Detective Grimoire is once again called to solve an elusive case: this time, they're taken to the eponymous Tangle Tower, a place in a mysterious island that houses the Fellow and Pointer families. Freya Fellow, one of the youngest in the former family, has been murdered, stabbed in the chest by... her own painting, found in the scene of the crime eerily holding a bloodied knife in front of her dead body.

A sequel to 2015's remarkable point-'n-click adventure Detective Grimoire: Secret of the Swamp, Tangle Tower improves upon its prequel in almost every regard. The game is rendered in even sharper visuals, with beautiful 2D backgrounds and fluid hand-drawn character animations, thanks to which its scenes and characters brim with life. A gorgeous soundtrack completes the immersion, with tracks that reflect the personality of each character and the atmosphere of each moment. The experience is worth the price of admission for the vibes alone.

Despite the seriousness of the case at hand, the tone of the writing is mostly on the light side, with eccentric characters and humorous exchanges. The game's Teen rating, however, is well-earned, as there are some tense moments as well as a subtle darkness hiding behind the island and its inhabitants. There is a history to this place, what with the mysterious nature of the lake surrounding the island, multiple members of both families having left for unknown reasons and the people that remain on the island each harboring secrets to be uncovered. And uncover them we will, because this is a detective game.

The original game's investigation mechanics were iterated upon, but the gist of the sequel remains more or less the same: Grimoire and his assistant, Sally, both of which are controlled by the player, move between locations by selecting them on the map, and examine the scenes point-'n-click style to find clues. Sometimes, said clues are gated by puzzles which, intentionally or not, end up being one of the standout points of the experience, being of a similar caliber to the more high quality puzzles from the best Professor Layton games. Even the BGM used during puzzle-solving is somewhat like of those in that series games.

The closest parallel for the overall mechanics, however, would have to be the Ace Attorney series, what with the assembling of a case file full of clues, the gathering of statements from each witness and the presentation of evidence to those same witnesses in other to have them set their testimonies straight. Grimoire and Sally, however, have the freedom to explore the many rooms of the titular mansion in a non-linear fashion, giving the investigation in Tangle Tower a more player-guided, deliberate feel that sets it apart from its inspirations.

Of course, which such freedom comes an increased chance of the player missing a clue or otherwise getting stuck, and the game is especially careful not to let that happen: a hint button in the map screen, when pressed, mentions a room that would yield a clue if investigated; in addition, whenever the set of evidence needed to press one of the witnesses becomes available, the game is even more explicit, with the playable characters notifying the player that the option to press on a suspicion is now available via voice lines and an on-screen call to action. The hint button is for the better, but its when these prompts come up that Tangle Tower's biggest flaw becomes more evident.

Progression to the final sections of the game is gated behind finding the contradictions in each of the witnesses' testimony. Crucially, this must be done at once, which is why the game makes a point of notifying the player that the option to do so is available, but because it happens right after getting a crucial piece of evidence, the result is that the player must, all at once, make several conclusions about that witness that they might not have had time to digest. This takes them away from the driver's seat as they are tossed into a gauntlet of multiple choice questions that, due to their very nature, stop short of spelling out the answer to the suspicion in question.

It's an issue with the design: had dialogue options not been standardized, and instead, had there been multiple opportunities to, piece by piece, break down lies and/or answer questions about the witness, the player could have been eased into the conclusions the game expects them to take without losing the feeling of agency. The Ace Attorney series also sometimes uses testimony records as pieces of evidence, and something in that direction could have helped give players more freedom to solve the case by themselves, for instance, by having to choose what to press the witness on.

Potential improvements to the investigation mechanics aside, Tangle Tower is still a very satisfying experience: the relaxing vibes, approachable tone and exceptional voice acting alone are enough to justify the experience; the intriguing mystery, great brain-teasers and, despite its issues, still entertaining detective work seal the deal. I sure hope this is not the last we see of Detective Grimoire and Sally, and that SFB Games puts forth a new case for them to solve coming up some time in the future.

I remember downloading the demo for Dragon Age II on PS3, coming out of several Origins playthroughs and being hungry for more RPG action. And oh boy, did I get action, with the new game gearing much towards that than the quiet, strategic gameplay of its predecessor. Units zoomed across the field and dished out attacks at impossible speeds, mages flung out spells like confetti, and enemies flooded the battlefields. As jarring as all of that felt, what really stood out was how unpolished the game looked and felt. "Surely this isn't coming out for at least a year or so, right?".

"...What? What do you mean 'it's coming out next week'?!"

Following hot on the success of DA:Origins, the geniuses at EA thought Bioware could pull a Majora's Mask and make a sequel to that game in a year or so. The result was not only massive crunch within the studio, but a final product that lost them much of the hype DA:O had garnered. While not exactly critically panned, it didn't come close to the acclaim of its predecessor, and its uneven quality set the fanbase ablaze -- to this day, some wince at the title's mere mention.

Myself, I was merely disappointed by the game's demo and completely forgot about it up until I was met with a very cheap copy on a retro game store a couple of months back. Somewhat reeling from the shock of realizing that its age was closer in years to the Pokémon Snap cartridge I picked up on the same trip than to the present year, I decided to dive in and see just how bad Dragon Age II was. By the end, I was positively surprised: the sequel to DA:O might not have reached the same heights as the original, but it hardly warrants the hatred it gets.

Dragon Age II opens rather unusually: a dwarf by the name of Varric, under arrest, is being interrogated by Cassandra, a Seeker of the Chantry. It's suggested that a great crisis struck the city of Kirkwall and then spread throughout the rest of the world; at the epicenter of said crisis, there was a key figure referred to by the Seeker as the Champion of Kirkwall, who has disappeared amidst the chaos and is wanted by the Chantry. Cassandra barely knows who they were, however, so she has Varric tell her the story of what transpired in Kirkwall. The entire game is told as a tale within a tale, with Varric recounting the Champion's ascension to the Seeker as he remembers it... with a few creative liberties, of course.

That story begins in Ferelden, still during the events of the first game, right after the fall of Ostagar. With Lothering soon to be overrun by the Blight, the Hawke family, led by the playable character, who's their eldest daughter, attempts to flee. Stuff happens on the way, but the group makes it more or less safe out of Ferelden, reaching the port of the city of Kirkwall, in the Free Marches. There, Hawke's rise to power, beginning all the way at the bottom of the ladder, begins.

As with many high-profile titles that were rushed -- Pokémon Scarlet and Violet being the most recent ones that come to mind -- that fact is immediately apparent by the wildly disparate levels of polish applied to different parts of the game. For instance, DA2 features much more impacting character designs than the original: the new designs for the Qunari and Flemeth stand out, as do the iconic designs for the main character and most of the main and supporting cast. Everyone feels more like characters from a fantasy setting instead of someone straight out of the character creator.

But then you look elsewhere, like the environment design, and that spark is gone. The opening segment areas look hideous; the city of Kirkwall is so little like a city and so underdesigned for the amount of quests that take place in it; most famously, for every other type of area in the city and its vicinity -- caves, dungeons, warehouses and so on -- there is one map for that type of place. Every grotto, every maze, every temple has the exact same layout flipped around and with new enemy placements, and sometimes having a couple of paths cordoned off. More than repetitive, this becomes extremely confusing not too many hours in.

Systems also have their own ups and downs: instead of the janky morality systems of other RPGs, DA2 has a personality system which keeps track of the style of dialogue options that gets picked the most and performs subtle changes in dialogues, like adding or taking away certain choices in conversations, or having NPCs take Hawke's threats more seriously if she's been consistently aggressive. It's a fantastic idea that, unfortunately, ends up very underused in the final game, and may even confuse those who don't know about it. Its subtlety should also not imply that the dialogue wheel is as smooth as it could be, as this is the easiest of all Bioware games with it to get jumpscared by a dialogue option that causes Hawke to say something completely different from what was expected.

My biggest dislike in terms of systems, though, has to be the combat. I specifically want to say that "I disliked it" instead of saying it's bad because what happened with Dragon Age's combat was a bit tricky. One would think, by the way DA2 seems like much more of an action game, that Bioware had created a more streamlined experience, but it was actually quite the opposite: skills are a lot more diverse and splashable in DA2, opening up far more possibilities of builds. Characters also end up with a ton of active abilities, so if playing a mage, for instance, players will be unleashing a constant barrage of spells, which means having to stop time to aim all the time.

All of that, combined with a more dynamic and faster paced game, in which the party is constantly getting ambushed and flanked, make for a far more tinkery experience, one that can't be survived without elaborate tactics setups and plenty of micromanagement on top. It's perfectly functional, and there are people who like it and have gone to great lengths theorycrafting around it, but I, myself, despite usually playing DA:O on Hard or Nightmare, grew less and less willing to put up with combat in DA2, lowering the difficulty to Normal by Act 2, then Casual by Act 3.

So... all those downsides in mind, why is Dragon Age II so great even then? Simply put, the writers and actors hard-carry it. As flawed as the main plot might be at times, there's a legitimate warmth to Hawke's story that is hard to ignore: Hawke loses almost everything to the Blight and has to start from scratch elsewhere, rising to the top from the lowly status of refugee -- it's an underdog story, and everybody loves an underdog. Plus, that rise is enhanced by a sociological aspect to the storytelling that greatly enhances it, owed to the brilliant choice of setting.

Kirkwall is a fantastic place to set DA2 in: being only a city-state, a place of a much smaller scale than the kingdom featured in Origins, it allows the writers to tell more personal stories, focusing on developing the characters close to the protagonist, as well as the dynamics between the different castes of people living in the city. The latter is important because, as one soon realizes, Kirkwall is a disaster waiting to happen, with serious tensions building within it from way before the moment Hawke and company set foot on its shores. These tensions feed into one another, and are ultimately going to reach a breaking point she interferes or not.

Dragon Age II resembles, in that sense, the first Mass Effect, by featuring a character who's but a tiny piece of the story, and also in how it always leaves that feeling of disgusting inevitability when looking back at the chains of events that shaped that world of the game. The three act structure, with a time skip between each act, also echoes the satisfying feeling of continuity from that series as the consequences of events in previous acts snowball into the next. Since DA2 is a self contained game instead of a trilogy, however, it enjoys a more consistent vision -- unfortunately, that does not save it from having a haphazard conclusion, but I guess that can also be considered a shared feature between the two series.

The more personal focus of the writing means that even with the main story removed, however, The Daily Adventures of Ms. Hawke & Pals would have been worth the ride for the phenomenal character writing alone: Hawke is an amazing protagonist and delivers on great lines regardless of whether she's being played as diplomatic, humorous or aggressive. Her responses, and sometimes, unhinged monologuing, would have easily earned her the #1 spot in fans' favorite companion lists in any other game, but the fact we have direct control of her makes it even more special. And that's not to say that the companions in DA2 leave anything to be desired.

Almost immediately upon booting the game, Varric wins over everyone's hearts. He is the ideal sidekick to Hawke, and the two play off each other spectacularly, with the game presenting a legitimate, wholesome development to their relationship over the years. The same happens with Aveline, an honorable warrior met still while on the run from the Blight who, despite a rocky start, becomes almost like family to Hawke, a friendly face with whom a bond of complete mutual trust is shared. Speaking of family, though, we have that too! Hawke is accompanied by her mother, Leandra, as well as her siblings Bethany and Carver. It's so rare to see a good sibling dynamic in fiction, some good old butting heads but with a lot of love sprinkled in, and Dragon Age II nails it perfectly.

And there's more! Do you like weird, asocial mages? Anders is back from Awakening! Do you enjoy a pirate lady with killer gear and even more killer looks? Isabela, once a minor character in Origins, has gotten a makeover and is now a stand-out member of Hawke's group! Do you like unhinged elves with dangerous magical powers? We've got two of them! DA2's cast is almost as large as its prequel's, and the seemingly unending stream of character interactions are bound to get chuckles out of the player for the whole ride.

Like the rise of the champion of Kirkwall, Dragon Age II is a glorious mess: a game rushed out the window that, despite the odds, still managed to come out with an incredible amount of heart. It's definitely a terrible starting point to Dragon Age for new fans, but fans of the series really ought to give it a fair shot.

Legacy has Hawke travel to the Vinmark Mountains in search of dwarven members of the Carta who, in turn, seek "the blood of the Hawke". There, Hawke (and their sibling, who should absolutely be taken along) finds out more about her father and his past.

Myself, I'm a sucker for more Hawke sisters banter, so I'll shill for this any day. Plus, it got me interested in the lore of Dragon Age really hard, pulling me harder back into a Dragon Age obsession than even DA2's main game managed to. I expect to finally play Inquisition soon.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow follows the footsteps of Thomasina Bateman, an archeologist from London who specializes in barrows, which, she'll explain, are a type of tumuli. After receiving a letter from a Mr. Leonard Shoulder telling of a most unusual barrow in the outskirts of the city of Bewlay, she takes the train there to investigate and, hopefully, excavate the place and uncover its secrets. The inhabitants are quick to tell her to turn back, warning that nothing good will come out of this excavation, warnings that Thomasina, ever the rationalist, ignores and presses on.

Before jumping into the game, I read a single review on it: that by Christian Donlan on Eurogamer. Aside from a strong sentiment that the game is best enjoyed as blind as possible, they mentioned how it would linger on their minds for hours after the credits roll. Having now played it myself, I agree on both counts: first, Hob's Barrow is something of a narrative puzzle, best experienced without being aware of how it's constructed, so if you're a fan of psychological horror and/or point-n'-clicks, consider just jumping in blind.

In fact, if you are a fan of horror games, the second point should come at no surprise: this is a story that's built to eat away at its spectator with the many gaps in its events and the insecurities it instills. In that sense, the game has definitely escaped its intended bubble, as many of the complaints leveraged at it from players boil down to "game vague and ending bad", which are baffling takes. This is a work that presents very specific themes, under a particular type of framing, and that is also going for a very well-known style of horror, and a lot of the players coming out dissatisfied are doing so due to refusing to engage with any of those things in more than a surface level.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow deserves to be given more credit than that: it's a beautifully created game. Every scene is meticulously crafted, every narrative decision is deliberate and purposeful. The town of Bewlay is surrounded by an unnerving atmosphere reinforced by both its eerie sound design and its visuals, the latter shifting between a bread-and-butter pixel art style and twisting, uncanny rotoscoped animations. It also enjoys fantastic voice acting, of a quality and extent that is hard to find, if not unheard of, in an indie game in this price range.

One could say it's much easier to find fault in the mechanical aspects of The Excavation of Hob's Barrow than in its artistic choices, but even then, it's no trivial task. The typical point-'n-click puzzles fit neatly into the setting and escalate alongside the narrative, never getting in the way, and being almost entirely free of the famed Moon Logic that often plagues its genre. The UI is also modern, with interactions and items working in a streamlined fashion, a to-do list helpfully explaining the next goal -- great for hopping in and out -- and a map function that makes exploring Bewlay much faster.

Thomasina's adventure is just, overall, a fantastic experience, a hidden gem I hope to see get more recognition.

Stacklands is a twist on management games: every object in the game, from people to buildings to resources to money, is represented by a card on the game board. These cards interact through being stacked on top of one another, causing an item to be equipped, a building to be built from the required materials, or a production cycle to be initiated. By producing excess goods and selling them, the player can buy booster packs, which unlock new cards and new recipes for buildings and items. Over time, new areas are unlocked, as well as powerful foes to do battle against.

The game takes place over turns called moons, which last for a few real time minutes. At the end of each moon, all your villagers have to be fed -- if there's not enough food cards, unfed villagers will starve and die. Aside from that, random events may occur between moons, some of which force your people into battle, and that may also result in their demise. Either way, should you run out of people cards at any moment, the game ends. It's easy to understand in theory, but Stacklands teaches little and forces the player to learn everything from experience, making the early game rocky. And that is but the first of its problems.

What could have been an outstanding game is merely fine, thanks to some questionable design choices and a rough execution. In Stacklands. annoyance is part of the game's mechanics: cards collide with one another and push each other off to the sides, messing up the board and adding some annoying glitches to the mix. Some cards allow for making compact stacks of the same type of card, or guiding your villagers towards certain foods, but those take time and resources to make and only solve part of the problems. Fundamentally, though, the floatiness of the game's objects eliminates their physicality as cards, downgrading Stacklands from an interesting card game to a more generic management one.

There's also a severe lack of quality of life options. If playing on the Steam Deck, you'll immediately feel it in your hands: the controller support is awful, if not on its own, because of glitches stemming from a misuse of Unity's (admittedly terrible) UI navigation system. That the game should not have the Steam Deck Verified seal is a given, but even playing with a mouse, the UI could have been so much more helpful, like by allowing for certain shortcuts, warning about finished tasks, or the presence and position of enemies and the like. It could also provide more guidance, not just in the beginning of the game, but also, when you're about to do something that would, I don't know, summon an incredibly powerful boss that might end your run or something.

On that note, Stacklands should not have had permadeath. Yes, I know card-based roguelikes are all the rage nowadays, but that doesn't mean just any card-adjacent game should have permadeath in it: a full run of Stacklands with the current updates takes upwards of ten hours. Imagine dying to the final boss and having to redo everything -- I almost feel bad for saying Dead Cells had it bad with its deaths. A save option, even if it was a consumable item you had to create with rare materials, would have been welcome.

There's something lovable about the indie game hit, the labor of love that sells millions of copies. Even more amazing is to see one come from Motion Twin, a small, worker-owned studio from France that has a long history making flash games. And what a stylish game did they come up with: Dead Cells is a slick and recognizable action platformer that went on to sell over 10 million copies. As I set out to see if it delivered on everything that it promised, however... I found myself a bit underwhelmed.

I normally like to open a review with a small synopsis, but to begin with Dead Cells's premise feels paradoxical, as Dead Cells itself does not do so. Its opening moments are so abrupt, I restarted thinking I'd accidentally skipped a cutscene. You play as a prisoner (referred to as the Beheaded outside of the game) in an unnamed kingdom who wakes up in a dungeon missing all of his memories and, well, his head. You quickly learn that you cannot die, instead returning the Prisoner's Quarters whenever you're killed. And... that's it. Go out on your merry way and explore the kingdom, aided by all of these random NPCs that also show up unexplained.

There is a story to the game, of course, but it is told in small fragments through lore rooms found throughout the randomly generated maps. In essence, the kingdom where Dead Cells takes place is all but destroyed, ravaged by a plague called the Malaise that either killed or turned into monsters the majority of the population. Multiple story threads give more context to your adventure, like how an alchemist made a failed attempt to find the origin of the Malaise and create a cure, how the queen disappeared, how the king repeatedly abused his powers and made the crisis worse... the structure of the game, however, makes it a pain to piece together the story, so most people will just watch a Youtube video on it instead.

It's unlikely you'll pick up Dead Cells for its plot, anyway, as it's most famous for its gameplay style: the game promises to combine metroidvania with roguelike. My biggest question was "how", seeing that one of those genres must be carefully hand-crafted, while the other is procedural. Surely, though, such a highly regarded game would have an answer for that... right? It did, actually, and it's a very straightforward answer, too: they don't mix. In fact, "they don't mix" is a bit of a theme in Dead Cells, as the crux of its issues lie in how it has multiple aspects that are fantastic in isolation, but work against each other in practice.

Dead Cells enjoys mesmerizing 2D sidescroller action: the Beheaded can equip up to two weapons and two skills at once, and can deftly slice through enemies with them in fast, fluid motions. There's three categories of weapons that each scale with one of the Beheaded's stats, and you'd better get comfortable with one of them, because enemies are relentless. It's important to know each enemy's behaviour and tells, because if they get you, it will hurt. This goes double for bosses, which require intense focus to get by their barrage of attacks and whittle down their health. There's even achievements for defeating all bosses without taking damage to encourage thoroughly learning the fight.

This would be great in a metroidvania, but if we consider that genre's definition, though, Dead Cells barely tried to be one. That one is a type of game defined by a dense, interconnected map meant to be explored in a back and forth manner as new power-ups of some kind are obtained, which is completely unlike what we see here: the kingdom of Dead Cells features a series of biomes, each of which is an isolated, procedurally generated 2D map built around a certain theme. There are branching paths at the ends of each map, but crucially, the world can only be traversed forwards, and there's no reason to explore any other paths. If this is a metroidvania, so are most sidescrollers on the SNES, like say, The Mask (1995).

"But there are items that add movement skills!", one might say, referring to key items that are retained between runs and open up optional areas. It's important to realize that those, at most, earn extra items or allow for alternative paths during runs. They are entirely optional do not affect progression in any way: the final boss can be reached from the very first run without the need for any of them. Furthermore, these upgrades are way off the beaten path, found in hidden rooms in areas one never has to enter. This further complicates the map design as nothing can ever be created under the assumption that a player will have any given ability, and failsafes for such cases can be found well into the endgame. Crucially, these items suit the needs of the roguelike, not those of the metroidvania.

Incidentally, if Dead Cells wasn't a roguelike, it would be a much better game already. The brand of punishing gameplay it tries to establish would have been fun to deal in-between save points, but has no place in a game where dying means going back to the beginning of the game. This goes double when taking into account that the player is forced to explore every nook and cranny of each map to gather stat-boosting scrolls and guarantee they're at the power level the game expects them to be. The hunt for level-ups makes runs pretty long, and thus, all the more annoying when an enemy or boss that hasn't been fought before wipes the floor with the Beheaded, yeeting them back to the Prisoner's Quarters. Being able to take the time to deal with one thing at a time would have been a much better use of the player's time.

And a better use of the map, too, as the map design in Dead Cells is fascinating on its own: each level gives two to three options for what the next one will be, meaning that there are multiple paths that can be taken to the final boss. This ties into the game's DLC model which is to simply add to those paths, to add new areas and new bosses that fit neatly into the default experience. The problem is, again, the punishing roguelike: in theory one can take whatever path, in practice, with the only objective being to reach the end of the game, there's no reason to deviate from the path one is already used to and risk getting blindsided. In fact, some areas are disproportionately harder than others, so by going into them, you'd be putting your run at risk for no extra reward.

Similarly, there's no reason to ever change builds. Dead Cells features a wide array of weapons and skills, and there's a lot of creativity in the myriad different effects, but because game must be hard, they end up completely overtuned. Patches often come with puzzling nerfs to weapons and skills, and between "powerful", "fun" and "handy", the majority of the arsenal can't even tick one of those boxes. Making matters worse, it's a grind to unlock new weapons, what with the need to find or drop their blueprints and then farm enough Cells -- a currency dropped from enemies, lost when dying -- to unlock them. It hurts to waste cells on weapons that turn out to be bad as, in the process, you'll permanently lower the chance of getting the preferred ones in a run. Again, the game is designed in a way that strongly encourages being minimalistic instead of engaging with its systems.

I keep going back to the game's central goal, because it has to be said: having the single-minded pursuit of killing the final boss, no matter how, at the core of the game, was a mistake. As has been a trend with roguelikes in the last several years, the goal here is to finish the game over and over again to reach the true ending of the game. Once you've beaten the final boss once, Dead Cells introduces something called a Boss Cell, which, when equipped, transforms the kingdom, making enemies more powerful and maps, harder. These harder modes are generally referred to by the playerbase as 1BC, 2BC and so on. The ultimate goal is to get to 5BC and beat the game twice more to unlock the true ending.

I speak from experience when I say this: don't do it. From 3BC onwards, the game is a complete meme, with enemies that spam the screen with projectiles or teleport behind you becoming commonplace. In both cases, they're almost always able to two-hit the Beheaded from full. This adds frustration to the chore that is beating the game, making Dead Cells into one of those games where people who didn't play it to the end -- say, played a couple of runs and thought it was too hard, or finished 0BC and decided they'd had enough -- are more likely to have a more positive opinion than those who tried to push through it. In that latter group, I suspect only a select group of masochists will even have it in them to see the game to the end. I... I actually have the platinum trophy. I wonder what that says about me. I should probably get my head checked.

On a more serious note, I think what ultimately kept me going was that, as with most games that are less than the sum of their parts, that have great ideas but do not make great wholes, you'll see small glimpses of the game that could have been and keep chasing after them. Listening to the wonderful soundtrack by composer Yoann "Valmont" Laulan also helped. The fact remains, however, that Dead Cells left me wanting a wholly different game: maybe an actual metroidvania, or maybe a roguelike that emphasized the variety of systems instead of a grind mentality, like by using different archetypes of weapons and/or taking different paths. There's plenty I feel could have been done to make Dead Cells a must-play, but as it is, it is something I could have done without.

It's not a bad DLC, the levels are fun, if a bit long, but the problem, like with other DLCs, is that there is no real reason to ever go through this area. It's a bit longer than the alternatives.

Fatal Falls is home to the biggest banger in all of Dead Cells, which is an unbelievably high bar. It's too bad that it's the theme of The Fractured Shrines, an area filled with so many hazards and deathtraps that you'll realistically never incorporate it into a run you hope to succeed in. Undying Shores is okay, at least, and the boss in The Mausoleum isn't too bad either.

If you want to pick up Dead Cells DLC, but you can only choose one, this should be it. It adds one (rather inconsequential) area and two of the best boss fights in all of Dead Cells. The Lighthouse fight is one of the most insane sequences I've ever seen in an action platformer, and the fight atop it is an alternative final boss to the game, which is also stunning and helps break the tedium of the Boss Cell grind. These are much, much harder than the default paths to the end of the game, however, so you might as well not.

So going through the base game to reach 4BC is enough of a pain, but Rise of the Giant should legally qualify as some manner of torture. I'll never forget reaching the Giant for the first time and him just wiping my entire health away in a single volley, before I even got a good look at him. Peak Dead Cells game design. The final area and its boss were a pain in the butt, too. Overall, the true ending to Dead Cells introduced by this DLC is one of the most laborious and least rewarding things in videogames.

Frog Detective 2 is a small evolution of the first game. It features slightly sharper writing, with the titular amphibian being a bit more fleshed out as a character this time around, and the central plot offering a more interesting whodunnit that even involves a moral choice. However, with the sequel fleshing out the mechanics a bit more, it took a few steps back, what with a confusing quest that looks like a sidequest but isn't, and a sluggish UI of a notebook that adds flavor at the cost of nuisance.

Still, it's a short game, not unlike its predecessor. It will make for an entertaining package for a young gamer, and a fine palate-cleanser between other larger games for an adult one.

It's... more Vampire Survivors. Although, I have to say, I don't like these new maps as much -- the second map is a bit annoying and the methods for unlocking the next steps in the DLC are rather roundabout, even for VS standards. The new characters are pretty satisfying, though -- it's impressive how there's still room for new ideas when the game has so much stuff in it already.

Side note, but curiously, because this DLC introduced extremely efficient gold and golden egg farming methods, I found out that people grind in Vampire Survivors. Why? I know many of the crappy clones (especially F2P ones) force people to do so, but in the original VS, I never had or felt the need to -- it's why I liked the game so much. It was a confounding discovery.

Something that has become increasingly common in online discourse is the idea that if a studio makes a game with a certain feature or quality, another studio with a lot of money can easily, and is in fact expected to, replicate that success, delivering on a product with that and more. It's a truly baffling take, for a variety of technical and creative reasons, but more fundamentally, that viewpoint ignores that money isn't the only resource at play in the games industry: time is also in short supply. Between console cycles, trends, holiday seasons, to name a few, it's rather common for a project to be more pressed for days than it is for dollars.

No series demonstrates that better than Pokémon: it is the largest media franchise in the world, which proves to be both a blessing and a curse. Not only are they bound to all the aforementioned time constraints, but also, new generations are tied to new anime seasons, new card game packs, manga, all sorts of merchandise... All of which led to the puzzling decision to release the ninth generation on November 2022. That's less than a year after Legends: Arceus, with whom the new games share most of their staff, making it highly likely that they had less than a year of full-steam production.

The result was the most chaotic release in series history, games that were clearly unfinished, with broken features and a myriad bugs ranging from funny to game-breaking at release. There's still some lingering issues months later as Game Freak no doubt shuffle to manage patching and live ops while working on the DLC. This situation, understandably, led to a lot of frustration, but since Pokémon has been the internet's favorite punching bag as of the last couple of years, it got blown way out of proportion, with every texture and animation scrutinized and even emulator glitches farmed for clicks, not unlike what happened to Legends: Arceus.

It's that vitriol that kept me from writing about the game for several months now, the discourse surrounding the series having become exhausting to take part in (and puzzlingly, frequently dominated by people who haven't played Pokémon in years). But hey, if only to get this off the way, please indulge me as I get into why I'm personally disappointed in Pokémon Scarlet. As you may have noticed from the score, it's not "this is bad and this series is dying", it's "this game had so much potential and it pains me that it will never fully realize it".

SV introduces an open world to the mainline series: a real open world this time, unlike Legends Arceus, which had a series of open maps to explore. Paldea is a contiguous map that can be explored from edge to edge, no loading screens at all. It's also... barren. It features rather bland environments, defined only by the color of the ground and vegetation density (ranging from sparse to none). That it looks nothing like the actual Iberian Peninsula is a given, but that wouldn't matter much if not for a lack of natural beauty and a near total absence of landmarks. It's hard to even understand what Paldea's areas are meant to be, not to mention remember them in the long run.

That said, even though the map is clearly the weakest part of the game, it's possible to see some positives. The biggest irony is that, because so much of the world feels generic, it's very easy to get lost in, which is a feeling I hadn't had since the sprawling caves of Johto. It's common to take some random detour and wind up somewhere entirely different where there's something cool to find, with no idea how you got there -- a situation that yields a sense of adventure that was slowly lost as the series' graphics improved and its design became more focused and linear.

Of course, because this is Pokémon, exploration is almost always rewarded, if not with some useful TMs, with new Pokémon. The Paldean dex has a nice 400 of them, a regional dex count that has been more or less stable since Alola and that mixes old favorites with new mons at a ratio of about 3 to 1. These 400 mons are spread around the region in a way that you'll be finding uncaught creatures all the way to the end of your adventure, but also, because there's no linear path to follow and multiple areas close to the starting area, there's also unprecedented variety of Pokémon to catch while still in the opening hours. I suspect this will earn SV a higher replay value in the long run.

It's clear there was a vision to the map design, as even though biomes are not well defined, the shape of the terrain is, with the idea behind the game being to navigate that with your partner, Koraidon. Koraidon is introduced still in the prologue, and it also joins the player's party at that point, serving as a mount that is the main mode of transportation for the entire journey. As the game progresses, Koraidon gains more abilities, from jumping higher, to swimming, to flying, meant to open up new areas and change how the player approaches the map. And it works: the map feels daunting at first, but later on, Koraidon feels unstoppable. Revisiting locations from earlier on is also made rewarding as there are plenty of optional areas and items that can't be reached at first but become accessible the right abilities.

Because this design is successful, Koraidon is also a success. In fact, due to being so inseparable from the way the game plays, as well as being deeply tied into the narrative in a way that's almost poetic, and having lovable and expressive body language, sound design and overall behaviour as a creature, Koraidon is the best cover legendary to ever grace the franchise, and it's by a long shot. For many of the series' entries, cover legendaries feel bolted onto their entries and/or not developed past "whoa, it's the legendary thing!". Nebby, then later Zacian and Zamazenta, attempted to remedy this by being present from the beginning of the story, but this little sandwich-loving, drooly, motorcycle fellow won over my heart in a way none of the others ever did.

Cover legendary is not the only category SV achieves a best of in: it's also home to the best rivals in franchise history. There are three of them: Nemona is an enthusiastic young woman who's been successful as a trainer and is eager to have a new rival to battle with; Arven is the son of the region's Professor Sada, and also has a penchant for cuisine; finally, Penny is a young introvert who, along with you, gets pulled into the fight against Team Star. Nemona, Arven and Penny are my precious children: they're well developed characters that help propel the narrative forward and make the time in Paldea all the more worth it.

Each of the three is tied to one of the main quests, which you are free to pursue in any order, but are most likely to do more or less concurrently. The most prominent story is the Victory Road, the traditional eight gym gauntlet before facing the Pokémon League. Nemona keeps an eye out for you as you travel the region gathering your Gym Badges, with the occasional battle here and there to keep you on your toes. Much has been said about Paldea's Pokémon League and its Chairwoman being boring and bureaucratic, but that's actually the point: SV's take on the League is that of an exam, a bureaucracy, with the real spark being your growth alongside your friends. It's a refreshing take that nevertheless does not change much about the rest of the quest, with Paldean Gym Leaders being a diverse and fun bunch, ranging from cheerful artists to soul-crushed criticisms of our result-obsessed society.

Speaking of criticisms of society, since the flop that was Team Flare, Game Freak has been upping the ante when it comes to their antagonist teams, giving them a deeper meaning than just grunts to fight with. On that note, Team Star is up there as one of my favorites. Starfall Street is another main quest that has you visiting the strongholds of Team Star and fighting their five leaders in intense contests of strength, leaders who are not only extremely noteworthy character designs in a series known for having excellent ones, but are also, much like the rivals, fascinating characters on their own. Team Star's story is a relatable and emotionally charged one -- just as much as the third main quest.

Arven's Path of Legends closes out the starting trios of quests with his pursuit of Titan Pokémon around Paldea and the rare spices that supposedly made them that way. During that quest, you'll get to learn more about Arven's motivations for his search, his history with his mother and the origins of Koraidon, the latter of which is also the focus of the endgame. Once the other main quests are complete, Path of Legends gives way to The Way Home, the final quest, that looks into Professor Sada's research and how Koraidon came to be loose in Paldea. The Way Home is the best endgame questline we've had in a Pokémon game since at least the Delta Emerald arc in ORAS, cashing in on some setups that had been enacted still in the prologue. I won't detail any of it because it deserves to be experienced blind and firsthand.

And I didn't even get into how the faculty at Naranja Academy all get their own sidestories, or how much resolution is offered to other characters even after The Way Home is complete. The harm done by the evidently rushed quality of the titles does not stop SV's plot and characters from being unforgettable... but it has to be said, it's felt regardless, and one has to wonder just what heights could have been reached in a truly polished game. A similar feeling pervades the postgame content, i.e. raids and competitive play, and to talk about those, let's first discuss yet another best of achieved by SV in with Terastalization.

Since Gen VI, every generation has had its own battle mechanic, and Gen IX is no different, with Terastalization allowing a trainer to change the type of any of their Pokémon once per battle. Like with Dynamax, I had no faith in Terastalization from the moment it was announced, thinking it looked gimmicky and stupid. Like with Dynamax, boy was I wrong: Terastalization might not look as exciting as some of its predecessors, but it is the best generation mechanic we've had yet, adding unprecedented flexibility and strategic depth to Pokémon battles. It can be used offensively or defensively, it can make unusual picks completely viable, and it has kept the meta shifting constantly since the games' releases.

Terastalization also contributed to making raids much more interesting, though this is also owed to other changes more suited for a PvE mode. No longer can you just Zacian your way to victory every single time, with each raid demanding specific strategies and typings, motivating the player to keep a roster of different Pokémon builds. On that note, Scarlet and Violet have the most accessible Pokémon training yet, further enhancing the improvements brought by SWSH on that front. Almost every relevant competitive item can now be bought with in-game money or exchanged for easy to find items, from TMs to held items to even Nature Mints and Bottle Caps -- for us who suffered through Gen III/IV breeding, getting competitive or raid ready mons is unbelievably fast.

It would have been the best era for online play... but of course, it wasn't that simple. Raids were flat out unplayable at launch. They have since been patched, but event raids still have issues due to bad raid configurations being pushed to players, signaling a lack of a forced update mechanism as well as deficient live ops tooling -- yet another consequence of development crunch. On the competitive front, PvP battles are even more unstable than SWSH -- an accomplishment, no doubt -- leading to serious issues during tournaments that in themselves already suffer from the lack of a spectator mode. Let's not even mention the complete fiasco conducted by TPCi with the Asian region tournaments, which will no doubt further sour large swathes of the player base towards the game.

And that-- that's what hurts so much about Gen IX. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet were meant for the favorites' list. Had they been given six more months, maybe a year had Legends: Arceus gotten pushed forward too, these versions would have been set up to be the best Pokémon games yet. Instead, they're just... fine. Excellent ideas marred by an execution that came way too short, that will probably harm the franchise in the long run. I have no doubt about the creative vision behind it nowadays, but their technical roadmaps and release schedules need to be reviewed if the franchise is to be remembered by the young players of today as well as it is by us adults that started with earlier gens.

This is a very short game, so to get to the point: it's about a frog who is also a detective -- the second best detective from their agency, in fact. They visit an island who's supposed to be haunted to try to find the truth about the ghost. It plays a lot like old point-n'-click games aimed at kids, or a particular brand of old flash games, where the game progresses through a sequence of trades: find an item, find someone who wants that item and trade it for something else, repeat until game beaten.

It's fine. Like a flash game, it's short and sweet, taking about 30 minutes to complete, and it's probably great for kids, seeing as how it features super cute characters and witty, all-ages writing. It didn't win me over as much as I had expected, though -- maybe whoever recommended it to me overhyped it a bit.

Katamari Forever is one of those games that's so unique and so out there, it has to be experienced, as it's impossible to understand it just from reading about it. I know this because I experienced this first-hand, originally having bought it on the recommendation of a friend, knowing nothing about the series except that it was supposed to be incredible. Even with the game in my hands, reading the back of the box only made me more confused.

The King of All Cosmos bumped his head and lost all his memory. The Prince and his cousins created RoboKing to replace the King, but it went out of control and destroyed all the stars in the Cosmos. Now, you must clean up the mess made by RoboKing and bring back the King's memory by rolling up everything in the Cosmos!

Not that helpful, huh? Most of what it says regards the plot of the game. The King of All Cosmos hit his head while performing a stunt of sorts and fell in a coma. The Prince and company, unable to awake His Majesty, decided the best course of action would be to build a robot that would replace him in his royal duties; however, due to a bug, the robot went berserk, flew into the Cosmos and destroyed the stars. This leaves you, the player, with two tasks: one, rolling up new stars to refill the sky, and two, rolling up memories inside the King's head to restore his consciousness.

Rolling up is the keyword, the one piece of information on that text blurb that relates to the game's mechanics: in every stage, your character is placed on some kind of place from Earth -- a table, a garden, a city -- with a ball in front of them. Any objects touched by it stick to it, so long as they are smaller that what you currently, forming an ever-growing mass of objects that the game calls a Katamari (a word that literally translates to 'cluster'). Your job, as the Prince, is to take a Katamari of a certain starting size and grow it to a certain diameter so it can be flung into space to make a new star in the sky.

There are often special conditions to this that make the trip to Earth more tricky: it could be that there's a time limit, or a limit on the amount of objects that can be rolled up, or a certain type of object that must or must not go into the Katamari. This variety of different challenges combined with ever transforming stages where greater Katamari sizes open up new pathways and interactions, as well as a fantastic soundtrack about as iconic as the game itself, keep the game feeling ever fresh even after rolling dozens of Katamari.

Which is to say, just talking about Katamari Forever makes me want to go for a spin, or rather, for a roll, even though I've completed the game a couple of times on all of its modes. It's fantastic on so many levels, unique in all the things it does, from how it's visuals, to its sound, to how it tells its story, but it's the mesmerizing gameplay that really ties it all together. It seems simple enough at first, and its frantic pacing might make one think they can roll everything and win, but there's a lot of strategy into when and how to visit certain parts of the stage to get a good time.

And I do want to emphasize "mesmerizing": the game creates a bizarre spin on the idea of a power fantasy, turning the "I bet can kill that" thought that's so common in games into "I bet I can roll that". Every slightly larger item is taken as a challenge and made into a mental note, culminating into the amusement of seeing your ever-increasing ball of mayhem grow even larger by trapping household items, bikes, horrified screaming pedestrians, houses and so on. It's that Hotline Miami feeling of behaving like an absolute lunatic, and not even noticing it until the music stops.

It's such a thrill. Katamari Forever is one of my favorite games of all time, and even within its series it shines as one of the largest and most varied entries. I wish Bamco would port it everywhere instead of drip-feeding ports of older releases.