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.

The story is forgettable and wrapped up much faster than I thought it would. The main character is, at best, fine but he's so inconsistent in tone and behavior that it's hard to really latch on to him.

The puzzles are okay, I suppose. They're mostly nothing to write home about except for the ones that are on strict timers but you'd only want to write home about how terrible and frustrating it is to have to die several times just to be able to see what your options to solve the puzzle even are. In the last hour or so the puzzles are replaced by minigames which weren't as bad as I thought they would be but they certainly weren't any good, either.

Also, I thought Christianity was supposed to be all about kindness and forgiveness or whatever but this game sure does have a grudge with sex workers and homeless people and drug users and several other marginalized groups. There is this quiet cruelty to the game where the man sent to supposedly save humanity ends up killing, maiming, and generally terrorizing an awful lot of the people he's supposed to save.

I cannot possibly recommend anyone actually play this game but I would recommend looking up the soundtrack because it legitimately slaps.

Very fun little game. Striking visuals, great soundtrack, and fun puzzles. It never got too difficult but never felt too easy, which can be a very tricky thing to balance with puzzle games. One note though, is that it recommends playing on a controller and I'd strongly second that. Keyboard controls are serviceable but controller feels significantly better.

The New Game + playthrough is an interesting thing for a puzzle game to have but because most of the puzzle elements of the game are seeing an spot and trying to figure out how to get there, they're able to move the orbs around and make sort-of remixes of the puzzles without having to alter level geometry at all. I think some of the orbs have been moved to silly positions (like hiding them in a bush so you can't see it at all) but for the most part it's a fun addition if you want to play the game for another hour or so.

One of my things about this game is when you get a new object and it's unclear what exactly it is. You need to organize is somewhere, so you come up with your best guess as to what it is and sort it accordingly. Maybe you see a white triangle with some yellow on one side and go "Well, I guess I'll call this a tent and put it with the outdoors objects, next to the trees and mountains." But then you talk to a friend or see a stream of someone playing and they get that same item and go "Ah! This is a block of cheese, I will sort it with the food objects" A food? That's not a food, it's a tent! You can't eat a tent! But then you see someone else get that same yellow and white triangle item and they say "I Do Not Care about the thing itself, it is a yellow background and so it goes with the other yellow background items." How could they do that?? Putting a tent next to rings and hiking boots and dinosaurs. How will they ever find anything with a sorting system like that!? And yet these are all viable ways to play Wilmot's Warehouse because it's ultimately about whatever system works best for you. There is no "optimal" way to play like there is in most games because the most "optimal" way is for you to play in whatever way makes the most sense to you and I think that's beautiful.

There are plenty of things I really like about this game: the art and character design is adorable, it's fun to talk to and text all the different characters, the side quests are very charming, the setting is interesting and intriguing, and the writing in general is pretty solid.

But oh my god the match-3 combat is atrocious. It saps all the fun out of the game. It's not fun to do and there's kind of a lot of it, considering how short the game is. You get caught up on enemies, trying to move sigils around fizzles way too often, if you're too close to the end of a tile is the same as not being on the tile at all, it occasionally won't use all the sigils in a combo for no discernible reason. It's extremely frustrating to deal with. Luckily, there is an option in the menu to turn on invincibility; despite how much I love the other parts of the game I nearly quit playing over how un-fun the combat is.

I played this a few months ago and have been turning it over in my mind ever since. And seeing as there are no other reviews on the site yet I guess I'll finally take a crack at putting my thoughts into words.

Saving You From Yourself is a game about the gatekeeping trans people face when getting hormone replacement therapy. The game puts you as a therapist who must decide if a trans woman is "trans enough" to start HRT. I wish I could say that it goes without saying that the idea of someone being "trans enough" is ridiculous and wrong and transphobic; that someone thinking about gender things and coming to the conclusion that they are transgender is enough and should be enough to get the medical care they want/need. But unfortunately, society is by and large cruel to us and thinks that making trans people "prove" their trans-ness in increasingly mean-spirited and arcane ways is actually good-hearted and caring. My issue with where this comes up in the game is that it leaves most of that up to you. The game simply presents with you the choice to give HRT or withhold it with little to no commentary on the choice you make. So, from that angle it isn't necessarily a game that I would suggest to any people who don't know about the process of trans healthcare but are willing to learn. And certainly wouldn't suggest it to people unwilling to learn. So the game doesn't feel like it could be any sort of educational tool to point out something wrong in society. But it also isn't something that I can look at as a trans woman and feel like there's much value in playing this. I am already extremely aware of how shitty the healthcare system is and how it's a fucking gauntlet that I'm surprised anyone is able to get through at all. So I wouldn't recommend any trans people play this, either.

The one thing that I think is thoroughly positive, though, is that the game does show the perseverance and the endurance of trans people and the trans community. We put up with a lot of shit but we're still here. We still exist. We care for one another in ways a lot of the world seems incapable of. No matter how unkind people may be, we are still here and we will always be here. And that absolutely rules.

All that being said, I think messy art deserves to exist and that it should exist. And this definitely falls into the category of 'messy art'. I am glad that this exists. I'm glad that this was a game I was able to play. Hell, I'm glad that this is able to be on Steam. I'm glad the creator was able to make the thing they wanted to make. But I'm not sure if I actually enjoyed it.

It's a messy game so maybe it's fitting that this review is a bit of a mess. I have no idea what rating to give this because, depending on when you ask me, it could be one star or it could be five stars, so I'll just give it a "I'm glad it exists" out of five.

Good god, am I glad this game got remade.

I don't really have much new or interesting to say about it: the story is great, Kiryu is a treasure, Haruka is an angel, the combat is rough, the English dub is endearing but not necessarily good.

It ends up being a pretty fascinating game to look at after you've played the other games and see how different certain aspects of it are. Maybe the most interesting thing was the localization and dub and how much that can change the tone of the whole game to where it occasionally feels like a parody of a Yakuza game.

More than anything, this game made me appreciate the Kiwami remake so much more. I already really liked that game but now I like it even more. It adds several scenes that are critically important to adding depth to characters that are relatively flat or poorly characterized in this original version. Go play Kiwami.

If you've never played a Yakuza before, do yourself a favor and play Kiwami instead. But if you've played them all and are desperate for a little bit more then this game is a fun thing to check out.

This game... kind of actually rules? Or, at the very least, I'm an absolute sucker for stories that reveal mysteries in two different times. The slow reveal of what happened to Ashley's mother and what happened to D's father was fun to work through and carried me through most of the game. Otherwise, the game is a pretty solid adventure game. The puzzles are never too easy or too obnoxious (aside from a few that required tedious backtracking). And it even makes good use of some of the DS's mechanics with the folding screen, built-in mic, and touchscreen, which is another thing that I'm a sucker for games doing. It almost feels like this game was crafted specifically for me.

It's actually impressive how dull this game is. The characters are all very bland and generic anime archetypes, the story is extremely predictable (evil church, magic stones, you can probably guess the rest), and the gameplay is downright boring. The combat has very few options so you end up just walking forward and attacking things all the time and the characters have essentially no customization to them.

The nicest thing I can say about this game is that there are some cute character designs but honestly games with cute character designs are a dime a dozen so that's barely even something in this game's favor when everything else about it is so weak.

The art is pretty good with a few particular screens that look very nice and the chill music compliments it well. I personally wasn't a fan of the rhyming writing and felt like had more than a few lines that were real clunkers, either stretching for rhymes or didn't fit any particular rhythm.

The puzzles made this the kind of adventure game that I'm not a big fan of. It expects you to go everywhere, click on everything, and use every item on everything else. If you try to think logically about what to do next you won't get very far because you need to think like an adventure game and occasionally poke a frog with a needle.

The choice to make the aliens so obviously racially coded is pretty bad! You have aliens come and abduct someone and still turned it into a white savior narrative! Bad!

Y'know what? I was expecting so much worse. People talk about this game like it's a barely functional trashfire that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And while it's not a good game by any stretch of the imagination, it's nowhere near that bad. The levels are too long, the combat is overly simple, the writing is pretty bad, and every other aspect of the game can be summed up as just plain "bad". But it's not unplayable. It's not a trashfire. It's not an unmitigated disaster like I was lead to believe it is. It was interesting to see it first hand and now I plan on never thinking about this game ever again.

It's really important for a tactics game to give you as much information as you need to be able to make informed decisions. If you don't have enough information then you're just guessing and it becomes hard to do anything tactically. Unfortunately, Ragnarok: Tactics hides or obfuscates too much information to be much fun to play. Too much of the combat felt like I was hoping for the best and finding out that, no, what I was hoping for wasn't going to happen because of information the game just didn't feel like giving to me. It makes combat very frustrating and when the first few hours of story weren't doing anything for me, it made me ask: Why bother playing this when there's so much else available. I could sit and play this (multiple times, as the game seems to suggest doing) but there are so many better things out there to try instead.

This game is a whole lot like Escape from Tarkov except better because you can actually play as a woman.

Edit: Okay okay I'll do a bit more of a 'real' review now that I've put quite a few more hours into Vigor instead of just being snarky about a different game.

I really like the idea at the core of this game of going into an area, looting things, maybe running into other people, and choosing between ignoring them, fighting them, or maybe even befriending them. That is such a cool idea for a video game! It combines the satisfying base of pickin' up things and using them to make other things with interesting social dynamics! Maybe you'll make a new friend while you pick up things or maybe you'll make a new enemy! Who knows! And it could be different every time you play. But that's only in theory. In practice, you loot stuff until a person sees you and you get shot to death because nearly everyone I encountered shoots on sight.

It wouldn't have been too bad if I had continued to be matched up with the people I was running into early on. They were just as scared and bad at shooters as I am, so it was a pretty fun way to play! Unfortunately, I eventually made my way into a higher matchmaking bracket and started playing against absolute killers. My survival rate tanked and the amount of loot I was able to get away with dropped precipitously which made my progress of rebuilding my Norwegian cabin slowed to a crawl.

I also want to note: this game is free to play and has several spots where you can stuff real money in for various things and it doesn't seem particularly better or worse than any other game with similar monetizations? A battle pass, cosmetic skins, lootboxes, all that stuff but it's all about as equally garbage as it is in any other game these days. I'm not sure if that's a plus or a minus, so I'll let you decide on that one.

Between all that plus the long queue times (5+ minutes to get into a ~10 minute long match) means that I think I value my time too much to play any more of this. It was an okay time. I've played worse. But I could also be playing so much better. So I think I will.