(As a disclaimer, I spent like $40 to get the diamond miner, which helped with unlocking pokeomon and decorations to help boost progress. You probably don't need to do that to have a good time, but it made some of the grind a bit less tedious.)

It doesn't do anything spectacular on its own, but I won't deny that it's addicting. There's just something about raising these Magikarp faster and faster while making them stronger that feels good.

As with almost any mobile game, you can skip this one and lose nothing. For me, though, I got a good amount of enjoyment out of this, and will probably keep playing it until I max out everything.

Give it a shot if you like grinding games and funny fish.

Fantasticaneer, I kneel before your offerings to the Egglike genre.

This is the game that started a cult genre called Egglikes, which are basically really weird walking sims where you collect stuff, do some platforming challenges of questionable quality, and encounter strange memes.

One of the major components of a Egglike is making sure the graphics look archaic enough without going overboard in making it look bad. The graphics of an Egglike aim to capture the feel of playing someone's first Unity project, mainly because that's what these probably are.

Fantasticaneer pioneered the Egglike genre with this game, The Fantastic Game. In this game, you explore an aimless world hunting for dollar bills. You'll explore weird areas, meet eggs that sing Smash Mouth's All Star, and more in this very short romp.

If you like janky first-person exploration-based platformers, The Fantastic Game is for you!

After putting a good few hours in and getting a better feel for the game's progression loop, I have come to the conclusion that I am indifferent to this game. If the combat felt smoother (being able to cancel out of attacks and being able to attack in more than 4 directions would be nice) and you could upgrade your backpack to give it more storage, I probably would stick with it. While there are solutions for the second point, they rely too much on luck for them to feel worth hunting for. I always feel torn between trying to get further into the dungeon and getting out early to sell more things at the shop. I could probably get far, but I don't want to deal with the frustration of making careless mistakes that cost me a run and tons of valuable materials. I guess the game makes me anxious? I'm never in a position where I'm excited to go back into a dungeon after selling stuff, and I'm never excited to sell off the expensive items I found. I wish this game made me feel more positive emotions, but it really gets nothing out of me.

I wish I could like you, Moonlighter, but it's not you, it's me. Actually it is mostly you the combat feel is really rough if it felt better I would probably want to beat this.

An amazing Rougelite experience with an amazing cast of characters that will have you coming back just to see how many interactions there are. There's hours upon hours of voiced dialogue here, incentivizing playing more to see what characters will say next! The gameplay is also really solid and addicting on its own, with plenty of ways to reward the player, whether they succeed in escaping or not.

If you buy this game, make sure it's the PS5 version, if only because the devs put haptic feedback in for when you pet Cerberus. What a glorious game.

Me: Oh wow it's Optimus Prime from Transformers! What are you doing here?

Optimus Prime:
I could have my ✨Gucci on✨
I could wear my ✨Louis Vuitton✨
But even with ✨nothin' on✨
Bet I made you look
I made you ✨look✨

Me:...Neat!

I had a small bit of fun with this one back in my late teens, booting it up on the 360 since Minecraft wasn't out on Xbox yet. The world you could explore wasn't all too big, but it did scratch the itch of exploring and crafting for a small while.

I did not play this game for very long. There is a reason for that.

When this game spawned onto the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace, in it was one enemy you could encounter. This was a spider, which is a familiar foe if you've played Minecraft. Unlike Minecraft's spiders, however, these were much, much scarier than they had any right to be.

Imagine if you were exploring a dark cave and then all of a sudden you saw two red dots in the distance. Then, as you stared back into these eyes in confusion, they silently rose high into the air and then landed a few yards away from you. Now, you can view the creature in its entirety. It is a giant black voxel spider with large red eyes.

It has no animations at all. It "hops" by quickly rising high into the air and falling down close to you. It doesn't blink. It turns in your direction without making a sound.

If you weren't scared of it now, you will be once it hops on top of you.

When a spider approaches you in Minecraft, you'll typically hear these sounds. They do a proper job of conveying what the spider is and its aggressiveness without being too scary, especially since spiders are typically easy to take down.

In Total Miner: Forge, when a spider hops on top of you, it lets out a blood curdling scream that is so loud that it feels like it's going to blow out your television's speakers!

I'm sure that with all of this information, you can easily determine why encountering one of these things in the dead of night in a dark cave made me never want to play this game ever again. Well, that and it wouldn't be long before Minecraft got its proper Xbox 360 port, ensuring the death of all Xbox Live Indie Game Minecraft clones.

If you didn't get to try this out when you could get it on Xbox, I can assure you that you missed out on nothing! Play Minecraft instead!

[Average Reading Time: 4 Minutes]

I will be avoiding story spoilers here, so no worries there. I go into gameplay stuff and talk about some mechanics, but I don't detail any specific items or enemies here.

There's a lot to unpack with this one.

Graphically, it looks great in the headset. Each mountainside you approach looks really nice up close, allowing for great immersion. However, there's some texture pop-in issues that you will notice quickly. It's nothing disorienting, but it is a little immersion-breaking.

Aside from a few rare dips in framerate, the game ran fine, overall. There are also plenty of accessibility options to help make the game more enjoyable if certain gameplay styles cause motion sickness.

The story is pretty weak. I didn't really get attached to the characters, and the plot is pretty straightforward. Don't go into this expecting a jaw-dropping narrative, or much of an interesting narrative at all, sadly.

Where this game shines and flickers, though, is its gameplay. Climbing mountains, ropes, and other things feels natural, for the most part. Moving too rapidly to quickly climb a mountain can cause some controller detection issues that can rarely lead to you missing an important grab and making you fall, but for the most part it works well.

Throughout the game you'll acquire different traversal tools to spice up climbing. Some of which you'll be using constantly throughout the game. However, there's one item you get that sadly doesn't get much use outside of the first area you get to play with it in. You'll reach the end of the game and forget it exists. The final traversal item gets plenty of use in the end, but you'll often need to be using it while looking directly up, which can make your neck pretty stiff after a while. If you have lights on in the room you're playing in and they're above you, this will also cause the VR headset's cameras to lose track of your environment, causing the game to stop for you to reorient yourself.

One half of this game is climbing and traversal. The other half is enemy encounters. Sadly, this is the weakest part of the game. Enemy encounters feel like they're designed for you to be facing one or two enemies at once at max. When 3 or more enemies appear, it quickly goes from exciting to stressful, requiring you to keep track of multiple enemies all doing different attacks while finding small pockets of time to allow you to shoot or eat a healing item.

As you progress, you'll acquire different types of ammo for your bow that cause status effects when you shoot enough of them at an enemy. Because enemies are constantly moving, for the most part, you'll either miss shots or spend too much time trying to aim. Along with needing to hit the enemy with enough of a status type, you also need to hit them rapidly. Wait too long and the status effect meter goes down, nullifying your hard work. It would be better if one or two arrows did the job regularly, instead of the multiple enemies and bosses require.

Speaking of bosses, there are some here. Visually, they're impressive. Fighting them, however, is kind of a nightmare. Bosses have multiple area-spanning attacks that will quickly tear through your health bar. You'll spend more time hunting for tables with apples on them during these matches than you will be actually fighting back. Enemies and bosses all have weak points that the game shows to you, allowing you to do good damage to them. It's great for common enemies, but when it comes to bosses, they can often be small or hard to hit, and with some bosses moving around rapidly, aiming for these points becomes an arduous task.

Enemy and boss arenas contain not only infinitely respawning healing items but also a limited number of special ammunition. Using special ammo is encouraged, if not required, for having a more fun experience fighting bosses as you expose weaknesses with them. However, the fun stops when you run out of special ammo. At this point all you can do is unload your basic infinite ammo into a boss until it falls over. Bosses take very little damage from regular ammo, turning fast-paced fights into boring slogs.

Perhaps the worst part about fighting bosses is that there is no checkpointing during them. If you're a few shots away from taking one down and you die, you restart from the beginning of the fight. This is highly frustrating, especially if a certain fight is dragged out due to previously mentioned special ammo problems.

Overall, I don't hate this game, but I don't think I'll be returning to it anytime soon. It does some cool stuff and is a long playthrough, so you do feel like you get your money's worth here. It's also a great workout, since you're moving your arms a lot during gameplay sessions.

If this game ever goes on sale for like $20 or $25, give it a shot if you want. While this game is not without its flaws, it isn't something I dislike.

One thing's for sure, it made me realize just how big the robots are in this universe. Honestly the coolest part of the game is getting to see these things up close. You can just boot it up to look at them and you'll immediately get your money's worth, if ya ask me.