It really feels like the team who made Sonic Mania weren't allowed to make a 3D Sonic game with Sega, so instead they just went and did it themselves. My problem is that, because of the collectibles and my general playstyle, I played it like it was a 3D Mario game

Fun presentation and a cool concept, but no real theme or elevated gameplay to hook me

Can't really form any cohesive opinions on this, because over a period of 50 hours, I spent 30 of those unhealthily caught up in this game. I love university exam seasons!

Loved it when I was solving languages and learning more about each culture, the game cleverly uses a variety of linguistic detection methods such as analysing glyph structures, using cultural context, or comparing languages. The rest of it was fine.

I wish I loved this game as much as other people, but I think it only scratches the surface of this mechanic's potential

I really wanted to love this game, but the pacing's totally off for me. I feel like I'm always being bombarded with new stuff, and so I can't run my business successfully, which means the expansion deeper takes longer and longer. I'm at a limit of 400m right now, and trying to beat the game down to 1,000m just seems like such a chore

Not much to say, it's just a reinvigoration of Mario

Perhaps playing this co-op with my Dad with a deadline of me leaving for uni wasn't the best way to experience this game

It may be worth $0.99, but it's not worth my time

Hi Land

A really important story (one which feels fairly underrepresented in this medium), which lacked interesting gameplay mechanics to fully immerse you. Props to the game for managing to use repetition to nicely subvert expectations though.

Played it basically every day while at home for the summer, and then went on pilgrimage and lost all of my momentum. One day, I'll actually finish this game

The base game feels like a bunch of really good ideas were thrown into a ball pit and shaken around. In the end, a few were dribbled on or deflated, and no ball really went well with that next to it, but on average each ball was a good quality.

Afterwards, the expansion took out several of the better balls, placed them on a web, and made a beautiful decoration.

This game would be great even without it's haunting atmosphere thanks to a dense, engaging and manipulable gameplay system. It's a shame then that it's FMV elements feel rather lacking and jarring in comparison to the rest of the game

Whilst the levelling and exploration of systems felt fun, combat felt cumbersome and grindy