adjansen
357 reviews liked by adjansen
Donut County
2018
Outer Wilds
2019
a brilliantly designed and crafted game that I admired more than I actually enjoyed playing, at least past the early hours. some people love having a thick layer of friction between them and the game world, some people love being harshly punished for failure by having to repeat a whole long-ass sequence of timed steps over and over, but I don’t
Lil Gator Game
2022
I would not have thought to ask the question "what if A Short Hike were about a child running around pretending to be Link in Breath of the Wild?", but I'm sure glad the developers of Lil Gator Game did. An unbelievably charming small-scale open-world exploration game with BOTW-inspired traversal mechanics (climbing on any surface with an upgradeable stamina meter, a glider, a shield you can surf downhill on), writing that's genuinely endearing in its depiction of childhood and growing up without coming across as overly affected, and an open world that's just the right size and density for it to be fun to explore without much in the way of navigational aids. The only reason I didn't give this a perfect rating is that I occasionally wished for more mechanically involving quest design (they usually don't involve much more than talking to one character or easily collecting/smashing a nearby item) or more bespoke platforming or puzzle challenges to make full use of the traversal toolset, but those are ultimately fairly minor complaints given how delightfully compact an experience the rest of the game is.