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.

On a technical level, this game is an improvement over Yakuza 1 in pretty much every way. It is genuinely incredible that they were able to make such a huge jump in quality in only a year between the two games.

The main plot of the game is kind of a mess all throughout but especially falls apart in the finale. The good bits of the story can be very good and it is compelling all the way through but I dislike the bad parts of it too much to come away from the game feeling positive about the story.

It's interesting seeing this game after having played the remake a year ago. There's an entire minigame (with its own subplot) about working as a host, the hostess management minigame is completely different, and there's even an entire third city (although it's tiny compared to Sotenbori and Kamurocho). Between the differences and how well the game holds up, I think this is genuinely still worth playing.

The core mechanic of the game is pretty cool. You move elements of a puzzle around to shine light onto other parts to activate them which gives you more parts to move until you eventually light up whatever the goal piece is. I do, generally, like that idea but I'm not sure it's strong enough to build an entire game around (even a game as short as this one). A handful of the puzzles I feel like I solved on accident by just moving things around. And a few other puzzles felt way too finicky, where I'd have to make very small and precise movements to just barely get a sliver of light onto the goal.

The writing in the game is okay. A story about some kind of underground bunker with a 'weird' religion in a post-apoc wasteland. I honestly stopped reading most of it after the second trial because it's all kinda mediocre and there's kind of a lot of it.

lo-fi mushrooming with your granny to vibe/chill to 2016

A delightful little thing. Looks and sounds nice. The writing is sparse but what there is is very well done. A wonderful experience all around.

(This was in the itchio Palestinian Aid bundle as well as the Racial Justice bundle so you probably already own this, as well!)

It's pretty common for your first time playing a game to be full of mistakes. Sometimes you don't fully grasp the system so you play sub-optimally. Or maybe you don't know what skills are going to be more valuable for the sort of playthrough you're going for and you spec in the wrong direction. But Wasteland 2 is the first time I made the mistake of using pre-generated characters instead of making my own characters (apparently by following a specific guide and not actually choosing things on my own, according to more veteran players). If you use the four preset characters, you'll not only be lacking on a lot of valuable skills you'll also have overlap on some only mildly useful ones! Hope you don't like opening doors, openings safes, hacking, disarming traps, or shutting off alarms because you'll run into all those things immediately and never get to interact with any of them! But don't worry, you've got multiple people with the same dialogue option skills (called "Hard Ass", "Smart Ass", and "Kiss Ass" which I guess is supposed to be funny/clever but only got a groan out of me). Oh, but those skills aren't high enough level to actually use, just high enough to see that there are things you could say if you leveled up more.

So it already felt the game was funneling me into a sort-of triage mode where I needed to spend my levels getting into the skills that I lacked to be able to interact with the world in the way that I wanted to. Unfortunately, everyone is so miserably poor at shooting things that speccing into combat felt like the much more vital thing. Every character seemed to have about a 70% chance to hit on every shot but in practice it seemed to be closer to 30-40% because, good god, these people couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

On top of all that, the game feels very clumsy. This is an area that, within the CRPG genre, I'm willing to cut an awful lot of slack because a lot of these games are unwieldy to try and control. But this one is kind of incredible in just how bad it can get. As an example, I had my medic character go down in combat. Not the end of the world - or so I though. I'll use the second medic character that I picked up to heal them. But the first medic has all the healing supplies because they're the better healer so it'd be an inefficient waste to have the second person carrying a bunch as well. This becomes a problem because when someone is downed, you lose access to their inventory. So I had a group of five people standing around, watching their friend bleed to death, and no one would reach into her pockets to pull out the thing to save her life. So she died there, on the floor because, I dunno, I guess it'd be rude to rifle through her backpack. It didn't have to be like that. Just let me take an item from them, what the fuck.

I do have one half-compliment though. I think the idea that you have to radio back to Ranger HQ to get your "promotion" is a neat idea that could be used in an interesting way but in practice just adds a few extra clicks because there's absolutely no restriction on where you can radio from. I was in a cavern underneath a research facility and apparently my radio got absolutely perfect reception down there. If I had to choose between pushing forward in a dungeon or backing out so I could level up then that could be an interesting choice to make but instead it's just tedium. Wasted potential there.

Even with all that frustration and utter lack of interest or fun with the combat, I'd be able to put up with it if the writing in the game were strong. But it isn't. It's extremely rote post-apocalyse fiction. Have you seen or read any post-apocalyptic fiction about a guy in a cowboy hat and a duster surviving in the wasteland? Congrats, you've pretty much seen the level of writing this game is at. In the handful of hours I got through, there was absolutely nothing that made me think sticking with this game was going to be worth it. No intriguing plot lines, no likable characters, no interesting lore to the world. Maybe I didn't get far enough in. But in the opening hours, this game is impressively dull.

Overall, I don't think I had any real fun with this game at all. There are some cool ideas that I'd like to see reworked into anything that isn't as miserable as this but there is nothing in this game that really makes me want to engage with it any more than I already have.

I don't usually play mobile games but I've been having to see doctors pretty often lately but this has helped keep my anxiety in check while I'm in waiting rooms trying not to be stressed about the disaster that is the American healthcare system.

Although since I have an older/smaller phone, it makes the bigger puzzles hard/almost impossible to do. But there's enough of the smaller size ones that I still have plenty to work through.

Pleasant lil game.

It's a pleasant little game for the two and half or so hours it took me to do everything. Very cute art, nice music, fun characters to meet, and a comfy flow to the game. You paddle your little boat around, catch some fish, collect some fruit, and befriend various animal spirits. Near the end it becomes a bit of an idle game which isn't inherently a bad thing because doing everything manually would've been way too tedious. But it does feel like it needed something to help balance it out and give you some reason to move around and do things. It was a nice time but wasn't amazing. Just a good lil thing to play in an afternoon.

What is there to say about Bloodborne that hasn't already been said? So much has been said about this game I feel like I agree with nearly all of it. It's a game where the modern FromSoft formula had been solidified but they still wanted to experiment with it and see what they could play with while still holding onto what makes a FromSoft game a FromSoft game.

A couple of notes before I get into it: my previous 'Souls-like' experience is the Dark Souls trilogy and Code Vein but not much else. I made sure to get the secret ending. I beat all the base game bosses and three of the five DLC bosses. This review doesn't have much coherent flow to it as it's just a rambling series of thoughts on various bits and pieces of the game. Please enjoy.

One thing I feel like I should note, is that I feel like the difficulty of the game has been somewhat overstated. Or, at the very least, like the talk around it is a bit misleading. This isn't some "oh this game is so easy" proclamation, not at all. Before playing this game, I had been lead to believe that this game was centered around using the gun to parry which, would've been a miserable time for me because I am absolutely terrible at parry timing in every game that has it. But, outside of a few select enemies, you can cruise through the game without ever bothering with parrying. I mostly used the gun for pulling enemies or getting a cheeky 20 extra damage in here or there. So while I thought this game was going to be ludicrously hard for me, it ended up being comparable to any of the Souls games.

One of my favorite parts of modern FromSoft games, and the 'Souls-like' genre as a whole, is the very special sense of exploration I get with these games. It's not just about visiting a new place and seeing what's there, but the specific feeling I get when I can look back and see how an area wraps around on itself or connects to other areas. I build this map in my mind of what it all looks like and how one area connects to another and the moment of realization when I open a new shortcut and figure out where I've just gone back to is unparalleled. It's one of my favorite feelings in games and is one of the biggest reasons I enjoy FromSoft's Souls games. Bloodborne absolutely continues that and while some of the areas felt relatively small, it still delivered time after time.

Something that perplexes me about Bloodborne, though, is how FromSoft looked at their games and decided to un-solve some problems. The first of these things is Blood Vials. I feel like with Dark Souls 2 they had kind of nailed the way limited healing worked. You had your Estus Flask changes that refill endlessly whenever you rest plus consumable healing. It was a good balance. Bloodborne is that but minus the Flask aspect of it so if you ever ended up in a position where you ran out of Blood Vials, then you had to either risk pushing on with no healing or backtrack and farm. And, to me, this sort of FromSoft game isn't about farming. Farming is never the solution. It may be beneficial and you could use it to get a leg up here or there but there never comes a time when you need to go farm something. It was a problem with the various healing grasses in Demon's Souls that they figured out better options for in the Dark Souls games and yet with Bloodborne they went back again. Normally I can look at something like this and see some reason why a developer might make this sort of change even if I disagree with it but in this case it feels like a step backwards for no benefit at all. It doesn't make for any interesting tension and just adds the potential for frustration. Just make the stash in the Hunter's Dream have infinite vials, problem solved. You maintain the limited healing but are never going to force someone to farm for more. A bizarre problem to re-add to the game.

On a related note, the way fast travel works is also a strange step backwards. It's a relatively minor thing, but having to travel to the Hunter's Dream and then to the lantern you want instead of directly from lantern to lantern is a bit tedious. And if you accidentally travel to the wrong place? May god have mercy on your soul.

On another, different, related note, I think there's a particular elegance to the flow of a FromSoft game. You know how I said you never really need to farm? I think it's pretty crucial to the way their games work. As long as you clear an area without losing too many Souls (or Blood Echoes or whatever) then you can probably level up and upgrade your equipment enough to safely move on to the next area without too much trouble. It's an important bit of design work that goes mostly unnoticed until you stop and think about it more.

The way Bloodborne encourages aggression is really fascinating. There's the obvious things they do such as the 'rally' mechanic of regaining a portion of your lost health by attacking after you've been hit or the lack of shields or heavy armor (and the one time you do get a shield, the description is a jab at the idea of blocking). But there are some other, more subtle ways they do it as well. What I found is that with quite a few of the bosses, there are attacks that it's better to move towards the boss rather than to try and back away or dodge out of danger. It's a minor thing but it's a very clever bit of design. They want you to push the attack and to be on the offensive and are looking at each aspect of the game and saying "how can we encourage this particular play style while still allowing people options?" It's very smart game design on their part.

Chalice Dungeons are an interesting idea that I found to be dreadfully boring. I like exploring areas. I like figuring out the weird lore. I like seeing interesting sights. So having a series of dungeons that are the same handful of tiles repeated over and over with little to no reward to them beyond more Blood Echoes is perhaps the most tedious thing they could've done. So even though I only did a few before I tapped out on those, I do hope they iterate on the ideas here in some way in a future game. I will say that I was surprised at how much unique asset work there was in those areas. The enemies, the areas themselves, and the bosses were entirely new from the base game. I was expecting it to be similar to the Depths from Code Vein where it was content from the main path of the game being recycled and remixed into little dungeons. So that at least was a welcome surprise.

Something that I was a bit surprised by was how, about halfway through my playthrough, I felt disappointed by the amount of items in the game and, more specifically, looting items off of enemies. In the Dark Souls games, getting an item drop from an enemy is always interesting. Maybe it's a weapon buff item or maybe it an upgrade material! Maybe it's a consumable item to heal a status ailment or maybe it's a new kind of hat! Sure, most of that stuff just gets thrown in a stash or sold for souls but a thing I like in RPGs is getting loot from stuff. Bloodborne feels like it really pared down the amount and variety of items in a way that makes a lot of logical sense, there is still an illogical part of me that is like "yeah but I like getting two dozen worthless swords".

A note about the DLC: Lady Maria is my wife and we were married atop the Astral Clocktower after she romantically ran me through with her sword and spilled my blood across the floorboards and left me there, bleeding to death.

More seriously, I really enjoyed how the DLC started off with an area that is familiar but also changed and how it plays with your knowledge of the area. My favorite specific example of this is at one point in that opening area, you find the building that is relatively early in the game that has an item on the ground and an old man in a chair that, when you pick up the item, he attacks you. You probably know the one I'm talking about. In the base game, you can go from that building to find a shortcut to a lantern. So when you get there in the DLC, you might think "oh, maybe there's a lantern near here, neat." And the thing is, there is a lantern nearby. But if you take the path that the you would in the base game, there isn't a lantern but instead there's a hunter who really wants to fuck you up. It's a great moment that only comes about because of how memorable the first area is and how the DLC plays with your memories of it.

The DLC definitely had one of my top moments. I got to the Living Failures fight and barely beat them on the first go in a very close fight. So to ride that high into the Lady Maria fight immediately after that felt great. I didn't care about how much she murdered me because it was such a stellar session of gaming to have those fights back to back like that. Incredibly fun pair of fights.

So, that's it. I'm happy to have finally checked this one off my backlog of games after staring at it sitting on my shelf for three or four years now. I'm not sure if I'll ever play it again (I rarely replay games these days) but I'm more than content with my time spent in the world of Yharnam and beyond.

I think this one is a four star game? It's damn close to five, though. Maybe my opinion will change with time as I think back on the game.