I made the mistake of going into this game immediately after finishing 7th Dragon 2020. I thought "Okay, I was a little tired of the relatively basic mechanics by the end of the first game but I'm sure the sequel will mix things up enough to make it feel fresh!" Unfortunately, 7th Dragon 2020-II is functionally identical. There's one new class that I didn't particularly care for and a bunch of balance changes that, as far as I could tell, only made my characters weaker. That second part is important because it made the game feel like it was pushing me to grind a bunch of extra levels right at the start because no one could survive more than two or three hits and all the costs of skills went way up so I couldn't get much stronger without committing to lots of extra fights.

On top of all that, the story sets itself up to be an exact repeat of the previous game. Oh, you killed the True Dragon who is a god that created all other dragons? Well, there's six more attacking Tokyo, please go kill them. Maybe there's something interesting later on but getting what appears to be largely the same story isn't worth the investment right now. Maybe someday I'll return to this and enjoy it, but not right now.

It's cool! It's got a strong opening and an interesting world that makes it genuinely fun to find the collectables and learn all the little extra bits of lore. The story does fall a bit flat in the end but it's mostly pretty good.

I'm not great with horror games but this one was barely a horror game for most of it. The jumpscares are cheap in the exact ways that all jumpscares are cheap. The chase sequences are never really scary they're just occasionally frustrating. And the ambiance is never quite right to make it properly spooky. But for me that's all totally fine because it meant I could actually play the game to completion!

I did have some gnarly texture glitches with somethings being extremely low-res despite having quality set to high (making some puzzles un-solvable) and, very occasionally, textures were completely missing. It doesn't seem like a super common issue but your mileage may vary.

I found this game to be serviceable but nothing special. First off, the puzzles aren't great. It's a lot of situations where you use everything in your inventory with everything else until something happens because you often have no logical reason to think to use or combine things in the ways the game requires you to. In addition to that, a lot of the gameplay ignores the ways the genre has modernized which results in a lot of deaths from walking into rooms or using an item incorrectly (neither of which you'd have any way of knowing how to avoid dying until after you've died once).

The horror aspects of the game are mostly jump scares and gore. The game is never really particularly scary (or really even creepy). The gore in particular starts to feel gratuitous to the point of being eye-rollingly edgy. Some of the 'creepy/spooky' sound design is quite good though, so I'll give them that. It's unfortunate that that alone isn't enough to salvage the game though.

The vast majority of the writing in the game is nothing to write home about. It does have some good bits here and there, mostly scattered throughout the PDAs that function as diaries for characters in the months leading up to their deaths. Little stories of who these people were, their role on the ship, their relationships with other crewmembers, and hints at their eventual deaths.

The art of the game isn't bad, per se, but I didn't find the vast majority of it to be particularly interesting. It probably doesn't help that game is so damn dark all the time.

Overall not a point and click I'd ever actively recommend but it's far from the worst one of the genre I've ever played. So you could do worse, I suppose.

Hey, you know how Still Life 1 ended on a whodunnit cliffhanger? Well this game looks at that and says "we don't care, it's solved and the characters know but you don't get to know". Then it goes on to just do whatever the hell it wants with a lot of pretty mediocre writing. The game was also very very broken for me. Several crashes, glitches causing softlocks, clunky controls, and a lack of saves made it way too frustrating to play. I really liked the first game but this was a massive disappointment.

I really want to like Whimsy. It's got a good art style, some solid writing, good music, and great vibes. But oh my god the puzzles. They're way too obtuse. Even the hints they give you about the puzzles are obtuse. I got to a color-based puzzle with different colors that are so hard to differentiate that I had to quit. I'm not even color blind! I can see just fine! But the colors chosen for the puzzle are just indecipherable. The cool art definitely got in the way of the puzzles in this game and it's a dang shame. It felt like my only choice was to brute-force a puzzle with thousands of solutions and, no thanks, I value my time too much for that.