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 first-person story with some shooty bits and some not-so-shooty bits. It’s a darkly comic commentary on the limited interaction and worldview present in most first-person shooters - or maybe it’s an unsubtle but effective metaphor for PTSD? It depends how much you think authorial intent matters in defining the meaning of a game.
A puzzle platformer with a charming minimalist aesthetic. You play as a box with the ability to extrude, retract, and detach a few more boxes of the same size which can be used in a variety of ways - making platforms or bridges, shielding against hazards, or snaking through gaps or onto high ledges.
A Musou game set in the One Piece universe. The adventure-filled and semi-fantastical setting is a great fit for the gameplay, as are the over-the-top super-powered characters. The game’s story mode presents a hyper-condensed take on the nearly twenty years' worth of One Piece plot arcs and thus serves as a solid primer on the world, its characters, and their relationships, although for any real depth or detail you’ll have to refer to the source material.
A sort of 2D dogfighting shooter by way of infinite runners. Pick a combination from available engines, weapons, and hulls with different properties and then fly around shooting down other planes and completing missions to unlock more parts. Once your plane is shot down, you can pick a new combination and try again.
A visual novel puzzle game with a player character who dies under mysterious circumstances at the very beginning. As a ghost, you’ve lost your memories but gained the ability to possess and manipulate objects - and also to rewind time and observe the death of the recently deceased. Your main goal is to solve the mystery of who you are and why you died, and you get caught up in a web of intrigue along the way.
An extremely short game where you play as a preteen girl trying to figure out sex by bumping her Barbie and Ken dolls together in the minute or two before her mother gets home. You control - loosely - the position of the dolls, and then you’re given a tally of how many times you “might have done sex” and are either caught by mom or put the dolls away just in time to avoid this fate.
The best competitive spelling game I’ve ever played. Two players compete for territory on a hex grid; each player starts with one hex of territory that is designated their “Capital.” Hexes next to active territory have random letters displayed and can be used to spell words. Players take turns spelling words to take territory - any hex you use that is next to your territory (or chains back to your territory through other letters you’re using this turn) becomes your territory, and any enemy territory adjacent to territory you take reverts to neutral and becomes letters for the next turn.
A sort of inverted crossword puzzle where you are given several clumps of letters that must be arranged on a grid to spell intersecting words that all match the specified clue. Clues might be cateories (“Winter Sports”), incomplete phrases that each word completes (“Eye of the…"), or themes (“Christmas Day”).
A free ten-minute experiment in player motivations, trust, and violence. It’s an interesting idea, but not much else, and the quality of the experience can vary widely from person to person. There’s also perhaps a bit too much exploratory freedom; it’s possible to miss the path to the game’s most important content without realizing you’ve done so.
A weird little puzzle game where you play as a… monster… bag… thing and try to catch up to the girl who is your friend and/or owner. You do this by hopping from person to person while remaining undetected - get seen and you fail and are kicked back to your last “checkpoint” hop.