I'm always saying I want something different—and this was quite different indeed. A really lovely experience of exploration and solitude with a unique movement mechanic that puts a welcome twist on the 'explore and read letters to get the story' genre. The environmental allegory is a little on-the-nose but still carries an impact. As someone who gets shaky climbing up to the roof of my one-story house, I found the scale of this game exhilarating and the setting was so well-realized that I had a tough time not blowing through in one sitting. Yet another decisive Game Pass victory!

Loved this. I never played Chrono Trigger or any Final Fantasies so maybe there were reference points I missed. They really nailed what I imagined those games might be like when i'd see them in nintendo power, though. Mission accomplished on nailing that very specific vibe as far as I'm concerned. Slow clap! Now pardon me while I download the messenger

I really enjoyed the amount of options you have to customize the difficulty of this game- it's been a nice run of games lately that really felt player-friendly: Jedi Survivor, Prince of Persia and this. It seems like it's becoming a trend and I hope it continues.

I beat this game and got the "true" ending without ever playing Wheels! Ok, I played it once and had zero interest in doing it again. Like why on earth would I play this when the rest of the world is so much fun to run around in? I'm sure it's great but it wasn't for me and I'm very grateful that the game doesn't require the player to play/win it to progress or upgrade anything.

After playing Sea of Stars, I had to check in on this one and it really delivered! Instead of Chrono Trigger this one pays tribute to Ninja Gaiden and other side-scrolling action titles of the 8- and 16-bit eras with banging music and buttery controls. Nice challenge level as well, it nails that fine line betwen retro challenge and outright sadism. When the game has somewhere to go, it's 5 stars no question. When it becomes a metroidvania-esque open-world riddle-solving game, it's... not quite as good. It's more than a little disruptive to be moving forward with so much momentum and then just let it all dissipate. You have this great upgrade tree, and once you fill it—which 100% of players will do in the first half of the game without even trying—that's it. Around the same time you also notice that there's about 20 enemy types total in this entire 15-hour game, which imo is a missed opportunity. But fortunately it all comes roaring back together towards the end with some real showstopping setpieces and fun bosses. And then you see in the credits that it was made by a very small team and the whole thing becomes even more impressive.

I have this sort of morbid fascination with these megabudget AAA games. This one had a some discourse around it and dropped on game pass so I had to give it a whirl. Made it about 4 or 5 hours in before grabbing Balatro on a whim—Immortals of Aveum didn't stand a chance.

This game rains down piles upon piles upon piles of Proper Noun lore and abilities on you—and I get why they thought this was a good idea—but it's all in service of "walk into a space some enemies materialize, explore around to find color-coded upgrade materials and currencies, repeat" gameplay. The sheer amount of time you spend in menus trying to decide whether to craft a new seekershards or upgrade your existing stormshard chalice yada yada was maddening. Way too many customization, currency and upgrade mechanics imo.

The AAA-ness of it all was fine. The settings were nice, and the world was well-realized but the whole time it felt like the game was a little desperate to show off. The acting was interesting, even if the main character has way too many Whedon-style "well THAT happened" ass clunker quips. We've been watching Suits recently and it was fun to see Gina Torres pop up here too.

visuals that got a genuine 'wow' out of me and good music but almost everything else is beyond bare bones. the setting, such as it is, is a lot of alice in wonderland and surprisingly, coraline (did anyone else clock that?). i could easily see this game captivating an 8- or 9-year old and eventually leading to other action rpgs with a little more depth.

it's easy to overlook a lot of this game's shortcomings but one actively got under my skin: as pointed out by another reviewer, your attacks make exactly one sound effect. by the end of the game you are hitting enemies 5-15 times and it's just that same sound effect over and over. i also have thoughts about the typography (cococucumber hire me to do your typography)

Came into this one straight off a SOTN luck run and this one surprisingly really holds its own! A bit more of a Hollow Knight-style MV than SOTN-style since there's no RPG elements but this may actually be a little bigger than HK, and I think I might even prefer this to HK as the setting and environments are a little more compelling to me, there's no Soulslike mechanics (thank fuck) and I appreciate that this game swaps HK's mute world for thoughtful, interesting dialogue.

The platforming is no joke, and there was definitely a point about 70% of the way through where I never wanted to see another hallway filled with rotating knives again, and a LOT of those hallways led to a specific type of currency that I didn't ever come close to running out of. In retrospect it wasn't that bad but in the moment my patience was running a little thin.

I invested all of my resources into the amulets that increased sword power, cultivating athra and boosting athra surge damage, and that enabled me to kind of inelegantly brute-force myself through a lot of late-game battles. So maybe I didn't embrace the combat system as much as I could have, but there's a big difference between appreciating a cool boss fight and having to master the timing of a dozen different attacks just to scrape by—so I regret nothing.

I really appreciated how reasonable the difficulty was, and I felt a deep respect for the player through a lot of really great QoL mechanics—the memory shards, a liberal view of 'resetting' double jump and air dash abilities, being able to respawn right back into a failed boss fight and the ability to swing my sword and shoot arrows while perched on a wall. All of that really helps your mood when you're staring down your 3000th rotating knife hallway.

Nintendo doubles down on the movie with this delightful, inspired take on 2D Mario, using a relentless parade of new ideas, mechanics and environments to bring back the original series' (particularly 3 and World) feeling of joyous exploration and discovery. This is the next-gen 2D Mario that we've waited 30 years for.

I've seen people doing discourse about the diffculty, but I don't want to hear a word until you beat the final final level. The last bit of the optional endgame is the toughest, most hardcore Mario this side of Maker. I got all the medals except the standee one-I should have started working on that earlier but alas.