Reviews
Reviews of the games we play, aiming to quickly encapsulate the game’s essence and quirks. Most games have an audience; our goal is for the review to make it clear to you whether you are part of a game’s audience - even if we aren’t.
A word search game where you must find words in an irregular grid of letters. The twist is that once found, the word is removed from the board and remaining letters fall toward the bottom center of the screen. Some words start out split by letters from other words, so you have to find the right words to start with and then proceed in order to get them all.
A fighting game starring Nintendo mascots and a few other characters. True to its name, Ultimate is the best and most complete iteration of the series. It’s incredibly generous with its content, options, and customization and can be enjoyed by players of widely disparate skill levels.
As with earlier installments, the core gameplay is a fighting game based on ring outs: damage taken doesn’t deplete a health bar but rather increases the knockback distance of future attacks.
A top-down 2D action adventure game in the vein of (and in clear homage to) The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, featuring charming pixel art and a beautiful chiptune soundtrack. Play as young knight Lily and use a growing arsenal of weapons and tools to explore the kingdom, conquer dungeons, and defeat the evil wizard.
A precision platformer tasking the player with running, jumping, and punching through hazardous levels to reach a goal. Each one features a risky optional collectible and also grades you based on your fastest run. Taking any damage from an obstacle or an enemy results in immediate death and level restart, but the levels are small and short.
A story-based 2D adventure and platforming game where you play as a bard. While you can walk, jump, and talk to people your primary method of interacting with the world is singing. Most of the game is quite gentle, with no failure modes to disrupt your carefree exploration and experimentation, though there are a few out-of-place difficulty spikes that damage the mood even if most players won’t have much trouble getting past them.
A remake of Senran Kagura Burst, updating the buxom-ninja-schoolgirl brawling action from a 2.5D sidescroller to full 3D while keeping the original story. The gameplay and graphics have taken several steps up along with a few quality-of-life improvements while the old mission structure and story are maintained faithfully - to the point of using literally the same text and art (in higher resolution) as before.
Several game protagonists from different (fictional) franchises are gathered in a tavern on a stormy night… and one of them is planning a murder. That’s the frame story, presented as essentially a point-and-click adventure. You also play as each protagonist in turn, flashing back to their (fictional) source games and learning each one’s dark past.
A noir-styled puzzle platformer in which you play as a mysterious woman with the ability to interact with shadows. By approaching well-lit surfaces, you can merge with your shadow and use other shadows as platforms to reach otherwise unreachable areas. This central gimmick combines with a few other mechanics (such as the ability to carry objects into the shadows and resposition light sources to move and resize shadows) to enable a series of platforming challenges and puzzles that you solve in order to help a little girl save her family.
A cute and simple action RPG set in a world populated by anthropomorphic cats. Wander around a 2D Zelda-like overworld getting into quick fights with randomly-spawning enemies, descending into mini-dungeons and clearing them of enemies, and doing quests for NPCs (that usually involve killing particular enemies). The story is light and serviceable if not particularly memorable, leaving the focus squarely on combat.
A retro-style pixel art 2D platformer and shooter. Jump and shoot your way through seven levels, each of which is an obstacle course of enemies ending in a boss fight (sometimes with a miniboss in the middle). While there are a few platforming challenges, the emphasis is firmly on combat - which is good, since your slow floaty jumps make precision difficult.