Completely captures the feeling of a fantranslated PS2 adaptation of a forgotten 90's shoujo manga. Almost dizzyingly textured & artisanal in its devotion to presenting this kind of rose-thorny traditional German folktale. Feels so genuine, inspired, fully realised in a way I desperately needed as a palate cleanser.

For me to become completely convinced of its gameplay and narrative goals, I’d have to replay it with alternate routes in mind, which I’m not quite able to facilitate with my current limited free time - and Little Goody Two Shoes doesn’t exactly make going down these forks in the story particularly breezy. I don’t tackle games with completionism in mind these days but I find myself a little bummed about how much work I’d need to put into this if I wanted to see the stories I’ve missed. Nothing a timeline/"skip seen dialogue" update somewhere down the line can’t fix, please don’t make me watch a Youtube video.

Wow kind of loved this. One of those plinky ploinky IcoXJourney type games that actually manages to completely seal the deal with some genuinely astounding world design that compliments the character movement. This laser focus on the goal of verticality and the notches inbetween - tactile, weighty, arduous toil as you use your climbing gear to best the challenges the geometry imposes. Gushing with a sense of true scale, milestoned by countless opportunities to pan the camera back at the places you’ve come from and the mountaineering feats you’ve cleared. Dense and well-considered little pockets of civilisation in between crumbling pathways and inclines, full of the kind of coastal town fishery imagery I am a cow for. Beautiful and breathless game imo. Shame it undoes itself with all of these collectables and wordy diary entries that explain away the superlunary mystery of da world, although I’m fickle enough to kind of think I’d have given them a pass if the font choice was more diegetic lol.

Jusant is 1 for da perverts who blush at the Google Image Search: “Abandoned Crab Traps stacked rly high”.

A sapphic love letter - a daisy chain of vignettes that offer glimpses into other creative and influential media powerhouses, metered out by the task of juggling keys and receptacles in limited inventory slots across a vast steel complex. Too much mule work for its weight in silver in my humble. This search for lost love where ur body is weighed down by deprivations of liberty and soul rings so hollow to me when it's so clockable under a very narrow scope of media that strikes the same chimes so much better. More to the point I think I'm just too depressed to find any spark in this. Since I've been resorting to it recently, the flashes of self-harm imagery just piss me the fuck off.
Signalis a visual juggernaut that can dole out amazing one-two punches of sight and sound when it wants to, but the genre darling glazing is too sickly for my blood, I'd roll my eyes at practically every cutscene calling to something in the creators' Anilist Previously Watched stack. Not a classic survival horror head either, sorry not for me, not a problem in and of itself.

Walked right up to my favorite city builders and claimed a spot among them like it was nothing.

This game (the real "TF2") pulls off several impressive tricks, but the most striking is the scale. I hate to be the guy who talks about The Graphics right off the bat but I am perpetually in awe that this game will let me zoom out to a level that could believably be an entire province/country(/etc) before zooming all the way down to individual lots that look far less sterile than any prefab from Cities Skylines, all without any visible changes in LOD or any hitches due to loading. Especially impressive is the countryside between the cities, which feels sufficiently vast from a birds-eye view without making your first-person train ride feel like a trip through a diorama. It's an imperfect illusion, but it works from so many different angles that I have to assume any critiques levelled at this particular element of the game are coming from the most steadfast of sticklers.

Being a transport management game, though, you don't actually need any of that to enjoy yourself. The game allows the rail freaks out there to work their magic, of course, but the gameplay is only ever as complex as you want it to be, and there's a lot of quick 'n' easy satisfaction to be found in a city builder where you're not doing the "heavy lifting" of zoning, determining the fire department budget, providing wastewater service, etc. If you don't feel like futzing around with train signals, you can usually keep your company in the black by cleverly placing some very simple routes: place two truck stops, buy some trucks, click both destinations and - as long as you're linking supply and demand - the vehicles will handle the rest. The half-star missing from my current rating is largely due to small quirks like the way the game displays profitability, which can occasionally be misleading if you're not paying close attention. Specifically, it seems to list the total balance for each vehicle/route over a relatively short amount of time, leading to situations in which an especially lengthy train route seems to be losing two million dollars only to complete its route, correctly display that it's actually making five times that amount in profit, and then go back to displaying a negative total moments later. The game gives you everything you need to figure out the real balance of the line, but 1. I'm not always trying to do those calculations myself, and 2. there doesn't seem to be a way to adjust the intervals it's using to calculate this - you just gotta deal with it.

I could speak more about its allure (e.g. I'm a mark for the way the cities slowly evolve as the eras march on) but I think that realistically, your gut reaction to "city builder where you build the infrastructure, not the buildings" will be accurate enough to decide whether you should play this. You don't have to be passionate about vehicles, you don't have to worry about configuring the logic each vehicle runs on, you uh... I just gotta find someone else to play this game so my coworkers won't think I'm strange for spending all my vacation days creating horsie traffic jams.

Hit ten hours of playtime in this game, although How Long to Beat threatens me with another seven or so before the campaign is cleared. When I realised my biggest pop-off was from finding and activating the option to skip puzzles I realised it was best I just tapped out.
I try to be polite and only log the games I've finished, but wow I am not enamoured by how much this glossy boot slurping sim traded my precious time for such little reward. This overly smooth slick and oily control scheme elicits nothing in me. The webslinging has no weight no turbulence no torque, it only serves in favour of noclipping from waypoint to waypoint collecting endless upgrade tokens to unlock exciting new flavours of web, all the while empowering the police state thru ubitowers. Pure slop no matter how gorgeously the sun bakes the building tiles. What is with this Hannah Barbara Voice acting direction also.

Really pleasantly surprised by this! Sleeper hit maybe. You grow small shops (and eventually automate or have other NPCs staff them). Except it has a focus on town/city exploration, meeting different characters, with a JRPG-esque story. There's unique humor and money systems here.

Managing items and stuff can feel a bit multitasky in a tedious way, but there's a lot of great ideas and design in this. Kind of reminds me of a weird spin on Trails in the Sky in some ways. check it out if you like rpgs!

Absolutely spellbound by this mod’s lofty creative and narrative ambitions. They’ve done a frankly brilliant job at realising a Central Asian post-Soviet locale in a world embittered by HL2’s Combine forces, ideologically split resistance forces and an MC with a hilariously unfortunate concussion. There’s this very keen eye for attention to detail by way of populating this campaign with an incredibly unique style of architecture and set-dressing. I don’t want to understate how blown away by the environment design I am - this feels like such a labour of love that deserves to be explored. punctuated by one of the most knockout game soundtracks I’ve heard in years - sometimes taking it upon itself to re-imagine classic Half Life songs for the setting, it’d be corny if it wasn’t honestly so hard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8Ar8lKYsQA

There’s a bit more of a focus on realism here, which is intriguing enough for a HL2 game - does lend itself to its more down to earth downtrodden rebel unrest narrative focus, with cool little additions like tossing aside used health items as physics objects. Enemy fire seems to hit harder and you can’t just HEV Faceroll around the pitch like Gordie.

What stops Swelter from really falling into my all killer no filler stockade is in how much it feels to be buckling under the weight of the Source Hammer Editor, it’s somewhat telling to me how once you blossom your HL2 puzzle design beyond a few switches and physics see-saw puzzles the cracks start showing. Has its own overly-lengthy train section and HL2:E2 roadrip for good measure as well. Turning cranks to slowly open gates and the devious addition of those god damn wired electrical plugs. Strongly dislike the new weapons and how the enemies feel to shoot. Twitter lowbie VA quality plodding around a story that kind of bites. Ah well!!!

Very very charming little thing. Free, too. Dat’s what’s so magical about hl2 mods 🕊️

With great shame, I've always been apathetic to Mario's plight. His journey is a noble one, but I do not see myself in his bings, nor his bings. His wahoos do not reach me. I feel like a cunt rat bastard for giving this Three Succulent Backloggd Stars ⭐⭐⭐ and absconding with the ultimate sayaway that this is "still one of the better Marios" but that's-a my burden, not yours - my paesano in cristo. I pirated and completed the game days ago and earnestly found myself worrying I'd forget I even played it before it released and I could officially log the game on BL.

It's good!!! Honest and true!!! Nice to see what felt like notes of 3D World in here with the little rosary bead structure and rhythm of each level having their own little wonder flower acting as an F5 button, refreshing the level's objective into a unique blink-and-you'll-miss-it sleight of hand trick. It keeps u guessing but only so much. It's still Mario, it's still the charisma of a cereal box free toy, but credit where it's due - the soundtrack is nice and they did a great job in shuffling the artstyle up into representing illustrative 3D. Not losing my nut over this but it's nice to see some sparks of personality rattling around behind mario's shark eyes.