Very charming game, especially as someone who loves cats! It has incited comparisons to untitled goose game, and I think I had more fun with this game than that one, but they decidedly left me with kind of the same feeling. It’s very charming looks-wise, it’s fun going around doing cat stuff, but… the ‘fun’ of playing an animal and doing mischief just fades very, very quickly. I think this game has more cuteness going for it than Untitled Goose Game did, but it also has a lot more jank to it, which in this case I didn’t really mind since I never got stuck, but I was surprised by the sheer amount of it at times. Oh well, in any case, it’s cute, it’s nice, it’s fun and it’s pretty short, so you can’t go wrong with this one if you just want a catastic adventure.

I personally started my Layton journey with miracle mask, but of course I wanted to check out the earlier games in the series at some point too. No better place to start than the very first one, and it does certainly have the mark of first-game-in-the-series-itis. It’s a relatively low stakes story where I feel for most of the plot not much really happens. The conclusion has some of the qualities I would come to love Layton for shining through though, and the characters are filled to the brim with charm.

Puzzle-wise they strike a good balance so that no puzzle takes too long to solve, and there’s plenty pf hint coins around if needed, but the difficulty of said puzzles is kind of all over the place sometimes. Some I cleared in 5 seconds, some took like half an hour if not more, and these would both happen rather randomly during the course of the adventure. As it is the first game, it’s clear they still had to iron that out a bit, but most of these puzzles are still quality.

Overall, I really liked this first adventure, and looking forward to moving on to the next one, where I also started collecting layton games in different regional dubs just for the fun of it.

- Played on NSO -
Lasts about as long as you’d expect a microgame collection to last, but quite fun the whole time! There’s not enough unique microgames here for even the very short campaign, but because of how quickly you have to react and some challenges being a bit less immediately obvious than others, I didn’t mind this, helped me get better at them faster. Some of the illustrations in here are cute, some are butt ugly, but I was surprised by how the little quirky cutscenes endeared me to the cast. It has lots of personality, and as it’s very first entry, it can only grow bigger and better from here. Onto the next one!

- Tried on NSO -
With emphasis on tried, because so far, the only F-Zero game I decently enjoyed was 99, and I also bounced off that one in a matter of hours. I just don’t vibe with the controls, and though I’m clearly doing something wrong, I feel like the game does not give the proper amount of feedback to even tell if I’m improving or not. With it feeling like the CPU is practically playing the game perfectly while I bounce into walls all over the place, just don’t feel like putting in the time to get better at it. Hopefully one of the later entries has a basic tutorial of some kind on how to drift? : P

What a pleasant surprise! Picked it up on a whim because I’m a big fan of mega man, and I had an absolute blast! I’m usually not one for roguelikes, but I saw this one through to the end because the difficulty was manageable, a run doesn’t take overly long and above all, it was just a lot of fun! Some upgrades tear some sections of levels in half, but I think that just adds to the fun of it, getting lucky with an upgrade combination that isn’t necessary to win but allows for some clever circumventing. Only gripe I had is that towards the end, it almost turned more into a touhou game than a mega man game with the amount of projectiles and visual information. I made it through, but it feels like by the end you either use your available moveset to the fullest or you’ll inevitably get hit because you can’t pay attention to five things at once. Besides that, the visual style isn’t much to write home about but it works, and the music was a pleasant surprise as well, quite catchy.
As I said, a nice surprise, definitely worth checking out, especially since it’s quite cheap on sale!

- Played on NSO -
So the general opinion I heard on this game was that it was well-liked and people were really happy to see the first mario land make it over to NSO when we previously only had the second one. I kinda liked the chunky aesthetic of it so I gave it a go and it… is definitely a game. The controls are extremely stiff to the point where making a very simple jump can still lead to you falling down a pit, while also being kind of slippery where I slipped down a platform at light speed. Yeah, mario DROPS in this game as soon as there’s no solid ground, so slide an inch of that platform and he’ll be off to his death in a flash. The shooter segments were actually a nice change of pace in that regard, enjoyed them quite a bit more than the usual levels… and then it just abruptly ends. I expected a little more, especially because levels aren’t shy to re-use the exact same segments by copy pasting them within that same level.
Short, stiff, not really that fun to play, but at least I see why they call it quirky. The random bamboo forest levels had a nice aesthetic, but the rest didn’t leave much of an impression.

A frankly terrible retelling of one piece, where knowledge of the manga is mandatory to even know what's going on because the cutscenes do such a poor job at it. Of course, if you already know the plot points, the cutscenes become even more useless, because the presentation is rather terrible. Besides the cutscenes, I actually like the presentation of battles with the limitations of the 3DS in mind, and having seen how bombastic the special moves get, I think they're animated rather well. There's just not much to the battle system, the 'dungeons' if you'd call them that are just straight hallways... I didn't get very far into this one, but from what I have played, it looks like One Piece Odyssey is essentially doing what this game wanted to do, but actually delivering quality. So, go play that instead.

It’s pretty nice, nicer than the base ACNH game for me since there’s an actual goal the game seems built around, but I guess due to my lack of fondness for the villagers and their lack of personality besides… being cute, I didn’t feel compelled to keep playing for long. Small limitations also got on my nerves rather quickly and made the immersion kind of shatter early on (If I put two chairs side to side, it really shouldn’t be impossible for my character to go from one to the other, it feels so cramped) so though I think this is super well made and I had my bit of fun, don’t think I’ll be returning to this one. Still, I could get behind an entire game based around this concept with a bit more to it.

This game is brimming with atmosphere, looks quite beautiful and the puzzles are quite clever! I had a good time just wandering around, finding new items, discovering secrets left and right. The atmosphere is both unnerving and relaxing in equal measure, and the encounters with the titular animals are all quite interesting, even if they're brief. It's very well made, has an identity all its own, it's a good time... but I admittedly don't get where all the high praise this game got came from. As I said, it's a good time, plenty of secrets and mystery, but nothing particularly that stuck with me or really made me go 'wow'. It's not that long and fairly priced, so definitely give it a go.

Starts off amazing with a Link-Zelda dynamic that I was immediately on board with… and then for most of the adventure you’re kind of just going around the world with not much interesting stuff happening. Sure, Zelda is great, but you get to see her for maybe like 10% of the adventure so that strong point kind of fades for most of the game. Besides her, Groose is well done, but his development kind of happens in a flash. He goes from bully to decent guy kind of off screen almost, but some of his lines were good enough that I ended up not minding. The rest of the cast doesn’t really stick out, but I really enjoyed Girahim as an antagonist, he shines in what few scenes he gets.

Now, gameplay-wise, I don’t mind the motion controls that much, but they make this game much more tiring to play than a traditional control scheme. Constantly having to recalibrate isn’t exactly fun, but when they work, they make for some of the most satisfying sword slashes in Zelda. When they didn’t work, they made for some of the most frustrating slashes in Zelda, but I realised that if I take my time with my swings, it worked a lot better. Other flaws are less easy to overlook and make it even more tiring to play. The story not really going anywhere, the companion character is literally the worst since Fi never adds anything interesting to the narrative nor the gameplay, constantly returning to the same locations which are rather bland to begin with (even if the desert with the timeshifting was a mechanic I was always glad to see return), the sky being quite barren and uninteresting… this adventure just takes up so much time where it feels like nothing is really pulling me along or exciting me, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is solid throughout. I especially loved the sandship, but it’s a bummer that the game essentially peaks at that point and you still have quite a bit to go.

Special mention to the music, which is absolute amazing and made some scenes so much more powerful just by the quality of it alone, and the final boss, was fittingly epic! I really like that as your sword upgrades, it feels fittingly OP by the end, worthy of the moniker of Master Sword!

I think it’s definitely a good game, but one with many flaws. It’s an odd case of the good parts never outclassed the flaws, it’s more so that the good and the bad balance each other out constantly so that I managed to get to the end while feeling fulfilled, as well as glad it was finally over in a way. It’s an odd one, but for the music alone, totally worth giving a spin (attack)!