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 3D brawler with light RPG elements and precision-demanding combat. You play as a samurai in feudal Japan, rendered with a distinctive cartoony style. The story is pretty light - you are literally tasked with rescuing the princess - and most of your time is spent fighting through various enemy arenas.
A sidescrolling platformer a boy (Kick) and his robot buddy (Fennick). You play as the boy using a large gun both to shoot enemy robots and to navigate levels by throwing yourself around with the gun’s recoil. This central mechanic is promising but doesn’t seem to go anywhere interesting (and was almost certainly done better in No Time to Explain).
Made for a game jam, this is a short and unpolished 3D puzzle platformer in which you must control several robots with different abilities and use them together to progress. The title references the game’s signature mechanic - any robot you have line of sight on can be taken over by right-clicking on it, so you must position the robots and use their abilities in turn.
A cute little (less than an hour) bullet hell rendered as an old-school RPG with minimalist plot, graphics, and sound. As Princess Remedy, walk across the towns and dungeons of Hurtland, gathering powerups and healing everyone you come across. Healing mode is a quick single-stick shooter (you continually shoot the direction you last moved in).
A one or two hour puzzle platformer starring a slightly monstrous little girl who wakes up in a gently nightmarish world and tries to find her mommy. The game’s atmosphere excels with visuals (reminiscent of A Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Gorey), music, and sound that are somehow both adorable and off-putting, warm and yet disturbing - appropriate for a world filled with a child’s fantasies and fears.
A lightly-interactive story about half an hour long, told in the format of a series of AIM conversations between high school and then college students in the early 2000s. If you’re in the right demographic segment, this game is a dose of nostalgia. Either way, it’s frustrating - you make some choices, but other things are decided for you.
A twenty-minute game about being a parent. You play as a mother occupying herself and occasionally checking in while her daughter hosts an all-night art party. Mechanically, interaction is limited to walking around and hitting spacebar to interact with certain prompts - primarily, talking to the kids. This is surprisingly effective in putting the player in Mom’s mindset, as she’s surrounded by interesting activity but is mainly on the outside, and can choose to what degree she wishes to try to insert herself.
An adventure game with a light horror setting - you play as one of a group of teenagers who must survive the night on an island despite the interference of hostile ghosts and some other twists along the way. The main draw is the game’s experimental mechanics - many puzzles are solved by tuning a radio, but more notable is the live conversation system.
A turn-based tactical RPG scaled down and streamlined to work as a mobile game. The core of the Fire Emblem experience remains - characters with a variety of traits and abilities that interact to create multi-layered rock/paper/scissors combat that feels almost chess-like due to the importance of positioning. A lot of the fuss on top of that (breakable/consumable weapons and items, units interacting and growing closer, a story that’s worth a damn, etc.
An auto-running platformer with a simple but deep control scheme where you collect coins, avoid obstacles, and defeat enemies. It has three modes - World Tour, a series of designed levels with replayability through multiple sets of challenging coins to collect, Toad Rally, which remixes the World Tour levels and tasks you with outperforming an AI ghost to earn Toads for your kingdom, and Kingdom Builder, where you use your accumulated coins and Toads to expand and customize your kingdom.