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). There are some difficulty spikes, especially if you don’t take the intended path and get into some healing attempts before you’re supposed to, but punishment is very low - failing to heal someone just kicks you out of the heal attempt with your own health restored - right away, you’re ready to try again. The control scheme uses a single context-sensitive button, which is a bit awkward and doesn’t seem necessary. The ending is silly and cute.

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. The little girl herself is best of all, with reactions that are full of personality and life. It’s hard not to be charmed by her happy giggle as you use the Vita’s touchscreen to literally take her by the hand and guide her through levels, and if you pull too fast she’ll stumble and fall.

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. You’ll get blamed for or called upon to defend actions your character apparently took between the conversations and outside of your control. When it becomes clear that you can’t actually steer the story the choices you do get become less of an opportunity and more of a chore. It’s also a chore because once you pick a response, you’re not done - you have to hit keys to type in the response, but you don’t know the text so you’re just mashing the keyboard - and pretty often, your character will make and correct typos or change their word choice. This feels like an attempt to increase immersion, but a failed one, just steering you into an uncanny valley of interactivity. Ultimately I feel like there’s not much value in this story being packaged in an interactive medium - the only value it can have comes from nostalgia, and when the things it’s evoking nostalgia for are set up to be frustrating and sad, there’s very little appeal.

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. You’re often presented with dialog options while someone else is speaking, and the game will handle interruptions or choosing to stay silent. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear whether clicking a dialog option will queue up a response or cut someone off - the system needs further refinement. There’s a lot of walking back and forth between points of interest along space-filling paths, which presumably is done to create time for the teens to converse. Since so much of the game is just listening to them talk to each other, it’s very good that the characters feel real enough to get attached to. Less good is that the game’s plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the ending is fairly unsatisfying.

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.) has been stripped away, and the smaller-scale battles (taking place on a single screen and generally four units to a side) and super-usable controls (you can move and attack in a single tap-and-drag) make the game faster and more accessible than ever. This makes it a great entry point into the series’s mechanics, as players can quickly and easily experiment and iterate and learn to play strategically, which is quite satisfying.

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. World Tour is a lot of fun, with well-designed levels that are satisfying to master (though giving the player a limited number of lives bubbles seems like unnecessary punishment given the levels also have time limits already). Kingdom Builder can also be a good time if you enjoy that sort of customization, and can otherwise be mostly ignored. Toad Rally is the most problematic with several design decisions that increase its frustration (you don’t know ahead of time how well you have to do to win, you are fined Toads for losing, etc.), which is unfortunate since it seems to be where the game wants you to spend most of your time. Overall, it’s an easy recommendation if you like platformers.

An action RPG-lite. There isn’t much story and the action is very streamlined. Your character is constantly moving across the screen with weapon outstreched - hit left or right to point them in a direction, press a button to jump, and press the button again to dive and point the weapon down. Kill enemies without taking damage to earn money which can be used to buy stat improvements. Kill all the enemies and the boss appears. Kill the boss to finish the level.

A sidescrolling platformer with hidden collectibles and some enemies to beat up. Unsurprisingly for a movie tie-in aimed at kids, it’s a bit roughly put together, which is a shame because there is solid potential here. The different heroes have different movesets - manipulating physics as Hiro or speeding around as GoGo can be a lot of fun, though unfortunately you can’t play as Baymax or Honey Lemon. While there are hidden paths (generally with collectibles at the end) the platforming is mostly fairly easy and mindless, interrupted occasionally by flimsy-feeling combat and a handful of obnoxiously bad boss fights. There is a story, but it’s thin and totally ignorable.

A standard collectathon platformer that doesn’t have anything wrong with it but feels cheaply slapped together. It’s clearly aimed at kids - there’s no reading, no dialog (aside from some Olaf voice clips obviously taken from the movie and used as repetitive barks), and no story to speak of. The sixty levels are all pretty short, and the entire game can be thoroughly completed by a skilled player in two hours or so. It’s mostly pretty easy, though if you’re collecting everything there are a few difficulty spikes that feel out of place. Completing levels and collecting things unlocks winter outfit pieces (hats, scarves, gloves, and buttons) you can use to customize Olaf’s appearance, which is cute.