Reviews
Reviews of the games I play, aiming to quickly encapsulate the game’s essence and quirks. Most games have an audience; my goal is for the review to make it clear to you whether you are part of a game’s audience (whether or not I am).
A life sim that casts you primarily as a farmer growing crops and raising livestock but also features fishing, cooking, crafting, mining, combat, and romanceable NPCs. The game is heavily influenced by the old Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons games, and is presented in a similar three-quarters overhead pixel-art style.
A puzzle game tasking the player with writing simple programs to manipulate numbers. Eleven different programming commands are available as building blocks for conquering forty one increasingly-complex challenges. Most puzzles also have optional goals to optimize your program’s line count and execution time. The experience is lightly wrapped in a shallow but ironic story that has your program executed by a human office worker doing pointless work to climb a corporate ladder.
A bite-sized pixel-art underwater Metroidvania starring a squid. Swim to explore your environment, get new abilities, and do favors for sea urchins. It’s a solid foundation that feels more like a proof of concept than a finished game, clocking in at about an hour and leaving most of its ideas undeveloped.
A Musou game set in a crossover Fire Emblem world, featuring a few original characters and many from previous games - mostly Awakening, Fates, and Shadow Dragon. As is standard for Musou crossover games, elements from the franchise have been incorporated into the standard large-scale hack-and-slash gameplay - and Fire Emblem turns out to be a shockingly good fit, resulting in easily the mechanically-best Musou gameplay I’ve ever experienced.
A video game adaptation of a mathematical picture-drawing puzzle that plays like if Picross took a few steps toward Minesweeper.
As with Picross, you have a rectangular grid where some squares are meant to be colored in to reveal a picture. Unlike Picross, here the clues are numbers from zero to nine found in some of the squares, indicating how many of the immediately-surrounding squares (plus the clue square itself) should be filled in.
A spin-off of the Senran Kagura series that presents a short and simple visual novel about face-of-the-series Asuka exploring her feelings and confessing her love for the player character. This is accomplished via a series of sexually-charged vignettes in which the player massages Asuka in simple minigames to unlock her emotions.
A 2D retro-styled Metroidvania in a well-developed world with platforming puzzles and varied combat that both make full use of your ever-growing toolset. The mechanics are satisfying and the storytelling is compelling, but the game doesn’t respect the player’s time quite as much as I’d like.
Your main tools are your wrench, which can thwack enemies or turn bolts to activate mechanisms, and your stun gun, which can blast enemies or open certain barriers.
A fast-paced 2D retro-styled brawler. While there are a couple of minor platforming puzzles and one hidden path to a secret boss, the focus is squarely on combat. There is a story that does serve as a sequel to the first Noitu Love, but that game is not at all a prerequisite to understanding or enjoying this one.
A 2D retro-styled platformer and brawler. Navigate through six large levels over the course of an hour or so, beating up a robot army and using “evomatic” machines to change forms and gain new powers used both for combat and platforming puzzles. There is a story, but it doesn’t matter much.
A jigsaw-like puzzle game with an international theme. Photos and a few drawings from a variety of countries are divided into rectilinear, Tetris-like pieces that the player must arrange to reconstruct the image.
Gameplay is kept uncluttered and manageable on a phone’s screen by focusing only on usable pieces. You start every puzzle with only two pieces; once these are combined several more are added, but only ones that can be used to connect to other pieces you have so far.