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 short (one and a half hours or so) adventure game with a time travel gimmick. As a spiritual successor to Cat Poke, the structure and controls are quite similar. Walk left and right and occasionally into a door or up stairs, picking up anything you can because it’ll solve a puzzle later.
A simple and relaxing card game. Cards are placed into piles on the table with the layout varying between levels and generally becoming more complex as the game goes on. The player can deal cards from the remaining deck one at a time onto their foundation. The top card of a table pile may be moved onto the foundation if it’s one rank higher or lower than the foundation’s current top card, which reveals the next card in the table pile.
A 2D mining Metroidvania and a direct sequel to SteamWorld Dig. Like before, you dig up and sell ores, find and buy upgrades and new abilities, and periodically have platform challenges and a boss fight or two. But this time everything’s bigger and better. The world is larger and more varied and new powers have a much greater effect on how you traverse it.
A 3D platformer in the vein of the original Jak and Daxter or Ratchet & Clank that wouldn’t have been out of place releasing right next to them in the early 2000s. Play as silent cat person Skylar accompanied by chatty owl Plux and platform through diverse areas collecting pickups, fighting enemies, and solving the occasional puzzle.
A short and simple first-person 3D parkour platformer. Run, jump, and climb your way onto a series of platforms to restore life (platforms start as bare concrete but become grassy when you step on them) and activate buttons that raise up more platforms to restore. The visuals are unobtrusively simple and cleanly beautiful and the uplifting electronic soundtrack perfectly matches the calmly energetic gameplay.
A short 3D platformer created by a team of game design grad students and released for free on Steam. The mechanics never get especially complicated - they don’t really have time to. You can run, jump, double-jump, and shoot a burst of wind that activates a few different kinds of things in the environment.
A beautiful game that’s a little difficult to categorize. Each level is the dream of a flower in which you use gyroscope controls to direct the wind and gather petals, bloom flowers, and breathe life and color into various objects or structures, sometimes opening new pathways to follow. There’s no dialog and the abstract story is told atmospherically as you progress through the dreams.
A spelling game framed as a simple RPG, with obvious parallels to Bookworm Adventures. Progress through a series of combat encounters, attacking by spelling words from the available pool of fifteen letters that replenish semi-randomly as they are used. Longer words or those with less common letters deal more damage. Enemies have their own attacks which will damage your health and sometimes confer various negative effects - including to the letter grid, such as causing certain tiles to damage the player when used.
Spelling, contextualized with lightweight RPG tactics and resource management.
Spelling, contextualized with lightweight RPG tactics and resource management.