A pretty clever game, though I don't know if I would spend $15 on it again as it was only around 2 hours long and didn't have too much gameplay. Home Safety Hotline definitely comes off as a game that would be popular with streamers, and low and behold when I looked up the game on Youtube to see other people's experiences, the first thing I saw was Markiplier's face LOL.

Home Safety Hotline is a fun idea for a game, and is done in a super aesthetically pleasing way, its just that the gameplay starts to get a bit monotonous, and around the 4th or 5th day I realized that this was just what the entire game would be. I thought there would be more of a twist with the ending, and instead found you just watch what looks like a film some college students put together and then the credits roll. Don't get me wrong, it was cute/silly, but I couldn't tell if the game was trying to do an actual horror-kinda thing or something goofier. Oh well, it's not that serious. I would recommend Home Safety Hotline if you're looking for a short, creative, spooky game to play in one night!

3/5

Short and sweet Moomin game focusing on everyone's favorite little fella, Snufkin. The Moomins aren't really a big thing in the Americas, in fact I was telling my coworkers about this game and part of my explanation had to also include what the Moomins even are lol, but this game does a great job of keeping the spirit of what Moominvalley entails. I know about the Moomins because a daycare center I worked at in Russia was decorated to hell and back with these funny fellas, and of course we had the DVD discs to show the kids, too. In Africa, Asia, and especially Europe, the Moomins, I would argue, are as common to see in child environments as Mickey Mouse. It was nice to see them get a video game that keeps so much in spirit with the series, while also still making an entertaining game!

The storyline focuses around following Snufkin while going through different canonical stories from the Moomins, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see they didn't try and squeaky-clean any of the morals, as a big part of Snufkin's character is going against authority, especially when it's causing harm over any good. A good portion of the gameplay in Melody of Moominvalley is about directly disobeying the police and purposefully breaking their silly laws. The villain straight-up is the police force, with no dilly-dallying around it. Your gameplay is mostly figuring out ways to destroy police property. It's fucking awesome, and I'm glad they didn't kinda half-ass it. You have some pretty good back-and-forths with Snufkin and Little My, and the friendship between Snufkin and Moomin is kept as being written as coming off a bit more like a romance as it sometimes does, but do you expect anything less from the openly-queer author?

Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley is a gorgeous and fun time. My only complaint would be that it runs a bit poorly on the Switch, even when docked, and that it's easy to beat the entire game in less than 3 hours! But overall, the game is simple, calming, and beautiful, and what words could better describe the charm of Moominvalley.

TLDR; Be gay, do crime.

3.5/5

One of the most beautiful and well-written games I've played in my life. Genuine tears were streaming down my face when I finished the epilogue. I haven't played many point-and-click adventure games: only the ones by Humongous Entertainment and Sam & Max, so randomly picking up this game that was super cheap during the steam sale and having it be one of the best pieces of media I've experienced in my life was an insanely pleasant surprise.

The Longest Journey, without going into too many spoilers, is a story about April Ryan, and her connection between the two worlds: Stark (the world of science and law) and Arcadia (the world of magic and chaos). Throughout the story, through April, you travel and experience the struggles of abuse, political censorship, and if war can ever truly be "just". You meet strange people, animals, and mystical creatures that help you along your journey to help reconnect the seperated worlds. Every character is so well thought-out and truly personal, it feels like you're properly meeting someone who has gone through so much in life, their skin moist with the sweat of real fears and missed dreams. Something personal to me that I really enjoyed was the crazy amount of strongly written female characters, ranging from our relatable but brave girl protag, to the realistic and openly accepted lesbian couple, to the old women whose tales we must trust more than our own self. I appreciate that the serious times of the game are allowed their moments, while also having many silly moments that know when to be separate. I went in expecting to hate Crow, as an example, but you don't see him too often for him to become annoying, and when you do see him, it feels like a breath of fresh air to hear his dumb, silly banter. The story is set up perfectly, and clearly had a lot of time and love put into it, with it being absolutely perfectly paced, and one of the better examples of using the Chekhov's Gun trope that I can think of.

My compliants are small, and just involve stuff that old point-and-clicks almost always do, such as having a couple confusing puzzles or actions to continue the story, but for a point-and-click as long and complicated as The Longest Journey I was pretty shocked how few "dead-ends" I ran into. The game also crashed a bit, but I guess it's to be expected when running an older PC game on a modern computer, and I mostly only really had issues with crashes when it didn't mix well with OBS.

The Longest Journey is $3 during the Steam sale - I've already bought and gifted it to 5 of my friends, begging them to put time aside and play this game. It's not going to be a game that touches everyone as emotionally as it touched me, but if you have $3 lying around and 25+ hours to spend, please please give it a chance...

This is the story of the Longest Journey, and I told it in my own words, as told to me by my teacher. As we will continue to tell for many, many years.

5/5

This one is weird man.

While it does feel like a step-down from X4 in some regards (definitely stages cause some of them were just obtuse). the bosses and amazing music helped make it an enjoyable experience. There were some gameplay mechanics that felt and looked questionable on paper, but ultimately it didn't really detract from my experience.

Can't deny that having your ending dependent on RNG is dumb though.

Just your average tennis game, except the SFC version has the loser exclaim SHIT!

Hard to believe, but this is one of the better tennis games of its time. The NES tennis game is so shit, I remember honestly still preferring the Atari one over it lmao.

3/5

Objectively speaking, this game has some of the worst boss and stage design I've experienced in my run of the franchise.

And yet as I'm playing, there's something about how insane it all is that was both rage-inducing and exhilarating.

So do I like it or hate it? In a way, I felt both.

End-game is horrible without the Shadow Armor though, no question about that.

Excellent game. A ton of variety with the levels and missions, and I mean a TON of variety. All the missions would surprise me with how different it would be. 99% of them were fun as hell.

Excellent music, especially in Paris, loved that first level.
Excellent voice cast.

Only negative was 1 of the areas of the game, the 3rd one, was a pain in the ass to traverse or navigate. Sour spot on the whole game but I still loved my time with this game and the missions in the area. Definitely an essential play for the ps2.

Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet, originally just Shadow of the Comet, is a Lovecraft themed 1993 point-and-click adventure game for the PC DOS. Its character portraits are just the tracing of famous actors, its interface was already outdated by the time it came out, and worst of all, its puzzles fucking suck. But, in conjunction with that all, Shadow of the Comet features a unique setting, awesome monsters, and some absolutely chilling scenes. All in all, it resulted in it getting this sort-of hated soft spot in my heart lol.

The weakest point in the entire game are its puzzles. Shadow of the Comet's puzzles are genuinely terrible, and impossible to figure out without a guide, as a significant number of them are also timed! The first true puzzle you run into in the game involves developing photos with the game giving you 8 chemicals to choose from. You only need to use 4; in a specific order mind you. There are absolutely no hints, except for expecting the player to know the scientific terms for the chemicals that make up the developer and what order to use them… naturally of course! All the other puzzles are not any better, in fact the game starts to make you time everything right with a countdown on top of it all. The last in-game day is impossible without a guide, genuinely. At least the creators seemed to release a guidebook about a year after the release of the game… but honestly, as a kid, I probably would have just dropped the game instead of searching for a guidebook.

The graphics, sound and interface are all a bit dated, even when it was first released in 1993. I mean like, come on, Myst and Day of the Tentacle came out the same year and were infinitely more impressive (Myst) or charming (DotT). Shadow of the Comet has a lot going for it, taking the lore of Lovecraft, something that uses the reader's imagination to physically shape their deepest fears, and using an interactive medium to tell it. I think the especially ghoulish scenes, such as the cemetery and jump-scare monsters are where the game really shows its strengths, making a really thrilling point-and-click adventure game. Just wish it focused on it a bit more. Sound wise, there’s I think 3 unique songs in this game, one of which only plays when you leave the town at the end. It gets annoying pretty fast.

Overall, I don’t think I would recommend Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet to too many, unless you’re dying to try a Lovecraft themed point-and-click. It’s not very fun because you really do need to look up everything you have to do, since so much of it is timed, you don’t have time to mess around and try stuff out. Cthulhu isn’t even really in the game! You see its tentacles kinda at the end, but that’s it. They should have just kept it named Shadow of Comet, since that’s what the game focuses on more, but I guess it doesn’t sound as scary. Some cool scenes, but pretty forgettable overall.

2/5