look. I love kirby. he's my patron saint. I love him and his universe's aesthetic and his franchise's embrace of kindness and eating and naps (the bubblegum religious horror is pretty great too)

I don't always love the games, as I'm not really into platformers, and a lot of this guy's games skew too easy as well

this though! probably the most I'm gonna love a kirby game. really well thought out, crafted, beautifully designed, and it swerved right into unsettling neon pink horror right there at the end

the waddle dee village was great too, and scratched my long enduring city-builder itch. really impressed with this overall

look, the lead characters remain ever as charming and the novelty of seeing phoenix and maya interact with the professor and luke is genuinely very enjoyable, but the actual plot is breathtakingly stupid and is as elegantly delivered as a boeing 737 through a duplex

still, despite the experience, I remain grateful for the opportunity to play as phoenix and maya working alongside each other for what appears to be the last time (boo, hiss)

edit: bumping this up a half star because I just finished playing the epilogue episodes and damn it the sweetness and sentimentality made me tear up

immigrant stories in media are increasingly more common nowadays, which is a great thing, but that does mean that under less than careful hands, some of them can be a bit...undercooked. flavored like a psa, if you will. I was worried that is what we would get here

and we didn't! despite being a rather short game, it's layered and allows itself the narrative privilege of mess, good mess! the kind that serves a great dish. and very ironically, the pat kind of immigrant story I was worried about above is directly criticized in the story, lol

extremely well crafted and told, and I am so hungry rn

I played mutazione, an earlier game of this developer's, a couple years back, and enjoyed it. aspects of the gameplay somewhat often dragged that experience down, but unmistakeable in the game was an abundance of creativity and heart. so when I saw that Die Gute Fabrik had released another bright, intriguing game with an intriguing cast of characters, I decided to lead gut first and check it out, with minimal pre-research

and I am so delighted I did! I loved this experience

to start, the art design is exceptional. lush. unrelentingly creative. the world and its characters are so gorgeously realized. and not just in the classic ways, like with its stunning color palettes, but also in how it interprets every locale, building, character.

the character designs in particular are my favorite, in part because though they can seem abstract in style, they do a better and more meaningful job capturing the beauty and breadth of human visual diversity than every other game, movie, tv show, comic that stacks itself with template mannequin models. zo's nose, kittick's body, stew's eyes, amrita's face—I see these wonderful features in the world around me, but rarely reflected in art.

and this embrace of variety and diversity reflects in the game's themes and narrative. it's a story about community, and finding healing and growth and hope in connection. the crew as the main character is quite fun, and tending to their relationships via the choices you make at each island really drives home the importance of acting as a community

and mechanically, I commend how the game makes it so accessible to explore and tinker with save states and make new choices. the format encourages exploration in a way far improved from mutazione, and every chance taken to learn about the world of saltsea and its players felt so rewarding

I have some potential notes on some final act storytelling choices that I'm still chewing on. nothing capsizing. but I do find myself wondering if they were delivered as well as they needed to be, or if that gnawing is just part of the experience.

all in all, an absolute superb end-of-year surprise from what has now become one of my favorite developers. a sequel isn't necessary for the completeness of the experience, but boy howdy would I not be mad at one. I'll remain dreamsailing until then

messy coming-of-age point-and-click adventure with the family aesthetics/energy of roseanne set on a fictionalized fire island (mostly) in the off-season? why yes I did greatly enjoy this game

I love specificity in stories, and every little detail in this one—the characters and their complex personalities, the content and delivery of dialogue, the fatally accurate period elements (AIM I miss you), all the way down to the subtlest pixel changes on a character's face or in the seasonality of the cursor—just sang, and made for such a rich, enjoyable experience

my only real complaint is that the, uh, period-appropriate jank common in the point-and-click world was a bit of challenge sometimes, especially!! when you discover there can be multiple endings and especially when you realize how wildly unintuitive some of those pathways were to find lol

but, life is unintuitive and this is true to mara's story, so I can't be too annoyed thematically, at least, lol

all-in-all though, great time. and if you don't want to do another playthrough to see the best ending, def look it up on youtube, because it's lovely

I started off playing this game expecting it to maybe be just a cute nostaglic throwback to the N64 era of 3D platformers, and it did start out that way, but by the end I found myself so enamored with the experience, and grateful for all the love woven within it

the endgame for me was definitely the best part—unlocking [redacted] and being able [redacted] just fully delivered on so much of the game's promise. the most fun hours I had, bar none

my biggest critique lies within the first majority bite of the main plot. you're given your basic objective (find/rescue your siblings) and then mostly nothing to begin to explain the world, the characters, the relationships on a fundamental basis until basically the last level. there was an initial foundation-setting with the game missing at the beginning, that then made it feel like playing a very pretty tech demo instead of a fleshed-out universe

and I say this as someone who was collecting the encyclopedia entries throughout. it wasn't enough. by the time I finally able to even understand the basics of the cavern of dreams as a world, the game was quite literally over. I retroactively was then able to appreciate all the different sub-worlds and characters, but I wish that had been the case while I was in those places initially.

basically, a cinematic or two at the beginning with a bit more ground level dialogue could've gone a long way to make the experience more immersive and the later plot payoffs more engaging

on a visual design basis, the game is a real treat. the autumnal tones in the first level are warm and inviting, the castle design in the third level is equally intriguing and chilling, and the gallery of nightmares had me fully clenched and expecting a last act swerve into creepypasta horror. I've always respected the willingness of older platformers to lean into the uncanny and frightening, and found myself wondering if this game would—it did, and in my perspective it's the scariest and most effective I've ever played. good work, I can never witness a flickering light again

will eagerly keep an eye out for any future games from the developer

weirdly the second game in a row I've played where the plot hinges significantly on a corporation's lack of safety protocols leading to a mine collapse and death of its resident miners

a really fascinating collection of highs and lows. every aspect of the art design is superb. the writing is a positive skew mixed bag—the dialogue is fun until it's a bit grating, and the plot is unexpectedly good until the ending, lmao. I do absolutely hate the metafictional author-as-narrator framing, though. the cute upsides to it do not remotely make up for how annoying I find the author character, and how much I'd prefer Jenny, the title lead, to be canonically "real" and not framed exclusively through the male narrator's perspective.

I don't feel it's fair to ding the game for its relatively straightforward game mechanics, because that's what this type of game this is, and it often reminds me of an extremely souped up Humungous Entertainment game in that regard, which I very much enjoyed as a kid. very much scratched that Spy Fox itch

overall: very glad I played, very impressed with how it improves throughout the middle, and am very mad at the ending

between this and kirby this is a great for me playing games about plucky, food-appreciating round boys who love making friends and fighting what are essentially eldritch demons

a deeply flawed game, but still an extremely fun one. I wish it had invested in the restauranteering side of things as much as the aforementioned eldrith demon-slaying, and even more wish its controls had been better ironed out during those fights, but! still loved it

wonderful art design, great characters, winning humor, and an often very fun gameplay loop. super looking forward to wherever dave's adventures go next, and hopefully they include a greater proportion of female characters

and in terms of the fat representation, dave (and others) definitely falls into familiar tropes and patterns with his character, but he is a lead. this affords him more characterization and presence than basically any other storytellers are interested in elsewhere, so! this is still a win

my first major exploration game, and the closest I've ever played to a horror game (which it definitely is at many points!)

absolutely gobsmacked at how ambitious and cleverly designed it is. having the ability to just point in a direction, explore the solar system, and pretty naturally have a compelling story stitched together for you no matter what choices you make was liberating and terrifying and wonderful—

for the 80% of the game where that was true, lol. I'd say curiosity and some mental elbow grease goes quite far in the game, but some of the puzzles? c'mon now. some of those logic leaps are wider than even zero gravity can take you

I think the ending makes a lot of sense for the type of game this is, but I still don't think that means I love it. will have to revisit

anyways: still a wholly unique experience that I treasure a lot

I was able to rent the original once back when it came out, enjoyed the few days I had with it. fast forward two decades, was excited to properly enjoy it! unfortunately, time (and some of the remade elements) have not been kind

stardew valley, which I haven't played in years, kinda ruins this experience for me. it is so densely brimming with so much of all kinds of content, and is accessible and engaging and very well fine-tuned. this remake, however, is very barren, in all kinds of ways

I can understand that the farming isn't the core element of the game—it's the chapter-based family storytelling, which can and does set it apart from its peers. but if that's true, then why is the storytelling so anemic?

why am I lucky to get two lines of different dialogue for any given character on a given day, let alone at all within a season? why do I barely have any context for this town's community, or these characters' relationships with one another? why must I stand around for 30 in-game minutes waiting for a character to uncross their arms for a brief millisecond window so I can give them a gift to maybe unlock more dialogue from them?????????

not only is it barren and unintuitive, it's also janky a lot and depends on using online guides to understand things. hell, even the game's instructions on things are wrong in some cases!

and as a minor note, I don't love the aesthetic redesign. I find many of the changes to be commercial pretty, which is my way of saying flat and lacking in character. the autumnal "muddiness" of the original game created a kind of warm, rustic aesthetic that I loved at the time, but this game feels very generically poppy and bright. and I understand some of the character redesigns (thumbs up on gordy), but in aggregate they clearly soften the original's more interesting and unique edges in favor of a generic, boring prettiness. it's unfortunate and common

very disappointed :( I still very much believe I could be in the market for a game like this, if it were more rich and bold and fleshed out and interesting. but this one isn't, and I'm gonna have to leave it behind, sadly

I love highwater's art direction, in a visual sense. puttering around in your inflatable dinghy can often be a serene, beautiful experience—in it, you peer out into the world around you, paved with cerulean and sinister waters, which at times yield to massive landmarks to the world before climate disaster. everything is eye-catching, eerie, and impressionistic, giving you glimpses into the setting, without revealing too much

even your closest buddies, in how they're visually represented, lack visual definition in even their facial features, lending an air of interpretive mystery to the closest sources of support you have in the game. in this respect, I would say the lack of high definition, of specificity, serves the game well

it does not, however, serve the writing well, which, for me, is the game's greatest (but not only) flaw

I appreciate, and even sometimes love, the intentions behind this game. rag-tag group of set-adrift folks try to work together to survive, escape? a climate disaster suffering world where the remaining institutions of power continue to do business as usual: exploit. it touches on community and the perils of individualism, and isn't afraid to give the player uncomfortable consequences

unfortunately, its writing beyond the point of concept is consistently lackluster, in almost every respect. the biggest crime for me is that the characters—who should matter so much in a story like this—are so thinly sketched they're barely on the page. there's never enough dialogue, and what there is is so plainly generic and lacking in personality from person-to-person. new characters get air dropped into your party with little explanation, and any backstory is short and not the easiest to navigate. some characters barely have enough writing to even meet the threshold of being archetypes. it's really disappointing and, worse, boring

the political worldbuilding is barely better. in moments it offers some decent observational satire, but the circumstances are so impressionistically vague in how they're explained that it's hard to say anything truly sharp or smart with it, other than "corporations bad!" (correct) and maybe "rebellions just as bad!" (eck). I would've said through most of the game it floats around this kind of, apathetic libertarianism, though to its credit, I think the endings do make it somewhat more complex, though barely

I think most other people will be frustrated at the gameplay. the gameplay didn't bother me much—the lack of level turned each combat encounter into a type of puzzle, which I could enjoy—but it isn't super well-tuned. once you figure out how to use josephine, almost every battle is easy to slice down. given my frustrations with the game, I didn't mind speeding through that part

on the flipside, though the exploration aspect of the game looks very pretty, it is deeply underbaked. despite the tantalizing appearance of being able to explore across this flooded environment, it's remarkable on rails for most of the game. and by the time you get to the one area that isn't, you've been trained to not explore that it's almost lucky if you still have the impulse

lastly, there's a lot of polish missing, especially towards the end. typos, score suddenly drops, etc. it's not game breaking, but it is noticeable

I appreciate the experience of the game, and respect the developers' intentions. I hope they can build on what works and improve on their writing approach moving forward, because there's totally potential here.

if you want to play better games the explore similar themes, I'd very highly recommend saltsea chronicles, citizen sleeper, and kentucky route zero