An incredible bound forward for open world exploration with a more interesting story to follow, a bevy of interesting discoveries and possibilities to engage with the world topped with phenomenal sound design and a perfect pendulum of serious and silly. Review here:
https://www.backloggd.com/u/SunlitSonata/review/809502/

Beautiful looking. A ton of design effort in all spots, and yet too much of it feels supplemental to an inherently flawed combat loop. Some incredibly heavy and powerful plot moments dictated to questionable pacing and sleeper alternate gameplay.

A lovely surprise, blending wonderful art direction with a rhymic twist on a strong character action base. Some platforming is a bit w/e but when the core base is as stronger as it is I'm excited for more to come out of this.

FFXVI is elevated so tremendously hard by Clive, its production value and genuinely fantastic game feel and expression. The more I think about how simplistic the plot is despite its veneer and how painfully slow its slow moments are the worse it gets.

Incredible survival horror with incredibly tight environments and ruthless enemies, sublime graphics, a protagonist incredibly easy to buy into, a phenomenal score and more. Truly incredible experience top to bottom

LITERALLY started it all; both Kirby and Sakurai's career. A sweet, contained little package with a refreshing amount of options for an old game including a hard mode. Set a lot of standards to be iterated in his career to come.

Great sense of discovery, simple but often challenging combat, and interesting progression language through the main path. The grind and moon logic required to get an actually satisfying conclusion was sadly lost on the developers.

Sublime gameplay evolution and integration of a core loop over a run, only held by occasionally nauseous jumping camera and forced need for 360 turning. Any plot communicated through gameplay sidequests is the best story in it. The rest is abysmally artless trash that struggles to hold a tone, actively makes your MC feel less cool when playing him, and reads like feeding Danganronpa to an AI.

An explosive emotional rush; it feels like what I'd equate a crack addiction toward with extremely cursed yet expressive presentation and a hearty skill curve if you'd want to dig deep into its surface. Some of the heaviest requirements are a bit TOO exact with any scheme but it builds on itself in all the right ways without overstaying the welcome of its own pacing.

A wonderfully fun surprise to see Sonic characterization played out, including for peeps long neglected by the franchise. It earnestly gives me hope in the future of the series more than most things this decade.

Not bad, but it doesn't have enough new to offer coming off of Aria beyond some new powers and a generally weaker castle/plot/boss roster/art design/slapped on touchscreen junk, but it's all at least good. The power system is still fun to mess around with, thankfully.

The most poser videogame ever created. At least it's short.

Of the three one word silent puzzle games, this one has the most advanced feeling concept at the expense of being the least comprehensible. It has neat boss battles and enough energy to meaningfully build on its concept through and through even with a slightly hollow ending.

I respect games like Machinarium a lot to be accommodating; giving you the space to figure stuff out but also letting you minigame your way through if you don't get things. Despite the frustration I respect the deviance, need for musical tone aside.

Wonderful vibes, great cast, great use of the dual screens, homely music. The complete package for a VN adventure; just don't expect TOO much puzzling

The scenario variety and storytelling within them is quite commendable in what it seeks to represent, in spite of some being shallow. Looks and sounds great, but fails to come together in its last stretch for gameplay or story.

Genuinely solid effort to revive the Classic Sonic concept getting way too much hate bc it doesn’t look like Sonic Mania and is a bit more platform heavy. Great levels, character control, most of the music, the art design has its moments and the bosses blow ass. Trip is cute.

It's okay; not as good as the first Wario Land and definitely lacks that speed factor you saw in 4, but the animations are great and levels decent enough. It's charming just lacks an x-factor beyond tedious motion controls.

If this game had a better grasp of all the philosophy it was trying to tangle on you at the end or if the princess's VA could avoid how often her microphone peaks, it would be kino. Experiencing every possibility is very fun and offers a surprising amount of variation in small spots, on top of great art and the more light banter.

Great gameplay, sans a wonky difficulty curve it's incredibly well put together, beautiful messy incomprehensible plot.

Theoretically breezy and pretty game held back by unnecessary creative decisions. The annoying/confused voice direction over a played out narrative, and general lack of variety/mood escalation really drag it down when it had all the pieces it needed to convey a strong feeling, but it just came off as distracting. I wish it felt faster.

The Innocent Devil system is so well made and a strong means of progression that it deserved to be in a game where everything else stacked up to even a marginal extent. Not sure what's up with that camera system but it's very wack.

Favorite narrative experience of 2023. Does a better job with its meta stuff than Slay the Princess and offers an entertaining mystery yarn with bits of horror and aesthetic flare from Japanese myth in a way that's fun to follow. Maybe a bit too odd at points, but memorable regardless.

The worst Dimps Sonic game. Overlong levels, really tedious gimmicks, gyroscope mechanics making everything needlessly arduous, framerate dropping to a crawl upon taking hits. It’s a mess through and through; the compression is admirable but it’s still the worst Modern Sonic plot.

This should’ve been so much better than it is but it’s got great cyberspace stages and a fun Amy and Tails. It's an interesting beta test theoretical for the next Sonic game and despite its foibles, I'm excited to see how the games keep evolving.

Not a Sonic game. A game with Sonic characters hastily cobbled together on an incapable platform for its ambition, leading to a buggy, poorly optimized game that only has enough design to to be a substandard Traveller's Tales LEGO game, which is basically game design baby mode. The music is generic and often unfitting.

DS Version.

Epitomizes SOUL. See here:
https://www.backloggd.com/u/SunlitSonata/review/1159597/

What it loses in challenge and general formulaic structure it makes up for with some surprisingly powerful story moments with strong character banter, solid customizability, great music and incredibly well realized takes on mini-Zelda dungeons.

Interesting attempt to shake up the conventions of a standard Pokemon game. Mixed results. See my review:
https://www.backloggd.com/u/SunlitSonata/review/626660/

The most okay Sonic game ever made; it has its charm and is a good genuine improvement on Shattered Crystal, but it's still very lacking in Sonic gameplay style and it's basically the equivalent of a slightly above average cartoon to game conversion.

Truly one of the mid games of all time; everything is serviceable, but nothing is remarkable. Just goes through the motions all game to mixed effect, and then ends.

Equally quirky and jank all at once. Depth percetion can be an issue and bosses are either too easy or exercises in frustration. Trusting two players to move a boat like that is too much.

Wacky, experimental genuinely bizarre tech demo that sadly didn't lead into anything and would never be made today. See my review on it:
https://www.backloggd.com/u/SunlitSonata/review/914792/

Fun, poppy game with expressive art and electro J-pop music on solid arcade boost-shooting that only gains variety from weapon gains, but remains enjoyable. The story, while very well-presented, may quite literally be THE most anime story of all time outside of adaptation games.

This is the first Shmup I've ever completed; honestly pretty decent

Bad in every possible way a game can be bad. Ugly graphics, horrific performance, shit plot, terrible menus, terrible lighting, boring forgettable music, comically unseamless world design, boring slow turn based combat, a failure to even fanservice well, bad animations, and more!

Horrifically bad as a licensed game; any spectacle ends at the system tilt to launch your spin top. No voice acting makes every character entirely lifeless, no progression, boring music, stock photo backgrounds, shitty minigames, it has it all. And by that I mean it has nothing.

Somehow this game manages to be both comically short AND padded out, reusing nearly every level over and over with different textures at random. The worst camera I've ever experienced in a game that constantly kills you with what you can't see coming. Ill-conceived character switching system that causes game breaking bugs during a boss fight. The storybook narration is cute, but everything else is as amateurish as can be.