I've played a fair few Sokoban-likes since making an effort to play a wider variety of games. And I think in general... the subgenre isn't really for me? Don't get me wrong, there are some Sokobans I have really enjoyed and appreciated: the genius concept of Baba Is You and the organic simplicity and focus on player discovery in Stephen's Sausage Roll make these among some of the best made puzzle games I've played. But there always becomes a point in these games where frustration overtakes me... when the number of interacting mechanics becomes too great, or the convoluted solutions to the puzzles become too clever for their own good. When the artificial complexity begins to outpace the more organic complexity of one of these games' premises, I always find myself losing interest. Well... that didn't happen with Parabox. Patrick's Parabox starts off a little slow but before long it had grabbed onto me completely and, despite my checkered record on that front, I didn't find myself cheating on a puzzle even once. In terms of pacing, level design and player experience, I would now rate this to be the best Sokoban I've played.

The premise of Parabox is fantastic; the recursion theme is great and requires some really lateral thinking. The actual number of distinct rules the game introduces is surprisingly small, and most of the puzzles are less about applying them in an awkward way and more about exploring the way they interact and their natural corollories. It meant that every time I got stuck on a puzzle it was generally because there was an implication to one of the rules I hadn't worked out yet, and it meant each of these sticking points ended in a great 'a-ha!' moment when I finally managed to solve it. In terms of both the recursive theme and this focus on streamlined puzzles, Parabox reminds me a lot of Cocoon; but while Cocoon came off as being very handholdy and afraid of reaching it's full potential with its puzzles, Parabox is much more trusting of its player's intelligence, and really wrings out every ounce of puzzle potential from its core ruleset. In short, Parabox is pretty much exactly the game I wish Cocoon had been.

There's not much here to write home about in terms of aesthetics, though. I'm not really a huge fan of the music, the visuals are very simplistic and there is no attempt to really have any kind of theming or framework. At first this can make the game seem rather sparse, especially in the early levels where not a whole lot is going on. But once you enter the mid-game and the complexity really starts ramping up, this visual simplicity becomes much more of a blessing than a curse. In particular the use of simple shapes and bright block colours makes it remarkably clear what's going on no matter how crazy the play area gets; the game has the option for you to zoom into any box at any time to see what's happening inside, but the visual design was so clean that I almost never felt the need to.

So yes, all around, a very solid little puzzler. It's a very pure game; like I said, there's no real atmosphere or interesting visuals to speak of, but Parabox really goes all in on its puzzles and they are executed beautifully. Strong recommend from me on this one, even for people who are (like me) unsold on Sokobans in general.

I mean, it's fine. On surface level there's not really a lot going on here, and I'm honestly not sure how it's gotten so popular: maybe it's a generational thing, because I'm very much a millennial and this game feels very zoomer-y, if that makes sense. I've only played maybe 10 hours or so of this with a friend, and we did have some fun, but I kinda feel I've got everything out of it I'm going to get.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy this, because Lethal Company was pretty fun... once we worked out how to play it. The onboarding in this game is terrible, and at first we assumed we were supposed to both go scavenging, which just ended up being a painful and aimless experience filled with unavoidable deaths. Once we started leaving somebody in the ship, our time got considerably better; having one person guide the other over walkie-talkie with a finite battery life leads to a pretty fun dynamic, and there was always a genuine 'oh shit' moment when the scavenger would go silent and you didn't know whether they'd died or just run out of power. Lethal Company has a pretty good vibe to it, and in general it succeeds in both its horror and its innate silly comedy.

There are a lot of different enemy types and quite a few different planets in this game, but it all ends up getting pretty samey pretty quick. Almost all of the interiors look exactly the same, the exterior layout on each planet is exactly the same every time you visit, and every enemy was functionally exactly the same for us because we never worked out a way to deal with literally any of them except 'run away'. I get the impression this game would be a lot more fun if you went diving through a wiki to learn enemy behaviour patterns and how to unlock secrets; as an example, once we went into an interior only to find a huge old-fashioned library instead of the regular steel corridors. I'm sure there must be hundreds of other secrets like this in the game, but yeah... we never had any idea what caused that area to spawn and we never saw it again. Again, I'm sure I could pore over the wiki to find these things out, but that's just not how I like to play games. And it feels like LC discourages organically discovering any of these secrets, because the cost for exploration and player death is usually so high.

I think the vibes here are generally strong enough that I'd be willing to push through the difficulties I'd had with this, if not for the quality of life in this game being pretty awful. For some reason you have to use an in-game Command Line on a terminal to do pretty much any in-game menuing, the exterior maps are overly large and easy to get lost in despite having nothing to see or do, and for some goddamn reason there's no way to reset the game! There were many times when it became clear we weren't going to meet the next quota, but in order to start again you have to land the ship however many times you have left and then sit through the cutscene of you being fired by the company. Every single time. And we fucked up a lot in this game; like I said, LC doesn't feel like it designed to be played by people who haven't read the Wiki, so we quite often would die and not even have any idea what killed us. For some reason if you both die, any scrap you had stored on the ship gets magically deleted, so yeah it can be obvious pretty early in a run that you're doomed... and yet the game forces you to go through the motions yet again. There's only so much of this I can take, and it's the single biggest issue I had with this game. I know there's mods that can fix it, but I'm not a big fan of modding, and this is a review for the base game so I'm not going to give it points for mods that happen to exist...

So yeah, there are some nice ideas in here, many of which are actually quite well implemented, but the poor quality of life and lack of player feedback really drag this one down for me. I imagine this is the kind of game that would be much more fun if one player knows what they're doing and the other doesn't, but two novices playing this together got pretty stale before I feel we'd really scratched the surface.

This is one hell of a good game, so let's deal with the elephant in the room first and get it out of the way. I see a lot of people complain about the story... and I'm not sure I agree. The story is... serviceable, the setting and premise are fine. It's the characters and the writing that bring this down. Dear god is there a lot of cringe in this game; White is an edgelord emo from the 00s who looks and acts like he belongs more in My Chemical Romance than in an action platform game, Violet is a squeaky voiced 'crazy lady' who just constantly babbles about boobs and murder, and none of the other characters are any more fleshed out or any less irritating. But it's the interactions between them that are the low point; none of them react to anything like human beings (none of them even seem to particularly care that they're all dead), and they constantly flip-flop between being mortal enemies, best friends and thirsty lovers, sometimes in the same sentence. Part of the visual novel side of NW is receiving prizes for your work, and most of these involve going to some location (karaoke, beach, baseball match etc) with one or more of the side characters, and these are all extremely heinous. I think it's quite telling that the beach excursion is the only time you see any of the characters dressed in anything other than their standard clothes, and we all have a good time looking at bikinis, talking about bikinis, joking about bikinis... it's honestly excruciating at times, and it really doesn't give a good first impression. I get the impression that most of this cringe is deliberate and trying to be comedic... there are one or two moments I'd describe as charming but, for the most part, intentional cringe is still cringe.

Right, that's out of the way now. Neon White is excellent and I've never played anything quite like it. The level design is phenomenal, the abilities are varied, distinct and all feel great to use and the soundtrack, while not really my kind of music, fits the experience perfectly. The game is simultaneously a platformer, a puzzle and an optimisation challenge. I ended up approaching each stage in 3 different ways. First I'd play as if it was just a normal platformer; get to the end of the stage in however long it takes and learn the general layout. Then speedrun the thing, looking for little shortcuts and tricks to try and get my time down. Then finally as a puzzle, working out how to end up with the right tools to get the gift which is hidden in each level. Each of these three approaches feels great, and it gives each level three times the life it would have otherwise had.

But I think NW's biggest strength is in player information and player feedback. Edgelord characters aside, the aesthetic in this game is very strong; the heaven theming means that most levels are crisp and clean in appearance, making everything within that level pop extremely well. The different ability cards are all coloured in a way that you can tell at a glance what they are, the same with the demons that drop those cards, and it all makes it remarkably clear what's going on in spite of the breakneck speed that you end up blasting through these levels at. And by god do you end up going fast... but it's remarkable how controllable it all feels. The diffculty curve is spot on, and makes sure you always know how to do what you'll need to do to get a good time in the next level. You do not need to be any good at speedrunning to play this, but it makes you feel like you are.

That speed can make the game feel a bit intense, however. The visual novel side of the game does really help with the pacing here by breaking things up a little (however, see aforementioned cringe) but I still find it's something I can only play for about an hour at a time. A couple of the hidden presents in the levels are bit obnoxious too; my favourite ones of these were in obvious places and the challenge was how to get to them, but some of them are just straight up hidden in obscure spots and it's a real pain in the arse to have to search some of the longer levels. A couple of levels can be a bit confusing in terms of where you need to go; the game is generally great at guiding you down an obvious path, but once or twice it does feel like there's a couple of broken links in the guidance chain. But there is so much content here, and the minor annoyances tend to be few and far between.

So honestly, just brace yourself, push through the cringe and play this, because the core game here is fantastic. I absolutely hate anime and thirsty characters and all of that stuff, but even I managed to push through it to enjoy this game, and you should read that as a pretty damn strong endorsement from me.

I've given this a higher rating than Bloodborne. I know I know, it's outrageous blasphemy, but give me a minute and I'll try to explain.

Lies of P is, in general, a very competently designed Soulsbourne. The combat feels great, there's a nice diverse set of enemies and bosses, the world looks gorgeous. Everything you'd expect from a From Software Soulsborne is here. The world and story are more coherent than in Bloodborne or Dark Souls; while I do think I prefer the more abstract and mysterious style of storytelling in the From Software games, it's nice to feel like a character in the story for once rather than a nobody who appears later to clean up the mess.

There are a couple of problems in the implementation; specifically in optimisation and localization. While the game mostly runs fine on the PS4 version I played, the load times are astronomical, which is particularly annoying when the game expects you to frequently return to the hotel. I also noticed quite a few graphical glitches, especially in the early game; some skyboxes seemed weirdly low-resolution, parts of enemies would visually clip through walls, and waving flags tended to just glitch out completely. As for localization, a lot of the dialogue and item text comes off as a bit awkward and either overly flowery or overly terse. While the voice acting is mostly fine, a lot of the English language VAs sound like they haven't been given much direction and don't know what their lines mean half of the time, and I even noticed some of the VAs would pronounce in-game jargon like 'ergo' or 'Krat' differently from each other. There's nothing major, but these little things just give Lies of P a slight air of... knock-off-ness. It makes you realise that while things like level design and worldbuilding in Lies of P are good, they just aren't quite as good as in Bloodborne, a game Lies of P so blatantly apes.

So why did I give this a higher score than Bloodborne? One word: combat. I fucking hate the frenetic, aggressive and chaotic combat in Bloodborne, to an extent that it kinda ruined the whole game for me. I can't tell what the fuck is going on, I never feel in control and it just stresses me the hell out. Lies of P's combat is much, much more tactical, inspired more by Sekiro than by Bloodborne (I've not actually played Sekiro yet so don't quote me on that). Don't get me wrong, it can still be fast and quite hectic, but I found this so much more playable than Bloodborne. Combat in Lies of P also feels quite a bit more varied than Bloodborne; there are quite a few different systems all at play at once (fable, legion, the wishstone, the grindstone, a billion different consumables, etc etc), and you can choose to focus on or ignore whichever ones you want. It just feels a lot more welcoming than Bloodborne's attitude of forcing you into one particular style of fighting.

There are a few moments where the gameplay in Lies of P did frustrate me though. The puppet theme results in a lot of enemies having deliberately unnatural movement, which is aesthetically pretty neat, but it can make it quite difficult to read their attacks correctly. The game also likes to use crates and wagons and other bits of scenery to wall off the play area, so it conditions you to stop trying to break these early on... then towards the mid game, it starts to hide secrets behind breakable boxes that look no different to the invincible ones. A couple of the bosses got on my nerves too. Because I'm a filthy scrub I used the phantoms whenever available, but there a few bosses where they just... aren't there as options? It always seemed weird to fight 4 or 5 bosses with a spectre present, only to have to completely change tactics when a (sometimes much easier) boss showed up without a star fragment fountain. Also the last boss of the bad ending can fuck right off, there were so many particle effects in that arena I had no clue what was going on.

But yes... generally I had a pretty great time here. It kinda ends up being like Bloodborne for people who are shit at Bloodborne. And I'm definitely shit at Bloodborne. Should I just go "git gud" and go replay the highest rated game on Backloggd? Maybe. But from my experience of the two games, I genuinely preferred Lies of P. Please do not burn my house down.

Paradise Killer is weird as hell, but it's absolutely my kind of weird. I'm a big sucker for worldbuilding and unusual settings, and Paradise Killer sure does deliver that in droves. The world seems to be entirely built around juxtaposition; high-energy disco and jazz music imposed against the ghoulishly empty streets, the fantastical sculptures and temples cast against the grimey tower blocks in the town below, and of course the bright and cheery facade of the island in general cast against its horrific purpose and history. And this isn't a case of 'seemingly nice world with a sinister undercurrent'; the world of Paradise Killer is cheery, idyllic, suave, mysterious, horrific and terrifying all at once, and this is all quite apparent from the get go. It's such an interesting way to present a Lovecraftian/cosmic horror-type setting like this; I've never seen anything quite like it, and I loved every second of it.

Of course you need a game to go with the setting, and it felt like Paradise Killer's gameplay revolved around two fairly disconnected cores. There is a kind of collectathon nature to the game, where you're encouraged to scour the island, complete puzzles and platforming challenges to find various things. Sometimes these things are important clues which tie into the other half of the game, but more often than you're just finding money or snippets of lore. And I'm not sure this really adds too much? The platforming is often very janky, and sometimes things are hidden out of the way at the ends of areas with nothing else to see, and so this aspect of the game can come across as a little time-wasting (especially as the island is fascinating enough that I found exploring it to be its own reward). I do think on the whole I was grateful for the collectathon elements as a change of pace in between more intense investigative parts of the game, but it's definitely not where PK shines brightest.

The investigation side of PK, on the other hand, absolutely gripped me; I legit lost a fair few hours of sleep trying to piece together pictures of what might have happened from the snippets of clues I had at the time. The characters you spend much of the game interviewing are all fantastic with excellently written dialogue, and it is absolutely fascinating trying to piece together their motives and backstories. By the end of the investigation I still feel there were one or two things that didn't really fit into place anywhere, which was a little frustrating, but aside from that I think this is probably one of the best-written video game mysteries out there.

The other part of this project that has clearly had tonnes of love and care poured into it is the presentation. Paradise Killer is incredibly stylized, especially in it's UI and in little flares like character's VA's constantly blurting out catchphrases mid-conversation. I mostly like these touches, they help to make the game feel even more standout and unique than it already is, but it does lead to the game being a very full-on and generally loud experience that isn't easy to play for too long at a time. And of course I have to mention the music, which is fantastic and somehow fits the setting absolutely perfectly (I wouldn't even be surprised if the music came first and the game was designed around it). But there are a couple of presentation choices that I didn't get along with. Most of the VA is... pretty bad, to be honest, but this almost feels like a deliberate choice? I quite liked the weird things all the characters would constantly yell mid-conversation, but it feels like most of the VAs weren't really given much direction and the performances come off pretty weak. I also kinda hate the way characters are presented in the world. Every NPC in Paradise Killer is a static jpeg that is either locked in place or slowly rotates to try and face you at all times. None of the characters have any presence or 'pop' at all, and it just looks kinda bad... nothing breaks immersion like walking past a taxi driver too fast and seeing her collapse into an infinitesimal one-dimensional being, or walking straight past a suspect because he was standing flush against a wall and your brain just assumed he was part of a wall texture. I get that 3D models are a whole other thing and would look out of place in this world, but I would have preferred PK to do something like Doom where the jpegs are locked to always face you exactly. In fact, as a proof of concept, Paradise Killer does exactly this with the various inanimate collectibles in the game, and they all stand out from the world just fine.

So yeah, little things like the character models, outdated-looking textures and some stiff platforming controls do give Paradise Killer an unmistakable air of jank (topped off with its lack of autosave, which seems a bizarre choice to make in 2020). But if some corners did have to be cut to make this then it was absolutely worth it, because that time that was saved was clearly redirected into making this game as special, well-written and memorable as possible. It's a great experience, with a great mystery to solve and a highly satisfying ending, and this is one I can thoroughly recommend.

Just want to get this bit off my chest first. I kinda hate some of the aesthetic direction in this game. Not all of it; the actual art design of the world is generally strong and the music slaps, and I particularly like how the trip-hop vibes in some of the tracks give a dingey arcade-hall-y feel to some areas to match the pinballing gameplay. But overall, Yoku definitely prioritizes being cutesy, quirky and cozy; to me, that's the unholy fucking trinity of tones that just piss me off. Parts of this game genuinely feel designed specifically to annoy; half the characters (yourself included) constantly squeak like dog toys for no goddamn reason, and I genuinely nearly abandoned the game when I realised my main way of interacting with the world was via a party blower. Maybe there's just something wrong in my brain but I really cannot stand cutesy 'lol randem' humour like this at all, and Yoku might be the single most not-for-me game I've ever played in that aspect.

Grumpy old man rant aside, this is an extraordinarily fun metroidvania. The pinball elements of Yoku help it to achieve something that games like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skaters manage, in that the act of movement in-and-of itself is both enjoyable and rewarding. I'm honestly surprised how well the pinball boards just slide into the gap that platforming would normally occupy in a Metroidvania; before playing this I would never have thought those were two genres that would merge well at all, but Yoku made them seem like the most natural pairing in the world.

But does the gimmicky movement make free exploration and backtracking a bit more awkward (as is the case in something like Dandara)? Well... yeah, i guess, but generally I didn't care because that was part of the fun, rather than something I just had to do to get between fun bits. And I think that's the most brilliant thing about Yoku; it's gimmick helps to counteract a couple of issues present in the Metroidvania genre as a whole. It actually made backtracking feel great!

I think the one spot Yoku's pacing isn't so great is whenever its economy gets involved. The only times you really get large amounts of currency is in the dedicated pinball boards, but in those doing literally anything just absolutely showers you with money. This is good, this is what pinball should do from a feedback point of view, but it clashes awkwardly with your coin capacity (which is small for most of the game) and your constant need to pay small amounts to unlock new paths. I found the economy to be extremely feast-or-famine; multiple times I'd be 10 fruit short of buying something, and then have to trek all the way back to the last dedicated pinball board and win far too much fruit because there just is no way to easily make a small amount of money in this game.

So yeah, I can recommend this. Like I said this is aesthetically very much a 'not for me' game, but even I can admit there is some charm in that department, and the underlying gameplay is more than strong enough to carry the experience. A weird combination well-executed and I now want to see more pinballtroidvanias.

Last year, I played both Moonlighter and Cult of the Lamb, two games built around a premise of gluing two mostly unrelated gameplay loops together where each has some impact on the other. And I enjoyed both of these games in their own way, but in each case it felt like I enjoyed them in spite of this central gimmick. But I think Dave the Diver might be the first thing I've played that manages to do this 2-games-together premise well! The secret, it turns out, is to just put an absolutely ungodly amount of elbow grease into every aspect of development...

Dave pretty much has it all. The graphical style is pixel perfect, from its emotive character designs to some of the best pixel-art animation I've ever seen in its recurring cutscenes. The characters themselves are full of charm and personality and are all lovable in their own way (especially the titular Dave, who comes across as just the nicest doormat to ever exist). The music is varied and great. The story is... absolutely buck wild, and you will not be able to guess where it's going at any point within it. There's not a single aspect of this game that isn't filled to the brim with care and attention, and it really shows. And it's all so endlessly charming. I challenge anybody to try and dislike this game; I'm not sure it's even possible!

But, of course, the place where Dave the Diver is most packed full of content is in it's gameplay. You can barely go 2 minutes without some new game-changing mechanic or one-and-done (but completely fleshed out) minigame coming into being, and yet it somehow never feels overwhelming or unfocused. No matter how crazy things get, you always have the same core of diving to fish and selling that fish at the restaurant and this central mechanic, while not thrilling, is an excellent foundation for everything else to build on, and helps keep this incredibly scattershot game remarkably grounded.

The quality of the gameplay content can be a little mixed, which is to be expected with this 'throw everything at the wall' approach. The UI was a little off in some places, e.g. an awful lot of minigames not letting you pause for some reason. I think the personal lowlights for me were the forced stealth sections, which really didn't feel very well implemented compared to everything else here. But that's the magic of Dave; stuck in a bit you don't like? Well don't worry, because 30 seconds from now you'll pretty much be playing a different game entirely, or back in the comforting Stardew Valley-like Zen of just managing your restaurant.

One aspect I'm not sure Dave does nail quite so well is pacing. Considering it is essentially a cozy game, it doesn't half have its foot on the accelerator a lot of the time, and honestly I welcome this because I do usually find games like this a bit slow for my taste. But this constant go-go-go approach makes it very obvious when there's a brief lull in the action, and there are a few times in the mid-game where it felt like things came to a screeching halt. There are a few points where the game makes you wait for a day or two for something to happen before you can continue on whatever plot thread you are pulling, and I found these to just be frustrating roadblocks to be honest. There are also a few more specific things I found that hindered the pacing somewhat. The fish farm specifically is a huge thorn in the side of the mid-to-late game; it's incredibly awkward to use efficiently, and emptying it ends up taking a huge portion of each day towards the end of the game. I feel like these are things I wouldn't mind if they were in something like Stardew Valley, but they just seem to fly in the face of the pacing that Dave seems to be wanting to set up for itself.

But yeah, by the time these minor aggrievances to start to set in, I was already more than hooked by the character, charm and joy that this game exudes in every aspect. It really is endlessly impressive how much stuff is in this game, and on balance it ends up being a fantastic little experience. Strong recommend on this one.

Sludge Life 2 is very much in the 'the same, but more' camp of sequels (which is not necessarily a bad thing by the way), so most if not all of the points from my previous review for Sludge Life still stand. Sludge Life 2, like its predecessor, oozes character, and has a fantastically grungy aesthetic in both its overall art and sound design, and it takes place in a weird as fuck world that I greatly enjoyed my time in.

To compare it with its prequel, I'd say that Sludge Life 2 feels like a more complete package than Sludge Life, and fixes a fair few of the (minor) issues I had with the first game. Unlike Sludge Life 1, Sludge Life 2 actually has a story... kind of... or at least a clear goal and motivation for the player character. The world is larger, more ambitious and much more varied in tone and setting, and the way its structured makes it much easier to navigate than in Sludge Life 1. And some of the characters feel just a tiny bit more fleshed out, but that tiny amount makes all the difference in my opinion.

I do wonder if perhaps Sludge Life 2 sacrificed a little authenticity in return, though. Don't get me wrong, it's still an unapologetic vibe of a game, but it just feels somehow a little less organic than the original. A fair proportion of the best moments in Sludge Life 2 are callbacks or references to Sludge Life 1, and a lot of the new jokes are a bit... well, there's a lot of poo in the game. There was a lot of toilet humour in Sludge Life 1, but it all felt like it was there to increase the Sludginess of the world, whereas the toilet humour in Sludge Life 2 feels a little more gratuitous. I dunno, I maybe reading into things that aren't there, but that's just the vibe I got while playing this.

But yeah, I think on balance this comes out as a slight improvement on the original. I don't know if the devs plan to continue the series but I hope they do, because there's nothing else out there that really captures the vibe these games are going for, and I still feel like the world has more that it would like to say.

I'm not too familiar with the point and click genre, but this feels like it's got to be one of the better ones. It's got an intricately detailed world realised in stunning visuals with a unique art style, and some consistently pretty great music throughout. I perhaps wasn't the biggest fan of the sound design; being a robot world, everything is constantly creaking and clanking and groaning, and the character voices are just... weird, but I guess it does all help to sell the world.

The puzzles are a bit more hit and miss; the standard point-and-click / inventory puzzles are mostly good (with the occasional splash of some pretty heavy moon logic, but that's just a given for this genre), but the more self-contained puzzles can be pretty disengaging or frustrating (e.g. sliding block puzzles, a prolonged Space Invaders clone, etc.). I also found the game could be quite picky with certain objects' click detection boxes; there were quite a few occurrences of me figuring out how to solve something but then being unable to actually solve it because I didn't realise I was clicking a few pixels away from where I needed to. But overall, it's a solid experience throughout; while the aesthetics are what sell this one, there's nothing too awkward or annoying in the gameplay to detract from it.

So... why have I given a relatively low score then? Well, I played this on Steam in 2023 and it barely runs at all. I am not an FPS snob at all, I couldn't care less as long as I can tell what's going on, but the whole game ran on my PC at something between 1/2 to 2/3 speed. At one point towards the end I ended up googling the answer to one of the more esoteric puzzles, and seeing how fast Josef is supposed to walk was shocking. I did a fair bit of reading up about this and it seems to be some kind of issue with modern graphics cards (it seems to be a common problem with the Steam version, but only in the last few years), and I hate to demote a game for something like that, but it honestly becomes near unplayable at times. Once the world opens up and a lot of the puzzles involve backtracking to previous areas, I could feel the seconds of my life draining away as I watched Josef waddle across the map at 10FPS for what felt like minutes at a time. It's such a shame, because Machinarium is a sweet and charming little adventure that I wanted to get invested in, but so much of it ended up feeling like a chore because of the slowdown. But I have to rate the game I played, and the Steam version of Machinarium is absolute ass on this technical level.

If I were to describe what this game is, I'd probably call it a chimera of mostly Papers Please with a healthy dollop of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, all presented in full FMV. And if that sounds like a bizarre mix of things, well... yeah, it is. But y'know what? It works... I think.

Not for Broadcast is undeniably shaky around the edges. It has all the shakiness you would expect from an FMV game. The comedy, writing and acting is all pretty hit and miss, but I'd definitely say it leans more towards good than bad, and the actors for the main cast at least are consistently decent. Most of the time, Not for Broadcast is a very silly game which doesn't take itself seriously at all, and you can tell everyone involved is having an absolute blast making it; the passion really shows here and absolutely helps sell the weird game concept. And overall I have no issue with the game being a bit silly; at it's best, Not for Broadcast comes off like 90s / 00s British satire like Brasseye or Not the Nine o'Clock News, and I love that kinda stuff.

But Not for Broadcast shines the best in the moments when that silliness drops. Some pretty brutal and shocking things happen in this game; at times, these moments even managed to give me irl chills at what I was seeing, and the acting and writing in these more serious parts is much more solid and consistent. The story on paper isn't anything all that special. It's a fairly standard 1984-type affair and yet it was an incredibly immersive experience, and I pin this success on the framing and gameplay.

The gameplay in Not for Broadcast is, much like many other aspects of this game, just kinda fine? There's a lot of little tasks you have to manage all at once, and it can be quite overwhelming and stressful at times in a way I don't think was intentional. But of course, during all this time, the news broadcast is on on your screens. And something about the fact you're absorbing the show subconsciously while your true focus is elsewhere just makes everything feel so... real. You get to know all the anchors, behind-the-scenes staff, public figures and regular guests, and they all feel like real people. You see them bicker and banter behind the scenes, you see them struggle with what they are being asked to do, and you really grow to care about them. And when shit hits the fan, it really helps sell the world when you get to see how these people react and deal with what is going on in the world around them. I think Not for Broadcast ends up going in the same bucket as something like Unpacking; it's a video game which explores things that only video games can do, and I'm totally here for it.

There are some low points though too, which do deserve a mention. A lot of the side characters are obvious parodies of specific real-world celebrities (David Beckham, Gordon Ramsey, etc), and it can get pretty cringey at times when they're on-screen. Also, in between gameplay segments, there are sections with long text to read and decisions for you to make regarding your home life. I don't think these are bad or anything, and they help establish the player character as a presence in the world and show another viewpoint as to how world events affect the everyman. But I always found these bits to be quite a tonal jolt, especially in the early game when the gameplay is more silly and the home sections are pretty serious, and they undid just a little bit of the great immersion set up by the rest of the game.

But overall, Not for Broadcast is a game with a strong vision for what it wants to be, and I think it hits that vision extremely well. I had a very good time with this one overall, and think it's a very good example of what more experimental games can achieve.