Conceptually, I'd love this game. It's one of the rare "wall defender" type of game where you defend a wall against hordes of enemies and there are few examples of this game, perhaps the best still being Elona shooter from a decade ago because I never managed to find a newer and more complex game.

Unfortunately the game is very shallow and also repetitive. There is little weapon variety, the characters are very similar and every run ends up being the same. There's also what, five different enemies? And the story can be completed in an hour. There are only a few very short interactions to be seen outside of it.

The gameplay is also pretty braindead honestly. You just blindly shoot and you're good, there isn't much thought or strategy involved. At most there's a bit of RNG in the survival mode.

The sprites are part of the game's charm, unfortunately while they look good, there's hardly any animation at all. So overall, it's a pretty average experience.

Cuisineer is a fun game that mixes elements from a few different other games. In this game, you're a cook that goes hunting for food to serve it to your customers. The restaurant management reminds me a lot of moonlighter, whereas the exploration part is similar to a roguelite version of Rune Factory.

The game is pretty fun but it's honestly flawed all over the place and there's a lot that could be improved. The balance of the game especially doesn't make any sense at all. I just can't understand some things, like why the most basic tutorial messages only appear at Day TWENTY (and that’s only first the very first one) to tell you useful info that should have been explained right away and which you probably figured out on your own in the meantime. It's the same for everything in the game, from some systems like weapon upgrading being seemingly useless to the amount of resources required being too much or too little, to the difficulty of the restaurant management... The game is still fun though but it would be a top contender of the genre for me if it was more focused.

The start is extremely slow with a lot of things left unexplained until way too late and systems that sort of discourage experimentation. For example, brewing costs 500 coins and there's no explanation for how it works until you try it out a few times to understand it. It's actually a pretty cool system but it's too expensive (the devs lowered the cost to 100 now thankfully), it takes your weapon away for one day and you don't have any idea what the weapon mods do either, nor are you informed that brewing will lock one slot forever. It also takes quite a fortune to acquire your first weapons.

The game made me actually believe I'd quickly be given one equipment of each type, because every new area gives you a new weapon and paying the debt gives you one piece of armour. But guess what? It took me over ten hours to pay the second debt and get... basic boots, something I already bought and dropped in dungeons for a good ten hours as well. Eventually you get a lot of weapons just from running the dungeon but they're mostly useless and the way the equipment mods work, I find that nearly every piece of equipment I obtain is unneeded. You can't even sell them so it really feels like cumbersome junk, especially considering that they take inventory slots.

This creates a displeasing gameplay loop where you don't even want to go any further than needed in dungeons. Why go beat a boss when my inventory is full? I only get the same materials as normal monsters and random equipment which is no better than checking the daily sales of the smith. I don't even get money and can't sell them, thus there's never any incentive to beat a boss. All you get is an achievement for beating them once and one quest requires you to beat floor 6 of the first dungeon, that's it! This part of the game could really be improved.

As for dungeoning itself, it's the best part of the game. The combat is solid and the maps, albeit a bit repetitive in patterns you can start to recognise (the dungeons are essentially a random arrangement of pre-made rooms) are beautiful and fun. Still, there are once again many flaws. My biggest gripe is probably how the cooldown of special attacks is so long, thus making the combat pretty monotonous as you can only spam the same basic attacks for most of the time. It would have also been a great addition to be able to switch between the two weapons you can equip, instead of only having one main weapon and the second slot being used for the special attack. A few more special attacks would have really made this game into a very awesome dungeon crawler.

That aside, the combat is tight there's no denying it. A lot of the bosses are fun and special mention to the second boss of the snow area which is straight up awesome. It's too bad the game doesn't really reward you for beating them. On another hand, the mobs can get annoying sometimes: the rice sprites are just about everywhere which really gets tedious at some point, especially considering how 1) they're so small you can hardly track them 2) they get hyper armour from their buffs and thus can easily destroy your crowd control. Hell, they can literally become immortal if two rice priests are buffing them and it's hard to notice. Oftentimes the combat can get really messy with many enemies and the screen being unreadable and this is where a few more special attacks would have shined.

As for the restaurant, it is also very unbalanced. First of all, running the restaurant an entire day (which is pretty much required) is twenty minutes!!! This is insane compared to a game like Dave the diver where this part of the game is very short (and also, unlike here, very involved with the player being actively tasked to do things). It's long and mostly very boring, especially at the beginning. For most of my ten hours of play, I never had enough customers to fill the restaurant and be busy and now that I have upgraded it to the maximum level and almost gotten max reputation, only now do I get to actively play the restaurant. This took me about 15 hours!!! And this is only during three times of the day (lunch, afternoon tea and dinner) during which customers are increased, the rest of the day is still very calm with perhaps two to three customers at once. This part is very obviously flawed.

The restaurant gameplay is very simple and could be improved too, but overall it's pretty good for what it is, if only you had enough customers. It doesn't require much thinking and doesn't offer much in the way of management but it's still fun to run and watch. Still, a game like Dave the diver really shows a lot of things that Cuisineer could have taken inspiration from. There's also a tight balance between dungeoning to get resources and running the restaurant which... also is pretty messy. Throughout the whole game I had way too much flour and rice (they're everywhere...) and I was mostly fine with most ingredients, but some of them like the pork and beef meat as well as cheese are extremely difficult to obtain because the enemies dropping them only appear in specific areas and are rare. Yet they end up being the most prized ingredients for your recipes and endgame recipes can even use five pieces of meat at once! One dungeon run would give me about twenty pieces of the ingredient I needed!!!

Finally, while the game introduces itself like a farming sim with a clock, a town with villagers to talk to… All of that aspect is extremely superficial. The dialogue is extremely uninteresting be it optional dialogues or the main quest which resumes itself to “pay your debt”. The villagers don’t react to anything you do, not even beating bosses for example and every side quest is structured the same way where they give you a random situation requiring you to find them an item and then explain what’s great about the recipes they’re giving you, but it doesn’t feel very convincing to read that part either and the repeated structure just gets previsible and boring, very fast. There’s very little to do in town other than buying things and completing your quests. There are birthdays, but it seems only two people a month (so eight in total) get to have a birthday out of all villagers and having them give you gifts instead of you doing it seems like a convenient way that the developers scrapped a planned social aspect. As for the clock, it really doesn’t matter : there’s little point to only running the restaurant for half a day and it doesn’t matter any more when you go dungeoning, because you get an unlimited amount of time and come back at 11pm. The clock could have been more useful if for example your dungeoning time was limited or you could come back and forth, for example dungeoning during the calm morning and coming back for the lunch rush. Once again, I think Dave the diver figured out a great way to handle this with days being separated into multiple parts and getting to do one action per part. Here, the clock is essentially the countdown until you close your restaurant.

Everyone praises this game for its gameplay but I believe that a lot of people are forgetting that the gameplay is not just the combat, but the entire interactive part of the game. Yes, SMT5 has solid combats and as always, the demon management part is also good but what else does it do well?

The old dungeon crawler style which is simple yet works was replaced by a bland, generic and unbearable 3D world. The game feels jank to walk through and ironically emphasizes exploration to find collectibles, which doesn't make it any more interesting. The combat encounters are no longer random but I can't find any pleasure in going after the overworld enemies and seeing them move like them, randomly agitating themselves in this empty world.

Yes, this was enough to make me drop the game. This is a big chunk of the gameplay and I personally can't ignore it, the whole game feels jank and cheap because of things like this and I'm not enough of a SMT enjoyer to just care about the combat.

TLG is a weird game which I’m not sure how I feel about. This is the last Fumito Ueda game I played, after completing Ico and SOTC which I both enjoyed greatly. Ico was the last one I played and hearing that TLG was similar, I decided to jump right into it.

My first experience with the game was that while it has immediately apparent flaws, it felt like a magical experience. Trico is really an endearing creature with detailed animations and a behaviour that, for the first hours of the game, is incredible. You’ll spot the wild creature playing with a chain, being attracted by the smell of a pot or sniffing random stuff and it is nice to just look at it (spoiler, this pretty much doesn't happen in the later half). You also have the two characters obviously getting closer over the first few hours, until they eventually trust each other. Magical is really the word that comes to my mind to describe this part of the game, I was especially impressed by the part where you have to rely on Trico to grab you in midair while you jump as that completely renewed the logic of the game, where the protagonist was the one taking the initiative for everything and Trico was, until that point, just a wild animal indirectly supporting you.

My first problem with the game appeared around halfway through, when you almost reach the top of the main tower. At that point, something happens to make both your characters fall. I cannot emphasise enough how much I hated this moment. Ico and SOTC are both short games with a very clear progression, in Ico after around an hour you’ll know you need to go to two places to unlock the final area and SOTC will right away tell you that you need to fight 16 colossi, you know pretty much exactly how far you are from finishing at any point. This led me to believe TLG would also be a pretty short game and indeed the game does lead you in that direction. Everything else seems to indicate that. Is there really enough in this game for a 10+ hours game? No, clearly not, I’ll detail this in the next section. And here is the problem, the game suddenly throws you back down and you have to climb yet another way, for about two more hours and guess what? The game does it again! You are thrown down twice and have to climb up again.

At this point, the magic just broke. I thought I was almost done and suddenly I’m hit with “not this shit again” about everything the game had to offer. You’re telling me I still have multiple hours of this “looking for a lever” thing? Trico is not listening to me again? Oh please, just let me end this game. Everything pretty much turned into a distasteful frustration. I am not sure if it is because of my negative feelings, but I feel like the game just became worse outside of a few moments. It doesn’t help that everything feels like an unneeded filler at this point, since the game just repeats the same pattern all the time, but I feel like Trico’s AI just started bugging all the time.

It’s obvious that Trico is on rails for most of the game and this doesn’t actually bother me, in fact I think this should have been the entire game. It’s obviously very difficult to create an AI of a giant beast that will be exploring corridors and solving puzzles and it shows. Whenever Trico has any freedom, he’s likely to just blank out at your orders, go back and forth, bark at you like you’re asking for the impossible and then after five minutes of waiting, he suddenly does the thing you’ve been trying to order him to do. Yes, Trico feels like a real animal WHEN he is on rails. When the AI takes over, he’s just blanking out and acting buggy. Trico staring at a wall is not lifelike. Trico doing two jumps then decides to go backward or blanking out before the third jump is not lifelike. It is just frustrating, especially when the game announces you’re not even close to the end and the game starts being repetitive, you just want to finish it and it hits you very hard how clumsy Trico is. It is obvious this is very badly managed or I would have said the game definitively needs to make Trico speaks more. Trico already barks and complains a lot, the problem is that it happens for something he'll suddenly do 5 minutes later so it doesn't clue you into anything at all. Another very frustrating aspect of Trico blanking out is that you need to restart some segments if you die, which can happen a lot because of other reasons I mention, and especially in the lategame they distance the checkpoints more than before, with segments where you need Trico to do something and it takes forever every single time you restart.

For the first part of the game, I think these problems are much less apparent because Trico is pretty much on rails all the time. The game only teaches you that you can command him after a few hours, so I am guessing you didn’t need to press R1 at all until then (I played Ico first, so I just assumed I can use it and never realised the tutorial didn’t tell me about it). There’s a logic I quickly learned: if Trico doesn’t do something, you probably need to look for another path and it proved to work (not that it’s a positive aspect of the game, the progression is often very artificial: you see a path but no you need to go another place first for an interaction with Trico THEN you can finally go there). I was almost never stuck and would always quickly find the way to go. This turned out much less obvious in the second half of the game as Trico’s AI would just bug out and there are things that just don’t make sense. There are a few parts of the game where you need to just walk to the right spot to trigger something or the game won’t progress. The voiceover gives you some clues, but even for these you sometimes need to trigger something or you can wait forever and it just won’t tell you anything. Sometimes, it also spoils the game right away without giving you any time to think. In fact, I think it was meant to spoil you all the time, it’s just that I didn’t always trigger it fast enough (or didn’t trigger it at all, most likely). There are also these dumb moments where you need to feed Trico or he won’t lead you to the next spot and the only way to learn is either the voiceover (which can make you wait forever, as I said) or looking everywhere and not finding anything (and if you’re lucky you’ll find the food before being stuck). Since the food is usually hidden somewhere, you just have to guess that it's time to actually look for food, not very intuitive.

By the way, most of the commands are literally useless. I don’t think I ever needed anything other than plain R1 and R1 + circle / square which orders him to smash something (which I did like twice, including the tutorial). I have no idea why they didn’t just remove this and simplify the game.

I mentioned earlier the game has apparent flaws but I could ignore them: the longer the game goes the more frustrating they are. The character’s controls are terrible and surprisingly worse than Ico. Not only is it very annoying how frail they made the boy this time, with a more “realistic” approach (not being able to run/jump while carrying something, no jump spam, struggling animations when climbing…) but they made things very annoying and confusing. The auto-grab is really a pain especially when you press the button to let go but he decides to grab something midfall, then you have the controls which can be confusing. In Ico, you approach a ladder and he climbs it, here you need to press the grab button. The thing I hated the most is how they’ve removed the auto-tracking for jump grabbing things. In Ico, you’ll never miss a chain because of the tracking but here, you really need to aim for that chain. The camera is also pretty terrible and really unfit for the combo of large beast + tight environments. It fades out to black a lot whenever it can’t manage to show something and it’ll often not show you what you want. I’m glad we can at least control it like a normal 3D game this time around though, as I really dislike the Ico camera. I don’t understand though why in every Fumito Ueda game, you just fucking can’t move the camera around without it centering back on the main character especially if you’re moving. What if I just want to observe some landscape?!

I like the overall design of the environment in this game and it looks very pretty with the cell shaded style and all. Not very immersive though because it quickly becomes apparent how much the place is designed for the player. Ico slightly had this problem but here it’s really emphasised. Literally everything you need has a magical lever to solve your problem. What’s the most immersion breaking is that they could have at least made a logic to those levers, but no. A gate you need to open will have a lever close to it, but not all gates will. Trico has a lever for the armour and chain at the very beginning, but not later beasts. Whenever you go off tracks you’ll notice how much the game has designed a path specifically for the player. Aside from these levers, the rest of the game is just as nonsensical. What’s the purpose of this entire place? It’s just full of empty rooms, big corridors and gates like the entrance of a castle. There isn’t a single room with anything useful and whenever it’s not empty, it’s some weird design like the traps that make Trico mad. Even the placement of the guards is weird.

And the guards… this is by far the worst part of the game. The guards are really annoying and the mechanic of mashing keys to free yourself is utterly terrible. Being pursued by them while you have to solve a riddle is just terrible. There’s even a section where I just restarted because if you get spotted by them, it’s impossible to have the time to pull a specific lever before they grab you. Then there’s the fights, where you just watch Trico beating the guards and can’t do anything. This is also where Trico’s animations are the worst as he’s jumping around in a really clunky manner and this is even more so terrible because it means you can’t even stand still on his back, remove spears or anything because it’ll constantly shake you. Oh yeah, you can’t even AFK because of this so don’t try it. Then after the fights Trico is angry and you need to appease him, which really gets tiring especially toward the end of the game where you need to do it multiple times in a row because they kept piling up fights. The end of the game is really a terrible section honestly with some of the worst segments of the game.

There were many cool moments but it feels like the game should have really just been that without the extra fillers: the first time you cross a bridge in midair and need to get rid of the eyes, the fight against another beast, when you’re left alone with the other beast, etc. Then the game would have been about 5-6 hours just like the previous games and I think people would appreciate it a lot more. The flaws are pretty easy to ignore when you make the game a much shorter experience. It really doesn’t offer anything to climb towers for an additional 6 hours with the same riddles all the time and frustrating mechanics. Some of the cool moments are even ruined because of how often they are used. I was really impressed the first time you have Trico jump and rescue you by grabbing you when you’re falling but then they kept doing it all the time. You also have the “oh no he missed you but surprise he’s using his tail to grab you” which just doesn’t work after the first time.

Remember how I mentioned that Trico and the boy become closer over the first few hours? It all stops after that and there’s pretty much no evolution until the last 30 minutes. There’s a part where Trico will actually fight the eye dudes because you’re in danger, but then he goes back to being scared by them again. That’s about it.

Finally, I’ll mention the lack of variety if I didn’t explicitly say it already. It’s always about finding a magical lever or having Trico jump somewhere, there’s pretty much nothing else. They really could have thought of better interactions, both for the boy and the protagonist. Maybe using a crate to push a button? Hell, Ico already had more ideas. They even added an item, the mirror, which you will use for about one hour in the entire game because it’s unavailable the rest of the time.

So despite all this, I actually enjoyed most of the game. It sorts of feels like a Ghibli movie, but that’s really about it. Even the story is honestly pretty uninteresting, Ueda gets praised for the minimalistic approach but I really don’t see anything special in this case, the story doesn’t complement the game or add anything, neither artistic nor a message. It doesn’t even particularly tie into the lore of the previous games. This game is basically Ico 2.0, some things better and a lot worse and it’s not terrible by any means but it’s definitely disappointing overall. I've seen people praise this story telling style but I feel like the game is very generic, it's almost just a Ghibli movie in my opinion. Yes, I like a minimalistic approach but really, what is left here? If I missed some details, I'd be happy to hear about it. I know there are some details in the game but they are really way too sparse. Compare to a game like Dark Souls for example, which is inspired by Ueda and also has a unique style of story telling. I'm not talking about how it has lore through item descriptions: have you noticed how much the environment tells you? You'll find statues of specific characters, broken things that indicate something was removed here, paintings, etc. and they clue you into additional lore. TLG just has bland environment, there's maybe two rooms (like the one with the mirror at the beginning) which clue you into anything but it's so lackluster that I think anyone theorising about this game's story is just inventing their own, entirely.

Even if you're a fan of Ueda's previous games I'm not sure I would recommend it. I would like to say that it's worth playing at least the first few hours and then you can drop it, unfortunately many of the good short events happen lategame so you'll still miss a lot.

Chained Echoes is not perfect, it's not the most artistic game I've ever played and it definitively has its flaws, but it was an extremely fun experience. I went into the game not expecting much but I was really surprised by what the game gave me.

Let me start with the worst parts: yes, this game's story is a mix of maybe too many things, you don't always understand where the creator wanted to go and many things feel rushed if not unexplained. Despite that, I think the game has a likeable cast, an extremely solid intro of over ten hours and the story manages to be good enough to be enjoyed and have its touching and memorable moments.

That aside, what this game does is something I don't often see in a JRPG. The gameplay is extremely FUN. From the combat to the exploration, this game really nails it and in a lot of ways it reminded me of why I loved CrossCode. You have to go from point A to B but the level is so big and full of stuff that you might spend hours just looking up for every small chest instead of doing the main quests.

As for the combat, I never got bored of the combat system and every trash fight was enjoyable even if not providing a challenge because the game has so many fun skills to use or combos to create between different abilities that I really enjoyed just mindlessly wrecking a horde of trashmobs, instead of trying to save my MP while spamming physical attacks.

And perhaps the strongest point of the game is the sidequests. The game has very humorous and lively quests that are unlocked as you progress or that you discover by exploring. They're all fun and there is a LOT of optional areas to explore. Hell, at some point the map really opens up and you get an overwhelming amount of things you can do at once, I thought it was a blast.

Chained Echoes is a really good game. It knows how to be fun and I could feel the author's spirit. I don't care that it's flawed, I think it's fine the way it is because ultimately the author wanted to do an homage to his childhood games and I think he managed to do so.

Somehow this game manages to be worse than the previous one despite showing evolution. Unfortunately, it evolved in all but the right ways. See my review of the first game for more details.

Everything that made the charm of the first game is essentially thrown away, I'll just list some comparisons:

The minimalistic story is replaced with a much more involved narrative. Unfortunately it only serves to show how poor the writing is, whereas it didn't matter in the previous game because the story is relatively unimportant. The abundance of mini-cutscenes is also quite frustrating, the game taking control away from you for usually no good reason. Every so often you have to watch your character agitating the lamp in multiple directions as if surprised by a sound or something, instead of experiencing it yourself. It's the same for multiple scares, which don't work because the game takes control away from you at that point. Not only does it break immersion but it's simply frustrating because of how often this happens are and they really break the flow.

I must admit however that the story has a good surprise toward the end, but that's about it.

Where the previous game could have benefited from being more open ended, this one is even more linear than before. Almost every single location is locked in a precise way by those giant monsters or barricades that magically disappear when it's convenient for the plot, requiring you to take the path the game wants. The directions are also clearer but in a way that only emphasizes the linearity. The annoying dog appears every 10 meters to tell you where to go and it is extremely immersion breaking.

The chases are replaced by mostly awful boss battles that require you to die multiple times and go through the same ordeal to solve them. The biggest problem with them is that they're extremely tedious to redo and require a lot of waiting every single time. This is a very intentional design in many segment of the game where it's obvious that the developers intended for the player to die and it's just infuriating, especially when you consider that they did not put checkpoints and require you to backtrack in many cases. Oftentimes, the boss is just a matter of evading attacks for a few minutes before you can do anything that matters and this is where you die if you do not have the solution, forcing you to restart a sequence of waiting for minutes before trying again.

The biggest change by far : the environmental sound design is much tamer and ordinary. What made the first game stand out was how powerful the environment was, the strong sound of cicadas or the wind in the rice fields. This created a truly unique and captivating atmosphere. This time around, the town is mostly silent and you'll only hear your footsteps. What's worse, the monsters are much more aggressive and most of them have very annoying and violent sounds that completely shatter any peacefulness. Even the dog seems completely out of the loop, why put such an annoying sounding pomeranian? A much lower pitched dog would have done the job better, like in the first game.

Adding onto that, the monsters themselves are rather boring. In the first game, you explore a town where most monsters can easily be avoided and are almost harmless. This helped to create this mystical atmosphere which is not just horror. In this game, you walk through a desolate town where at every corner there's a white ghost looking to chase you for 100 meters while spamming the same annoying scream and death traps are also much more common. There are also less ways to interact with enemies such as throwing rocks so that the ghosts would not pursue you any more. Therefore the appeal of exploration is reduced and there are more chases through areas instead.

All of this just shows that the developers did not grasp what made the first game so interesting and instead invested into much cheaper directions, making a game which keeps the flaws but doesn't have any of the pros of the previous one. I would not recommend to play this game at all and it's pretty terrible in my opinion. The first game is also much shorter, it doesn't help that this one is double the length when it has nothing to show.

Continued by my review of the second game.

I'm genuinely conflicted by this game. On one hand it's a very nice "horror" game. Night Alone is beautiful with an incredibly well done sound design that carries the charm of a lonely walk through a town at night. It has light horror elements that are almost poetic and it really builds an atmosphere around that.

On the other hand, it tries too hard to do horror by throwing some unneeded screamers at you, some of the sounds being way too high and breaking the game's peaceful atmosphere and an absurdly frustrating difficulty at multiple points of the game.

The difficulty is really the biggest flaw of the game in my opinion. One of the things I really loved about the game at first is that it was not hard and felt very different from every horror game I've ever played. You walk around spirits and most of them are almost harmless, the remaining ones are like a puzzle and each of them have an appropriate way of being approached. You're not running, your life is not under a big threat, in many ways it reminded me of a movie like Spirited Away. It's also quite similar to Yume Nikki in the amount of weird and unique things you'll find through your adventure.

But aside from that, not only does the game throw more and more boring chase sequences at you but they're just absurdly difficult and require almost perfect timings (moving as soon as a cutscene is over, managing your stamina...) to survive. The checkpoint system contributes to making this frustrating especially late game. There's even a boss fight which feels completely out of place in a game like this.

I really wish the game had just stuck to the peaceful horror kind instead of trying more. Even the sole fact of walking in such a charming city at night makes it a one of a kind game because I've never seen any game replicate a feeling like this.

I think the game could have also benefited from being more open ended and less linear. Since we're just collecting trinkets through the entire game and there isn't really much of a narrative progression, such a structure would have been perfectly fitting and would have amplified the ingenuity of the design. But it still feels very nice to discover this small city and I really enjoyed that part.

Ultimately, the game doesn't seem to understand what it's good at and tries to appeal to generic concepts instead. Maybe it was riskier, but this game could have been great without being linear, without a "proper story" and without following horror tropes. This also raises a question: do all games that aim to be horror need to be scary? I think this game had a rather cool perspective of that and instead aimed at being spiritual more so than scary: you play a kid as if you were a cartoon's protagonist, there is no stress in regards to resource management (well except the salt, good luck finding salt) and dying isn't punished heavily. It could be an amazing, chill horror themed exploration game, but it's not.

Through a compilation of short videos of an interrogation room, this game manages to present a very compelling and fascinating story. Right from the get-go, it manages to captivate you with a single word, murder, and you'll have to understand what it means and you'll WANT to know why it's there.

It's amazing how this game manages to hook you so easily into doing this investigation work. The nature of the game also makes it that every player will take their own path and make reach a different answer. At the end of the game, I was honestly far from being fixated on an answer and I must admit to having watched all the footage in the proper order, in the game's folder, before I could really understand what's going on.

I think this game truly creates a morbid, fascinating atmosphere that really makes you feel the dread of your average household incident. It's a "slice of life" of real life horror.

This is a very unique game that's somewhat a mix of Ace Attorney's investigation part (the trials not so much) and a walking simulator instead of point and clicking on a fixed screen. PK is set in an extremely alien world that is very confusing at first but very interesting to discover about. The game's lore is fairly extensive and there is quite an amount of info to discover, both on characters and the universe.

Despite its simplicity, the game's map is quite beautiful and interesting. There's a charm to all of the vaporwave visuals, the music, the empty town you're free to explore with no one to stop you. It might sound like a cheap walking simulator but the game did manage to stay fun to explore. You really have fun climbing all over the place, looking for random loot or shortcuts, discovering new things in town. However I also think that part of the game is the weakest. First, the game becomes too reliant on an ability to see where points of interest are, because without it you're never going to 100% the game. I think the only thing you can do about this is to remove the ability and any sort of counter to not induce FOMO in players. Second, a lot of the things you find, more than half, is useless. Most of it is just the in-game currency, so that's okay but it still doesn't really feel rewarding because this is the sort of game where you want info, lore, stories, not money and collectibles. As for the collectibles, they really just give you a random message that has nothing to do with the game, like a description of a soda can's flavour. I found that very boring and disappointing, as few are the items to actually extend lore. Think of Fromsoftware's games, where every item has a little story instead of a cheap nothing description.

The characters and story of the game were very interesting. Slowly exploring the mystery builds up into big discoveries and greatly extend the plot. I think the trials at the end could have been a bit more (like giving final lines to people you execute and making it harder to come to the true conclusion, the game basically serves you the solution even though you can figure it out by thinking) but it's alright, it wasn't bad.

Fez is a beautiful plateformer that emphasizes exploration and puzzles with a unique mechanic of rotating the camera in 3D/2D environment. The game is simply impressive on many levels, the degree of immersion and the enjoyment of exploration is at its peak and the game is full of challenging puzzles. Some of the last puzzles are almost impossible or require a heavy amount of investment (such as learning how to read the in-game alphabet) but most of the game is fairly balanced, with backtracking being the only issue until you get used to the game's map.

The controls are a little on the stiff side and quite be annoying from time to time, especially when you've revisited an area dozens of time but need to backtrack to a puzzle, however it's a minor nitpick. It takes about ten hours to complete most of the game (excluding the hardcore puzzles), so it's not a very long game. The same as Tunic, Fez ultimately provides a truly enjoyable experience of discovery.

Perhaps one thing that I really didn't appreciate is that one part of the game is locked behind getting the first ending and the game gives no clue in that regard. Starting NG+ will unlock a new feature and requires you to backtrack all over the place once again until you realize what you can use it for and considering this happens pretty late, it's easy to skip and forget checking some things and not making the required connections.

When it comes to atmosphere, this is just as good as yeo's previous game. However unlike Ringo's adventures, it suffers from a lot of problem.The game is really devoid of content and I find it hard to justify its price. Where Ringo had a lot of things to explore in town, it'll take you maybe 20min to see everything this game has to offer. There's really nothing much to explore. You can't talk to anyone but one character and all the dialogue with that guy never ends up making sense.Ringo allowed you to interact with characters and do activies, while still being a very depressive game where you felt emptiness in a similar manner. AoSB feels like a huge downgrade : smaller world, literally nothing to do in it except try to get to the evening. Perhaps this is the feeling the dev wanted to make you feel, how to waste away your days and the protagonist's despair? But I feel like we could still have had more to do or at least more places to explore, to just look at. The city feels way too dead and empty. The game could have been shorter to justify the lack of anything to do. You don't need to do 3 hours of this nothing.The other gameplay part is a side scrolling shooter which is quite fun and has an interesting "lucky hit" mechanic where you die in one shot, but only if a bullet randomly manages to hit you. Unfortunately it feels extremely unfair, I've been shot close to the end of the level so many time that I'm pretty sure there's something unnatural about it. Also there are enemies outside the screen AND the entire map that can shoot at you, in some levels they'll even spawn right at the beginning and you won't realize they're there until it's too late.I liked the game overall but it's even more frustrating than it should have been.

I wanted to 100% this game but encountered two problems: 1) some of my progression achievements were not accounted for 2) the game crashed during a sidequest and all sidequests became inaccessible.

Overall a nice game if I exclude this problem. Nice enough that I wanted to 100% it.

The game is pretty simple and bare bone outside of combat, it's the main appeal of the game. The combat is nice and in my opinion offers quite a bit of variety with a lot of moves to be unlocked. I was never quite bored and experimented a lot of different things throughout the game.

The game is fairly easy but it's also why you can afford to experiment so much and the moves are cool, so I had a lot of fun. I also like the fact that every mission has a hard alternative and the ranking system adds some more meat to the game.

Outside combat, there's not much to see. The characters are nice but the story is forgettable and sometimes sounds like gibberish machine translation. The game has some Persona-like events which are disappointingly short and void of any depth. The events are like five long and that's it. For example, one of them was just a conversation akin to "Hey you got a guitar? You'll play music for me sometimes? Yeah ok".

All the collectibles are pretty stupid, requiring you to spam the same action over and over until you get it : eating multiple times at restaurants, spending 10 minutes watching the gacha action to get all the loot... It feels like they were designed for you to come back every once in a while and max them out just like you would in Yakuza for example, but there's no reason to hang out in the city and getting the food buff that way would be genuinely painful. Besides, nothing stops you from spamming and the prices are cheap.

And speaking of spam, one of the achievements require you to constantly water a tree throughout almost the entire game. It seriously takes a long time.

I hope the second game would be less buggy and have improve the quality of content outside combat. Considering the length of these games though, I'm not buying it anytime soon because it's too expensive.