>INHALE
Robin inhaled.

>HOLD BREATH
Time passed.

>EXHALE
Robin exhaled.
Robin felt his body lighten as he drifted into a deep trance.

>METAMORPH INTO EAGLE
That will mean loading the next section of the game. Do you wish to continue? (Remember, this is your last chance to SAVE a part 1 position to TAPE/DISK!)

Trying on the clothes from Persona 5's wardrobe and failing to come up with an outfit that isn't mismatched and ill-fitting. Now that the Vita has been excised, Nippon Icchi feel as though they're struggling to maintain their longstanding legacy of producing wall to wall ribald dogshit for idiots. Poison Control, on the absolute surface, does an okay job at posturing like it belongs on a home console with admittedly slick presentation, brave colour choices and effervescent UI design - but going any lower than skin deep reveals that it's just not even trying.

A genuinely dire third-person corridor shooter where the central mechanic of cleaning goo off the ground wastes absolutely no time in making itself known to be simple padding for content.
The game's structure is a series of levels that contextualise themselves as the hells made manifest of their respective victims, from which the player is tasked to cleanse those tortured souls and free them from their damnation. Where this could be a pretty intriguing premise, as each of these victims do have drastically different folk-tales among them, the game is pretty contempt to explore this setting in the most superficial way imaginable. Wall-less corridors floating in a void, stringing together enemy waves and interspersed with an apt decal and decoration or two. If you're making a game that is comprised entirely of one of the best-received elements from Persona 5, namely the mind palaces, try not to fail at realising that they were effective because of the insight they offered of their rulers. It’s nigh impossible to be invested in Poison Control because I’m not even convinced it’s all that interested either.

As comes with the NI territory, the dialogue is tropey and leery and pathetic. Each level is embarassingly titled a "Belle's Hell" (the entire cast of victims is female), every spoken line is a tit joke, the game even blatantly manipulates players into choosing the crudest dialogue options by tying them to the better stat boosts. I’m the type of mother fucker to be willing to throw a bone if it was at least any fun, but with these sluggish unreliable controls, difficulty spikes that force you to revisit older levels to grind… I’m keeping my bone!!!!!

All credit goes to the UI designers, the only mother fuckers to show up to the office. Or log in on Teams.

Not a terrible VN hybrid, I honestly admire what it aspires to do with its different mechanics but they simply don't culminate in an interesting game.
The structure of Death Mark is composed of chapters with large areas to navigate and pick for key items, similar to Ace Attorney. This is where Death Mark particularly excels, being where it executes its style of horror quite well, with an excellent soundtrack and subtle corner-of-the-eye flourishes that unnerve better than any dough-brained jumpscare does. In between these sections are frankly terrible "puzzles" that typically amount to using key items on obvious spots, and bits where you have to choose the options in a dialogue tree that won't lead to instant death. The writing is basic and repetitious as fuck so the VN parts drag, characters literally never talk to one another, or even say anything particularly unique or interesting when taken on missions. Dotted throughout are these insane CGs of dying half-naked girls that look like they're from a completely different game entirely???

Death Mark wastes too much of your time. I'm not sure why it feels the need to completely deflate its atmosphere by forcing the player to meet very narrow item/character requirements that funnel you into asinine deaths and restarts, only for chapters to end in a hilarious turn-based combat puzzle thing. Curious enough to see if the sequel improves on these things, but I'm not hopeful!

They called this shit Penta Tentacles in Europe lol. Out of all of these Art Style games, I honestly think this one is my fav!
Rotozoa shares some similarities with Thatgamecompany's flOw, surprisingly (to me) enough, but with far more of a puzzle game-y spin on the formula of wading across the primordial ooze eating plankton and amoebas. What is essentially just a colour matching challenge can become pretty engrossing with some smart engagement design that stacks wonderfully as you're tasked with an increasing amount of plates to spin. All 35 stages have their own unique bgm, upon which layers are added and excited depending on how much you've grown and how much you're wrecking shop, it's pretty charming!
It's a shame Skip didn't stay active for very long after the release of Rotozoa - you could tell this studio was bustling with ideas. Skip's Art Style / Bit Generation titles very rarely feel as though they've had enough backing to push them past the concept phase, which can certainly be a bit of a charm point, as I genuinely believe that their projects still present themselves incredibly uniquely. Their titles have this confusing, stripped-back air of something that'd appear on your DSi one morning to confuse and scare the piss out of you as if you've just been airdropped some alien spyware. From what I've played or achieved, Rotozoa is the only one of their titles that lives so long it has its own credits sequence.

Mechanically competent, I'm keen on the Skate-like control scheme making shots more difficult to accurately pull off than the simple stop-and-start QTE that most other golf games roll with. Thing is, in a game this utterly bereft of personality, style, and overall gamemode variety, I somewhat expected it to act as more of a core golfing sim than it really is. It somewhat expounds the little grievances that creep up, like swinging fast causing a left hook, and the slow downswing a rightward slice - which just makes no sense, and the input method is too inconsistent for its bizarre punishments to feel fair.
Begging the PC to get a good golf game, i can't live off this saltine flavored pish forever.

Played this on a whim because I couldn't sleep one night, chosen specifically because its art style is kind of stellar. The character designs and lavish amount of unique animations therein are the perfect concoction to bring Ruby Gloom ass kids into the realm of gambling - welcome to the world of vice and brain rot, children. The first three hours or so is literally just tapping Next on tutorial prompts, which is hilarious considering this game essentially just plays itself. You've seen it all before, base building character upgrading stat treadmill that will only end when you, dear reader, physically perish. Deviously designed quests that reward JUST beneath what you need to meet your next progression requirement, spurring the lizzid brain into Just One More Mission fancy. The bare minimum level of player input combat that runs at like 15fps tops, just spitting upgrade items into units until the numbers cease to mean anything and you're left completely zombified. Mobile games are so good dude.

The dream is that maybe this studio will use what I can safely assume to be their incalculable "fuck you" profits to make a game that uses these designs for something less like a pachinko machine, but maybe i should just get really into cartoon network instead.

That there was such a focus on thematic art direction and narrative meant I actually cared to see this Roguelite through to the end, multiple times. Shocked and stunned beyond all belief that an entry in this genre can actually look pretty, and not just be a dozen repeating mud tilesets.
For a game about systems compounding into "always-unique" runs, I still found myself rolling my thumb across the face buttons and dashing to victory regardless. Eventually grew weary of having to dungeon run for 20~ minutes before I saw some new dialogue, but it was nice affirming Medusa while it lasted. Such a sprawling and reactive script is obviously very impressive, I certainly hope loamlikes everywhere take the hint.