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).

Capsule Review: 2000:1: A Space Felony

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A spiritual followup to Disorient on the Murder Express that takes the logical-connection mystery solving and accusation mechanic and tries to build a fuller and more polished game around it with mixed results.

The game casts you as an investigator sent to a spacecraft that has lost contact with Earth to determine what happened. You find the crew dead and collect evidence in the form of photographs and then work with the shipboard AI to reconstruct the chain of events, using your gathered evidence to support or refute theories as appropriate to determine whether the AI is responsible for the crew’s deaths.

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Capsule Review: Disorient On The Murder Express

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A proof-of-concept born from a game jam. You play a washed-up detective on board a train with a few colorful characters, one of whom is shortly murdered. After inspecting the crime scene and available clues, you gather the suspects to solve the mystery. Here’s where the game’s unique mechanic comes into play - by clicking any two pieces of evidence (including the murder victim and each suspect) your character will explain their logical connection. When you’re done, you then render your accusation, which will vary depending on which logical connections you’ve drawn.

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Capsule Review: Hell Girls

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A match-3 game with a lightweight RPG framework. Combat is accomplished through match-3 gameplay, and in betwen battles you spend money and experience to improve your stats and occasionally get new abilities. You play as one of three elemental maidens who have different stat allocations and slightly different special moves, fighting a series of monsters who attack in varying ways - one enemy puts bombs on the board that deal heavy damage if not destroyed before their countdown runs out, while another poisons several tiles that each deal light damage every turn they are not cleared.

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Capsule Review: Theatrhythm Final Fantasy

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A rhythm game tribute to the long-running Final Fantasy series. There are songs and characters from every mainline numbered title from the original Final Fantasy to then-recent Final Fantasy XIII. Songs are grouped into a few different kinds of levels depending on the nature of the music - battle music has you fighting a series of monsters, event music plays over cutscenes, and field music has you journeying through the game world. It’s all layered on top of an RPG system where you build a party of four, level them up, and equip items and abilities.

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Capsule Review: ABZÛ

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An exploration game roughly in the vein of Flower or Journey. Play as a diver swimming through underwater caverns and submerged ruins. There’s no dialog and gameplay consists mostly of navigating a beautiful environment against an emotive soundtrack. The star of the show is the sea life - hundreds of real-world species of fish, turtles, whales, and more lovingly rendered with up to several thousand individual creatures on screen at any given time. The game sets up multiple jaw-dropping moments the first time you see certain animals or groups thereof.

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Capsule Review: Zeno Clash

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A first-person brawler and occasional shooter in a bizarre otherworldly setting. An extensive tutorial eases you into the combat mechanics but you’re dropped into the world itself with essentially no explanation. You get to practice the many attack and defensive options while piecing together clues on what kind of place you’re in and what your role is in it.

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Capsule Review: Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World

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A 2D platformer that evolves the textile-based art style from Kirby’s Epic Yarn and matches it with Yoshi’s Island gameplay. Play as a woven Yoshi and make your way through levels, eating enemies and parts of the scenery and turning them not into eggs but balls of yarn which you can then throw as weapons or use to activate various other parts of the scenery. Just reaching the end of a level will allow you to progress to the next, but each level also has many collectibles with varying effects - find all of a level’s yarn skeins to unlock a new Yoshi to play as, collect all the special beads to unlock new Yoshi customization options, and pick up all the flowers in all levels in a world to unlock a bonus level for that world. (For full completion you also need to finish each level with full health.)

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Capsule Review: Yoshi's Woolly World

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A 2D platformer that evolves the textile-based art style from Kirby’s Epic Yarn and matches it with Yoshi’s Island gameplay. Play as a woven Yoshi and make your way through levels, eating enemies and parts of the scenery and turning them not into eggs but balls of yarn which you can then throw as weapons or use to activate various other parts of the scenery. Just reaching the end of a level will allow you to progress to the next, but each level also has many collectibles with varying effects - find all of a level’s yarn skeins to unlock a new Yoshi to play as, collect all the special beads to unlock Miiverse stamps, and pick up all the flowers in all levels in a world to unlock a bonus level for that world. (For full completion you also need to finish each level with full health.)

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Capsule Review: Confess My Love

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A short adventure game where you play as male student Willie who plans to confess his love to female classmate Liza. You can technically accomplish this in a matter of seconds, but there are twenty different endings based on exactly what you do and when you do it and all of them must be witnessed before the game is truly complete - and the more endings you see, the more clues you find that things are not as they seem.

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Capsule Review: The Metronomicon

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A rhythm RPG. Combat is accomplished by playing through a song - your four party members each get a lane of scrolling button prompts similar to games like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero. You can switch from character to character and getting a streak of correctly-timed hits for a given character will activate one of their abilities.

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