I struggle a bit when thinking about Indika. Because on paper it does a lot of things I really like. Especially the enviroment design and general weirdness of the whole experience really stood out to me. But it also feels a little aimless sometimes, and especially its portrayal of sexual assault is a point where they should most definitely have gone back to the drawing board. If you're interested in Indika at all, I think it's a very good idea to pick it up. And meanwhile, I'll sit here, in my little corner, thinking about why I don't love it the way I thought I would.

Well, Stitch. is not ~really a puzzle game. There's little to think about, even on the highest difficulty. It's moreso a game where you can just let your brain go on autopilot and relax. Because the things it needs to get right - giving the stitching a tactile feel and creating a calming sensory landscape - it absolutely does. Your enjoyment of this game is mostly dependent on your expectation: If you want a good puzzle game, look elsewhere. If you want a good way to wind down for 30min a day, it might be a good choice to pick this one up.

Stellar Blade, to me, felt like a B-movie whose budget was randomly doubled while in production. What I mean by this is: The production quality is top notch, but everything beneath that would be perfectly at home in a lower budget ""AA"" effort. From the sleazyness to the slightly undercooked gameplay to the agressively overconfident story (the story is mostly plot holes), Stellar Blade is highly polished trash. And I think that's very fun! It's not the best thing ever, but I enjoyed my time with it.

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is a behemoth. It's filled to the brim with sights to see, places to be, things to do and monsters to fight. And it... overwhelmed me. I've never been this overwhelmed by any game, which may be because I thought I knew what to expect after playing Remake. I've never been so wrong. The devs added an immense amount of new features and tweaked the central systems to the point of unrecognizability. The end result is, at its core, the most full open world game I've experienced yet - keep in mind, there aren't many, I don't really vibe with these games normally. And, in the end, I did experience almost none of it, instead going for my established Xenoblade-strategy of just always waltzing over to the next map marker and adjusting the difficulty when the going got too tough. So yea, in the end, my experience with Rebirth was that of a Xenoblade game, mostly. But, and this is actually the important bit, I still enjoyed that experience immensely.

Because, oh, does this game have the vibes: the wonderful enviromental and character designs, the quirkyness, the really esoteric and kinda hippie enviromentalist message, the clusterfuck of a story. It's raw and yet beautifully realized. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, for me, is an engine running entirely on its vibes and themes, pulling off the most difficult part of creating any trilogy that aims to tell a single story: not making the second part shit. Only time will tell if it avoids the other pitfall of feeling mostly irrelevant after the conclusion of the story.

On first glance Pepper Grinder is remarkable because of it's central gameplay conceit, on second glance I found remarkable because of everything else. Because while the digging gameplay of the titular grinder is really fun, it's not what kept me engaged. It was the world the game portrays that fascinated me the most. Initially I kinda assumed it would be a harmless, vividly rendered world like so many others 2D platformers (like what the boxart would imply). But Pepper Grinder is absolutely obsessed with death. Enemies explode into small bones, the one big collectible is skull coins and in the end you burrow through layers of bone. In its second half the game makes the tantalizing decision to mostly forego the complexities of its central movement system in favor of gimmicks and fights: controlling a robot of mass destruction, sinking ships with enemies on them, killing hundreds of goons in a final skirmish, destroying houses and firing a gatling gun. This doesn't meaningfully build on any gameplay dynamics, but instead on the thematic resonance of this game's obsession with death. You tear through an entire civilization in your conquest. You have no context as why you are doing this until the very end.

It's a competent deckbuilder with a fun character designs, but really not much more than that? I think towards the end the runs go on for wayy to long and the control the player has over their deck is kinda restricted by not having a reliable way to remove cards from your deck (or reject picking any new cards up). For me, this led to most runs just being played with a steadily balooning deck size, where you can try to make the most of the synergies the game randomly gives you, but you're kinda consigned to that randomness.

Snufkin: Memory of Moominvalley was everything I hoped it would be. It's a short game with the coziest of vibes showing a deep love for all the characters it features. I enjoyed every second I spent in this beautiful rendition of Moominvalley. This is my dream Moomin game, it's a wonderfully light adventure game that puts most of its effort into recreating the vibes and soul of the Moomin books - and while that doesn't make it extraordinary, it does make it the perfect type of comfort game to just lose yourself in. I felt calmer whenever I played this game. (Stay away from the Switch version though, Moominvally is best enjoyed with a framerate above 15fps!)

After having completed the epilogue, I know finally feel comfortable rating this game. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a game so thoroughly streamlined, so optimized for fun, that it's very hard not to enjoy your time with it. The gameplay is snappy and varied through all of the different unique characters with their own movesets and game plans, the presentation is beautiful and the main story goes over so fast there's literally no downtime. What happens after that is a cleverly designed loot grind to optimize your loadout and team, one that is so addictive even I wasn't able to shy away from it (normally, a single hour of grind would be a reason to drop a game). In short: It's a really fun game. And I was and am still able to derive a lot of joy from that. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a completely frictionless game. And if you want exactly that, a fun way to spend 15-999hrs and not think about anything, I can't recommend it highly enough.

But this also results in me not really loving it. Because all this streamlining also results in a game experience that is entirely toothless, it has nothing to say. Its story is as bare-bones and clichéd as they come, it's characters mostly rough caricatures. Which is sad to me, as they didn't feel like that in the other Granblue media I looked at in preperation for this, neither in the anime nor in the (admittedly terrible) gatcha game. In a way, Granblue Fantasy: Relink lost a lot of soul in this streamlining, and no amount of optimization grind can fill that void. There are moments where that soul shines through, the completely voiced Fate Episodes i.e., or some smaller character interactions in the moment-to-moment gameplay, but overall, it's a little too streamlined, a little too frictionless. Which doesn't take away from the fact that it's still a very fun game, but I feel like it could've been a lot more.