Easily the best game in the DS library. My only gripe is that there are no options to either mute or turn down the awfully limited and predictable music. I absolutely love the pixel art, the colour palettes and designs are beautiful. I own the Steam port, but the DS version is the original and the best. It’s painfully obvious that the game was developed for the DS then ported to other systems. Although it’s a good thing that other ports exist, the charm does not translate. Apparently they’ve implemented rebalancing for subsequent releases, but I didn’t feel that it was necessary nor have I noticed the “improvements.” Also the game studio is called “Capybara Games,” literally the best name and logo for a game company of all time. Every time I boot it up and see the 3 Capys I :)

If you're looking for a nice relaxing and cozy game, then this might be the one for you. It's a decent delivery simulator but outside of that, this game doesn't offer much else. You can socialize with other NPCs and catch up with people you used to know from your past but without any foundation nor character development, the impact really falls flat. Speaking of falling flat, there is no implication on why this game is rated M (It's a false rating in my opinion). Don't come into this game expecting a dark twist or anything of that nature or you will be heavily disappointed and let down. A bit of a nitpick but the title of this game is super basic and there is a "lake" in the game per se, although there's literally nothing significant about it.

This is one of the most fun puzzle battlers I've played. I see now why it had so much hype.

My only complaints are that the campaign difficulty curve varied wildly throughout, with it seemingly randomly getting much harder or easier, culminating in a final boss you kind of have to cheese.
The only other complaint is that I don't see people online when I try to quick match, which tbh is sort of expected I think.

All around though an excellent game that I'd recommend to anyone who likes puzzle battler type games.

While objectively very beautiful, there's so many minor issues I have with this game that make it beyond frustrating. Some of these include the way the amount of color and detail on the screen can make it hard to see what's attacking you. The bash skill was highly inconsistent with regards to how close I needed to be for it to function. When you go upside-down, the controls, don't change, so you're inversed for these movement segments. While all of these things are manageable, the mere fact that they exist makes the game more obnoxiously difficult than it needs to be. Much of the difficulty I experienced while playing the game came from control issues, or other issues with illogical respawn states and game progression

Visually very appealing and looks like a children's game, but it's definitely not. The platforming can be brutally hard in certain places and it's more frustrating than fun. I never got comfortable with the "floaty" controls of Ori, which made some of the pin point precision timing on jumps incredible hard. The game is also quite hard on the mechanical side of the controller, since Ori has a lot of moves, which sometimes needs to be chained together very rapidly in order to progress. I wanted to love this game, but when the credits rolled I was just glad to be finished with it.

Beautiful, but frustrating experience. The presentation is immaculate, and the story very cute, yet the gameplay itself can be a headache. The main reason for this is that the combat is janky, repetitive, and feels unpredictable at times. Combine this with the fact that the artwork means the foreground can easily blend in with the background, then you have a recipe for disaster. It feels like the combat was shoved in just because they thought it was necessary for a game, but it just detracted from the platforming, which is where the game shines. With the said, this also came with some flaws - at times the platforming felt floaty, and at others inconsistent, particularly when you had to rely on enemy RNG. For a metroidvania it was very linear, with each area basically being fully completed before moving on to the next.

Recently, I had a thought that is purely speculative. It feels to me that anyone who will tell you they love a specific SNES game will also follow that up with "And it STILL HOLDS UP!" Like, think about it, if anyone you know talks about Mario World, they'll likely add "And I 100%'d it during lockdown and you know what? Still holds up!"

Anyway, I don't feel like I've ever heard anyone say that about Donkey Kong Country! I've never played DKC, so I thought I'd play it to see if, well, it holds up.

It does not.

I played through this on my Miyoo Mini, which obviously allows for save states. I'm not one of these cunts that says "Ah, but if you used savestates/rewinds you didn't really beat the game" because I've known satisfaction in my life from things that aren't video games. However, because I was specifically trying to see if it felt fun to play in 2023, I tried to play it "legit". No save states or rewinds. Fuck me what a slog. Just a horrid experience.

What if Myst had a spoken story and a voiceover that held your hand through every puzzle while commenting on every random object scattered throughout the world?

Most of what pushed me through Call of the Sea was an interesting mystery I wanted to get to the bottom of as well as some occasionally neat puzzles.

The puzzles are a mix of "wait what am I supposed to do with this?" and "OK I get it you don't need to walk me through every step of putting this round thing in the round hole". It would've been nice if they had threaded that needle a bit better.

While the mystery was interesting, the moment-to-moment writing was pretty bad. The protagonist is constantly commenting on every single thing she finds throughout the world and it truly feels like they ran out of things for her to say. Voice acting left a bit to be desired as well.

I enjoyed the game for the most part but the ending was pretty bad and left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Not sure if I'd recommend it. I think there are better games like this.

+ Intriguing mystery
+ Some interesting puzzles

- Bad moment to moment writing
- Too much narrating
- Iffy voice talent
- Occasionally confusing puzzles
- Terrible ending

Completed with 100% of achievements unlocked (1,000G). Call of the Sea is an immersive, story-rich first-person puzzle game, following a woman seeking her husband's missing exhibition on a strange island. I'll admit in opening that the Lovecraft-esque themes that the game explores aren't particularly too my liking, but what's here is well-done, with a story log filling out as you find various books, photos and story-relevant objects - some simply there for the plot, others there to support puzzle solutions. Technically the game is well-made, with the island's beauty clearly on show, alongside impressively atmospheric music. Overall, though, I didn't find the game to be as enjoyable as I'd hoped, primarily due to the puzzle design - while there's nothing objectively wrong with it, it leans towards observation-based solutions, which I don't find as compelling as the arguably more thoughtful, environmental manipulation and logic-based approaches seen in the likes of Portal or, more recently, Superliminal.

these blobs can fucking sing!

We lost something culturally when a studio that put a swarm of blobs whose mouths match the vocals in the game music gets shutdown to fund games that poorly ape Hollywood. And hollywood isn't even good in the first place!

This isn't the most fun or innovative or wild game ever made yknow. But it's a game which seeps with joy, acknowledgment of the medium, and totally whips aesthetically.