I was already enamored with the demo, and the full version is even better. I absolutely love The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, it's a beautiful game that manages to create so much narrative intrigue through its core gameplay system of creating your own Tarot cards and then reading them. After having replayed this for three (!!!) times again, I honestly gotta say that this is deffo my favorite game this year. It just connects to me on an emotional level and has such a brilliant approach to narrative and player choice. The vibes are impeccable, too. I have a huge amount of love for this game.

Season is also about what can’t be recorded or written down, about a lot of small or big moments and their atmosphere. The roadtrip-setting of the game is one filled with endings without closure, fitting for a game about recording history. In that aspect, it’s not just about history, but also about living in it. About the people you meet and their right (not) to be remembered. But also about the people you can no longer meet, about the absences felt in this game’s world – which is brilliantly crafted. Through careful sound design, it manages to have a tangibility to it that few games will ever reach. A tangibility that makes you feel the absences even more intensely.

I'm sure there've been many versions of what an Alan Wake 2 could've been. I'm very glad it's this.

This game left me completely burned out on an emotional level but kinda... in a good way? The Wreck features the most emotionally nuanced writing I've ever seen in a video game. I teared up multiple times while playing. It tackles all the themes and, somehow, manages to do them justice. It's a lot. It's devastating and beautiful and, in the end, hopeful. Give this game a chance if you feel up to the subject matter! And remember to take care of yourself while playing, take breaks when you need them <3

I had a great time with Goodbye Volcano High! It has great production value, really lovely animations and character designs and an emotional core to it that I so love to see in games revolving about teenage angst & joy & everything in between. It's also a really charming and funny game! I had a lot of audible "aawwws" and laughs while playing this. Big hugs to all the queer characters on their own little journeys, they were joyful to witness. So yea, it's great, it rules, please play it if it seems appealing to you, and fuck all the insecure manbabies hating on this <3

I'm not sure I have anything meaningful to say about this game, but rest assured, it's an absolute treasure.

I really liked my time with Final Fantasy XVI. It's world is really captivating to witness and the intricate worldbuilding of the first half is one of the strongest aspects of the entire game. It's a little sad this aspects gets phased out in the latter half of the game, but the replacement is interesting enough. The only thing that really bothers me about this narrative is that it's a thematic mess sometimes, the rest is really good!

Tears of the Kingdom manages to mostly re-capture the experience I had with Breath of the Wild back in the day - The feeling of exploration these two games offer are really unparalleled. There's a lot of joy in just disovering and traversing the game world, furthered by the new abilities. Flow especially is such a clever idea for an open world game. And the other two abilities - Ultra-Hand and Rewind - feel kinda ground-breaking. Sadly, TotK is also really bland and unoriginal in it's theming and story and I wasn't as charmed by the vibes as I was back when I played BotW. It's all way more messy and intense, in a way I don't really like.

A really haunting meditation on loss and grief that has the game mechanics in all the right places to make that mean something!

I really really loved my time with Stray Gods and I definitely intend to return to check out some of the other paths the story could have played out (Although I suspect they won't be that different). It's a lovely visual novel with a moderate integration of player choice that really shines in the musical segments of the game! While your choices there don't feel like they change the course of the story all too often, they do heavily impact the style and tone of what's sung, which is a delightful thing to witness. With a little more polish (the game crashed on me quite often), some more budget for animations and a tighter narrative and theming, this would've been even better, but I'm really glad the game's out there as it is.

I really think they handled their explicitely political subject matter(s) quite well. Sadly, the ending dilutes the entire experience a little. I really like the central gameplay twist! It's a really clever way of using a flowchart. The consequences of your actions are made abundantly clear!
The load times on Switch are horribly optimized tho.

Paranormasight is a thrilling, well-written and concise horror/mystery visual novel with some really clever twists and ideas. I really like visual novels where the flowchart has diegetic importance and this one really has a clever twist on that idea. If you have any interests in great mystery visual novels and/or ar a fan of Kotaro Uchikoshi's work, I can guarantee you a really fun time with this game!

I really love Astrea's engaging and clever gameplay loop and beautiful visuals, but in the end, as it is with most games I enjoy mostly because of their gameplay, I find myself wishing for something more - on a thematic and/or vibes-based level. And I'd love this even more if it had that, but I still really like Astrea for it's brilliantly designed gameplay.

This game does everything so well it's almost boring! All of the songs I've played are really well done, the artstyle is cute and does a good enough job of unifiying the games' different aesthetic approaches and the songs are just very good overall and there are sooooo many of them!

Thirsty Suitors is an incredibly charming game with a strong emotional core brought down by its boring turn-based combat and some pacing issues.

This is one of the most aesthetically pleasing games I've played in a long time. The rest is also kinda neat, although I think it can feel like a drag sometimes - but that might also be because the combat never felt all too engaging to me and there are very few moments where the core concept really shines. The game also has some weird subtext in regards to gender, but well, I think that's just what the franchise has always been.

Jusant is a really pleasent meditative experience that doesn't overstay its welcome - but could've expanded on the excellent climbing mechanics a little bit more! They feel a little under-utilized, especially at the end. I really like the narrative framing that you start from the literal bottom of the sea!

Having these unique, specially programmed moments where you lose all grip on reality for a moment is really, really fun and adds to the huge amount of charme the game already has going for it. I was actually suprised by how much the game was able to charm me, I don't like the Mario franchise as a vibe all that much, but here it kinda worked! It's really fun, kinda cute and quite addicting! As soon as that charme wears off tho, there's not much left to enjoy.

I never really managed to get into a fighting game, but this is at least the closest I got! There's a lot of fun to be had in Street Fighter 6, but it's still not for me. The game has really strong visual identity and vibes tho

This is quite a sweet game! I actually kinda like the story, although it's told a little weirdly. The combat also has enough oomph and glitter and sparkles and very dramatic looking animations that I found it entertaining - and very pleasing to look at. This whole thing feels to me like an AA-effort blown up into a overproduced full-front system-seller AAA-"experience", where the worst parts come from that conversion process. But overall... I think this is nice enough.

I liked Super Mario RPG and its smallness, but it's nothing I'll keep on thinking about (only exception is the tremendous OST).

It's short & sweet and really fun for a few hours, the whackyness of the world and the satisfaction of growing the katamari never fail to make me smile. But as with the first game I really don't see a reason to keep playing this. I'm not much of a highscore person so maybe that's the reason for that. Sweet lil' game with sweet lil' vibes :)

The whole experience somehow left me really saturated, but not in an especially great way? Not in a necessarily bad way either, it just kinda came and went, had some nice moments, went some weird places thematically and arrived at kinda the same conclusion as all the games before XC3, but a little worse. Maybe it's just because 3 wrapped that whole thing up so nicely, but now I'm really fearful of the next Xenoblade game still beating that same old drum.

It's fine, it gave me something to do during a rough period of my life, but I won't ever return to it outside of that.

I think with Fashion Dreamer it really comes down to your expectations. If you wanna have a really fun time for two hours and then jump in every day for like 30 minutes to like and share some outfits, this game is for you. If you want a gameplay loop more intricate than "like & subscribe" maybe stay with the Style Savy games.

This game left me incredibly torn, and I think that's because its highs are very high and its lows are just really painful. In the first four cases it commits the cardinal sin of adventure games by making the mystery solving process just simply unfun. Everything takes way too long, the mini-games are never really fun and the long load times on Switch really do their best to kill of the rest of the pacing in the mystery labyrinths. But I must also admit that with those last two cases the entire experince just worked? Especially that final mystery labyrinth was snappy enough to be really fun. I like the general meditations on justice and power the game features, but it really throws them all out of the window for it's central twist. Rain Code only ever manages to scratch the surface thematically, and remains ambiguous enough that you can read it pro and contra capital punishment - which is... not great?

I'm really struggling what to think abt this game, been like two months since I completed it but I still can't get my head around it. Ghostpia has a lot of cuteness and gruesomeness at the same time, which sometimes works, sometimes just seems like an attempt at shock value, and sometimes these two vibes clash so hard that everything else is lost in the battle. The narrative just meanders along for most of its runtime while the expressive visual style really tries to hold the entire experience together. It's an uneventful experience with a lot of confusing vibes, which might make it a cult classic in the future, maybe?

I think imma just go out and say that this game made me realize that I really don't get metroidvanias. After the world started opening up, I was just kinda constantly confused and not really amused by all the backtracking I did. I then played two more hours with a guide and I really didn't like that experience either. I think I'm kinda incompatible with the genre? Definitely incompatible with this game! It looks really really pretty tho!

The bottom line: It's a great and charming story with an okay combat system made (a lot) worse by all the things that make it a gatcha. Which, to be honest, was the review I could've already written before playing the game.

Starts off really strong and then just kinda... loses itself? There's no better way to describe it. The mystery and intrigue of the story just drop off after two chapters and there's nothing left to replace it.

A gorgeous game that doesn't know quite what to do with all of its splendor and mainly works because of its vibes in the end. The gameplay is cute enough, the story is okay enough - only the visuals really excel here. Which is fine, actually. You can do far worse with your time. Of course, you could also do far better.

After Us has a lot of really great visual setpieces and I was in awe of many of them. But it stays way too long on the same page in terms of visual identity and doesn't manage to translate any of it into gameplay. Playing the game feels painfully uniform, you mostly jump from rock platform to pieces of junk to rock platform, the few gameplay ideas never managing to break this cycle in an interesting way.

The reductive political and morality system in this game is really weirdly ideologically charged - which in itself every morality system is, of course, but this one's really confusing in its messaging. The ending especially is kinda dumb in its setup. On the gameplay side of things, it's essentially a worse Sayonara Wild Hearts with some really great setpieces.

Storyteller reproduces and lets you reproduce boring and vain fairytale tropes in search of something fun to salvage from them. It rarely succeeds and only lays bare how... boring they actually are. You're never asked to re-think tropes, only to rearrange them. And I think that's the key to why I don't vibe with this game - it's a missed opportunity that made the whole experience really dull overall.