If you're a millenial or an early zoomer, there's a chance that Christianity and religion was part of your life at some point, wether you wanted it or not. With the sudden uprise of the LGBTQ+ movement and rights, people are less and less afraid of being queer to the point "gay" is not an insult anymore. We Know the Devil is a story released at a moment in life where acceptance wasn't as present as it is today (online, at least) but christianity and religion was still quite present.

One of the things you'll notice very early on is how unsettling and distant the soundtrack is. Almost as if it always stalking, waiting for the moment to catch you off guard. It doesn't really has much calm moments where you can actually relax. It's a soundtrack that perfectly encapsulates the feeling of trying to hide something, of a danger that is lurking but hasn't striken. It sometimes manifests itself like a broken disc, with static and scratches.
I am unaware if this is intentional or not, but at one point where the game is using the second "messiest" song, they are talking about radio static being described as "God is already warning us".

The writing respects the reader with a storytelling that skips over details and lets you fill in the blanks based on the information you receive with the interaction of each character.
Every time details are given, it's to plant a seed on the reader. A seed of doubt. A seed of curiosity. A seed of inquisivity.
To give a non spoilery example, at one moment the player asks themselves what even is this camp. What are the intentions behind it aside of religious, which is when the game does this clever thing of [i]telling[/i] it's hand rather than showing it by saying it's a camp for "bad kids", which ponders the question of what is considered bad based upon the entire religious context. It is a line delivered fairly early into the game which really helps the reader to start analyzing more and more the possible reasons why these kids were sent here. Although they're ultimately revealed, it has never felt as if the writing is mad at you for not figuring things out earlier.

We Know the Devil might be short, but it takes a lot of care in it's writing , which is something I truly admire.

--

On a personal note, aside of the review and more of a vent than anything, I want to mention that I knew I was trans since a very early age. Religion never truly sticked with me thanks to my brother that really fucking hated going to church (just like me) because of how boring it was. We stopped going at an early age and one of the arguments we gave was that the church is nothing but humans who read the bible and interpreted a specific way. We got out of religion with the excuse that we wanted ot have our own interpretation of the bible and follow our own path with our own beliefs. It is important to note that my brother is 4 years older than I and my brain was too small to formulate these kinds of thoughts yet so all I did was nod to whatever he said for.. some years.
Seeking my own interpretation of the bible, I finally felt at peace. It was the moment where being queer stopped being shameful. Where I started to question myself and how I was feeling -- hell, at one moment I even had the interpretation that we're all our own god, which is the opposite conclusion the game gives in each arc lol --, yet it took me more than 10 years to finally come out of the closet to my family.
I'll never forget how my mom, who volunteers at the church, grabbed me by the arms and told me "please, never be gay. I see them suffer so much". At that moment my young self understood that as "it's not safe to be gay" and therefore.. hid it. I never repressed it, I hid it.
I blocked my family from all social media, I prohibited from entering my room and slowly but surely cut contact with them as much as I could.
I isolated myself from my family out of fear.
As the years went by, my parents and family kept saying they missed me, that they wish I was more present, but every time I tried they all mocked me and pushed me deeper into isolation until I felt like trying wasn't worth it.
After coming out of the closet, my dad did not talk to me for a while. My mom was overwhelmed at basically having her daughter tell her she has to help her rewire her, and my brother had other things to worry about, specially after those years of extreme isolation on my end.
Fast forward to today, I am living in another country with my wife in a family that accepts me and accompanies me as a whole. I'm still in contact with my parents. My dad talks to me but by my deadname and refuses to call me by my now legal name, so I avoid him if possible. My mom wishes she could be closer to me but realizes not even herself knows how to be a woman, and therefore doesn't know how to be a mother. She feels more like a friend that worries about me but doesn't have the words nor means to support me. I'm sorry mom.
My brother on the other hand, I want to call him a cunt but he has all the reasons and rights to be one. It's not like I have been the best sister to him.

I am having a good life where I'm free, loved and don't have to hide myself anymore, but sometimes I have to get reminded of the two decades I spent in the closet to not go there again.

The new weapon and shell are incredibly good and fun to use, to the point where it's honestly quite broken and it makes the game quite easy. If you're struggling, you will enjoy the character and the weapon.

The Virtuous Cycle gamemode is just mediocre, but the achievements make the experience incredibly bad.
These achievements require you to do 90 billion runs (50 minimum, if you want me to be specific and minmaxing) because of RNG and the requirement to unlock skins which ask you to kill 5 of a specific boss (which basically translates to a minimum of 5 runs with that character) and almost every shell has this. Each run lasts for around an hour, even more if you have bad luck. You can get these objectives before the hour (aka kill boss -> leave run) but it is just such a stupid unnecessary drag.

I feel like if they just did the katana + shell then it would be a pretty good DLC, but sadly if you want to get 100% achievements you need to play through the Virtuous Cycle gamemode a lot, and it just sucks.

I'm not going to lie, this game looks and sound so incredibly generic due to the lack of personality it has but the more you play the more you realize just how unique it is.
More often than not, the reaction to every new thing/mechanic we discover that this game has to offer is "wait what? holy shit that's genuinely so cool". Like for example there's this item that's a grappling hook that's primarily function is to help you grapple certain points, but you can use it to steal shields from enemies.

The overworld is full of secrets and shit to discover and doing it with friends is just really fun.

It kinda makes me sad that a game like this has a name and personality so [i]forgettable[/i] and [i]uninteresting[/i]. The quests are generic, the characters, story and lore are just forgettable, but the actual content and gameplay side of things is where this game truly shines and when it shines, it really does.

It is definitely one of those games that require a little bit of patience to fully enjoy, but an experience definitely worth playing for the gameplay alone.

DreadEye VR is a game that had potential and great ideas but the execution is INCREDIBLY poor.

The game starts with the player being moved in a wheelchair, suggesting seated play. Every instance you see your character in, they're sitting. Then you are presented by the core gameplay loop; doing a ritual with different ingredients being put in a cauldron. This spawns a ghost, you give the ghost attention and then they leave, leaving you an item behind. Sometimes you get teleported to a "nightmare sequence" where sometimes you can interact with, some other times you just watch.

The way the ghosts work is that they need to be watched for them to leave. Once you watched them enough, a sound will appear on your left, right or behind you, with the intention to make you turn.
Once you do, you are rewarded with a jumpscare and the ghost leaving.
If you're used to horror games and their ambient noise, this will make the experience incredibly frustrating because all you will think about is "WHY IS IT NOT MOVING I AM FLASHING THEM JUST LIKE THE GAME TOLD ME TO".
I feel like the worst aspect of this comes when the game makes you look behind you because you can only really do that if your chair can spin or if you're standing. My chair is like the cheapest thing ever so I ended up having to play standing.

Small problem with playing standing is that you're gonna have to recalibrate the space boundaries and then switch to seating again for the cutscenes and everything will become an offsync buggy mess.

To make this worse, the achievements will hinder your experience.
One asks you to play the game ignoring all calls (AKA with your phone permanently buzzing), another one by never resetting the ingredients (meaning that if because of physics shenanigans or a ghost fucking up your setup, say goodbye to this achievement), another one by beating it under one hour (this is where you can notice all of the flaws in the game's design and it's incredibly frustrating to get if you don't know how the ghosts work) and there's one for having bought another of the developer's games.

The nightmare sequences of the game is the only good part of this game because they actually offer something more other than just jumpscares.

In conclusion: DreadEye VR has something to offer, but it is so incredibly not worth it I really cannot recommend anyone from trying this one out.

Many times have I picked up this game, always unable to finish it. There was something about it that just didn't hook me, not to mention the stress and FoMO even with mods like lookup anything.
I have tried with cheat mods, porn mods, expansions; nothing made it an enjoyable experience.

Was it because the game was boring? was it because I didn't like it?
No, because I lacked dedicated [people] to play with.
It wasn't until I literally got married IRL and I was looking for games to play with my wife that we really got hooked.
I taught her the ropes, and since I never actually finished a year, we quickly got to the max amount of progress I ever got and I was.. really enjoying it!

Being able to be with someone you enjoy being with really makes any experience better, but Stardew Valley has so much stuff to do
back when I first got this game in like.. 2018 or so? the goal was the community center and that's it but now there's like more quests and secrets and masteries and events and it all just clicks so incredibly well. The endgame of this game is truly where the fun is at and that's just incredible to me, that a game [i]actively get's better[/i] at the endgame. That's just an incredibly rare sight in general and I feel like that is because Stardew Valley rewards the player's experience. Time is limited, so you slowly but surely learn how to optimize that more and more until you're at a point where either you want the day to end already or you are doing some extra stuff for hours, days or even weeks ahead.

Stardew Valley has the ability to be as complex as you want but also as casual as you want aswell and I feel like that's just really great.

My family never had a lot of money so when I was a kid I would see games like yu-gi-oh and club penguin's card jitsu and I remember wanting to play them so badly that I ended up making a ripoff that combined both games rules. The cards were done on a paper sheet with different drawings, effects and crazy unbalanced stuff.
I played with those with my friends at school and we would make up new rules each session and have card ideas and stuff like that.

Sketch Crawler kind of gave me that feeling and nostalgia again of designing my own cards, even if here I'm just doing the drawing.
It has a lot of things to polish, and the gameplay can be a bit confusing at times on what's the best thing to do, but the game is just so charming I'm just looking forwards to the future and how it evolves.

If you like payday 2 stealth, you will REALLY enjoy this. It's less risky than payday 2 (in terms of consequences for being caught) in exchange for more chaos.

Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine is a banger game with an unique cast of characters with different abilities that allow different strategies to be used to finish your objectives.
The developers understand that a stealth heavy game can be "just so fun" and so each level offers a variety of twists in its hazards, obstacles and story to keep the experience fresh.

The only weak point of this game is that it doesn't know if it wants to be singleplayer or multiplayer game, offering achievements sometimes locked to singleplayer but the singleplayer experience being incredibly hard and basically putting yourself at a disadvantage. I assume this is why they give you achievements for SP, because it's more "challenging".

highly recommended

I really enjoy the Pikmin games and Pikmin 3 is no exception. The addition of the kopad and the three captains work so well together, making Pikmin 3 a multitasking beast of a game that's really satisfactory to play.

The game adds a lot of QoL such as being able to quickly throw pikmin as well as lock on and a confirmation for the whistle being used on pikmin that are working.

As much as I love this game, it's incredibly hand holdy and its full potential is not reached until after you're pretty much done with the game because of the captains. It's an incredible short game that relies on telling the player "hey, now that you beat the main story you can now access these other parts for a fruit or two" and that's honestly a bit of a shame because I wish the game had more of a reason.

Pikmin 3 is all about collecting fruits doing multiple puzzles or killing enemies and the fruits are also used as the "timer" of the game, kinda like the day limit in pikmin 1 but more manageable.
A 100% run requires you to get all fruits but because they're tied to the time limit, they also respawn, making fruits feel less special and the progress a bit more invisible to see and feel (not to mention you gotta open the map to check if the fruit you're grabbing/going for is one you already grabbed before or not) and that's a shame. The juice mechanic is so generous you barely have to care about it so on top of feeling unnecessary, it also feels like something was lost.

Don't get me wrong, I love this game but it's the one I'm the most conflicted about replaying (solo) due to all the core features being unlocked so late into the game and that's my biggest criticism.

I wasn't a fan of the caves in Pikmin 2 and losing the sweet personality that the series had, so in that regards I did enjoy my time with Pikmin 3.

I remember back when I was a kid I almost joined a cult by accident through a page that looked similar to the ones in this game but I was saved by my ability of not understanding English very well.

It's not usual for life to let you relive life experiences as fresh, and while not exactly it, I'm glad I was able to somewhat relive some of that but as an adult-- and without the gore + jeff the killer jumpscares and viruses (that would cost me actual real money*) the old internet had.

Hypnospace Outlaw is not just a simulator about old internet for le funny xD !, it's a detective game with an incredible story that I don't want to spoil.

AploVVare Collection tries to simulate the feeling of having a Megadrive with a lot of cartridges to choose from (currently 23, they keep adding more and more). These cartridges are gamejam projects/short games the devs made and packed them in this neat little collection. Games can be hit or miss and often experimental but they're often charming enough to not be just a prototype that must and should be forgotten because it's so raw it's barely anything.

The biggest highlight of the collection is the DLC that simulates the 32X; an addon for the Megadrive that basically attempted to "upgrade" the console so you didn't have to buy a new one. What does that DLC do? It adds +18 content to every game.... yeah...
the developer AploveStudio is quite horny and they don't hide it! The games themselves without the DLC can have some horny content, but most if not all of it is contained to the DLC. From simple nudity and sprite/art swaps to new synergies and effects and characters, the +18 DLC is by far the most relevant thing about this.

*I forgot to mention this and I don't know where to put it, AploveStudio's characters are all over AploVVare Collection, but it's fine if you haven't played any of their games. Hell, you might meet and know them this way a bit more easily.