The game is atmospherically heavy, by which I mean two things: the entire narrative is very dependent on its atmosphere and it drowns you in its very weighty melancholy. As you play an AI, the visuals of the game are perfectly and inhumanly fit: you are not a human, you do not see like a human. Therefore, the world you (or rather, the person you guide) explore forever stays alien to you, you only get to know anything through meticulous descriptions that really allow your imagination to work. The soundtrack is very melancholic and I think it fits the themes of the game perfectly.

This is a very narrative focused game which makes you imagine an extensive in-game marine universe with rich environmental descriptions of the flora and fauna. The story itself is mainly told through occasional monologues and a few diary pages, which I found very depressing by the end of the game.

On the gameplay part though, the game is a bit lackluster. I think the ergonomy could seriously be improved. Having to constantly shift through the scan mode and travel mode is a pain and the worst is that you can't read descriptions, which are essential to enjoying the game, while in travel mode: this means that everytime you're in a dangerous situation where you need to move fast you have to stay still and waste your oxygen and outside of that is it also annoying because of the amount of time you spend watching your character moving without being able to do much. Fusing the scan and travel screens and having hovering text boxes would have been much better. The controls are also somewhat lackluster, I think it would have been better to simply click on things to travel rather than move the directional thing. I tried both keyboard and mouse and a gamepad, ultimately settling on the keyboard and mouse because I couldn't figure out how to use the shuttle menu with the gamepad.

The map being limited to such a small screen is also relatively annoying, in my opinion, as it really becomes a bother when revisiting areas. I don't think it would remove annoying to the unknown nature of your environment if the whole screen was used, they could simply use a fog of war instead. If these points were improved, the game would really be a great experience. Nonetheless, I still highly appreciated it.

This game was probably worth being made for the "roguelight" pun alone. That aside, it's a pretty cool roguelite which is suprisingly short. Does a game have to be long to be good? I personally like short games like this that don't overstay their welcome and which I can finish and move on to something else.

The game has a really nice art direction with some gothic artstyle and a very simple pallet of "colours". There are a lot of cute little details in the animations, especially when it comes to the protagonists such as her victory poses, the main menu... Really cool. I really really like the artstyle and the character design is neat too, the heroine really stands out in my opinion.

For a roguelite, the replayability is more limited than usual but as I said, I didn't mind that and on another hand, the game manages to bring something new regularly. The runs are divided into story progression chapters and will unlock the full dungeon after three runs, then customised runs with gimmicks which bring some welcome changes. It's still fairly limited though, why not change the spawn point for example instead of always starting in the same area or have a boss rush, or runs that don't require completing every area for the umpteenth time?

There are also quite a few balancing issues. A lot of the weapons feel underpowered and some of them are way too good compared to the rest. For example, there's a weapon that scatters light directly in front of you on the ground, the range is extremely limiteed, the damage is the same as any weapon and it doesn't have any special effect. Another one just slows down projectiles, which is pretty much useless considering the small range of the weapon. A lot of them just don't stand out and there's seemingly no reason to pick them, hell they can be worse than the default weapon. It's the same for the weapon perks: why pick something that increases my damage after killing an enemy when I can find the same passive but it works at all times? There's seemingly no advantage to the killing version and the game doesn't make a good job at explaining how long it lasts, how much of a bonus it is... What is flash damage? I never understood throughout the entire game.

Another issue I find with balancing is that the game gives you too many upgrade slots. This ultimately means that you can combine all the useful buffs the game provides you and you have to worry very little about making choices, which is a big flaw in a roguelite. I can combine electricity, healing, daze and burning all at once and the buffs such as damage seem pretty limited, so there's hardly any moment in the game where you're stuck in a dilemma. Since the drops get better with the run progression, it's also pretty rare to find multiple equivalent drops and instead you just get better gear, so the game really doesn't raise the question of how to build your character.

Still, I really enjoy the game despite its flaws and I think it's worth playing.

TWOM struck me as too much of a video game for me to care about its subject. It felt very tedious and unfun to play, but without the immersion.

Some moments of the game just broke it for me. Choosing a house to raid and ending in the house of some old people felt like a very forced guiltrip and I couldn't reckon why I just can't move somewhere else. Some combat encounters also just made me roll my eyes, as my gun armed character got wrecked by a completely unarmed opponent.

I feel like this game would work better without being real time. Something like Crusader king with text boxes and choices.

I once dropped the game a very quickly. It has some flaws and some of them are very apparent, and overall it feels like a mountain to be climbed. For example, characters only gain experience points by killing enemies but healers don't have offensive spells so at first you might assume it'll be a pain to level them up. With a big of knowledge, it turns out to be very easy and ultimately my healer was my strongest character. There is a lot of mechanics being introduced at once and only when I understood that I should ignore them and learn as I go did I manage to enjoy the game for what it is.

The game is very atypical for a tactics in my opinion and plays more like a grid-based JRPG where you control up to ten characters at once, though I usually find myself using less people than that and most of them just being meatshield and lures. It's a very fun guilty pleasure in a way and it's relaxing to watch with the nice animations of attacks.

The various random mechanics ultimately add to the pleasure once you learn to master them. One thing the game lacks however is polish in certain aspects and some QoL features. For example, once you select a map to play you cannot go back any more unless you return to the title menu (and hope you saved) which is something that I accidentally did multiple times. Some things feel quite clunky: a master can learn its pupils' spells, but only by being next to them and casting them until the spell levels up. This just makes you grind the same spell in the tutorial map for five minutes.

There are also some missing features that were introducted in other versions of the game. While you might assume a PC release is the final version, it's actually not as NIS rereleased the game on Switch with upgraded graphics and even more features, then an android version of the switch game with additional features that weren't even ported to the switch. Still, I ultimately prefer the pixel art so I'm fine sticking to this version but I would probably not grind to the endgame content because of the lack of some features that make it much easier to grind.

The story is funny and the characters are very cute. The spritework is just about excellent, with a lot of small detailed animations for just about every reaction the characters have. It's a really nice and cute game and I barely paid 3€ for it on sales.

Careful though, for this game does not run properly on some AMD cards. Thankfully I had a nvidia laptop but this is really the proof that the pc port is more than mediocre.

The gameplay is horrendously boring, I was fooled into thinking this is like Roadwarden but there's very little text and most of the game time is doing boring grinding on the spaceship map as you do tasks. It's very tedious dragging the dice/items to the box, and then you have to wait a few seconds for no other reason than they put a useless animation of a loading bar.

The writing part was very disappointing, the text is very sparse and never goes into anything detailed. The characters feel flat and boring, everything also seems very black and white. The game pretends to have mystery but five minutes after learning of them, you're given the answer to those riddles. It also can't shut up about its intrigues with a lot of question marks (Hey you noticed this was a mystery? What's gonna happen? Is this a bad guy????). The choices are also pretty much useless, their only purpose is to get additional info from time to time (mostly useless and boring) or will result in the same outcome, no matter your choices. Everything also seems self contained, no interaction between quests at all which quickly makes the game feel empty.

I also don't like the art it doesn't fit the atmosphere at all imo. This is like a wannabe roguelite but without what makes a roguelite fun, not at all a text focused game like I've been sold.

Pocket Mirror has everything to reach excellence as a RPG Maker mix of horror/cute. Unfortunately, it has some heavy issues that lessen the experience.


A game that’s frustrating to play

As someone who’s played a few RPG Maker games, I certainly don’t have a problem with its default and limited core mechanics such as the grid based walking. This is not where this game has problems.

One of the issues of Pocket Mirror is in its game design, based around puzzles you need to solve to progress throughout the story. A lot of the puzzles are very time wasting because they are based on trial and error and their presentation doesn’t help you in solving them. For example, for one puzzle you get three keys to pick up in a room and you have to go back and forth between that room and another to try them. As far as I know there was no clue on how to proceed. Honestly, I didn’t even understand most puzzles.

The second issue is the most important and goes in pair with the problem of centering the puzzles around trial and error: you die A LOT. Dying in this game has two consequences: the first is that you are sent back to your last save and the second is that you have to endure an absurdly long animation before you can do so. Whenever you die, you have to redo all your progress and that means going through all the cutscenes on your way, which can take forever.

It doesn’t help that checkpoints can be quite rare in certain parts of the game and the nature of the deaths encourages you to go back every single time you trigger a cutscene, out of fear of having to restart them. You never know when you might die: perhaps a conversation will trigger a choice that leads to your death. Perhaps it’ll be a chase that starts as soon as the conversation ends: these chases don’t give you a single second to figure out they started before you die, making it almost mandatory to die on your first attempt. I find the deaths in this game to be extremely cheap for these reasons.


The first hour and a half of the game can be quite frustrating because of these problems and the lack of build-up for the story. That aside, I’d like to talk about what I, despite these problems, liked about the game after enduring a rough introduction.


A very beautiful RPG Maker game

If not for the gameplay quirks such as how you walk, perhaps you would not guess this is a RPG Maker game. The sprite work is absolutely beautiful and rich. The locations can get very varied and detailed with few repetitions. I also noticed some nice animations for the sprites here and there.

The game also has very pretty portraits for every character and some occasional drawings to illustrate a specific scene.

As far as music goes, I wasn’t impressed but neither was I disappointed. On another hand, the sound design works well to complement the atmosphere and the eerie noises used in this game work well. There’s a lot of ambient tunes heard throughout the game as well as a variety of noises meant to distress you.


I can’t say much about the story, I did enjoy it but I don’t think it’s a standout. The start is very slow however and there isn’t much of an introduction to anything at the beginning. It’s the overall experience which is pretty cool.

If you like the trendy mix of horror and cute things, then you will like this game. It doesn’t really do anything surprising but it’s not a bad game either.

About 20 minutes to complete, the game takes you through different puzzles that are extremely linear and whose solution is obvious. Even the items only exist for the sake of solving one thing (seriously, the shovel and pickaxe just magically disappear after one use, and one of these items could have been used twice but instead you'll have to find a rock the second time you need to break a wall) and are conveniently located on your way. There's a decent amount of atmosphere, but really the game hasn't much more to offer and feels like a demo.

Most of your meager twenty minutes will be walking from point A to B, so really nothing much to say about this game. Not very interesting. The ending is very abrupt and you feel like you were just beginning to get into the game when it happens. There isn't much to say about lore or story either.

In recent years, there has been an uprising of farming games and many new developers have tried their hands at it. It has become increasingly difficult for a farming game to stand out but it shouldn’t have been a problem for Immortal Life with its unique setting amongst them: a farming game heavily inspired by Chinese cultivation stories. Unfortunately, the game is very janky. Fortunately, it’s still pretty good.


The game is absolute jank:

Everything from the menus to the gameplay is extremely buggy. The controls are off and sometimes they don’t work, sometimes you select a tool and because you were too fast it doesn’t work. There are many visual bugs too. Despite that, the game is playable and it’s fairly easy to look past the jank if you have played any other game like this. I did not encounter any game breaking bug.

This necessarily detracts from the enjoyment and it’s honestly a wonder why the devs did not invest more effort into the presentation when you see how much content there is behind it. As it stands, there is little hope to see improvements in this aspect, the game having been released as a 1.0 version.

Despite this, I did enjoy the game for about 40 hours because of all it offers.


Cool premises of cultivation:

The game is set in an ancient Chinese cultivation setting and that really rocks with me. I enjoy cultivation novels a lot and I think this game gets it right. It’s not straight out cultivation as you are a unique farmer / cultivator and I think this setup just works.


The game excels at setting up its cultivation atmosphere. There are moments where I was truly amazed: I am fishing in town and after I’m down, I notice a guy has popped up with a quest icon. I talk to him and he mentions the krills I caught, giving me a cooking recipe. That kind of thing feels so organic. There is a real life to the game through the numerous quests you get too, which set up every character’s role and what they do throughout the day.

It’s not perfect though. While the game has some unique moments like that, it also has a lot of static NPCs with the same dialogue throughout the entire game. Even the main characters will say the exact same line the whole game (not even two lines, yes) when you choose to talk to them to improve your relationship.

The translation could also use a rework. Sometimes it’s tough to understand the text.


Diversified gameplay and some unique features

One of the things that compensates the jankiness of this game is that it offers a variety of unique gameplay elements.

Tending to your farm is more fun when you have a spell to summon a rain cloud, magic scythes that tear down crops to collect them and you can use the wind to spread seeds. It’s very effective though it’s a shame that all of these tools are not available from the get go. They play into your MP reserves too, making stats quite important even outside of combat.

Instead of your standard full recovery at night, you only recover your stats partially according to the decorations in your house. Therefore, it becomes a minigame in itself to optimise your recovery. Sleep is also not mandatory and you can skip it if you have enough food instead or haven’t used up your stats.

Very late in the game, you get introduced to a “feng shui farming” system which is interesting but I didn’t really think much of it. As it really involves going back and forth from one side of town to buy things you need, I wasn’t a big fan of it.

There are a variety of other gameplay elements which aren’t quite as unique and in my opinion they also don’t work as well: cooking is a mini-game similar to Overcooked but a little too jank for my appreciation and it gets repetitive fast; the combat seems inspired by a game like Vampire Survivors but the spells aren’t really interesting and it’s also very repetitive, with boring maps on top of it; fishing or alchemy are your usual gameplay and don’t really offer much…


Not so desirable lategame:

I think that around 35 hours in the game, I had seen most of what it had to offer. I unlocked every gameplay element and past that point, all that’s left is the story progression and half a dozen dungeons to clear.

Unfortunately it’s around this time that the game starts being quite tedious. As you unlock more town areas, you get to walk more to reach farther places and there’s no efficient way of teleporting (nor is it easy to unlock). You don’t even get to build the save/storage crystals that allow you to quickly access your storage, unlike at the beginning of the game. This makes some portions of the game really savage: it takes a full minute to walk from the nearest storage crystal to the alchemist / smith and you can only consult their list of crafting by visiting them. It’s even farther away if you need something at the farm instead.

The dungeons also suddenly become extremely hard, as if to counter the player rushing and force you into a grind. You absolutely need to use buffs and upgrade to the maximum every time to get a normal level of difficulty. This really disincentivizes the upgrade system and buffs in my opinion because they become mandatory. You don’t feel the progress of upgrading any more because monsters stay tanky and constantly requiring to cook will also make you tired.

This is also somewhat a problem through the game: you’re constantly forced to engage with every single gameplay element and if you don’t like one or get bored of it, tough luck. If you play another game like Stardew, you know you could easily ignore a feature and get by just fine. You don’t really get alternative ways here, such as paying money to get some of the stuff.


Overall I had a fun time with the game but I’m not sure I would recommend it. The jankiness is really detrimental to the enjoyment of the game and I really wish they had put efforts into fixing that. Ultimately it feels like a forgettable game and it doesn’t really stand out in any way.

Despite the appearances, the game is extremely poorly optimised. On my laptop with a 1050 Ti and a i5-8300H, I would often get frame drops in later areas or the farm and I think the game suffers from memory leaks. And don’t even try to play this game on a HDD, it just doesn’t work somehow.

This is an excellent pc port which is close to a remake of the game, I don’t believe this wasn’t entirely rewritten because of claims I’ve seen that the game behaves differently from the original.

It’s a very solid experience and adds a lot. It’s somewhat buggy but I personally had no game breaking bug at all. Here are the changes which improved my experience.

Seeing more of the map and no screen transitions:

Being able to see a wider screen is genuinely nice and makes the game look incredible on anything bigger than a gameboy. Of course this implies a lack of transition screens, everything is seamless.

Sure this may spoil dungeon rooms and a few secrets but in my opinion it’s worth it and I don’t think it breaks the experience or anything, it just makes it better. My first time playing the game was on this version and it’s just great, I don’t feel like it failed me in any way and I would recommend it.

This feature also brings some changes to the game: monsters can move between maps and dungeon rooms and you can also bring pots around for example, so the solutions to some puzzles may be different. Occasionally it can be confusing because you don’t know where the limits of a room are so you might look farther than you need for the answer.

One other really cool feature, although it’s pretty useless, is that you can zoom out and view the ENTIRE map of the game at once and yes with the monsters being there and moving. This is probably why the game can be heavy on resources.

Better UI, more item buttons:

Really not much to say here. Instead of a bottom white bar taking a part of the screen, it’s just some info in the corners of the screen. Much better.

Four item buttons instead of two, meaning you have to switch items way less often.

And lastly, 60 frames per second!

It does lack a few things some hacks did, like removing the messages every time you interact with a rock or pot. Not a big deal though especially since you can sort of skip the text in this version.

Would Nintendo ever do a port that does any of this? Hell no, even less so now that they have a 3D remake of the game. Instead they’d rather DMCA this guy and this is why we’ll never see bug fixes. Fans are doing one hell of a job making these games so awesome, Nintendo will barely bother to re-release these games in a buggy state once in a while and instead focus on suing people who do a better job. Fuck copyright.

I've complained before that Persona 5 was a bunch of mini-cutscenes that are way too short and ultimately only create superficial plot. Haven uses a similar structure to Persona with short slice of life events but with a single change: there's only two characters and every event relates to the two of them. And boom! The game is only ten hours long but it gives its story more depth and manages to create something meaningful.

I really enjoyed playing through this game and it is a solid example of slice of life in video games. I strongly appreciate how they don't hold just make the entire concept of a physical relationship disappear like many games do, in the spirit of puritanism, but instead they freely refer to it, just like traditional French works.

I do have to complain that the gameplay is too simple and gets repetitive very fast. What's more, the controls of your most common action, moving, are pretty bad. The game hardly renews itself: every map is the same with exactly the same things to clear out and every so often you have to fight a few monsters to clean the area. It doesn't help that you'll usually miss one spot or a monster which is not obvious, which just makes things more tedious.

The environment variety is also poor: there's only four biomes and 90% of the game is in the same one. There's more variety to monsters and I did feel like I was progressing through the combat until I unlocked everything, knew how to deal with monsters and then some of the last battles were just tedious too especially when I had to clear multiple groups per map.

A lot of the game's rhythm relies on the pacing of slice of life events that come up throughout the adventure or when you go back to base. The slice of life is a genuinely enjoyable experience, however most of the game is spent cleaning similar islets of the grasslands, looking for that one last hidden thing to clear the islet and hearing the same repeated overworld dialogues.