Such a blast. The combat is weighty and satisfying. Blowing up bugs with different weapons and gear is made all the more satisfying with the sound design and visuals of guts exploding everywhere. Bugs and bots play completely different too, it almost feels like two separate games. Running through a dark, dense jungle as lasers from the automatons zip all around you makes for some tense, really atmospheric moments. Honestly, as you slowly get better at the game and slowly crank up the difficulty, they manage to maintain this really nice balance of tension and power fantasy. Can't wait to see how updates evolve the game over time. Definitely an Evergreen title that I'll keep coming back to over the years.

One of the best 3/5 games I've ever played. I really like how the game makes the Pals feel like they're actually interacting with you and helping you. It does it in a way that I don't think Pokemon has ever really matched. Each time a friend would bring a new pal back to base to show off, it was always met with comments like, "WHOA, IT'S SO COOL, WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?" and then we would run off and go find more of them to bring back. Discovering new Pals to put to work in the base is also really satisfying.
Unfortunately, that's about the only good thing about this game. Cookie cutter survival gameplay was only made tolerable by the inherently fun concept of scouring an open world for different types of Pals. It's a feeling that I still think Gamefreak has not even come close to achieving in their games. I would love to see a game with exploration and discovery like this, but with less survival tedium and more towns, characters, bosses, story... anything but fucking mining ore as the core gameplay loop.
Incredible fun with friends, probably pretty bland if you're playing solo.
MANY of the Pal designs are remarkably better than so many modern Pokemon designs. I don't even care if they slightly rip off various body parts from official Pokemon designs, they're just better than most of the shit we get nowadays. Sorry, not sorry. I believe in Penking supremacy. Orserk is goated. So many of these Pals would be instant favorite Pokemon if they were official designs. They have a surprising amount of personality in their animations and sounds. I hope Pocket Pair keeps iterating on this concept and makes a true Pokemon competitor because god knows we need one.

Totally captivating mystery game about a ship whose entire crew goes missing. The Macintosh filter effect and jaunty soundtrack are super cool and give the game such a unique feel. The sound design for each chapter of the tale is also really good at giving you context clues for solving each mystery. At a certain point, all the pieces of the puzzle start falling into place and it becomes so satisfying to solve each group of three. Highly recommend.

It's a really good time to be a Final Fantasy fan. I'm a bit torn between giving this a 4 and a 4.5, but I think it stands out enough to warrant the higher marks. While it does stumble a bit with pacing and lack of characterization for side characters, it still delivers a powerful story from start to finish. This game also pulls a lot of inspiration from my favorite FF, FFIV, in its tone and setting so it really felt like playing a modern take on that aesthetic. I was a bit disappointed that none of the Bahamut skills involved Dragoon type attacks, and I just found myself wishing I could play a FF action game as a Dragoon with similar combat.
This game is a spectacle, the soundtrack, graphics, and combat all come together to make some truly unforgettable moments. There were so many times during boss fights where the music would sync absolutely perfectly with what was happening on screen. It aligned so perfectly during the Bahamut fight that my jaw genuinely dropped in shock. I don't usually physically react to games like that, so it was pretty noteworthy.
The game does have a few pacing issues though, notably during the Dhalmekia arc. I also feel like it didn't help that many of the side quests just felt lackluster in comparison to the main scenario. Seriously, these side quests never stood a chance. You'll go from these epic, cinematic fights with demigods one minute, to collecting soil samples the next. Thankfully the game marks side quests that are worth doing with a plus mark, I really appreciated that.
The combat was at it's best when stumbling across new powerful enemies in the early game. I definitely feel like you get a little too powerful in the second half of the game, but those fights when you only have Phoenix and Garuda were so thrilling.
Crafting also feels oddly... pointless? By the end of the game I had thousands of materials, but the most powerful gear. It feels like maybe they planned for you to be able to kit out party members or have more options for Eikon specific gear, but cut it leaving hundreds of chests with useless crafting materials in the world.
Not sure what else to say. I feel like this game unfortunately got overshadowed by a lot of the other insane releases last year. I grabbed it on sale for $35 only about 5 months after release, felt a bit wrong to me as I thought it was well worth full price. Remarkable game though, despite its shortcomings. The ending also absolutely WRECKED me and I WAS NOT expecting it to. Something about the flashback scenes and the music, maybe it's because I also have a brother about the same age gap as Clive and Joshua.

Tried so hard to find the fun in this game but I just couldn't. It's like someone just checked off all the features of Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley with more tedium and none of the soul. Just kind of ran around for 4 hours selling fish and all I had to show for it was a general store and a museum. The reason why AC and Stardew are so good is because of everything you can interact with in between the tedium. Having to manually pick up every single item I try to harvest is a big turnoff too.
I grabbed it because I had heard good things and it had high marks on Steam but I don't know how this game is rated as highly as it is.

2022

I miss game manuals. This game is so cleverly designed it had me checking every corner for hidden pathways. Enemy behavior and combat reminded me of something in between Brave Fencer Musashi and Zelda. While the music isn't very memorable, it is calming and fits the tone of the game.

I got like 13 hours into this game but ultimately I gave up on it. It is simultaneously fun and very unfun at the same time. The game has a lot of cool ideas, but pretty much every one of them feels underdeveloped and half baked. A lot of the story and quests feel generic and uninteresting, and almost every quest has you walking slowly through a big, mostly empty map. I was at the Griffin quest and was excited to finally fight the thing, only for it to fly away and the NPCs to immediately tell me that it went to it's nest all the way on the other side of the map. The journey from point to point wouldn't be as bad if there were interesting things to do in between, but there's just not. The music is good... when it plays. Otherwise the game feels dead silent in a lot of places. The whole experience just feels kind of junky and unfinished.
However, like I said I did have fun with the game initially because it has a lot of fun concepts in its combat and follower system. The formula is in desperate need of modernization which is why I'm still very interested in the new game coming up. I think a modern Capcom can make something really special with the bones of this game. However, the original feels like a chore to play.

I wasn't expecting to like this game as much as I did. A lot of Sony's first parts offerings lately have been pretty hit or miss for me, but Spider-Man managed to pull me in.
The game is at its best in the first 5-7 hours, when you're still unlocking new abilities and getting into the flow of combat. There are a lot of interesting things to see and do in New York City and you stumble upon and complete them pretty organically. This game looks pretty easy to 100% and I appreciate that.
The combat is flashy and cinematic, and as I said earlier feels really good at the start of the game. By the end, you kind of become pretty OP and the game starts playing itself, which is sort of a bummer. The overall presentation was dynamic enough that it wasn't boring however.
The game is... mostly polished. Like the combat and traversal is solid, but it's odd because it's actually one of the buggier games I've played in the past couple years. There were three distinct times where I would be blocked by a bug on the critical path and have to reload a checkpoint to fix things.
Overall, super stylish and fun Spider-Man game.

Lies of P is an incredibly polished Soulslike that even rivals some of From Software's early offerings in the genre they pioneered. It draws inspiration from the structure of Demon's Souls, the combat of Sekiro, and the tone and art direction of Bloodborne. While it doesn't really do any of these better than From Soft, the package as a whole is still incredibly enjoyable regardless. There were times in the game where you could have told me I was playing a From Soft game and I might have believed you. The combat is the only area where Lies of P really shines, and even then I have exceptions to that claim.
Specifically player side combat feels awesome. There are a wealth of interesting weapons that each have their own flair, and to add to that most weapons can be disassembled into two components and recombined into completely new weapons. I can't understate how cool this is, I must have experimented more with different playstyles in a single run of Lies of P than I have with any other From Soft game, with the exception of maybe Elden Ring. The Legion Arm and Fable Arts also provided me with a lot of tools to mix up how I approached encounters.
Now where the combat isn't as exciting is the enemies. A lot of the rank and file in Lies of P are very similar humanoid puppets and monsters. When I did come across a unique, strong enemy, they were usually well designed and super fun to fight. The giant toddler puppet for example was a very memorable encounter.
I would similarly say that the bosses have some... problems. Some of them are really interesting and fun to fight, some of them feel incredibly poorly designed, maybe even intentionally all in the pursuit of that "brutal" difficulty of the genre. It has felt like a trend in a lot of recent Soulslikes, both from other devs and From Soft themselves, where you don't fight bosses, the bosses fight you. You are constantly put on the defensive, spending most of your time during the fight deflecting attacks rather than being on the offensive. I get that that's the name of the game with a parry based loop like Lies and Sekiro have, but it sometimes feels like you're never given a moment to breath and reposition. Bosses in Lies all have insane gap closers that track you the entire way through their animations, no amount of good positioning will spare you from being hit. You must either dodge or parry on the right frame of the animation itself, or you will be taking damage. This limits the kinds of playstyles that can be viable in these games.
A really egregious example of this I had in Lies was against the true final boss, where I usually lead the fight with applying shock grindstone to my weapon. Before I even finished my "walking through the fog gate" animation, the boss had already rolled and dashed within 10 feet of me and begun an attack. This only happened once during all of my attempts during this boss, but it really shocked me. I didn't even react, I did nothing, I let the boss kill me so I could retry with my elemental buff.

This is not a satisfying way to play the game.

When I did finally beat the boss, the fight itself was exciting, but the sense of accomplishment that I've had in overcoming a tough Souls boss in the past was not there. I was just frustrated and glad to be done with the game.
Despite all of its shortcomings, the game as a whole was really enjoyable and if this is their Demon's Souls, I can't wait to see what is next.

Really compelling, only complaint is some clunky mechanics and movement at times. Also some of the later puzzles were just a matter of trial and error until you got the right timing which was kind of tedious. Otherwise it was just the right length, a fun little horror game for spooky month. Probably great to play while high too.

This review contains spoilers

Loved this game with a couple really egregious exceptions. This game hooked me at Balteus and then completely lost me at CEL 240. Do not play this game with mouse and keyboard, some late game bosses become extremely difficult without hard lock.
I'm starting to really dislike From Soft's boss design philosophy. CEL 240 and Ayre both suffer from the same design of, "I'm going to fly 720 degrees around you at mach 5, while chipping away at you with an endless barrage of missiles. If you so much as dare to get hit by one of my stronger attacks, you will unfortunately have to try again." Balteus was extremely manageable once you realized you just needed to be aggressive and use a shield shredding weapon. The other more difficult bosses just feel like RNG.
Everything else about the game was superb though. Soundtrack, customization, and combat were all amazing. You could spend hours customizing your mech in really crazy ways, I've seen some amazing designs.
CEL 240 just sucked all of my enjoyment out of the game near the end. I tried it for a while with my standard build and then realized I just didn't want to spend the time on this shit. Switched to double Zimmerman and breezed past it.
Real bummer that a couple of those bosses are just way too overtuned. Even Sea Spider was totally fine, I don't know why they nerfed that and Balteus but left CEL and Ayre alone.

Dandori today... Dandori tomorrow...
I didn't play Pikmin for the first time until 2020, but I feel like it's a very underrated Nintendo series. It feels very unique in its identity with not a lot of similar games out there.

Pikmin 4 feels like the ultimate Pikmin game. Caves return to give a bit more depth to the game, there are tons of areas and interesting situations to navigate using your silly little guys. Dandori battles and time challenges were a good way to add some difficulty because the game is quite easy.

My only gripes with the game were that the soundtrack didn't go as hard as past Pikmin games and that it was a bit long to the point of feeling repetitive. I didn't quite 100% it, but was very close, and I just couldn't be bothered to go back in and get the 4 treasures I was missing.

Also I'm very happy that this game is currently sitting at 4.4.

The game drew me in initially with it's incredible atmosphere. It's a pretty simple and relaxing fishing game with an eerie twist. Explores some Lovecraftian adjacent themes.
I do wish the game had a bit more depth to it though, pun intended. It became pretty predictable around half way through and the environment did not feel more threatening. I would have loved some situations that forced me to adapt my playstyle while trying to avoid the horrors of the night, but it didn't feel like there were many.
Solid game, not a lot of others like it.

This was my second Monster Hunter game and I enjoyed it a lot, probably due to the fact that it had crossplay allowing me to play with my friends. It's like the bare minimum considering it's only the Windows Store and Xbox versions, but it's still more than most games can say they have.
The wirebugs and silkbind attacks add a lot of mobility to the weighty Monster Hunter gameplay. I think it strikes a good balance between needing to think about your movements, while also letting you become an anime hero.
Overall great game

It's kind of like if The Witness was actually a good game.
In all seriousness though, this game is a really unique experience that I think most people should just experience blind. Incredible soundtrack, fun physics based gameplay, and an undeniable sense of mystery.