...is how I would have originally opened my review if I had really stopped playing when uninstalling the game out of frustration after nine hours of play. However, I'm not too eager to hate on games, especially ones like Loop Hero that, armed with a zero dollars marketing budget, became so beloved: if so many people came to like it, I wanted to know how it worked and what made it click. Sure enough, my insistence led to an answer, but one that made me more confused rather than less. Strap in, and let's examine why this game has been living in my head rent-free for a while now.

What is Loop Hero, anyway? Its premise is that the world is being erased by a supernatural entity and its remnants are slowly forgetting all that used to exist. You play as a young hero who attempts to resist the destruction, going on expeditions to gather materials and build a village along with other survivors. These expeditions have them looping around a set path on the world map, passing by their camp after every lap. The twist is, although the path through the map might be set, its contents are not: with every battle, the hero earns cards that can be used to place landmarks around the map, like groves, meadows, ruins, etcetera -- as if remembering what the world used to be like before.

These cards, when placed, give boons to the hero, but also cause enemies to appear in their path that could bring an end to their adventure. The goal is to survive long enough to place enough tiles and spawn a boss, whose defeat unlocks the next act of the story. Between expeditions, resources can be used to build new facilities around the village and upgrade the existing ones. In true roguelite fashion, doing so unlocks permanent bonuses for your character, like stat increases, new classes, extra lives and so on, and also unlocks more cards containing different landmarks to assemble a deck with and use in the expedition map.

The game's poetic setting quickly gives way to frustration, as the player is left to reason about Loop Hero's incredibly cryptic mechanics on their own. It’s hard to understand what makes a deck good; the in-game texts explaining cards and stats are vague, when not misleading; and there are hidden interactions that the game does not explain whatsoever. This extends into the expeditions, which make for lengthy gameplay sessions even at max game speed, and should they come to an end through the hero’s death – a highly likely outcome, as enemies also have opaque rules and interactions to them – the player is punished by losing most of the resources gathered.

That’s where the grinding kicks in, as players turn to the one thing they see some progress happening in: the village. By slowly gathering resources over the course of their expeditions, one figures they might accrue enough bonuses to power through the seemingly impossible hordes of enemies. That's where I originally stopped: completely stumped by Act II, at the end of a long grind for Metal Shards that was leading into an even larger grind of Orbs of Evolution. My conclusion was that the game was a grindfest and not worth my time. But was it, really? I eventually started thinking that if the game was truly a grindfest, then speedruns of it must also take hours. A quick search yielded this, which I watched intently.

Later that day, I reinstalled the game and beat it within an hour and a half, finishing the three remaining acts in almost back-to-back runs.

There is no grinding in Loop Hero. There isn't a single point in the game where you have to stop and grind, and doing so it's a consequence of playing the game wrong. Mystery solved! It's a case of, as the kids say, git gud, amirite? Except, nobody plays the game wrong intentionally, they do it because the correct answer is unclear and/or something leads them down the wrong path. What is going on? What is it about Loop Hero that guides people towards ruining their own experiences?

The first factor is the general haziness surrounding the mechanics I previously went over. The second is in the risk-reward ratio heavily skewing towards "risk". A simple example can be found in choosing to end the expedition after finishing a loop: loops grow increasingly dangerous the higher their number, and staying for one more loop and dying would lose you 70% of your total resources. Surviving one more loop would yield 10%, maybe 20% more? Better to play conservatively and do short expeditions. And what about increasing the spawn of enemies? A definite no-no, as it could easily result in death! The game even helpfully gives you the Road Lantern card to prevent spawns from getting out of control!

Which leads me into the third factor that pushes people into “playing wrong”: there are very few ways to play correctly, as Loop Hero offers a very narrow set of viable builds. I'd risk saying two thirds of the game's cards are unusable, which, for a deck builder, where you generally expect most cards to be viable so long as the rest of the deck synergizes with them, is disastrous. Classes, too, seem like they can be built around different stats, but in reality, there are definitive answers to what must be prioritized, if for no other reason that each boss is a specific mechanics check. To say nothing of traits: picking any boss trait whatsoever is making the game harder on yourself as all of them suck, and their presence reduces the chance of rolling the few good ones. In short, if you don’t build everything exactly as the game wants you to, you’ll die, over and over and over again.

Combine these three things and it’s almost inevitable to come to the conclusion that the only way out of this loop (no pun intended) is to grind the difficulty away, playing each expedition super carefully and slowly amassing materials. Never mind that aggressively placing cards and maximizing encounters is the key to success, both in terms of obtaining more cards and equipment that can further the current expedition and in terms of maximizing the materials you bring back to the village: to give a concrete example, before doing research on the game, I was painstakingly obtaining 1~3 Orbs of Evolution per expedition. After fixing my builds, I easily raked 20~40, along with loads of most other resources. This is why I say there’s no grinding: the material yields are far higher than one might expect.

Anyway, mystery solved²! I figured that was how Loop Hero operated. People who like the game are the ones who figure out which builds to use, play aggressively and finish it quickly, and people who dislike the game are the ones who get stuck in the grind. As we can see from the looking at the game's reviews:

- Steam user StaticSpine recommends it, saying “...it overstays its welcome and becomes way too grindy starting from Act III. But the first ~20 hours I had a blast.”
- Steam user technocosm does not recommend it, ”...the progression is slower than most microtransaction-ridden mobile games.”
- Steam user mercenaryai recommends it, ”...quickly becomes a time-wasting grind.”

Ah.

In the end, it’s not so simple: most reviews mention grinding as a defining aspect of the experience, even the positive ones – in fact, to some people, the punishing grind is the enjoyable part of the game. So where does that leave me? With the game still living rent-free in my mind, I suppose. Maybe my assumption that there is a correct, developer-intended way to play the game is wrong, as much as it irks me to think that the grind is an intentional design choice instead of accident. Some people also mention that they enjoy the game because it’s very hands-free, and they use it to keep their minds busy while multitasking, which I guess I understand, though I would definitely pick a less punishing game.

In the end, would I recommend the game myself? The game design field trip was certainly intriguing, but I would have to say “no”. Aside from the very real risk that anyone that plays this will end up farming for hours on end, a deck builder that provides so few viable options is not a very good one. But it is a fascinating game, and there is legitimate untapped potential in the concept: the ideas behind the game are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Maybe a Loop Hero 2 will eventually come up, with better balance and more in-game information, and deliver on all that potential.

Taking place a few years after its prequel, Yakuza 6 starts with a small timeskip as Kiryu goes to jail due to the events that transpired in the finale of Y5. Coming back to Morning Glory, he finds Haruka missing, having left to avoid drawing negative attention to the other kids in the orphanage. Kiryu immediately sets out to find his daughter, and to his surprise, finds out that she now has a son of her own, a young boy that's tied to a decades-old underworld conspiracy.

Yakuza 6 was a very positive surprise. After the CIA, rubber bullets and... whatever the heck went on in the fever dream that was Yakuza 5, Y6 feels refreshing, with a plot that's incredibly convoluted, as per series standards, but where the pieces nevertheless fall beautifully into place, each part of the conspiracy leading into the other in a way that feels almost inevitable. Plus, it features a large and incredibly well-realized cast, each character having layered personalities and motivations: Nagumo, Kiyomi, Hirose, Someya, Yuuta, Han-Joon-Gi and more are some of the best the series has seen. Overall, I would risk saying this is the best Yakuza storyline since 0 (series' chronology wise).

One aspect that's often brought up as a criticism is that RGG went back to having only one character, down from the whopping five in Yakuza 5, but it's clear that, for the story they wanted to tell, and the conclusion they wanted to have, paving the way for Yagami and Ichiban to take over as series' leads, there was no way to not have the story focus on Kiryu. That intent is clear from the game's cover: like previous entries, Yakuza 6 establishes its themes right from the game's subtitle, which the Western localization was kind enough to keep this time around: The Song of Life. The old being replaced by the new. Younger generations taking over and doing things their own way. Parents, their children and their grandchildren. Focusing the story on Kiryu and his family allowed the writers to amplify this message in a way that the multiple protagonist setup would just not have been able to.

And it's not only the characters of Kiryu, Haruka and Haruto reflect that cycle at the core of the game's storytelling: so does the city of Kamurocho, which feels exceptionally hostile this time around. For one, people now walk around with all sorts of gadgets that our nearly 50-year-old protagonist struggles to wrap his head around. But more than the people, the city itself has transformed, more of it having been swallowed by large companies and criminal enterprises, large hotels, gyms, food chains and whatnot now standing where once stood familiar locations. Of note is that Little Asia is entirely gone, and one can't help but wonder what happened to all those people from Y4. The game never explains, of course, because that's just how it is: folks are pushed out and the city moves on, cold and unfeeling.

Kamurocho is contrasted with Onomichi, the countryside town in Hiroshima that Kiryu is eventually led by the story, which presents a much more traditional Japanese town, where life is simpler and time moves more slowly. Both locations feel even better in the Dragon Engine, which allows for more detail and makes the urban landscapes shine at night. As per the series' standards, both areas also feature a myriad side activities, many of the latter being unique to Yakuza 6, like the Cat Café, Spearfishing, the Snack Bar, the baseball team, and so on. Not to mention, the substories are top-notch, as per usual -- I mentioned Kiryu's struggles with technology, as that's a focus of some of my favorite substories. Most of the other quests have that wholesome flavor to them that's a trademark of the series and that feels intensely satisfying.

What might feel lackluster at first is the game's combat, which, like in Kiwami 2, was a bit dialed down compared to the previous game (again, chronology-wise). Indeed, Kiryu has a much leaner moveset in this entry, but I'd use that exact word to describe Y6's combat: lean. It limits itself to the more fundamental aspects of the franchise gameplay, which means it's less flashy, but still very functional. The game feels great in the moment-to-moment action, so long as you can let go of expecting the exact systems from previous games. In fact, in some cases, this reset feels better: I actually had fun fighting Amon this time around, whereas his gimmicky Y5 incarnation made me want to eat my controller.

Saying goodbye to Kiryu, Haruka and so many others feels bittersweet after hundreds of hours spent with them over the last few years, but I'm glad their farewell has done justice to them. More than that, the way Yakuza 6 is an embodiment of so many of the franchise's qualities makes me incredibly excited for Yakuza 7, Judgment and all the other games I have yet to play.

There are many reasons for which someone might come to enjoy a game, be it the story and characters, or the challenge, or the strategy and decision making, or the means of self expression... the list goes on. However, there's a type of game, of no particular genre, that has become common in recent years and that just has the player perform braindead tasks over and over, "rewarding" them player only with flashing lights and increasing numbers to trigger a dopamine rush, but otherwise never developing. Such games are anathema to me, and for quite a while, I've avoided Vampire Survivors because I thought it was one of those. Having finally tried it, I'm so glad to have been wrong.

Vampire Survivors is a roguelite that presents an elegant summary of the genre's gameplay loop: you pick a character with certain traits and a map where enemies spawn endlessly, and your objective is to survive past the 30 minute mark. Your character attacks automatically with whatever weapons they have equipped, and your only input is moving them around. Enemies that die drop experience and sometimes items, and using those, you'll try to create a character build that can clear the stage. Whether you manage to do it or not, gold you collect can be used to unlock new characters and, optionally, to buy stat increases. All of this happens in the span of 30 minutes, the maximum duration of any playthrough.

The game is sold at an extremely modest price point, and yet its systems present a surprising amount of depth, starting with how there's plenty of decision-making involved in building your character: different weapons scale with different power ups, and also match the innate traits of different characters. Your inventory is limited and there's no getting rid of items, so the loadout must be picked carefully, also taking into account that every map has distinct sets of enemies that may require changing up your strategy. Finally, as much as only being able to move sounds like the recipe for shallow gameplay, there's plenty of split-second decision making both in navigating the enemies as well as deciding whether or not to go for an item or exp pellets. And if anything goes wrong and you die, at worst, you lost a few minutes.

In all likelihood, though, booting the game will mean at least a few hours flying by in an instant: not only is the gameplay loop extremely exciting, not only is pretty much every weapon in the game viable if you know how to work around it, there are also a lot of interesting stuff to unlock in each stage. The game takes its time revealing its hand: when you think you've seen everything, it throws some new secret stage or weapon at you, and pulls you back in. All in all, it's no wonder it spawned a genre of its own -- Vampire Survivors is fantastic bang-for-your-buck and deserves the love it got.

My main memory of this game is owning Putt-Putt at checkers over and over, but then always having that goddamn bear snipe away all my pieces in reversi. Anyway.

This is a pretty solid offering, with fifteen games packed into one, well, Activity Pack. True, some are filler, but in general, it's a great package for small kids and their developing brains, especially games like Memory, Tangram, Guesses and such. If I ever do have children, I guess I'll have to pull these out, as they don't make kids' games like this anymore.

I hopped to this page as I reviewed Aperture Desk Job, which fulfills more or less the same role as Welcome Park on the Steam Deck and had me reminiscing. I was shocked to find out that Welcome Park is rated so low over here. It was just such a delight to play through when unboxing my Vita, waaaay back when.

Welcome Park was a free piece of software that came bundled into the PS Vita. It stood for a collection of minigames that used the Vita's many features. For instance, did you know the Vita featured a rear touchpad? A surprising amount of Vita owners did not, because few games used it and most of them were release window titles. BUT! If you played through the entirety of Welcome Park, you'd know that and more!

The minigames weren't really anything to write home about, but they were entertaining and fulfilled their purpose of introducing the console to its new user very well, and they even came with a not-trivial trophy list so you could hunt your first Vita 100%! No platinum trophy, but hey. Sony was a bit more stringent with those back then.

So yeah, I don't get why the app is so maligned -- it was a pretty nice experience, considering its purpose, and Sony did a good thing by bundling it with the Vita. It's just too bad they messed up the, uh

[checks notes]
[grows increasingly worried while flipping through an unending stack of pages]

...well, basically everything else about the Vita.

I have to wonder why Aperture Desk Job doesn't just come built into the Steam Deck. The game provides an excellent onboarding to the portable machine and is a must play for new owners. I only found out about it through word of mouth, though, as you have to search for and download it on the Steam Store yourself, and only on the store page does it say that it is a Steam Deck demo app -- I thought it was some Portal gag-spin-off at first.

It's a very welcome introduction to Valve's new gadget. The premise is simple: you're an Aperture employee tasked with certifying the company's products. You're assisted by a robot called Grady, who quickly develops ambitions of climbing the corporate ladder and drags you along with him. It's a short (30 minutes) experience that boasts incredible production values, and will walk you through all of the Steam Deck's functionality, from "what are all the buttons on it" to "how to open the virtual keyboard in-game".

It's great when console manufacturers do this sort of thing, like Nintendo bundling Wii Sports with the Wii and the AR stuff with the 3DS, or Sony adding the Welcome Park to the Vita. With the gains from generational leaps getting ever smaller, getting a new console doesn't have the same spark as it once did -- "new machine that does previously unthinkable things" has given way to "new machine does the same as previous machine, probably even shares much of the same games, but performs slightly better". Having these demo apps helps give a bit more personality to the new toy, and Aperture Desk Job is brimming with character.

There's a common piece of advice you'll hear in indie game making circles: when making your game, pick one thing (e.g. a core mechanic) and make sure to do that one thing exceptionally well. The point is not that every good game has to have a singular strong point, but that unfocused development, if it even manages to deliver a product, often leads to a game with no strong points at all. It's excellent advice -- and Grow: Song of the Evertree is a great cautionary tale in favor of that advice.

Grow is... a lot of things. Perhaps most prominently, it's a city builder, but it's unclear whether it wants to be one in the management sense or in the Animal Crossing sandbox sense. In the former case, progression is stilted, held back by strict item requirements as well as luck. There's also no real economy in the districts you build: there's no flow of resources, nor an incentive to make the town remotely like a real town. The only control you have over this theoretical simulation is matching residents to jobs they want (often brainwashing them into liking a job you can give them), and the only yield from that is far more money than you'll ever need because, again, there's no economy: I finished the game with dozens of thousands in the bank.

But consider the other possibility, that it's aiming for the sandbox style of something like Animal Crossing, where the game world is your canvas and you build for the sake of self expression. In that case, the railroading along with the arbitrary constraints on number of buildings and decorations per district put a cap on your creativity, as do the limited handout of customization items that, for the most part, don't stand out anyway. The villagers that inhabit the town are similarly soulless, generated randomly from three base models and a random pool of names, and spewing dialogue that is largely the same -- with only half a dozen exceptions, they're bots that the game churns out for the player to brainwash and enslave.

The Animal Crossing theory is reinforced by the equally soulless bugs and fish, all with generic names and models, that can be caught around the many worlds -- yes, worlds, but before getting into that, there's one more aspect of the building gameplay that bothers me, and that's how it ignores, if not contradicts, the central themes of the game. Grow is the story of a world destroyed by the excesses of its inhabitants, who greedily took from the Evertree until it Withered -- essentially a parallel to the destruction of nature by man's hand. So why does none of the city building reflect that? The buildings you get are all generic medieval-ish looking stuff, with no emphasis on nature whatsoever. All throughout the game, I couldn't help but wonder if, in my quest to revive the Evertree, I wasn't just rebuilding the world that killed it in the first place.

In this world, you play as a fledgling alchemist who decided to stay behind after the Withering to devise a way to save the Evertree. You do this by creating World Seeds using alchemy and using them to restore the pocket worlds around the tree, and in this, there are two more gameplay aspects to discuss: alchemy and pseudo-farming-sim. Both fail to present any sort of depth: on the latter case, restoring worlds has you clearing land and planting seeds, like you'd do on the first day of any Harvest Moon game, except there's only one type of seed, for which the game decides where you can plant them and what will grow from them. Thus, your only input on this activity is the mechanical labor, which will likely account for the majority of your playtime.

Those worlds, although cute, are then only used for harvesting trees, boulders and other natural resources to use in crafting -- see what I mean about the themes? The idea is that you, the alchemist, can toss items in your cauldron to break them down into essences, which can then be turned into more World Seeds and new buildings for the town. Apart from essences also being something you'll have way too much of in the endgame, there's no real depth to crafting good world seeds: there's a random chance that any crafting attempt will fail, and there are six crafting recipes, found in journals and alchemy tables across the overworld, that yield the seeds you ultimately want to make, the others being suboptimal or useless. Considering that suboptimal worlds are as laborious to create as optimal ones, you might want to check a walkthrough to discover those recipes ahead of time, and then forget about alchemy halfway through the game.

Speaking of walkthroughs, however, I have no idea how people beat this game without them, but I suspect it takes them a very, very long time. If you try to get alchemical essences the way the game leads you to, and only make the recipes you find in-game, you will have to grind and walk around aimlessly a lot. The way I did it was buying wallpapers from the general store and breaking them down as they hand out random essences. This would be even faster if the game allowed you to pass days faster by sleeping, which it doesn't because you'd be able to farm money and defeat the only (brief) purpose the town has. See, this is why games like this often have stuff like seasons, or otherwise time-limited events: because it forces the player to make the most of their days. Without it, you kinda have to put artificial limits on.

This review already feels like beating a dead horse, so let me quickly go over the remaining points: the soulless NPCs will give you quests that are either "decorate my house" or "give me x type of item", and they're never worth it. The few NPCs with an identity have quests that are interesting on paper, but are very poorly written, and if you're not careful, you might end up in some really awful romances (yes, really). You can also befriend pets, which is repetitive and pointless, as is an entire other city you can visit and completely ignore the shops and NPCs there as they're inconsequential past the forced story visit. Speaking of maps, though, there are dungeons to complete in between unlocking town districts. They're... fine, if you like Breath of the Wild shrines, but I was left wanting a real, old-school video game dungeon.

And that's gonna be my final takeaway from this: instead of Grow, just play anything else that does the thing you expect from it: want dungeons? Go for a Zelda-like. Farming sim? There's loads of those coming out nowadays. Alchemy? Have you tried the Atelier series? Whichever of those it may be, in Grow, the same mechanic will be too shallow to be worth anybody's time.

Oh, and one more thing: if you ever do make a game yourself, remember: pick one thing, and make sure to do that thing exceptionally well.

The second FRAMED game is more of the first, which is a positive in my book. One thing to note is that this sequel-prequel's difficulty level starts more or less at the difficulty the original game ended at, so absolutely do not skip to this game right off the bat. Fans of the original will be delighted at the fiendish levels the sequel takes its puzzles to, but those who didn't like the first game will probably have an even worse time with this one.

FRAMED is a duology of mobile games that follows a duo of accomplices on the run, fleeing from the police and other pursuers. It's a puzzle game where each stage is laid out as a series of panels, as in a comic book. When the stage begins, the panels are laid out in a way that will inevitably result in your character's capture or death -- your job is to rearrange the panels in a way that they make it safely to the last panel.

You can influence the outcome by using whatever stage elements are present on each panel. If your character leaves a panel from the right, they'll come in from the left in the next, however, if there's a door in their path, they'll opt to go through it, and then enter the next panel from a similar door. If there's a ladder, they'll climb it; if there's an item, they'll take it with them into the following panels.

FRAMED's puzzles elegantly play off comics logic and our understanding of continuity in visual storytelling. They do so while instigating your curiosity, beckoning you to discover what would happen in X or Y arrangement of panels. I've seen people frame the puzzles as trial-and-error and unintuitive, and, well, there's some truth to the former point, but experimenting a couple of times with the stage elements to figure out what they do is part of the fun in the game, as there's always a consistent underlying logic behind how they work. The fact that you have to tinker with each panel a bit only makes the final solution more satisfying.

Besides, it's hard to say that the game drags: it features bite-sized stages, totals only a couple of hours, and each run through a stage flies by before you notice, as the phenomenal animation work and sound design make it easy to lose yourself in the action. It's one of those games that you do not want to play without headphones on. These are apps I've had installed on my phone for years -- they're great for burning half an hour every now and then while putting the brain to work.

Just before the release of the final Layton game, The Azran Legacy, Level-5 tried their hand at entering the mobile market. Instead of bringing the main series over, however, something they would only do several years later a spin-off was created in the form of Layton Brothers: Mystery Room.

Well, more or less. Mystery Room wasn't conceived as a Layton game, it was instead meant to be an entirely separate investigation series. Level-5 went quiet about this game after its announcement, and then it resurfaced after over a year, rebranded as Layton Brothers: Mystery Room. And you can kind of feel how the Layton brand was shoehorned into this: the only relation it has to the Layton series is that one of the protagonists, Alfendi Layton, is supposed to be Hershel's son, but other than that, it features mechanics and stories entirely separate from those in the good professor's games.

As the game begins, Lucy Baker joins Scotland Yard as a detective. Her job is to assist renowned investigator Alfendi Layton in solving murder cases that get sent to the ward. In time, Lucy begins to realize that there is more to her colleague than meets the eye. The story is split into an intro plus nine cases, some of which are interlinked and form a larger plot. In each case, data about the murder is brought to Lucy and Alfendi along with profiles of its suspects, and the two set out to investigate and try to pin one of the suspects.

The game plays closer to something like Ace Attorney than Layton. Every case begins with the circumstances of the crime being made known, followed by Lucy and Alfendi inspecting the crime scene for every piece of evidence they can find. There's mostly only one room to investigate in the entire case, though, you don't get to move between various locations like Phoenix does, which makes it a more casual experience than AA, for good and for bad. It's fitting for a mobile game, where you go and play a game when you have time to kill, but it's also not as memorable as other similar titles.

The case is laid out as a series of questions that need to be answered by the player either through evidence and/or statements from the people present at the time of the crime. Once each of these questions has been answered and the suspect has been narrowed down, the detectives call over the person whodunnit to finally get their confession.

Overall, Mystery Room is far from an unmissable part of the Layton series, but it’s an enjoyable detective romp, and I figure the only major problem is that it goes out with a whimper. The last couple of cases are meant to be the highest point of the story, but they are by far the worst of the bunch. The central issue is that they revolve around events that happened so far in Alfendi's past that it feels like you're grasping at straws for two entire cases. The writers really wrote themselves into a corner with this ending.

Just as there is life, there is death -- a specter looming above us that will come for those around us and, eventually, will come for us. When that inevitable day comes, will you be able to let go of the people and memories you cherish, and move on without regrets? This is the question the characters in Spiritfarer are faced with, and the one the main character of the game, Stella, is supposed to help them navigate.

Stella and her pet cat Daffodil take on the mantle of ferrymen of the dead from Charon himself, and are tasked with exploring this limbo-esque world aboard their ship and helping spirits they find move on to the afterlife. The game takes place on a vast ocean and presents a blend of sidescrolling platformer with city builder. Its world structure and navigation will be immediately familiar to people who played The Wind Waker's sequel The Phantom Hourglass, where you select a point (generally, an island) on the ocean to visit and the ship sails that way automatically.

While she waits to reach her destination, Stella tends to her craft and its passengers. As ferrywoman of the dead, she is tasked with caring for the spirits she encounters, who will board the ship and hand out quests that require that a variety of lodgings and facilities be built. This ties into the game's crafting systems: across the oceans, it's possible to collect a variety of seeds that can be grown into crops, as well as resources that can be manufactured into all sorts of materials through a variety of minigames.

And... I hope you like those, because that's where most of your playtime will be spent. Despite the title, in this game, you do a meager amount of Spiritfaring, instead occupying yourself with performing chores around the ship, over and over, to try to fulfill the game's objectives. Plant more crops, do a bunch of timing minigames for the umpteenth time, farm money for ship upgrades, sail to a faraway island to see if maybe it offers a means to progress (and find out it requires power ups you have no idea what and where they are).

To say that Spiritfarer moves slowly is an understatement for the glacial pace at which it unfolds: the game is, no hyperbole, twenty hours longer than it should have been to have any effectiveness. As it is, the story ends up so diluted amongst the chores, it's easy to forget what your main quest is, the spirits aboard the boat reduced to quest givers at best and complainers at worst. Their story is, after all, told mostly through random conversations that are not only rushed, but also lean on RNG to occur, so you're lucky if you even get to see them -- more often than not, they'll call to you simply to complain about food. And this is but one of the problems with the storytelling.

Compared to other pieces of media that revolve around grief, regret and overcoming loss, Spiritfarer is incredibly tame. It presents a lot of themes and ideas through its characters and overall premise, but does not explore them whatsoever, and the storytelling is loose at best and absent at worst. The writing feels soft, as if afraid of tackling the topics the game ostensibly revolves around head-on, and this results in virtually every character feeling undeveloped by the time they leave, as well as the game never having the emotional impact a piece of media revolving around loss usually has.

It seems the folks at Thunder Lotus realized it, even if a bit too late. In the original release, Stella's story was paradoxically central to the game and barely touched upon by it, apart from some clumsy exposition from the spirits who all, somehow, were related to her in some way. This gap eventually led to the Lily update being released, which added an endgame quest line that expands on Stella's story. It's an exposition-heavy quest that comes right in the final act -- an ugly solution, but one that fixes the even uglier problem. The Lily update also fixed some baffling QoL omissions -- I pity anyone who played the game on release -- but I digress.

The most frustrating part is that there was so much potential here. The platforming feels great once you have every power-up unlocked. Plus, anyone who boots into the game for the first time will notice that Spiritfarer is an audiovisual delight: sprites are animated smoothly and expressively, and the 2D art is accompanied by subtle modern visual effects that enhance it in almost seamlessly. And the music in this game is incredible! There's a minigame in the southeastern regions of the map that makes me cry every time I play it, and I don't even know why. Its BGM is just incredibly charged with emotion.

Which is to say, there are moments where the game hits, even if seemingly by accident. One spirit, whose arc revolves around dementia, is often named as players' favorite character, and that's because her decay is expressed using game mechanics instead of the game's less effective usual tools. Moreover, Lily's questline is often cited as the writing getting better in the late game, for very good reasons, and the ending is so bold in its finality, it feels like a knife to the chest.

Had the game been less afraid to use that knife and more willing to twist it around, and had it been less preoccupied with pointless chores, Spiritfarer would have been unforgettable. As it is, its gorgeous art aside, it's a hard game to recommend to anyone who doesn't have an outstanding tolerance for repetitive gameplay, as well as lots of free time.

Recently, it has become popular to make games that either don't feature combat, or in which combat takes a back seat as crafting, building and farming take the lead. This is a positive trend, to me, but like all trends in gaming, it's one that also often goes wrong, with designers failing to understand player motivations for the genres they're working on and, in this particular trend's case, creating games where the chore part is treated as the goal of the experience. This usually only results in a bland, boring game that you forget about as soon as you're done playing -- it wasn't until Forager that one of those managed to really offend me.

Forager is a mix of adventure and builder that does a lot of things, none of them well. It is also number-go-up taken to an extreme: the chore for the sake of the chore, the grind a means and an end. There is no story, there is no quest, there is no motivator for the player whatsoever. You expand your land so you can get more money so you can expand your land further. You collect stuff because it's there and you might as well, not because there's a reason to. It's an utterly joyless experience with nothing to offer but the cheap dopamine rushes from a game saying you accomplished something.

The real kicker, though, is that Forager is all that, and it's one of the most self-aggrandizing pieces of media I have ever seen. The game's synopsis cites inspirations from Zelda and Terraria, and... I can see the Zelda part if I squint, but "Terraria" is baffling -- Forager is as similar to that game as it is to any other with a crafting system. I doubt the creator understands what makes Terraria fun. Speaking of him, though, he makes several appearances in-game as some sort of in-universe god-figure, and every time he bores you with terrible jokes and with him going off about his own interests. It's like a bad Tinder date you paid a $20 Uber to be at.

And it looks hideous, especially in the late game where some of the art was apparently crowd-sourced. And it's buggy: it's been out for three, nearing four years already, and you still can't trust it to not crash or present game-breaking bugs.

So, thinking of buying Forager? How about you spend your hard earned money on an Excel course instead? It will probably take less of your time, the spreadsheets you'll work on will be more charming and engaging, and by the end, you'll even have a new, marketable skill! A much better investment than this game.