I'd been eyeing this for a while because I love a good city builder, and it seems like there's a weird deficit for those in the fantasy genre. Got it with some store credit and hung out for a few hours and it just didn't really strike anything with me in the way I'd expect from being advertised as "the best part of city builders made into a rogue game."
I can't pin it exactly, but it feels equally too simplistic and too maximalist? Having to move buildings around constantly to fit them into a harvesting radius means you're not designing an aesthetic town as much as functional, fluid town, and the size of the build space means you always have to build roads out into new glades and move camps way far out from the village centers, so none of the satisfaction comes from placing buildings and more from "numbers go up, now the queen is less mad at me." It's fine, but it's not engaging the parts of my brain I was expecting it to, and honestly just makes me want to play Loop Hero more - an equally basic game that's at least a little more addicting to me and allows you to spend some time building a cohesive fantasy world with little implied stories playing out within it. Here, it feels like the world does not matter past a means of production, the things you're doing don't matter, and thus the time you're spending doesn't matter. Maybe that changes after a solid 30 hours or so, but I'm seeing other people's reviews saying it stays true for quite a while.

Every step a journey, every dungeon crawler a new plaque in my heart. I don't have anything new to say about Shadow Tower that I haven't said about King's Field, but oh my god it goes above and beyond with the vibes. As soon as the first title card popped up with the blotty typewriter font and the dithering, my soul was bound and I fell in love. I'm chaining myself down trying not to start Abyss right away, but it's technically irrelevant to what I'm working on right now and I can't justify it yet...

I actually got kinda burnt out with all the side content (something I didn't think would happen after playing the first game) and decided the best way to get myself forward was just to watch a playthrough of the last 6-ish hours.
It's definitely a perfect sequel, it's bigger and better in almost every way, but it still feels too close to the first game in a lot of ways that prevent it from hitting the same charm for me. I think that's why I ultimately burnt, it felt more like I'd taken a year's break from Yakuza 1 and then jumped back in right where I'd left off, instead of starting a fully new game, even regardless of the fact that there's a timeskip and new things are happening. It's still great, undeniably a lot of fun and the side content is really engaging, but I can't help but wonder how they could've pushed it further. At the very least, it's got me excited to play Y3 knowing how it mixes things up for the new console gen.

To preface: I'm very interested in HalOpe, and Starbage's work in general, and I think this is a really cool project for them even if it didn't hit me the same way I was hoping it would. I think this game is fine, I just have some constructive critiques!

HalOpe's main mechanic is dialogue, which contains loose puzzles (bring an item to a character who sounds like they want that item) but mainly exists to convey tone. Unfortunately, the writing suffers from sticking to a static voice, which makes that primary mechanic a lot less exciting as you enact it with roughly the same expected results over several conversations. Most characters will have the same awkward inflection, and a lot of their characterization is shown through the use of ellipses, outside of some more confident monologues about their struggles. There are outliers in the form of the occasional "RPG Maker freak" NPCs that we always love to see, a ghost girl or a shadow creature or a self-aware monster with a goofy dialogue gimmick, but HalOpe stays relatively safe with the types of sprites you're shown (mostly cute girls*, which isn't a bad thing direction for the art, but leaves a little wanting when they're mostly all the SAME cute girl with a slightly different flavor), and these "RPGMFs" don't serve a big purpose, even as comic relief or abstract horror as we see them in other games.
It's a shame, because the art is pulling a lot of weight and I want to be more interested in the characters for how well they're generally drawn, but more often than not they exist as little more than an almost self-aware NPC type that acknowledges it's weird to ask the player for help with a mundane task, but needs to for the sake of the game working. I made it about halfway through the game before I decided it wasn't entirely for me and I wasn't necessarily getting anything new and different from the experience, but I did look at a playthrough to glean some more of the visuals, and man I love the pastel area you get to later on. I don't want to say the world feels less "alive" than it could, because that implies I want it to be bigger budget or something, but I would really love to see it fleshed out a little more, even cluttered up and more experimental.

I'll be looking out for what Starbage does next!! I hope they keep making games!

I think it's best as a supplement to the physical board game, for when you're already familiar with the rules and any number of factors are preventing you from seeing your friends as often as is necessary to excuse playing complex board games with them. It's much more fun playing IRL, of course, even if it's a more expensive and demanding experience.

I wish there was a little more focus on Kyle Ferrin's charming art, if they'd maybe gone the Wingspan route and just puppet-animated his illustrations for the game, but the 3D models grew on me after a few matches and I'm just happy to be able to play this more often, when I see my friends in-person so rarely.

I'm conflicted on Babbdi because by all means I should really love it, and I do, but the discomfort isn't quite enough compared to something like Off-Peak that puts in a solid amount of effort to be a uniquely artistic and handcrafted piece on top of being "weird for weird's sake."
Babbdi's biggest flaw in this conversation is its use of AI textures to add to its eerie nature. Given, this was 2022 and it's still early Dall-E generation, as opposed to a "I couldn't afford an artist so here's an earnest attempt to make something look good with AI prompts," but we've all been through too much these past two years for me to look back on it and feel charmed by how bad it worked back then. It is, I'll say, effective at making the world feel sloppy and alien, and I would maybe even cite Babbdi as "the one good use of AI," but I think that would be contrary to everything me and my community have fought for as artists since this tech came out in the first place. If I think about it any longer, I start to imagine if this game had the same level of artistry as Cosmo D's games, then it starts to lower Babbdi's charm even more by comparison.
It's not a bad game, though! The setting is uniquely horrific, and the game guides you through its corpse with a wonderful movement system as you meet its inhabitants and find surreal rewards on your search for a ttain tricket ou toff toowm, t scseape Babbdi froeferver

In theory, this game is doing a lot of really cool stuff. The art direction is phenomenal, I love the atmosphere and the little quirks, but it never takes any of its individual components far enough to really feel good to play. If it had leaned just slightly harder into being a roguelike imsim, if it had made the runs feel even slightly more varied, I think it would've doubled my interest. As it is, it's worth trying for sure, but literally three runs in it starts to feel repetitive as you realize you're just doing the same thing but with new equipment that makes it slightly easier to run through a room opening all the drawers and then running back to your ship.

I'm super bad at these kinds of games, but Severed Steel takes the mechanical-prestige begging-for-a-speedrun format and makes it bombastic enough to hold anyone's attention regardless of skill level. It's short, sweet, and doesn't ask you to play longer than you want to, but provides a few interesting reasons to go back - namely the Rogue Steel mode that adds a few arcadey touches to the main game that feel like the developers' excuse to keep experimenting with the format in a way that feels cohesive outside of the campaign.
I do feel a little bit like my enjoyment of any given level hinged more on how hard the soundtrack went than anything else, and I think that speaks to how integral the music is to this experience. There's some great stuff here, but when the beat dies down too much I start to lose some of the adrenaline and my flow breaks.

As excited as I was for this game, the opening hours didn't really spark anything in me. The setup is sort of anticlimactic, it presents this open space for you to explore, but moving through that space doesn't feel good and exploration is only really rewarded with small amounts of money. The game starts you off with a purposefully shitty bike, that doesn't go fast or feel particularly good to ride, but then once you get your actual real bike it doesn't end up feeling that much better, I think in part due to the speed and the emptiness of the world.
Then they do the Death Stranding thing where you get to the first big open stretch, and a song with lyrics starts playing while you traverse the space, and my body's natural reaction to this is to get choked up and feel things because it's such a cool way to heighten the emotions while letting you absorb how big this space is. The problem is that this space is little more than just "big." There's not a lot to do but go from point A to B, and when the traversal feels just ok, and the landscape is really just empty space with some rocks here and there, there's not much incentive to continue "just going forward" after you've seen a few different landmarks and satisfied yourself with the sparse rewards therein.
I'm really interested in the story, from what I've heard of it, but I also don't really know if this is a unique enough experience to justify being a Big Old Open World Game, even if it is a short one.

Sometimes I love a simple little shmup, and Black Bird hits that spot by not being incredibly difficult, not incredibly long, and bringing out some of the best Kimura art direction I've seen so far.
The style is much darker than you might expect, as we're essentially shown the death of a child who's corpse then mutates into a terrible petulant bird that kills people by spitting acid and screeching loud enough to combust organic matter.
How this happened, nobody will know.
There's a lot of playful energy to the darkness, though, and it makes the game feel incredibly unique - especially for a shmup. The pinhole-film style that gradually evolves into steampunk and eventually cyber-bourgoisie(???) absurdity, with some of the same vibes as Kirby's colorful eldritch gods popping out here and there. You can tell the team had a blast drafting up all the little guys and conceptualizing the locales while finding spots to put in little signature flourishes.
The audioscape is just as impressive as the visuals, Kimura even got an opera singer to perform for the soundtrack, which adds such a unique twist to the art direction that it really feels like the bow on top of the whole experience.

I forgot to review this because I was like "I haven't played enough to form any thoughts about it." Turns out, I have over 10 hours in it and I guess I just don't have anything interesting to say about it.
My friend loves this game, can't get enough of it, has started 3 different characters just to play more of it, I was like "hey man don't burn out before we all get to play together" and he was like "I promise that would never happen." Then Helldivers 2 came out and they ditched the campaign even though we were gonna wait to play HD2 all together and they didn't even tell me they'd bought it. That doesn't really matter, but maybe it says something about the half life on this game, as it doesn't really seem like my friend has made it past the 11 hour mark on any of his 3 campaigns even though he says its one of his favorite games of all time. I can collect that the progression reaches a plateau around this point, when the loot becomes little more than an inconvenience, and all you're doing anymore is spamming hotkeys to decimate crowds of enemies until you get to level up again.