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.

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 game's concept is alright but I just can't highly rate a game that relies so much on the cheap difficulty tricks you find in very old plateformers, such as placing a block right above the character so that your jump will end up killing you because you got blocked and forcing you to do near pixel perfect jumps.

Because of these things, the game gradually becomes tedious to play. Its concept doesn't do much either at some point, it's just a repetition of the same thing over eight layers and only one of them has special gimmicks. I was mainly interested in the game because of its scare factor and the description as "sadlet", but there's nothing "sad" in this game (there isn't a story at all) and the horror is just on the surface. Even the music is pretty tedious and repetitive.

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.

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.

Overall a good concept but I didn't really like the execution. The game is extremely frustrating for many reasons, such as :
- the terrible aiming and how precise you need to be to hit with guns
- hell, even melee weapons sometimes, why can't the character redirect himself with the left joystick like it does in the non combat areas???
- janky IA that randomly doesn't notice shots
- a screen that easily becomes unreadable AND enemies constantly out of your sight
- enemies that are so similar you can hardly tell which weapon they're holding
- the instant reaction speed of enemies and their 100% precise aiming
- the disastrous boss design (thankfully there's only two of them)

It feels very cheap to die when it's so easy for it to happen and how things are outside of your control. It also doesn't encourage me to learn and better myself at the game, I'm done playing it once.

The story part feels pretty poor, while it's interesting the execution is also mediocre. After playing Katana Zero, I'd say that game is a straight up upgrade in every concept that Hotline Miami wanted to execute.

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.

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.

Wow, just wow! Katamari Damacy is a masterpiece of game design and one of the most unique games I have ever come across. Everything in this game is weird and unique, from the intro to the title screen to the gameplay, but at the same time I can only say it is great and successful in doing so.

The game is extremely artsy and creative with beautiful design ideas. For example, the main menu to play the game is a planet on which your character walks and it really looks good and feels like. The sound design is a blast and the soundtrack... it's the greatest soundtrack ever!

The main gameplay is to roll, which is very exhilarating in a way and addicting. While the game only has a few maps compared to its sequel, they're all really big and independent levels will explore them in different manners, something I enjoyed much more than getting a different map every time. The way the game handles this makes you feel like you are progressing: from a small guy that can't do much to passerbies to a big ball crushing that one building you've been roaming around since the beginning of the game, it's something We Love Kamatari just didn't do.

I have no doubt that this is a timeless masterpiece.

The LiEat trilogy is a compilation of three short JRPGs that are quite peculiar. Each game tells one self contained story but at the same time they all expand upon the created universe and the main two characters, leading to a sort of conclusion by the third game. It feels like a unique format and I don't regret playing it.

There's almost no grind in the game except for one single moment where your level matters, so you mostly just follow the story. The game also has a very nice and unique art style which I really liked.

An improvement over the base game, this DLC has more lighted areas to bring some fresh air into the base game's very dark locations. It makes great use of the previous locations, having you reexplore them and revisit some of the characters of the base game before its events take place. Some ties with the main scenario were also really great and surprising.

It also has less annoying chases and moments where you get stuck, a better "pursuer" for a big chunk of the experience and overall it just flows better.

While it's an horror game, I didn't find the game very scary but it does have a great atmosphere and settings. A lot of the jumpscares were not as impactful as they should be though and the intense chords in the soundtrack proved to be somewhat annoying. The camera gimmick is great and the game makes good use of darkness.

The game does have stressful segments where you're being pursued but it's easy to realise the AI is extremely limited and you can just turn around a pillar or something blocking their way to lose them. Overall I'd say these segments were annoying because you have no idea where you're going and you have to think at the same time as you run to solve a puzzle. For example, the first chase segment is great because you most likely already know that you need to go to the basement and the enemy stops following you when you arrive at the location, however many of them happen during parts where you don't know what to do and it takes forever to solve the riddle because of that. Some were successful in making you stressful out of fear of losing your progress but others are just an annoyance, especially when you just can't find the solution.