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 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.
A game that has you running a boutique selling clothes and accessories and incidentally helping a few young women become pop idols. With low-stakes gameplay in a safe and friendly world, it’s mostly a warm and relaxing game, but interruptive management sim elements and slow progression make it more tedious and repetitive than it needs to be.
An RPG with retro aesthetics and an intricately strategic turn-based combat system. Recruit a diverse cast of teammates, explore sci-fi environments, and battle your way through uncovering and thwarting a sinister plot. The Sega Saturn-like visuals and music by HyperDuck SoundWorks are both appealing and put to good use, and the UI is carefully crafted to give you all the information you need to navigate battle without being overwhelming.
An exploration and survival game with building and space sim elements. Explore procedurally-generated alien worlds, scan the wildlife, and collect resources and artifacts. Craft technology and upgrades, build a base, and trade with aliens. Fight space pirates, command fleets of ships, and investigate the galaxy’s mysteries.
It’s a very ambitious game that constantly gets in its own way.
A short exploration game set on a procedurally-generated island with minimal interactivity. Walk around and look at pixelated landscapes, plants, and animals, the latter of which usually flee from your approach. Passing near certain stones will cause them to emit white lights and during the night phase of the day/night cycle you can find a circle of these lights which allows you to advance to the next season.
A cooperative puzzle game about defusing time bombs. One player (the “defuser”) can see and manipulate the bomb, while another (the “expert”) can read the manual that indicates how to defuse it. The players must communicate clearly and efficiently to correctly defuse the bomb before time runs out. The simple controls (and fact that the expert isn’t using a game system at all) make it approachable for inexperienced gamers and the asymmetric multiplayer means more players are likely to enjoy at least one of the available roles.
An Old West-themed comedic RPG with monochrome stick-figure art and surprisingly good music and sound effects. Pick your class (Cow Puncher, Beanslinger, or Snake Oiler), get a horse and a “pardner” (a combat teammate who is also tied to a major sidequest), and head out west to seek your fortune. Along the way, run into various random encounters and episodic sidequests featuring combat, puzzles, and a lot of humor.
A sprawlingly-large open-world action RPG with a ton of things to do, all of which are loaded with backstory and world-building. The game’s aesthetic, fascinating world, deep lore, and mechanical variety combine to create a feeling I haven’t experienced since quitting World of Warcraft.
Set in a universe created and fleshed out by fantasy writer R.
A game featuring a modified three-dimensional variant of Picross. Instead of a grid made of squares to selectively fill in to reveal an image, the player is presented with a rectangular prism made of cubes to selectively chip away to reveal an object. The clues work differently as well - not every row or column has clues, and each clue is a single number indicating how many cubes should be left in that row or column.