Feels like fanfiction of itself! I thought it was great while at the same time being extremely stupid and just sort of playing the hits in a way the base game saved until the very end. Extremely funny that they tried to cram a whole Xenoblade’s worth of RPG progression into 20 hours because at every single moment a number is going up somewhere or a new feature is being unlocked. Imagine one of those tiktoks where someone is playing subway surfer while in another window a child is explaining the plot of sword art online. Riku is there

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

Played this game for the first time with the remaster - a heap of praise should go to how good this thing looks and runs at a time in the switch’s lifecycle where new games are starting to strain against the limits of the hardware. Putting it side by side with the original after playing it for a bit I was struck by how much care went into making the remaster look like your memories of what this generation of gaming looked like, while still including enough new creative flourishes that bring it up to parity with modern releases. I left Metroid Prime feeling pretty mixed overall - the game is structurally really interesting and has a lot of cool ideas, but is filled with a bunch of little annoyances that really compound towards the end of the game and left me feeling really sour on it.

I played with hints on and honestly have no idea how you’d play this for the first time without them and not spend hours just throwing spaghetti up against the wall to try and make progress. I get that games of this type are all about memorising things you’ve seen and not been able to interact with yet, but moving through Prime’s world takes so long and is full of so many little irritations that I came to dread coming across a new thing I couldn’t do yet and would have to revisit later.

If the game hadn’t ended with the artifact hunt and filled its last hours with really annoying enemy types, I’d probably feel much better about it overall - but by the end of Prime I kind of just wanted it to be over. Doesn’t quite stand up to the 2D games in the series, but the ways in which it’s bad are at least interesting to think about in a modern context. Being trapped on the GameCube at a time when the PS2 was king means that this game hasn’t been as directly influential as its predecessors, but Prime in interesting enough in what it‘s going for that I want to see more games swing for the huge things it’s trying to accomplish. I probably would have loved this when it came out, but playing it for the first time now with no nostalgia attached left me feeling pretty cold.

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.