A classic puzzle game that I used to watch my mom play all the time on the family computer when I was a little kid. At the time, I didn't really understand what she liked about it. But as an adult, I tried it out, and now I understand. It's easy to get play, but difficult to master. You could probably beat it in an hour and a half if you were to get through every level on your first try, it's technically not a long game at all. But that will likely not happen. After playing the game for a while on Xbox and getting too frustrated by it's controls (not really the game's fault, to be fair), I got it on Steam. There are 12 main "worlds", each with an increasing number of levels. On PC, I'm pretty sure I beat the first 11 without losing all my lives, or even dying many times at all. But world 12 took me significantly longer than the first 11 did combined. RNG can definitely make or break your run, which can feel a little frustrating. But in the end, you can always win if you react quick and correctly. So it doesn't feel like you're getting screwed over.

Overall, a very fun and inexpensive title that I would recommend to just about anyone, even if puzzle games aren't your thing. It's so easy for it to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Simultaneously one of the biggest steps forward and biggest steps back for Pokemon. It's obviously still a Pokemon RPG at its core, and as usual comes with a solid new roster of monsters, cool characters, banging music, etc. The stuff Pokemon has been good at since the beginning. But the big difference is that now it's completely open world. Sword and Shield were the first to experiment with something like this, with a large open area placed in the middle of the rest of the game's linear map. Legends Arceus was pretty close to open world, consisting exclusively of multiple large maps. But Scarlet and Violet were the final evolution, and has one big & completely open world. Overall, it executes it pretty well, aside from no level-scaling for the gym leaders/boss battles. You could make the argument that level scaling would make the difficulty curve much more boring, which I sort of agree with. But it would be nice if the game at least let you know what the "correct" order is to do the boss battles, because for every battle that you are underleveled for, there's another that you will be overleveled for.

However, this game suffers from some of the worst technical issues I've ever seen from a video game series as massive as Pokemon. The game runs terribly on the aging Switch hardware, and the visuals range from "decent" to "complete shit." The Switch was already underpowered at launch, so the fact that it was almost six years old by the time this game came out is certainly part of the equation. But multiple other studios have proven that you can squeeze out a way better performance/visuals ratio, and with Pokemon being the most profitable media franchise in the world, there's absolutely NO excuse for how it turned out. I'm writing this almost a year after the game launched, and it still runs just as bad.

Despite all of that, the game is still playable. Pokemon is thankfully a series that doesn't require quick & precise movement. And it didn't stop me from putting in around 75 hours within the first month. I had a ton of fun with it and I'm excited for the future. But the technical issues absolutely took away a good amount of the enjoyment, and if I didn't enjoy playing this series so much, there's a good chance that it would've ruined the whole thing for me.

Portal 2 pretty much does everything that Portal 1 does and improves it. The puzzles, the atmosphere, the writing, etc. It's quite a bit longer than the first game (from ~3 hours to ~8 hours), and also has a level editor/Steam Workshop support and a co-op mode with a separate set of levels from the main game. Not gonna say much because it would be a lot of repeating from my Portal 1 review, but this is how you make a sequel.

It would absolutely be worth the $9.99 if it didn't go on sale so often for $0.99. But it does, so wait for that.

Can't remember exactly when I started/beat the game, but it was around April/July respectively. This release is a remaster of the original Return to Dream Land (Wii, 2011) + a new Epilogue featuring Magolor. It peaked my interest during the Nintendo Direct, but as of now I have only played the main story, nor am I planning on doing anything else. My backlog is too long.

The main game is fine. It's plays exactly like you'd expect a Kirby game to. The addition of Meta Knight, Waddle Dee and King DeeDeeDee as playable characters was really cool for the original release, but isn't very special now. The only other unique element that I can immediately recall is the "Super Abilities", which are neat spectacles at first but ultimately don't amount to much.

Main story isn't super long either, the average on HowLongToBeat is only around 7 hours. Which is fine by itself, a Kirby game really shouldn't be much longer. But the $59.99 price tag is pretty hefty when you consider that in addition to it being a port of a Wii game. You really gotta eat up all of the content if you wanna get your money's worth.

I'm doing the game a pretty big disservice by not playing any of the side content, as it's a sizable chunk of the game. I'd probably be more inclined to if I paid for the game (interpret that however you'd like). But I honestly lost interest in putting much more time into it after finishing. It's a game I played in multiple small chunks over a long span of time. Like junk food, it was sweet but too much at a time can make you sick. And once your full meal (Tears of the Kingdom) arrives, you don't really care about it anymore.

A short game that I enjoyed every minute of. Only took about three hours, but got me thinking and felt very satisfying to go through. As far as I am aware, Portal is still one of the only puzzle/first-person shooter games, and does it extremely well. The Portal Gun is super simple at the core, but creates an engaging experience when combined with the level design. Still looks great graphically today, even without the new ray-tracing version. Dialogue is funny, and the short story leaves some unanswered questions (probably intentionally), but is enjoyable regardless.

My only issue is that you don't get a ton of content after beating the main game. Outside of six levels that get hard-mode variations after beating the main story, plus the challenges (beat levels using the least amount of time/portals/steps), I didn't see anything else to do. The challenges didn't interest me much, so the main story + "advanced chambers" only took me about 5 hours.

At launch, Portal was exclusively part of The Orange Box (five game bundle from Valve), so the shorter playtime is acceptable. Today, the game retails on Steam at $9.99 USD. This would be worth it if the game didn't go on sale for $0.99 so often (as of April 2023, it has happened five times since November 2022). Wait for the sale, and then grab this game (alongside Portal 2).