Very Edith Finch-inspired walking sim set around an old theater after the death of its featured playwright; as you explore, you'll find various masks, each of which sends you into a fantasy world inspired by one of the plays, with each world having its own distinct gameplay mechanics. Not nearly as good as Edith Finch, unsurprisingly (the "plays" feel very little like anything that could have been performed on a stage, and their central mechanics are nicely distinct from one another but don't tie into the story nearly as well), but it's still an admirably ambitious walking sim for a project that I imagine was developed on much less resources than Edith Finch, and manages to be polished enough to warrant a one-sitting play.

Extremely flawed, to be sure: the art direction and atmosphere feel like they'd have better suited an abstract narrative told largely through implication (like Heart Machine's previous game Hyper Light Drifter) than the fully voiced, dialogue-heavy story here; enemies kept knocking me to the ground or killing me during platforming sequences when I had to get lucky just to successfully attack them; and while I somewhat respect the minimal handholding aside from a few objective markers, I felt I still ended up spending too much of my playtime aimlessly wandering around for a path forward. And all that said, the excellent traversal, great art direction, and Shadow of the Colossus-meets-Journey -meets-Mario Galaxy-meets-Zelda gameplay were enough to keep me playing through the end. A qualified recommendation, but even with its frustrations, still worth trying if that mix of influences sounds compelling.

The Norwegian setting and crude low-poly visuals are mostly charming, and the "teen boy investigating his grandfather's past with a magic bracelet" setup has potential. unfortunately, it seems like most of the game is set on one island, which you're asked to explore without any sort of navigational aids - no objective markers, no fast travel, not even an in-game map - and the island map is already large enough to make backtracking tedious; the fixed camera and awkward controls don't help in orienting yourself, either. maybe I'll give it another shot at some point, but that's enough to turn me off from this game for now

An extremely charming, polished, and varied little platformer, paying tribute to the original 1990 games in the right ways (do we need a more complicated story than "Minnie has been kidnapped by an evil witch?" No. Does it make any sense that a bottle in the library level would lead to a world where everything is made of candy and desserts? Also no, but that's how Sega did it in 1990 so that's what we're doing) while having the confidence to completely reimagine the level designs in ways that would never have been possible on 8- or 16-bit hardware (I generally enjoyed the 3D sections, though I know not everyone agrees). Extremely short, even more so than I had remembered (I wish that every gem had at least gotten its own set of levels, even if that's not how the original game did it either), but that makes it a good one- or two-sitting play. A damn shame that Sega Studios Australia was shut down just before this game was released; would have liked to see them do more remakes in this vein.

Bramble is a very pretty, very linear... action/adventure? 3D cinematic platformer? in the Little Nightmares vein, with a beautifully realized Scandinavian folk horror setting. While the strengths of Bramble's art direction, atmosphere, and varied level design were enough to keep me playing through most of its duration (less so its story, which doesn't ultimately add up to much), it unfortunately commits a lot of game design sins that lead to unnecessary frustration: readability is often lacking, making it difficult to distinguish scenery from traversable paths; fixed camera angles lead to unnecessary difficulty gauging the distance of jumps; stealth sequences are tedious; the handful of boss battles generally go on for too long and make for frustrating difficulty spikes, even with mid-battle checkpoints, given that one hit always means death (I ultimately gave up at the last boss and watched a playthrough of the rest of the game on YouTube instead); and there's just too much reliance on trial and error in general, which is exacerbated by the previous points in this list. I'd still give it a qualified recommendation for fans of cinematic platformers or very linear horror action/adventure games, but definitely play it on Game Pass or wait for a sale.