PARANORMASIGHT is a mystery VN with great visual aesthetics and underwhelming story.

I love the edited photos as background imagery, the character sprites look fairly unique and are expressive enough. The menus also look great. My only complaint about the visuals is that chromatic aberration is a bit annoying and there's no way to disable it. The music is fitting though repetition got to me a bit by the end.

That being said, the presentation is probably the weakest part of the game when the writing is concerned - most of the playtime will be spent reading character's accounts on the information you are already aware of, or on the cool stuff they apparently did offscreen.

The story doesn't really have a hook or an overarching theme that would give the player a reason to care about what's going on. I have seen every ending in the game, and I still can't tell you what the story is supposed to be about. The game tells you that it's about the different perspective on resurrection, but it doesn't really explore the concept, it just uses it as a prop. Stuff just happens until the story is over. Every mystery VN has at least one Epic Twist that's supposed to recontextualize what's happened before then, and in PARANORMASIGHT you guess this twist immediately if you've played games like this before, and then the ~10 hours between the start and the end are filled with faffing about doing things that don't really tie together into a cohesive narrative.

Random meta gimmicks would've been cool, if they weren't already overdone by dozens other games that do a better job of tying them into the narrative. The game has nominally non-linear structure, but the progression through the game's story is almost entirely devoid of actual choice on the player's part: the flowchart is full of arbitrary roadblocks that force the player down the single available path.

The characters personalities are fairly weak and I don't think I could recognize most of their lines without seeing their names/sprites. Their motivations are often contrived and the game even draws its attention to it, only to handwave it with a "women be shopping" kind of remark.

The bottom line is that this VN doesn't do anything better than the other VNs with a similar focus already have done.
I recommend PARANORMASIGHT only to people who are really desperate for another fix of a story similar to Zero Escape or AI: Somnium Files.

The best way I can describe Class of '09 is that it's a South Park episode in a VN form.
It doesn't really have anything interesting to say, the setting is greatly hyperbolized to the point of absurdity (if this really is accurate to american highschool experience then Jesus Christ, America is even more cooked than I've realized), and progression between some scenes makes absolutely no sense, but it's decently funny (even if the jokes are one-note and get old pretty fast) and short enough to not outstay its welcome too much.

Also, Nicole's VA must move on to the bigger leagues, she did an amazing job at voicing the character exactly how the obnoxious selfish teenager would talk, from the first voiced line you hear you immediately know who you're dealing with.

I recommend this VN to anyone who enjoys crass cynical humor of the shows like South Park.

In the age of hundreds of gigabytes of storage space wasted by mediocre high budget slop, a game 60 megabytes in size comes out and cooks all of them.
The year has barely started, and it seems like my GOTY has already been decided - Balatro is an excellent game that sucked me in for 40 odd hours, and I have blasted through all I cared to complete in about half a week since the release.

Balatro is a loosely poker-based roguelite with the same basic structure as Luck be a Landlord - every round you have a target score you need to hit by assembling poker hands from the cards you get from your deck, and you build synergies between rounds to hit higher scores as they scale up. The gameplay loop is extremely addicting and you can easily lose yourself for hours playing run after another.
The game has nailed basically everything there is to playing a game like this: the runs are pretty short and you can leave them whenever without losing progress, rounds don't drag out because you're encouraged to hit the score in as few hands as possible, the descriptions are consistent and succinct, the UI is clear and intuitive (my favourite thing about it is that you can see your deck composition just by howering over it) and there aren't any tiny annoyances that wouldn't matter by themselves but build fatigue over the dozens of runs.

On top of that, the game looks great and sounds great. The one song the game has is completely stuck in my head, and I love the special edition card effects - they look exactly how I remember collectible cards looking.

There are some things that could've been done better, but nothing too bad and nothing that can't be improved by updates or expansions.
The first thing is common for roguelites: the playable decks you unlock are, for the most part, very similar to one another and there are maybe 3 or 4 decks that actually play differently. I wish there were more gimmicky decks like Plasma or Anaglyph, or maybe a way to assemble your own deck, or a deck that starts you with 2 random eternal jokers.
The second is I feel there isn't enough synergies for the types of combos except flush. It's much harder to build a run around straights, or x-of-a-kind, or full houses than it is to build a flush run. There are more jokers that implicitly or explicitly synergise with playing a full hand of the same suit, and there are many more tools to turn cards into the same suit than there are tools to manipulate cards' rank.
The third is the way challenges get unlocked. You only have 5 unfinished challenges available at any time, and you unlock one more every time you finish one. This leads to a situation where you finish all the fun ones that are available, and are left with 5 unfun ones (which is fine! challenge is literally in the name) that are hiding who knows what behind them. I will say that the fun ones are frontloaded and the further you go, the more anti-fun they get, but you can't really know what's there until you've unlocked them.
Like I said, this is all stuff that could be added with updates or DLC. It doesn't detract from the core of the game at all, and it more or less boils down to "I wish there was more of it". Maybe there will be more, but it is already an excellent game.

I highly recommend Balatro to anyone who likes roguelites and especially the synergy building aspect of the genre.