving multiple farming plots is the worst...

There's no weight in the relationships between your cultists, and no depth to them that would make you invested when talking to them, gifting them things... You can customize any cultist and give them any appearance, and they have no personality. The quests they give are few and bland: they'll keep asking you to make them eat poop (???), gather materials, build something... and other stuff you do already without quest incentives. But the rewards aren't really worth anything either. And then they die.

But it's not only a mix of roguelite slasher where the combat is horrible and city sim that's as lifeless and grindy as possible. It's also a bug-riddled mess, from small stuff to various ways of getting soft-locked:

You may kill a boss and have the bullet attacks not stop when its death animation plays, killing you and making you unable to progress. You may have unlocked the offering shrine before having the alter up to level 3, also blocking you from unlocking more buildings. You may find invisible enemies. You may have cultists giving you a quest and it failing automatically upon accepting it. You can have enemies sometimes knocked outside the map. Cultists will not eat when hungry or work when there's tasks to be done; some may even die of hunger. There's too many to list.

To an extent, that's okay, all games have bugs. If you click on the roadmap you'll get is a popup saying: "free updates will be coming soon". That's the extent, which is not really a roadmap though. So in short they had the pre-purchase / day 1 dlc more thought-out than actual updates and fixes to a game that has released as broken as it has.

In short, it's a mix of different types of games, none of them done well. It's like playing animal crossing, and hades, and binding of isaac, and frostpunk... if they all sucked really hard. Plus, it's broken.