Alright, guys, I can't add it to IGDB due to their rules, but I just played the griffpatch Scratch demake/remake of this game, and, holy shit, it's like if this game was actually good.

This is probably one of my wildest takes yet, but hear me out. Switching back and forth between the Scratch remake and the actual game it's imitating is night and day.

The Griffpatch remake feels so much better to control while still asking a lot of dexterity from the player (much more friction, and hammer movement doesn't have a noticeable delay), with the bonus of feeling a whole lot less cynical and combative. The narration is largely about the creation of the game itself and fighting with the Scratch engine, which is a lot more directed and triumphant than the bitter and dour free-association rambling of this. Another really striking difference is the usage of bright Scratch assets instead of assets reminiscent of Unity asset store shovelware, which does a lot in terms of invoking a sort of hopeful and optimistic naive creativity, rather than the unfeeling and gloomy energy exuded here.

I played a bit of the Scratch version and thought "oh this is actually pretty good, maybe I should reappraise the original", so I booted it up, and I'm sorry, it's just absolute dogshit to control. Weird mouse acceleration settings, the hammer slips around on literally everything, and you can accidentally launch yourself with nothing more than a sneeze. I mean, I guess that's the modus operandi here, but I just never could get over that initial frustration, even as I had climbed higher. I just never really felt like my mistakes were my fault (which is the intended result), whereas there it was much easier to understand what I did wrong and what I could avoid next time.

Highly recommended if you want a version of this without hate or malice in its heart.

Outer Wilds showed me the folly of forcing my way through a game I'm not enjoying just because it's so acclaimed. What would have been a game that bored me that I just would have moved on quickly from led to me just straight up hating it. This game does not deserve that because regardless of my feelings for it, it does a lot of things right. It's a puzzle game that genuinely makes you think to figure out how it works and it doesn't force in some bad combat. Even if it isn't a setting I care about, I can see how this exploration of a solar system with diverse planets is a dream game for people. I just found the game so completely tedious. Every time I die or do something that resets the loop, having to go through launching the ship and flying back to the planet I was on is so annoying to me. It's not like it takes that long and there's auto pilot but I just hated every second I had to do that. It led to me not willing to experiment with the puzzle solving or rushing exploration because I don't know how long I have left in the loop. I'm usually pretty strict with not looking up answers for puzzles in games but the thought of another loop reset broke me down when I was already forcing my way through it. There has been a lot of time loop games the last few years and this is the only one that had me dreading it every time. I'm being overly harsh on a game that has some brilliant ingenuity to it but I really just did not enjoy it.

I have no clue why but I guess you can play a fuckton of shitty mobile games with no ads in your browser now through YouTube??? Maybe these are supposed to have ads, this feels like a game that only exists to serve you ads, but my adblocker seems to have caught them anyways. So brave of Google to step up their game and give you keys jingling in an environment even more interactive than YouTube Shorts.

At level 20 the sky changes from blue to orange, and then at 40 it just alternates back. I locked into this for 30 minutes for a third color, God damn it

Probably one of the most unnecessary sequels to ever exist. Puyo puyo tetris 1 had one goal in combining the gameplay of puyo puyo and tetris together and they pretty much executed it flawlessly on the first go. So this is pretty much just more of that. There are a handful of new game modes and all of them are very gimmicky and didn't interest me that much. The new story mode was inoffensive, though I think the localization focused a bit too much on making the dialog quirky and comedic which was eh. At least it has dual audio on all the versions instead of just PC, thank christ.

I feel like your enjoyment on this depends entirely on how much of the first game you have played. If you haven't played it, then this has more characters and game modes to make it worth going for. But really it's pretty much the exact same game as its predecessor all over again.