Proof positive of my long-standing belief that Zelda 2 is a good game that got buried under its own punishing difficulty. The combat still feels a little wonky, but it's a really cool experience once you're no longer crushed beneath the original's glaring issues like needing to navigate all the way across the overworld again after game overs & the flashing death screen.

The graphics punch-ups are sort of a neutral element to me--I don't mind the graphical oddities of the original and I'd have happily played the hack if it was just gameplay changes, but the sprite hacks are well executed and manage that rare feat of not looking too "modern".

Would strongly recommend just playing this over the original, even on a first time. Just making it easier really brings the game's strengths to the forefront.

Pretty good. The new dungeons are fun, the building is janky but enjoyable, the new areas are cool. The greater enemy variety, the honest to god bosses, and the overall pretty well designed world map revamp make this game. It's basically a jankier weirder BotW.

I'm not super hot on the new powers--there was an elegance to Breath of the Wild that I appreciated a lot. Sequence breaks and shrine skips in that game feel cool and earned because you're working within boundaries definite enough that breaking them is an accomplishment, often requiring obscure knowledge like the shield surf double jump or the use of special weapons in combination with slate powers. Tears of the Kingdom sometimes had a really good puzzle, but I was able to cheat at a lot of them very easily--many minecart puzzles are weak to the minecart shield, many gap-crossing puzzles are weak to gluing everything in the vicinity together into a huge bridge. Overall it's fun and technically very impressive, but it loses something in its versatility. (As an aside, Ascend is such a half-baked idea for a mechanic in a game already basically centered around different ways of gaining and losing altitude. It comes in handy occasionally but 90% of spots designed to require it could have had a ladder or climbable wall available and functionally changed nothing.)

The plot is written terribly and is structured very badly. The characters are paper thin, the voice acting is generally wasted on pointless material, and if you do things remotely out of order things start falling apart--do the memories sidequest before beating the dungeons and you will tear your hair out over Link's inability to share critical plot details with everyone, ignore the game nudging you towards exploring certain areas first and you'll be locked out of game mechanics until you cave and do what they tell you.

The new enemies are genuinely very very cool. Gibdos rock and should have gotten more screentime. The final boss is my favorite fight in any Zelda game, I think, from a gameplay standpoint at least.

Also the game is broadly very pretty and I very much appreciate that exploring the map and completing segments of the game makes it prettier (removes environmental hazards, turns off big ugly map tower spotlights) whereas BotW rewarded you for completing parts of the game by permanently ruining the view with laser pointers.

It's a weird game. There are things in this that I really hate and things in it that I really like. The moment to moment gameplay is quite good, so I would recommend it overall, and I think in some ways it corrects problems I had with BotW and hits some of the 'classic Zelda' notes the last one was missing. But I also think that viewed as a whole it's a worse game than BotW that loses some of the charm by the very act of trying to recapture it.

This is really fun. Great game about running around very fast and walloping enemies--the movement feels wonderful once you get it down, though it's a little tricky to start.

I like the soundtrack quite a lot, has a lot going on and a bunch of different styles. An important thing this game gets right is that when, at the end of levels, you have to backtrack and escape them, the music is overridden by the escape theme, and the theme is really good and you don't get sick of it or miss the original level theme that much--a lot of games botch that, I think. The artstyle is a delight as well; I wanna say it's somewhere between a handful of 90s-early 2000s cartoons and the weird Czech episodes of Tom and Jerry? Doing it's own thing also though.

It's maybe a little too maximalist for me personally? I had to play it in 1-2 hour intervals because there's just so much going on it would wear me down a little, but I enjoyed it a lot all the same.

Gonna need more time to organize my thoughts and come up with a real review, because there's so much to dig into in this game, but the long and short of it is that it's Disco Elysium (with a little Night in the Woods in there) for history nerds. It's an impeccably well-written and well-researched game that tells a moving and thoughtful story which absolutely nails the fine line of feeling topical and relevant while remaining firmly grounded in its historical setting. I cannot recommend it enough.

This is a really delightful little game; a few hours and the price of a couple movie tickets well spent, I think. I was especially impressed by its final big twist--it crept up on me for a genuinely amazing revelation.

I'm really kind of fascinated by "passive detective" games like this and Obra Dinn, where the player-detective cannot change the outcome of the story by solving the mystery. It lends itself to a fundamentally different sort of mystery to the more traditional sort, but I think I might actually like it a little more? There's this really fascinating puzzle-box quality to the style that I've never gotten out of anything else.

As far as roguelikes/lites go this one is really fun--I haven't beaten it many times but I have unlocked all the characters.
I like to compare "neo-roguelikes" to the genre's classics--what ideas can be traced from stuff like Angband to this? The inspiration I think Streets of Rogue really latches on to is the ability of the player to think laterally. Though there's a fairly small pool of different missions to complete and NPCs to interact with, the many different systems in the game--status effects, relations, alertness, combat stats--make devising solutions to problems and coming up with plans and strategies really enjoyable. Gameplay tactics like getting free healing items as a vampire--having your own blood put into bags, then topping off your HP via random back-alley NPCs--are a delight to come up with and manage, and feel like some of the classic outside-the-box tactics of classic roguelikes, like wielding cockatrice corpses as weapons to petrify opponents in NetHack.

Really cute game. The card gameplay was very satisfying and does an excellent job making you feel like you're learning and mastering a card trick. The story is kind of a popcorn read, but it's enjoyably written and very charming. The soundtrack and art direction were really excellent as well. I wish it was a little longer and maybe that it committed more in its story, but I also feel like it was a decent length so as not to overstay its welcome.

My main complaint is that some of the late game card tricks are frustratingly fiddly, namely the false riffle shuffle and the tricks involving rifling through the deck looking for specific cards.

Overall a very enjoyable little game.