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 (half an hour or so, depending on how quickly you figure out some of the more obtuse puzzles) and simple point-and-click adventure masquerading as a puzzle platformer. You must use all the tools at your disposal - various kinds of movement and light platforming as well as inventory-based puzzles - to poke each of the nine cats in the house.
A barely interactive game where you spend about twenty minutes directing the idle glances and hand movements of a 27-year-old man being stood up for a date. The story is mainly experienced by listening to his thoughts as he tries to figure out where his lovelife and career are going. His struggles are plausible but pretty typical and he’s not especially likable or interesting, so it’s hard to get invested - especially since the player’s actions have no real effect on the game’s events or on the character’s mood.
A visual novel in which you are a high school teacher in a not-too-far future where your students have never known a world without social networks. There’s a lot of reading as you spend most of your time talking to your students or snooping on their online conversations, though unlike some of Christine Love’s other work every character has portraits accompanying their dialog so it’s easy to keep them straight.
A collection of six classic NES titles (DuckTales, DuckTales 2, Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Darkwing Duck, and TaleSpin) bundled together. Most of these games are platformers - DuckTales emphasizes treasure-hunting in non-linear levels, Rescue Rangers features frantic two-player action, Darkwing Duck has almost Mega Man-like combat and bosses, and the lone non-platformer is TaleSpin which is instead a side-scrolling aerial shooter.
A 2D retro-styled Metroid homage. Your spaceship is damaged and you must explore areas on four planets to repair it. Along the way, you navigate levels, defeat enemies, and acquire new abilities. The game seems to be trying pretty hard to set a specific mood to make the player feel like a lonely, vulnerable human exploring an unknown and hostile world - there’s no instruction on where to go in what order and (at least early on) the enemies tend to need a lot of hits to take down while the player character doesn’t.
A classic 2D Mario platformer. Progress through a series of themed levels by moving to the right, collecting coins and powerups, and avoiding or defeating enemies.
Mario platformers in general aren’t my cup of tea. Their powerup system, wherein you get extra abilities and lose them when you lose health, means the game gets easier as the player gets better.
A small, simple game with a one-note joke: you are speed-dating pugs with no explanation provided. You can choose from a list of stock questions that are filled in mad-libs style and your date’s responses have a similar format, chosen apparently at random with no consistency to suggest an underlying personality or any consequences to your own choices.
A brawler with level-up mechanics starring the Justice League. Take control of characters such as Superman, Batman, and several others to explore levels, find collectibles, and defeat enemies and bosses. In each mission, you have two heroes and can switch control at any time, with the other left to the AI.
A brief and fairly pointless first person game where you play the last ten minutes or so in the life of a deeply and cartoonishly disturbed person. You can piece together the rough outline of what’s going on through environmental clues and then decide whether it ends with a suicide or a murder suicide, but there’s so little context that the game doesn’t really seem to be saying anything - it’s just putting you in a disturbing situation for the sake of doing so, and not a particularly realistic one.
A charming collectathon platformer in a papercraft world. There’s a light tone, a strong sense of adventure, and an emphasis on creativity and self-expression resulting in a very similar mood to its creator’s previous work, Little Big Planet. You’re occasionally tasked with designing aspects of characters or the environment and can create your own decorations to place on the player character.