Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories is a game that is very good at being what it wants to be, and it should be scored a bit higher but what I've learned from this is that I really am not the target audience for these types of experiences

There is undeniably a lot of love put into this game, the music for one is very well made and there are an impressive amount of tracks, some of which were only used for a screen or two but sounded good nonetheless. The visuals are also very pleasing, despite the limited pixel artstyle and color pallete they still somehow managed to make every character distinct and recognizable.

This game is heavily inspired by Earthbound and I think it's probably one of the games that does it best, the witty dialouge very much captured the same feelings as I would have playing Mother.

While not as bad as something like Lil Gator Game for me, there is just something about the unrelatability of the characters that doesn't really connect with me. While in Gator Game it was more of the dialogue, here I couldn't really stand the relationships a lot of characters had with each other. More particularly the ones with romantic undertones, but the cutesy atmosphere just wasn't pleasant to watch.

Undeniably though, this game runs bad on switch. It crashed 3 times for me- losing a significant amount of progress since this game doesn't autosave, and it would frequently stutter when saving and speaking with an NPC. it's short enough that it isn't that big of a bummer, but since there's no way to advance text really fast or skip cutscenes, it still hurts the game quite badly.

L'unica cosa che si fa durante tutto il gioco è parlare con personaggi più o meno eccentrici mentre si tenta di svelare diciamo un mistero all'interno di un contesto che subito appare come fintamente perfetto. Per quel che riguarda il design sicuramente è il punto forte, la storia invece rimane semplice come già si può immaginare sin dall'inizio. Non una esperienza particolare ma sicuramente dolce, l'assenza di un gameplay effettivo rende particolarmente pesante la ripetizione di certi trope che non rendono necessariamente brutta l'esperienza ma per i miei gusti tendono a divertirmi poco se non giusto nei punti più alti. Oltre a questo trovo un po' di materiale sprecato (quindi aspettatevi di non capire alcuni dettagli), ma probabilmente sarà tutto utilizzato per un continuo

There's a book called "Dog Kapital" by Karl Melon. Read it?

>Yes

I'm in my thirties, I look like Max Payne from the end of Max Payne 3, and I've been pulled into my boss' office on more than one occasion and talked to about my unfriendly demeanor. I might not strike you as someone who likes cute things, but I do! So much so that Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories sold me off the adorable charm of its cover alone, with its clay-art characters and bubbly title font. I'm a bit self-conscious about admitting how easily drawn in I am by cute things, but it would be disingenuous to say I didn't immediately fall in love with this thing.

I otherwise went into this game sight-unseen, having previously read a review by Moschidae which I had since forgotten because I have the memory retention of a slug. I do recall being a bit apprehensive as I feel a lot of deceptively cute indie games like to hide traumatic elements or dig at something more emotionally complex than what you might absorb at face value. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I just wanna pal around with some cute animals for about 3 to 5 hours, man. There are a few times one of the various goobers you encounter in town has their feelings hurt and runs away crying and like that made me feel bad because I'm a big softie.

You also join a gang and kidnap the mayor's son, so it's got like, an edge to it. The Cavity Crew don't fuck around, their teeth are rotting out of their skull!

Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories is a story driven game, lacking any heavy gameplay elements beyond knowing where to go and who to talk to in order to complete small quests and advance the story. You play as Honeydew, an employee at a melon soda factory who gets sucked into a conspiracy involving the distribution of contraband melon seeds to a neighboring town where they have been outlawed. Honeydew must solve "minor" problems like recovering a stolen violin, reuniting a pup with his parents, and busting cats out of jail while slowly uncovering the deeper conspiracy behind the melon trade, which goes to the highest echelons of political and corporate power. Why are melons illegal in Hog Town? I don't know, but I've seen what melon addiction is doing to this town and it's messed up!

I wasn't expecting this game to be so funny or even as subversive as it is. There's loads of goofy little scenes you can find by poking around in Hog Town, and Melon Journey's core cast of characters are all endearing. Kitten Princess and Strong Dog are perhaps one of gaming's greatest power couples (literally, they're powerful), and I really enjoyed Lily's backstory about how her estrangement from her parents led her to become radicalized against authority figures. There's plenty of shots taken against capitalism and governmental corruption, but nothing so complex as to feel tonally out of place or against the grain of Melon Journey's sense of humor. Not that I don't vibe with the message, Cavity Crew says fuck the police. Thievery Snake will burn the jail to the ground if given the opportunity.

My only complaint here is that there's not enough Detective Hamlumbo. How are you going to drop a classic character like that on me in the first ten minutes of the game and never loop back around to him? Wasted potential. Perhaps he'll show up in the sequel, which is set up if you're willing to resolve all of the Cavity Crew's problems and earn the true ending. Word of advice: all of these side quests are pretty intuitive but you can miss steps and cross points of no return so you might want to pull a guide up just to make sure you don't skip something small yet mandatory. 100% completion is otherwise not hard to achieve, and I feel like you're really missing out if you don't see a lot of these side stories through to their conclusion. This is a game not about the destination but the (Melon) journey.

Had a great time with this. It's cute, it's got loads of Game Boy charm and is remarkably expressive despite its graphical limitations, the writing is just plain fun, and it speaks to me on a personal level considering my own crippling addiction to carbonated beverages. If you told me NOS had some mind controlling agent in it, I'd buy that, but I'd still keep drinking that garbage.