It's an okay game that has a HUGE amount of potential. Ultimately, I'm glad I grabbed this while it was free since I'd probably feel a bit disappointed if I paid for it

Essentially, it's Lethal Company but you're Youtubers, so the enjoyment of the game largely comes down to you and your friends being funny, which is fine, these types of games can be great! I like that you're forced to confront the monsters to do good, instead of always running away, even if a lot of them just kinda stun lock or instakill you

My main issues are:

- The Ragdoll physics add a ton of comedy but the way your camera view wobbles a bunch for just turning your mouse or moving slightly is kinda unpleasant/nauseating
- The camera doesn't have a whole lot of battery with seemingly no way to upgrade it, but I get you wanna keep the videos short
- The dungeons you go into are pretty bland, with the same texture usually laid over everything. They're also super huge, which kinda makes me miss Lethal Company's incentive to search for items. Generally monsters appear without a whole lot of warning too, so it's a lot of stumbling around an empty environment until sudden jumpscare noise
- Voice chat is generally pretty quiet. Promixity chat is one of the best parts about these types of games but in CW, you basically need to all be on top of each other to hear and even then, it can still not be enough. This is especially noticable when you play back the videos you make, where a lot of the funny jokes you made can barely be heard

That being said, I think this game is a few updates away from potentially being super amazing. The ideas and core gameplay loop are fantastic

I backed the Kickstarter for this, and have also been learning Japanese for about a year and a half - Shashingo is a very neat experience, but doesn't have a whole lot of content and I struggle to recommend it for its price, unless you're a specific kind of person (which is, knows Hiragana/Katakana and some very basic Japanese, but not too much)

You have a small city plaza (with a couple of backalleys) full of props to photograph, which then get turned into flashcards. You can also be challenged by receiving a word and having to go find it. Thirdly, there is a small guide book with some basic Japanese lessons, that explain some key phrases and vocab, which is nicely presented and well explained, but nothing that you can't find elsewhere online for free

So yeah, the content is fairly simple. Honestly I think my biggest problem, which kinda just takes me out of the whole thing, is that to take a photograph, you NEED to be looking at an object that has a word associated with it somewhat directly. This makes it feel restrictive and I'd often use photo angles that the game would allow, rather than ones I wanted. It made my collection of photos look and feel a bit generic since it was hard to get creative angles the game would accept - a lot of the time it was just Thing in the centre of photo because that's what would be accepted

I will say, I think a lot of love has gone into this game. The city, although it can be fully explored in about five minutes, looks lovely and the atmosphere is great. I love that the world has a ton of Japanese posters and signage about for reading practise. The day/night cycle and different weathers add some coziness as well. I can't really complain about the presentation - it's all fantastic, I just wish there was more

Ultimately, I didn't expect a whole lot from Shashingo as a learning tool - games that aim to teach Japanese are almost never more effective than a good flashcard deck, and that's okay. Plus I also kinda appreciate a tool that isn't aimed solely at people new to Japanese, since most will start you off with learning Hiragana, which I'm way past

Unfortunately, the super wonderful vibes, presentation and atmosphere can't quite make up for the photograph aspect being a bit shallow, and a lack of content that makes for a slightly barren experience overall

Played through the Fan translation patch that came out recently: https://twitter.com/RetroTranslator/status/1765315202218954988

It was a neat experience! It's a bit of a mess but sometimes the most interesting games are. I complain about visual novels commonly being too slow paced but this kinda goes into the opposite direction LOL, with constant reveals that didn't properly sink in before the next one hit

For such an old game, I really loved the presentation - it's a shame that characters don't really get sprites, as it led to a bit of disconnect for me, but everything else looked pretty good! The simple sound effects also make for a decently creepy atmosphere, especially in the beginning

Every so often someone comes onto a game dev forum to be like "hey guys, I wanna make a game that messes with the player's computer! how do I do it?" and then every reply is like No Don't Fucking Do That, You're Basically Making A Virus

Well, KinitoPET goes ahead and does it anyway, and you know what? It's a lot of fun. KinitoPET isn't flawless or particularly deep - it's pretty short and ends when you think the game is just getting going. Plus the scares that don't fall into meta PC fuckery like asking you to open command prompt to give Kinito special privileges, are pretty much generic creepypasta stuff you can find any Itchio horror game. THAT BEING SAID, I still absolutely think it's worth checking out and there's clear passion here, even if the idea isn't used to its full potential

After playing through Aria of Sorrow last month and dipping my toes into Metroidvanias, I have completed SOTN as a newcomer to the series!

Overall, I recognize that SOTN is a very good game - but I think it has some flaws and overall, I enjoyed Aria quite a bit more. I had two main problems with Symphony - the difficulty curve fluctuates a lot and feels a bit wonky, and I felt like I got lost more than in Aria

Initially, I found the game extremely hard but by the latter half, I felt like the game was giving me health upgrades way too frequently. It felt like almost every sword I picked up was worse than what I had and I don't think you can remove sell stuff from your inventory, so things really pile up lol. Plus, because I got lost so often, I ended up unintentionally grinding a lot and I think overleveled, because a few late game bosses were pretty easy

I'm also not a huge fan of how sub weapons work - where you can carry one at a time, and find them in set destroyables. I really liked the knife as a consistent cheap range ability, but I would sometimes pick up others without realizing and not be able to get my old one back

Despite my negativity, I did enjoy the game a lot - I'd like to give a special shoutout to how good everything looks. The spritework is really nice with some very fun touches of 3D scattered around the place. The sound track is consistently solid with some standout tracks and the voice acting is just.......it's absolutely delightfully dogshit, just peak PS1 "we're recording in a bathroom" vibes, I loved it

American Arcadia is a testement to how much I'm willing to tolerate gameplay that's making me utterly miserable for an extremely good story

I've seen some negative reviews that say this would be better as a TV show but I don't agree with that either. There are moments where the dual protagonists you switch between work very well and the story is definitely suited to a video game. But goddamn did I find a lot of it tedious

Trevor's gameplay is platforming, usually while under the pressure of being chased. However, any mistake is often an immediate game over and restart. Sometimes you aren't given much time to react, leading to a lot of monotenous trial and error. Plus, characters are pretty chatty, so enjoy hearing the same voiceline. I'm not gonna beat around the bush - I thought a lot of these sections sucked absolute shit. Angela's first puzzle sections and puzzles are...maybe more interesting, but you can run into the same issues there too.

There are moments where the gameplay is okay - there's a sequence very near the end that I won't spoil, which is fantastic. There's also another bit early on where you're in first person as Angela. On one monitor, you're watching Trevor and have to avoid him being detected with the WASD keys. On another monitor, you must use your mouse to guide Angela's eyes to the correct answers of a quiz while being grilled by a distracting Security member. WHY WAS THIS ONLY UTILIZIED ONCE???? IT WAS SO GOOD COMPARED TO EVERYTHING ELSE??

As for the story, it's basically The Truman Show Made By Walt Disney - and while there's no subtly there, it's a really strong premise with a lot of intrigue that wraps up very nicely, with a particularly strong moment towards the end

Ultimately, I recommend American Arcadia but I also think it could have been a lot better

The cool thing about being an adult is that you can look at a game with a ton of Discourse surrounding it, and just play it for yourself because you know that fiction is allowed to include Dark topics, and what matters is how its handled

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is........fine. Almost unremarkable if you remove the Discourse. The gameplay is peak bog standard RPG Maker walk and talking, where you press space on an object and maybe pick it up to bring it somewhere else. The kind that's perfectly servicable but occasionally slows the pacing down if you can't figure out what to interactive with, and therefore just start trying everything. If you take a break from the game and come back, you might stumble trying to remember where you left off

The writing is unabashedly edgy, and I think it would still be very polarizing without all the dialogue about Ashley wanting to fuck her brother. I actually found myself reminded a lot of Jhonen Vasquez's work, which I will admit I haven't read since I was 15 so maybe my memory is off, where they share that same slightly immature and incredibly cynical strain of humour that occasionally falls into the territory of trying too hard. There's a scene where you're in a public park and if you interact with a tree, the game is like "you picked up: used condom - you decide not to bring it with you". There's an billboard advert that says "are you tired of being alive? ask your doctor about euthanasia today!". Maybe RPG Maker is slightly to blame for this but a part of me is surprised Andy & Leyley came out in 2023, because it really feels like something that would've been made while I was in High School, and that someone like me would've loved back then

As for the incest stuff, I do think it's a bit disingenous to say "oh it's just a bad ending" when Ashley makes repeated comments that boil down to "I would like to fuck my brother". You don't need to justify your enjoyment of the game with "actually, it's a commentary on toxic relationships", because sure it is, but the game never really commits to it and that's fine! you're allowed to like this because it's a bit edgy and fucked up, that is okay. Alternatively, there's nothing wrong with saying "I'm not a prude but the gameplay is boring and the writing tries too hard"

I do think the game struggles a little bit with knowing what it wants to be, and because of that, it tends to go in circles sometimes. I did find myself getting surprisingly invested in the world and the characters, but kept wanting more since each episode length is pretty short so far. I wanna see more consequences for the fucked up things these characters do and feel, but maybe that'll be in the later chapters. I will say, the artstyle is very nice - every character is very expressive with their portraits. You can tell you're in a world of RPG Maker tiles but I think they make the most of it and the artstyle is there too

I have a big soft spot for low budget death game Visual Novels and honestly, while The Zodiac Trial is by no means perfect, it continuously keeps up a good pace that makes for an overall very enjoyable experience

I liked the characters overall a lot, they're definitely the stars here. Everyone gets their own route with four endings, and each route is pretty different to each other - it's geninuely quite impressive how much subtle variety you get here. Combine this with the constant fast pacing, and I was always invested in the story, always interested to see where it would go next or what choices would do. I love that I got to see all the characters take on different roles and how they would react to it. Ox and Snake were the standouts for me! I was very invested in both

It's not a deal breaker, but the art is a bit wonky. Some characters I think look great - Dragon, Rooster, Snake and Ox in particular - while other designs are somewhat dull, or have weird proportions that you take you out of things a little bit. Monkey I think is a good example of both of these things. The backgrounds are also just photos with filters on them, which I'm not gonna fault a low budget VN for, but it did occasionally make things hard to follow when characters were moving about a room or general area. There's also not a whole lot of CGIs so during big moments, you're usually left with a black screen or just the background, which can take you out of things a bit but again, I'm not gonna let it bother me in a low budget VN. The ones we do get generally look pretty good though! The soundtrack also isn't anything mindblowing, but it does the job and there's a couple of especially good tracks in there. Sound effects are quite lacking overall, though

My main criticisms for The Zodiac Trial would be:

1. There's a good handful of typos, some of them quite unfortunate, like mixing up the name of a victim and their killer. It's not a dealbreaker, but it is noticable.

2. This is a Visual Novel made in ren'py, which means the standard features of scrolling back through text is very fluid, but it does mean you don't get a flowchart (despite there being over 50 endings) or some kind of menu with information you've already learnt, meaning you can feel overwhelmed at times or forget things. For example, I struggled to keep track of the Bowens and Morris', who are important characters to the story but not actually present

3. Sometimes it felt like the protagonist whose perspective you witness the story from was miles ahead of me, pulling out complicated deductions from thin air that I hadn't even began to grasp. Now I will admit, I am kinda dumb so maybe it was on me, but I did often feel like I was just coming along for the ride, although this personally didn't bother me too much