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).

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Capsule Review: Big Hero 6: Battle in the Bay

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.

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Capsule Review: Frozen: Olaf's Quest

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.

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Capsule Review: Nihilumbra

An atmospheric 2D puzzle platformer where you paint surfaces different colors to give them different properties - blue makes them slippery, green makes them bouncy, brown makes them sticky, etc. You use these properties to navigate the levels and get past enemies and other obstacles. The puzzles never get that deep (at least in the main story mode) and there’s some learn-by-dying, but the art is beautiful and the player character’s wonder at experiencing the world for the first time is charming.

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Capsule Review: Escape Plan

A puzzle game where you manipulate the environment and guide two characters through a series of rooms. It’s fairly atmospheric and has a distinctive aesthetic, but the mood is disrupted regularly because each room is apparently considered a distinct level and after every one you have to be told your time and the number of stars you earned.

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Capsule Review: Insecticide

A comedic noir platformer/shooter/adventure game set in a world populated by anthropomorphic insects - you play as an “Insecticide” detective, equivalent to a “Homicide” detective in the real world. The noir setting is presented in a light-heartedly satirical way with a near-constant stream of insect jokes and puns, the cumulative effect of which can be enjoyable despite most of them individually not being particularly funny.

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Capsule Review: L.A. Noire

A noir action-adventure game in which the player takes the role of an LAPD officer in the 1940s to investigate crimes, interrogate witnesses, and do some driving/shooting/punching along the way. The interrogation gameplay relies on impressively realistic facial motion capture intended to allow the player to watch NPC faces for nervous tics and other tells when they may be hiding something.

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Capsule Review: Type:Rider

A 2D platformer where you play as two dots rolling and jumping through themed levels learning about typography in different eras. It’s a cute idea with visuals and music that make for strong atmosphere and the early levels feel like an interactive museum exhibit. There’s some interesting history to be learned, but it’s rather poorly integrated as periodic walls of text that you have to pause the gameplay to read (and that have some errors that appear to be artifacts of the translation from French).

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Capsule Review: Dragon Quest Builders

A Minecraft-like game of gathering, crafting, and building wrapped in an action RPG. It’s also a love letter to the Dragon Quest franchise - the soundtrack is a compilation of newly-orchestrated versions of the series’s best music and the story is set after the optional bad ending of the original Dragon Quest with many nods and references to that game.

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Capsule Review: Senran Kagura Estival Versus

A brawler starring busty schoolgirl ninjas who take clothing damage. A direct sequel to Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus that is mostly bigger and better - the cast has grown to twenty-eight playable characters without DLC (with the fun variety and unfortunate character shallowness that implies) and while you still fight through rooms of enemies to get to the boss at the end, the combat is more satisfying and feels less like filler - due partly to just looking better and having more on-screen enemies at once on the PS4, and partly to it serving as an important adjustment period since you’re rotating between so many characters all the time.

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