Looks fucking great! I should be exhausted by indies cribbing from the BotW the aesthetic of glowing blue tendrils of light, but the new things that Windbound does with its look really elevate it - the player character looks amazing, the clouds and water look excellent, and the Nautilus god is a really sticky piece of imagery that keeps coming back into my mind when I’m not even thinking about video games

Shouldn’t have played this on the Switch because it runs pretty badly and the feeling of jankiness infects the mechanics making them feel much worse than they probably are - the crafting and inventory stuff isn’t very fun or intuitive, but the feeling of slowly improving your boat is really cool and scratches a part of my brain that loves the idea of subsistence and the making of functional items

Combat is unfortunately dogshit, and dying forcing you to restart from chapter one in the base difficulty is stupidly punishing without having a strong enough foundation to encourage mastery

It was on sale for 2 bucks on the eshop, and finding such a full-featured little budget game when I wasn’t really looking for one was a nice surprise! I’ve definitely got my eye on whatever the devs do next even if I was pretty mixed on it overall

I really tried to love this, but the way the game controls and handles its puzzles put me offside pretty much immediately. Everything you do in the game is introduced by a punishingly slow cutscene where the exact solution for what’s happening is presented to you, and then you do it - and doing it feels bad! The dynamic music is great but is undercut by the deeply hostile constant sounds of crying children. I'm glad people like Keita Takahashi get to keep making games, but this was so unpleasant to play

Really great! The knowledge that there's more content on the way makes me wish I'd held off for a little while to play something a bit longer, but the gestures towards a larger world on show here are pretty special. The slow arc from feeling lost on The Eye to feeling extremely comfortable navigating it is one of the best portrayals of arriving in a new place that I've ever seen in a video game.

My only real criticism of the game is that none of the stories on show here really interacted with each other in a meaningful way outside of one notable example - there were tiny crossovers here and there, but I felt like completing certain Drives should have locked you out of others or impacted the outcomes and content of other questlines. This of course widen's the game's scope by a significant amount, and overall I think this is a pretty special thing worth your time at its current scale.

Put more dice in video games

Heard about this years ago and was pleasantly surprised when it actually came out - kudos to a mostly solo dev for putting so much work into what is very clearly a labor of love, but I feel like I’m missing something when I hear people calling it the next great indie RPG - it’s just fine.

A couple of interesting setpieces and bits of mechanical refinement of the JRPGs Chained Echoes is cribbing from don’t really make up for the fact that the rest of the game is pretty boring. Every story decision feels like the least interesting one that could be made in the moment, and every new mechanic introduced feels less refined and integrated into the whole than the last. I put it down not even by choice - I just realised I hadn’t played it in a few days because I didn’t care about what might happen next.

When the game at one point tries to integrate a story featuring graphic sexual assault into a character’s backstory, I found it hard to even be offended at the batshit message it was trying to get across, because like the rest of the game the moment felt unfocused and only put where it was because other stories do that kind of thing. Chained Echoes struggles to find any sense of individuality or identity outside of its reverence to other video games, but instead of feeling like a considered understanding of what made those things great, it just feels like somebody quoting a good movie back at you.