Apropos of nothing, here's a caveat: I have never played Bloodborne. I am a PC gamer, and I have not ever owned a PS4, nor will I. This frustrates me, as someone who enjoys From Software's catalog quite a bit.

I enjoyed Nightmare Kart! I think it translated the Souls-like formula to a kart racer incredibly well. Using souls for speed, stamina for drifting, pickups as consumables-- it all works far better than it should. The art style is gorgeous, I love how emotive everything is-- the game is just absolutely lovely.

That said, the AI is a bit janky at times and I didn't really see any difficulty, outside of the final race when one racer got really far out ahead and I'm still not sure how.

It's free, it's fun, the boss fights (particularly the one with Nicholas) are unique highlights that are unlike anything seen in kart racers before it.

This game is fine. It's fun. It's good. It's not the most in-depth thing ever, but for a community in-joke turned to an April Fool's joke turned to a fully functional game, it's worth a playthrough.

For better and worse, this game is exhausting. The narrative forces you to meet it on its terms, and refuses to ever try and explain anything. You have to interpret and understand everything yourself. There is a lot of meaning and it's obvious that a lot of focus is put on making things feel visceral.

Unfortunately, that exhausting also extends to the gameplay. The combat is... unfortunate. The boss fights range from okay to a lot of fun (a certain late-game boss is very fun and doesn't wear out its welcome all that much), but the regular enemy fights are just exhausting. There's no difficulty to the combat, everything is very straight forward, they just decided that the best way to up the difficulty is by throwing more enemies into the fight.

Early game? Yeah, one or two. Mid game? A basic enemy and an interesting enemy. By the end? Enjoy a cluster of time-wasting combat where making mistakes means spending a lot of extra time re-doing the fights.

I wish I had more to say about the story, though. It's meaningful, and obviously has a lot of heart-wrenching moments as you explore Senua's... everything. She might be the most tormented-feeling character in all of gaming. But the gameplay is at its most interesting with puzzles that feel like they'd be at home in an escape room, and combat that just... shouldn't really be there.

Maybe the developers wanted the players to feel that same level of exhaustion and frustration as Senua, but for me it's just... not fun. This is one game that I feel would 100% work better as a movie.

OneShot is a wildly interesting game. It's a few fairly straight-forward puzzles littered around a moderately-interesting-but-also-dying world. You do puzzles to advance the game, and guide Niko to their destiny. Yeah Niko's a cat-person-child of questionable gender but just go with it. Which is kind of the whole premise of the game: There's something weird that isn't explained, but-yeah-just-go-with-it.

I guess that's also the charm of the game. The characters are wacky and so incredibly charming, led by Niko who is so incredibly well-written that you can't help but love the poor little catperson.

By the end, it's so wildly high-stakes and heartbreaking that you can't help but be drawn in.

KIND OF SPOILERS FOR THIS ONE LINE, BUT NOT REALLY: I will say that the "postgame" was a lot weaker to me and felt unnecessary. I was happy with the ending, and continuing it felt just... it was fine, but unnecessary. END OF KIND OF SPOILERS IS HERE

So yeah, I highly recommend you play it because it's so incredibly good. As a caveat, if you don't find it charming by the end of the first area, the game probably isn't for you, because the game lives and dies on the charm of the characters.