A cute little (less than an hour) bullet hell rendered as an old-school RPG with minimalist plot, graphics, and sound. As Princess Remedy, walk across the towns and dungeons of Hurtland, gathering powerups and healing everyone you come across. Healing mode is a quick single-stick shooter (you continually shoot the direction you last moved in). There are some difficulty spikes, especially if you don’t take the intended path and get into some healing attempts before you’re supposed to, but punishment is very low - failing to heal someone just kicks you out of the heal attempt with your own health restored - right away, you’re ready to try again. The control scheme uses a single context-sensitive button, which is a bit awkward and doesn’t seem necessary. The ending is silly and cute.

A one or two hour puzzle platformer starring a slightly monstrous little girl who wakes up in a gently nightmarish world and tries to find her mommy. The game’s atmosphere excels with visuals (reminiscent of A Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Gorey), music, and sound that are somehow both adorable and off-putting, warm and yet disturbing - appropriate for a world filled with a child’s fantasies and fears. The little girl herself is best of all, with reactions that are full of personality and life. It’s hard not to be charmed by her happy giggle as you use the Vita’s touchscreen to literally take her by the hand and guide her through levels, and if you pull too fast she’ll stumble and fall.

A lightly-interactive story about half an hour long, told in the format of a series of AIM conversations between high school and then college students in the early 2000s. If you’re in the right demographic segment, this game is a dose of nostalgia. Either way, it’s frustrating - you make some choices, but other things are decided for you. You’ll get blamed for or called upon to defend actions your character apparently took between the conversations and outside of your control. When it becomes clear that you can’t actually steer the story the choices you do get become less of an opportunity and more of a chore. It’s also a chore because once you pick a response, you’re not done - you have to hit keys to type in the response, but you don’t know the text so you’re just mashing the keyboard - and pretty often, your character will make and correct typos or change their word choice. This feels like an attempt to increase immersion, but a failed one, just steering you into an uncanny valley of interactivity. Ultimately I feel like there’s not much value in this story being packaged in an interactive medium - the only value it can have comes from nostalgia, and when the things it’s evoking nostalgia for are set up to be frustrating and sad, there’s very little appeal.

A twenty-minute game about being a parent. You play as a mother occupying herself and occasionally checking in while her daughter hosts an all-night art party. Mechanically, interaction is limited to walking around and hitting spacebar to interact with certain prompts - primarily, talking to the kids. This is surprisingly effective in putting the player in Mom’s mindset, as she’s surrounded by interesting activity but is mainly on the outside, and can choose to what degree she wishes to try to insert herself.

An adventure game with a light horror setting - you play as one of a group of teenagers who must survive the night on an island despite the interference of hostile ghosts and some other twists along the way. The main draw is the game’s experimental mechanics - many puzzles are solved by tuning a radio, but more notable is the live conversation system. You’re often presented with dialog options while someone else is speaking, and the game will handle interruptions or choosing to stay silent. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear whether clicking a dialog option will queue up a response or cut someone off - the system needs further refinement. There’s a lot of walking back and forth between points of interest along space-filling paths, which presumably is done to create time for the teens to converse. Since so much of the game is just listening to them talk to each other, it’s very good that the characters feel real enough to get attached to. Less good is that the game’s plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the ending is fairly unsatisfying.

A turn-based tactical RPG scaled down and streamlined to work as a mobile game. The core of the Fire Emblem experience remains - characters with a variety of traits and abilities that interact to create multi-layered rock/paper/scissors combat that feels almost chess-like due to the importance of positioning. A lot of the fuss on top of that (breakable/consumable weapons and items, units interacting and growing closer, a story that’s worth a damn, etc.) has been stripped away, and the smaller-scale battles (taking place on a single screen and generally four units to a side) and super-usable controls (you can move and attack in a single tap-and-drag) make the game faster and more accessible than ever. This makes it a great entry point into the series’s mechanics, as players can quickly and easily experiment and iterate and learn to play strategically, which is quite satisfying.

An auto-running platformer with a simple but deep control scheme where you collect coins, avoid obstacles, and defeat enemies. It has three modes - World Tour, a series of designed levels with replayability through multiple sets of challenging coins to collect, Toad Rally, which remixes the World Tour levels and tasks you with outperforming an AI ghost to earn Toads for your kingdom, and Kingdom Builder, where you use your accumulated coins and Toads to expand and customize your kingdom. World Tour is a lot of fun, with well-designed levels that are satisfying to master (though giving the player a limited number of lives bubbles seems like unnecessary punishment given the levels also have time limits already). Kingdom Builder can also be a good time if you enjoy that sort of customization, and can otherwise be mostly ignored. Toad Rally is the most problematic with several design decisions that increase its frustration (you don’t know ahead of time how well you have to do to win, you are fined Toads for losing, etc.), which is unfortunate since it seems to be where the game wants you to spend most of your time. Overall, it’s an easy recommendation if you like platformers.

An action RPG-lite. There isn’t much story and the action is very streamlined. Your character is constantly moving across the screen with weapon outstreched - hit left or right to point them in a direction, press a button to jump, and press the button again to dive and point the weapon down. Kill enemies without taking damage to earn money which can be used to buy stat improvements. Kill all the enemies and the boss appears. Kill the boss to finish the level.

A sidescrolling platformer with hidden collectibles and some enemies to beat up. Unsurprisingly for a movie tie-in aimed at kids, it’s a bit roughly put together, which is a shame because there is solid potential here. The different heroes have different movesets - manipulating physics as Hiro or speeding around as GoGo can be a lot of fun, though unfortunately you can’t play as Baymax or Honey Lemon. While there are hidden paths (generally with collectibles at the end) the platforming is mostly fairly easy and mindless, interrupted occasionally by flimsy-feeling combat and a handful of obnoxiously bad boss fights. There is a story, but it’s thin and totally ignorable.

A standard collectathon platformer that doesn’t have anything wrong with it but feels cheaply slapped together. It’s clearly aimed at kids - there’s no reading, no dialog (aside from some Olaf voice clips obviously taken from the movie and used as repetitive barks), and no story to speak of. The sixty levels are all pretty short, and the entire game can be thoroughly completed by a skilled player in two hours or so. It’s mostly pretty easy, though if you’re collecting everything there are a few difficulty spikes that feel out of place. Completing levels and collecting things unlocks winter outfit pieces (hats, scarves, gloves, and buttons) you can use to customize Olaf’s appearance, which is cute.

An atmospheric 2D puzzle platformer where you paint surfaces different colors to give them different properties - blue makes them slippery, green makes them bouncy, brown makes them sticky, etc. You use these properties to navigate the levels and get past enemies and other obstacles. The puzzles never get that deep (at least in the main story mode) and there’s some learn-by-dying, but the art is beautiful and the player character’s wonder at experiencing the world for the first time is charming. There’s also a challenge mode for those who want harder puzzles; I was satisfied after the normal story mode.

A puzzle game where you manipulate the environment and guide two characters through a series of rooms. It’s fairly atmospheric and has a distinctive aesthetic, but the mood is disrupted regularly because each room is apparently considered a distinct level and after every one you have to be told your time and the number of stars you earned. There’s also a lot of instant death obstacles, and the game actually keeps track of how many times you’ve killed the characters and displays these numbers on the main screen. The solutions to the rooms don’t always feel entirely fair, and it would be okay if the game just let you explore and tease them out, but since it’s constantly rubbing in your face how long you’re taking and how often you’ve had to learn by dying, I found the experience too frustrating to enjoy the atmosphere and put it down pretty fast.

A comedic noir platformer/shooter/adventure game set in a world populated by anthropomorphic insects - you play as an “Insecticide” detective, equivalent to a “Homicide” detective in the real world. The noir setting is presented in a light-heartedly satirical way with a near-constant stream of insect jokes and puns, the cumulative effect of which can be enjoyable despite most of them individually not being particularly funny. The gameplay alternates between investigation levels that play as a 3D point-and-click adventure game and action levels that play as a third-person platformer/shooter - and neither mode is that great. The investigation levels are bogged down by moon logic (it’s not quite disguise puzzle from Gabriel Knight III crazy, but it’s not sane) and sluggish dialog that you can’t really speed up. On the PC, where I played the game, the action levels are basically competent but lack polish - guns don’t feel good to use and you can’t really tell when enemies are taking damage. On the DS version (which I have not played), the hardware limitations apparently cause these sections to fare much worse, with most reviews complaining of their slowness, poor visiblity, and bad controls.

A noir action-adventure game in which the player takes the role of an LAPD officer in the 1940s to investigate crimes, interrogate witnesses, and do some driving/shooting/punching along the way. The interrogation gameplay relies on impressively realistic facial motion capture intended to allow the player to watch NPC faces for nervous tics and other tells when they may be hiding something.

A 2D platformer where you play as two dots rolling and jumping through themed levels learning about typography in different eras. It’s a cute idea with visuals and music that make for strong atmosphere and the early levels feel like an interactive museum exhibit. There’s some interesting history to be learned, but it’s rather poorly integrated as periodic walls of text that you have to pause the gameplay to read (and that have some errors that appear to be artifacts of the translation from French). Unfortunately the relaxed educational atmosphere is significantly damaged by later levels upping the difficulty by adding in a lot of instant-death hazards and turning the game into a precision platformer which is a poor fit for the floaty controls, unpredictable physics, and rolling motion of the player character. This makes the latter half of the game a lot more frustrating than it needs to be and it feels like they lost sight of the game’s purpose.

A Minecraft-like game of gathering, crafting, and building wrapped in an action RPG. It’s also a love letter to the Dragon Quest franchise - the soundtrack is a compilation of newly-orchestrated versions of the series’s best music and the story is set after the optional bad ending of the original Dragon Quest with many nods and references to that game. You play as the legendary Builder gifted with the sacred ability to make items and place blocks, using this power to save the people suffering under the reign of the evil Dragonlord.

A brawler starring busty schoolgirl ninjas who take clothing damage. A direct sequel to Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus that is mostly bigger and better - the cast has grown to twenty-eight playable characters without DLC (with the fun variety and unfortunate character shallowness that implies) and while you still fight through rooms of enemies to get to the boss at the end, the combat is more satisfying and feels less like filler - due partly to just looking better and having more on-screen enemies at once on the PS4, and partly to it serving as an important adjustment period since you’re rotating between so many characters all the time. The story is the weakest in the mainline series so far, though it has some great character moments. Diorama mode (pose up to five characters for screenshots) and the new “creative finisher” set pieces are fun fanservicey additions that take advantage of the series’s first HD excursion. The abusive DLC model from the previous Sony installments is back - only worse, since it’s no longer part of a cross-buy platform. All in all, it doesn’t really move the series forward, but it is Senran Kagura on a console, looking better than ever and with perhaps the best combat yet.

A brawler starring busty schoolgirl ninjas who take clothing damage. A direct sequel to Senran Kagura Burst, but with a bit more depth and less breadth than the Vita’s Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus. The cast is the same as Burst (plus an optional male joke character) but combat is deeper, fighting styles are more varied, and there’s a new pair-battle system allowing two girls to work together to clear levels. There’s also a lot to do, including a huge Yóma’s Nest to clear out for weapon skins and special missions to undertake for equippable stat bonuses. The level gating requires some grinding for anything off the main story, which is a shame because even the improved combat becomes repetitive after a while.

A rhythm game starring busty schoolgirl ninjas who take clothing damage. Like most rhythm spin-offs, this game is basically competent but hard to recommend for folks who aren’t already fans of the franchise. Story mode has the cast of Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus taking part in a cooking tournament. Each girl has their own story, all of which are very silly (and non-canon, not that Senran Kagura has a particularly well-defined canon). The tracklist is fairly short with just one song per character, but it’s neat that each girl has a theme song now (though only the class leaders and DLC characters get lyrics). The series-standard cheesecake and outfit customization are intact and all Shinovi Versus DLC can be used here too. The rhythm gameplay is not especially deep, but it works and someone who enjoys both the Senran Kagura cast and rhythm gameplay can have a good time here.

A brawler starring busty schoolgirl ninjas who take clothing damage. Bigger in many ways than its 3DS predecessor, but some of these are mixed bags. As the game area is now 3D, it’s often compared to Dynasty Warriors but this is not entirely fair - while you do take on large numbers of weak enemies simultaneously in a combat system that’s heavy on combos and special attacks, each level is a linear series of rooms that you can’t leave until you mop up all the enemies. Without the sense of freedom and living world provided by Dynasty Warriors, and since none of these enemies really pose a challenge, this combat often feels like rote filler you just have to wade through to get to the actually-interesting boss fights. Similarly, the cast has doubled in size which makes for additional variety of combat styles, but means that character depth is sacrificed as many girls are reduced to their most stereotyped traits in order to stand out from the crowd. But the game looks great on the Vita, which enhances the outfit customization and omnipresent cheesecake.