Let's just be honest, drawing games tend to be pretty one note. Physics games doubly so. Combining the two just leads to make it more interesting but not by much. And so we have Crayon Physics Deluxe, a game that is exactly what you expect it to be on the tin and nothing more.

Repetitive soundtrack, goals that are either way too easy or absolutely not, and graphics that do the job.

Genuinely the thing that saves it is that this game is peak "I'm sick and want to play a video game" fuel. Nothing much tops it.

A Sonic fan-game publicly put out by SEGA that's written FANTASTICALLY. The art is pretty, the gameplay is good enough for a free game, and everything has so much personality that I adore it.

THEY ALSO GAVE TAILS A TINY HAT!!!!

Play through it, give it a stellar steam review, and then play through it with friends. If for no other reasons than they made an escape room joke which I hope turns into a Zero Escape parody and they had a vent be an important plot point without making an Among Us reference in 2023. And I know for a fact that took a massive amount of restraint to do that.

If there's any game I can point to and go "Your grandmother might be able to play it and say she's played a video game more complicated than pong", VVVVVV might be that game. It's incredibly simple. Ya move left and right, and instead of jumping you flip gravity to run on the ceiling. Or the floor...wait, was the floor the ceiling or is the ceiling now the floor...oooghh...

Long story short for a game as short and simple as VVVVVV, get it. It's 5 bucks normally and goes on sale a majority of the time as long as there's a sale available. It's one of the best 2D platformers ever made, and considering it's able to be beaten in an hour, that should say how fantastic the experience is.

TLDR: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game. Is one of the greatest games ever ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ made. That's being held back by a ball and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ chain because the company that made it was Ubisoft. The game runs absolutely fine on it's own without problems, but my god is it a Ubisoft release and my god do they hate people who play their games on things that aren't Ubisoft storefronts by ruining the experience for everyone.

A game that has unmatched visual style, some of the smoothest controls I've ever had the pleasure of using, one of the best soundtracks for a video game ever composed, some of the nicest knowing nods to consumers of the base property, and I could and honestly should go on. Issue is that it's a Ubisoft game. So somethings just don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ make sense.

Uplay is a forced install (although it's Ubisoft Connect now it's the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing I don't care what they call it, it's still unbridled tumoric ass), and a forced launch if you want to play the game even in single player. Achievements? Ubisoft Connect exclusive, no Steam stuff. In fact, Steam Remote Play just doesn't work at the time of writing this. Multiple controllers don't function when this game is being played through it for reasons completely unknown.

Ubisoft surprising nobody when it comes to being professionals at Pulling Ubisofts aside, please for the love of god get this game and beat it either alone or with friends. It's a super SUPER fun time for everyone involved and I heavily recommend it. Especially get it right now because the reason this dropped this year and is a huge deal is because the game got taken off storefronts YEARS ago due to licensing issues (i.e. Ubisoft not renewing the license like BASTARDS-) and let's just be real it's a Ubisoft product, so they might just do the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing again. So get it while it's back or you might not be able to get it again legally ever again.

Played the main story levels to completion front to back. Won't ever go back for the rest of the achievements here. Terrible gameplay, a level chunk generation system that isn't remotely homogenius with one another, and a very clear weight towards wanting to make a franchise for pure profit over making an actually fun video game. Which is ironic coming from Super Meat Boy, a series made by people who were focused on making a fun game first over making a money grubbing soulless corpse.

I cannot remotely describe how aggressively disappointing this game is. You wait 10 years for the shittiest autorunner imaginable with the design philosophy of taking an iconic indie game, placing an interesting idea or two into it, then shoving the most aggressively terrible design decisions into it until it chokes on them, then giving up and turning that into an auto runner. Follow that up with a delicious side of attempting to bury the entire design philosophy of the original's story with one that's categoricially worse with an additional backstory for a character that was used as a gag in the original, turning them into a recurring bit character who's only use is a shoehorned reason for the final level to exist instead of writing something interesting.

Finalize that with the chaser shot of the dev trying to serialize the series into bootlegs of other genres of games because he's done cannablizing the corpse of a ten year old gaming trend and is now just straight up ripping off other games entirely but with a poorly inserted gimmick rather than trying to make anything remotely related to the original that made the series what it's known to be because he's fully aware that he can't because he has zero perceived talent at making anything original on his own and would rather throw money at the game to make the cutscenes pretty rather than make a playable video game first.

I'm ecstatic that these games are finally playable off of steam now, And they play very very well! I'd totally be down to recommend dropping 7-9 dollars on this nowadays!

I only wish for 2 things. 1 is World 3 in 60 FPS, which is something that should be coming eventually, so cool!

The second is wishing the movement was bridged together a lot better. There's the sense of Nostalgia keeping world 1's movement, world 2's movement, and world 3's movement, all bridged together by a hub with world 4's movement, but I wish they were all unified. The modern movement system is so fluid and fun to mess around with that world 1's is just radically inhibiting.

Taps into that perfect balance of "So absurd you can't stop laughing" and "So terrifying you can't stop screaming". Even in early access, every single co-op horror experience should take aggressive notes from this.

Only complaint as of right now is I wish the dead had more ways to ♥♥♥♥ with the living. Let me make noises, let me force lights to flicker. There's only one thing funnier than watching them stumble around in the dark alone and terrified, and that's knowing I'M the one making them terrified and they don't even know it.

It's a visual novel, yeah, so I'm not expecting the highest bar of quality, but it's pleasant to find that it's very well done. It uses the Ren.Py engine so it holds up pretty well with only a handful of graphical errors here and there. The writing is good, great at times even, with me really enjoying a couple of the routes you can take. There are a few errors here and there but overall, it's fine.

The gameplay for 80% of the time is box standard. But that 20% extra bit makes it...very interesting. There's a great magic system for learning spells, but in all honesty you only need to use like 5 or 6 spells throughout the whole game while the rest of your spellbook gets filled with things you'll never use, making spell navigation a nightmare. Overall it's not bad, but it needs a lot of work.

The other big issue is the graphics. Now, I'm not expecting Mona Lisa tier graphics, but I won't be the first person to admit that most of the characters look ripped straight out of one of those "How To Draw Anime" books you'd find as a kid at one of those scholastic book fairs. The sequel seems to have fixed this but still, it's a bit of a bar to clear if you're used to other visual novels on Steam.

Finally, you're gender-locked into playing as a girl. Granted, that's not at all a real issue considering that most visual novels on Steam force you to play as a guy, but it's still a thing to make note of. The sequel does do the inverse of this, but still. Just throwing this out there at the end.

Overall it's really not that bad if you can get around the absurdly dated visuals that you'll be staring at constantly through your playthrough. I wouldn't pick it up unless it was on sale, but still grab it if you like visual novels that give you the option to play with stats.

This is one of the better and much more in depth visual novels that I've played in my life, and it's free. Is it as fancy as others? No. Is it as pretty as others? Some, yeah. Why is this set in a USSR childranger camp? I've got no clue, and I've beat the game like 3 different times already at least.

Just play it, it's free, the writing isn't that bad, the art and music are decent, there are some decent moments in there, and it's got more routes and endings than probably a third of the visual novels out on steam right now for actual cold hard cash.