Animal well is creative and impressive. The solodev is clearly skilled in both programming and design. This game gets immense praise. Which imo is a bit undeserved. Animal well is unique as it does away with the generic combat and abilities that most metroidvania games contain (it still contains the flame collecting from super metroid tho). Here you collect bizar items that are used in different ways to solve creative puzzles and progress in the world. The amount of puzzles honestly feels a bit lacking tho. I would have liked to see more big imaginative puzzles. But as only one person worked on this for 7 years thats excusable. Whats not excusable is the annoying time wasting design. There are moments where you accidently fall of a cliff and have to traverse 8 screens for a few minutes to get back to the same point. Or you get physically stuck in a trial and error puzzle, where you have to traverse several screens to try again. And all this could be solved by removing 2 tiles. There are a lot of instances in this game like this. So the criticism, that this game wastes your time is kinda valid imo. This doesnt have to do with incompetence. As the dev is clearly an incredible designer as seen in other parts of the game. So I dont really understand these design decisions. Another criticism are the puzzle locked doors. Some stay open after dying, others dont. There is not really any consistency here. Which gets annoying overtime. Aside from the several weird design choses. Animal well is a great game. Incredibly imaginitive. And shows that indie dev are easily on par (or better) compared to the big boys creatively. I'd still recommend Animal Well, but on sale. As 25 bucks is steep for a 5 hour game (very replayable tho).

Hollow Knight is great. Amazing even.
With a (very) similar story and approach as Dark Souls, Hollow Knight has a rich world with lore to uncover. Standalone the story is fine, at best. But the gameplay and sheer scale of the world with its different biomes and areas make for a suprisingly large epic.
The mechanics all work perfectly together, unfortunately Hollow Knight does not contain any unique gameplay elements compared to metroidvania's and games that came before. But somewhat makes up for it with absolutely beautiful art. Where Hollow Knight falters a bit are weird design choices. The lack of boss health bars (no feeling of progression in boss fights, resulting in a frustrating feeling, a first for me regarding hard boss fights) and other smaller ones, like the blocking of paths in infected crossroads, weird platform placements and the double damage some bosses do with even less of a charge up, making it feel kinda unfair and ruining the mask shard collecting. (You now need 8 mask shards to tank a hit). Resulting in you artificially having the exact same amount of health in the beginning as end of the game. Even though you put countless hours in mask collecting.
In the end an amazing game and massive achievement for a studio of 3 people. But the lack of innovation regarding gameplay and some baffling design choices make it not as perfect as Id liked to see.

Quickly loses most of its magic after playing any other Persona or SMT game. Feels absolutely amazing as your first SMT game. Then you play the rest of the franchise and it becomes imminent most people only played Persona 5.
The combat is a lot of fun (a smt staple). And I dont think we need to talk about its style, because come on. OST is great, but a little overrated imo. It fits the style greatly, but it might be some of the most generic and simple acid jazz I've ever heard. Even compared to Shoji's other works.
Game begins with its best arc and really quickly drops in story quality.
Still fun, but might be one of the weakest games in the franchise.

Twilight Princess has always been on my mind as a zelda game that looked really good and that I wanted to play, but never really gave the time to. While waiting for Tears of the Kingdom I took the time, I had, to delve into Zelda games I had yet to play. TP was one of those.

TP starts slow. It paints a picture of a farmboy with relations to a small village. Perfectly painting the ordinary world. The story starts small and evolves into an epic.

After the criticism Nintendo received for WindWaker and its cartoonish style, they felt a need to make a more "mature" dark realistic zelda game. And they did. With its flaws.

Aside from the magical fairy tale like beginning and vibe of the ordinary world and the anticipation of a grand adventure, like most zelda games have. TP falls flat on its atmosphere. The game is dark. So dark it becomes a bit tacky. In contrast to its none mature story. People tend to call TP mature, for its themes. But I fail to recognize them. TP tells a simple story of an ordinary boy who grows out to be a hero. The villain (or villains) are flat and side characters arent very interesting either. Especially to its predessecor Majoras Mask. Which indulges more in actual mature subjects.
TP feels tacky and fake in its "dark" and "mature" themes.

The villains dont feel great either. Both Zant and Ganondorf have an amazing introduction. But after that, their presence arent felt at all, besides the twilight areas and the shattering of the mirror. Both Zant and Ganondorf have about 3 minutes screentime each before their boss fights.

The gameplay has a lot to be desired as well. Its VERY lineair. You are send from point a to b to a again, numerous amounts of times it becomes infuriating. A big portion of this game feels like chores, with no real logical explanation to why you have to do it, besides padding. Even the big hyrule field is very lineair. Paths are blocked off constantly so you can only traverse through it one way. Later on you can open up entries to for example hyrule castle. But these are more chores that dont add to the experience.

Dungeons are a mixed bag. On one hand you have the awesome Arbiter Grounds, which combines the forest Temple of OoT with a pinballmachine and a rollercoaster, with an under utilized item. And on the other you have the infuriating Temple of Time, which is both boring and the most lineair straight path dungeon I have seen in a zelda game. You go to the end of the dungeon to get the dungeon item and traverse the whole dungeon reversed guiding a hard to control statue.

The pre gameplay to the city in the sky is also a good example of the flaws of this game. You are send all across the map of hyrule to recover sky symbols. It feels very arbitrary and just an easy way to pad out the game. The boss Keys in general is also a good example of this. In the first dungeon the boss key is hidden in plain sight. While in the other dungeons the boss key is hidden in the most arbitrary off path places. In such a way that I always had to traverse the dungeon a second time to find the boss key. The twilight dungeon is the best example of this. The boss key. An item you HAVE to collect. Is hidden behind a random waterfall with no indication its behind it.

Most of my time with Twilight Princess was wondering why systems were designed this way. Why did Midna always interrupt any flow in gameplay. Why did I always have to backtrack every single time. Why did link have to transform every time I wanted to teleport into wolf link, where I had to manually transform back after being teleported. Why why why?

I may sound very negative in this review. That is because being a zelda game comes with its expectations. I expect an immersive world and story with in depth gameplay. And frankly, I didnt find it here. When I keep getting pulled out of the game because of annoying mechanics and design, I tend to not really care about the world or characters anymore. That being said this is not a bad game. Comparing this to any other game at that time its even a very good game. But comparing it to any other zelda game. Even 2d ones. It takes the lowest point in my zelda ranking.

Unbelievably unique and passionate. I think there are few games with a vibe similar to pikmin. Pikmin has such an out of place vibe, that anyone who knows it, but hasnt played it, thinks its a cutesy easy game. But oh boy could you be more wrong. Pikmin are indeed cute. Until they get flattened to death, drown or get eaten whole in huge amounts. And all of that is your, the player's, fault. To a degree, which brings us to my criticism. It is clear they were still experimenting with this type of gameplay. The path finding of the pikmin is unbelievably weak, until they get a hold of an item, than its miraculously flawless. Combat is still very weak in this one, with most encounters just spamming pikmin hoping the enemy dies first. Some enemies have more of a strategy, which is awesome.
All in all, super unique and an amazing game that has (had) some things to improve (they did in later entries).