Love this game's moxie and it breaks my heart to only come out thinking it's just a poor Armored Core-like. Wing of Darkness is a fair bit more interested in telling a story than having particularly stirring gameplay, with missions broken up through visual novel sequences that touch on the human impact of war and relationships and all that. Cuts too many corners as it beelines to the end of its 2-hour total playtime and fails to flesh out both its characters or systems as a result. Bleh.
It is at the very least host to my favourite soundtrack of the year lol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1ZL2l3pRc0

Very well designed in ways that aren't obvious. "Randomly generated endless runner" is one of the most incandescent red flags in existence, but the game itself generally leans far enough into its strengths.

Each level is a handful of prefab obstacles strewn in a line as conducted by the seed of your save file. It attempts to keep a sense of theming by isolating new mechanics to individual acts in the world map, lending a very clear and deliberate sense of progression and escalation of difficulty, but it just can't help but be dragged down by the completely random nature of its design - destroying the flow, potentially placing the easiest obstacles in the pack after some of the hardest. The game at its best is constantly reinventing itself with a plethora of absolutely ingenious design decisions and obstacles that make the always-moving endless-runner aspect feel less like a mobile game necessity and more a very cognizantly respected direction for the levels to follow.

My personal patience for trial and error has waned over the years. Any game that has me being able to die- respawn-die-respawn with the haste of, say, Hotline Miami, absolutely never leaves me feeling satisfied to have eventually overcome the trial. It's like growing callused after punching the brick wall of the level. I slowly chip away at the challenge, bit-by-bit progressing through trial and error, but the callus forms and I unfeelingly break through the goal. The reward of hard work, but an endpoint I'd assuredly have gotten to anyway by grinding away for the time anyway. I've never quite been able to put my finger on why this type of thing doesn't feel satisfying to me any more, but "callus" feels about right. Expect to die a lot in SMBF, and not often for reasons that were telegraphed to you very well. This is a game of running headfirst and blindly into obstacles you can't predict, the satisfaction comes (I guess) from memorisation. That Boshy shit.

Oh well, the game's good. The production values are kind of insane and if you have the patience, go for it.

Everything about this strikes me as the type of game that Mr Brainwash would make - unceremoniously smashing together a 3D collage of ready-made graphics with the sole intent of leaving a grotesque impact under the presumption there's a profoundness to it all. This game looks like a Second Life map, hideously warped prefab character models dancing with bought emotes and with bizarre decor strewn around in a way that only makes sense in the designer's stormcloud of a mind. Honest contender for most botched implementation of sun shafts I've ever seen. Off-Peak is probably supposed to be funny in a beguiling sort of way, but the languid dialogue and hacked together assets just hit me as dull and uncreative. The soundtrack is a bop though.

Hammered the entire Bit.Trip series in release order (sans the Runner sequels) the night before Christmas, I have no idea what brought me to thinking this made any sense. My scores for each of the games may not be positively glowing - I just didn't find them all too enjoyable - but you can colour me VERY surprised by how much of a journey the series takes you on.
I had no idea at all that there is a canon to these games, essentially outlining Commander Video's conception, life, death and ascension. There's something a little corny about that on paper, that's the "emotional 2009-2011 indie game story" shorthand, but it's wonderfully obfuscated here by being told almost entirely through wordless gameplay.
Despite the Pong-like bookends at the start and end of the series, each entry plays very differently, but are always a little abrasively difficult. VOID was my favourite, it was a great Katamari-like arcadey concept where you have to be very cognisant of your greed and impulse control.

When the game permits itself to show the player a fun, bombastic setpiece sequence, its latent charm and creativity finally takes centre stage. Really cool moments that make the fullest use of the environments and hardware to reinvent the way you have to tackle obstacles.
The overwhelming majority of the game, however, is hamstrung by the worst controls imaginable and sprawling sadistically vague world design. This cast and world is so great! But Brave Fencer Musashi throws itself into cryosleep for hours at a time between the moments that absolutely slap. I don't want to say this game peaks in the first thirty or so minutes, but you can kinda safely only play the prologue and come out more positively than if you otherwise finished it.

(Played whatever version is on Gamepass)
The game equivalent of being a child running through the aisles of Toys R Us and looking at all the products, being hypnotised into complete silence whenever an unskippable ad for some expansion pack starts playing on a kiosk. Completely barren of personality with thanks to how flawless and glossy the presentation is, but the appeal of Forza for most likely isn't going to be how it postures itself like a car dealership.

Honestly very fun for the first session or so! Gives you a huge lovingly rendered Edinburgh simulation and lets you carve whatever routes across it you want. It scratched that blessed Burnout Paradise itch for a while and I can see the appeal of an endless ball of yarn of procedurally/community generated racing content, but the monotony set in for me very quickly. No finely-tuned progression and reward systems in the world will ever be as satisfying to me as crashing a car and watching it wrap itself around the lamppost like a snap bracelet.

Sharing a gameplay and narrative structure that is almost identical to their earlier title The Void, Cargo instead applies a surrealist and sickly veneer of hard primary colours peering through confetti and bric-à-brac. The vague metaphorical currencies and the omni-present omni-lying deities of The Void return with a Crash Bandicoot makeover and spend their time going into a warp frenzy about the Idiot Gamers and their lust for being filled with so much instant gratification that they burst. What you're left with is essentially the Slav Wattam.

Ice Pick Lodge are more qualified than practically any other studio to make a scathing satirical critique on the triple-A sausage machine, as well as the gormless piggies sanctimoniously gobbling the samey meat links churned endlessly out for carnal joy - but they don't have to be so mean about it. Cargo feels adolescent, lashing out at the industry that failed them and the audience that ignored them, an almost embarrassing "Nobody Understands Me" phase laid bare in a .exe. It's hard to hate a game that is this eccentric and I will give IPL every free pass I've got, it's a miracle they're even still standing. Cargo is just kind of all bark and no bite, dull to play and not even for the reasons it tries to be.

Solves my biggest problem with Slay the Spire - rather than facing off with only two or three enemies at a time, you are hurriedly retaining ground control of the three floors of your train from a series of escalating enemy waves. It's less elegant, by oh my god it's not stopped being exciting.
Lacks Slay the Spire's years of content and quality of life updates, but the foundation of Monster Train is so strong I'm excited to see where the journey takes it. Wonderfully designed around scrounging whatever bizarre and broken-feeling combos you can find on the road, with a tough but fair difficulty curve that encourages you to do so.