Brilliant conceptually, but unfortunately it falls a little short gameplay wise. It's absolutely genius to have an open-ended 3D hub world for linear 2D levels, but these 3D areas end up feeling pretty boring due to how non-interactive they are- it'd go a long way if the spark ability had any uses outside of just entering levels. The 2D levels aren't perfect either. They start off really strong with some great, textbook examples of introducing and expanding on new mechanics in a short timespan, but they quickly start over-relying on Very Special sections that completely veer off from the established gameplay. Of course, it's a comedy game, so sections like these are expected, even welcome, but frankly there's not enough of the "normal" game to justify how many "weird" sections there are. Non-sequiturs that deviate harshly from the norm are only meaningful when it doesn't feel like most of the game is non-sequiturs- I think I played two levels in a row where all I had to do to win was talk to several NPCs.

It's a game that has a lot to say story wise, and the story is generally well integrated with the gameplay, aside from when it matters the most. There's one sequence about halfway through that sticks out in this regard- it's a crucial and genuinely pretty powerful story beat that gets told almost entirely through a really length sequence of text boxes. In this way the story's pretty representative of the game as a whole: a fantastic vision that wasn't able to end up becoming a fantastic final product.

An amalgamation of micro-worlds, bound together by human connections and pain, in order to escape the homogeneous void and uniformity of the world. The system won't give you resolution, only a small comfort until your demise. A 32-bit/16-bit/8-bit adaptation of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The smaller you go, the more concrete these worlds seem, but also more constraining. They might also hide bigger possibilities, new ways of rethinking live and community.

At times, this feels like a search for limitations, instead of actually being limited by software/hardware/manpower. That's why the little card-hunting there is didn't bother me, it went as far and wide as it wanted to.

It’s not like the ideas Anodyne 2 lives off are totally unique, but the way they are built so wholeheartedly, so creatively will make the entire time you play this game a pure joy. It doesn’t matter if it’s PS1 aesthetics open world or the 16 bit top-down snes era vibes, exploring the world is simple but addicting. It’s such a welcome change to play something so cozy and wholesome, listening to a wonderful soundtrack. I can’t recommend the game enough, If a weird little rather experimental indie sounds like it’s something for you.

I downloaded this game back when it was released on Game Pass and completely forgot about it until they announced it was leaving the service, so I decided to knock through it really quick since it looked interesting on a cursory glance. After beating it, I think I'd say I'm content with the experience I got and I wanna give it a full review because I haven't seen any discussion on it anywhere.

To start off, the visuals are fantastic and I'd say it's one of the most visually pleasing games on Unity. Normally I'm not a fan of voxel-based art styles since most games that use them tend to look a bit samey but Vanessa Chia and her team did a great job at creating their own style with the tools they used. On top of that, the lighting is fantastic and used very well in conveying tone and atmosphere. I feel it shines best in bigger, open areas where they use 2D pixel art to create distance detail, like sunsets, distant cities or neighborhoods, and plains. In terms of the world you're interacting with though, every area is full of lots of clutter and detail that all feels intentional and makes the world feel lived in which makes taking in your surroundings a joy. The music and sound design are also great, with the soundtrack matching very well with the lighting and coloring of every scene and the ambient audio creating good tension when needed. Props to Pusher for making an overall fantastic soundtrack.

When it comes to gameplay, Echo Generation has you going between two main methods - Paper Mario-style combat and point-and-click-style exploration. Every combat encounter is turn-based with you, your sister, and one of several pets you can find each having unique skills with different purposes. When you level up, you have the choice of choosing between upgrading each characters' health, strength, or skill points. I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND upgrading health evenly with all characters, while having the humans focus on strength past that and your pet upgrade skill points. Your humans will be the main damage dealer and the pet will be mostly focused on healing them both. Unfortunately, early on the combat isn't particularly fun since most enemies can take you out really quickly unless you get a feel for the timed actions for blocking their attacks and landing yours. Thankfully the enemies are physically in the world except for two areas so you can pick and choose your fights, but there aren't that many and they respawn on a timer so if you need to grind, it can be a hassle. As your journey progresses, you can find comic books which expand a specific characters' moveset while adding more utility to their kit, like making the enemies bleed or poisoned or stunned. Unfortunately, these status effects aren’t that important as they all last for less than three rounds and deal only one damage per enemy turn while nearly every enemy has over 50 health past the 1/3 point.

My biggest gripe is that you don't have much of a reason to use anything except the first pet since it has a cheap healing move and every pet you get starts at level 1 in a game where grinding is time consuming. Once you hit about the 1/3 point in the game, every fight ends up going the same way with you spamming the same moves over and over just because they're more efficient than anything else. This slightly changes when you hit the 2/3 point and you swap to some new moves, but most of the encounters go the same way and take a while because enemies are extremely tanky and combat is a bit on the slow side. They are very well designed in a visual sense however. There aren't many enemies in the game overall, but all of them have incredibly good designs and the animation work done by Edgar Abrego and Ian Mendoza make them all stand out. I just wish fighting them was more fun.

Past the combat, the exploration and story progression were some of the few things I didn’t like from the start. Like I stated earlier, exploration is like a point-and-click adventure game where you search every nook and cranny for items to pick up and for where they might need to be used. The highly detailed environments you explore through are very nice like said earlier but some areas have so much clutter that it’s hard to tell what you can and can’t interact with. On top of that, there are a lot of items your character will just decide they need for an arbitrary reason so it makes the discovery process not very satisfying overall. At a certain point I needed to use a guide for several things because I missed small items or couldn’t find the single interactable object that I needed to progress. I feel it was an interesting choice since it encourages full exploration of each area, but some things felt really obscure and didn’t make sense to me. If you’re a more patient person than I am, this might be something about the game you’d enjoy but I personally didn’t like this aspect. The world is also a little annoying to navigate since there isn’t any form of fast travel, unless you can consider a bus to an area that’s disconnected to the rest of the map to be that. There are two points where the end of an area would connect with a previously closed off part of the map, but the movement speed of your character when sprinting is just slow enough to make it not feel convenient.

I don’t really have much to say about the story honestly. It’s fine, it’s not particularly interesting and felt like most of the plot just kind of happened without much cause or effect. I’m probably misremembering, but the initial drive for the story was also completely unrelated to what ends up happening, other than the inclusion of aliens. Early on, people around you are talking about you and your friends are going to make a movie about aliens the next day, but you’re not driven to go to the first plot beat of the game which involves the player heading to the right and entering a repair shop. Everything felt really disconnected and lacked any sort of stakes so I was hard pressed to care about what could happen next.

In the end, I would recommend this game to someone wanting a more puzzle focused game who is fine with the combat shoving you around a little bit. The story doesn’t do enough to keep you engrossed in it and the lack of variety is a little disappointing, but the art, music, and world are solid enough to make the experience enjoyable. If they were to make a follow-up, I would want them to make the combat have more variety in terms of enemies, useful skills, and options in the early game and I would love to see a quest log or character thoughts page or something to make the direction a bit less vague.

Just a fun, basic 3D platformer that doesnt bust your balls. Only took 7 hours to 100%, not counting the annoying "reach level 9 in arcade Pac Man" challenge.

Controls are really responsive for a B tier platformer, music is very cool (space levels) or obnoxious everywhere else. Bosses offers some cool genre shifts.

Definitely worth a play if you like Crash Bandicoot for the gameplay, not just the challenge.

Stylish, challenging, frustrating beat 'em up with an isometric Diablo camera perspective and a twin stick control scheme.

About 30 levels in, Midnight Fight Express has quite the fun, yet flawed gameplay. You can attack, grab enemies, parry/block, dodge roll, use and throw guns/weapons (speaking of weapons, these are scattered just about everywhere for your disposal).

40 Levels exist, taking anywhere from 2-5 or so minutes. Score is based off of several performance factors. Completing levels rewards money, which can be used to buy in-game items to customize and outfit your character, and even buy enemy/boss skins to further set the appearance of your character. A skill and upgrade tree also exists for further developing attack, defense, grab and other combat abilities. Upgrades and skills are quite basic and don't go as deep as other 3D beat 'em ups or hack-n-slash games. I'd even go as far to say the most of the skills lacked impact or any real advantage over the few that really mattered. For an indie title, customization is quite deep with a fair amount of options.

Since the game is played in an isometric 3D format, there is more freedom on movement instead of just walking left to right. But levels are linear for the most part. Secrets and unlockables can be found in levels as well. Combat is fun if quite simplistic, but can become quite challenging and even a bit button mashy as levels progress. A lot of dodge rolling and parrying is involved, especially in middle and later levels where some cheap difficulty spikes occur. You'll be swarmed by enemies, some of which have weapons and attacks capable of either taking chunks of your health or one-hit-killing you, making sections require you to die an annoying amount of deaths before you get lucky enough to pass them. In this case, the game at several points ends up revolving around luck rather than your skill. This was all under my Normal mode difficulty playthrough, which is the default and easiest difficulty in the game. A few extra settings do exist to somewhat remedy this issue like setting your health higher and decreasing enemy aggressiveness, but it doesn't necessarily make the experience noticeably easier.

Achievements also exist, which is a very welcome addition for the Switch version seeing that most Switch games are void of achievements. With a statistics page, a best score/rank/time challenge for every level and different optional objectives per level (albeit difficult objectives), replayability and challenge is definitely there in Midnight Fight Express.

Graphics and Audio look and sound just fine. Visuals have a clean HD, 3D polygon style (like a PS1 or N64 game with full blown remade textures) and the music has an EDM techno, dubstep rock sound going on while bashing thugs up and down the various levels. No multiplayer or co-op is present. The only multiplayer aspect available are leaderboards for chasing after high scores. A training mode also exists to practice your skills against enemies with a decent amount of options available. Very smooth gameplay in handheld mode on Switch, with very few framerate drops at small instances.

Midnight Fight Express has the DNA and design of a well designed, creative 3D beat 'em up. However, the difficulty spikes that frequently pop up quite early in the game dragged down the enjoyment I had with this one. Have read that a patch has been deployed for the Steam version that has not made it's way to consoles yet. Unscored for now, but maybe when the patch released on Switch and I finish the final 10 levels, final thoughts may change.

an open-world exploration game that has both more "breath" and more "wild" than Breath of the Wild

Sable wears its BotW inspiration on its sleeve, but the game is much more than that. BotW's combat is servicable at best (the bows are okay), but Sable imagines an open-world experience without that. what if you focused less on conquering and looting a space and more on luxuriating in it and learning more about it. the world feels alive, skittering like the wind across the dunes. the people don't feel placed in random locations, they feel nestled into their own communities where it's you're job to figure out where you fit in with them.

for a coming-of-age narrative, Sable goes a lot more beyond that. it has its Lore Dumps, sure, but the story does a lot by piecing out the flavor of the world through incredible dialogue. i have a folder full of screenshots of my favorite lines, and i STILL missed a lot that i wish i would have captured at the time. the writing centers the player not as a Grand Important Hero that the land needs to survive, but instead as a friend to many. the different groups of "jobs" that you get badges for both asks you what Sable wants to do and what You like doing. for a game about deciding what you want to do with your life, it encourages you to taste all of its flavors.

i love the score by Japanese Breakfast. i got tears when the title theme first appeared in the story. so often i would warp to a specific area when night would fall just so i could hear the area's night theme while driving aimlessly across the desert or climbing to sit atop the dunes or a perch somewhere

it is with this that Sable's love is felt. not when you are running from place to place trying to burn through a game as fast as you can just so you can say you beat it, but when you sit and become part of the world around you. it's this ludonarrative synergy that kept me coming back. the game embodies the feeling of being on a road trip, stopping somewhere cool to get food and the locals there are really nice to you, continuing to drive in the dark, looking at the houses that pass by and wondering who lives there.

in this, Sable reminds us that the joy of games is not in the checking of boxes off of a list of activities, it is in the running and jumping, the exploring, the learning.

(the game has bugs but whatever lol. i'm always willing to look past jank/unintended things when the core experience is good enough)